Spot the bawbags
(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)
We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.
Because it’s actually true that just days after completely ignoring a poll of over 1000 Scottish people (one analysed this afternoon, incidentally, by Professor John Curtice, who clearly didn’t get the memo), the paper has made its front page lead the opinion of one American guy who, if the average US citizen’s grasp of the outside world is any guide, probably couldn’t find Scotland on a map of northern Europe if you told him it was on an island and gave him three tries.
Nate Silver, of course, is actually pretty smart. But we can’t find a single word he’s ever written about Scotland before, and the notion that he’s suddenly become an expert on its politics, a year away from a referendum for which the White Paper hasn’t even been published, is almost as comical as the Scotsman’s laughably slanted presentation of poll numbers in the story.
(When listing UK polling companies, it childishly excludes Panelbase and its figures.)
Since the Michael Kelly piece in last week’s paper, we’ve found it increasingly hard to tell the Scotsman apart from the Daily Mash anyway. (It’ll soon be a publication that carries regular columns by Kelly, Brian Wilson, John McTernan, Gerald Warner AND Brian Menteith.) Here’s a tin lid for it.
I wish I could say I was surprised…
The best response to this will be mockery in the style of the 500(+) questions debacle…
Treat it with the disdain it deserves and let’s all have a laugh in the process.
considering, Kelly’s, contribution, the tin lid will fit nicely on the biscuit tin
This is actually quite appalling. This is the sort of tactic used by the Nazis, it is nothing more than an attempt at mind manipulation. I know that most folk who seek self determination gave up on this rag a long time ago, however I think it is time to campaign for a boycott of this particular propaganda organ of the union.
Nice of the Hootsmon to finally come out of the closet and admit to anyone who is prepared to listen, not that many by the way, that they are 110%$ behind Blair McDougall and all his lies, deceit and misinformation!
I don’t think it’s as much biased but at war more like, against the Indy movement, it really disgusts me they can print blatant misinformation like this and get away with it.
Only 18% would vote to create a Union today…. Roll on next year, lets have a partyyyyyyyyy 🙂
And yet again we hear the bottom of the barrel being scrapped “a US polling guru” do you get mince with that, the next headline is bound to be North Sea oil is running out, honestly who gives a fuck what the Scotsman prints !!
Well done to John Curtice for coming out of the ‘airing cupboard’ to give us his views on the Silent Poll, its more than any of the gutless BBC & MSM so-called journalist’s have done. kudo’s to the man.
Hail Alba.
Relax – its the only the Scotsman. The Comic edition.
We Politics Anoracks tend to get het up about this sort of thing, but – if I may quote a very senior Government Minister in an aside at a meeting I happened to overhear – “who cares what the Scotsman says, only 30,000 people buy it and none will vote for us anyway”.
A wee bit O/T but sorry to hear the news of David McLetchies sad early death. There is a good arguement that a post independence Scotland needs a pro-business, slightly right of Centre Scandinavian Christian Democrat style party. Along with a few of his more savy Tory colleagues Mr McLechie could have shuffled straight into that role.
Hopefully this filthy brit propaganda rag goes to the wall along with its beloved union.
Sept 2014 two birds with one stone.
‘Scotland’s National Newspaper’
?!
Beyond chutzpah.
Also, isn’t it actually a regional newspaper now to avoid publishing embarrassing ABCs every month?
Scotlands national newspaper? It doesn’t believe that Scotland is a country! Its a trojan horse that needs to be put out of its misery. Lets make the hootsmon history!
the media manipulation and bias is becoming staggeringly blatant.still i have to say rev you are giving them more publicity than they deserve.the sooner this rag is out of buisness the better.
@Rev,
Aye, and if you strip out the number of copies dumped daily in hotels, airports etc, how many people are actually parting with cash to get a copy of it?
“Relax – its the only the Scotsman.”
I’m not angry, I’m laughing. It’s so desperate it’s almost slapstick.
LOL I stopped buying it way back when they started letting Warner write. It is a sad echo of the paper that used to be genuinely balanced and considered back in the 70s and 80s.
Desperate and cynical stuff.
The worst thing about it is the main reason they’ve done it is not the tosh written in the piece – its the headline they want/need, primarily for the pavement billboards, which punters who never read the rag will see and take subliminal note of…all part of the mind conditioning they and the rest of Project Fear are trying to achieve: that being that to be/think pro-Yes is not ‘normal’, is fringe and being the ‘other’, the old British imperialist ruse/mindset.
The Scotsman is a regional newspaper for a region. You cannot fault their logic.
Hail Alba
If Nate Silver had the Holyrood polling figures in February 2011 thrust on to his computer he would have said Labour would be a shoo-in.
The more in-depth Panelbase poll gives the No side more unfavourable ratings than the Yes side. I doubt this poll was put under his nose.
Perhaps the Rev might want to email him with the poll findings. His claim that the No side always gain during a campaign is incorrect as the Quebec Referendum had the Yes side gain through the campaign. At the outset the No side started at 67%.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Desperate, aren’t they? And understandably so. No Scotland can’t expect to have a good last six months to the campaign, so they’d like to convince everyone that it’s all settled already, thank you very much. But the calendar is not ideal for them.
There will be local elections in England & Wales on 22 May 2014. There will also be a European election UK-wide on the same day. Not much room for cross-party unity in the run-up to either of those. Not much room for reporting on the referendum either when how UKIP will do (or did), and what it all means for the 2015 Westminster elections will be the main story. By the time the dust has settled on that, Westminster will be just about to pack up for the summer (18 July-2 September) and the Silly Season will begin.
Will LibLabCon manage to bury the hatchet and maintain any sort of united front? They’re not doing well today – hello United with Labour! – and it won’t get any easier with the real prize, control of Westminster, looming larger every day. Will the ferrets behave, or will it all go into Yes-to-AV-style meltdown? We’ll see soon enough.
But the reality is that nobody should place much confidence in polling at any point in the campaign, not even in the final months. We can know roughly who votes in Holyrood elections, and how they voted in the past, so polls can be weighted. And the same is true of Westminster polls. But we’ve never, ever had a referendum on independence, so how do you weight that? This is so not the US presidential election. But then again, neither were the last two US presidential elections what was expected. Unexpectedly high turn outs among groups which would normally be less likely to vote made a lot of pollsters look very, very silly.
