EU referendum : "Leave" campaign storms into the lead in average of online polls

So far, there have been two Britain-wide polls on the EU referendum since Cameron's failure to secure credible concessions, and both have shown leads for the "Leave" campaign that are clearly outside the normal range. YouGov had "Leave" a full nine points ahead, and although the lead with ICM was a wafer-thin single point, that's still highly significant, because ICM have previously always had "Remain" ahead. (Although the main focus has been on the huge divergence between telephone and online polls, it shouldn't be overlooked that there is also a mini-divide between online firms, with ICM tending to be slightly more Remain-friendly than YouGov.) It's possible that this is just a wild coincidence, but the more likely explanation is that voters have reacted badly to the proposed deal, and that there has been a genuine swing to "Leave". However, we could really do with a telephone poll to confirm that.

The movement has been enough to push "Leave", for the first time, into a slight lead in the online average of the Poll of Polls - although that may well underestimate the true strength of the Outers, because most of the polls in the sample were conducted before the details of the deal emerged.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 48.1% (-0.3)
Leave 39.3% (+0.3)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 41.6% (-0.7)
Leave 42.6% (+0.7)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 54.5% (n/c)
Leave 36.0% (n/c)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on ten polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, one from Survation, one from Panelbase, one from BMG and one from ORB. The telephone average is based on one poll from ComRes and one from Ipsos-Mori.)

New dictionary definition : Spannersplaining

Spannersplain (verb)

1.  The process by which establishment figures, especially journalists, explain to members of the general public which matters are, and are not, of interest to the general public.

2.  The process by which journalists explain that members of the public who investigate for themselves matters which they incorrectly think are of interest to them (especially matters which may shed light on the motivations and priorities of journalists) are mentally unstable.

Pressure mounts on Cameron : is he really going to betray The Vow, and risk reopening the independence question?

The negotiations on the fiscal framework have become a game of chess - both sides would prefer a deal, but both are trying to manoeuvre themselves into the most favourable position if a deal isn't possible.  The London Tories want to be able to say -

"We tried everything possible to deliver The Vow, but the SNP sabotaged the whole process with ridiculous demands."

While the Scottish Government want to be able to say -

"The Vow has been betrayed.  Nobody told No voters they would only get the new powers they were promised in return for a £3 billion cut in Scotland's budget."

As you can see, either way The Vow won't have been delivered, so this game is far more dangerous for Cameron than it is for Sturgeon.  At best, he can find a plausible excuse for his own failure to keep his side of the most important bargain London has ever struck with the people of Scotland.  At worst, the charge of a deliberate betrayal of The Vow will stick, thus bringing about one of the two obvious casus belli for a second referendum that we always knew were possible (the other being Brexit).

At the moment, the game seems to be moving decisively in the Scottish Government's direction.  With six out of the ten members of the Smith Commission (including representatives of four of the five parties involved) saying they broadly agree with the Scottish Government's interpretation of the 'no detriment' principle that was at the heart of the Smith package, it's going to be almost impossible for Cameron to establish a narrative of The Vow being sabotaged by the wicked SNP.  He now has two choices - make a more credible compromise offer, or accept the consequences of his government's double-dealing.

For my own part, I actually take a different view from the majority of independence supporters on social media - I very much want a deal to be struck, even if it involves some compromise.  I want the Scotland Bill to come fully into effect, so that we have something tangible to show for the success of the Yes campaign.  But even I accept that we can't take that at any price, and at the moment the price looks far, far, far too high.

Inspirational Ipsos-Mori poll finds majority of Scottish voters still support independence

After our little sneak peek at the unfiltered Ipsos-Mori numbers earlier, here are the official headline results filtered by certainty to vote - and they're even better than we expected for the SNP.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 53% (+3)
Labour 20% (n/c)
Conservatives 16% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 49% (+3)
Labour 19% (n/c)
Conservatives 15% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 8% (n/c)
Greens 6% (-1)

Of even greater significance, though, is that Ipsos-Mori have asked the independence question.  This is only the third 'real world' poll (telephone or face-to-face) to test support for independence since the referendum - and, extraordinarily, all three have shown a Yes lead.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 52.1% (-2.8)
No 47.9% (+2.8)

This is obviously further confirmation (if any were needed) of the divide that has opened up on the topic of independence between 'real world' pollsters and firms that rely on volunteer online polling panels. Bizarrely, it's the complete opposite of the divide we saw during the bulk of the referendum campaign, when online firms (with YouGov sticking out like a sore thumb as the sole exception) tended to be much more Yes-friendly than their 'real world' counterparts.

