That's not fair - they can do magic! After all, the UK government (the whole UK) is managing still to borrow and spend at least £100 billion per year more than it has coming in, and without having to pay a high rate of interest for it ("of course we'll pay it back one day...").
These stats ARE for yesterday's referendum @Exige - the 2011 bit on the right hand side is analysis against the 2011 Holyrood voting pattern (e.g. only 5% of people who voted Conservative in 2011 voted YES yesterday - 95& of them voted NO ... which is not surprising)
Difficult when all our politicians are basically the same and when challenging the "consensus" sees you denounced by the political and media establishment and their apologists as an extremists or a nutter. We live in a society where a small cabal of people have decided how we should live and what opinions we should hold and where the process of governance is seen as a marketing exercise in which the electorate are consumers whose expectations and preferences are things to be managed and manipulated until they fit with policy which has been settled in advance.
Well yes, 2014 indeed. But these figures report what people say when asked by a pollster. What they actually do in the polling booth might be entirely different for all anybody knows.
As you'd expect, when people are asked if they want change, those with nothing to lose and perhaps things to gain say yes, and those who have plenty to lose say no. Consequently the young voted yes (they currently have nothing material), and the relatively poor of Glasgow voted yes. The older and the more affluent voted no. No great surprise there, then.
Opinion polls: If you ask 1,000 people whether they are greedy, ignorant, and stupid all 1,000 of them will respond NO. But that doesn't mean that they aren't.
I like this a lot. I'm not happy at all with any of the politicians that are put in front of the camera, none of them seem to have any firm agenda, anything they really, truly, believe in. They're soundbite engineers, trying to say what you and I want to hear. Perhaps I don't want a major upheaval, I just want politicians to stand up and be proud of what they believe in, so that I, the great unwashed, can interpret them and rate them correctly. At the moment I can't; they all look and sound identical.
