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Wings Over Scotland



The UK’s most popular party 114

Posted on July 17, 2015 by

…has for the last 14 years been the None Of The Above Party.

graph(9)

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A natural progression 215

Posted on July 16, 2015 by

sa1

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A question for the Labour Party 243

Posted on March 17, 2015 by

From a piece on Labour’s welfare shadow Rachel Reeves in today’s Guardian.

scumreeves1

So… who DOES represent those people, then?

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The Great Narrowing 224

Posted on February 11, 2015 by

Independent website Political Compass has just released its 2015 graph charting the ideological positions of all the political parties of the UK. It’s a fairly predictable one.

pc2015

On the image above, we’ve added, for parties active in Scotland only, striped circles indicating each party’s 2010 position. But what does it tell us about 2015?

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Keeping on keeping on 166

Posted on January 17, 2015 by

Some readers have been a bit dispirited by the findings of our Panelbase poll this week, which revealed a few quite socially-conservative views among the Scottish population and also found fairly small differences of opinion between Scots and the rest of the UK on a number of issues.

keepon

But to be downhearted about the findings is to miss a whole series of points.

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The forgotten creed 118

Posted on January 16, 2015 by

We apologise if the results of our twin social-attitudes polls of both Scotland and the rUK have been a little depressing so far, readers.

hoymanana

Depending on how you choose to look at things (and where you live), this next tranche of data is going to either cheer you up a little bit or make you feel even worse.

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A six and two threes 68

Posted on January 14, 2015 by

We note with interest that the remarkable “I am not and have never been a Unionist” article about Jim Murphy, which vanished last night from the Daily Record website for several hours, has reappeared today. As far as we can see at a glance it’s the same as the original version with one slight alteration.

murphytory1a

We’re not sure that was worth all the effort, lads. For most Scots, including a great many in the Labour Party, those are two interchangeable terms.

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The Conservative And Labour Party 258

Posted on December 09, 2014 by

This is Tory activist Sarah Robb. She’s not a very nice person. (We don’t feel too bad about saying that, as she’s no fan of ours either.)

sarahrobb

But, y’know, Tory activist, not a nice person – no news there, right?

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The great surrender 70

Posted on September 07, 2014 by

Owen Jones in the Guardian, 7 September 2014:

“New Labour’s surrender to the underlying assumptions of the Thatcherite crusade gave the independence movement its greatest opportunity. Yes, the Blairites could not entirely purge Labour’s traditions, and so the minimum wage was introduced (albeit at too low a level), poverty was reduced and public services were invested in.

Yet they illegally invaded Iraq with Conservative support, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and 179 British military personnel before handing much of the country over to fanatics. They punished aspiration by introducing tuition fees, saddled public services with long-term debt through the colossal rip-off of PFI, and began privatising our NHS – laying the foundations for some of the pernicious policies of this coalition as they did so.

They allowed the living standards of millions of working people to begin falling years before the crash, even as the coffers of corporate Britain prospered like never before. They failed to solve an ever-worsening housing crisis, leaving 5 million languishing on council housing waiting lists. They cut taxes on corporate Britain while indulging in entirely destructive gimmicks such as scrapping the 10p tax rate.

Many Scots look at the Britain built by this political elite, they don’t like it and they want out.”

Seems to pretty much cover it.

Hobson’s Choice 64

Posted on August 10, 2014 by

The Telegraph, 10 August 2014:

“Policy Exchange, a think tank with close links to the Conservative Party, will later this month publish a report calling for the government’s £26,000 benefits cap to be lowered outside London to reflect the lower cost of living.

That pesky vortex again 195

Posted on July 10, 2014 by

Kudos is due to the Daily Record today, which has a large and prominent feature about NHS surgeon Dr Philippa Whitford, with whom readers should be familiar. Her message, from a position of knowledge and authority, of the fate awaiting the NHS on both sides of the border is a powerful one and makes a strong case for a Yes vote.

Obviously, that upsets both Labour and the No campaign very much.

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You can trust the Labour Party 95

Posted on June 24, 2014 by

There’s an interesting article on the Guardian today from the invariably-excellent former music journalist John Harris entitled “The crisis in the Labour party goes much deeper than Ed Miliband”, which looks at how a 280-page policy document published this month by the Labour-leaning IPPR thinktank was boiled down by the party for public and media consumption to “cutting benefits for young people”.

That got us to thinking about something, but luckily before we’d wasted too much time on thinking we discovered that Labour Uncut had helpfully already done the research we were about to embark on for us.

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