SNP finish second in Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election

The fourth and final by-election result for this week was released a few hours ago, and it's impossible to deny that it's a very good one for the Liberal Democrats.  By the same token, it can't be denied that the Lib Dems have been polling fairly poorly in many other recent by-elections, which speaks to the factor that is both their greatest strength and their most serious weakness - ie. they're becoming ever more ghettoised in specific geographical pockets, which pays handsome dividends in first-past-the-post elections and even in STV by-elections, but which will make it very hard for them to get back to the type of broad national strength they had in the days of Jim Wallace, before they made hardline British Nationalism such a key part of their identity and branding.

Fort William & Ardnamurchan by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Liberal Democrats 58.9% (+21.4)
SNP 25.5% (-8.0)
Greens 6.0% (-3.6)
Labour 4.5% (n/a)
Conservatives 4.4% (-5.7)
Scottish Libertarian Party 0.6% (n/a)

It's impossible to calculate a swing from SNP to Labour in this ward, because Labour didn't put up a candidate last time around.  So the average swing to Labour in this week's round of by-elections remains at a modest 3.9%, which if extrapolated to the national picture would leave them around 4.5 percentage points behind the SNP, very much in line with recent opinion polls.

Although the eight-point drop in the SNP's vote is obviously not great, it's actually a smaller decrease than they suffered in any of the three Glasgow by-elections yesterday.  The Tories have had another appalling result, although in fairness the reason may be different in this case.  In the Glasgow results they were probably losing votes to Reform, but in Fort William there was no Reform candidate, so the Tories may have suffered from a more conventional anti-SNP squeeze as unionist voters coalesced behind the Lib Dem candidate.

Small average swing in Glasgow by-election triple-header suggests SNP have a national lead over Labour of around 4.5% - bang in line with recent polling

Labour are fibbing yet again on Twitter - they're claiming to have "gained" three Glasgow City Council seats in by-elections yesterday, whereas in fact they were defending all three seats, and in two of the three wards they had even won the popular vote in 2022 (at a time when the SNP were still well ahead nationally).  

Maryhill by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 35.9% (+1.9)
SNP 29.2% (-12.9)
Reform UK 12.7% (n/a)
Greens 12.1% (-0.2)
Alba 4.2% (n/a)
Conservatives 3.2% (-5.0)
Liberal Democrats 2.7% (+0.3)

Drumchapel & Anniesland by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 34.3% (-3.8)

SNP 26.3% (-11.6)

Reform UK 12.8% (n/a)

Independent - Kerr 9.4% (+4.2)

Greens 8.3% (+2.3)

Conservatives 5.8% (-3.7)

Liberal Democrats 2.9% (+1.3)

Glasgow North-East by-election result on first preference votes (21st November 2024):

Labour 34.3% (-9.7)

SNP 32.2% (-10.4)

Reform UK 18.3% (n/a)

Conservatives 5.4% (-3.3)

Greens 4.2% (+1.2)

TUSC 3.7% (+2.5)

Liberal Democrats 2.0% (n/a)

Although the SNP vote is significantly down in all three wards, what matters as always is the swing from SNP to Labour, and in only one case (Maryhill) would that be sufficient to just about put Labour ahead nationally.  The average swing across the three wards is just 3.9%, which assuming a uniform national swing would point to a national SNP lead over Labour of approximately 4.5% - pretty much bang in line with what the new full-scale Scottish poll from Survation shows.

However, there was also a by-election in Fort William & Ardnamurchan yesterday, and the votes have yet to be counted, so we'll wait to see if that one shows anything radically different.

One thing that's striking about the results we do have so far is the consistency with which Reform UK seem to be leaving the Tories in their wake in Glasgow.  During Ruth Davidson's leadership there may have been hope for some sort of limited Tory renaissance in the city, but the Reform UK factor seems to have snuffed that out completely, at least for the foreseeable future.  Reform are now very much the party of the right-wing vote in Glasgow.