Doubtless the likes of our occasional commenter "Roger Mexico" will continue to point out that there is no absolute proof that the divergence is caused by data collection method, because it just so happens that the two 'real world' firms (Ipsos-Mori and TNS) are also the only two firms that don't weight by recalled referendum vote - ie. it's possible that there are too many Yes voters from 2014 in the Ipsos-Mori sample, perhaps because they are more eager to take part in polls.  However, I'm extremely sceptical as to whether that's the whole explanation for the divergence, not least because the TNS poll showing a decent Yes lead was politically weighted, albeit by recall of party vote, rather than referendum vote.

Even when different firms seem to have an in-built 'house skew' towards one side or the other, it is of course still possible for all firms to broadly agree with each other on the direction of travel.  As this is the third (arguably the fourth) consecutive poll from an assortment of firms to show some movement towards No, an interesting question is whether we now have convincing evidence of a real swing, or whether it could just be an illusion caused by normal sampling variation.  The reality is that we don't have enough information to go on yet.  The swing showed by Panelbase looked like an innocuous reversion to the mean, because the previous poll had been unusually good for Yes.  The YouGov findings may have been more significant, because the Yes vote was below its recent 'normal range'.  But with Ipsos-Mori, it's impossible to reach any firm conclusions, because this is only their second post-referendum poll on independence, so there's no way of knowing whether a 52% Yes vote is 'unusually low' for the firm or not.

Just as Panelbase did recently, Ipsos-Mori have sought to test whether Britain's exit from the European Union would lead to any change in public opinion on independence.  They've found the same relatively modest increase in support for Yes that Panelbase did - but of course Ipsos-Mori's basic Yes vote is higher than Panelbase's, leading to a much more commanding Yes lead when Brexit is assumed...

Imagine that the UK as a whole votes to leave the European Union in the referendum when voters in Scotland vote to remain in the European Union.  If this led to another Scottish independence referendum being held, how would you vote in response to the question ''Should Scotland be an independent country''?

Yes 57.7%
No 42.3%

The exact figures shouldn't be taken too seriously, because people tend to be bad at working out how they would feel about a subject in hypothetical circumstances.  There's also a danger that some respondents may have felt that Brexit was "expected" to change their view on independence.  So probably the most that can be said is that it's encouraging that Brexit seems to nudge more people towards Yes than towards No.

On the EU referendum itself, Ipsos-Mori have found that Scottish voters currently plan to back the "Remain" position by an overwhelming margin of 62% to 26%.  STV's Stephen Daisley (who has refreshingly reverted to "non-zoomer analyst" mode, just for the day) has made a direct comparison between those figures and the most recent Britain-wide Ipsos-Mori poll showing Remain ahead by 55% to 36%.  However, that could be quite misleading, because the Britain-wide poll took place entirely before David Cameron's failure to secure a credible deal with his EU partners.  So the divergence between Scottish and UK public opinion could well be even more extreme (as indeed other pollsters have suggested it is).

To return to the Scottish Parliament numbers, the recovery in Labour's lead over the Tories for second place isn't as pronounced in the headline results as in the unfiltered numbers, and it's entirely caused by Tory slippage rather than by Labour progress, but it will still be a relief for Kezia Dugdale to see an up-to-date telephone poll giving her a 4% cushion.  It's debatable whether the Tories really have slipped, though - the jump in their support in the November poll looked implausibly huge.  Today's poll doesn't wipe all of those gains out, so we could simply be looking at a more realsitic estimate of the modest advances they have made over the last six months or so.

