Wings Over Scotland

Last week the Press & Journal carried a story about a debate held at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre, attended by just over 150 company directors, senior managers and other “business leaders”. The debate was between John Swinney and Danny Alexander (with contributions from Professor David Bell and businesswoman Christine O’Neill), followed by a poll carried out among the audience.

The No-friendly headline figures – which will come of no surprise to anyone who has ever read the Press & Journal – said 68% of the audience would be voting No at the end of the debate, with 16% Yes and 15% still unsure (1 person said they wouldn’t be voting. Maybe they walked into the wrong room at the start or something.)

That sounds like a pretty comprehensive win for No, so we should probably all just pack up our stuff and concede defeat.

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Earlier today we reported the Edinburgh Evening News’ coverage of a study by Sheffield Hallam University which found that households across Edinburgh would lose an average of £780 each thanks to the coalition’s welfare cuts, with the worst-affected area – Craigmillar – likely to take an annual hit of £1,240 per household.

Today’s edition of the Daily Record has a prominent feature on the same survey, but chooses to focus on Glasgow rather than Edinburgh, and finds that things are even worse. Households in the poorest part of Glasgow – Calton, infamous for its low male life expectancies – stand to see a shocking £1,760 a year ripped out of their budget.

The Record being the Record, of course, it characterises the cuts – quite correctly – as being the responsibility of the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition. But then, weirdly, it asks a Labour MSP to comment on them.

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Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the London School of Economics, a man with absolutely no dog in the Scottish independence fight, has now published his detailed assessment of the set-up costs of an independent Scotland.

He puts the actual additional cost – that is, what Scotland would have to spend that it wouldn’t have to spend anyway if it stayed in the UK – at around £200m. That’s the total, not every year, and is somewhat below the UK government’s own “estimate” of £2.7bn, issued just three weeks ago to widespread derision.

For comparison purposes that’s very roughly what Scotland spends on the upkeep of Trident nuclear submarines every year (our share of the £2.24bn annual cost), but as the Unionist parties constantly complain that Scotland’s savings on Trident get spent several times over by Yes supporters, we thought we’d come up with an alternative.

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We suppose, then, that we’d better deal with the UK government’s bizarre propaganda booklet that’s about to slither through every letterbox in Scotland at taxpayers’ expense whether they like it or not. We’ve been having some fun with the cover image in the last couple of days, but astonishingly enough this is the real version:

To be honest, readers, we’re still kind of rubbing our eyes in disbelief at that one. But the McTrapp Family above (who are these implausibly happy children? Where, who or what are they running from? Are they trespassing? Where are their parents?) aren’t even nearly the weirdest thing about the pamphlet.

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In the course of debunking some No-camp myths about “high taxes” and the cost of living in Scandinavian countries, we’ve often mentioned that in addition to average real incomes being far higher in places like Norway and Denmark (even after adjusting for the cost of living), that average is itself misleading, because the poor distribution of wealth in the UK means that it’s artificially inflated by the incomes of the super-rich.

Now it’s possible to actually put figures on that.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. Voters less ordinary
Housewife turns out to be activist. What could go wrong?

2. Inaudible mumble amplified
A good week to bury someone calling a million Scots racists.

3. Becoming the story
Smearing the messenger.

4. To the editor of the Scotsman
Standing by for developments.

5. The unacceptable face of politics
Grumpy-Looking Man confronts Not Quite All There Woman.

This week’s theme: CYBERNATS! (Again.)

The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. OBAMA INTERVENES IN REFERENDUM
All two words of it. We’re not sure how to feel about that.

2. It’s about democracy, stupid
A more eloquent response from American Scot Jean Muir.

3. What Alistair Darling said
We’re still waiting for the New Statesman to release the tapes.

4. Zombies walk the Earth
The reason Labour have shoved Anas Sarwar off onto a bus.

5. How times don’t change
You’d already forgotten the Strathclyde Commission happened, hadn’t you?

This week’s theme: spot the sensible.

The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. An actual letter from America
A fresh perspective on NATO and nukes.

2. The news less fit to print
The media tries to pretend there isn’t a blue whale in the room.

3. Unrestricted warfare
Just your standard No camp make-people-think-their-child-will-die stuff.

4. A day of shame
On which we learned that 10% = 30% and 4 = 1.

5. Friends and enemies
Anas Sarwar claims the BNP and Britain First for team-mates.

This week’s theme: spin so intense it alters gravity.

Readership stats for May, if you like that sort of thing.

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We’re rather kicking ourselves for not having spotted this one when it was staring us in the face, so kudos to Welsh professor of political science Roger Scully for the catch.

In the 2009 European elections, UKIP got 16.5% of the vote in the UK as a whole, and 5.2% in Scotland – a gap of 11.3%. In this year’s election the tallies were 27.5% in the UK and 10.5% in Scotland – a gap of 17%.

In other words, despite all the bluster from Unionists about how Scotland can no longer claim to be different to the rest of the UK in terms of supporting Nigel Farage’s party, in fact the degree of difference has substantially increased, by a whopping 55%.

It just seems worth pointing out.

Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)

And it seems our critiques have already hit home.

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For quite some time now, and in particular since the turn of the year, this site’s been pointing out two things about polling for the 2015 UK general election.

One is that Labour’s lead has been in steady decline since 2012. The other is that the polls present a falsely optimistic picture for Ed Miliband’s party, as ultimately a significant proportion of UKIP support is likely to vote tactically, because only two people have a chance of becoming Prime Minister and only one of them is promising what UKIP supporters want above all else – a referendum on leaving the EU.

Pleasingly, on one level at least, today we were proved right.

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