Saturday, March 25, 2023

Whoever is elected SNP leader on Monday will definitely become the new First Minister - that's a simple fact that people need to start accepting

Late last night, I was accosted on Twitter by a couple of diehard Humza Yousaf supporters - one of them was being abusive, although in fairness the other was not.  Both of them were still trying to push the fantastical line of argument that it "huztae be Humza" because supposedly neither of the other candidates for leader has the numbers to be installed as First Minister by the Scottish Parliament.  This is a very, very silly myth that just refuses to die.  So let's work through step-by-step why the next leader of the SNP will undoubtedly become First Minister, no matter who that person is.

1) The SNP have 64 of the 128 voting members of the Scottish Parliament - exactly half.  That excludes the non-voting Presiding Officer, and compares to just 47 seats for the SNP when Alex Salmond was first elected as First Minister fifteen years ago.

2) The new SNP leader, no matter whether that person is Humza Yousaf, Ash Regan or Kate Forbes, will be able to count on the support of all, or almost all, of those 64 SNP MSPs in the election for First Minister.  The reason is that elections for First Minister in mid-term are tantamount to votes of confidence in the government, and thus any SNP MSP who votes against their leader, or who fails to vote without a valid excuse, will undoubtedly lose the party whip and will not be eligible to stand for the party in future elections.  They would effectively be throwing their careers away, and if there's one thing we know about parliamentarians who have endorsed Humza Yousaf, it's that they really, really value their careers.

3) At the margins it's not impossible that one or two particularly zealous MSPs might make a career-ending stand by opposing their new leader in the vote.  (Emma Roddick was speculated about as a possibility, although she has since given an "SNP till I die" oath of loyalty.)  But that wouldn't make any difference, because under the rules an absolute majority of MSPs is not required to be elected First Minister.  In 2007, Alex Salmond was elected with just 49 votes (47 SNP, 2 Green) - which was only 38% of the voting MSPs.  On the final ballot, by which point Jack McConnell was the only remaining opponent for Salmond who hadn't yet been eliminated, 46 votes (36%) went to McConnell and the remainder abstained.   The abstentions were disregarded, and Salmond was declared the winner because his 49 votes slightly outcounted the 46 for the only other remaining candidate.  It will therefore be extremely easy for the new SNP leader to get elected with 62 or 63 votes.  The only way that would not be the case is if every single other party, plus any SNP rebel, actively votes for Douglas Ross to become First Minister.  Anyone who thinks Labour, let alone the Scottish Green Party, is about to install a Tory-led government is living in Narnia.

There endeth the lesson, there explodeth the myth.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

New Ipsos poll shows Humza Yousaf's net approval rating has now slumped to -20, well behind both Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer - pointing to potential disaster for the SNP if Yousaf leads them into the next Westminster and Holyrood elections

We've been in a weird 'polling desert' since the Murrell scandal broke a few days ago, but at last we do have some up to date numbers.  Again, they come from polling of the general public rather than SNP members.  However, there appears to have been a YouGov poll of SNP members in the field for around a week, so we'll have to see if that eventually shows up, perhaps at the weekend.

The new Ipsos numbers come in the form of net approval ratings for each candidate and for other senior politicians.  They show Nicola Sturgeon's rating improving (just in time for that to no longer matter) while almost everyone else's falls.  Both Anas Sarwar and Kate Forbes have slipped into negative territory since the last poll, but the bad news for Humza Yousaf - who was already in negative territory in the last poll - is that he has slumped even deeper into the red and thus remains way behind both Sarwar and Forbes.

Ipsos net approval ratings (17th-21st March 2023):

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): +8
Anas Sarwar (Labour): -4
Kate Forbes (SNP): -8
Keir Starmer (Labour): -9
Humza Yousaf (SNP): -20
Ash Regan (SNP): -24
Rishi Sunak (Conservatives): -37
Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -39

So the concern remains the same.  Kate Forbes looks capable of competing with Labour's leaders on a roughly equal footing, but Humza Yousaf does not - which gives us fair warning that a Yousaf-led SNP would be likely to suffer seat losses in the next Westminster and Holyrood elections, and possibly to surrender power to Labour.

