Wings Over Scotland

Perhaps the single most striking feature of everyday non-constitutional Scottish politics is Labour’s constantly-recurring habit of highlighting some supposedly unsatisfactory statistic about the Scottish Government’s performance, only for it to be revealed that it’s vastly better than the comparable figure for Wales, where Labour has been in power ever since the Assembly was created in 1999.

So let’s crank up the machine again and see what it says, shall we?

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The data in this Scottish Government reply to an alert reader this week pretty much speaks for itself, so we’re not going to add too much to it.

The number of FOI requests submitted to the Scottish Government by the BBC in the past three years (112) is more than 25% higher than the total number submitted in the previous seven years (89).

The number submitted by Labour in 2017 was more than TEN TIMES as many as it submitted in 2008, and twice as many as any other year.

The number submitted by the Tories in 2017 was a third more than the total number submitted in the previous NINE years (92). They’ve also exceeded that total in the first seven months of this year alone.

And as the highlighted passage notes, the true numbers are considerably higher.

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It’s around this time of year that we always enjoy a delve in the impenetrable enigma that is the membership of Scottish Labour. (As gathered together in the picture below during Jeremy Corbyn’s last trip to Edinburgh.)

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We’re just going to reprint this piece every year, because only the numbers change.

Today saw the publication of the 2017-18 GERS stats, which are once again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the current decade stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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Several right-wing media outlets, including the Scotsman, the Scottish Daily Mail and a far-right Unionist website called the Unity News Network have in recent days picked up on the findings of a newly-published study commissioned by the Scottish Government on young people’s attitudes towards immigration.

To give you a flavour of the Unity News Network, it was most recently seen making a Facebook post that captioned a fascinating colour video of London in 1924 with the words “Before Sadiq Khan, Before Terrorism, Before Acid Attacks, Before Moped Gangs, Before Mass Immigration…. Who wants Britain to go back to that time?”

(Some sample reader replies include: “How wonderful, we want our country back” and “It wasn’t the murder capital of the western world then I wonder why it changed was it a black cloud that descended on it?” For perspective on that claim, London recorded 80 murders in the first six months of 2018, compared to 141 in New York.)

And yet UNN still managed to put the least racist spin on the story.

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One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).

The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a single decade.

At the very least, then, you’d imagine that the period might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.

The like-for-like sales total of the same newspapers today is 492,353.

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Several of today’s Scottish newspapers report on a marginal increase in the number of homeless people in Scotland, and in particular – for some reason – those who’ve slept rough for at least one night in the three months before declaring themselves homeless.

Things become a little clearer when you see that the reported stats are courtesy of “research by Scottish Labour”, who’ve scoured the document to cherry-pick the worst-sounding numbers in order to blame “Tory and SNP austerity”, etc etc.

That weirdly specific stat for rough sleepers has risen by 10% over two years, although this year’s increase was only 1% and overall homelessness is only up by less than 1% over the same two-year period.

But all credit to Labour – it’s only taken them two months to come up with that number (which is the second line of Table 2 in the statistics). Because the figures were actually released – and reported – in the middle of June.

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Part 1: the story.

This year’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey has found, yet again, that Scottish people trust their government in Holyrood vastly more than they trust the one in Westminster. The figures transcend party loyalties, with far more people saying they trust the Scottish Government than vote for the SNP.

Trust in both governments was down by five points, which meant the Scottish Government had lost 7.6% of its trust (66 down to 61) while the UK government had lost 20% of its trust (25 down to 20).

Now let’s see how two newspapers owned by the same company reported the news.

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So here’s a headline from the (Dundee) Evening Telegraph.

You know how we’re always pointing out how newspapers love to lie to readers without actually saying things that are untrue? Let’s have a quick case study.

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We’ve commented quite a few times in recent months about the Scottish media’s habit of running statistical stories rendered meaningless by the absence of any context.

The reasons for this aren’t necessarily sinister – sometimes journalists are just lazy or the full stats are hard to establish because like-for-like figures aren’t published – but usually it’s just a way to get an SNP BAD story out of isolated numbers which, if the full picture was presented, would render that impossible.

The above story from STV News today contains no furious rentaquotes from Labour or the Tories (at least not yet), so we should place it in the former category. Nevertheless, we do feel it’s our duty in a general sense to provide readers with the information that the Scottish media can’t be bothered to, so let’s do that.

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…as the Scottish Government releases its Brexit impact paper.

(Panelbase, Scottish adults, fieldwork mid-December 2017)

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The latest Wings Over Scotland annual readership stats are in:

2017 average monthly unique visitors: 303,719
2016 monthly average: 286,162
2015 monthly average: 290,522

(pre-2015 stats from different provider not comparable on a like-for-like basis)

That’s a 6% increase year-on-year, which is pretty respectable going for the dullest 12 months in Scottish politics since this site started (and particularly given the challenging circumstances we had to operate in for the whole of the autumn).

We also found out we were by some distance the most popular website of the Scottish Government, which was nice:

Thank you for all your support, your financial backing, your tip-offs and your company. 2018 is shaping up to be somewhat more interesting, so we hope you’ll stay with us.