There's more bad news for RISE in this poll with time rapidly running out - just one person in the whole sample of 749 plans to vote for them.  That's the same as the BNP, and fewer than Solidarity.  The only polling firm that has offered RISE any limited cause for optimism is YouGov - but that may simply be because YouGov (as a volunteer online panel pollster) have a few core SSP supporters on their books.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Today's update of the Holyrood Poll of Polls is arguably the most useful so far, because all of the polls that make up the sample were entirely conducted in either January or February.  And there's no distortion in the trend this time, because no firms have dropped out of the sample or returned to it.

Constituency ballot : 

SNP 52.4% (+0.6)
Labour 20.4% (n/c)
Conservatives 17.2% (-0.4)
Liberal Democrats 5.6% (-0.2)

Regional list ballot : 

SNP 46.6% (+0.6)
Labour 19.4% (n/c)
Conservatives 17.0% (-0.2)
Liberal Democrats 6.8% (n/c)
Greens 6.4% (-0.2)

(The Scottish Parliament Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are five - Panelbase, Survation, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

And here is the independence Poll of Polls.  Bear in mind that this one uses a slightly different methodology, so some of the fieldwork taken into account is much older.

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 48.7% (-0.5)
No 51.3% (+0.5)

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 44.8% (-0.7)
No 47.2% (+0.2)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 47.9% (n/c)
No 52.1% (n/c)

(The independence Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have polled on independence since the referendum, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

Ipsos-Mori look set to report SNP lead of around 30% in new Scottish Parliament poll

Three different people have given me a steer in this direction, so here goes.  The quarterly Ipsos-Mori poll of Scottish voting intentions for STV appears to be on its way.  The headline numbers haven't been released yet, but the results of a nuclear weapons question have been, and from the datasets it's possible to work out that the constituency voting intentions for Holyrood seem to be -

SNP 52%
Labour 22%
Conservatives 15%
Liberal Democrats 7%

I've already had to update this post, because it took a couple of minutes for the penny to drop that Ipsos-Mori had split their sample in two on the nuclear question, and therefore it was necessary to aggregate two slightly different sets of voting intention numbers.  That means the above results cover the whole sample, and aren't filtered by certainty to vote.  It's the filtered sample that Ipsos-Mori use for their headline numbers, so those will probably be a little different.

On the unfiltered numbers, the gap between Labour and Tory for second place seems to have grown significantly since November.  That's an unexpected finding, given that other firms have shown recent movement in the opposite direction - and indeed YouGov suggested that the Tories had actually overtaken Labour on the constituency vote.  Unless the filtered numbers show something radically different, that will be the big story of the poll, and the cause of some relief for Kezia Dugdale.  (To the extent that any Scottish Labour leader can really be relieved when her party is languishing in the low 20s.)

UPDATE : The headline, turnout-filtered results have now been released.  Full details can be found HERE.

Everyone has a first love

In the light of recent events, I thought it might be fun to have a look at a short list of public figures, plus myself, and see which was the very first account we all followed on Twitter.  In most cases, it tells you quite a bit about the person - where they work, which celebrity they most admire, who they share political and/or moral convictions with...or in Jeremy Corbyn's case it doesn't tell you anything at all.

Me : Subrosa (pro-independence blogger)

Ruth Davidson : Heather Peace (actress, musician and gay rights activist)

Jeremy Corbyn : Syam Ahmedarino (seemingly random bloke from Malaysia)

Leanne Wood : Colin Nosworthy (Welsh language campaigner)

Stephen Daisley : Matt Roper (STV Digital Editor)

George Osborne : David Cameron (Prime Minister)

Willie Rennie : Caron Lindsay (Scottish Liberal Democrat activist and blogger)

Alex Salmond : Kirk J. Torrance (SNP new media strategist)

Brian Spanner : Euan McColm (popular journalist)

Patrick Harvie : Adam Ramsay (Green writer/blogger)

Gerry Adams : Shaun Tracey (Sinn Féin press officer)

Incidentally, I noticed as I was scrolling through various accounts that David Cameron still follows Douglas Carswell, which is rather sweet.

