Wings Over Scotland

We had an interesting chinwag with a very nice chap called David Phillips at the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier today. By the time he called we’d already managed to determine where the missing hundreds of millions had gotten to (a planned £400m cut to the Scottish defence budget from Westminster that oddly doesn’t get mentioned much when Unionists are telling us how we need to stay in the Union to protect defence jobs), but we did learn some other stuff.

Not unrelatedly, we thought it might be fun to list just a few of the factors in the IFS’s calculations of the finances of an independent Scotland that rely on being able to accurately predict the future – a skill at which governments and economists alike have, let’s say, a sub-optimal track record.

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After some nudging from us, YouGov have now slightly belatedly added the data tables and question text from their recent “Better Together”-commissioned poll on benefits and tax receipts to their website.

Strangely, none of the media reports of the poll mentioned the fact that in addition to quizzing Scots, the company asked the same set of questions* to full-sized samples of English and Welsh voters too. (Indeed, the samples for England and Wales were both bigger – 1051 Scots were polled, 1116 Welsh people and 1744 English.)

We don’t know why nobody cares about the opinion of the Northern Irish. But the data highlighted some interesting discrepancies, and one very surprising thing.

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Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.

(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)

We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.

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We’re still waiting for YouGov to publish the data tables for the survey they conducted for “Better Together” and which was reported on Sunday and Monday in the Herald, the Courier, the Scotsman and possibly others. As far as we can see, publication is now overdue under British Polling Council rules.

In the meantime, though, we’ve had an email from one of the poll’s respondents – alert reader Nikkii Hall – which offers a revealing insight into how it’s possible to manipulate surveys to get the answers you want. We thought you might find it interesting.

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We’ve had so many Freedom Of Information requests knocked back that we’re still a little bit wrongfooted when one comes in that doesn’t try to wriggle out of it and actually answers the questions we asked. So we’ll just let this one speak for itself.

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This is Lord (Ian) Lang of Monkton (Conservative) speaking in the House Of Lords on the 6th of September 2011, during the second Lords reading of the Scotland Bill (later to become the Scotland Act 2012):

“Over the past decade, United Kingdom public spending, which determines the level of the Scottish block grant, has grown faster than Scottish income, which of course determines the revenue from income tax. UK public spending, of which Scotland has received its share and more, has grown by 94 per cent in 10 years, but Scottish income by only 48 per cent.

Therefore, when the new Scottish income tax replaces part of the block grant, it seems that it will have to be raised above the United Kingdom rate for Scottish public spending just to stand still.“

And there’s more.

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Just for laughs, we thought we’d have a look on the BBC website this morning for some intelligent, detailed analysis of yesterday’s devolution proposals from the Conservatives. Yeah, we know. We must still be a bit drunk from last night.

Not only is there not a single mention of the Strathclyde Commission report in the headlines (which do find room to report the line-up of a book festival in Nairn coincidentally featuring a number of BBC presenters, and the hot news that Roy Keane will NOT be the next manager of Celtic, although neither he nor Celtic had ever said he would), but on digging down into the dedicated referendum section we found something more disturbing.

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As we forced ourselves unwillingly through the full text of the Strathclyde Commission report in the name of professionalism this afternoon, it struck us that perhaps in our partisan haste we’d been just a tiny bit harsh on it.

After all, while the extension of tax powers is at best an empty charade and at worst an expensive millstone around the neck of the Scottish Government’s budget, and the proposals for devolving elements of welfare vague and highly unlikely to ever be implemented, there are a couple of recommendations that would, while minor in the context of Holyrood’s overall finances, at least be welcome.

Something nagged at the back of our mind, though.

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The Strathclyde Commission report, 15 months in the making and repeatedly delayed, is just 16 pages long. We’re not too sure what the team did for 14 months and three weeks of that time, because in essence the report is the executive summary of Scottish Labour’s “Powers For A Purpose” paper with a couple of numbers changed.

(Luckily they’re fantasy numbers that won’t affect anything, as the powers they refer to can never be used and in fact will be delivered by the Scotland Act 2012 anyway.)

So rather than bore you by going through it making all the same arguments that we made about the Labour report again, we’re going to keep it short.

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This morning’s papers are already full of reports about the contents of the Strathclyde Commission report, the Conservative counterpart to Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals. Embarrassingly for Johann Lamont, it looks as though the Tories are going to “outbid” Labour, the self-proclaimed “party of devolution”, with what are superficially greater powers for the Scottish Parliament on taxation.

And like much of the media’s coverage of the entire independence debate, the reporting to date is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. An actual letter from America
A fresh perspective on NATO and nukes.

2. The news less fit to print
The media tries to pretend there isn’t a blue whale in the room.

3. Unrestricted warfare
Just your standard No camp make-people-think-their-child-will-die stuff.

4. A day of shame
On which we learned that 10% = 30% and 4 = 1.

5. Friends and enemies
Anas Sarwar claims the BNP and Britain First for team-mates.

This week’s theme: spin so intense it alters gravity.

We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.

(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)

Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.

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