The 18%s rag of choice,not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Re the text of the article – I also predicted the outcome of the US election. I AM A GURU…I AM A GURU…AM I A GURU?
O/T Rev, your new logo would look excellent on my car. Where would I buy such a thing? Or, do you have a good quality .PNG image so I could submit it for vinyl printing. Probably copyright issues there but it really could work very well on my car.
I came to the conclusion a long time ago c1992 that anybody that actually bought the rag let alone read it was in need of brain surgery. That or ought to be committed somewhere to protect themselves from the self harming! A bit like those loony enough to still be paying the TV Tax!
Its purpose is to give something for call Kaye and Newsnicht something to chew on. As they say on the State broadcaster. ” lets look at tomorrows headlines”.
Nate Silver said in April it was 50/50. So what has changed when you consider the polls are actually tightening?
He is just trying to sell his book at the Festival, so he needs all the publicity he can get.
“Nate Silver said in April it was 50/50.”
That was actually on a spoof site…
You do get a goody bag if you buy a copy on the streets of Edinburgh, though, thanks to the Fringe (which is fantastic otherwise). That’s got to be worth something.
Businesses who shell out cash to advertise in this ‘newspaper’ should be leery of whatever stats they’re given re circulation, especially online – years ago I signed-up for the Scotsman headlines via e-mail.
After their disgraceful ‘swastika Saltire’ was published I tried to unsubscribe, and couldn’t. There is no such option. I wrote to two different online ‘Scotsman’ addresses requesting that my details be removed from their mailing-list – neither was even acknowledged.
I still get the ‘headline’ e-mails every day, and they’re deleted, unread. Please, all ye potential advertisers, beware.
Oh Stu, you need to get hold of Ritchie’s book. It’s not long, it’s an easy read, and if you have to wait till September, it’s not heavy. You will be astounded.
Westminster Govt : “NO!! You can’t do it!!! Tell them Ali Darling, tell them! What? They aren’t listening?! I’M TELLING ON YOU!!!!”
*runs off crying to the big boys*
“America! They aren’t listening to us!! You have more nukes and are bigger…will you tell them?!?”
The headline says ‘YES camp has virtually no chance’. No chance of what?
“Yes camp has no chance of favourable Hootsmon coverage”?
“Yes camp has no chance in fear mongering contest”?
“YES camp has no chance of finding campsite in independent Scotland”?
“YES camp has no chance of chancing it as much as the Hootsmon does”?
“YES camp has no chance of becoming as laughable as the MSM”?
Can’t find that article on the online version. Maybe to stop adverse comments Re ignoring the Panelbase poll.
Oh, they wouldn’t leave the leader off the web site, that’s ridiculous. Give it time.
Monteith.
Magnus Barelegs
Scotlands national newspaper? It doesn’t believe that Scotland is a country!
That’s the point. Once upon a time Andrew Neil had the bright idea that with modern technology you could publish a national (meaning UK) newspaper out of Edinburgh. He managed to sell this idea to the Barclay brothers as owners of the Scotsman, hence the wonderfully ambiguous strapline. Needless to say, Neil failed to make the Scotsman into a national (UK) paper and alienated most of its Scottish readers in the process. So Neil went off to be a media pundit in London and the Barclay brothers sold the Hootsmon and bought the Torygraph instead. That’s the way the media work.
I didn’t know that was a spoof site, but Nate Silver certainly called the 2010 UK election wrong.
Well, he’s got me stumped. If we use the example of Scotland, we voted yes in the referendum of 1979 and we voted yes to both questions in the referendum of 1997. Going by what he said, Yes must always have been in the lead on both these occasions. I don’t remember that being the case – does anybody else remember? If Yes wasn’t in the lead to begin with in 1979 and 1997, then his theory doesn’t seem to hold much water where Scotand is concerned. But hey…I’m no expert.
I find the sight of this headline strangely uplifting. If the Yes camp really has ‘virtually no chance’, then why is it necessary to scream it from the front page?
The Yes camp has every chance, and they know it.
O/T –
Ian Smart thinks Independence is ‘exciting’ (from his blog, as linked above in ‘Zany Comedy Relief’) –
‘So here’s my suggestion. In the aftermath of the Referendum, there should be a commitment to a UK Constitutional Convention. Everything should be on the agenda but among the things on the table should be the powers, particularly the taxation powers of all the devolved legislatures. And, like the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the participants should extend well beyond the political parties.Now, I know that’s not a very exciting proposal, Certainly not nearly as exciting as a way forward as Independence. But it is a practical proposal and it is also, dare I say it, a more honest one than some sort of vague promise without process which appears to be the alternative course of action commended to my Party. Anyway, given that we’re patently not going to vote for Independence, it is at least something.’
The headline sounds vaguely familiar. Almost as if Scotland is where the No campaign dominate opinion and will simply have to weigh their vote.
Sick to the stomach watching Chris Hoy with David Cameron on news at ten. Chris how can you sleep at night.
It’s Brian MONteith.
I know, you have no idea what I….
Ianbrotherhood
This would be the same Ian Smart who was telling anyone who would listen that there would never be a referendum , it appears he never learns from his mistakes , long may it continue lol
Who gives a shit? The anti-Scotsman are becoming more desperate and biased by the day. They are seriously giving Pravda a run for their money.
What do they hope to achieve by printing this?
WoS…reads the Hootsmon so you don’t have to. Thanks for taking one for the team. This rag will disappear before September 2014.
Hang on, I thought the Daily Mail reported Dr “Matt Qvortrup” (what was his job on the Enterprise again?) as saying that 99.99999% of all independence referenda produced a “yes” result.
Was I wrong?
I’m pleased Prof Curtice has commented on the poll,but disappointed he chose not to give his opinion about the question on how Scots would vote if we were currently independent.
As for the Scotsman….it really is the pits.
@Silvertay-
‘This would be the same Ian Smart who was telling anyone who would listen that there would never be a referendum.’
Indeed. He also comes as close as he dares to repeating those calamitous Twitter remarks about societal breakdown in the event of a Yes vote.
