A few thoughts on the Tory/Labour plan to legalise sectarian abuse at football matches

It's been suggested today that because the SNP won a clear mandate at the Holyrood election, it's wrong for the opposition parties to press for the repeal of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act.  It may surprise you to hear that I don't agree with that line of argument.  In this particular case (and it's a very rare one), a tiny majority of MSPs with a vote - 65 out of 128, or 50.8% - were elected under the banner of a party that opposes one specific SNP policy.  If those MSPs want to attempt to use that numerical edge to reverse the policy, there's no democratic problem there - quite the reverse, in fact.  But the operative word is "attempt".  There's a fair chance this episode may actually end up demonstrating just how strong the SNP's arithmetical position is.  The opposition parties will need total discipline across four party groups who agree on little else and who don't particularly like each other - and that will only get them to 65 votes.  By contrast, the SNP group is cohesive and should easily be able to turn out 63 votes.  There's very little margin for error as far as the opposition are concerned, and the devil is often in the detail.  At this stage, the smart money should probably be on the Act remaining in force.

However, if by any chance the repeal attempt succeeds, the Tories and Labour are quite right to say that we have to accept that there is a 65-63 mandate for that to happen, albeit a complicated four-party mandate.  But the principle cuts both ways.  The 69-59 mandate given to the two main pro-independence parties is of course considerably less complicated and much more emphatic (one might almost say "decisive").  I therefore look forward to the unionist parties displaying their customary logical consistency, and showing the same respect for democracy that they demand of us.

By the way, my popular Labour MSP namesake has made this mind-boggling observation on the subject -

"Labour will work [with] other parties in the Scottish Parliament to repeal the Football Act. The law has become a symbol of the SNP's arrogance in government. No other party supported the law but the SNP used their majority to bulldoze it through anyway."

Kelly-speak to English translation : The SNP used the overwhelming mandate they received at the 2011 election to outvote the losing parties.  This is in line with what majority governments are typically expected to do.  Presumably Kelly thinks the Attlee government shouldn't have used its 1945 mandate to establish the National Health Service, but should have been less "arrogant" and entered into a compromise with the Tories instead.  But hey, a 10% discount on medical bills would be almost as good as a free NHS, right?

James Mackenzie : "As I correctly predicted...er...oh wait..."

You've got to hand it to the Greens' former PR man James Mackenzie, he's brazen if nothing else.  He's updated his Better Nation blog for only the second time since October (so it's probably safe to say that something is really bugging him), and his main aim seems to be to convince us all that his pre-election "predictions" about wasted SNP list votes were not in fact the cynically misleading propaganda claims that the election result demonstrated them to be, but were somehow proved accurate.  Specifically, he prays in aid this tweet about the final Ipsos-Mori poll of the campaign in late April -

"And, as with previous polls, this would see the SNP win list seats only in Highlands and Islands and South."

Which, of course, sounds uncannily accurate unless you bother to take the obvious step of checking what came before the "and"...

"The three questions for this election would be answered thus: another SNP majority, Tories beating Labour, Greens beating Lib Dems."

Ah.  I see.  So the whole basis for Mackenzie's "prediction" that the SNP would not win list seats in six out of eight regions was that they would win an overall majority on constituency seats alone.  To state the bleedin' obvious, that isn't even close to what actually happened.  In reality, the SNP fell well short of winning 65 constituency seats - but they would have been compensated for that on the list if their share of the list vote had help up.  Instead, it fell.  With 44% of the list vote in 2011, the SNP were topped up with list seats until they reached 69 seats overall.  With 42% of the list vote in 2016, they were only topped up to 63 seats - two short of a majority.  That small drop made a big difference.  And why did it happen?  Ooooh, we can only speculate, but one obvious possibility is the sustained propaganda campaign (from the Greens, RISE, Solidarity, and parts of both the mainstream and alternative media) that sought to persuade people that SNP list votes would be wasted no matter how many of them there were.

