Wings Over Scotland

So, just a quick one, because we’ve got Christmas shopping to do:

Since continuing to fight for the GRR was famously a “red line” for the Scottish Greens in terms of the Bute House Agreeement, do we think that the Greens will now withdraw from the governing coalition, sacrifice their ministerial cars and salaries and influence, and return to the back benches for the next two and a half years until they can try to form an alliance with Labour?

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To be honest, Humza Yousaf’s new Cabinet satirises itself – everyone’s picking on the absurdity of noted idiot Shona Robison becoming Finance Secretary but the funniest is surely omnifailure Shirley-Anne Somerville as Trans Rights – sorry, “Social Justice” Secretary – so rather than waste our breath on it today we’re going to catch up on some results from our latest Panelbase poll that we haven’t managed to squeeze in amid the mayhem of the last couple of weeks.

They tell us some interesting things about the Scotland the new FM now leads.

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It’s all about the D, readers.

If you’re talking about “transwomen”, you’re almost always talking about people with a fully intact and functional penis. More than 95% of people who identify as trans have NOT undergone any genital surgery, and that’s a fact that’s still not widely understood.

So in our most recent and double-size Panelbase poll we made it explicit that we were referring to people with a full set of man-junk, and the results speak for themselves.

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Let’s take a moment off, folks. In our latest Panelbase poll, we also threw in a question just for fun, with genuinely no agenda at all, simply because we were curious to know what the answer was. Here it is:

Some of the detail, though, might intrigue you.

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Last month Wings broke a story about a “survey” being conducted by dozens of primary schools in the Aberdeen area in which children as young as nine were being asked about their sexual orientation and “gender identity”.

After we revealed it and national press picked up the story, the survey was swiftly pulled by the city council, but it’s only one example of primary children across Scotland (and elsewhere) being indoctrinated with the concept of gender ideology.

So in our latest Panelbase poll we thought we’d ask what voters thought about it.

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So this is interesting. Last week we were about to release some results from our latest Panelbase poll when events intervened. Naturally we’d asked a few questions about gender issues, and one of them concerned the Scottish Government’s potential legal challenge to the UK government’s use of a Section 35 order to block the Gender Recognition Reform bill.

There were three options in the question, and as luck would have it the three potential new leaders of the SNP each advocates a different one.

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We’ve just had the results back from some very interesting new polling, and the first snippet is a particularly instructive one.

When challenged on questions of gender, the reflex response of politicians of most parties in the Scottish Parliament is to bang on about how overwhelmingly MSPs voted for the Gender Recognition Reform bill.

Curiously, so far no journalist has bothered to ask whether they care that according to every poll, they’re utterly failing to represent the views of their constituents on the subject – which is, after all, what they’re supposed to be there for.

So we just asked directly if people felt their MSPs were doing their jobs.

Ouch. By well over 2 to 1, respondents felt that they were being let down by the people who are supposed to speak for them. (Excluding DKs the margin is just shy of 70/30, very similar to the margin by which people in polls oppose self-ID generally.)

But it’s when you drill down into the detail that it gets a bit disturbing.

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It’s manifestly obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention to Scottish politics that the current Holyrood chamber is stuffed to the gills with otherwise-unemployable dum-dums. When we recently had cause to go through the entire roster of 129, the number who leapt out as either vaguely honourable or even just halfway-competent didn’t require us to take our shoes off to count.

(Indeed, speaking as a professional Scottish politics website about a thousand times more interested in this stuff than normal people, the number of expenses-guzzling seatwarmers we’d never even heard of was more than a little disturbing.)

So these figures from a Panelbase poll this month – which was conducted BEFORE the grim scenes around the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform bill – can only be explained in two ways: either people have become accustomed to very low standards, or (more likely) people don’t pay that much attention to politics.

But there’s a much more interesting story in the numbers.

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The newest Panelbase poll, which shows a narrow lead for independence, was an “omnibus” one with questions provided by multiple clients, including Wings and the Sunday Times. The questions we’re about to show you were asked by the ST rather than ourselves, but their results are deeply disturbing on multiple levels.

The first one is perhaps predictable but still unsettling. (Click all pics to enlarge.)

A huge 2:1 majority of Scots believe the Scottish Government’s proposed new “gender recognition” laws pose a safety risk to women. Tory voters think so by almost 9:1, Lib Dem voters by almost 6:1, and Labour voters by nearly 2:1.

That can only partly be explained away by partisan party loyalty – Labour and the Liberal Democrats both support the bill, but their own voters are still strongly against. More noteworthy is the fact that (excluding Don’t Knows) even slavishly loyal SNP voters agree with the statement by a smaller but still clear 12-point margin, 56 to 44.

So let’s say it unambiguously: most SNP voters think the SNP’s gender reforms pose a danger to women’s safety.

But that’s not the disturbing bit.

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Kezia Dugdale, the hapless leader who took Scottish Labour to 14% in the polls, is one of the most extravagantly-paid people in Scotland who has no discernible talent or significance to public life whatsoever.

As well as being the Director of the John Smith Policy Centre (a job with no known responsibilities but which nevertheless pays around the same as being an MSP making laws in the Scottish Parliament) she writes regular columns in The Times and The Courier and is now, hilariously, the new Professor of Practice in Public Service in Glasgow University.

(A post with unspecified duties and unknown salary and which was also not, as far as anyone can tell, ever publicly advertised.)

We were bored so we thought we’d find out, via Panelbase, if her latest lucrative role was perhaps the result of a noticeably impressive performance in the first one.

Ah. Not so much.

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Half a decade apart, almost to the day.

So what are we expecting?

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As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.

In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.

The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.

If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.

Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.

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