Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Scottish Labour may be dinosaurs, but it wasn't a dead cat bounce

As you may have seen on social media, there was a post on the LSE politics blog yesterday arguing that the notion of a "Corbyn bounce" in Scotland at the general election is a "myth" and a "mirage", and that the SNP should not be sidetracked into strategies to fend off Labour when the Tories are the real enemy.  It would be comforting to agree with that, and to tell ourselves there is only one unionist party worth worrying about, but I do think the conclusion is wrong.  The main flaw of the blogpost is that it treats the results of the 2015 and 2017 general elections as if they are the only pieces of information available to us.  When you look at it that way, it does appear superficially that the entire drop in the SNP vote can be explained by a natural 'correction' after the freakish result of 2015, and that the very small revival in the Labour vote (from 24% to 27%) was an inevitable side-effect of that readjustment, rather than being caused by the phenomenon that generated a much bigger Labour surge in England.

However, if you widen your gaze to take account of opinion poll evidence (and indeed the Holyrood election of last year), the picture suddenly looks very different.  There is overwhelming evidence that Labour's true recovery in Scotland was not from the low of 24% recorded in 2015, but from the much worse position that the party slumped to after that election.  Survation, who proved to be the most accurate pollster, had Scottish Labour languishing at just 18% as recently as mid-April, but by the end of the campaign that had jumped to 29%.  Other firms showed a similar trend (even if the exact figures were very different).  That sort of big shift is much more in line with the Corbyn surge that occurred in England, and given that it happened at exactly the same time, it's not unreasonable to suppose that it probably happened for much the same reason.  It can't really be explained by the correction in the SNP's vote share, because the SNP had dropped to the low 40s (and the Tories had risen to the high 20s) before the Labour surge even started.  It looks much more likely that the SNP suffered a drop from an unsustainable high, and then suffered a further small drop as a direct result of voters switching to Labour because of enthusiasm for the Corbyn project.

Even though the premise of the LSE blogpost is wrong, I do think it's correct to argue that the SNP shouldn't head off on a radical left wild goose chase to try to deal with the Corbyn threat.  If you're losing voters who are inspired by the prospect of a radical left government at Westminster, you can hardly counter that by offering a radical left opposition at Westminster (and an opposition with third-party status at that).  You can only compete by putting forward an alternative inspiring vision that Corbyn can't/won't offer - and that means a much greater focus on independence than we saw in the recent campaign.

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Elsewhere in the LSE blogpost, a reasonable point is made about the SNP's "heroic" determination to conflate support for independence with support for remaining within the European Union, which may have cost the party votes from Brexit supporters.  That factor may also go a long way towards explaining the Tories' seemingly puzzling failure to defeat the SNP in places like Perth & North Perthshire and Edinburgh South-West - both constituencies that voted Remain by a much more emphatic margin than the rural north-east did.

But this is not just a dilemma for the SNP.  Could the Scottish Tory surge be a similar phenomenon to the SNP surge of 2015?  In other words, was it partly caused by temporarily energised Brexit supporters who were determined to reinforce their vote from the referendum last year?  If so, the Scottish Tories are very likely to suffer their own natural 'correction' at the next general election (as long as it doesn't take place in the near future).  Those new north-east Tory MPs, especially the ones with the narrowest majorities, probably shouldn't get too comfy in their seats.

21 comments:

  1. The fact remains James, the SNP fought an abysmal campaign and even failed to respond to taunts about the '15 billion pound annual fiscal deficit' If you don't challenge these claims they soon become Unionist 'facts' The economic case cost us in 2014 and 3 years later we are no further on.

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    1. But the SNP haven't been campaigning on independence. They can't really be expected to be "further on" if they haven't been talking about the subject.

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    2. The Nat sis have nothing else to campaign on except nationalism. They have no other policies to raise the Scottish people from poverty and foodbanks. They have no policies to reverse Thatcherite privatisation. They are just 16th century Jacobites living in the past singing sad songs in pubs.

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    3. James - it doesn't matter whether the SNP has/hasn't been campaigning on independence or not.

      Lies must always be shot down.

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  2. While I accept Mr Kelly's point that there is much more evidence to consider than just the 2015 and 2017 General Election results, it is instructive to look at how few defeated Labour MPs from 2015 stood again in 2017. There was a significant change in personnel with many younger candidates standing. They were, in the main, less tribally dogmatic in their approach and might be - yes, might be - more open-minded than the turgid group of MSPs. Perhaps the kind of closed-shop cliques which Gerry Hassan indicated ran most constituency parties have been broken or, at least had their power curtailed. During the Council elections and the GE I was more impressed with many of the Labour candidates and their supporters than I had been for a couple of decades.

    There might well be more openness to ideas and the possibility of engaging with them to extend significantly the range of powers devolved to Holyrood and, more generally, to distribute power to much more local levels, such as to Community Councils.

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  3. Why doesn't your logic for Tory failures in Edinburgh SW and P&NP extend to Aberdeen South and East Ren? Both seats were very pro-Remain, but both fell to the Tories. In fact Aberdeen South was taken by SCon's *only* actual Brexiteer - Ross Thompson.

