Wings Over Scotland

This is a genuine request for enlightenment, readers. Hopefully someone can help.

When we’re bored, we like to take a look at the Herald website front page and play Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline. It’s not usually too taxing a game – by way of illustration, we suspect you won’t have too much trouble with this example:

The actual story itself, though, has us bewildered.

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Viewers watching the BBC and STV’s coverage of the Aberdeen Donside by-election last night will have noticed one particular pre-prepared script get repeated airings from Labour representatives. Kezia Dugdale on Newsnight Scotland, Anas Sarwar on Scotland Tonight and others at the count all spontaneously offered a list of SNP seats which would fall to Labour were the evening’s 9% swing to be repeated nationwide.

The interesting thing about the line, though, was how little it actually said. In the 2011 Holyrood election the SNP took 45% of the constituency vote to Labour’s 32%. Last night, despite the advantages of a by-election (traditionally used to register a protest vote), a 50% increase in the number of candidates contesting the seat and the loss of an MSP who was extremely personally popular in the constituency, the numbers were 42% and 33% respectively – a swing to Labour of just 2% in a little over two years.

On that schedule, Labour will surge back to power at Holyrood at the election of 2024.

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It’s like they’re actually writing the jokes for us.

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As veteran readers will know, there’s little this site enjoys more than investigating the Comical Ali-style claims made by the No campaign about the attendance figures at its events, which it typically likes to exaggerate by between 100% and 150%.

Disturbingly, though, the contagion which robs victims of basic counting powers seems to be infectious, and taking hold even beyond the bounds of “Better Together”.

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Readers will probably barely recall a story from back in January, because it only made the front page of almost every Scottish newspaper and the lead item on most Scottish political TV and radio programmes. It was a Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report which put support for independence – via an extremely old and outdated question formulation – at a dramatic low of 23%.

Almost as forgotten was the “Better Together” campaign’s half-hearted attempt at capitalising on the numbers, by misrepresenting them as meaning something else entirely in order to create a misleading graph. (Perhaps because by now we’re so used to them being somewhat creative with numbers that nobody noticed.)

So it’s only to be expected that the latest poll numbers from the same source, released yesterday, don’t seem to have made any of today’s papers or broadcasts.

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Particularly alert readers may recall a shock-horror story from the Scottish media earlier this year relating to a sharp rise in the number of people waiting over four hours for treatment in hospital A&E departments, which came complete with some dramatic (and highly misleading) graphs.

Labour’s ironic Scottish health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie poured opprobrium on the Scottish Government both for the figures and for changing the treatment-within-four-hours target from 98% to 95%, with the Tories enthusiastically joining in as usual.

So we were naturally quite curious to see what the corresponding figures for the English NHS would be, and they were finally released today.

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Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.

We thought we might as well actually put figures to the impact of Rangers’ liquidation on the rest of the clubs in the SPL in season 2012-13. So we did. If you don’t want to read another article about football, look away now.

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The debate about whether Scotland could survive and flourish outside the Union is uncannily similar to the one that filled the media a year ago about whether Scottish football could live without Rangers. (And which by a strange and almost inexplicable coincidence tends to feature many of the same people on the respective sides.)

As the events of the spring and summer of 2012 unfolded, even the game’s own governing body insisted that separating the rest of the SPL from the Union Jack-loving Ibrox club would reap a disastrous whirlwind of destruction, with businesses (sponsors) fleeing in terror and clubs becoming impoverished without the generous subsidy of thousands of visiting Rangers fans.

In the end, despite the most strenuous efforts of the SFA, SPL and SFL to override the wishes of their customers with a campaign of relentless and increasingly-hysterical fearmongering, the new “Rangers” was denied both entry to the SPL and a “leapfrog” into SFL 1, and joined Scottish football at the lowest professional level.

So how did post-apocalypse life turn out in the people’s game?

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We’re a little suspicious of yesterday’s Ipsos MORI poll on Scottish politics.

It’s not so much the numbers for independence, which are within normal fluctuations and error margins and may also reflect a recent tsunami of doom-laden, irrational and hyperbolic media coverage on the currency issue. No, what’s got us in sceptical mood are the frankly ridiculous Holyrood voting intentions figures, which appear to suggest a shift towards Labour of about 16 points in the space of two months during which the party did nothing but make a laughing-stock of itself.

Frankly, if we could find even a single Labour supporter who thought Johann Lamont was actually going to be Scotland’s next First Minister we’d be astonished, so we’re putting the poll down as a rogue until it’s corroborated by another one. But there was something even stranger about it.

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Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.

That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.

An alert reader pointed us this morning to an Ipsos Mori poll from last week that seemed to escape most of the media’s attention. As well as mirroring numerous recent surveys showing Labour’s lead over the Conservatives collapsing, it asked a rather more specific question.

Long-time readers may recall a piece this site wrote back in September 2012 about the “Kinnock Factor”, a well-documented phenomenon in British politics by which the electorate, when it comes to the crunch of a general election, invariably rejects parties whose leaders it doesn’t like – even if the party itself is well ahead in the polls.

And in that context, Ipsos had nothing but bad news for Ed Miliband.

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