Wings Over Scotland

Viewers who are still awake after all today’s excitement will doubtless recall an article from this morning in which we reported the fact that hapless “Better Together” director Blair McDougall had issued an extraordinary petted-lip complaint about the Yes camp daring to use the phrase “best of both worlds”, as if it was copyrighted.

(The even more remarkable news being that the Scotsman considered this a story.)

Still, it’s a fair point, right? You shouldn’t just pinch stuff from people, should you?

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This is the last of the political data from our Panelbase survey of Scottish opinion. The full data tables should now be available to the media from the pollster.

(But a quick word to all the Scottish journalists who we know read this site – had a single one of you had the courtesy, wit or basic journalistic initiative to actually contact us and ask us for the tables directly, we’d gladly have given them to you 24 hours before your competitors. Just a wee tip there.)

We know our chums at “Better Together” have been looking forward to this one for days, so we won’t keep them waiting any longer.

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We didn’t just go for big blockbuster revelations with our Panelbase poll. We thought it’d also be interesting to delve a little deeper into voters’ party affiliations, since the referendum isn’t a party political issue (despite the determined attempts of the No camp to make it all about the SNP rather than independence).

Given the gulf between how Scotland votes in Westminster elections and Holyrood ones, we were particularly curious to find out to what degree the constitution was colouring party loyalties, one way or another. Here’s what we discovered.

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We learned yesterday, in perhaps not the most groundbreaking journalistic scoop of all time, that people don’t much trust politicians. While Scots were much more inclined to believe what they were told by the Yes campaign than the No one, the majority still thought they were being told more fibs than truth by everyone concerned.

What, then, of those whose job it is to scrutinise our politicians, dig down through all the spin and evasion for the facts and tell the public what they need to know?

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We thought we might as well take advantage of an excellent new facility revealed to us by an alert reader last night, whereby we can now link you to permanent full copies of web pages without directing traffic to the website in question or faffing around with awkward and flaky things like Google Cache.

Unsurprisingly totally ignoring yesterday’s dramatic poll revelations, the Scotsman’s big political story this morning is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall throwing a barely-believable playground tantrum about Alex Salmond saying some words that Mr McDougall likes to say.

You can read it, without earning the Scotsman any undeserved ad revenue, here.

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David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:

“Next year is the centenary of the start of the Great War and some nationalists in Scotland think Mr Cameron is pulling a Salmond. Coming as it does in August between Bannockburn and the referendum vote, they believe the commemoration has been planned as an artificial booster to Britishness. ‘There’s no conceivable justification or precedent in British history’, complained a Reverend Stuart Campbell, ‘for celebrating the start of a war.’

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Our poll has already established that the Scottish public is deeply sceptical of the No camp’s vague, equivocal dangling of unspecified new powers as an incentive to reject independence. But we also wanted to find out how much they believed the output of the two official campaign groups in general.

As mainly politicians are involved, you can probably guess the results.

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Let’s start with a bang, then.

Since nobody wants to define devo-max and the parties of the Union won’t let anyone vote for it anyway (preferring the “Oh, we’ll sort it out for you later, just trust us” argument they so often berate the SNP for), the independence referendum has a great big hole in it where a very substantial proportion of the population would like to be.

So while the press constantly talks about “more powers” (and repeats the falsehood that the London parties are committed to them) without ever saying what the phrase means, and as Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems frantically evade even making solid promises to think about them in the event of a No vote, we thought we’d cut straight to the chase and ask the Scottish people what they wanted.

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So it’s very nearly time to start on the poll results. We’ve made you wait long enough. But before the big reveals, we’d better get some quick background out of the way.

We got quotes from all the grown-up polling companies, most of which were in pretty much the same ballpark (with one dramatically expensive exception), but we chose Panelbase because they’ve got an excellent record for accuracy, they were the best at responding to our numerous stupid questions in a friendly and patient way, and if they’re good enough for the Sunday Times they’re good enough for us.

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One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

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Okay, so we know this is teasing, but the results of our poll are in.

They make for amazingly interesting reading, and we’re confident you’re going to feel you got value for your money if you were one of the people who contributed to our absurdly successful fundraiser, which achieved 400% of its target in 72 hours before we had to issue a series of panicked tweets telling people to STOP sending money.

We only got the tables half an hour ago – we’re still digesting it all ourselves and there’s a fair bit of technical admin to do before we can start publishing, and there’s so much info we’re going to have to put it out in instalments so as not to overwhelm you with data, but hold tight. We should have the first release for you tomorrow.

Ooh, we haven’t had one of these for a while. Browsing the newspapers on our iPad this morning before getting up, we noticed an interesting headline in the Scotsman.

Intrigued, we clicked on it to see if it was a standard-issue scare story in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section, and were pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t. In fact, the warned-of tax rises or cuts in services were those which would follow a No vote in the referendum, as they’re those planned by UK Chancellor George Osborne.

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