A response to some 'feedback'

Even by normal standards there has been a truly industrial scale of trolling on the last three threads, and I've had a bit of it on Twitter as well.  Lesson: if you really want to upset the unionist contingent, all you have to do is point out to them that three Labour by-election wins are not actually as impressive as they would like to believe.  Their synthetic indignation at the idea that anything other than the winner of each by-election matters reminds me of someone watching the first few points of a match between Novak Djokovic and some minnow, and theatrically screaming "OH MY GOD, DJOKOVIC IS GETTING ABSOLUTELY SLAUGHTERED" when the minnow has a routine hold in his opening service game.

As I'm in a generous mood, I'll explain in a bit more detail why the results (with one exception) were not that great for Labour.

Whitburn and Blackburn: The SNP won the popular vote in this ward by just one percentage point in 2022, even though they were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  So on a uniform swing, they would have needed to be eleven points ahead of Labour nationally to win the ward on Thursday.  Although several polls have shown the SNP recovering since the general election and moving back into the lead, there has not yet been a lead of eleven points or more.  On no planet were the SNP favourites to win this by-election - although, as it happens, they very nearly did.

Doon Valley: Labour were more than two points ahead of the SNP in this ward in 2022, even though the SNP were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  By any standards, that makes it an unusually Labour-friendly ward.  To have won it on Thursday on a uniform swing, the SNP would have needed to be ahead of Labour by about fourteen-and-a-half points nationally.  No, it is not a major problem for the SNP that they are not fourteen-and-a-half points ahead nationally at this stage.

Colinton/Fairmilehead: The SNP weren't even starting from second place in this ward - in 2022 they were in third place with just 17% of the vote, in spite of being miles ahead nationally.  The idea that there is any shame in failing to win here on Thursday is completely ludicrous.  There was in fact a technical swing from Labour to the SNP, although admittedly in practice that was mainly caused by movement from Labour to the Lib Dems.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse: As I stated several times yesterday, this was the one and only result that was genuinely good for Labour and disappointing for the SNP.  In 2022, the SNP's lead in the ward was a little above ten points, very similar to the national picture, meaning on a uniform swing they would only have needed a tiny national lead to win on Thursday.  So yes, this particular one was a poor outcome, but it's one out of four, guys, one out of four.

SNP return to gold medal position: latest batch of by-elections suggest they have big national lead over Labour

First things first: I have an analysis piece at The National about yesterday's crop of four by-elections, and you can read it HERE.

The results were certainly a mixed bag. Labour's vote was well up in two and well down in the other two.  The SNP vote was up in one and down in three.  Of the two wards where Reform UK stood, they had a very good result in one and a poor result in the other.  The Liberal Democrats had a sensational victory in one, but didn't really trouble the scorer elsewhere.

All you can really do in these situations is look at the average, and the average swing from the SNP to Labour across the four wards was just 2%. Because that's measured from the 2022 local elections when the SNP were twelve points clear of Labour nationally, it points to a Scotland-wide lead for the SNP of eight points - putting them firmly in landslide territory in Westminster terms.

Really the one and only genuinely good result for Labour yesterday was in Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse, which is frustrating because that was also the only ward where the SNP appeared to have a realistic chance of winning.  However, even there the swing to Labour was only 8%, rather than the 9% falsely claimed by Anas Sarwar.

Anas Sarwar caught fibbing about the swing in Ayrshire by-election?

I've had to go old school on this one and calculate the percentages manually from the raw results published on the East Ayrshire Council website, but I'm fairly sure I haven't made any mistakes - and the swing to Labour appears to be a smidgeon above 8%, rather than the 9% claimed by Anas Sarwar on Twitter.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 39.4% (+11.2)

SNP 33.3% (-5.1)

Conservatives 20.2% (-1.8)

Liberal Democrats 4.7% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 2.4% (n/a)

Doon Valley by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 32.2% (+9.1)

Conservatives 25.6% (+8.9)

SNP 23.7% (+2.9)

Independent - Ireland 10.7% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 4.2% (n/a)

Greens 3.0% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 0.6% (n/a)

Whitburn and Blackburn by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 30.9% (-6.5)

SNP 28.9% (-9.7)

Reform UK 16.3% (n/a)

Independent - Lynch 11.9% (n/a)

Conservatives 6.7% (-11.8)

Liberal Democrats 2.7% (+0.3)

Greens 2.6% (-0.5)

Colinton / Fairmilehead by-election result on first preference votes:

Liberal Democrats 36.3% (+23.9)

Conservatives 19.6% (-0.7)

Labour 19.5% (-13.9)

SNP 10.8% (-6.5)

Greens 5.3% (-0.1)

Reform UK 3.6% (n/a)

