Wings Over Scotland

The Economist:

“George Osborne’s political vision is brave, bold – and on many counts wrong. 

Cutting benefits to the very poor while reducing inheritance tax for the wealthy is indefensible.”

The acting leader of the Labour Party:

Of course, it’s entirely natural that the Labour Party and The Economist should be on opposite sides. But somehow everything seems to be the wrong way round.

One of the worst things about running this website is that eventually it causes you to doubt the existence of reason. Things happen that – even putting all partisanship to one side, in so far as is humanly possible – it’s impossible to believe any remotely rational being or organisation would ever think, say or do.

A recent obvious case in point was the election of Jim Murphy as Scottish Labour leader. SNP supporters rubbed their eyes in disbelief as Labour and the media rushed, with apparent sincerity, to proclaim one of Labour’s most right-wing and divisive MPs the party’s saviour.

So unable was the nationalist side to contain its glee and amusement at what was a plainly suicidal move to anyone sane, the Unionist establishment persuaded itself a bluff was afoot and that the laughter masked fear. We all know how that turned out.

But what we want to talk about in this article is how, no matter how often that same tragi-comic farce is played out – in 2007, 2011 and now 2015 – the astonishing fact is that it never seems to make any difference. In defiance of the most famous quote attributed (apocryphally or otherwise) to Albert Einstein, Labour and its cheerleaders keep right on repeating the same actions over and over, expecting different results.

For those of us who cling to reason as the hope of mankind, increasingly despite all the evidence, it can cause outbreaks of incredulous despair. “They just CAN’T be this stupid!”, we exclaim, only for Labour to prove us wrong by offering their long-suffering Scottish members a prospective dream team of Kezia Dugdale and Gordon Matheson.

But we may have had a modest epiphany.

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Because our recent Panelbase poll shared a sample with one for the Sunday Times, there was an unasked-for bonus in the data. The ST had asked Panelbase to divide the 1002 Scottish residents into those born in Scotland, those born in England and those born elsewhere (including the rest of the UK).

The paper has a slightly unsavoury track record for doing so, and it did it this time for the sake of running a deeply statistically-iffy question aiming to prove that a lot of Yes voters were anti-English, but we’ll get to that in another article.

What that meant was that we were able to cross-reference the “ethnicity” data against all of our questions, and that resulted in a couple of interesting findings.

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Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the least self-aware human in Scotland:

Remind us how many Tories Scotland elected again? So why is it that Scotland has a Tory government? Oh yeah, we remember now.

Last year:

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As this site is somewhat on the left of the political spectrum, it’d be all too easy to attack yesterday’s Budget based on its interpretation by what still passes for the UK’s left-wing media. So instead let’s look at it through the eyes of the Daily Mail, which is putting, shall we say, quite a positive spin on it.

Fair-minded readers will concur, we trust, that the Mail’s English and Scottish editions are both portraying George Osborne’s first all-Tory budget in almost 20 years as being a good thing for the nation. But let’s take a look inside. Because when it’s finished with the spin, even the Mail can’t disguise that what happened yesterday was the biggest robbery of the British people in a lifetime.

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85.1% of the Scottish electorate voted against the Conservatives in May. Scotland has a Tory government anyway, because of how England voted, because Scotland is part of the UK and so doesn’t get to choose its own governments. The people who ensured that could happen don’t get to whine about what that Tory government does.

So do everyone a favour and shut your mouths today, No voters. We warned you until we were blue in the face. This is what you wanted. This is what you got. Suck it up.

Here’s Kezia Dugdale in the Scotsman:

“Too often in the recent past it has looked like we are only on the side of one group of people – the most vulnerable in society.”

Now, to be honest we’re not sure we remember exactly when that was. Was it when Scottish Labour were threatening to slash “something for nothing” public services? Was it when Rachel Reeves said “we are not the party of people on benefits” (which is almost half the country)? Was it when Tom Harris said “we weren’t set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society”?

All we do know is, if we were a prospective Labour leader and we were going to make comments like that at all, we probably wouldn’t choose to do it just hours before a Tory chancellor was going to produce a budget battering living hell out of the most vulnerable in society and throwing 500,000 children in Scotland alone into poverty.

Because, y’know, we might be idiots, but we’re not complete idiots.

There’s a very strange feature in today’s Daily Record, and it’s not even one of their regular pieces of pioneering and hard-hitting investigative journalism about who’s the hottest guest ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The headline screams unequivocally that according to a new Survation poll, fear of the SNP influencing a Labour government was the reason that English voters swung back to the Conservatives, defying polls that said the Tories would be the largest party but be short of an overall majority.

(Weirdly it says that their goal in doing so was to “keep Salmond out of power”, even though (a) Alex Salmond is a humble backbench MP who doesn’t even lead the SNP group at Westminster, let alone the party, and (b) he won his seat anyway.)

The article then produces a flurry of graphs and figures showing that various numbers of supporters of the four UK parties switched their votes to various other parties after being polled (as always happens).

But then there’s something quite important missing.

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We noticed this last night, and we checked this morning and it’s still there:

That’s going to come as news to the people going to court tomorrow.

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