Is it this Nate Silver? http://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2013/07/23/polls-pundits-and-nate-silver-its-the-electoral-college-not-rocket-science/
it would seem his methodology is nothing special, and rather geared to
the specific way the US elects presidents. I’m not sure it’s entirely
relevant to a referendum.
@Currywurst
I do believe you’re mellowing.
I believe it was 97%
Also, only 18% of people in Scotland would vote for the union if Scotland was independent according to the latest poll.
This is just another scream from the bottom of the barrel by a rag that sells by the handful. Must be a bit quiet and draughty in the Hootsman building these days.
link to nationalcollective.com
Sorry for going O/T here Stu but I’ve read the article written by everyone’s favourite professor and think I may be a wee bit confused. (Yes I know it doesn’t take much to confuse me these days…..)
In the fourth paragraph he says this:
If a survey is to acquire reliable information on how many people propose to vote in line with the recommendation of the party they support it needs to ask not one question but two – how do people propose to vote in the referendum and how they would vote in an election or how they voted in the past – and then cross-analyse the results to see how many people say both Yes and SNP, etc. We should not expect survey respondents to do the work for us.
Now my understanding of this is that he is calling for TWO questions to be asked. We know that ONE question was asked because he acknowledges this fact in the second paragraph of his piece. What I find confusing is his call for a second question asking how people would vote in an election. I believe that this “required” second question WAS asked in the poll.
Q7. If you currently know how you plan to vote in the referendum, how does that intention compare to the official position of the party you voted for in the WESTMINSTER general election of 2010?
Q8. There will be a SCOTTISH Parliament election in 2016 regardless of the outcome of the referendum. Thinking about how you are CURRENTLY most likely to vote in that election, might your voting intention change depending on whether Scotland was independent or not?
D3. Did you vote in Scotland in the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary Election? If so, who did you vote for with your constituency vote?
D4. And who did you vote for with your regional vote?
I’m just wondering if I’m misinterpreting what the good professor is saying or perhaps I’m reading too much into his article. Alternatively I’m just being too stupid for this time of night! 😆
Here’s an alternative headline for tomorrow’s Hootsmon.
WE TELL LIES
The number of people that read the Scotsman is about this ” small.
I find it funny every time BT link to it.
What’s even more funny is when they link to the Telegraph. How much more Tory could you possibly advertise yourself as?
sorry, wee bit o/t, but waiting with bated breath to see what Mr Smart is about to say on Newsnight Scotland; great that he was available to appear when none of Ms Lamont, Mr Sarwar or Ms Curran was.
@cynicalHighlander-
Thanks for that link – have forwarded it to aspiring student journo friend who will surely make the most of it.
Cheers.
BBC Newsnight Scotland : Ian S Smart …Blah,Blah, Blah… easy time from Brewer took a kidding from pundit though
STV Scotland Tonight : Mark Millar, such a cool ending to his interview on supporting Independence.
Chalk & Cheese
He predicted the American election result?
Wow!
A choice of two and a result obvious to a blind deaf man with no interest in politics!
I must follow this guru and pay homage.
Not many folk read the Hootsman and even fewer read the Torygraph so the only folk they’re scaring with this tripe is the No camp. Poor buggers must be so terrified by now it’s a wonder they ever come out from under the bed.
Gordon Brewer has just kindly supplied the North Bridge Rag with TV coverage for its headline. Surprise, surprise.
Funny how Brewer mentioned on Newsnight there that ‘polls’ show Better Together is winning.
Not that I’d accuse the BBC in Scotland of being deliberately provocative after ignoring the Panelbase poll and receiving today’s complaints. They wouldn’t, would they?
Serious question.. Is Ian Smart, who was on Newsnight Scotland tonight, mentally ill ???.
You just have to screw your face up when listening to him replying to fairly simple questions. He talks the biggest load of gibberish that I have ever heard from any human being. Its the first time I have actually hear him speak, you don’t know if you have to feel sorry for him or loathe him. And to cap the programme off, they finish with a look at the front page of the Scotsman, just another typical night down at Pacific Quay.
Ironic: ‘Lying Doctor faces being struck off’
Holier than thou? The Scotsman?
Nate Silver is very good at modelling elections where there are numerous datapoints from various pollsters who have a good track record in their specific field e.g. the US presidential election and senate elections.
In instances where polling is relatively infrequent i.e. less frequent than once a fortnight, and where there is no in depth constituency/regional polling to enhance the model and to hedge against possible systematic errors in the national polls (which is totally understandable since there is effectively only one constituency) he tends to perform less well. See his UK election predictions in 2010, which overestimated the LD surge and its impact on the number of seats won under FPTP link to fivethirtyeight.com
There simply isn’t sufficient Y/N polling data out there from enough firms to draw a clear conclusion (and certainly not more than a year out), not to mention the fact that referenda are a completely different and far more volatile beast than national elections, which can flip fairly dramatically depending on which side the momentum is with. While the AV referendum was an extreme example of this, with the polling just a month out showing a tied race with a large number of undecideds and the final result ending up as a 68/32 massacre, it does show how fast things could potentially move once the remaining undecideds and soft nos/soft yeses make up their minds.
Now that sounds cynical; surely they’re professionals ?? They wouldn’t would they ??
Another pep story for Labour (C’mon Labour ) & Invite Mr BritNat Smart
Then a pricless plug fror the Britman front page (No Panel base Poll)
Brewer could hardly contain splitting his sides …. its so easy for them
Its offensive & sickening
The way the circulation of the Fife Free Press is holding up, I wonder when it will overtake the Scotsman as Johstone Press’s largest Scottish paper. Kirkcaldy 1 Edinburgh 0 🙂
“If Yes wasn’t in the lead to begin with in 1979 and 1997, then his theory doesn’t seem to hold much water where Scotand is concerned. But hey…I’m no expert.”
Good question. Did yes come from behind in those cases? I’m too young for 79 but I’m pretty sure 97 was a shoo-in from the get-go.
Nate Silver isn’t applying his eldritch polling skillz here. He’s just stating the conventional wisdom on referenda that Qvortrup mentioned a few weeks ago. Hardly front page news.
I have no idea who Nate Silver is (or indeed if that is his real name) but it seemed to me that the Republicans were up against it and couldn’t make their mind up who they wanted as their candidate with various hopefuls shooting themselves in the feet. I’m not sure predicting an Obama win was that remarkable. Who are the Hootsman going to call on next…the German octopus that was predicting football matches?