A conversation between the usual suspects and a creepy stalker

The Usual Suspects : So, Mr. G, what did you do when you saw these abusive tweets?

Mr. G : Well, I scoured the internet for any clues as to the real identities of the people that wrote them.

The Usual Suspects : Oooh, that's a bit weird.

Mr. G : Why?

The Usual Suspects : Because nobody CARES who these totally random, uninteresting individuals are!  No normal person would waste perfectly good brainwaves even thinking about them, let alone expend any energy trying to discover any information about them.  OK, so what did you do then?

Mr. G : Well, after I found out where they lived...

The Usual Suspects : What, seriously?  You found out where they lived?  Oooh, that's creepy.  And then what?

Mr. G : I went round to their houses to confront them.

The Usual Suspects : ARE YOU BLOODY JOKING?  That's sinister.

Mr. G : But why?

The Usual Suspects : Because...look, we were all in total agreement yesterday that the Scot Goes Pop reader who took an hour out of her day to go to Ardrossan beach was a complete nutter, but what you've done is far, far worse.  We're so creeped out right now, we can't even begin to tell you.  Can we at least assume that it ended there?

Mr. G : Well, no, obviously I published the conversations I had with them.

The Usual Suspects : You did WHAT?

Mr. G : And also I published their real names, and lots of juicy personal details about them and their families.

The Usual Suspects : FAMILIES?

Mr. G : Oh, and I sent around a photographer to take unflattering pictures of them when they weren't looking.

The Usual Suspects : Wha...?  Are you mentally ill?  You need help, Mr. G.  Have you anything at all to say in your defence?

Mr. G : Yes, as a matter of fact I do.  My name's Graham Grant, I work for the Daily Mail, and the seven Twitter users I unmasked were all supporters of Scottish independence.

The Usual Suspects : That puts an entirely different complexion on matters, Mr Grant, sir.  Your article was a must-read, and entirely justified in the public interest, no question at all.  Our humblest apologies. Would you like a seat in the House of Lords?

*  *  *

PS.  And, yes, I know that some of the Daily Mail's "Cybernat 7" hadn't even written anything abusive.  One of them was Melissa Iacone, for pity's sake.

Merci, Monsieur Spanner. De nada, Ardrossan.

Well, I hope the people of Ardrossan are duly grateful for my heroic efforts on their behalf today - my previous blogpost single-handedly got them trending on Twitter across the whole UK.

That's Ardrossan in tenth place just after 10pm, and it was at least as high as eighth at one point.

By the same token, I'm deeply grateful to "Brian Spanner", Euan McColm, J K Rowling et al, because their affected "hilarity" over the subject (which I've been privately offered some very intriguing interpretations of) helped this blog to its highest level of traffic in a single day since the general election period last spring.  In all honesty, I'm a bit miffed it wasn't even better than that, but it seems even the magic of Hogwarts has its limitations.

Incidentally, I'm excited to inform you that I actually spent an hour or so on Ardrossan beach last year when I was killing time waiting for the train after a delayed ferry back from Arran.  I'm sure I took some pictures, so I'll study them closely and let you know if I spot any misogynists lurking in the seaweed.

EXCLUSIVE : Has J K Rowling's misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner" been traced to Ardrossan?

A Scot Goes Pop reader has been doing some detective work into the real identity and whereabouts of J K Rowling's notoriously abusive and misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner".  I'll let her email speak for itself, but it's in edited form to avoid any conceivable breaches of privacy.

"On July 7th 2015, Mr Spanner sent this tweet:

"Tonight I will be mostly sending weird pictures to my neighbour's unsecured wireless printer."

In it you can see he tweets the image of the local wifi networks he’s getting from his mac.  (In case you’re not a mac user, I am and can confirm that this is what the network list looks like on one.)
So whoever he is, he’s not skint.

If you look at the top network, you can see that there is a wee mark to the left of it. This is the back end of a tick, indicating that this is the network he’s actually attached to.

There is a website called WiGLE which collates SSIDs for wifi, so I checked this network and it flagged as being based in Ardrossan, next to the beach. It was spotted at this address on the 6th April 2015. Below is the info from WiGLE on it. Beneath the WPA logo are the coordinates.

