Wings Over Scotland

We’ve received a reply to the Freedom Of Information request we submitted to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde a few weeks ago with regard to the cost of renaming the new Southern General Hospital in Glasgow. The total cost of the renaming, the bulk of which was accounted for by the ceremony and three free-standing commemorative plaques, has been given as £100,486.

NHSGGC’s full statement can be read here.

There’s much noisy chat at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn being 20 points ahead of his Labour leadership rivals on first-preference votes. His rivals seem to agree; they’ve turned their main efforts to competing amongst themselves for second and third preference “stop Corbyn” votes.

But could any of them really close such a huge gap? And what if they don’t?

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Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.

Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.

The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.

Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.

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Michelle Mone, the fake-tan-and-diet-pills tycoon who threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the 2007 Holyrood election (but didn’t when they did), then threatened to leave if Yes won the referendum (but did when it didn’t), now lives in a very expensive flat by the Thames in London with a lovely view of Tower Bridge.

And boy, does she ever want you to know about it.

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It’s three months since our last traffic-stats update, so we’re due again.

WINGS OVER SCOTLAND JULY 2015

Unique users: 308,314
(up 20,626 on June 2015, up 79,159 on July 2014)

Visits: 1,147,571
(up 90,453 on June 2015, up 229,604 on July 2014)

Page views: 4,732,038
(up 94,495 on June 2015, up 498,717 on July 2014)

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We couldn’t help but smile at the related tunes.

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Having failed over the course of several years to label the SNP “Nazis” and “fascists” (or, depending on which sort of newspaper you were reading, “Tartan Stalinists”), the party’s political and media opponents have a new(ish) meme to punt: that the SNP is a religious cult made up of credulous, fanatical zealots impervious to logic or facts.

The leader of this new front is right-wing columnist Alex Massie, who by our count has managed to flog someone this diatribe at least four times already this year – the most recent being in yesterday’s Times:

“With its group-think, blame culture and wilful blindness, the Teflon party has turned into a faith-based organisation”

But he’s far from alone.

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You can kind of see why they don’t think Ian Smart is a problem.

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There’s been something of a resurgence recently in pundits bemoaning online abuse and saying “Yes, there are bad apples on both sides but the overwhelming majority of offenders are Yes supporters”.

The authors of such articles oddly choose to ignore the only statistical data so far in existence, which shows the opposite:

“In a worrying development for the Better Together campaign, 21 per cent of those planning to vote Yes have received abuse or threats compared to just eight per cent of those planning to vote No.”

It also seems not to occur to them that their own experience of abuse may be a result of their particular – real or perceived – partisan position. (Ours, for example, is that 98% comes from No voters, but then that WOULD be our experience because on the whole you tend to get abused by people who disagree with you, not your own side.)

So we expect they’ll ignore this inconvenient statistical data from our latest Panelbase poll too, but we’ll put it out there anyway, alongside the Express poll, for reference. It’s pretty much all you can do.

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Alert readers can’t have failed to notice the media working itself up into a particularly dopey froth this week over the subject of a second independence referendum. First the press, short of actual news in the political silly season, pumped up Alex Salmond stating the bleeding obvious into some kind of hold-the-front-page revelation.

(Salmond has said, like, forever that he believes Scotland will be independent in his lifetime. That can only happen through a referendum. It therefore stands to reason that he must believe a second referendum is inevitable. Him saying so, for the 500th time, in response to a direct question is about as far from “news” as it’s possible to get.)

Then today all the papers reported David Cameron ruling out any possibility of another one while he’s Prime Minister, as if it was any of his business to do so.

(Should the SNP stand on a manifesto commitment to another referendum, and win a majority on that platform, it’d be not only an affront to democracy but politically idiotic to block it. Even those Scots opposed to independence, or to another referendum, still want their country’s democratic will respected.)

Luckily, there’s an easy solution to the problem.

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On last night’s surprisingly feisty Scottish Labour leadership debate, one thing the two candidates firmly agreed on was that Scottish Labour should NOT become a fully autonomous party able to form its own policies. So it probably won’t come as any great shock to find that they’re both out of step with public opinion.

In fairness, it should be noted that a narrow majority (40% to 28%) of Labour’s own voters still want the Scottish branch office to be ultimately controlled by the UK party, as do Tory and Lib Dem supporters. More disturbing is probably the 29% of all Scots (including 13% of Labour voters) who think it doesn’t matter either way.

Whoever wins, we suspect they shouldn’t get their hopes up.