Loving the jailer 314
On the face of it, this finding from our latest Panelbase poll isn’t very surprising:
But then again, maybe it is.
On the face of it, this finding from our latest Panelbase poll isn’t very surprising:
But then again, maybe it is.
So, the good news today is that independence polling is finally back to where it was almost exactly four years ago – 26 June 2016, to be precise. Although we couldn’t help notice that The National’s front-page splash on the latest (re)surge was taking second billing in its readership stats to a day-old story about the First Minister’s haircut.
Now, as we noted earlier this month, that might just be down to people getting weary of false dawns. But it might also indicate that a measure of realism is belatedly beginning to dawn on the Yes movement about the lack of connection between nice poll numbers and actually securing another referendum.
We had a little mini-poll out with Panelbase this week, readers. Given that the SNP are currently still insisting that they need ANOTHER mandate at the ballot box to secure a second independence referendum (by our count that would be the tenth), we thought we’d see how many people believed this cunning plan would work.
The results, we suspect, will not amaze you.
Scottish voters, it turns out, aren’t completely stupid.
We’re pretty sure they used the same “separating rival groups” phrasing at Tianenmen Square too, but we’d have to go and check. Meanwhile, here’s what really happened.
My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of under £200 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).
But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.
It’s basically become magic.
We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:
The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.
I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.
And yet, here we are.
We’ve often said on Wings Over Scotland that we really don’t mind if journalists are biased. Everyone is biased, including us – we’d just rather people stopped pretending to be impartial when they weren’t. But what we do really hate about the Scottish media is just how astonishingly bad at its job it is.
A particularly striking example arose recently.
Pretty much every newspaper and broadcaster in the country carried the sad story of former Labour MP Paul Sweeney‘s fall from besuited lawmaker to skint benefits claimant. And yet not a single one of them asked the question that literally every single reader of the story would have been shouting at their screen.
Good news, everyone – there’s been another surge.
Go back to your constituencies and prepare for indyref2! Yes, again.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.