Wings Over Scotland

We have a bit more respect for Professor Brian Ashcroft than most of the No camp’s scaremongers (indeed, we’ve even run an article of his on Wings Over Scotland), so we looked with interest at the latest entry on his blog yesterday, a piece with the fairly self-explanatory title of  “Has Scotland already spent its oil fund?”

It purports to examine what Scotland’s financial position would have been had it been independent for the last 32 years, in response to a Scottish Government document (which was backed up by fullfact.org) showing that Scotland had been a large net contributor to the UK over the period, but arrives at a bizarrely tangential conclusion.

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You’re not too late to catch Alistair Darling’s latest unveiling of “the positive case for the Union” via a live webcast on the “Better Together” website this morning. As we write he’s 10 minutes late, and the audience is rocketing towards triple figures.

We’re all playing bingo. Come and join us.

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If we’d seen this 15 minutes earlier, we’d have made it the And Finally… story instead of the GTA V picture. To be honest, we’re still kinda rubbing our eyes and not quite believing it. Did we just get invaded before we were even a country?

For those of you who stubbornly STILL don’t follow us on Twitter, this is our favourite still from the trailer for Grand Theft Auto V, the latest instalment in the blockbuster series from splendid Edinburgh-based videogame developers Rockstar North.

(This is AF #54, if you’re keeping track. We know we weren’t.)

We meant to mention this in yesterday’s post about the Future Of England Survey, but it was so hot the part of our brain holding the thought got incinerated when we foolishly went to the corner shop to buy some milk without an asbestos hat on.

52% of the good people of England believe Scotland gets “more than its fair share” of UK public spending, with only 19% thinking the distribution of cash was “pretty much fair”. Almost as many (49%) think Scotland benefits the most financially from the Union, compared to just 23% who say both nations do equally well and therefore, at most, 28% who think England gets the best deal.

(Oddly, the survey doesn’t actually put a figure to the latter.)

81%, meanwhile, think Scottish MPs should butt out of parliamentary matters that only affect England and Wales (although this neglects to consider the knock-on effect on the Barnett formula, which can impinge on devolved matters).

Why, then, do only 30% of them support Scottish independence?

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We’ve spoken before of the difficulty of empirically demonstrating anti-independence bias in the Scottish and UK media, because of the relative rarity of directly comparable situations. So today we’re pleased to see one of them present itself.

Michael Gray of National Collective recently visited Scandinavia and did a nice bit of journalism, securing quotes from a number of senior Danish politicians to the effect that an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU would be “a mere formality” and that the subject was “a non-issue”.

Good news. But how does it help us illustrate media bias?

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Diligent readers will, we have no doubt recall, that the No campaign chairman, Alistair Darling, has made abundantly clear the conditions of any future enhanced devolution settlement for Scotland in the aftermath of a No vote in 2014:

“If you are going to stand on any platform of constitutional change you are duty bound to put it in a UK manifesto. It is not about a veto it is about having a mandate for it.”

Darling’s position couldn’t be less ambiguous – if Scotland rejects independence, any additional powers for the Scottish Parliament will be subject to the approval of the voters of the rest of the UK (chiefly England, which supplies around 90% of them).

But do we know how the good folk of South Britain are likely to view such a prospect?

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Oh my goodness. Our deep-cover source inside the “Better Together” HQ has well and truly surpassed themselves this time, with a leak of the No campaign’s latest poster so early that it doesn’t even have the “official” logo in place yet.

We’re in trouble now, folks.

Oh dear, here we go again. The latest Scotsman/SoS poll yesterday afternoon:

And here it is this morning:

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This is getting spooky now.

Scottish Labour quasi-leader Johann Lamont at FMQs last month.

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We’ve explored the “Kinnock Factor” previously on this site, but some numbers from the latest YouGov weekly polling surprised even us today. Labour’s lead over the midterm Conservative-led government is still falling – to just 6% this time – and Ed Miliband’s personal ratings are even worse than David Cameron’s, but that wasn’t it.

You’ll probably want to click on that image to enlarge it.

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Got stuff to write about today. Should really comment on Henry McLeish’s cutting observations about the No campaign, or mock the Daily Record’s hilarious attempt to pretend Johann Lamont’s been driving Labour action over Falkirk all along. But I can’t seem to put sentences together, because I’m still trembling a bit after watching this.

It’s hard to relate it to the Scottish independence debate, except to note that where the US goes, the UK is rarely far behind. (In much the same way that a devolved Scotland ends up following the policies of England within a few years, because without control of your own revenues, taxation and welfare there’s only so much you can juggle a decreasing budget to try to offset the effects.)

I don’t want a “special relationship” any more. I want out.