Wings Over Scotland

In our previous poll, we discovered that the public overwhelmingly thought its politicians were a bunch of liars. Not a single one of them scored a net positive trust rating for truthfulness, although Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon had the small consolation of being well out in front of the competition as the least distrusted.

We felt a little bit sorry for the nation’s elected representatives, so we thought we’d give them a better chance this time around.

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Alert readers will recall that earlier today we revealed the answers to the first 10 questions we asked the Scottish public about their views on various topics not directly related to the independence referendum, just because we were asking them about stuff anyway and it seemed like a good idea.

Here, in a surprise twist, are the other 10.

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As we were compiling our second poll, it struck us that it provided an opportunity to find out a lot of things about the Scottish public at once, that weren’t necessarily directly related to the referendum.

Politicians and newspapers routinely make all sorts of claims about what the public’s attitude to various issues are, but whenever we Google for polling data backing up those assertions it’s very thin on the ground, especially for Scotland specifically.

So as usual, we just went ahead and did it ourselves.

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As readers will know because we always go on about it, we’re not very fussed about straight Yes/No polls this far out from the vote. We want to get right under the Scottish electorate’s skin, so for our second crowd-funded poll (as with the previous one) we asked for their opinion on all sorts of other stuff too.

But the media is boring and only cares about the simple bits. Headlines first, then.

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SHOULD SCOTLAND BE AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY?

Yes 35%
No 43%
Undecided 20%

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Just an eight-point gap, which remains unchanged if you only include people who are at least 8/10 likely to vote – the numbers in that scenario move to Y37-N45-DK17. With the white paper still unpublished and 11 months to go, the Yes side needs a mere 4% swing to close the gap completely.

But that’s just about the least interesting stat in our poll.

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The data from our second Panelbase poll will be released tomorrow in six instalments, starting at 8am and then arriving at two-hourly intervals. (That’s what we’ve instructed WordPress to do anyway. We have no idea what its attitude towards Greenwich Mean Time is, so it could actually be 8am, 7am or 9am. But whichever one it turns out to be, the other ones will be two hours afterwards.)

We’re telling you this now because we’re having the DAY OFF. It’s our BIRTHDAY.

We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.

First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.

Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.

(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)

We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.

As all the cool, good-looking people who follow us on Twitter will already know, the results of our second crowd-funded poll are in. The data tables only arrived around teatime, so we won’t be publishing anything until Sunday, because we have to analyse a great big mountain of info, write some posts about it and get those posts cleared by Panelbase, all of which takes a wee while.

But allow us to offer you the odd little teaser snippet.

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We were a little confused as we caught up with our Twitter timeline this morning.

Brilliant result? What?

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We couldn’t be bothered staying up for the Dunfermline by-election result. Roughly 60 seconds into the coverage we switched over to Family Guy on BBC3, and then – faced with the unwelcome prospect of all the same old faces spouting all the same old guff as they filled dead air with deathly waffle for a few hours – we went to bed.

Since the disgraced Bill Walker’s resignation (if you can call it that, so unwillingly was he dragged out by the ankles), it’s been obvious that Labour would win, and you don’t stay up into the wee small hours watching a TV show you already know the end of.

So with the benefit of a new day’s eye, let’s have a wee delve.

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With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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Latvia has been ruled by others for most of the past thousand years, with Riga even being the largest city in Sweden until they carelessly lost it to Peter the Great in 1710. Independence from Russia came in 1918 and then from the Soviet Union in 1991.

I arrived in Riga a few months later and stayed for a year and a half. At the time I joked that, apart from my paid work, I was there to observe what they were going through and to take notes for when Scotland became independent. It’s been a long time but some things, I hope, will be relevant to the process over the next year.

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The Spectator: as subtle as it is classy.