In the light of David Davis’ resignation last night and the continuing shambolic chaos that is UK politics, it seemed a pertinent time for these findings from our latest poll.
Readers probably won’t be too shocked that it’s Scotland Vs The Tories again.
Alert readers may recall that a few weeks ago we revealed how an independent Scotland could reduce its budget deficit by billions of pounds a year – by renting out the Faslane naval base to the rest of the UK to keep their nuclear weapons in.
Voters in England, we learned, were more than happy to pay Scotland £5bn annually – and perhaps even more – for a Trident submarine park during the decades that it would take to build a replacement base south of the border.
Of course, that plan is only any good if the people of Scotland would accept it too.
From time to time in our Panelbase polls we like to test Scotland’s opinion of its media, since that’s the main focus of our website, and our newest poll was one such time. It found that Scotland’s preferred broadcaster for political coverage was… Channel 4.
The station scored a net +23 rating with respondents, higher than STV (+19), with BBC Scotland trailing in last but still on +16 overall.
The BBC was the only one which had a notable difference in perception between Yes and No voters. C4 got +25 from Nos and a very similar +21 from Yessers, STV was closer still at +20 vs +19, but the BBC had a sizeable gap: just +6 from independence supporters (which is still startlingly high), but a thumping +23 from Unionists.
All broadcasters in Scotland are required by Ofcom rules to be neutral and balanced. We suppose that two out of three more or less managing it isn’t bad.
We noticed a recurring theme in our latest Panelbase poll. In recent years Scottish politics has of course been defined mainly by the constitution, with all three major UK parties united in opposition to the SNP more or less reflexively. But if you strip out questions about the constitution, voters have largely reverted to the previous norm of a broadly centre-left consensus against the Conservatives.
For years now Lib Dem voters have shown up in polling as essentially Tories Lite, not because individual people’s opinions had changed but because most of the party’s traditional left-leaning voter base had abandoned it in disgust after the 2010 coalition which saw Lib Dem support plunge from 23% to 8% in a single Parliamentary term.
But now – although Lib Dem support has barely increased – things are changing.
Much of central Cowdenbeath was closed down for several hours by the police yesterday to facilitate an Orange Order parade attended by DUP leader Arlene Foster. (Curiously, Ruth Davidson, who’d been vocal in her complaints about traffic disruption in Glasgow due to the recent Yes march, had no objections this time.)
Foster made an audaciously ironic plea for a nation “free from intolerance and hatred“, right before the next speaker stepped up to denounce large sections of the local population as “enemies of Christ”.
The rest of the parade took its usual form.
In our latest Panelbase poll, we asked the same independence question we asked in the last one, and got much the same answer. (Technically the indy vote went up by about a sixth of one percent, but that’s statistically meaningless.)
That’s a bit disappointing after the events of recent weeks, but also not very surprising – after all, the way the question is framed pretty much guarantees at least 38% of the population will choose the second option straight off the bat.
Much more interesting is the question we asked next.
As alert readers will know, we’ve heard little from the Unionist parties in Scotland over the last couple of years but “SCOTLAND SAID NO!”, “SCOTLAND DOESN’T WANT ANOTHER REFERENDUM!” and “WHAT PART OF NO DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”
That clutch of blunt, angry slogans was (and remains) pretty much the entire Scottish Conservatives manifesto, for example, and it rests on the claim – based on some extremely misleading selective reading of opinion polls – that the nation is implacably opposed to a second vote. The reality, as we know, is somewhat more balanced. But it’s never been quite THIS balanced before.
We’ve just got the results back from a new Panelbase poll of Scottish voters. As ever there’s some fascinating stuff in there, but we’ll start with the headline voting numbers:
HOLYROOD VOTING INTENTION (excl DK, chgs vs Dec 2017)
SNP 41 (+2)
Con 27 (-1)
Lab 22 (-3)
LD 6 (-)
Grn 2 (-)
(1018 Scottish voters, fieldwork 21-26 June 2018)
In all the excitement of the torching of the devolution settlement, we forgot to mention a curious piece of data from our recent poll of English voters.
Of all the people south of the border who would gladly throw Scotland and Northern Ireland under the bus (and more to the point, out of the UK) in order to ensure England left the EU, by far the most willing were the voters of the only UK party which expressly identifies itself as standing FOR the Union – the Conservative And Unionist Party.
We’ll shortly round up the last pieces of data from our Panelbase poll of English voters last month, but this one merits singling out, we think.
Wait, what?
The findings of Lord Bracadale’s report into hate-crime law in Scotland were published today (tl;dr version: OBFA’s coming back), and we couldn’t help observing them in the context of an interesting Guardian article on the alt/far right yesterday.
Because we’ve discovered something slightly odd about the subject.
Of all the dishonest memes regularly put around by the Unionist side in the Scottish constitutional debate, the most bare-faced is the notion of the “fiscal transfer”. Part-time pretend economists harp on endlessly about how the UK “transfers” money (the current popular figure is £9bn) to Scotland to balance the books every year, as if it was a munificent gift out of the sheer kindness of Westminster’s heart.
The reality, of course, is that it’s a loan, which Scotland has to pay back with interest. If an independent Scotland ran a deficit – like almost every country on Earth – it could take that loan out from any number of possible lenders and carry on as normal.
It is in no sense whatsoever an argument for Scotland staying in the Union, because it’s completely irrelevant to the Union, except in so far as that the only reason Scotland needs to borrow money at all is because it’s been part of the UK for the last 40 years and has been left impoverished as a result while a very similar neighbouring country has become wealthy beyond imagination.
But still, let’s indulge them for a moment and assume there really is a £9bn hole in Scotland’s finances. Is there anything we could do to reduce the size of it significantly? Well, since you ask, we have some poll data on that.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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Wings Over Scotland