Nate’s story agrees with what they want to happen; your poll does not.
I accept that a professional journalist would be obliged to put that on one side and report the facts.
That they have chosen to report the American’s opinion as their lead story and ignore the actual results of a survey of a good sample size, of Scots, conducted by a respected polling company, probably says all you need to know about the integrity of the Scotsman.
But, hey, if they think they have it in the bag, thats fine. We know differently.
Nate did his sums in the presidential poll and nailed the result. The funny thing was, partisans at the time refused to sit down and accept his prediction, and the media pretended that it was All to Play For regardless. End of the day, he was bang on.
But again, this front page is pure Appeal to Authority.
Did anyone here seriously expect Obama to lose?
If the best that the No campaign can do at this stage is bring in a yank, then I think that’s them pretty much f****d.
Don’t buy it do not look at it online tell all you love to do the same. It has to become an article of faith among all of us on this side of the debate NEVER to contribute a penny piece to this rag ever again in terms of sales or page views or reader comments.
Use ONLY the ARCHIVE is website to check on Scotsman content
It’s collapse cannot be far away. This is a big two fingers to the Yes community. Fine the decks have been cleared and all pretense put aside.
Q – When Newsnicht introduce Ian Smart, how do they describe him? What comes up onscreen as he starts talking? ‘Blogger’? ‘Lawyer’? ‘Journalist’?
You have to wonder what he puts on his invoices to the Beeb. (Wasn’t someone, just t’other day, tweeting about ‘accountability’?)
Maybe next time, but not on his second shot.
His vote went down though as would be expected.
Makes me puzzled as to why BT think BSD are the way to go. BSD helped Obama get less votes than last time and that’s good?
Coincidence that Events Liar is an anagram of Nate Silver?
Tomorrow’s Guardian Poll puts Labour only three points ahead on voting intentions and Tories well ahead on economic competence. Looks like its goodbye to Torydee and Torydum. I think our American friend should stick to politics over the pond.
Romney supporters saw the polls and heard Nate Silver’s predictions, and they made various excuses as to why the polls were wrong, and they knew better and then Obama won.
Understandable, given they weren’t just going to throw up their hands and stop campaigning.
It’s hard to be objective when you’re… not objective. Of course we’re all objective so knew Obama would win. 😉
the German octopus that was predicting football matches?
He died.
So yes, probably.
I used to buy the Hootsman every day. No longer, and I seldom even look at it online. There’s no reason to.
1990’s this time of year, I was walking down North Bridge one festival evening with friends, making our way to The Hebridean Bar when we came across a completely blootered individual near the top of the Scotsman steps pissing on the wall of the Scotsman building. Guess who? None other than Andrew Neil.
Just about sums up what happened to the once mighty organ. It’s founding mission statement was to apply ” Impartiality, firmness, and INDEPENDENCE” to counter the “Unblushing subservience” of the established Scottish press. Now it simply needs to roll over and die.
Of course we’re all objective so knew Obama would win.
Knew would be overstating it given the circumstances. I personally was open to being surprised (whilst worried). However, it would have been a big surprise (and worry)!
“We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman.”
Some-one is gonna have to point them out to me – has something truthful been sleekitly inserted?
Hands up, I like Nate Silver, and I really like his approach to evaluating the polling in elections. However as mentioned a few times above, he wasn’t brilliant with the 2010 UK General Election. I just went back and had a quick check because I was pretty sure he’d mentioned the relative paucity of polling data in the UK to the US. Here’s what he said;
“Ultimately, we are suffering from a real paucity of data. A fundamental problem of psephology is that elections occur only so often and so the sample sizes are not large. But at least in the United States, we have a real abundance of data associated with each election cycle, such as extremely robust polling both before and after elections, which provides much more information on preferences by locality and demographic group. To the extent that swings in electoral preferences are non-uniform, it is almost always possible to explain them robustly after the fact (e.g. “Reagan did especially well with working-class whites”), and quite often possible to anticipate them ahead of time.”
He’s not going to be brilliant with UK elections. He’s also not going to have a massive inside track on what polls are saying if some of them are being suppressed and he’s unaware of them… In terms of Scotland, and this referendum, he’s going to be clueless because he won’t know any (or at least very little) of the context. of various things which are going to be important. For example, he’s unlikely to be aware of the fact that the SNP have a good ground game which isn’t matched by any of the other parties.
The Obama-Romney result was never in doubt. It just suited the networks to pretend it was.
A bit like a phone-in eviction on a reality TV show where Davina McCall or Dermot O’Leary or Ant & Dec or whoever goes “it’s too close to call! Register your vote now because it’s ever so close! It’s neck and neck!” They do it right up to the final advert break, only for the end result to be 90% to 10%.
Most importantly, the US presidential elections can be predicted because we know which bits of America tend to vote one way or the other. Not so with the independence referendum. No one knows how it’ll go, because we’ve never done it before.
“Q – When Newsnicht introduce Ian Smart, how do they describe him? What comes up onscreen as he starts talking? ‘Blogger’? ‘Lawyer’? ‘Journalist’?”
Regardless of how they describe him, he certainly left me anything but impressed. He brought up the school exam results and made some comment about the bottom 20%, and how this is the group Labour represent. So, going by Smart’s logic, they’re only chasing a fifth of the vote.
He brought up the school exam results and made some comment about the bottom 20%, and how this is the group Labour represent
So he’s saying you have to be stupid to vote Labour?
Last shout for anyone who wants to meet up in Glasgow:
ian@stevenston4.fsnet.co.uk
I’ll reply with details but not via here – need email addresses.
Cheers.
Jimbo says:
“We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman.”
Some-one is gonna have to point them out to me – has something truthful been sleekitly inserted?
Yes – The date.
I thought you might like a copy of an email I sent to the Scottish on line media website All Media Scotland.com.
‘Dear …
Only 6% of Scots think the Scottish media is doing an adequate job of giving them the facts about independence.
