Wings Over Scotland

Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)

And it seems our critiques have already hit home.

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Having spent the last few months pleading poverty and pitiful-underdog status, “Better Together” this week appeared to have suddenly remembered that £500,000 cheque it got ages ago from Tory oil tycoon (and friend of genocidal war criminals everywhere) Ian Taylor, and started spending some of it.

12-page colour inserts in newspapers like the Daily Record and Guardian don’t come cheap, and hundreds of thousands of Scots found themselves looking at a small booklet which didn’t identify its source until the very last page, and could have been taken by the unwary to have been a production by the newspapers themselves.

(Especially given the little pale blue “sticker” on the front using what looks very much like the Guardian’s own typeface).

But that was the least of the dishonesty in “The Facts You Need”.

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A thing we’ve noticed throughout the referendum campaign is just how delicate many of those on the No side are when faced with any sort of unfavourable information. Having perhaps expected a very easy ride, a lot of Unionists (and indeed several journalists) have proven terribly thin-skinned, with a tendency to fly off the handle at comically slight amounts of challenge.

The Secretary of State for Portsmouth, for example, having been introduced into the debate as a “bruiser”, hadn’t been in his post five minutes before he was bawling to STV’s Rona McDougall for protection as the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon hammered him with nothing more than a few facts and arguments.

When placed under even the tiniest modicum of pressure, No-camp figures will panic and start blurting out the most ludicrous claims, like Ian Davidson’s extraordinary, petulant “Newsnat Scotland” outburst at a justifiably offended Isabel Fraser, or Alistair Darling’s mad assertion that North Sea oil was on course to run out in January 2017.

And so it was this week with Tory MSP Murdo Fraser.

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For quite some time now, and in particular since the turn of the year, this site’s been pointing out two things about polling for the 2015 UK general election.

One is that Labour’s lead has been in steady decline since 2012. The other is that the polls present a falsely optimistic picture for Ed Miliband’s party, as ultimately a significant proportion of UKIP support is likely to vote tactically, because only two people have a chance of becoming Prime Minister and only one of them is promising what UKIP supporters want above all else – a referendum on leaving the EU.

Pleasingly, on one level at least, today we were proved right.

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While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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This is the latest cinema ad from fake-grassroots campaign group “Vote No Borders”:

And below is why it’s a despicable, shameful lie.

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We learned a couple of moderately interesting things today. One was the result of our politely pestering Sunday Mail editor Jim Wilson, who agreed to release the data tables from the paper’s poll earlier this month which showed a 20-point No lead.

The pollster who conducted the survey, Progressive Partnership, isn’t a member of the British Polling Council, which meant the Mail was under no obligation to make the data available, but the editor very kindly chose to anyway in the interests of transparency and they can be found here.

What they reveal is that PP neither asked, nor weighted its results for, respondents’ party affiliations. That isn’t necessarily any sort of smoking gun – the referendum isn’t a party issue, and it may be that the sample happened to be reflective of voter distribution anyway – but the one thing it DOES tell us is that comparing the results with a party-weighted YouGov poll (as “Better Together” did in a desperate attempt to present a major swing to Yes as one towards No) is a complete nonsense.

The other thing we found out today was more disturbing.

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Another UKIP voter. This one’s a bit more interesting.

Because the thing about UKIP is that – by their own admission – they don’t actually have any policies about anything other than cracking down on immigration and leaving the EU. Their official position is that the rest of their manifesto is blank paper, to be formulated on all other subjects at their summer conference.

Yet even in the complete absence of any other policies, voters are happy to tell TV cameras that the party “their political agenda suits my opinions”.  What does that tell us? It tells us what the 2015 UK general election will be fought on, and it’s not Ed Miliband’s “cost of living crisis”.

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And let’s make Britain great again.

(Labour only needed to gain three seats from 60 for control of Walsall. They failed.)

An email we just got from the Office for National Statistics:

“Hello! The ONS is launching a compendium of statistics on 5 June which enables people to compare stats for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland across subjects such as their economies and populations.”

We’re not entirely sure where they even got our address, but our curiosity’s piqued.

On last night’s Scotland Tonight, Labour MSP Patricia Ferguson claimed that a vote for independence would put at risk Scotland’s access to over £3 billion of BBC programming. It’s a curious and illogical straw-man argument rather akin to saying that if you stop being an ice-cream man you’re not allowed to have ice-cream any more, but we’ll let that slide until another day.

£3bn sounds like quite a lot of money, so in a dull moment we thought we’d study a week’s output from BBC One, the national broadcaster’s flagship channel, and see how much of it we could bear to live without.

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