Mackenzie can huff and puff about "correctly predicting" that the SNP would fail to win list seats in six out of eight regions, but the reality is that this was an aim successfully realised, not a passive prediction.  None of us ever said that the SNP would win a barrel-load of list seats if there weren't enough SNP list votes.  The whole point we were making is that there was a path to an SNP overall majority, even without 65 constituency seats - but only if enough people voted SNP on the list.  A comparison between the 2011 and 2016 results demonstrates that point to be indisputably true.  Mackenzie and others used the false claims about the voting system to successfully reduce the SNP list vote and to strip Nicola Sturgeon of her overall majority.  No-one can doubt that he's extremely pleased about doing that, because it was in his own party's best interests, but is he proud of misleading people to get what he wanted?  I suspect he probably is, actually.  For an ideological zealot like Mackenzie (I've never come across anyone else quite like him in Scottish politics), the end often justifies the means.

Elsewhere, he completely misrepresents the concerns that have been raised about the Edinburgh Central result -

"There’s been a moderate amount of mumping and moaning from the wilder fringes of Nat-dom online about the Greens’ candidacy in Edinburgh Central. Those were our 4,644 votes, they say, and we’d have held Central if the Greens hadn’t stood the wonderful Alison Johnstone."

Sorry, but who the hell has been saying that the Greens' votes in Edinburgh Central were "ours"? The only claim I've heard anyone make is one that is, again, utterly indisputable - that if the Greens had followed exactly the same practice in Edinburgh Central that they did in virtually every other constituency in Scotland, Ruth Davidson would not have been elected a constituency MSP (thus depriving the Tories of a propaganda coup), and the SNP would have been only one seat short of a majority, not two. And as it happens, we wouldn't have been deprived of Alison Johnstone's "wonderfulness" anyway, because she would still have been elected on the list. It was perfectly legitimate for the Greens to stand a candidate wherever they liked and for whatever reason they liked, but it's a cop-out for them not to acknowledge that the decision to stand in that particular constituency has had certain consequences for the pro-independence movement. Perhaps they feel that an election is every man or woman for themselves, and every party for itself - but if they do feel that, why did they spend so much time lecturing SNP voters about putting the movement first by switching to a different party on the list? They really can't have it both ways.

Incidentally, don't even bother to alert Mackenzie to this blogpost.  He won't address the substance of what I've said - he'll just boast that he isn't going to read it, but then still attempt to delegitimise it as the ramblings of a "misogynistic Wings-loving tube/zoomer/rocket". If you've ever wondered why dyed-in-the-wool left-wingers like myself would think twice about voting Green even if the SNP didn't exist, look no further than the abusive Mr Mackenzie.

*  *  *

UPDATE : In the comments section below, someone has objected to the notion that the RISE/Solidarity end of the propaganda campaign could possibly have contributed to the loss of the SNP's majority, because RISE and Solidarity "didn't actually receive any votes".  This is another myth that needs to be knocked on the head.  As poorly as they performed, those two parties in combination received 1.1% of the list vote - up from 0.6% five years ago.  The SNP's list vote only fell by 2.3%, so the vote-splitting message from the radical left can conceivably explain a fair chunk of that drop.

*  *  *

Kezia Dugdale has called upon the SNP to make a positive case for remaining in Europe, instead of complaining about the UK government making a negative case.  Today I'm calling on Kezia Dugdale to make a positive case about why the SNP are bad, rather than complaining about the SNP's complaints.

*  *  *

There's talk that the Leave campaign are deeply unhappy that Nigel Farage has been invited to put the anti-EU case in two high-profile TV debates, and that's entirely understandable.  Even when George Galloway took part in the indyref debate in the Hydro and made the fraudulent promise of "Devo Super Max" if Scotland voted No, he did so (incredibly) as the official nominated representative of Better Together.  So it does seem odd that the designated Leave campaign can't choose its own spokespeople for the most important debates.  But what I find most interesting is Farage's own motivation for taking up the invites.  It must be one of two things - either a) he doesn't care about losing the referendum as long as his own profile is boosted, or b) he genuinely doesn't have enough self-awareness to realise that Leave is less likely to win if he refuses to take a back seat.

