Wings Over Scotland

This is what we use to record episodes of “Call Kaye”.

Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?

It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.

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We know “Better Together” has a history of mangling statistics beyond all recognition, but today’s effort might just take the biscuit. Their Facebook page and Twitter feed still carries a graphic distorting the true findings of today’s Lord Ashcroft polling to a degree so spectacular as to be unmeasurable.

It’s going to be hard to count all the untruths in that single image – partly because some of them are falsehoods on several different levels – but we’ll try.

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Yesterday we ran a couple of features examining the sort of people the Yes campaign needs to convince if it’s to win the referendum in just over a year’s time, and how it might go about tackling that job. Today saw the release of a series of polls from Tory peer Lord Ashcroft that demonstrate just how big a challenge that’s going to present.

Because it’s not that the results show an electorate deeply committed to the Union (although they do suggest a large No majority, albeit from polling which was conducted as much as almost seven months ago), but because they illustrate just how little voters currently know about anything.

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As we’ve already noted today, those who don’t currently support independence can be split into two groups: those who can be persuaded to support it, and those who can’t.

For the purposes of winning the referendum it’s important to be able to tell the difference between the two, so as to avoid wasting time trying to convert the non-convertible, and spend our time instead on those who can be persuaded to vote Yes.

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Scotland on Sunday this week carries a piece interviewing No voters to find out why they’re currently intending to keep Scotland governed by Westminster (following on from a similar article about Yes supporters last week). It’s an interesting snapshot of both diehards and people who could yet be turned round.

Let’s take a look and see who we’re dealing with.

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Norway is a country with a slightly smaller population than Scotland, with more difficult territory and climate. It discovered oil in its territorial waters at the same time as Scotland, and in broadly similar quantities. While Scotland’s standard of living is in freefall, like that of the rest of the UK, due to Tory austerity cuts brought about in large part by Labour’s spectacular failure to tackle inequality in “boom” times, this is how our neighbours across the North Sea are doing:

“Norway, which goes to the polls tomorrow, faces a strange problem: too much money. The Nordic country, an island of prosperity in ailing Europe, faces an embarrassment of riches as it tries to figure out how to spend its huge pile of oil money without damaging the economy in the long run.”

Better Together? The best of both worlds? Yeah, right.

We’re still trying to pick through the half-dozen or so completely contradictory statements various senior Labour figures – including Ed Miliband, Liam Byrne, Johann Lamont and Anas Sarwar – have made about the bedroom tax this week. This quote from an article in the Herald illustrates the problem:

“Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne told Good Morning Scotland that, before Labour could make a manifesto commitment they had to prove that the policy costs more than it saves.

During the STV debate, Mr Sarwar said: “If we were in government tomorrow, we would abolish the bedroom tax.””

So, let’s just go over that again – Labour can’t commit to repealing the bedroom tax if elected in 2015 because they don’t know if it costs more than it saves. BUT, if they were somehow to be elected tomorrow, they’d just go ahead and make the decision to abolish it without that (suddenly apparently no longer important) information?

Can anyone walk us through the logic of that one? It’s got us beaten.

He’s got a fake paper!

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Okay, it’s going to be FAR too much work to plough through well over 500 comments in the previous thread to work this out, so let’s do it the easy way. If you’re planning to attend the march and rally on Calton Hill later this month, please post ONCE in the comments below. (Put anything you like in that one comment, though – jokes, pictures of cute kittens, links to comical tweets by Duncan Bannatyne, whatever.)

Please DON’T post if you’re NOT going or aren’t sure, and please DON’T conduct discussions in this thread – use the old one for that. One post per attendee. Any post breaching these rules will be deleted mercilessly and with extreme prejudice. Cheers!

This just in: Labour policy clarification on the bedroom tax, from the horse’s mouth.

(No, really. We’re not being satirical, although they might be.)

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It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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