Incidentally, some random troll quoted these exact numbers at me last night on Twitter, several hours before they were published, although he had the fieldwork dates wrong.  I'd be interested to know how that was possible, although I have my suspicions.  He seemed to think the numbers were somehow good for Yousaf, possibly because he didn't spot the minus symbol before the 20!

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Recently I've published results from TWO new Scot Goes Pop opinion polls - an opportunity to commission a second poll suddenly arose, so I made a snap decision to go ahead.  However, as you'll appreciate, polls are very expensive, so if anyone feels able to make a contribution, here are the options...

The simplest donation method is a direct Paypal payment. My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you wish, you can add a note saying "for the fundraiser", although even if you don't do that, it'll be fairly obvious what the payment is for.

If you don't have a Paypal account, last year's fundraiser is still very much open for donations HERE.

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Is there ANY way the SNP could win the 2026 Holyrood election with a leader as unpopular as Humza Yousaf?

That's a headline deliberately "in the style of the Daily Mail", but there's a perfectly serious point behind it, and it's one I've made a number of times before.  I thought it might be worth revisiting on the day that we're told Humza Yousaf thinks - with a certain lack of self-awareness, it has to be said - that his opponents in the leadership election might cost the SNP some of its supporters. In reality, that concern relates mainly to himself.

We know that the approval ratings of leaders are often highly predictive of general election and Scottish Parliament election results, and every poll that has measured approval ratings over the course of this campaign has had Kate Forbes well ahead of Humza Yousaf.  But the most telling results have been from Ipsos, who also asked the same approval question of non-SNP politicians, and most importantly of the Labour leader Anas Sarwar, to allow a direct comparison to be made.  Here is what the most recent Ipsos poll showed...

Ipsos net approval ratings (6th-7th March 2023):

Kate Forbes (SNP): +8
Anas Sarwar (Labour): +5
Humza Yousaf (SNP): -7

So the SNP really are at a crossroads.  They can opt to give themselves a slight inbuilt advantage over Labour at the 2026 Holyrood election by choosing in Kate Forbes a leader who is a touch more popular than the de facto main opposition leader - and even having that option after so many years in government is pretty extraordinary, let's face it.  Or they can self-harm by spurning that opportunity and installing a leader who is significantly less popular than his Labour opposite number.

Would it be possible for the SNP to overcome the hindrance of an unpopular leader like Yousaf to hold onto power?  That would be a very tall order.  For as long as anyone can remember, UK general elections have generally been won by the party with the most popular leader.  The two exceptions that are generally cited are 1970, which was won by the Conservatives in spite of Harold Wilson being more popular than Edward Heath, and 1979, which was also won by the Tories in spite of James Callaghan being more popular than Margaret Thatcher.  But UK elections were a lot less presidential in the 1970s than they are now.

In a Scottish context, some may point out that Ruth Davidson often had slightly superior approval ratings to Nicola Sturgeon, and yet Sturgeon always got the better of Davidson in elections.  But that's not really a meaningful comparison because the Tories can't compete on a level playing field with the SNP in Scotland.  Their brand is too loathed outside their own core vote.  Scottish Labour have no such disadvantage, and in any case it's hard to dispute that Davidson achieved something very close to the best results that were realistically possible for her.

The only glimmer of hope for a Yousaf-led SNP might be the question of "which came first - the chicken or the egg?"  We might assume that it's leaders that make parties popular or unpopular, but just occasionally it can be the other way around.  Just by chance, I happened to be in the Republic of Ireland (Donegal, to be exact) in the week of the 2007 general election, which was widely expected to be won by Fine Gael, led by Enda Kenny.  But the snag was that Kenny was significantly less popular on a personal level than Fianna Fáil's incumbent Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.  I watched Kenny deliver his final party election broadcast, in which his strategists had forced him to parrot some North American-imported artificial nonsense about a "Contract with Ireland", and he came across as stilted and uncomfortable.  In the end, Fianna Fáil surprisingly retained power, and to a large extent that was attributed to the charm of Ahern, who was thought to be the sort of guy people would like to spend time with in a pub.