Come on, Ruth, make our day

Elections for the Scottish Parliament's nominee as First Minister are rarely the most riveting of affairs - they generally just rubber-stamp a decision that has already been predetermined by how the electorate voted, and/or by coalition negotiations.  (A rare exception was the 2007 contest between Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell, when the arithmetic was so tight that there were genuine concerns that McConnell might somehow get elected by accident.)  But they do tend to receive coverage from the TV networks, if only for form's sake, so I think it would be rather helpful if Ruth Davidson makes a vanity bid for the top job - just as she did eighteen months ago.  If she does stand, she'll be very visibly and heavily defeated by Nicola Sturgeon by 63 votes to 31, and that might finally hammer home the message that the actual result of last week's election didn't bear much resemblance to the media narrative - there was a very clear winner, even if the cameras were pointing elsewhere.

It would also helpfully demonstrate that we haven't ended up with a single-party SNP government "in spite" of the election result.  In parliamentary systems, the voters elect the parliament and the parliament chooses the government, and so you simply can't have an SNP government without the SNP winning an election.  In the Holyrood system, even individual ministers need to have their appointments ratified by the elected parliament, so the SNP's mandate to govern alone is going to be absolutely impeccable.  Just as the bluster about "no mandate to hold a referendum" has no basis in law or in constitutional convention, there is also no legal or constitutional distinction whatever between a single-party majority government and a single-party minority government, except perhaps in the fevered imaginings of Jeremy Purvis.  Both have been given a mandate to govern by the elected parliament.  Indeed, past precedents at Westminster demonstrate that strong minority governments sometimes find it easier to get their business through than weak majority governments with a rebel wing.  John Major's greatest problems came between 1992 and 1994 when he still had a majority - by the time he'd lost it in 1996-97, he was winning almost all votes with a bit to spare thanks to an informal understanding with David Trimble, who was elected Ulster Unionist leader in 1995.

Let's just make a direct comparison between Nicola Sturgeon's and David Cameron's respective mandates...

Popular vote :

UK Conservative government : 36.9%

Scottish SNP government : 46.5% (constituency ballot), 41.7% (list ballot)

Was the government elected?

UK Conservative government : NO - Prime Minister appointed by Queen, all other ministers appointed by Prime Minister without parliamentary ratification.

Scottish SNP government : YES - First Minister directly elected by parliament, all other ministerial appointments subject to parliamentary ratification.

From any logical point of view, therefore, it ought to be impossible for the Tories to challenge the Scottish Government's mandate to do anything - including to hold a second independence referendum - without everyone bursting out laughing.  If Nicola Sturgeon doesn't have a mandate to act, then David Cameron most certainly doesn't.  A couple of MPs were pointing out on Twitter last night that the SNP actually have a stronger mandate than any other lead party in government in the whole of western Europe, including the Tories and Angela Merkel's CDU.  I haven't trawled through the ocean of figures to double-check that claim, but it sounds eminently plausible, because it's very rare for a single party to get 46.5% of the vote in a proportional system (in fact it's pretty rare in a majoritarian system as well).

These points are so unanswerable that you can begin to understand why there's been such a determined effort from the unionist media to establish the narrative that the SNP somehow didn't 'really' win the election.  They're hoping that people will just accept that as a fact and view anything that happens from this point on (for example any attempt by Westminster to block an independence referendum) through that ludicrously distorted lens.  It's up to us to get the real facts out there, because no-one is going to do it for us.

The Meow of Middle Scotland

As we've discussed a number of times now, the main reason the SNP fell just short of a second overall majority is that their vote went up on the constituency ballot, but down on the list ballot - and ultimately it's the list that decides the overall composition of parliament.  But the SNP weren't the only party to suffer disproportionately on the list .  It shouldn't be forgotten that Labour actually narrowly defeated the Tories in the popular vote on the constituency ballot, before taking a big hit on the list.

Constituency ballot :

Labour 22.6%
Conservatives 22.0%

Regional list ballot :

Labour 19.1%
Conservatives 22.9%

In past elections, we might have assumed that Labour's 3.5% drop from one ballot to the other could be explained by voters drifting off to other left-of-centre parties on the list.  But that doesn't fully make sense in this case, because support for the two radical socialist parties was negligible, and the Green vote was only up by 2.2% - much of which can presumably already be accounted for by the drop in the SNP's list support.

