There’s a remarkable story on the BBC News website today about the latest findings of the British Election Study, last seen destroying the myth that fear of the SNP damaged Labour in England. The piece focuses on the discovery that being seen as “too left-wing” does NOT, in fact, cost Labour votes, despite the hysterical warnings of supposedly leftist pundits.
But there’s a more startling fact buried right at the end.
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Category
comment, debunks, stats, uk politics
Dear Blairite MP,
I’m writing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members; some new, and some, like me, who have been loyal party members throughout our adult lives. I’m not writing to any one of you in particular.
The ones I’m addressing will know who they are.
It’s time to talk about us.
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Tags: perspectives
Category
comment, uk politics
All five of the opinion pollsters who regularly poll on Scottish politics (Panelbase, YouGov, TNS, Ipsos Mori and Survation) have now published surveys in the past two weeks asking the independence question. So it seems reasonable to expect there’ll be no more polls before the anniversary of the referendum on Friday.
Given the conventional wisdom that the economy, underpinned by that pesky volatile oil, was the main reason not enough Scots could be persuaded to take the leap into self-government, readers might expect that the dramatic collapse in the oil price since last year (when we checked today it was trading at just over $47 a barrel, less than half the $97 it was at the start of September 2014) would only have cemented voters’ feeling that they made the right decision.
So why is the opposite true?
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Tags: ticktock
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics
There’s been a veritable flurry of polls commissioned to mark the impending one-year anniversary of the independence referendum. In the last 48 hours alone we’ve seen ones from Survation, YouGov and Panelbase, making a variety of interesting findings. As ever, though, the trick is in the interpretation.
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Tags: arithmetic fail, flat-out lies, headline ferret
Category
debunks, scottish politics, stats
As we were poking around with this, we thought it’d be useful to have all the basic donations and spending information about the referendum in one place. It’s normally scattered around different places and hard to access easily, and it’s quite interesting.
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Tags: flat-out lies
Category
reference
This happened last night:
Despite having only raised £5,470 of its £50,000 target, the fundraiser set up by a veteran Lib Dem activist (or, in BBC language, an “Aberdeen woman”) was suddenly closed down, with no explanation offered.
So what do we know?
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Category
comment, scottish politics
It’s a pretty widely-held axiom that supporters of independence rule the internet. While there are online No sites – mainly demented Loyalist affairs on Facebook – none of them has anything like the reach of even the middle-ranked Yes ones.
Where the independence movement has always trailed a long way behind is conventional media. For most of the modern era there hasn’t been a single newspaper or broadcast outlet that supported Yes. Now the Sunday Herald and The National have stepped into that space, with encouraging results, and NewsShaft are doing increasingly exciting things on air (though still web-based).
Clearly, though, more is needed, and one of the most impressive productions is one which has existed for almost a year already, but is curiously little-heralded.
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Category
comment, media
Here’s Atul Hatwal, editor of the influential Labour website Labour Uncut, speaking first in July and then reviewing his position with the benefit of hindsight in August.
Corbyn just won the leadership election in the first round with 60% of the vote. Don’t give up the day job, Atul. Well, actually, maybe you should.
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Category
comment, uk politics