But four years later, it couldn't have been more different.  Kenny had somehow survived as Fine Gael leader, and in spite of the fact that his personality hadn't changed one iota, he weirdly had much higher approval ratings than before, and indeed was more popular than his opponent.  Voters had grown thoroughly sick of Fianna Fáil, and simply by embodying something different, Kenny became much more liked.  However, I think it would be wildly over-optimistic and naive to imagine Humza Yousaf could benefit from a similar effect - if you're unpopular just before you assume the highest office in the land, the likelihood is that the only way is down.

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Over the last few days I've published results from TWO new Scot Goes Pop opinion polls - an opportunity to commission a second poll suddenly arose, so I made a snap decision to go ahead.  However, as you'll appreciate, polls are very expensive, so if anyone feels able to make a contribution, here are the options...

The simplest donation method is a direct Paypal payment. My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you wish, you can add a note saying "for the fundraiser", although even if you don't do that, it'll be fairly obvious what the payment is for.

If you don't have a Paypal account, last year's fundraiser is still very much open for donations HERE.

Monday, March 20, 2023

Tories cut Labour's Britain-wide lead to just 10 points in new poll - the lowest since Liz Truss was Prime Minister

There's a very big health warning to be put on this, because two other polls conducted at around the same time have failed to pick up the same trend, but nevertheless Deltapoll are indeed reporting that Labour's GB-wide lead has been slashed from 23 points to just 10 - which seems to be the smallest Labour advantage in any poll from any firm since mid-September 2022, when Liz Truss was still Prime Minister (just before she blew it completely).

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (17th-20th March 2023):

Labour 45% (-5)
Conservatives 35% (+8)
Liberal Democrats 7% (-2)

It looks like that would still produce a decent enough Labour overall majority, although it certainly wouldn't be a three-figure majority, and not too much more of a swing back to the Tories would bring a hung parliament back into play.

Although there isn't really any supporting evidence of a Tory surge from other polls, it was notable that in the Opinium poll at the weekend, Rishi Sunak had slightly overtaken Keir Starmer to become the public's preference for Prime Minister.  We know that leadership ratings are sometimes more predictive of election results than standard voting intentions, especially a long way out from polling day.  

This is beginning to feel a little bit less like the run-up to the 1997 election.  In other words, although Labour are justifiably strong favourites to win next year's general election, it's possible to see a path back for the Tories in a way that wasn't really the case in the 1990s.  And in a perverse sense that might throw a lifeline to the SNP, who would stand a better chance of maintaining their majority status among Scottish MPs at Westminster if the momentum towards a Labour government starts stalling.

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Over the last few days I've published results from TWO new Scot Goes Pop opinion polls - an opportunity to commission a second poll suddenly arose, so I made a snap decision to go ahead.  However, as you'll appreciate, polls are very expensive, so if anyone feels able to make a contribution, here are the options...

The simplest donation method is a direct Paypal payment. My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you wish, you can add a note saying "for the fundraiser", although even if you don't do that, it'll be fairly obvious what the payment is for.

If you don't have a Paypal account, last year's fundraiser is still very much open for donations HERE.

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Installing a continuity leader in this scenario would be a disaster the SNP might never recover from - the solution is for Yousaf to make a dignified withdrawal and for his supporters to make their peace with Kate Forbes

I've written a few times about my fears that a Humza Yousaf win, even if it only results in him being leader for a year or two, could cause such damage to both the SNP and the independence movement that it might not be repairable by the person who replaces him. I think we're now getting to the point where this leadership campaign itself is causing enough damage that there's going to be a major problem even if the right person wins.  The idiocy of the people who told the media a direct lie about the membership numbers has caused newspapers to wreak their revenge by portraying the SNP as a party riven by sleaze and on its way out.  That is going to be hard to come back from, and the only way it can even possibly be done is with a completely new broom.  A Yousaf leadership is no longer a credible option.

The independence movement has split into two completely different types of hellscape today.  If you're brave enough to venture into the Wings comments section, you'll bizarrely encounter a party atmosphere as people effectively celebrate a process that could be killing the independence cause before our eyes.  As much as I understand the schadenfreude about the long-overdue downfall of Peter Murrell, there is, as ever, a total failure to see the bigger picture.  I presume many Wings commenters do still support independence to some degree, but today that seems to be coming a very poor second to the settling of old scores.