Just one of the many interesting findings of the recently crowdfunded Panelbase survey by the pro independence website Wings Over Scotland, http://wingsoverscotland.com/closing-ranks/#comment-464387, yet not one of the MSM published the data., apart from Newsnet Scotland, another pro indy site, link to newsnetscotland.com“
Perhaps the Scottish mainstream media don’t like the results, and perhaps that is why they are dying on their feet.
Would All Media like to comment, or better still, publish the data and ask their readers to comment?
Clearly, the rigorous researchers at the Scotsman missed this little gem by the same ‘guru’
link to theporridge.co.uk
“Clearly, the rigorous researchers at the Scotsman missed this little gem by the same ‘guru’”
As noted earlier in the thread: that’s a spoof site.
“So he’s saying you have to be stupid to vote Labour?”
Either that, Jiggs, or he’s telling us he’s stupid. I’ll opt for the latter. As the guy from the independent pointed out, to get elected you have to represent more than that.
Re the Scotsman: The sooner this rag goes bust, the better for democracy in Scotland. Wasn’t there some talk a while back about merging the Herald and the Scotsman? If it ever came about, I wonder, how would they go about merging the titles? The Herman, perhaps? The Scald? The Scold? With their attachments to Slab, should it be called the The Slabber? The possibilities are endless.
“Yes – The date.”
I just had to go and check that, Rabb.
Off topic for this thread maybe, but Alyn Smith MEP asked the pertinent question regarding Chris Bryant’s “British jobs for British Workers” intervention today,”What happened to the Labour Party’s internationalist stance then?”
As Alex Andreou of the New Statesman pointed out elsewhere, there was supposed to be a boom that meant there were terrible jobs (eg Communications Manager for the Tories) UK folk would not do, so we’d import foreigners. The bubble burst and this left that idea shown up for the mistake it was, at least for London. Elsewhere, we need the bodies and skills
Rev,
If you’re stuck for something to read on the way to the Calton Hill gathering, you could do worse than this:
link to amazon.com
Not sure if it’s available in Kindle – if it isn’t, you’ll exhaust your highlighter and end up with enough material to keep ‘Quoted for Truth’ going weekly well beyond next September.
He’s not stuck. He’s going to read Murray Ritchie’s Scotland Reclaimed.
Right?
Ian Brotherhood – tried to email you, I am up for a bevvy in Glasgow.
I’m trying to get my head around this. In a way I understand the ‘virtual’ conclusion that Nat Silver has come to. But its based on ‘fed’ knowledge. That is he is given poll readings from last year upto June or July plus other ‘data’ by who ever is asking him to predict. He is a mathematician, an analyst of statistics, who had his own blog spot on the New York Times under the ‘Five Thirty Eight’ Column that was his. He has since left the NY Times and is joining ESPN, no doubt to supply predictions on NFL games. He really doesn’t have an interest in Scotland or the Scottish.
Perhaps money would have been better spent asking the outcome of Wednesdays Scotland v England game
(it interesting that the Scotsman story is also in the Times)
Ananurhing –
“the once mighty organ”
Brilliant – surprised nobody else noted this ;0)
Oh Jeez and the sub eds don’t think its a wee bit OTT? Mind you it is in Scotland’s version of the National Enquirer.
They really should just give up now. Regardless of what happens next year, just who is ever going to trust or buy into their comic ever again? They should be more worried about redundancy payments, pension arrangements and dusting off the CVs.
I haven’t looked at the Scotsman website for months now. More power to National collective’s latest project – Scotland’s alternative media is growing. I suspect the average age of a hard-copy buyer is well into the 50s or even 60s.
I wonder- do old folks’ homes have computers in them? Maybe if anyone knows someone who works in one, they could keep accidentally leaving the browsers showing WoS, NNS, NC, copies of the McCrone report etc. These places are full of voters who are stuck in the UK Labour/Tory voting mindset through lack of information. The Yes campaign needs to get through to them somehow.
Hmm. Looks familiar to me…
Red squirrel says:
Not many folk read the Hootsman and even fewer read the Torygraph
Although only 30,000 sales the headlines can be seen in all newstands and BBC gives it wider credence,
The US GURU is live on Radio Scotland just after 8,30 am and expect further coverage on TV later.
Time to get the phone calls and emails made.
How are BBC Scotlandshire going to cover this Hootsmon front page… there doesn’t seem to be much to add to the satire.
ICM.
Labour 35%
Con 32%
LD 14%
UKIP 10%
Labour been hitting some increasingly low values recently. Tories on the up.
Conan
The meet is The Horseshoe Bar in Drury Street Glasgow at 7pm on Friday the 23rd
BtP etc
The Scotsman continues its descent into farce. Having pointedly ignored a survey carried out in Scotland by a reputable organisation, this increasingly ludicrous rag then gives a front page splash to the ill-informed prattling of some American who hasn’t done any polling at all on Scotland’s constitutional question.
But let us not be too harsh on Nate Silver. Let us at least afford him the respect of capitalising his name. Which is more than the amateurish clowns at The Scotsman can manage to do consistently. And let us allow that Mr Silver has foolishly let himself be duped into forsaking his much-vaunted preference for scientific rigour in order to comment on the basis of selective and highly dubious information provided by the British nationalist press.
Far from being “based on layers of evidence”, his remarks about Scotland’s independence referendum are informed by little more than the malicious spin that passes for political analysis in what is wryly referred to as the “Scottish” media.
How “scientific” is it to make comparisons between Scotland’s independence referendum and one that took place many years ago in a different place where an entirely different set of factors were at play. No effort is made to establish any credible equivalence between Scotland and Quebec beyond the bare fact that both were referendums on independence. Mr Silver plays to the stereotype of the pathologically parochial American in evidently being unaware of the history, culture and politics of either place. And yet he has no hesitation whatever in making bold pronouncements as if he were intimately familiar with more than the stuff that is taken from the foreign media and uncritically reprinted in US newspapers.
When it comes to polls and surveys the analysis offered by the British media is notoriously shallow and the interpretation quite blatantly biased in favour of the British establishment. What Nate Silver has offered us here is his own deplorably shallow analysis of something that was already quite devoid of substance.
To an observer unfamiliar with the habits and practices of The Scotsman it will seem incredible that such vacuous piffle could be deemed worthy of being printed at all, far less that it should be afforded such prominence. To the rest of us it is no more than a sadly redundant confirmation of the abysmal depths to which this once proud newspaper has sunk.
