Wings Over Scotland

There’s a rather horrible article by Margaret Curran in the Scotsman today. (No real news there.) It’s a combination of empty noise and ugly smears about the pursuit of independence – an attempt to engage directly with the rest of the world in our own right – being xenophobic and inward-looking and all the usual rubbish.

But we thought it might be interesting to take a look at a single paragraph, examine it forensically and see what it was actually saying. We chose one from near the end, because to be honest we’d be amazed if anyone else had actually had the fortitude to wade that far through Curran’s  plodding, will-sapping prose.

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Okay, the verdict of the readers was pretty unequivocal, with an almost four-to-one majority in favour of going ahead with another opinion poll right away. So let’s get fundraising again. Click the pic to go to the Indiegogo page. (As before, if you can’t use IG for any reason, there are other donating options.)

We’re only running this one for a week, so if you weren’t part of the fun last time, don’t miss out on this second exciting opportunity to be relieved of your cash. All the cool kids are doing it! You want to be cool, don’t you?

Professor Michael E. Smith, the Chair of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, is a man who it’s fair to say knows his onions when it comes to the politics of transatlantic defence. A native of the USA who describes himself as “increasingly intrigued about independence”, he’s written extensively on EU military and security policy, and also understands the internal machinations of NATO a touch better than plebs such as ourselves or even, dare we say it, Willie Rennie.

So we were extremely delighted when he agreed to give Wings Over Scotland an exclusive interview on the subject of an independent Scotland’s future relationship with the West’s main military alliance.

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An alert reader (what would we do without them?) sent us this interesting graph today:

It comes from a page on the website of a heating-oil supplier, and had both our reader and ourselves scratching our heads trying to explain it. Scotland is an oil-producing nation, and almost all of the UK’s oil comes ashore and is refined in Scotland. It has less distance to travel to get to customers in Scotland than anywhere else.

So why do Scots, consistently and by a strikingly large margin, pay the most for it?

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General consensus among the Wings Over Scotland readership seems to be that our Panelbase poll was a resounding success. Despite an almost-total media blackout, traffic to the site has seen a large spike since we undertook the project, and the survey’s findings have bled into the narrative of the debate even when the press didn’t want to acknowledge their source.

We’ve also had some helpful advice on how to do an even better job next time, and to be honest with you, readers, we’re itching to have another go.

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The Scotsman goes big this morning on a story revealing that John Swinney has admitted accidentally misinterpreting a report from Lloyds Banking Group which said that the oil and gas industry would create 34,000 new jobs in the UK over the next two years. A Scottish Government paper in July originally said the jobs would all come to Scotland, but the error was corrected within three days.

While most papers give the issue a couple of short lines, the Scotsman runs the news twice, once in a substantial article of its own and also (for some reason we can’t quite fathom) as a sizeable addendum tacked onto its lead story about Henry McLeish criticising the relentless negativity of the No campaign.

The Scotsman is quite right to highlight this embarrassing clanger. After all, what sort of hapless bumbling idiot could have published something which misinterpreted the Lloyds report as referring to solely Scottish jobs?

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Forgive us another rummage around in our poll data, but we didn’t do a lot of study into gender differences in our first wave of analysis, and we were struck by something this morning as we idly browsed through the question about what Scots were scared of.

Along with the fact that women were almost twice as likely – 38% to 22% – to be undecided about their referendum vote* as men (and indeed about most other votes), it was one of the areas where the differences between the sexes were most stark.

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Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran is quoted in the Herald today presenting the award of £300m of contracts for the navy’s innovative new aircraft-free aircraft carriers as a benefit of the Union, and continuing the well-worn scare story that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards would close in an independent Scotland.

We’ve already dealt with that particular canard, so instead let’s look at the sums.

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Even moderately alert readers will recall our expressing slight concern on Saturday at the recent disappearance of a page from the Scottish TUC website, in which the trade-union organisation outlined its view that the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system would result in a net loss of thousands of jobs in Scotland – a position which is strongly at odds with that of the Labour Party.

So we were relieved to be contacted on Sunday evening by the STUC’s Deputy General Secretary, Dave Moxham, who confirmed that the Congress’s opinion hadn’t changed, and that its full analysis could still be found here.

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We’ve been in a bit of a stat-wading frame of mind generally today, readers, so we hope you’ll forgive us for one last toot on the trumpet after a fortnight that’s seen every readership record on the site trashed in spectacular style.

It’s not even our fault – an alert reader on Twitter pointed out our soaring rating on global web traffic tracker Alexa.com over the course of the last few months (since we became wingsoverscotland.com), so we couldn’t resist a bit of a nosy poke around for the rankings of other Scottish politics sites and, well, these were the findings.

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Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:

“Prof Jim Gallagher understands the intricacies of picking and choosing powers to be devolved. He was secretary of the Calman Commission, whose recommendation formed the basis of the Scotland Act, and has co-authored a book about what will happen after the referendum.

According to Prof Gallagher, the idea of Scotland winning some version of ‘devo max’ in the aftermath of a no vote is fantastical. The term as understood by most people is ‘just independence light’ and will never be accepted by Westminster.”

Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.

We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.

And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.

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