It is with the heaviest of hearts, readers, that we must report to you that Gordon Brown has done an intervention again.
With a new book to sell, the purposeless former Chancellor and Prime Minister who led the UK into a catastrophic financial crisis that’s now entering its second decade has put on his hindsight goggles and made a whole series of bewildering proclamations after the event, which have – naturally – been dutifully received and repeated by the fawning Scottish press like God handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses.
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Category
comment, debunks, scottish politics, stats
Percentage of A&E patients in Scotland in 2017 to date seen within four hours (target 95%), described by Labour MSP Colin Smyth as a “deeply troubling” figure: 94%
Percentage of the vote on which Mr Smyth was elected as an MSP in 2016: 8.9%
Category
comment, scottish politics, stats
Number of references to “UK”, “Britain” or “British” in this story about salmon: 17
Number of references to “Scotland” or “Scottish”: 1 (in a quote)
Percentage of “UK” salmon industry that’s actually in Scotland: 96.3%
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scottish politics, stats, uk politics
A reader sent us an interesting snippet of information today.
That seemed a startling fact, so we looked into it. And it’s true.
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, stats, uk politics
Today’s Daily Record covers the story we mentioned yesterday about a report from a Scottish Labour campaign group making the pretty factually-uncontestable point that the branch office’s dismal strategy in last month’s election held the UK party back.
And it made the Record really angry.
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Tags: arithmetic failmisinformation
Category
analysis, debunks, idiots, scottish politics, stats, uk politics
A very brief stat post, as our “regular” cartoonist is on holiday YET AGAIN.
Wings had just over 300,000 unique readers in June, despite taking the last couple of weeks off ourselves, bringing the monthly average readership for the first half of 2017 to 346,226. That’s 55,532 up on the same period last year, or a 19% increase.
Rarely can a flush have been more busted.
Category
navel-gazing, stats
This one definitely looks dodgy.
We, um… we don’t think they DID show that, Kez.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
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comment, debunks, scottish politics, stats
When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.
So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?
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Tags: and finallyflat-out lies
Category
analysis, idiots, scottish politics, stats
There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times, about a cunning plan by which the Scottish Government could bypass the veto of Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and legislate for a second independence referendum – forcing a direct showdown in which the UK government would have to openly trample the Scottish Parliament and its electoral mandate.
If pursued, it would reopen the current absurd argument in which the Unionist parties claim that the Scottish Government has no “mandate” to pursue a second referendum, despite mandates arising solely from the ability to win votes in Parliament.
(If an absolute majority for one party was required to pass legislation, Holyrood would of course have done absolutely nothing for most of its life.)
And that reminded us that our last Panelbase opinion poll was so vast we still hadn’t finished releasing the results of it, including one rather surprising finding.
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Tags: poll
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, stats
Actually, mighty King Leonidas is understating here. It was 311% in the end.
Wings Over Scotland 2017 fundraiser total: £140,047.
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Tags: fundraisers
Category
media, navel-gazing, stats
The figure below is my own, but it’s also remarkably typical:
Click the pic to get yours.
(It actually feels like a lot more than that – quite possibly because I have, in fact, not for one minute of my entire life been represented by a government at Westminster – or anywhere else, come to that – that I voted for, unless you count the token presence of the Lib Dems in the 2010-15 coalition. Which I don’t, because they immediately betrayed every policy and principle for which I’d voted for them in the first place.)
For Scotland, democracy in the UK simply doesn’t work.
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comment, history, scottish politics, stats, uk politics
We saw this exchange on Twitter this morning, involving left-wing Labour activist Eoin Clarke, a reader, and Scottish Labour list MSP Elaine Smith.
Smith professed to find it “unbelievable” and “scary” that the reader thought he’d had Tory governments for most of his lifetime. (We asked him how old he was and he said 34, which means he’s had Tory governments for 62% of his life, so that checks out.)
But it’s a standard Scottish Labour line that there’s no real difference between Scottish and English voters in terms of favouring left-wing politics, so we thought we’d just quickly check the arithmetic on that. The results are unlikely to shock you.
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analysis, comment, debunks, scottish politics, stats, stupidity, uk politics