Wings Over Scotland

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.

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

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.

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.

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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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:

(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.

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.

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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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.

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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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?

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

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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.

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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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.

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Every single line a classic.

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.

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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Forgive the mangled Star Trek/Blackadder reference, there.

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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