Independent - Wilkinson 2.3% (n/a)

Independent - Henry 0.8% (n/a)

Scottish Family Party 0.7% (-0.9)

Independent - Brown 0.7% (n/a)

Independent - Bob 0.3% (n/a)

Scottish Libertarian Party 0.1% (n/a)

Whatever else happens, the SNP *must* avoid triggering an unnecessary by-election in Stephen Flynn's seat - that's priority number one

I agree with a lot of the comments that have been made about Stephen Flynn's attempt to get a seat at Holyrood.  There's an obvious double standard in forbidding dual mandates simply to put a spanner in the works for one SNP faction, and then suddenly deciding dual mandates are absolutely fine when it suits the interests of the ruling faction.  And while in principle there's nothing wrong with standing against an incumbent constituency MSP in a party selection (internal party democracy dictates that nobody should have a guaranteed seat for life), the optics are terrible because it's such an obvious case of punching downwards - the challenger is far more powerful and influential than the person he is challenging, and he's essentially trampling all over her in the service of raw ambition, much as Douglas Ross did to David Duguid.  I don't really agree that this has got anything to do with "men" and "women", though, because ultimately Flynn's factional advantages can be traced back to Nicola Sturgeon.

Flynn's justifications have been almost comically insincere at every step along the way.  In the immediate aftermath of the general election he said that the possibility of switching to Holyrood was not uppermost in his thoughts, when in reality he must have already been plotting in some detail how he was going to do it.  Then when he made the announcement, he insisted he was only doing it because there was so much interest from others in what he might do - nothing to do with the fact that there was a deadline to put himself forward and he could scarcely challenge a sitting MSP in conditions of total secrecy.  Most ludicrously of all, he claimed the reason for his decision was to avoid "sitting out" an important electoral contest for Aberdeen, as if the only conceivable alternative to muscling in and seeking a dual mandate was to let voters down by being a passive bystander.  Well, why end there, Stephen?  Why not seek a perpetual triple mandate by standing in every single local election, Scottish Parliament election and Westminster election?  If you don't, you're bound to let the people of Aberdeen down by being a bystander at least two-thirds of the time, and that would be a frightful, beastly, caddish thing to do.

I know we like our politicians to be confident and to have the gift of the gab, but when the self-serving insincerity is quite so transparent, I wonder if it does more harm than good.  My biggest concern now is that because the backlash against Flynn's antics has been so severe, there may be pressure on him to do a partial U-turn and accept the same rule that applied to Joanna Cherry.  That would be the worst of all worlds, because it would lead to a by-election that the SNP could easily lose.  The best solution to this problem would be for Flynn to accept that he already has an important job as leader of the fourth largest group at Westminster (bigger than Reform UK, bigger than the Greens, bigger than Jeremy Corbyn's group of independents) and to dedicate himself to it.  But if he insists on switching to Holyrood, the least worst outcome is for others to accept his dual mandate for a couple of years, albeit perhaps with a disapproving frown.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - after the Rutherglen debacle, the SNP have got to learn to stop chucking away parliamentary seats like confetti.  They've lost quite enough seats already, so whatever else happens they must avoid being reduced from nine to eight.

Keir Starmer, genocide denier

Although Keir Starmer going out to bat for the genocidal Netanyahu regime (and giving it feminine pronouns) is very much the established norm, on some level I'm puzzled by his decision today to double down on David Lammy's insistence that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Ultimately this will not remain a matter of interpretation for self-interested politicians - the question of whether genocide has occurred will be adjudicated in international courts and also by academics.  When a legal and academic consensus of genocide is established, and I do think that's now a question of 'when' rather than 'if', Starmer will clearly be seen to have been catastrophically on the wrong side of history, and that's bound to be detrimental to his legacy.  It really is odd that he's not leaving himself a bit of wiggle-room.

In one specific sense, of course, Lammy was just indisputably wrong and there should have been no great difficulty in publicly admitting that. He suggested that not enough Palestinians had been killed for it to be genocide, and using that word would trivialise 'real' genocides like the Holocaust in which millions died.  However, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Holocaust was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which "only" 8000 people died. That's less than a fifth of the minimum death toll in Gaza (likely to be a massive underestimate) and is a little over 0.1% of the number killed in the Holocaust.  Ultimately defining genocide isn't a numbers game, it's about the nature and characteristics of the act.

In the long run, the UK government's good relations with Netanyahu could end up looking as poorly judged as having good relations with Hitler - the only real difference between the two leaders' actions is one of scale.  It's interesting that one of the reasons given for scepticism over the claims that Donald Trump is a fascist is that true fascist governments of the past have tended to be violently expansionist.  Well, Trump may not tick that box (notwithstanding his fury when Denmark refused to sell him Greenland) but Netanyahu certainly does - he's made no secret of the fact that he's going all-out for annexation of what both he and Bill Clinton call "Judea and Samaria", ie. the sovereign Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  The Israeli government also meets a number of the other criteria for fascism, notably militarism, suppression of opposition and a belief in racial supremacy.

