Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will have noticed that for the last week or so we’ve been challenging some of the conventional wisdom about Labour’s election victories from 1997-2005. While the right wing of the party and commentariat regularly insists that Tony Blair was its most successful leader ever, we demonstrated that over the course of his leadership he lost Labour over two million votes, whereas Neil Kinnock’s reign had resulted in a GAIN of three million.

In short, New Labour’s victories were primarily the result of the Conservatives being in a catastrophic state during Blair’s rule, exhausted by almost 20 years of power and scandal and infighting about Europe. With William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard at the head of a shattered opposition, Labour could have won those elections with Piers Morgan or a Teletubby in charge.

What our research also found was that the most striking thing about the period since Blair became Labour leader in 1994 was a staggering and almost overnight increase in the number of British voters turned off politics altogether.

In 1992 just eight million people entitled to vote stayed at home. By 2001 that number had rocketed to EIGHTEEN million, a 125% increase in nine years, and in May it was still at almost 16 million.

Since Blair, eight million UK citizens who used to vote have simply walked away and washed their hands of the entire political process. That’s quite a legacy, but it’s also an opportunity, because it’s a lot of people waiting for a reason to vote for someone. (Most of them young and/or poor, two traditionally Labour-friendly demographics.)

Bizarrely, it’s an opportunity Labour and its allies seem utterly determined to shun.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Sunday Times has today released some more of the data from the joint poll it conducted with this site a couple of weeks ago. As well as giving the SNP a 31% lead over Labour for Holyrood 2016, there’s a very interesting stat on Europe.

That lead in England for the UK leaving the EU is surprising – most recent polling has shown something like a 60-40 margin in favour of staying in. We’ll need to wait and see if the poll is an outlier or if there’s been another shift in English opinion.

It’s also interesting in that it blows a hole in the regular assertions of Unionist pundits that there are no real differences in social attitudes on either side of the border. At a time when England is split down the middle, Scotland’s resounding 2:1 majority for staying in Europe has never, to our recollection, been higher.

There’s one more thing of note about the poll, though.

Read the rest of this entry →

This week, as the UK’s new Conservative government brought forward a bill to impose tax on renewable energy projects, just seven Labour MPs turned up to oppose it.

You know these guys that you used to see wandering round the city centre with a sandwich board telling us “THE END IS NIGH”? It seems they were right.

Read the rest of this entry →

Since Germany decided to punish Greece for daring to try to exercise democracy and national sovereignty, there’s been something of an upsurge in commentators on the British left questioning whether the EU is really the progressive institution they’d assumed it to be, leaving their vote in 2017’s EU referendum potentially up for grabs.

(Unlike Scotland, of course, at least Greece didn’t have to ask permission to hold its plebiscite on austerity, even if it appears to have counted for nothing in the end.)

Coming hot on the heels of the European Parliament ignoring concerns over the highly secretive TTIP negotiations, the European dream is turning into a nightmare for many.

Read the rest of this entry →

…has for the last 14 years been the None Of The Above Party.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re still trying to get our heads round this:

The article in question, which we posted last night regarding the former Parliamentary Assistant to Scottish Labour deputy leader hopeful Richard Baker who’s just defected to the Tories, was entirely comprised of some of Stephen Anderson’s own tweets.

It carried no editorial commentary on them whatsoever, and none of the tweets had (of course) been doctored in any way, so the only way the piece could have been “filled with inaccuracies” would have been if the tweets themselves were drivel.

We wish Ruth Davidson the best of luck with her new recruit.

Read the rest of this entry →

Read the rest of this entry →

Last night we ran a piece about a story in last week’s Daily Record in which a Scottish Labour official was given free rein to make an extended political attack on the SNP in the guise of a “business student” from the University of the West of Scotland, without his Labour identity being revealed, on the flimsy basis of a petition about college cuts with a few hundred signatures.

As it happens, another UWS student also has a petition doing the rounds at the moment. But it got treated rather differently by the Scottish press.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alert contributor Calum Ferguson tells us the first bookie to come out with odds for the 2016 Holyrood election is Ladbrokes. Fortune-making opportunities seem limited.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

Read the rest of this entry →

An alert reader brought our attention today to a Daily Record article that we’d missed on Friday, reporting how a Glasgow student had launched a petition bitterly attacking the Scottish Government over cuts to college places.

Despite having attracted only 500 signatures (and only 400 more in the following five days despite the Record helpfully linking to it), the petition was deemed newsworthy enough for a hefty polemic in which petition author Eunis Jassemi pulled no punches, repeatedly lashing the SNP in highly political terms. No counterquote was offered.

Mr Jassemi was described by the Record in the piece as a “business student” and a “former Hutcheson’s Grammar School pupil”, but we can only assume that they must have run out of room before they got to a rather more pertinent item on his CV.

Read the rest of this entry →