Wings Over Scotland

Last month Scotland on Sunday published some findings from a poll covering, among other things, backing for Trident and for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit vote.

We didn’t think much about it until a reader told us that Labour MSP Jackie Baillie had trumpeted the Trident result – a wafer-thin 43-42 majority in favour – in her column in the Helensburgh Advertiser. We were curious to see the finer details and set about finding the full data tables for the poll, which was conducted by ICM.

(Under British Polling Council rules, pollsters have to release full data within 48 hours of any headline findings being made public.)

Weirdly, they didn’t exist.

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Readers, we’re honestly starting to believe that the entire Scottish media is some sort of elaborate Jeremy-Beadle-style prank.

Because the alternative – that they actually mean this stuff seriously – is just too bizarre and horrible to contemplate.

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So a few things need said about the events of the weekend.

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For much of its life, this site has been warning readers that, as their default position, they should always assume newspaper headlines are a lie until proven otherwise.

Today, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper admitted it in public.

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It must be bewildering being the SNP sometimes.

You win a historic third election with a second massive landslide, getting more than twice as many seats as your nearest challenger – the first time such a thing has ever happened in a Holyrood election – on the back of what’s (self-evidently) by and large a very popular policy programme and record, and before you’ve even taken your seats in the chamber all the parties you just thrashed out of sight line up to explain how you’ve been doing everything wrong.

And as alliances go, they don’t get much less holy.

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We’re supposed to be taking a few days off, but it’s been tipping it down outside for 36 solid hours, so when an alert reader emailed us a question relating to this article from Monday, we couldn’t help but go and research it just to pass some time.

They’d asked how many of the Tory MSPs elected last Thursday had been rejected by the voters of a constituency seat on the same day, and we were startled by the answer – of the 24 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament elected on the list last week, every single one was also a failed constituency candidate.

And that got us thinking.

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A few weeks ago we rather cruelly highlighted an old post from Kezia Dugdale’s blog in which she bitterly bemoaned the practice of candidates who’d been rejected by voters in constituency seats still being able to get into Parliament via the “back door” of the regional lists.

Angrily Dugdale raged:

“Alex Salmond will try every trick in the book to get elected to the Scottish Parliament. Standing for both a constituency and a list seat this May doesn’t even register in his party’s mindset as being inappropriate.“

She also had a swing at a Lib Dem MSP:

“Mike Pringle has a majority of 158. He is I think, the third most marginal MSP in Scotland. Aware of his vulnerability, Mike has put his name forward for the Liberal Democrat Lothian List which means it’s nearly impossible to get rid of him at the next election. How unfair is that?”

So, y’know, she had this coming.

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The social-media reaction to this post yesterday was astonishing. Merely pointing out calmly and quietly that our warnings before the election had been entirely vindicated, and that everyone else’s unequivocal assertions of a guaranteed SNP majority had been the rubbish we always said they were, unleashed a torrent of abuse equal to any we’ve ever endured in the last four and a half years – distinguished only by the fact that so much of this one came from supposed Yes supporters.

But no amount of screaming and shouting will change the facts. Let’s look at them.

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Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

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During this election campaign, there’ve been the usual bouts of political sparring, the tit-for-tat point-scoring frenzy played out through a plethora of media. One particular battleground, though, had a special resonance for me – the “Named Person” scheme.

I’m a former “looked-after” child. I’ve suffered the abuse and neglect that this scheme is intended to help protect children from. Having scrutinised the details for myself, I fully support it.

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We’re looking forward to the publication of the Scottish Labour manifesto for next month’s election, which is due to be published on Wednesday, just eight days before the vote. We confidently anticipate that it will definitively clear up a few issues we’re still not absolutely sure of the branch office’s position on.

For a day or two, at least.

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Considering we’re only eleven days from a general election, there’s remarkably little politics coverage in the Sunday papers today. Most of what there is is in the Sunday Herald, which has a substantial (and quite entertaining) interview with Kezia Dugdale and another two pages devoted to what’s essentially spluttering attempted justification of its shambolic front-page lead from last week.

We’re not going to go into it in depth, as James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already had a close look and made a pretty fair assessment. But for want of anything more interesting to talk about, and in the wake of some depressing Twitter conversations with people who apparently STILL don’t understand either the Holyrood electoral system or basic arithmetic, we’re going to have one more wade in the list-vote debate.

You might want to see if there’s football on or something.

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