Wings Over Scotland

We couldn’t be bothered staying up for the Dunfermline by-election result. Roughly 60 seconds into the coverage we switched over to Family Guy on BBC3, and then – faced with the unwelcome prospect of all the same old faces spouting all the same old guff as they filled dead air with deathly waffle for a few hours – we went to bed.

Since the disgraced Bill Walker’s resignation (if you can call it that, so unwillingly was he dragged out by the ankles), it’s been obvious that Labour would win, and you don’t stay up into the wee small hours watching a TV show you already know the end of.

So with the benefit of a new day’s eye, let’s have a wee delve.

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Few people seem to have noticed the appearance of a new TNS-BMRB Scottish opinion poll today. After taking a bit of a savaging for their previous poll, whose sample suggested that Labour had won the 2011 Holyrood election, the company has changed its methodology to reflect reality – though it’s made little difference to the headline findings, of which the most dramatic aspect is the huge 31% figure for “Don’t Know”.

The Yes camp still needs a 10% swing to catch up, but as readers will know we place very little store by the Yes/No questions in polls this far out, with the white paper still unreleased. We’re a lot more interested in digging around in the data below the surface, and this poll has one particular nugget that caught our eye.

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We’re not quite sure why the UK government has chosen this year, of all years, to start disaggregating tax receipts by nation, breaking down the UK’s income according to how much of it came from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even calculating oil revenues on a geographical basis.

You might well imagine that such an exercise could only serve to provide fuel for the independence movement, and the initial release of figures (probably the only one before the referendum) certainly seem to confirm that impression.

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(No. 3246 in a long and continuing series.)

The “Better Together” campaign director has a lengthy piece on the right-wing Labour “Progress Online” website today, which we won’t trouble ourselves with the usual disingenuous content of. We’re not even going to challenge the comical assertion that “recent polls show that support for independence currently stands at just one in four”, because if you’re selective enough it IS possible to find outliers with wildly flawed methodology producing that sort of number.

There was one claim we WOULD like to clarify, though.

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This seems to count as a pretty big landmark.

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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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