So, being a belligerent and nosey sort of person, I went down to Ardrossan with my laptop to look for it. And indeed it’s still there. It can be detected fleetingly from the main beach road of ************** Road but it can very reliably be detected from a side street called ***************. Map attached and pics of my picking the network up. I have a wifi scanning file that confirms it, if anybody requires proof."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm seems to have family that hail from Ardrossan and thereabouts, judging from a tweet on 23rd November 2012 -

Euan McColm : "our dads were saltcoats then ardrossan, i think."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm once randomly mentioned the beach at Ardrossan in a Scotsman article -

"I’d have my man or woman outline a vision for the future from Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh’s Royal Mile or the beach at Ardrossan."

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm was the first person that "Brian Spanner" ever followed on Twitter, out of 300 million or so possibilities.

Coincidentally, popular journalist Euan McColm and "Brian Spanner" both use the C-word on social media far more frequently than the average person.  (Come to think of it, the average person doesn't use the C-word at all.)

Hmmm.  More than anything, I think this is a timely reminder that coincidences are just far, far more common than most of us realise.  For example, did you know that in any given football match, there is a roughly 50/50 chance that two of the players will share the same birthday?  With there only being 22 players on the pitch, and 365 days in the year, many people would think that the chances of that happening are only around 5%.  But nope - it's 50%.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

The Green party member who wants people to vote tactically in a non-tactical sort of way

I was more than a little dismayed to see a link on Facebook to a blogpost by Green party member Morag Hannah, which can be roughly summarised as follows : "You should vote for whoever you want on the list.  That's what the voting system was designed for.  No-one should vote tactically on the list.  I don't believe in tactical voting.  However, you should probably vote Green on the list because SNP list votes will be wasted and will only help the unionist parties.  But whatever you do, don't vote tactically.  I don't believe in tactical voting."

I was even more dismayed to see people on Facebook say they had been confused until they read Morag's post, but suddenly everything was clear!

Without wanting to go over the whole issue all over again, I just want to draw attention to three specific inaccurate claims in Morag's post -

1)  She graciously concedes that it's not a "dead cert" that the SNP will win almost every constituency seat in May, but claims that polling evidence means it's "very likely indeed" that they will (thus ensuring they won't need any list seats to retain their majority).  The reality, of course, is that recent polls from Panelbase and YouGov have put the SNP on 50% of the constituency vote - exactly where they were in the UK general election when they fell short in three constituencies, and only won very narrowly in another four (and that was out of 59 constituencies, rather than the 73 constituencies that will be up for grabs in the Holyrood election).  If the polls are overestimating the SNP slightly, or if there is any sort of slippage at all over the next three months, it is eminently possible that the SNP could fail to win a significant number of constituency seats.  It's true that TNS are still giving the SNP well over 50% of the vote, but from the way Morag is talking you'd be forgiven for thinking TNS are the only polling firm.

2) Morag claims there has been a "massive increase in support for smaller leftwing parties" since 2011, and prays in aid a "900% increase" in Green party membership.  It's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at this point, because it really shouldn't be necessary to point out that increases in support and increases in membership are not the same thing.  In 2011, the Greens received 87,060 list votes - from what I can gather, that's roughly nine times as many people as are currently Green party members.  Yes, it's possible that an increase in membership is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of wider support, but where is the evidence for that?  The Greens are currently getting approximately the same polling numbers as they got immediately before the 2011 election.  Their share of the vote in the 2015 general election only increased from 0.7% to 1.3% - and that's in spite of the fact that they stood in twelve more constituencies than in 2010.  (And yes, we know that some people probably think that the SNP's landslide last year was only won as a result of a "mass tactical vote" by "green left liberals", but let's get real, shall we?)

