Wings Over Scotland | 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.