Fresh misery for Labour in Scotland as SNP storm back into the lead in *Westminster* voting intentions, according to sizzling new Survation survey

Progress Scotland have been impressively fast in getting the data tables up for their new Survation poll - faster than Survation themselves, as it happens.  Probably the most important news is that the SNP have broken out of their deadlock with Labour in the only other post-election Survation poll (conducted in September), and now have a clear lead in Westminster voting intentions.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Survation/Progress Scotland, 1st-15th November 2024)

SNP 31% (-)

Labour 28% (-3)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Reform UK 13% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 6% (-3)

It's a similar story on the Holyrood constituency ballot - the SNP and Labour were level in the previous Survation poll and the SNP now have a clear lead, although the swing is bigger than on the Westminster ballot.  On the Holyrood list, the small SNP lead remains unchanged from the previous poll, although that doesn't prevent the constituency swing improving the SNP's showing on the all-important seats projection.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 32% (+1)

Labour 27% (-4)

Conservatives 14% (+1)

Reform UK 10% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+1)

Greens 6% (-)

Alba 1% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 27% (-1)

Labour 25% (-1)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Reform UK 11% (+1)

Greens 10% (-)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-1)

Alba 3% (-)

Seats projection: SNP 42, Labour 34, Conservatives 18, Reform UK 14, Liberal Democrats 11, Greens 10

So the 'mainstream' unionist parties would have 63 seats in combination, two short of an overall majority.  The pro-independence parties would be well behind on 52, but in my view the SNP as the largest single party would be well-placed to cling on as some sort of minority government, given the difficulty Labour would face in cobbling together a coalition involving both the Tories and Reform UK.  Even if they were prepared to destroy their own credibility by attempting that, I doubt if Reform UK would play ball, or not without naming an impossible price.

It's noteworthy that the replacement of Douglas Ross with Russell Findlay hasn't had a transformative effect on Tory fortunes - at best Findlay has very slightly steadied the ship - and Reform UK remains a bigger problem for him than for anyone else.  Alba are once again flatlining at a level that would be unlikely to win them any list seats at all, a fact that isn't really compatible with the repeated claims from the party leadership that they're making big breakthroughs and closing in on multiple list seats.  It's true that Alba's by-election results have become more respectable in recent weeks, but they've done that by choosing their battles and concentrating their resources.  It's not really any indication that their underlying support has increased nationally.

Although the headline result from the poll was a non-standard, multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, the standard Yes/No question on independence was also asked, and the results lend some support to the evidence that there may have been a recent uptick in Yes support.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 48% (+2)

No 52% (-2)

Will the issuing of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu force European countries into a reluctant parting of the ways with the US?

In retrospect there can't be much doubt that when Jeremy Corbyn was at the height of his powers as Labour leader, when he had recently achieved a miracle result at the 2017 general election and looked impossible to dislodge, a number of right-wing figures within Labour got together privately and tried to work out how on earth they could turn the tide and get the party back under their control, and what they settled on was the construction of a largely fake 'anti-semitism crisis'.  As Machiavellian strategies go, that one would have seemed particularly unpromising if it had been set out in advance, and it really is quite astonishing how comprehensively it worked.  Doubtless there was the occasional example of genuine anti-semitism on the Corbynite left, as there is in all walks of life, but generally speaking what the supposed "crisis" was about was legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state being repackaged as "anti-semitism".  Too many people who might reasonably have been expected to be sensible enough to see through the stunt proved all too credulous, probably due to their own underlying disdain for the Corbyn project.  The momentum behind Corbyn, which briefly made him look like a Prime Minister in waiting, was put sharply into reverse, and once again he was back to being dismissed as an abnormal figure outside the bounds of political acceptability.   The tactic undoubtedly contributed to the scale of his defeat in 2019, paving the way for his replacement by Starmer, who was emboldened enough to remove his predecessor from the party on bogus grounds of anti-semitism - an act of unprecedented cynicism and arrogance.  And yet the political and commentator class continued acting as if nothing was amiss.

Having seemed for ages to get away with all of this Scot-free, it's hard to escape the supreme historical irony of the fact that Starmer and co were - unbeknown to them - concocting their "anti-semitism crisis" at a moment in time just before the State of Israel was about to commit the worst genocide of the 21st Century so far, thus unexpectedly putting Jeremy Corbyn very publicly on the right side of history as one of the minority of politicians who had consistently refused to accept Israel using accusations of anti-semitism as a shield to allow them to get on with oppressing a neighbouring people.  By contrast, Corbyn's tormentors like Margaret Hodge and David Lammy were left as the ones being seen to have cosy selfies taken with genocidal war criminals like Isaac Herzog and Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Labour leadership's initial reaction to this problem seemed to be to double down and join with Israel in accusing anyone trying to impede the genocide, or even to identify its existence, of anti-semitism.  But can you really do that with the International Criminal Court, now that they have issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu?  