On the face of it, the most logical alternative explanation is that a significant number of Labour constituency voters switched to the Tories on the list.  That would certainly help to explain why the Tories' list support was 1% higher on the list than on the constituency ballot - a counterintuitive outcome when you consider that they must have lost some votes on the list to UKIP, and other assorted fringe right-wing nutjob outfits.  This doesn't necessarily mean that Labour constituency voters misunderstood the system and gave their more important vote to their second preference party - it could be that these were people who preferred the Tories anyway, but were giving a tactical constituency vote to Labour in the vast swathes of Scotland where the Tories and Lib Dems are also-rans.

The huge Labour-to-Tory swings in many SNP/Labour battleground seats may superficially appear to disprove that theory, but that's not really the case - some of the tactical voting for Labour may have been going on under the radar, meaning that the swing would have been even bigger without it.

Incidentally, we've heard quite a bit in recent days about "the roar of Middle Scotland".  Assuming that the representatives of "Middle Scotland" are the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it should be noted that those three parties in combination won 60 seats - which is just three more than the 57 they won five years ago.  Nobody would deny that represents a modest recovery from an all-time low, but a "roar"?  Hmmm.  Maybe more of a meow.

The tactical voting lobby were proved comprehensively wrong on almost every point on Thursday night - and yet they're still in denial

Apologies for returning to the topic of the "tactical voting on the list" fiasco yet again, but I am absolutely flabbergasted at the rubbish that is still being written about it.  Almost all of the things that we warned could go wrong with the grand scheme did go wrong on Thursday night, and yet still the tactical voting lobby brazen it out, insisting that "wasted SNP list votes" were somehow the real problem in this election.  (Exactly how fewer SNP votes could have solved the problem of the SNP falling short of a majority is a bit of a mystery, but don't hold your breath for an explanation.)

It really is both the ultimate circular argument, and the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.  First they tell prospective SNP list voters that their votes are going to be "wasted" and they should vote for a different party instead.  Some people heed that advice, and as a result the SNP list vote drops, and the party doesn't have enough votes for a list seat in six out of eight regions (compared to just one out of eight in the 2011 election).  Then they say : "You see?  We told you SNP list votes would be wasted!"  Shameless, or what?

I mean, do they think the sixteen list seats that carried the SNP to an overall majority in 2011 were magicked out of thin air by pixies?  Seriously, guys, the SNP won those seats because more people voted for them on the list in 2011.  This isn't rocket science.

Here's what STV's online election reporter Dan Vevers (who openly admits that he is glad the SNP failed to win a majority) had to say on Twitter earlier today -

"If 7% of SNP voters had gone Green, the Greens would have been five seats behind Tories on 14...With this swing, Greens would have had 74% of the Tory number of seats with only 60% of its regional vote...If someone really wanted to light a match in a powderkeg, one might even say both votes SNP ensured the Conservative surge...Where pro-union folk voted smartly to maximise Unionist voices in Parliament, the evidence suggests pro-indy people did the opposite."

Just HOW many times does the bleedin' obvious have to be pointed out to people - that tactical voting is often relatively easy, risk-free and effective in single-member constituency elections, but is virtually impossible on the list.  This was exactly the problem that the SNP and the broader pro-independence movement faced in this election - that attempts at unionist tactical voting were going to take place almost exclusively on the constituency ballot, where it was potentially going to prove highly effective, and that attempts at pro-indy tactical voting were going to take place almost exclusively on the list ballot, where it had every chance of backfiring.  Ironically, one of the major reasons for the risk of it backfiring is precisely that people were failing to take into account the potential for successful anti-SNP tactical voting in the constituencies.  I'm in no way being wise after the event on this point - I said it a number of times during my debate with Tommy Sheridan in February, for example.

To cast an effective tactical vote in a single-member constituency election, you only need to know one thing in advance with a high level of confidence - and that's who the top two candidates in the constituency will be.  In some cases, it's not possible to know that, either because there was a virtual tie for second-place last time around, or because public opinion has shifted dramatically since the last election.  But in many, many constituencies on Thursday, it was the easiest thing in the world for unionist voters to identify that the top two parties in their constituency would be the SNP and a specific unionist party.  So all that Tories in North-East Fife or Edinburgh Western had to do was vote Liberal Democrat, and they knew that one of two things would happen - either a) the SNP would lose and the objective would be accomplished, or b) the SNP would win and the unionist position would be no worse than it otherwise would have been.  In other words, tactical voting in constituencies generally either works or has no effect - but it very rarely backfires.