I plan to e-mail him about this weekend’s lottery results.
Funny how the Silver ‘story’ is eagerly picked up by other dead tree outlets and the BBC.
But when the same outlets are contacted directly with real data from an actual poll information doesn’t seem quite as contagious.
There must be an explanation for this anomaly given the professionalism and dedication to truth for which so many of our journalists are rightly famed.
I was out canvassing on Saturday (for the first time ever in my life) and I met a retired gent who wanted me to engage in a conversation so that he could tell me he was voting No and nothing that I could say would divert him from that. Fair enough, we know that there is an immovable No vote and a similar Yes vote. Of course it turned out that he didn’t really know some fundamental stuff, in particular about the financial side, insisting that we relied on UK Government handouts.
However the interesting point was when he asked me what I was doing out canvassing with over a year to go. When I told him that I was out listening to peoples hopes, fears, aspirations and concerns and discussing them and reporting back to Yes, he said he was “extremely worried”. I asked what about, was it that I was misleading people, because if so, I could show him the GERS figures that we had just talked about. His response was that no, he wasn’t worried about that, he was worried that we were talking to “don’t knows” and that nobody in No was doing that, they were just “shouting at them”.
We need feet on the ground folks. Don’t be shy, volunteer now, Your Country Needs You.
This Nate laddie has a rather simplistic approach.
Nate Sliver.. never heard of him
Wonder if Mr Silver has been handed any real facts or access to polling data at all? They’ve just put this guy’s name all over this article in what is a national conversation. Just how happy do you reckon he’ll be with this coverage when we win our independence next year? Be interesting to fire some real facts and figures at him and see if he comes to the same conclusion. I mean, if all he’s been fed are the numbers from ‘Scotsman Polls’, (that would be the ones where thousands vote between midnight and dawn), well on those figures I’d have to conclude we were fecked too without knowing their origin.
A DESPERATE PLEA FOR HELP !
Can anyone please explain this BBC story to me, it’s been up for a couple of days now on:
link to bbc.co.uk
‘The number of missed hospital appointments in Scotland has increased by 24,729 in a year.’
Ok I get that bit….
‘The largest increase was in Lanarkshire where missed appointments increased by 11,426 to 107,909. In Tayside, the figure rose by 7,637 to 131,831.’
Eh ? That comes to nearly 225,000
The scotsman headline will fade into the shit it is in a day or two, it has more chance of being mentioned more by eager halfwits within the bbc than being read by many in Scotland……….but the good news is that the deluded gung ho style ‘no’ voters will believe they don’t even need to go to the Referendum polling station as these lame headlines inspire them into believing they don’t need to turn up on the day-something the YES lot and those who are undecided but there to persuade WILL DO!
Hio (nate) Silver! Away with the shitesman and the drivel it spouts-we live in the real scotland not fucking Britadoon!
It’s almost as if the pro-union camp want No voters to stay at home on the day as it’s ‘never going to happen’ anyway.
Hey Scottish skier-I just beat you to that by two minutes but the fact is that this inspires those who wish to change Scotland for the better and makes the complacent ones stay at home!
Hey Ho Silver !
Hail Alba
Why do the scotsman bbc etc actually believe that there are all these people willing to dumb down on a once in 300 years decision to alter our constitutional future and simply dismiss it-the real polls as the referendum draws closer will have them shitting their desks in the news room if they still have a news room to shit in.
@Angus
Aye. The stupidity is amazing. They should be saying ‘Independence is increasingly popular. The union is under a serious threat – every vote for it counts’ if they want to get their vote out.
@Peter A Bell
Far from being “based on layers of evidence”, his remarks about Scotland’s independence referendum are informed by little more than the malicious spin that passes for political analysis in what is wryly referred to as the “Scottish” media.
I don’t buy that to be honest. The UK isn’t his area of expertise, and he won’t know what’s spin or not, so he’ll be going by the polling he’s seen. Put it this way, regardless of our anecdotal evidence about how we think peoples voting intention is going, ignoring the polling that’s out there is the way to complacency and defeat. The polls are saying (imo) that this is winnable, but we’re behind. Work hard, develop the arguments for Yes, and the arguments against No. Shouting down someone who’s got a very good track record of reading polls (contrary to the Scotsmans article he actually rose to prominence in the 2008 US Presidential election where he got 49 states correct which is what got him the New York Times gig in the first place) and saying they know nothing is going down a Mitt Romney route of ignoring evidence because you don’t want it to be true.
There’s stuff to mitigate the current results in the polls a bit. There’s a vast number of undecided people (pretty much a third of the electorate) who are being counted in the spinning as being “against independence” when they could easily be lumped in with the Yes’s as “against the status quo”. Nate Silver thinks they’ll break towards the status quo, I don’t. I think that they’ll mostly vote Yes. I think Yes will have way more feet on the ground in terms of enthusing people. I think there is a better get out the vote infrastructure already in place. I think that with the increasing likeliehood of a renewed tory government, and a Labour Party that continually goes right to win the votes of people who are tories it means you have the thing that gives us a Yes.
For what it’s worth anyone interested in statistical anlysis should have a read of The Signal & The Noise. Very good study of what the limitations are and how it works when it’s used well.
If what Nate Silver was offering was some kind of analysis of polling data then you might have a point. But there is neither polling data nor analysis here. There is just some throwaway comments based on a few highly questionable snippets of rather dubious information. To be frank, it is astounding that someone with Nate Silver’s reputation allowed himself to be drawn into making these remarks. I have not the slightest doubt that he will be cringing in embarrassment when he reads what The Scotsman has made of his comments.
And nobody is suggesting that we should ignore the polls. Certainly not me. What we should have little regard for is the shallow and partial “analysis” of the polling data that is fed to us by the unionist media.
To illustrate the failings of this “analysis” we could look at just one thing that has come out of recent polling – the fact that, despite months of campaigning, there has been little evidence of any significant shift in the polls. This is almost universally portrayed in the mainstream media as a failure of the Yes campaign. Although simple logic tells us that if neither side has moved the polls then either both have failed or neither has. To attribute failure to only one side or the other is an unmistakeable indicator of bias.
