Saturday, November 21, 2020

Pro-indy parties make progress in Clackmannanshire East by-election

A rare advantage of being forced to have pre-moderation switched on is that I was able to intercept a comment the other night by a well-known unionist propagandist who was attempting to portray the Conservative hold in the Clackmannanshire East by-election as some kind of glorious, game-changing victory for unionism. In reality, the vote share for both pro-independence parties actually went up slightly, and it looks like the unexpectedly sharp increase in the Tory vote can be explained mainly by an intra-unionist swing caused by yet another Labour collapse. 

Clackmannanshire East by-election result: 
 
Conservatives 51.2% (+9.7) 
SNP 32.0% (+1.8) 
Labour 8.1% (-12.1) 
Greens 5.8% (+2.0) 
Liberal Democrats 2.9% (-1.4) 

If we'd seen this result in late 2017 or 2018, I might have interpreted the Tories' relatively strong performance as being of wider national significance. But at the moment we have tonnes of polling evidence, and indeed evidence from other recent local by-elections, that the Tories are struggling across Scotland and that the Douglas Ross experiment is failing. So the Clackmannanshire East outcome has got 'local factors' written all over it. It was a reasonably solid Tory ward in 2017 anyway - it contains Dollar, so it's very much the posh end of the county.

9 comments:

  1. Clearly the end of independence and a ringing endorsement of Johnson's premiership.

    TBH, mid-term cooncil by-elections are normally the Tory forte given their voters are good at turning out. So things are really bleak for them based on recent results.

    SNP 2007-> honeymoon continues.

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  2. The sad fact is that a Labour collapse has boosted the Conservatives. It's a consolation for the SNP for its vote to increase slightly, but you'd expect more left-of-centre Labour voters to move to left-of centre SNP. Do most labour voters in Clacks think "SNP bad"?

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  3. Watch this and see your opponent.

    A rambling imbecile who couldn't fight his way out of a wet chip poke.

    I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone thinks this fuckwit is the decider on Scotland's future.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD9ogU8Pxw8

    The UK has never had such a weak, pathetic, joke of a PM in its entire history. One that can't even remember how many children he's sired never mind the latest strategy for holding the UK together.

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    Replies
    1. Little wonder they turned off the comments on that.

      Low satisfaction? I assume no one told him about the Ipsos Mori Poll.

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  4. Very positive signs in the latest data that covid deaths are now following cases / % positive / R / hospital admissions / ICU and falling in line with these, suggesting we are past phase 2 peak in all aspects.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53511877

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  5. one of the problems with offering this video as an example of 'A rambling imbecile who couldn't fight his way out of a wet chip poke' is that for viewers approaching the video with a lingering or active hinterland of belief in the 'uk Government' having their interests at heart, it is no such thing, and this video does nothing to make them think that's what they are seeing and so change their minds.
    tit for tat is not a real benefit to any of us, but BJ and Co (and there's a lot of them of all the political persuasions) can glibly reel off the gross insults that he did at the start of the video in the knowledge that no one from the Scottish Government or SNP will be in a position to either provide a strong rebuttal or get an audience for such a rebuttal.
    We need to be attacking first instead of being polite.

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  6. I can add some additional insight to the Clacks election - "local factors" definitely play into it. I've known the newly elected councillor for many, many years and would say he's much more an old-school, one-nation Tory than a Thatcherite (though he does have an unpleasant soft-spot for the Iron Lady). He's a hard worker and very personable, so will have come across well when on the campaign trail.

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