Wings Over Scotland

The Sun (English edition only, the Scottish one goes for a domestic murrdurr story) has an inflammatory front page today, as Parliament debates the most important series of votes so far on Brexit, including one to overrule devolution.

It’s a rerun of a(n in)famous previous front-page illustration from the paper, which you can see below. But there’s something odd about it.

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November 2009: “at the end of the day the banks will be paying money to the British people and not the other way round”.

Shall we take a look through the arched-eyebrows window, readers?

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We’ll shortly round up the last pieces of data from our Panelbase poll of English voters last month, but this one merits singling out, we think.

Wait, what?

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The findings of Lord Bracadale’s report into hate-crime law in Scotland were published today (tl;dr version: OBFA’s coming back), and we couldn’t help observing them in the context of an interesting Guardian article on the alt/far right yesterday.

Because we’ve discovered something slightly odd about the subject.

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This is from one of the first ever articles we wrote on Wings, just a couple of weeks after the site’s launch way back in November 2011:

Depressingly, some people still don’t get it.

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We’ll keep this one brief, because it’s a bank holiday. We asked our Panelbase poll of English voters this month who they thought – regardless of respondents’ own politics – was doing the best job of leading their party. These were the results, in descending order of perceived competence:

1. Nicola Sturgeon (SNP)
Net rating: -5
(32% good, 37% bad, 31% don’t know)

2. Arlene Foster (DUP)
Net rating: -5
(13% good, 18% bad, 69% don’t know)

3. Vince Cable (Lib Dem)
Net rating: -7
(21% good, 28% bad, 51% don’t know)

4. Theresa May (Con)
Net rating: -18
(34% well, 52% badly, 14% don’t know)

5. Jeremy Corbyn (Lab)
Net rating: -19
(32% well, 51% badly, 17% don’t know)

Not a single net positive, and it seems particularly telling (and grim) that the two at the very bottom of the list are the only ones with any chance of actually becoming Prime Minister – pending, Lord have mercy on us all, the arrival of Jacob Rees-Mogg – while the top two don’t even sit in the UK Parliament.

(Foster, in fact, doesn’t currently sit in ANY parliament.)

To be honest, readers, it’s a miracle British people bother to vote at all any more.

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Like most Scottish politics nerds we’re going to be spending the morning absorbing the report of the Sustainable Growth Commission. But while we do that, we’ve got more data from our Panelbase poll of English voters earlier this month, on what Scotland could expect in the future if it stays in the UK.

We told them: “Under a system known as the Barnett Formula, the government spends more money per head on people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than it does on people in England, because their populations are more thinly spread so it costs more money to provide the same services.”

And this was how they felt about that:

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Of all the dishonest memes regularly put around by the Unionist side in the Scottish constitutional debate, the most bare-faced is the notion of the “fiscal transfer”. Part-time pretend economists harp on endlessly about how the UK “transfers” money (the current popular figure is £9bn) to Scotland to balance the books every year, as if it was a munificent gift out of the sheer kindness of Westminster’s heart.

The reality, of course, is that it’s a loan, which Scotland has to pay back with interest. If an independent Scotland ran a deficit – like almost every country on Earth – it could take that loan out from any number of possible lenders and carry on as normal.

It is in no sense whatsoever an argument for Scotland staying in the Union, because it’s completely irrelevant to the Union, except in so far as that the only reason Scotland needs to borrow money at all is because it’s been part of the UK for the last 40 years and has been left impoverished as a result while a very similar neighbouring country has become wealthy beyond imagination.

But still, let’s indulge them for a moment and assume there really is a £9bn hole in Scotland’s finances. Is there anything we could do to reduce the size of it significantly? Well, since you ask, we have some poll data on that.

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The phrase “the Labour Party has gotten itself into a catastrophic mess on [X]” is a sentence you can complete with almost any subject these days, whether it’s Brexit or anti-Semitism or anti-Asian racism or factionalism or Venezuela or just about anything else under the sun, so it should be no surprise that its gender policy is no different.

The party’s stance regarding all-women shortlists is now that men can be on them, so long as they say they’re women, with no questions asked, except when Labour decide arbitrarily that they aren’t really women at all because they’re obviously really men, except for all the other occasions when they’re obviously really men.

Which seemed like a timely moment for some more new poll data.

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Last week we revealed that English voters would happily see Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK if it was the price of securing Brexit. But one of the odder things was that those figures included a sizeable number of Remain voters, who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.

We were a little perplexed, so we did a follow-up question asking those people if they’d elaborate a bit and got some interesting replies. One person, for example, answered “The Scottish people are very arrogant and although they want to be separate from the rest of the UK they are happy to take money from England”. Charming.

But there was also another stream of opinion on the subject, and it was revealed in the responses to another question in the original poll.

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