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The direction of travel 126

Posted on September 19, 2013 by

One other thing struck us about the YouGov poll for the Sun we mentioned earlier today. It recorded voter responses by both how they voted in 2010 and how they plan to vote in 2015, and the numbers were drastically different.

sunpoll

If  for the sake of argument we regard the Lib Dems as still being very broadly on the (relative) left of the UK political spectrum, and the emergent UKIP as obviously on the right, we get a rather chilling result.

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Rolling the dice 107

Posted on September 19, 2013 by

Vote No in 2014 and one of these three could be your nation’s leader:

takeyourpick

The full data tables are here. In them you’ll learn that just 6% of Labour voters think Ed Miliband is “strong”, only 13% of Conservative voters think David Cameron is “in touch with the concerns of ordinary people”, and incredibly, as many as 13% of Liberal Democrat voters still think Nick Clegg “sticks to what he believes in”.

You could have one – or quite possibly two – of those guys, who even their own supporters overwhelmingly think are useless. Or you could have a Scot leading a government of Scots elected by Scots making all the decisions about Scotland.

It’s your choice. You’ve got a year left to think about it.

Turning the truth upside down 110

Posted on September 16, 2013 by

There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.

upsidekit

The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)

This should be interesting, then.

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Good news, everyone! 112

Posted on September 16, 2013 by

We don’t like to reprint old posts here as a rule, but with the Scotsman today reporting that the prospect of Scots being £500 a year better off would give the Yes camp a 10-point lead, it seems timely and appropriate to revisit this one from back in July:

spending1700

(Link and link.)

Or put simply: Scots already over-contribute to the UK by, coincidentally, £500 a year each. If we leave the Union, without doing anything else at all, without changing a single spending plan or tax rate, we WILL be £500 a year better off. Job done! Now all Yes Scotland needs to do is tell everyone.

Hard times 97

Posted on September 11, 2013 by

We’re most grateful to the eagle-eyed reader who spotted something today that had escaped our notice, and apparently also that of the Scottish media. When we were trying to figure out the likely membership of “Scottish Labour” back in June, the most recent set of accounts for the branch (or “Accounting Unit” as it’s officially termed) on the Electoral Commission website were those for 2011.

slabaccts

It turns out that we were in just a bit too early. The 2012 ones were published a mere four weeks later, and they paint a worrying picture for Johann Lamont and her pals.

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Fingers jammed in ears 105

Posted on September 10, 2013 by

Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.

fingerears

We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.

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Honesty boxing 55

Posted on September 09, 2013 by

Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?

homebakes

It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.

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Making up the numbers 72

Posted on September 09, 2013 by

We know “Better Together” has a history of mangling statistics beyond all recognition, but today’s effort might just take the biscuit. Their Facebook page and Twitter feed still carries a graphic distorting the true findings of today’s Lord Ashcroft polling to a degree so spectacular as to be unmeasurable.

btp1

It’s going to be hard to count all the untruths in that single image – partly because some of them are falsehoods on several different levels – but we’ll try.

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Assets and liabilities 304

Posted on September 05, 2013 by

The results of some of the questions in this week’s Panelbase independence poll are so striking we just couldn’t help ourselves. Let’s have a quick delve.

salmondlectern5

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Rogue bloopers 100

Posted on September 04, 2013 by

Every single line a classic.

roguepoll

If we must, then 76

Posted on September 04, 2013 by

The No campaign got itself rather excited today about the third independence poll of this week, this time by TNS-BMRB, which showed a spectacular and unexpected doubling of the “Don’t Know” figures at the expense of both Yes and No.

zimbabwe

We didn’t go into the other two in any depth (noting only the difference in media coverage of them), because as we’ve said for the last 18 months, simple Yes/No polls at this stage are fairly meaningless. But this one deserves a little scrutiny.

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We cannae dae it, Captain Darling 129

Posted on September 02, 2013 by

Forgive the mangled Star Trek/Blackadder reference, there.

scottie

We’ve been having a wee dig around in the just-released full data tables from today’s Panelbase poll, and found something we thought was particularly interesting, and which we don’t think anyone’s picked up on, because it’s a bit tricky to get your head round. Walk with us while we simplify it.

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