An authentic fascist leader is committing an authentic genocide in plain sight in the year 2024 - and yet he remains the West's number one buddy.  That's going to have long-term consequences for leaders like Starmer, probably well beyond what most people can imagine right now.

Do Brit Nats *really* think they can sell Prime Minister Badenoch as acceptable to Scotland? They may need to try, as new poll shows a Britain-wide Tory lead

During the Tory leadership contest, I suggested that a Robert Jenrick victory might open up a potential new path by which independence could happen, because he was using withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights as a wedge issue to try to get elected, which would be like a red rag to a bull for many liberal Remainers in Scotland.  Of course Jenrick did not win, and some Tories like George Osborne specifically voted for Kemi Badenoch because they don't want to leave the ECHR, and yet the paradox is that the new path to independence may still be there.  Badenoch has not ruled out leaving the ECHR and has said there may be some circumstances in which it will be necessary, but even beyond that issue she's just extraordinarily right-wing as an overall package.  Many commentators have described her as far-right, and although some might argue that's an exaggeration, I think it's fair to say that at the very least she occupies a grey area between the mainstream hard-right and the far-right.  So if she becomes Prime Minister, or even if a realistic expectation develops that she's going to become Prime Minister in 2028 or 2029, the familiar debate will start again about whether the UK has become too extreme a country for Scotland to feel comfortable within.

Looked at from that point of view, the early signs are ominous for the Brit Nats, because More In Common's first GB-wide poll since Badenoch became leader shows the Tories surging into the lead.

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 8th-11th November 2024):

Conservatives 29% (+3)

Labour 27% (-1)

Reform UK 19% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (-3)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 2% (-1)

James Cleverly's elimination from the leadership election was supposed to be Christmas come early for Labour because he was purportedly more voter-friendly than Badenoch, but that ignored the fact that the biggest obstacle the Tories have faced in recent times is the split in their natural support base between themselves and Reform UK.  Badenoch would seem to be far better placed than Cleverly to woo Reform voters back, and although there's no real sign that she's succeeded in doing that yet, both the polls conducted since she became leader have shown the Tory vote increasing rather than decreasing (with the caveat that the increase is minor and statistically insignificant in the case of the Techne poll).

*  *  *

You may well already have seen the video below, but if not I urge you to watch it, because it moves discussion about the genocide in Gaza into a radically new phase.  Apologists for Israel have until now tried to play a philosophical game by arguing that it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are mass-slaughtered, as long as Israel can nominally claim to have been targeting Hamas in each strike, regardless of how wildly implausible that claim often is, eg. "yeah we bombed the hospital and killed dozens of patients and doctors but that was only because the terrorists buried their GOLD there".  The idea is that it may not technically be genocide if you can muddy the waters about "intent" and "purpose" and make a case that civilians have only been mass-killed "incidentally".  But when you have a credible witness setting out how Israel have on a daily basis used drones to precisely target individual children to murder, you move beyond differing interpretations of possible 'indirect' acts of genocide, and are left with indisputable evidence of a genocide that is every bit as direct, calculated and industrial as the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre or the Rwanda genocide.  European politicians have thus far been let off the hook of facing up to that fact thanks to Israel doing its utmost to prevent any independent witnesses to the genocide, so that the pretence can be maintained that this is simply a conflict like previous ones Israel has been involved in, albeit with the customarily insane number of non-Israeli civilian casualties.

To answer the question asked by John Mason and others "if Israel wanted to commit genocide, why haven't they killed ten times as many people?", I'd have thought the answer was pretty obvious - they want to exterminate Palestinians at the maximum scale and speed consistent with retaining the support of the United States.  For any other country that would be an almost impossible balancing act, but not for Israel - and with the incoming Trump administration offering Netanyahu a blank cheque, we may now see the rate of the mass killings increase dramatically to something akin to the murder of Jews in the gas chambers.  The obvious question for us in this country is: what, if anything, will Keir Starmer and David Lammy say and do while this happens?  And if they do nothing other than moronically parrot the words "Israel has the right to defend herself", what will be the long-term consequences for themselves, the Labour party, and the continued viability of the United Kingdom?  

Where is the International Criminal Court?

British surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down in UK Parliament, describing Israel’s quadcopters DELIBERATELY TARGETING CHILDREN who had just been bombed.

pic.twitter.com/oGPYyDFBoz

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 12, 2024