Wings Over Scotland

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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Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, were greatly preoccupied in the days after the referendum with the thought that greater devolution to Holyrood could lead to Scottish MPs at Westminster becoming “second-class” members, should the move lead to restrictions on their voting rights in the Commons.

As yet we don’t know what will become of the drive for “English votes for English laws”. But it’s something of a moot point, because we know that as far as politics (and much else, but we’ll get to football another day) goes, Scots are second-class citizens in the UK already.

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Pretty much the entire Scottish media yesterday carried a sad story about the funeral in Forfar of a young soldier who tragically died after serving in Afghanistan.

Private Mark Connolly wasn’t killed in combat but died after being punched by a comrade in a fight. Wrangling between his widow and mother had delayed his funeral for four years, and spilled over into angry confrontations as he was laid to rest, which the papers reported with considerable relish and plenty of photographs, and even video footage from the graveside.

The story was picked up in the Scotsman, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph’s Scotland section, STV News, BBC Scotland, the Courier and more. Curiously, though, one aspect of the unfortunate event was almost completely written out of the coverage.

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An unsurprising result.

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Labour 2014:

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There’s a new hot topic among the Westminster commentariat.

Because desperate times call for desperate measures.

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We’re still supposed to be on a skeleton service for the festive period, but we couldn’t just let this one slide. The cashflow problems at the Labour Party must be more severe than previously thought, because the entire organisation seems to be sharing a single email account. We got yet another begging letter today, from the same address previously named as “Iain McNicol” and “Ed Miliband”, but today’s one was credited to shadow women’s minister Gloria De Piero.

Alert readers will recognise the appeal as one we’ve been watching for 11 days now. It’s an attempt by the UK party to raise some cash to employ 10 campaign assistants specifically for Scottish Labour. The jobs are still openly listed as such on the Labour website’s situations-vacant page. Yet the party seems oddly reluctant to say so.

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By now readers will probably be familiar with STV News reporter Stephen Daisley’s superbly withering review of Alan Cochrane’s referendum diaries. One quote from the book aroused particular interest:

“There are one or two interesting tidbits. He shares a story that Bank of England governor Mark Carney fired a warning shot at Alex Salmond when he came to Edinburgh for their landmark meeting. 

According to Cochrane, the Canadian economist told the First Minister: ‘I’m only here for one day, Alex, but don’t f— with me or I’ll be up here a lot more often.’“

But did that really happen?

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Hang on a minute. We just got yet another begging email from Labour.

Those vacancies sound familiar. The amount, not so much. £87,500?

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The argument that seat projections based on current opinion polling give the SNP (based on uniform swing) a wildly unrealistic number of seats seems at first glance to be compelling. More than two dozen current Labour seats have five-figure majorities, and several are higher than 20,000. Taken individually every single one represents a mammoth task, and capturing the bulk of them looks an absurd dream.

We’re deeply sceptical ourselves about the predictions giving the SNP 40 or more seats, partly for that reason and partly because the lesson of 2011 – when the Nats somehow pulled off a 30-point poll shift in around six weeks – shows how foolish it is to call a febrile-looking election that’s still the best part of five months away.

So we’re not going to be doing that. We’re not making any forecasts here. Rather, we were interested in taking a look at how it could happen, and how First Past The Post, for so long the SNP’s mortal enemy, could next year become a powerful ally.

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The egos of the SNP’s tiny band of six Westminster MPs must be swelling by the day. For weeks we’ve been recording Labour’s standard, decades-old mantra of how Scots mustn’t vote SNP or the Tories will get in. In today’s Herald, meanwhile, no less a figure than the Prime Minister warns that if we vote SNP, Labour will get in.

And the Lib Dems? The Lib Dems have completely lost their minds.

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An intriguing extract from the weekend’s YouGov poll for The Sun:

It’s not the biggest vote of confidence, is it?

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