The world's most-read Scottish politics website

Wings Over Scotland



Signing up new seamen fast 134

Posted on May 08, 2022 by

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Voting for people who hate you 77

Posted on May 02, 2022 by

We had some poll questions out with Panelbase last week. The results were in most ways wholly unsurprising, in line with all previous polls on the subject. Here they are.

Read the rest of this entry →

Progress update 1,173

Posted on April 13, 2022 by

In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.

It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)

April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.

Read the rest of this entry →

Believing Her 639

Posted on December 13, 2021 by

This is the last piece of data from our recent Panelbase poll.

Click image to enlarge. Full data tables here.

Jigsaw Puzzle Blues 408

Posted on November 22, 2021 by

Craig Murray is due to be released from HMP Edinburgh a week tomorrow, having served half of an eight-month sentence for contempt of court via “jigsaw identification”. Our latest poll data from Panelbase, surveying 2000 Scottish voters last week, reveals that just a quarter of Scots think that such an offence merits imprisonment.

Readers may find the figures for male and female respondents of note. The full data tables can be downloaded here.

Into the new world 203

Posted on November 18, 2021 by

So, in accordance with the wishes of the readership (and despite rather peculiar claims on some sites that all polls in Scotland are now commissioned by Unionists), Wings has its first polling data for you in its present form, relayed without comment.

In association with Panelbase, this month we surveyed 2000 Scottish voters (double the normal sample size) on a couple of subjects. The first question was this:

“Barring unforeseen events, next year Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister. She took office in November 2014, in a Scotland which was evenly split on the constitution. (Average support for independence in polling was at 50%, compared to the current 48%.)

Which of the following, if any, do you personally regard as her greatest achievement in office?”

The results are below. Click images to enlarge.

Read the rest of this entry →

The source of all fear 176

Posted on April 20, 2021 by

We’ve been racking our brains for a few hours now, but we still haven’t been able to think of a single UK citizen of the last 100 years – indeed, probably the last 300 – who has terrified the British establishment more than Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

By any conceivable measure Salmond is the most successful Scottish politician of all time. He’s the only one to date to have won a (supposedly impossible) majority in the Scottish Parliament, the only one to have secured an independence referendum, and the man who took Scotland to the brink of regaining its democracy, where – despite the best efforts of his successor – it still just about remains.

He survived a uniformly hostile media for 20 years as SNP leader, then also survived a corrupt and criminal conspiracy within his own former party to have him imprisoned, walking out of court a free and innocent man despite a two-year smear campaign in the press and a police and government operation of unprecedented scale trying to convict him.

(A point that hasn’t been made enough in coverage of the entire fiasco is the amount of police resources which were devoted to the case. Ask the average woman who’s alleged a sexual assault below the level of rape – or indeed an actual rape – if SHE got a team of two dozen dedicated police officers interviewing over 400 people at a cost of millions of pounds to try to firm up HER claim.)

So you’d think that when he formed a brand-new political party, which got numerous elected representatives from the SNP to defect to it, and contested a notionally-crucial Scottish general election, it would sound like a work of absurdist dystopian fiction if one were to suggest the media would exclude it from even participating in televised election debates in a manner more befitting North Korea than a Western democracy.

And yet here we are.

Read the rest of this entry →

Nobody Cares What You Think 397

Posted on April 15, 2021 by

Yesterday we mentioned an SNP election leaflet that someone had posted on social media. It turns out that either deliberately or accidentally (probably the latter, while taking out the bit with their name and address on it) they’d cropped off part of it containing a logo that does passingly refer to independence. You can see it down at the bottom-right corner.

So we should note that by way of clarification. But what’s more interesting about the rest of the leaflet is that if you took the logos off it, it could be from literally ANY of the parties contesting the election. It contains no policies whatsoever, just some general feelgood sloganeering. Which parties, do you suppose, are campaigning AGAINST “equipping children to succeed” or “supporting businesses” or “creating jobs”?

The deeper truth is that the leaflet demonstrates how completely pointless this election actually is, because nothing you do with your vote next month is going to affect anything that happens in the subsequent five years. Only one party is going to win, and once they do it won’t matter what’s in the 76-page “manifesto” they released today. The manifesto is a fake – in reality it amounts to a single line: “keep us in power so we can fill our pockets and do whatever we like for another half a decade, suckers”.

Allow us to illustrate.

Read the rest of this entry →

Garbage in, garbage out 182

Posted on February 02, 2021 by

A week ago we told you this:

And you’ll never guess what.

Read the rest of this entry →

Code Red 164

Posted on January 20, 2021 by

In addition to the Survation poll that was in the field last week and which we’ve been reporting on, there was also a Panelbase one going round at the same time.

(It’s as yet unpublished, and having been sent a few of the… interesting questions in it by some people who took the poll we’re very excited to find out who commissioned it. Our money is on either George Galloway’s furious new list party – which incidentally just had its registration refused again by the Electoral Commission – or the collection of anonymous hyper-Unionist nutters ironically calling themselves “The Majority”.)

But as the opportunity was there we slipped a couple of questions of our own in too, and the findings from one of them were pretty dramatic.

Read the rest of this entry →

The state is not her 224

Posted on November 19, 2020 by

One of the dumber things we see regularly posted on social media is that Yes voices should stop criticising the First Minister because her leadership is the only reason Yes is now consistently ahead in the polls and we would have no chance of winning a new referendum with someone else in charge.

This is obviously nonsense, because Nicola Sturgeon was SNP leader and FM for five years in which support moved barely a single millimetre, until COVID-19 came along. Our current lead is due entirely to a tiny invisible virus and a giant Etonian buffoon.

