The Guardian tonight reports, by way of covering Johann Lamont’s debacle at First Minister’s Questions today, an interesting snippet related to our post of earlier today:
Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?
We’re not sure which of The Scotsman and Murdo Fraser of the Scottish Conservatives was most confused this morning. Reporting on the second half of its intriguing ICM poll (which put the gap between Yes and No votes as low as six points), the paper publishes some data about the attitude of Scots to the EU.
Excluding don’t knows, the results provide a clear 16-point margin for Scotland remaining in Europe, at 58% to 42%. (The raw numbers put it only slightly lower, at 46 to 33.) But for some odd reason the newspaper chooses to reveal this vote of confidence under the bafflingly negative headline “A third of Scots would back exit from EU”, without even an “only” in there to reflect the implication of the stats.
Weirder still is Murdo Fraser’s reaction, though.
The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last 7 days.
1. The bully pulpit
The Scottish Daily Mail “unmasks” some devilish “cybernats”.
2. Walls come tumbling down
The scare stories of Project Fear begin to crumble.
3. Eleven words of truth
The UK government’s latest propaganda paper starts well.
4. A frightened man
Jim Murphy MP demands nobody be allowed to challenge the No campaign.
5. To a grouse
The poem so good that we published a poem.
Today’s release of the 2013 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey results provided an interesting pair of stats. Scottish people told pollsters ScotCen that they’d favour independence by a very big margin (52% to 30%, or 63 to 37 excluding Don’t Knows) if they could be assured that they’d be personally £500 a year better off.
However, if merely assured that they’d be neither better nor worse off that they are now, the No vote narrowly came out on top, by (again excluding DKs) 54 to 46. An obvious question therefore presented itself: just how big a bribe do Scots need to take responsibility for their own country?
The headline findings of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey compiled every year by ScotCen are of limited use in the context of the independence referendum. The main constitutional question it asks is deeply unhelpful, with a vague, all-encompassing “devolution” option that tell us next to nothing about how Scots will vote.
(To be fair, that’s not the survey’s fault – it was designed long before the referendum was ever thought of as a reality, for a broader purpose, and asks the same questions every year for consistency of comparison.)
But the results for 2013 are interesting – as they always are – because they tell us what Scotland thinks when the debate is moved away from overtly political questions, they tell us where the arguments are being won and lost, and they enable us to determine just why Scots are the only people on Earth who’ve been (so far) successfully made scared of running their own country.
Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today:
Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?
It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.
So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.
Yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday took a slightly strange angle on the results of a social-attitudes survey conducted by the thinktank “British Future” last month.
…or put another way, MORE than half of them DON’T believe that. But anyway.
The Scotsman and Herald both carry stories today reporting an Ipsos-MORI poll which found that only 14% of voters considered themselves to be “well-informed” about the referendum debate, and that two-thirds of the electorate had difficulty in discerning whether what they were being told was true or not.
Since this site’s entire reason for existence is to demonstrate that what much of the No campaign and the Scottish media tells people is either distorted, misleading or flat-out untrue, we can’t say those findings surprise us much. But there was an interesting nugget buried in the poll data which the papers didn’t pick up on.
We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.
The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.
As a civil servant in London in the 1960s, and being part of the establishment, I always accepted the general view that an independent Scotland would not be able to survive on its own without financial help from the London Exchequer.
However, when in 1968 I was able to closely examine the UK’s “books” for myself in an official capacity, I was shocked to find that the position was exactly the opposite: that Scotland contributed far more to the UK economy than its other partners. And this, of course, was all before the oil boom.
I realised that the Treasury would wish to keep this a secret, as it might feed the then-fledgling nationalistic tendencies north of the border. I decided to keep an eye on the situation to see how long it would take for the true facts to emerge, which I felt would only be a short time. However, the machinery of Westminster, aided and abetted by the media, did an excellent job of keeping the myth about “subsidised” Scotland alive.
In fact it took another 30 years before the first chink in their armour appeared.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
