Wings Over Scotland

This select gathering is all the Scottish Conservative conference delegates who were interested in discussing the party’s approach to devolving more powers to the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote in the independence referendum of 2014.

Readers far more cynical than ourselves may find the picture a useful gauge by which to measure the true degree of interest the Tories have in more powers.

Keen followers of the Scottish media may have noticed that since the start of the year there’s been little sight of the phrase “the positive case for the Union”. Perhaps buoyed by opinion polls showing little movement, the No camp has more or less abandoned even the pretence of positivity and concentrated on the tactic it’s most familiar and comfortable with – carpeting Scotland with fearbombs.

The last couple of days have been no exception. At the Scottish Tory conference David Cameron repeated the curiously vague threat that an independent Scotland might not be allowed to keep the pound, and yesterday in Westminster the Home Secretary dropped (implausible) hints that Scots might not be allowed to keep UK passports.

But wait a minute. Why so shy?

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No cause for alarm, just some inescapable events. Probably no posts until later this afternoon, so catch up on the stuff you may have missed over the last few days. THERE WILL BE A QUIZ. (There probably won’t.) (OR WILL THERE?)

As veteran readers will know, there’s little this site enjoys more than investigating the Comical Ali-style claims made by the No campaign about the attendance figures at its events, which it typically likes to exaggerate by between 100% and 150%.

Disturbingly, though, the contagion which robs victims of basic counting powers seems to be infectious, and taking hold even beyond the bounds of “Better Together”.

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Ruth Davidson triumphantly exits the hall to a standing ovation after her keynote speech to the Scottish Conservatives conference yesterday.

The Sunday Herald today gives the total number of delegates attending the conference at just 200 or so (although more on that later). We can count almost 40 empty seats in the picture above, taken from the BBC coverage, which shows one half of the hall, and we presume the other side must have looked pretty similar.

We estimate the the leader’s speech – which is the centrepiece of any political party’s conference – was therefore attended by between 120 and 140 people. Readers might wish to keep that figure in mind the next time Scottish Tories mock an unofficial independence rally for “only” attracting between 6000 and 7000.

“Despite the joint campaign with Labour and the Liberal Democrats against independence, Mr Gove said a No vote would represent a Tory victory.”

Keep that in mind as Alistair Darling speaks at the Scottish Tory conference today.

It’s taken 306 years for the people of Scotland to be allowed a democratic voice on the constitution of their country. It’s a thing that was never supposed to happen. The Scottish Parliament’s electoral system was constructed deliberately and explicitly to prevent any party achieving a majority – in theory ensuring that the SNP could never pass a referendum bill – even though the two main UK parties still resolutely defend the First Past The Post system that produces them at Westminster.

But that’s all sorted out now, right?

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It’s going to be tough to hold our heads up abroad if Scotland actually democratically votes not to take responsibility for its own affairs like any normal grown-up country.

In any vaguely self-respecting world, a No vote would be accompanied by the immediate disbandment of the Scottish national football and rugby teams, because we’d have declared ourselves not to be a nation. But either way, hopefully we won’t have to face scenes of opposing fans telling us to man up again after 2014.

Readers will probably barely recall a story from back in January, because it only made the front page of almost every Scottish newspaper and the lead item on most Scottish political TV and radio programmes. It was a Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report which put support for independence – via an extremely old and outdated question formulation – at a dramatic low of 23%.

Almost as forgotten was the “Better Together” campaign’s half-hearted attempt at capitalising on the numbers, by misrepresenting them as meaning something else entirely in order to create a misleading graph. (Perhaps because by now we’re so used to them being somewhat creative with numbers that nobody noticed.)

So it’s only to be expected that the latest poll numbers from the same source, released yesterday, don’t seem to have made any of today’s papers or broadcasts.

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Labour Party member Cailean Gallagher in the Herald, 7th June 2013:

“Until this week, the hope was that a Labour government at Westminster would respond with a cure. Now Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have disclosed Labour’s response to austerity: more austerity. No use sitting tight and hoping for change at Westminster – even with Labour we get a party in thrall to austerity.

So people realise austerity is not just a Tory policy, but an inevitability of the Westminster system. Alternating Labour and Tory governments at Westminster are not a route out of austerity. After 13 years of Labour, Britain is the fourth most unequal country in the developed world. It is on course to being the most unequal.”