Radical Welfare Benefits Blog

"Now is not the time" according to May , for a second independence referendum. This was regarded by some in the SNP as a gift that they could use to their advantage: See how Westminster is is denying democracy for Scotland,  See how they are overruling the "will" of the Scottish Parliament etc. It can only increase the support for independence.  As usual these threats of a dramatic change in support for independence were hope over reality as the latest crop of polls show. We remain largely on trend across the board and spot on trend when it comes to the log line of best fit. This implies a slight narrowing of the polls that we have already seen and is nothing new. For now then, it would seem 'now is not the time' for most Scots. UPDATE We've a new YouGov poll late in the month so I've updated the charts, it makes a subtle difference to the long term log trend which does basically shows that views of independence have remained very s

We start off with a rather obvious predicted outcome, but we've been there before! Let's see how this pans out. I'll be feeding the data through the twitter account  @OddsonGE2017  but it will just be the data. I'm not getting sucked into all of that again! 

Yes I know there is an election on! Yes I'll get to blogging on the odds market, so don't worry, but I have to turn back to the DWP letter again.  It's fair to say that the militant wing of the nationalist movement is really struggling with the death of the DWP letter on pensions . Most have gone into denial, to the point of refusing to believe the FOI letter or even to suggest that the brilliant https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/  was a fake website! But today it took an altogether darker turn. An old boss of mine brought to my attention a tweet (forgive me I wont link to it for reasons that will become clear) from iScot magazine  published by Ken McDonald .  Here we were presented with the zombie DWP letter and an email which is not redacted (the redactions above and below are my own). In this email a DWP press officer notes that the letter is from the DWP and "its content is correct". You'll note that McDonald copies in Campbell and asked him to Retw

Not to worry this isn't an exceptionally complex of long blog, two weeks ago I finally brought my FOI on the DWP letter to a close.I've been on holiday so gave the blog a bit of a rest, hence the delay in getting this out. There was one outstanding issue I wanted to clear up regards "Rab's" letter. Was that letter a one off or was it part of a erroneous series of letters from the DWP until it was brought to their attention by Salmond in the Scottish Parliament. If you listened to the Yes campaign they certainly claimed that it was one of many. Salmond certainly did claiming " constituents " (plural) had been written to. As did the Yes campaign  here is Margaret Ferrier MP in a video referring to letters (plural). As I looked into this more and more the thing that sparked my greatest interest was the idea that there were, apparently, many letters but only one circulating on the internet. It was that more than anything else that made me think something w

I listened in to John Beattie at the BBC this afternoon and I gather Twitter tried to create a virtual spin room on the debate on GERS between Kevin Hague and Richard J Murphy .  As with his poor  contribution  in the National Murphy failed to turn up with any specific criticism  of GERS. His argument once more was that it was an estimate and therefore "may" have been unreliable.  There was a fascinating section towards the end where Murphy showed that he was, frankly, "at it" and was only out to try and score some points for the furthest fringe of the nationalist movement.  When confronted with Beattie listing the conclusions of the Fiscal Commission Working Group, which was composed of a set of economists that Murphy admires and couldn't hold a candle to, Murphy started to stumble.  "They were looking at the data in a totally different way. All data is what, as an economist, what I would call a social construct... The issue is you have to const