One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.
That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.
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analysis, reference, scottish politics, stats, uk politics, world
The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.
Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.
Today is one of those times.
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Tags: flat-out lies, misinformation
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analysis, comment, europe, media, scottish politics, uk politics
The Daily Record, 13 December 2013:
But phew – luckily, in the UK there’s always an alternative.
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Tags: lizards
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comment, uk politics
We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.
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Tags: confused
Category
scottish politics, uk politics, wtf
We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.
We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).
Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.
Don’t they?
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Tags: Kinnock Factor
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analysis, comment, stats, uk politics
The wording of that headline isn’t strictly accurate, because the Claim Of Right For Scotland – signed in 1989 by over 80% of Scottish MPs, and many other politicians and representatives of “civic Scotland” – isn’t a law, and has no binding force.
Nevertheless, it’s a document that carries a certain amount of political weight, as an open acknowledgement by Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the people of Scotland (not Parliament and the monarch, as is the case in England) are sovereign and are entitled to determine the form of government they want.
Up to a point, anyway.
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Tags: vote no get nothing
Category
analysis, history, scottish politics
Oh, there it is.
Click here for the fascinating full data. And when you hear Labour talk of “pooling and sharing resources” after a No vote, remember where it is that the pool’s located. Because they’ll probably be closing the one near your house.
Category
stats, uk politics
In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.
Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.
Category
scottish politics, stats, uk politics
Now and again, the independence debate gets so dismally stupid that we despair for a few hours and just sit around with our head in our hands trying to understand how professional, apparently-rational people can be so hopelessly, galactically thick.
Today the trigger was The Times, which issued the latest in a flurry of “post-White Paper” polls that have appeared with indecent haste and proclaimed the document’s failure, this time under the ridiculous headline “Poll sinks hope for a ‘yes’ vote”.
Do we even need to write the next bit? Does it really have to be spelled out?
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comment, media, scottish politics
We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.
Yikes!
Category
disturbing, leaks, pictures, scottish politics, uk politics