Israel itself is of course already trying to discredit the ICC as an anti-semitic institution, motivated by a wish to distract from sexual harassment accusations against their chief prosecutor.  The incoming Trump administration will doubtless join in with this smokescreen, and will probably take far more sinister actions against the ICC and its staff too.  But given that the UK is a party to the ICC and fully accepts its jurisdiction, how can Starmer go down that road himself?  Indeed, how can he do anything other than denounce those who try to undermine the rule of international law?  In spite of the way the Labour party has mutated in recent years, there are still enough internationalists within the PLP that it's hard to imagine them indefinitely tolerating a leader who favours Trump and a wanted war criminal over the international courts.  

I said a couple of weeks ago that one of the silver linings of Trump's victory is that it might force European countries, however reluctantly, to move away from slavish loyalty to US leadership.  The ICC ruling may mark a parting of the ways whereby European countries will be forced to make a straight choice between loyalty to the US and adherence to an international rules-based system, because the two concepts will henceforth be opposites and fundamentally inconsistent with each other.

Bit of a problem for Keir Starmer that a big part of the ICC's rationale for issuing the arrest warrant against Netanyahu is "knowingly depriving the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival", ie. exactly what Starmer said Israel had the right to do.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 21, 2024

The Empire Flops Back: 61% of the Scottish public demand powers are transferred from London to the Scottish Parliament

This morning brings word of a new Survation poll for Angus Robertson's Progress Scotland organisation, which goes 1990s retro by asking a multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, rather than a straight Yes/No question on independence.  The results have been given as an exclusive to the Daily Record, which is fair enough - if you can get Pravda to report on a bad news story for Labour and their Precious Union, why not?  The only snag, though, is that the Record have - true to character - presented the results in a somewhat garbled manner. But as I understand it, these are the top preferences of voters:

Independence inside the EU: 34%

Independence outside the EU: 8%

More powerful Scottish Parliament inside the UK: 19%

The status quo inside the UK: 22%

Abolition of the Scottish Parliament, return to direct rule from London: 17%

There are two ways of looking at these numbers.  If the two pro-independence options are combined, they come to 42%, and if the three non-independence options are combined, they come to 58%, which is a bigger gap than in conventional Yes/No polls.  But that can perhaps be partly explained by the very fact that there are more non-independence options than pro-independence options - some people without strong views tend to gravitate towards the middle option, no matter what it might be.

On the other hand, the three options that involve a more powerful Scottish Parliament command the support of 61%, compared to only 39% for either the status quo or for fewer powers.  So clearly the "line in the sand" and "enough is enough" narrative from unionists has failed to chime with voters.

*  *  *

Something very peculiar has been going on in the comments section of this blog over the last five days or so.  What appears to be one person has been posing as an army of befuddled and indignant "casual readers", all posting anonymously and all with suspiciously identical writing styles, who purport to be downright *furious* that this blog used the easy-to-grasp concept of swing, introduced by David Butler as long ago as the 1950s, to extrapolate from last Thursday's local by-elections to a potential general election result.  He's tried to dismiss Butler's concept as "hocus pocus" or "not cutting the mustard" - well, good luck with that, mate.  The true reason for his anger is likely to be that the calculation shows that the SNP would have a national lead of around eight percentage points, putting them into landslide territory in Westminster terms.  But he doesn't actually dispute the calculation, and nor can he, because anyone can replicate it for themselves.  Instead, all he's left with is repeatedly spluttering "you can't extrapolate from local elections to Westminster".  

Of course you can.  In doing so, all you're saying is that if people vote in the same way in a general election as they do in local elections, and if last Thursday's results were typical, the SNP would win big across Scotland in a general election.  So is there any particular reason to think people vote differently in general elections from local elections?  Well, yes, recent history shows there is a modest amount of divergence.  But here's the thing - the SNP have actually tended to do less well in local elections than in other types of elections.  So if you make an adjustment to take account of that phenomenon, the SNP's big projected national lead would actually increase in a general election context, not decrease.

As the president of the Donald Trump Fan Club Of Somerset might put it: "what's your point, caller?"