What I have yet to see is anybody in the mainstream media asking any meaningful questions about why the polls remain as static as they do despite the efforts of the two campaigns. Is it that these efforts are merely cancelling each other out? Or is there something more going on? Could it be that there actually is movement, as one might reasonably expect, but that the polling is simply too crude to reveal it?
Could it be that all the movement is taking place within what is recorded as a No vote rather than between that and a Yes vote (or “don’t know”)?
The No vote is treated as a homogeneous category when it is plainly ridiculous to suppose that such a large cohort could possibly be devoid of any variation. What would be useful would be a distinction between “hard” No and “soft” No with information on shifts along that spectrum. My expectation is that this would find a significant part of the claimed No vote much closer to “don’t know” than anyone in the anti-independence campaign would want to admit.
The hypothesis is that the No vote is much more vulnerable than the Yes vote. We have seen indirect indications of this in surveys which asked “what if” questions about being better/worse off after independence and polls that posit another Tory government after 2015. It would be good to see polling that more thoroughly tests the hypothesis.
The Wings Over Scotland poll is interesting mainly because it asks more searching questions than most. I’m not sure how much the results of this poll tell us about hypothesised movement within the No vote. But at the very least it points the way to finding such information.
“A DESPERATE PLEA FOR HELP !
Can anyone please explain this BBC story to me, it’s been up for a couple of days now on:
link to bbc.co.uk
‘The number of missed hospital appointments in Scotland has increased by 24,729 in a year.’
Ok I get that bit….
‘The largest increase was in Lanarkshire where missed appointments increased by 11,426 to 107,909. In Tayside, the figure rose by 7,637 to 131,831.’
Eh ? That comes to nearly 225,000″
Quite simple really. People often miss appointments. The hospital specialist should be seeing a patient, but is seeing noone in this slot. They could have been seeing someone else instead – a big systemic waste, contributing to waiting times etc.
The simple thing to do is to blame the patient. They ARE often at fault – usually due to forgetting appointments or deciding they do not wish to be seen (or a competing commitment) but not cancelling the appointment. However, quite often someone may be ill/in hospital, may not have recieved the appointment notification, may not have been able to go due to logisitics.
The aim of reminding someone in advance is therefore sensible – prompting them to either attend or cancel (thereby allowing another to use the slot).
It’ll only keep No voters at home if the polls are showing a similar No majority on September next year, and if they do I’ll be worried. But at the moment, it’s just mildly irritating.
“Aye. The stupidity is amazing. They should be saying ‘Independence is increasingly popular. The union is under a serious threat – every vote for it counts’ if they want to get their vote out.”
They will eventually wake up to that tactic, probably about a month before the vote. In the meantime, we’re still in full-blown ‘let’s demoralise the Nats and render independence a minority pursuit’ mode.
Did anybody see STV Scotland Tonight / last night:
Mark Millar / John MacKay interview ………’Supporting Independence’ @ end.
Thought he came across brilliant .. very relaxed
link to bbc.co.uk
1 May 2013, “US pollster who accurately predicted the last US presidential results reckoned Labour would win an overall majority in the UK today, but it was “a bit early to make a call” on the 2015 general election. Nate Silver said the polls were most likely to give a clear idea about six to eight weeks from election day“
…. it was “a bit early to make a call” on the 2015 general election. Nate Silver said the polls were most likely to give a clear idea about six to eight weeks from election day”
No shit, Sherlock?
Morag says:
13 August, 2013 at 9:17 am
It’ll only keep No voters at home….”
This sort of deluded inventive stuff from news media in Scotland and ‘britain’ makes those who are ‘instinctively’ thinking of voting no become very complacent and detached……I know a few people who have no idea why they would prefer to vote no but actually finish by saying they ain’t going to vote!
I also know a good few folk who have been swung because they have realised that the relentless negativity is ‘an insult’ to intelligence and become angry at every aspect of Independence being slagged off by the media without any factual basis to back up the more spurious claims, and loads and loads of the claims are spurious, the Scotsman shrieker of a headline is a prime example and will annoy the undecideds who are very important indeed.
It is apparent that a key part of the No strategy is to constantly communicate the message that they have this already won. You can see it in what Blair Mc says and what comes from BT. You can see it in Ian Smarts latest blog posting. Its a coordinated message,
I think they do it because they want to stop people thinking about the issues. They are worried that if this is seen as a proper 2 horse race then Indy becomes ‘normalised’ and people start to look at the facts and make a decision, rather than just defaulting to the ‘don’t bother thinking about it because it’ll never happen’ camp.
I think they also do it because it’s what their bosses in London want to hear. Ed has enough to worry about without thinking through the consequences of a YES vote, so easier just to tell him what he wants to hear. LAB don’t have an analysis of what they would do in 2015 if there is a Yes vote in 2014. For them it doesn’t bear thinking about – so they don’t think about it.
For them this is a great weakness I think, as it blinds them to the reality of a slowing building Yes momentum. By the time they realise what is happening it will be too late. I think they learned nothing from 2011.
The real lesson I think from the Hootsman headline is how coordinated this BT campaign strategy is with the MSM. Nate Silver isn’t on there by accident. Its difficult not to come to the conclusion that its because they see Yes solidifying and creeping up in their own polls, and the Panelbase poll with its 36/34 results, now aired in public by Prof Curtice.
(Interestingly we haven’t seen a poll on Indy apart from Panelbase for a long time now, don’t know if this is just a summer gap, or they just aren’t getting published ?
I also wonder whether Silver got a phone call from the Blue State Digital guys who are working with BT to throw his tuppence worth in at this particular point. BT will want to slam the lid firmly down every time they see they see the flickerings of a bit of Yes momentum.
I think the fact that we are seeing this now means that they are worried that this isn’t going their way.
Remember that in SLABs psychology anything less than a 60/40 win for them is a disaster as they see the referendum merely as a stepping stone to a Holyrood win in 2016. The realisation that race this is closer, when it hits them, will be a real tipping point as they will go into panic mode.
Aha! From Today online the New Statesman:
link to newstatesman.com
Anent the oxygen of publicity for the Scotsman by the BBC. Another source, with I believe, a very small membership in Scotland that gets trotted out as experts fairly often is the CBI who I understand have very few members in Scotland with 50% of an already small base being academic institutions. Am I correct and does anyone have the figures?.