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    1. Not to mention the completely inexplicable Tory victories in Stirling and South Ochil.

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    2. A Tory winning in Michael Forsyth's old seat (very, very narrowly, I might add) is scarcely 'inexplicable'. But the answer to your question is that when there is a very large swing from one party to another, you're going to get sensational gains (the Tories almost took Lanark and Hamilton East, for pity's sake), so what stands out more are the holds against the tide. My initial thought about Perth & North Perthshire is that Pete Wishart's personal vote may have helped, as may the SNP manifesto launch in Perth (followed by a mass canvass). Both of those may have been genuine factors, but I think the greater strength of the Remain vote in Perth and Kinross (as compared to the north-east) is the single most plausible explanation.

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    3. I think "Remain" played a much smaller part in the elections than what you suggest or what the SNP would have liked. Now that you mention it I do think that the personal vote, manifesto launch and mass canvass has more to do with Wishart holding on. The Eurosceptic Northeast rural seats you talk about are mostly straight SNP-Tory swings, whereas in the high-Remain voting seats gained by the Tories (mostly well-off suburbs of big cities, but some rural gains too), it was a depressed SNP turnout combined with a mass shift from Lib/Lab to Con. All 4 parties totally failed to make Brexit a significant part of the electoral agenda (as ended up being the case in England too - Sturgeon and May both had the most to gain by being the vanguards of their Euro tribes).

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    4. "I think "Remain" played a much smaller part in the elections than what you suggest"

      I think that's a very, very difficult argument to sustain if you make a direct comparison between the pre-referendum 2016 Holyrood result and the 2017 Westminster result. It's not so much that 'Remain played a part' as you put it, but more that the Tories wouldn't have made some of their gains without the Leave factor.

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  4. Do you have the expression " all politics is local" ? Sometimes one gets wave elections and sometimes one strike s at the right time etc. But sometimes people vote for a new person? A berger candidate? Sometimes things are fixed.

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    1. I think it's fair to say the candidate is generally much less important in UK elections than in US elections. There are exceptions to that rule, but most voters in a general election are thinking about the national picture. For example, there is no way that Alex Salmond's defeat is a personal vindication for Colin Clark, who most people in that constituency probably haven't even heard of. In their minds they were voting Tory, "against Indyref2", for Brexit, possibly for Ruth Davidson (the mind boggles).

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  5. My take on the election is that it was less a Brexit dominated campaign and much more dominated by the independence/Union question. The big move by LibDem voters to the Tories in the North East is unlikely to have been a pro Brexit vote. Much more likely an anti-Indy vote.

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    1. Of course some of it was an anti-independence vote. But, again, I invite you to look at the differences between the 2016 Holyrood election and the 2017 Westminster election, and the greater swing to the Tories in seats with relatively high Leave votes. Look at how ridiculously comfortably the SNP held Banffshire and Buchan Coast in 2016, and how comfortably the Tories took the equivalent seat in 2017. That transformation has got Brexit written all over it.

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  6. What played a part in the election 2017,its easily answered as many opinions as to cause and effect.A bit of everything had an effect,some did follow Corbyn,some may think a lot gave Labour the boost? The Brexit the SNP wanting to remain in the EU and SNP followers and members voting Tory because of Brexit,not sure of that? Perhaps some SNP members thought that we would still win a large majority of seats well they were right.Perhaps non-member followers of the SNP thought to give a bloody nose to us and they did give the SNP food for thought!Now anybody think the 56 seats was normal? or a fluke? most realise it was a fluke result and hoped for something close again,well we still won the majority of Scottish seats at Westminster and more than all the unionists put together,it was still a great result this 2017 GE.I am happy with the amount of seats at Westminster still the third party knocking one UK national party into fourth place and some criticise us? Autopsy time is over time to prepare for the next referendum and this one we will make it an honest one no cheating and no lies or liars allowed,if they say it then prove it before the vote.

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  7. Standard Metropolitan blinkers, only general elections matter so there is no need to look at intermediate trends for such unimportant things like a Holyrood election or local elections.

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  8. Captain obvious here, but a voter who wants Scotland Totally independent like a " real country" has actually no option but to vote tactically and "use their vote to send a message".

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    1. Only if Independence is their primary, overriding concern, which for many people it is not.

      Imagine if the only Independence party in Scotland was on the Right, instead of the Left (a pro-Scottish version of UKIP). Would you still vote for them to make your independence point?

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    2. A party can be on the right without being UKIP. If the only serious pro-independence party was a kind of Scottish "Fine Gael", then I might well vote for it. I wouldn't vote for a hard-right party.

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    3. Agreed, I was using them as a currently existing example.

      My core point is that we all have our red lines, and very few people are 'Indy first, last and always'.
      I could never vote for a party that supports Fox Hunting, for example, no matter what other policies they might have.

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    4. The red line could just as easily be independence, of course. A lot of people would struggle to vote for an anti-independence party, even if they agreed with all its other policies.

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