Wings Over Scotland

In a post earlier today we quoted some extracts from the political memoirs of former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on the subject of the infamous 1979 vote of no confidence which resulted from his government overturning the Yes result of the Scottish devolution referendum that year, as a result of a Labour MP’s amendment to the bill which meant that it required an effectively impossible threshold for a Yes vote.

Callaghan said of the amendment:

“This provision was carried by a majority of fifteen, with as many as thirty-four Labour Members voting against the Government. I have since wondered whether those thirty-four Labour Members would have voted as they did if they had been able to foresee that their votes on that evening would precipitate a General Election in 1979, at the least favourable time for their Government.”

He blamed the rebels on his own benches, rather than the SNP, for ultimately bringing about the collapse of his government and opening the door to the victory of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. And we’ve often wondered who they were.

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We’ve spoken before of Scottish Labour’s most revered ancient totem of faith, the 1979 “stab in the back” myth by which they accuse the SNP of sole responsibility for the 18-year rule of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.

More than three-and-a-half decades later, Labour still cling to it as their trump card in any argument against the SNP, pulling it out when all else fails and relying on the fact that hardly anyone was there to contradict their version of events.

It’s an accusation that’s complete cobblers from top to bottom, but then again you’d expect us to say that. So instead let’s get the view of someone who was there.

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It is sometimes said, unkindly, that in parts of Scotland it would be possible to get a monkey elected as a Labour MP, so long as said monkey was wearing a red rosette.

Here, not entirely unrelatedly, is Brian Donohoe (Central Ayrshire), earlier today.

Um, just a couple of points.

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There are sacred rules, except when you don’t have to bother with them.

The beauty of an unwritten “constitution”, eh readers?

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Honestly, they should put ribbons and a bow on this stuff.

Some readers have been a bit dispirited by the findings of our Panelbase poll this week, which revealed a few quite socially-conservative views among the Scottish population and also found fairly small differences of opinion between Scots and the rest of the UK on a number of issues.

But to be downhearted about the findings is to miss a whole series of points.

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So far in our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK we’ve found that while there can be very sizeable gaps between Scottish public opinion and that elsewhere, it mostly tends to be within the same side of the debate – for example, rUK citizens are much keener on retaining the monarchy and nuclear weapons than Scots are, but Scots do still favour both.

Our final round-up off the poll findings, though, focuses on the three questions we asked where the differences DID cross the divide.

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For our next grab-bag of data from our twin social-attitudes polls of Scotland and the rUK, let’s take a look at some things where Scottish people converge and diverge from their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts. It’ll be something to do.

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We apologise if the results of our twin social-attitudes polls of both Scotland and the rUK have been a little depressing so far, readers.

Depending on how you choose to look at things (and where you live), this next tranche of data is going to either cheer you up a little bit or make you feel even worse.

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Having found to our dismay that both Scots and the rest of the UK want to see people prosecuted for offensive but non-threatening comments on Twitter and Facebook, it seems a good time to reveal the rest of our findings on matters of law and justice.

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Freedom of speech has been a very hot topic across the world in the wake of the brutal murder of 12 editorial staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and other related killings. So in our latest poll we thought we’d find out how committed people were to the principle, even in much less deadly situations.

The results were sobering.

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Keen students of politics can’t have failed to notice a fascinating situation coalescing in the last few months. On current polling, it looks very much like no two of the UK’s four constituent nations will vote for the same party at the forthcoming general election. The Tories are miles ahead in England, in Scotland the SNP lead by even more, Wales is still a Labour stronghold and Northern Ireland continues to do its own thing, split roughly half-and-half along, well, let’s call them “cultural” lines.

So when we decided to conduct another poll with our left-over fundraiser money (start saving now for 2015’s annual grand appeal next month, readers!), we thought it might be interesting to do something that we’re not sure has ever been done before.

We commissioned TWO full-sample polls, one of 1000 people in Scotland and one of 1000 people in the rest of the UK, and we asked them the same questions.

The results we got were fascinating – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, sometimes pleasing and sometimes dismaying. But we’re going to start off with one we really didn’t see coming at all.

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