In contrast, think about the sheer number of things an SNP supporter in Glasgow would have had to know for sure in advance before he or she could have cast a risk-free and effective tactical vote on the list -

* That the SNP were definitely going to win all nine constituency seats.  (And yeah, yeah, "everyone knew" that they were going to manage that, but then everyone knew the SNP were going to win Dumbarton - until they didn't.)

* That the effective target for the SNP to win a list seat after winning all of the constituencies would be as high as 59.5% of the vote.  (It could easily have been significantly lower than that, depending on how the list votes divided between the other parties.)

* That the SNP had no chance of getting close to 59.5% of the list vote.  (And really the tactical voting lobby can't have it both ways on this point - if their whole argument rested upon the SNP being so all-conquering in Glasgow that there was no risk of the party failing to take a clean sweep of constituencies, it's not immediately apparent why a 50%+ list vote should have been considered such an impossible target.)

* That Solidarity were going to fall well short of the threshold for a list seat.  (Without knowing this, there would have been no way of knowing that a tactical vote for Solidarity would be completely wasted and that the Greens might be a better bet.)

* That the Greens didn't have enough support for a second list seat without the assistance of tactical voters.  (The point here is that if the Greens already had enough support anyway, tactical votes for them would have been completely wasted, because the d'Hondt formula would already have divided their vote by three and they would have had no realistic prospect of a third seat.)

Tell me, Dan, how the hell was anyone supposed to know all of that?  This has got nothing to do with unionist voters being "smarter" than us, it's simply about the fact that none of us actually possess psychic powers.

Meanwhile, Juliet Swann, once of the Electoral Reform Society, made my jaw drop to the floor with these tweets -

"a few thousand votes switched from Greens to SNP OR VICE VERSA could have influenced seats... BUT so could any other combo of any other party's votes. The fact is we have multiple parties & people voted 4 them...cannae vote tactically in AMS ;-)"

Juliet, who I met last year and is a very nice person, has by all accounts been going around over the last few months with her trusty set of graphs, giving talks to pro-indy groups with the aim of persuading them that SNP list votes would be "wasted" and that they should vote for a smaller party instead. When you've been doing that sort of thing quite openly, it does seem incredibly disingenuous to turn around after the event and innocently say "there was a choice of parties and people made their own choice, tactical voting is impossible, so nothing to do with me, guv". If you've made an intervention and changed people's votes, for heaven's sake take ownership of that intervention, and either apologise for it or stand by it.

Oh, and as for Kevin Williamson's claim that he should be forgiven for saying that the SNP were absolutely certain to win a majority on constituency seats alone because he couldn't possibly have known that Nicola Sturgeon would pose with a copy of the Sun and lose some of her voters...give me a break.  If you want to say fatuous things like that, no-one can stop you, but just don't expect to be taken seriously on this topic when you have another bash in five years' time.

A crucial point about the new parliamentary arithmetic : the SNP outnumber all of the unionist parties combined, even without Green help

Since it became clear yesterday morning that the pro-independence majority in the new Scottish Parliament would be dependent on two parties and not just the SNP alone, a debate has raged over whether this has significantly reduced the chances of a second referendum during the next five years if one of the fabled 'material changes in circumstances' occurs (the most likely of which is Brexit).  My own view is that it hasn't, for the reasons set out in my IBTimes piece.  However, I do accept that my assessment can only be a provisional one at this early stage, not least because I'm not an expert on the internal politics of the Green party, upon which so much now depends.  I certainly think that a little heat should be put on those Green members and sympathisers who effectively authored this suboptimal election result by duping people into thinking that SNP list votes would be "wasted", and definitely wouldn't be needed for an overall majority, etc, etc.  The least they should be doing now is setting some minds at rest about the Greens' stance on a second referendum.

However, there's one very simple way of looking at this problem that doesn't actually require a nuanced understanding of Green attitudes.  Let's take a close look at the composition of the new parliament...

SNP 63
Conservatives 31
Labour 24
Greens 6
Liberal Democrats 5

(As an aside, it really should be noted what a truly dreadful outcome that is for the Liberal Democrats, who suffered an exact repeat of their catastrophic result from 2011 in spite of having been relieved of their toxic ties to the Tories.  Why Tim Farron and Willie Rennie were hugging each other and cracking open the champagne is anyone's guess.)