But you know us, readers – we like to check.

Read the rest of this entry →

Darwin’s Failures 305

Posted on August 20, 2020 by

The BBC ran a completely insane story this week about a transman (ie a mentally ill woman) who almost died of kidney failure because she didn’t tell her doctors what sex she really was. The standout paragraph was probably the one pictured below, in which the atom-brained narcissist imbecile explained to a startled nation that apparently having a mental disorder also changes your physical biology:

(Also, y’know, “cute and awesome!” is definitely how men talk.)

But anyway. When we commission opinion polls, we’ve often noted that in any given poll you can expect around 5-10% of respondents to vote for even the most seemingly ridiculous options – either as a “joke”, or because they’re too dim to have understood the question, or whatever.

And last week we thought we’d put that to the test.

Read the rest of this entry →

  • About

    Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.

    Stats: 6,787 Posts, 1,222,037 Comments

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Categories

  • Tags

  • Recent Comments

    • twathater on According As We Need Them: “TBQH Sarah I would disregard ANYTHING that Bastard Tax MOAN and his wee Scotland Hating sidekicks like Aydun Corporal Batshit…Jul 16, 01:58
    • sarah on According As We Need Them: “@ Northcode: “mirkie watter”. I like it, Northcode. Your knowledge of poetic forms puts me to shame.Jul 15, 22:58
    • sam on According As We Need Them: “https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52524-europeans-would-welcome-an-independent-scotland-into-the-eu “That Scotland may vote in a second independence referendum to leave the UK cannot be discounted, and Scottish nationalists…Jul 15, 21:43
    • sam on According As We Need Them: “The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a United Nations treaty that the UK has ratified (meaning…Jul 15, 21:38
    • Northcode on According As We Need Them: “Thanks, James. Here’s another: mirkie watter Rever stanes smuithed roond; shaped by watter no thair ain; drouned in silence, worn…Jul 15, 19:17
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Thanks for the info, Aidan. On the face of it then, it sounds like just another ruse by which the…Jul 15, 19:11
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Fair enough, sarah, I stand corrected. How about a link so we can all see what it’s about?Jul 15, 18:58
    • Captain Caveman on According As We Need Them: “@TwatByName You know what they say, “there’s no fool like an old fool”. Silly old sod. Take up bowls or…Jul 15, 18:56
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Sure, TH. I have little doubt that the humous boys will be hunted down to the ends of the earth…Jul 15, 18:54
    • Aidan on According As We Need Them: “I’ll save you the trouble, it’s another cunning plan which says that if the Scottish Government implemented the ICCPR, because…Jul 15, 18:34
    • sarah on According As We Need Them: ““clearly a good thing because Angus R…oppose it.” This is an example of humour.Jul 15, 18:32
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Guid Gowd, sarah, but you’re a dunderheid. Things are intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Their goodness or otherwise is not…Jul 15, 18:17
    • twathater on According As We Need Them: “Ewen used to be a regular contributor BTL on Yours For Scotland and was asked by Iain Lawson to do…Jul 15, 18:16
    • twathater on According As We Need Them: “There’s Chas focusing his inner franchise fanny and CLAIMING that he knows what the MAJORITY of visitors to WOS are…Jul 15, 18:10
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Writing of drunk arses …Jul 15, 18:08
    • twathater on According As We Need Them: “The problem wi that is the humous boys have probably witnessed what is currently being done to innocent women and…Jul 15, 18:03
    • twathater on According As We Need Them: “And as if any proof were required about the relationship of yoons and lunacy, immediately up pops Bastard Tax MOAN…Jul 15, 17:50
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Ah come oan noo, sarah. We need to all focus on supporting the good news you report above to a…Jul 15, 17:50
    • sarah on According As We Need Them: “O/T Ewen Kennedy [retired lawyer and an independence supporter] has made a submission to Holyrood’s petitions committee in support of…Jul 15, 17:45
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “There is much truth in what you write here, James. A phrase I read a little while back sticks with…Jul 15, 17:38
    • James Cheyne on According As We Need Them: “Sven. Indeed it appears that Labour are finishing and finalising what the Tories Started, with considerable help from the greens…Jul 15, 17:27
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “Seriously, Alf? You’re now getting info from the scatological ravings of Confused? ‘as the saying goes : “a drunk arse…Jul 15, 17:26
    • sarah on According As We Need Them: “Rev, have you a proposal for the campaign over the next 9 months? It would be useful to hear which…Jul 15, 17:22
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “That is good news, sarah. I expect they’ll agree a stern resolution calling for the humous boys to come out…Jul 15, 17:14
    • Hatey McHateface on According As We Need Them: “@DaveL says: 15 July, 2025 at 2:20 am “Can you explain why or how?” I think you’re new here, Dave.…Jul 15, 17:09
    • Chas on According As We Need Them: “Congratulations Sven. You must be one of the very few people who actually read any of the repetive gibberish produced…Jul 15, 16:30
    • Sven on According As We Need Them: “James Cheyne @15.29. Dear Lord, “James”, how I wish I wasn’t in complete agreement with so many of those points.Jul 15, 15:55
    • James Cheyne on According As We Need Them: “The social engineering experiments on the populations is an ideology effecting all governances from enforced migrations across borders being encouraged…Jul 15, 15:29
    • Captain Caveman on According As We Need Them: “‘… hence also that “the moon is made of cheese” (Cesaire)’ I’m sorry, but you just have to laugh, right?…Jul 15, 15:21
    • sarah on According As We Need Them: “O/T Good news today – Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, Brazil, South Africa and 15 other countries are meeting today…Jul 15, 15:19
  • A tall tale



↑ Top