Wings Over Scotland

So, this was January:

Yeah, we’ll take that.

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Alex Salmond’s appearance on Scotland Tonight this week raised an issue we’ve been meaning to address for a while, so let’s do it now before we forget again.

Of the numerous polls of the last few months, the most encouraging for supporters of independence was the one conducted by Panelbase for the Sunday Times in late October. It showed a pretty tight race at 37% Yes to 45% No, but the most interesting aspect was how the numbers changed when voters were asked for their opinion in the hypothetical scenario that they expected the Conservatives be returned as either a majority or coalition government at the 2015 Westminster general election.

In that scenario, independence leapt ahead with a massive 10% swing, to lead by 52% to 40%. But much less reported by the media was another finding of the poll.

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Your jaw just drops sometimes at the sheer cheek of it.

“I am pleased that this impartial body has […] rejected the nationalist attempts to silence their opponents by setting spending limits that would have given them an unfair advantage.” – No campaign leader Alistair Darling, in a post on the “Better Together” site today.

Remember: the “nationalists” wanted to let the No campaign spend £250,000 more than the Yes campaign –  a funny kind of “silencing” and a quite unusual definition of “advantage”, let alone “unfair”. Instead, the Electoral Commission has recommended that the Yes campaign be allowed to spend more than its opponents. We’re trying for all we’re worth to work out why Mr Darling considers that a victory.

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Scottish Government proposals for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £1,250,000
NO side: £1,500,000
(advantage of £250,000 to NO campaign)

Electoral Commission recommendations for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £2,994,000
NO side: £2,931,000
(advantage of £63,000 to YES campaign)

Oh no! It’s another defeat for the SNP!

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And as we’re talking about money, we couldn’t resist this one.

“Pro-independence parties will be able to spend £1.494m compared with £1.4m for the pro-UK parties, an advantage of £63,000.”

Keep up the good work, chaps.

We’ve already offered our opinion on the Electoral Commission’s report on the question for the independence referendum. The Commission also made two other main recommendations: that both sides should provide information on the consequences of their preferred outcome (something the Unionist side has steadfastly refused to do until now), and that the campaign spending limits should be higher than the Scottish Government’s proposed figures, at £1.5m per side for politicial parties, and the same for other organisations – a total of up to £6m.

The former will be intriguing to watch, but for now let’s talk quickly about the money.

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We know for certain that a good many Scottish newspaper and broadcast journalists read this website, so maybe one of them will enlighten us about something. The latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report contained a wealth of tables and statistics in respect of the independence debate, but the entire media seized, with complete and startling uniformity, on one in particular.

It was a curious choice to highlight, as it related to a vaguely-worded, ambiguous question with no relevance to the options which voters will actually choose between in the referendum. Yet the very same survey contained a much more interesting set of results which got either a dismissive passing mention or no coverage at all.

Since, as we’ve already established, there’s no Grand Unionist Black-Ops Society which meets in Pacific Quay to decide how best to serve the grim needs of the No campaign, we’d honestly like to know how not one single newspaper, TV channel or radio station thought this particular question merited lead status in their coverage of the SSAS. Because it presents a radically different picture of Scottish opinion to the one absolutely everyone decided, by miraculous coincidence, to paint.

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When I wrote previously about how Scotland’s export business does not depend on the UK (as had been claimed by Alistair Darling at last year’s Mackintosh Memorial Lecture), one of the questions I was asked was what export business Scotland has.

On Wednesday, in a piece lurking at the bottom of Scottish news section, the BBC reported a £1.6bn rise in Scottish exports. The Global Connections Survey (GCS) – full report here – showed that exports were up to record highs both to the rest of the UK and to the rest of the world. Scotland’s exports to the rUK showed a value of £45.5 billion, and to the rest of the world they rose by the headlined £1.6bn, up to £23.9bn.

It’s worth noting that none of these statistics include oil (see page 2 of the report), despite the mention of “refined petroleum” below – we’ll deal with that another day.

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In case you missed it on Twitter, we reveal the No campaign’s Head Of Graphs:

There, that should cheer up those grumpy The Rangers fans from last night.

Poor old “Better Together”. We already knew they had some difficulty with basic counting, but today it seems their reading isn’t up to much either. Desperate to deflect attention from the hideous hole they’ve dug themselves into over Europe, they’ve seized on the latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing (depending how you spin it) almost three-quarters of Scots in favour of devolution rather than independence.

There’s only one problem: the cited source for those figures doesn’t say that at all.

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One of the most unfortunate things about the Scottish media’s coverage of the independence debate is the persistent portrayal of the Yes campaign as nothing more than a figleaf concealing the SNP. Recently we’ve pointed out the unwillingness of the press to acknowledge information that’s already in clear public view with regard to the demographic make-up of the pro-independence movement, even while making great play of the alleged comparative broadness of the No side.

So we decided to conduct our own poll, just out of curiosity, on a dozen random topics. With just shy of 1000 respondents it’s a respectable sample size, and while of course it isn’t scientific (being self-selecting) it wasn’t aiming to be. The large majority of this site’s readership is of the nationalist persuasion – for want of a better term, at least – so we weren’t trying to take a snapshot of all Scotland, but rather one specifically of the Yes movement. The results were pretty interesting.

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We’ve already highlighted the absurdity of the comments made by several Unionist politicians last week (in both the Commons and the Lords) about the Scottish Parliament being “undemocratic” and a “one-man dictatorship”. But we only mentioned Scottish representation in doing so. What about the whole UK?

The majority – 53% – of votes cast by the British electorate in 2010 were worthless, because they were cast for candidates who didn’t win the seat they contested and are therefore simply thrown in the bin by the “first past the post” electoral system. Thousands of people were locked out of polling stations across the country on the evening of the vote, but it didn’t really matter, because statistically speaking their vote would probably have been completely ignored anyway.

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