From The New Statesman Aug 13 2013:
“Still, the main reason why Silver was wrong in Britain was simply that public opinion shifted. Cleggmania didn’t make it to the polls, the Lib Dem share collapsed, and Labour swept up the leftovers. It wasn’t just Silver who got that wrong: most political pundits didn’t see it coming either.
So maybe the Yes campaign can breath a sigh of relief. It’s not over just because the baseball nerd sang.”
link to newstatesman.com
@les calthorps
See below
link to calumcashley.blogspot.co.uk
How far does their deeply partial spokesman speak for his members?
@chlocoderic-
I’m not sure if I got your message – if you didn’t use your handle in it I won’t be able to connect it with your ‘real’ name. Please message me again – ian@stevenston4.fsnet.co.uk
Ivan McKee
“I think they also do it because it’s what their bosses in London want to hear. Ed has enough to worry about without thinking through the consequences of a YES vote, so easier just to tell him what he wants to hear. LAB don’t have an analysis of what they would do in 2015 if there is a Yes vote in 2014. For them it doesn’t bear thinking about – so they don’t think about it.”
I have seen this failure in management in many companies; essentially “don’t bring me problems just solutions and results” It is none so more to be seen within the BBC and they way they manipulate the Referendum coverage whilst the high heid yins sit in their favourite restaurants inside the London Bubble, with their fingers firmly stuck in the ears about what happens outside their pay grade and daily commute.
The other great example of this was the USSR and their 5 and 7 year plans and infamous Tractor statistics. People just told the Centre what the Centre wanted to know.
The BBC is dysfunctional to its founding purpose but as long as it is funded by a Tax it will not change and will eventually gum up.
An interesting article in the New Statesman:
Will Nate Silver be wrong about Scotland, like he was wrong about Britain?
@ Tom Hogg (8:38am)
Great post, looks like someone was paying attention (on the Business for Scotland Ambassador training) the other week 🙂
BTW we’ve got another training session coming up in August if anyone is interested.
“he was worried that we were talking to “don’t knows” and that nobody in No was doing that, they were just “shouting at them”.”
Couple of anecdotal things. One Labour person I know who is a hard no said a friend had been turned off by Better Together to the point where he was considering a Yes vote. Up until then he was a very definite no. I gather he actually wanted to help out Better Together but was so scunnered by the way they talked to him he walked away.
Second, I had a chat to my sister recently about independence. I don’t bring it up with her as she’s not very political and currently swamped with two young kids. But she brought it up. She’s still a no/undecided, and pretty badly informed in a lot of areas. But the big difference this time was that, rather than me banging on about the media being biased, I didn’t say a thing. She said, “of course I know what I’m reading in the media is bollocks”.
She doesn’t have the time or interest to be delving into blogs, like many people – which is fair enough, and where FB shares come in. But at some point between now and next year, I’m hoping/assuming there will be easier, more digestible ways of getting the basic information we need out. People already know they’re not getting good information. They’re frustrated at being lied to and treated like idiots, but the alternatives don’t have visibility. When the pamphlets or printed versions or whatever is produced come out, people will be very open to it. That’s what’s really needed – things that can sit around the house and be read in a snatched 5 minutes with a coffee.
“LAB don’t have an analysis of what they would do in 2015 if there is a Yes vote in 2014. For them it doesn’t bear thinking about – so they don’t think about it.”
I get this. What I don’t get is precisely what they think will happen after a NO vote. Have they given even a second thought to that?
Imagine for a moment a NO vote in 2014. There will be a whole swathe of Yes voters in Scotland who will despise Labour for their part in that, and for whom Labour will be as dead as the Tories are. Many of these may well be ex-Labour voters, people who once would have voted Labour at Westminster to keep the Tories out. Many will not be able to bring themselves to do this in 2015, especially as the realisation that a NO means nothing, or possibly less than that hits home, and people wake up to the lies that brought us to it. Scotland will be a depressed, despairing place after a No vote, with probably even many who voted no disappointed.
So lets say the Tories then get in again – perhaps even in part as a result of a collapse in the Labour vote in Scotland. That looks like a very likely result right now anyway. Labour will be utterly complicit in whatever happens to Scotland after that, and blamed for it. There will be no other party to blame in Scotland, the Tories having no representation anyway.
Where exactly do Labour think they go from there? Where do they think “the union” goes? I don’t think they’re capable of thinking past 2014 in either way. I’m not sure they’ve reached the ability to think beyond 2007 to be honest.
Very good points, Cath. I have written before of the phenomenon to which you refer. I call it “curtailed thinking”. Basically, it means taking a train of thought as far as the first things that feeds your prejudices and then forsaking altogether any further thought on the matter.
With British Labour in Scotland this tends to be the involve getting to the first, most simplistic and most glib anti-SNP/Alex Salmond sound-bite and then switching off the brain.
But we see it in the wider anti-independence campaign as well. Think of the nonsense about thousands of treaties having to be renegotiated in the event of Scotland becoming independent. It was immediately clear that nobody over at Project Fear had thought this through. Nobody had questioned the assertion. Nobody had considered what the response would be.
Curtailed thinking.
@ Cath
I get this. What I don’t get is precisely what they think will happen after a NO vote. Have they given even a second thought to that?
I think their view is that they win in 2014 by 65/35 at least.
The evil Salmond and his minions are exposed and destroyed in the process.
The SNP fractures and goes into meltdown amid a raft of recriminations.
LAB wins GE2015, and then SLAB comes riding in on a White Horse to save Scotland and take control of Holyrood in 2016.
Normal service is resumed and we all live happily ever after in a LAB/SLAB wonderland (which isn’t a ‘something for nothing’ society you understand).
The evil separatists and their fiendish plots are forgotten in the mists of history, (and no one will remember Project Fear as the means justifies the ends).
As a fantasy it takes some beating, but I can tell you that’s exactly where they are mentally.
The Panelbase poll was carried out on-line? When I carried out polls face-to-face on the street (many moons ago) I found that when people were asked how they intended to vote, they often took this to mean “who do you expect to win”, it strikes me that modern polling methods do not take this into account – thus explaining why real results can be dramatically different.
Taken for a mug by the Scotsman. Is that even possible?