The Other Kind Of Winning
The National runs headlines like this quite often.
The sort-of newspaper doesn’t actually have a sports section – it just publishes The Herald’s – but if it did you have to wonder what it would look like.
That IS the story, too. The actual figure in the poll The National reports is 35%, almost exactly the proportion of goals scored by Sort-Of Rangers at Ibrox on Sunday.
It’s hard to know what we’re meant to make of this factlet. “If something that you know is never going to happen somehow happened, how would you feel about it?” isn’t much of a question. Frankly we’re quite impressed that as many as 77% of Find Out Now’s respondents expressed a view either way to such a meaningless proposition.
The data was further undermined by the fact that the question offered no context, such as how this declaration would come about (ie whether it would follow an election with a majority of seats for indy parties, or a majority of votes, or just suddenly be announced out of the blue).
And the detailed numbers watered down the headline still further, revealing that just a quarter of Scots would “strongly support” the idea, with 10% “somewhat” in favour, whereas those opposed were almost all strongly opposed.
(And not insignificantly, if a civil war broke out they’d be the ones with all the guns.)
Quite why The National thinks it’s a headline-worthy thing that in some inadequately-defined hypothetical scenario the Scottish Government would find itself trying to force independence on a country with only one in four people behind them is somewhat beyond us. Even for the summer silly season in politics it’s desperate stuff.
But perhaps they could drop Gianni Infantino a line and let him know about it, because he’s currently in a bit of a pickle and is probably willing to give anything a go.
The National is a Goebellsian comic strip that does more to damage any credibility of the Independence movement than anything else.
It’s up there with the Daily Mail and TeH GrAuNiAd in terms of hysterical desperate swiping-at-air agitprop and barefaced lies. The Daily Sport has more credibility than this bumwad fodder.
That poll shows that 3/4 of the population oppose or don’t have have an opinion one way or the other against 1/4 supporting UDI. Hardly a resounding level of support for UDI.
Make you wander just what they are trying to say?
Were a collective/ junta/ faction consisting of Scotland’s brightest, one would hope for the brightest, were to do a well planned UDI and not tell the media or the dog of the plan, is it rather unlikely the Brits could do anything about it except send in the troops which would look terribly bad in the media. The Scottish population, which is remarkably docile and forebearing, even in extremis , would just wait for the winner to emerge.
The Scottish education system which once vaunted the thinking individualist lad o pairts type now produces conformists with well developed thumbs who wouldn’t know a coup d’état from a junta or care much either way as long as the internet did not go down.
So worth a punt, t’is the season to be silly after all.
“rather unlikely the Brits could do anything about it”
They might immediately stop paying benefits and pensions.
I’m entirely in favour of a Scottish political party campaigning for election at both WM and HR on a platform promising that if they are voted into the majority position (which means power at HR), they will commence negotiating Indy, with the UDI backstop if the talks are drawn out unnecessarily.
That would be implementing the democratic will of the Scottish electorate.
Anything else will be firing the starting gun for civil war and the break up of Scotland.
Said it before and will say it again. The National only exists, and only ever existed, to leverage and exploit the indy £. End of.
I am having some difficulty reconciling the donut chart graphic which shows, among other things, that the ‘Don’t know’ cohort looks like nearly a quarter, lets estimate conservatively and visually, it looks like about 20 – 22%.
When I look at the article in The National [1]
I see sliver of 7% attributed.
When I look on the findoutnow website, I see no data [2]
The number of people who ‘don’y know’ is massively important to interpreting what the result actually means in the real world.
Stu can you aid my comprehension please?
[1] link to thenational.scot
[2] link to findoutnow.co.uk
Oh FFS.
“Scots give verdict on unilateral declaration of independence”
link to thenational.scot
Here’s the deguffed archive version:
link to archive.is
I’m in no way defending the National, and going further, a story in their paper that promotes actual movement on indy would have my spider senses tingling, BUT on the actual figures, it does make you think, would people actually be opposed? Before a campaign started for indy around 2012, support for independence was under 30% was it not? Did that figure ultimately count for anything once people got access to information and motivated by the thought they could actually DO SOMETHING? The SNP are clearly very much against doing anything and they’re very comfortable with “Westminster says no”. Justifying their stance with “the people wouldn’t accept it” (assuming they make that argument) would be BS and this story probably just makes it relatively obvious.
My take on Scottish society is that you’d get similar numbers mobilised against UDI/non Brit authorised indy as you get
a) at an Orange march
b) at a Union Bears gathering
c) at an anti-immigrant fat bald men against foreigners gathering
(note – a b and c as circles on a venn diagram may have a high overlap)