Wings Over Scotland

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

1. Unleashing a firestorm
The Financial Times breaks ranks and tells the truth.

2. Ask and ye shall receive
Actual lovebombs from the rest of the UK.

3. Father knows best
Lesley Riddoch puts David Aaronovitch in his place.

4. The ultimate weapon
John Barrowman Of The Week.

5. A mixed day for Johann Lamont
Probably the best she can hope for from now on.

The top two of those are also our all-time #3 and #4 most-read posts, in what’s been a record-shattering start to February. As we write this we’re well over 800,000 pageviews for the week, with five hours to go, compared to the previous best of 618,499. And as for the number of unique visitors, well, we’re not even going to talk about that yet.

If nothing else about independence tempts you, surely this does?

“Sixteen per cent of Scottish voters – the equivalent of 640,000 people – say they would think about moving away if Alex Salmond achieves his dream of breaking up the United Kingdom.

Conservative voters were the most likely to say they would think about emigrating or moving to the rest of the UK.“

(It’s from last year, but we doubt they’ve changed their minds.)

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From Oddschecker. Click to enlarge.

Proves nothing, of course. But the trend’s the thing, readers.

Here’s the Herald today on YouGov’s latest independence polling:

“Support for independence has remained unchanged with one in three voters wanting Scotland to leave the UK, the latest poll shows. The YouGov survey put support for a Yes vote at 33%, trailing backing for No on 52%. A further 12% were undecided with the rest saying they would not vote in the referendum on September 18.

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

1. The honesty patrol
Cybernats!

2. The lonely hours
Cybernats!

3. Cybernat of the week
CYBERNATS!

4. The Mars bar at your seat
Idiot.

5. You’d need a heart of stone
Idiot whines about cybernats.

Eesh. Grim stuff. Let’s hope for a more pleasant week to come.

We like to put a bit of extra effort in in January. The excitement of a fresh new year, coupled with the need to shake people out of the festive-period stupor that otherwise kills momentum stone dead, calls for 110%. Even so, with the slow opening week and then losing most of a weekend to a server outage, we weren’t expecting this.

Not only were January’s pageview stats more than 30% up on December, but they also smashed the all-time record set in November by well over 100,000.

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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:

“The pro-UK Better Together campaign announced that it was to distribute half a million leaflets at railway stations, homes and high streets in Scotland this weekend with the single word “goodbye” on its front page, the O letters replaced by pound coins.”

Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today:

Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?

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