And on the other extreme, we have the true believers, the diehard defenders of the current regime and of the continuity candidate, who are lashing out angrily at just about everyone apart from the ones actually responsible for this mess - ie. their own side.  What they don't seem to understand - or want to understand - is that the lie about membership numbers couldn't have been covered up indefinitely, even if Kate Forbes and Ash Regan had conveniently played along with the veil of secrecy.  When the leadership election result was announced, either the membership numbers would have been visible in the result, or else the result would have been expressed only in percentages, which would have been so suspicious that the media would have known instantly a cover-up was going on.  The problem was always the lie and not the calls for transparency - and yet we have Nicola Sturgeon's own sister saying she's so furious with the calls for transparency that she would rather vote Tory than vote for an SNP led by Forbes or Regan.

In this situation, it is unthinkable that a continuity candidate could emerge as leader of the SNP.  An analogous event was the downfall of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons, when it was obvious to everyone that if confidence was going to be restored, the person who replaced him would have to be in a completely different mould.  But the problem is that the SNP have arrived at this moment after the bulk of votes for leader have already been cast - which raises the horrifying prospect of Yousaf being elected as a zombie leader whose position had already become untenable in the days before he took office.  Responsible Yousaf supporters who care first and foremost about the interests of the SNP and the independence cause should now be giving urgent thought to how that scenario can be averted.  The obvious solution would be for Yousaf to make a dignified withdrawal and for his supporters to make their peace with Kate Forbes.

There was a TV series in the 1970s called The Sandbaggers, which is often considered one of the most realistic depictions of espionage ever seen on TV because it was written by someone who was believed to have been an intelligence officer himself.  There's one episode in which "C", the head of the intelligence service, suddenly stands down due to ill health, and his Director of Operations - the lead character in the show - starts panicking because he realises that the most likely replacement is a personal enemy of his and someone who has a completely different prescription for the future of the service.  So he spends the episode frantically trying to fix the selection process so that the new "C" is a different person who he knows to be completely unsuitable for the job but at least isn't his enemy - somewhat analogous to the various tactics being employed by the SNP establishment in favour of Humza Yousaf.  By the end, he's patting himself on the back because he thinks he's succeeded - but then his chosen candidate does something so stupid and ridiculous that it would result in the end of the service.  So he sheepishly goes back to his superiors and tells them he was completely wrong and that he can now see that his enemy was always the best person available - the right man at the right time.  His humiliation is complete when he is told that his enemy has already been appointed anyway.  But in later episodes, he finds he can work with his enemy effectively enough, albeit in an uneasy fashion, and he can even start to see a few merits in the philosophy of the new "C", which he had previously regarded as so alien.

If I was constructing my ideal First Minister, Kate Forbes is probably not the person I would choose.  I'd want someone a bit more left-wing, a bit less socially conservative (I do agree with her about the GRR, but that's got nothing to do with social conservatism), and certainly a lot more radical on independence strategy.  But a responsible party of government needs a leader, and that leader needs to be the best person available, the right person at the right time.  Making that hardheaded choice can sometimes mean giving a new leader some latitude to chart a different course that you might not be entirely comfortable with - but that's still infinitely better than choosing an obviously unsuitable person.  If this contest is boiling down to Forbes v Yousaf, the decision ought to be a no-brainer in the current climate.  The party establishment have backed the wrong man, and they need to be responsible enough to set aside factionalism and petty grievances. and to put their mistake right before incalculable damage is done.  They can surely see that a Forbes leadership wouldn't be the end of civilisation as we know it - they had her, after all, as their own Finance Secretary.

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Over the last few days I've published results from TWO new Scot Goes Pop opinion polls - an opportunity to commission a second poll suddenly arose, so I made a snap decision to go ahead.  However, as you'll appreciate, polls are very expensive, so if anyone feels able to make a contribution, here are the options...

The simplest donation method is a direct Paypal payment. My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you wish, you can add a note saying "for the fundraiser", although even if you don't do that, it'll be fairly obvious what the payment is for.

If you don't have a Paypal account, last year's fundraiser is still very much open for donations HERE.