3) Morag claims that the SNP only want people to vote for them on the list so they can boast they got so many votes that they "literally broke the system", and not because they think it will affect their number of MSPs by "a single jot".  Unfortunately she's contradicting herself there, because she's already asserted that the SNP can "only" hope to win one list seat per region.  As it happens, the Greens' realistic ambitions on the list are remarkably similar to that - except perhaps in Lothian, they're unlikely to win two seats in any region.  So it doesn't seem unfair to point out that the SNP are asking for list votes for much the same reason as the Greens - they're actually trying to win list seats.  Vile, isn't it?

A question for Labour on abortion law

If anyone from Labour happens to be passing, you might be able to help with a question that's been nagging away at me.  As I understand it, your party believes that the more abortion rights that women have, the better.  Yvette Cooper said the other day that Labour (alone among all major political parties) thinks that the Scottish Parliament can't be trusted to assume control over abortion law because Nicola Sturgeon isn't able to bind her successors.  In other words, Westminster might decide to keep the law in England and Wales as it is, while the Scottish Parliament might eventually restrict access to abortion.  That's possible, but there are of course are at least three other possible outcomes of devolving abortion law -

1) Westminster (which after all has far more social conservatives in it than Holyrood) might restrict access to abortion in England and Wales, while the Scottish Parliament keeps the Abortion Act 1967 unchanged in Scotland.

2) Westminster might keep the law unchanged in England and Wales, while the Scottish Parliament liberalises the law to grant greater abortion rights in Scotland.

3) Both jurisdictions might grant greater abortion rights, with one following the example set by the other.

Two of these three scenarios would lead (from the perspective that Labour claims to take) to improved rights for women in Scotland, while the other would mean that devolution of abortion law had directly prevented women's rights in Scotland from being eroded.  If that came to pass, is it something that Labour would welcome?  Or would they continue to insist on "equality" across Great Britain even when that amounts to an equal lack of rights for women?

If the latter, it seems to me there's a fairly obvious British nationalist agenda at play here, rather than a feminist one.

*  *  *

There was an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day between RevStu and Jamie Ross of BuzzFeed.  RevStu asked Ross if he was comfortable with the "sneering protective wall" that the media had constructed around J K Rowling's abusive and misogynistic friend "Brian Spanner".  Ross replied that he didn't think there was any protection, merely a "realisation that no one outside Twitter knows or cares about Brian Spanner".  That's something of a circular argument, because there's one reason and one reason only why no-one outside Twitter knows or cares about Brian Spanner, which is that the media haven't told anyone about him.  In fact, they went to extraordinary lengths to edit him out of their extensive coverage of Rowling v McGarry, even though that story made no sense whatever without him.  Contrast that with their eagerness last year to out SNP candidate Neil Hay as "Paco McSheepie" - a Twitter troll account that was far, far less abusive than Brian Spanner, and that, again, nobody would have known or cared about unless journalists had told them.

It's not as if the media aren't in a position to out Spanner.  After my two recent blogposts pointing out the astonishing and totally coincidental links between Spanner and popular journalist Euan McColm, I was struck by the large number of people who came out with a close variation on the following theme : "I have been told by someone I trust that it's not McColm."  To state the bleedin' obvious, it's not possible to know for a fact that Spanner is not McColm (or Deerin, or Daisley, or even Rowling herself) unless you already know the guy's real identity.  That means there are an awful lot of people out there protecting him.  My strong impression is that many of those people are journalists, but even if that isn't the case, it would surely be pretty easy for the media to find out who he is and break the story.  So why don't they?  Was it really in the public interest to out McSheepie, but to protect Spanner?  If so, why?  Or would it be closer to the mark to say that Spanner is a mate of several leading right-wing journalists, and that they're happy to let him act with impunity?

*  *  *

I was at Murrayfield yesterday for my first ever Scotland-England game, and I fear I must report that triumphalist England supporters murdering what was once a perfectly respectable Christian song aren't any more lovable in the flesh than they are on TV.  You might also be amused to hear that I was sitting next to a kilt-wearing, Scotland-supporting Brit Nat who was incensed that the announcer referred to God Save the Queen as "our visitors' anthem", and got his revenge by belting it out with the England supporters.  He then proceeded to sing Flower of Scotland, but not quite as lustily.  I suppose I've always known that people like that existed, but it was educational to come across one for real.