This year’s Scottish Household Survey is out, and the press is in an absolutely gleeful orgy of misery over it. Here’s the Times, for example:

The paper’s leading line is that “only half of those polled were happy with schools, the NHS and transport provision in their area”. So readers would naturally assume that the other half were DISsatisfied, right?

The reality is somewhat different.

Because these (from p.170 of the document) are the actual percentages of Scots who said they were either “fairly” or “very” dissatisfied with the respective services:

Health: 12%

(unchanged from 2007)

Schools: 5%

(up from 4% in 2007)

Public transport: 16%

(DOWN from 17% in 2007)

That’s…that’s not a massive amount of dissatisfaction. Not even mild dissatisfaction. Indeed, readers might feel those figures are absolutely astoundingly positive given that (a) they come after 10 years of budgets squeezed by austerity cuts from Westminster, and (b) the media has been screaming itself hoarse non-stop for that whole decade about how completely dreadful everything in Scotland is.

In order to get their negative headlines, the press has had to leap on a stat for people who are happy with everything, which has indeed dropped a little over the decade (though only from 57% to 52%, and still an absolute majority).

But almost all of that change comes from education, and it’s not even people going from satisfied to dissatisfied, but from satisfied to (effectively) Don’t Know. Over the period, satisfaction with the NHS is fractionally UP (81% to 82%), and public transport is unchanged at 69% – still four and a half times the number who are UNhappy with their trains and buses.

Out of interest, if you DO treat “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” as Don’t Knows and exclude them from the figures, as polls normally do, you end up with figures which – in line with the unadjusted ones – show that FEWER people are unhappy with the state of education than with anything else:

NHS

Satisfied: 87%

Dissatisfied: 13%

SCHOOLS

Satisfied: 93%

Dissatisfied: 7%

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Satisfied: 81%

Dissatisfied: 19%

If you then bear in mind that only around 44% of the Scottish population voted SNP at the last Holyrood election, those are phenomenal approval ratings. The arithmetic inescapably demonstrates that the large majority of Labour, Tory and Lib Dem voters are broadly happy with the state of Scottish public services under the SNP, despite their own parties and the entire media constantly telling them they’re dreadful.

But still, in the papers, all is apocalypse.

The mystery of why so many Scots – faster than anyone else in the world – are giving up on the idea of handing over money to be lied to every day just keeps on deepening.