Wings Over Scotland

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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To the ASTONISHMENT OF ALL, the Scottish media has leapt to cover a new poll today. It was conducted on behalf of the cross-party “Devo Plus” group, which we were mildly surprised to discover apparently still exists despite the previous two posts on its website being dated February 2013 and November 2012.

Being far more fair-minded than other news outlets, however, and not ones for bearing petty grudges, Wings Over Scotland is more than happy to run some analysis on it.

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Well, it’s been quite a week, readers. Over the course of the last seven days, Wings Over Scotland – and in particular myself, as its editor – has been subjected to an unprecedented series of smear attacks from several groups of alarmingly angry people, from “Better Together” activists (sometimes in unholy alliance with a small handful of confused, naive young SNP student sorts) to senior Scottish journalists, failed Tory election candidates, psychopathic stalkers and Rangers supporters.

I’ve personally been called – in the space of just that single week – homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist, disablist, ageist, fascist, sectarian, a rape apologist, anti-English, anti-Welsh and a hate-preaching bigot. All are entirely untrue, of course.

(Just about the only people I’m apparently NOT prejudiced against are left-handed unicycling vegan budgie-owners from Fermanagh. Which is doubly ironic, because I really loathe those smug, cack-fisted carrot-munchers.)

If you want to know why, look below.

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A curious facet of the independence debate in recent weeks has been the rise in – mostly, but not exclusively, Unionist – commentators rubbishing the idea that Scots are significantly different in their social attitudes from people in the rest of the UK.

It’s been pointed out that a majority of Scots support the benefit cap (glossing over the fact that it applies to basically nobody in Scotland), it’s been claimed that most Scots back Trident, and most recently that contrary to popular belief, they’re no less Eurosceptic than their English neighbours.

So we were curious when Saga recently conducted a large-sample poll of its members (people aged 50 and above, generally considered to be the most conservative demographic) about their attitudes to the EU, and the Scottish press reported it without mentioning the Scottish results.

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…about the sales figures of “regional” Scottish newspapers, released today:

Numbers (for Jan-June 2013, compared to the same period in 2012) are below.

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The debt Scotland stands to inherit as an independent nation is often used as a stick to beat the Yes camp, and various “estimates” of the size of said debt – ranging from the merely extreme to the comically deranged – are a core element of the scare stories that suggest Scotland would have a fragile economy prone to collapsing the first time there was a bad year for oil prices/production.

But to understand the reality you need to dig a little into the nature of the debt, as the relatively widely-known figures of outstanding UK debt only tell half the story. Delving into the (deliberately) labyrinthine world of finance is a daunting task, but we’ll keep this as understandable as we can.

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We’ve been in a bit of a stat-wading frame of mind generally today, readers, so we hope you’ll forgive us for one last toot on the trumpet after a fortnight that’s seen every readership record on the site trashed in spectacular style.

It’s not even our fault – an alert reader on Twitter pointed out our soaring rating on global web traffic tracker Alexa.com over the course of the last few months (since we became wingsoverscotland.com), so we couldn’t resist a bit of a nosy poke around for the rankings of other Scottish politics sites and, well, these were the findings.

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We try not to bang on about our readership stats so often these days, but as some mainstream media types have been casting doubt on our figures this week and we’ve just passed a couple of nice round numbers, we thought you might like to know.

We’d like to say a big “Welcome!” to the 15,000 brand-new readers who’ve joined us in the last 30 days, a big “Thanks!” to those of you who were here already, and an extra-special one to those of you who told others. Keep spreading the word, folks.

…to reporting of opinion polls in the Scottish media! These are all from today:

“More than half of Scots live on ready meals or takeaways at least three times a week, according to a new poll.”

Vital data, there. And definitely more interesting and important than learning that two-thirds of Scots don’t believe the promises of improved devolution after a No vote.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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