Wings Over Scotland

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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We’re going to enjoy this one while we can, because there’s a big barren fortnight across the last week of December and the first week of January when no politics happens at all, so we probably won’t see these sorts of numbers again for a while.

Crivvens.

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This morning we’ve been double- and triple-checking our story from last night, because we were so sure we must have missed something. Even given the low esteem in which we hold the integrity of the hapless “Better Together” campaign, we felt that they surely couldn’t have made such an idiotic and fundamental error, and that instead we must have misinterpreted a word or a sentence somewhere along the way.

But no. We were wrong in that assumption. They really ARE that dim.

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There’s an atrocious piece of journalism in this morning’s Guardian, and on this particular occasion we’re referring to its technical standards rather than any bias or spin. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“The Treasury has claimed Scotland’s voters will face tax rises of £1,000 per head after independence unless the next Scottish government immediately cuts billions of pounds in spending.

In a calculated effort to undermine the release on Tuesday of the landmark white paper outlining the case for Scottish independence, the Treasury said those increases would hit 2.4m people now paying the basic rate of income tax.

It said the alternative, according to the most optimistic scenario for Scotland’s economy and debt levels sketched out last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, would be to cut public spending by £3bn more than the UK government plans by 2021.”

We’re confused already.

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We’ve had a closer look at the Institute for Fiscal Studies report from this week.

Basically, the conclusion of the report is that if an independent Scotland continued to do exactly the same things over the next 50 years as the UK does now, it would have to grow its GDP by 1.9% to cover a predicted fiscal gap, while the UK would only have to grow by 0.8% to cover a similar gap. According to the IFS, this 1.9% shortfall would mean a 6% cut in services or a hike of 8% in income tax in an independent Scotland.

However, close reading of the small print in the IFS document highlights facts and forecast figures that appear to contradict the IFS’s argument and instead point to a situation where an independent Scotland would actually be in a similar fiscal position to the UK. Confused? Yes, so were we.

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From this morning’s Daily Record:

– Number of Scottish Lib Dems MPs who didn’t vote for an opposition motion: 11
– Number of Scottish Labour MPs who didn’t vote for their own motion: 10

– Number of UK Lib Dem MPs who didn’t vote for an opposition motion: 55
– Number of UK Labour MPs who didn’t vote for their own motion: 47

Where should we drop this delivery of stones for Torcuil Crichton’s glass house?

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Just for a little bit of fun, we thought we’d dig out how much money was claimed for accommodation last year by the 47 Labour MPs who couldn’t be bothered to turn up and vote to abolish the bedroom tax yesterday. (You can look up the data here.)

It was this much: £387,439.

That’s more than a third of a million pounds, paid by all of us, specifically for second homes so that MPs can be close to Parliament and attend votes there. It doesn’t include any of their other expenses. It only covers those 47 Labour MPs.

It’s an average of £8,243 each. It would pay the bedroom tax for a year for 532 people.

See if you can guess which piggy was the greediest out of the 47.

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It’s the 1st of November and we almost forgot to do a stats post. Tch, eh?

We’re calling one of those numbers another landmark.

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