Wings Over 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.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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We’ve read a lot in the past few days about how referendum polling basically hasn’t moved at all this year. But we weren’t sure if that was really true. So with nine months to go, it seemed a reasonable idea to check the stats for the LAST nine months and see if any progress was being made.

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The under-occupancy penalty more commonly known as the bedroom tax is a policy whose roots lie in London. Rents in the UK capital are so extortionate that keeping a roof over the heads of the unemployed, low-paid, disabled and vulnerable has become a dreadful burden on the taxes of City bankers, in the few cases where they pay any.

Readers might be forgiven for imagining, then, that the savage benefit reductions would be punishing Londoners harder than people in other regions of the UK. We’ve just been crunching the numbers, and you might be a little surprised at who it turns out are actually bearing the brunt more than most.

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There’s a rather strange article by Peter Kellner, CEO of polling company YouGov, in today’s Guardian. It makes a whole series of dubious claims, one of the most startling being the assertion that “Labour is the pro-welfare party-of-the-heart”, a view somewhat at odds with the party’s stated intent to be “tougher than the Tories on benefits”.

But perhaps most curious of all was the piece’s strapline.

Because the idea that Labour was winning any battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over public-sector cuts was quite dramatically contradicted the very same day by some data released by… YouGov.

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The Huffington Post, 15 December 2013:

“The number of Britons who think Ed Miliband is likely to be the prime minister after the next election has fallen dramatically, according to a poll.

Research by ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror found 21% believed the Labour leader would be in No 10 after the next election, down 10 points since May.”

This, remember, is after a summer in which the nation’s political commentators almost universally agreed that Miliband’s conference promise of an energy price freeze and subsequent talk of a cost-of-living crisis was winning the hearts of the country.

Last week three separate opinion polls showed Labour’s lead over the Tories down to a pitiful five points, despite 70% of the population saying they’d felt no benefit from Britain’s feeble economic “recovery”.

We don’t think Labour has ever sacked a leader who hadn’t contested at least one general election. Ed Miliband will lead them to the polls in 2015, and only one in five Britons thinks he’ll end up in Number 10. Don’t take our word for it. Don’t heed the experts. Don’t even examine the statistics. Listen to the people who’ll be voting.

It was nice to get a wee plug this morning on Radio Scotland’s always-interesting “Headlines” programme. Their online round-up talked about our piece on Scandinavian taxation, and contrasted it with one written by Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser for the right-wing “ThinkScotland” blog, in which he disputed the widely-held, and oft-decried by Yes supporters, notion that the UK was one of the most unequal countries in the civilised world.

Now, anyone who’d also read Wings columnist Julie McDowall’s superb, blood-boiling article on foodbanks in today’s Sunday Herald might naturally be rather sceptical of Fraser’s claim that the UK was an egalitarian paradise of wealth distribution, but he provided a link, so we had a look.

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One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.

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We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.

We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).

Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.

Don’t they?

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Oh, there it is.

Click here for the fascinating full data. And when you hear Labour talk of “pooling and sharing resources” after a No vote, remember where it is that the pool’s located. Because they’ll probably be closing the one near your house.

In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.

Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.

Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?

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