Now, just for a moment, let's remove the Greens from the equation altogether, and see what's left...

SNP 63
Unionist Parties 60

As you can see, the SNP in their own right clearly outnumber all of the unionist MSPs.  But why does this matter, given that the Greens obviously do exist and do have six votes that could theoretically swing the balance in either direction?  Well, because in any parliamentary vote, there are three options open to any MSP - they can vote in favour, vote against, or abstain.  (The latter option is colloquially known as "doing a Labour".)  So if, for the sake of argument, the UK voted to leave the EU next month, and the SNP responded by tabling some sort of proposal for a second independence referendum, the only way it could be voted down would be if the Greens actively voted against it.  If they merely abstained, the referendum proposal would be passed by 63 votes to 60 (or in practice by either 62 to 60, or 63 to 59, depending on whether the new Presiding Officer is a government or opposition MSP).

Therefore, if you really think that the chances of a second indyref have been substantially diminished, it follows that you must also believe that Patrick Harvie and his troops would actively vote it down on the floor of the Scottish Parliament.  Is that a remotely credible belief?  Apart from anything else, it would be electoral suicide for them, as so much of their new support was directly won as a result of their pro-independence stance.  Even if they had severe misgivings about the specifics of what the SNP were doing, they would surely be more likely to abstain and allow the proposal to pass without taking direct responsibility for it.

Now, of course I can't be 100% sure of that.  I was astonished last summer when Caroline Lucas actively voted against Full Fiscal Autonomy in the Commons, and said afterwards that she only did so in deference to her Scottish colleagues' express wishes.  That incident didn't lead to any great internal dissent within the Scottish Greens, or not that I noticed anyway.  But I really think that actively voting down an independence referendum would be in a different category entirely - they would lose a huge chunk of their membership and support, and I simply don't believe they would do it.

So in my view, the parliamentary numbers are there for a second referendum if the SNP decide to pull the trigger.  That's only half the battle, of course.  If they were aiming to bypass the Westminster veto altogether by holding a consultative referendum, they would need the Presiding Officer to certify the legislation as being within the parliament's powers.  That gives the SNP a big dilemma right now over who to install as the new Presiding Officer.  For obvious reasons, they don't want it to be someone like Adam "IT'S THE LAW!!!!" Tomkins, but neither will they be very keen on giving up one of their own MSPs when the arithmetic is so tight.  Ideally, what they could do with would be the equivalent of a John Bercow, who was nominally a Tory but very friendly towards Labour.  I'm not really sure whether such a person exists, though, so they may have to decide upon the lesser of two evils.

If, on the other hand, the SNP seek a repeat of the Edinburgh Agreement, they would need the Westminster government to respect the mandate for a second referendum.  Some would argue that the result on Thursday makes that less likely.  But here's the thing - a "mandate for a referendum" is not a concept with any legal or constitutional standing whatsoever.  The London establishment are literally making up the rules on this as they go on, and if they had been facing an SNP majority government, they would simply have reverted to the alternative excuse that the wording of the manifesto wasn't clear enough.  So yes, they might now say "you don't have a mandate for a referendum because the SNP didn't win an absolute majority", but that's nothing more than a debating point, and the SNP have the obvious replies of "the pro-independence parties do have an absolute majority" and "we won a vote to do this in the democratically-elected Scottish Parliament".  The outcome of any dispute along those lines would probably depend to a large extent on the public mood at the time.  If it was clear that Westminster resistance to a referendum was creating a backlash against London rule, Cameron or his successor might be forced to the negotiating table.

In one sense, a pretty good result - and in another sense, an absolutely ideal result

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, about how the SNP's narrow failure to secure an overall majority hasn't significantly diminished the chances of a second referendum, and how the Tories' success may make independence considerably more likely in the long run.  You can read the article HERE.

I hate to say I told you so, but...

@NeilCaple @JamesKelly isnt going to happen. Constituencies heading for repeat of 2015 as SNP support has increased since then.

— Kevin Williamson (@williamsonkev) May 2, 2016

Aft Fri either I'll be relentlessly ridiculing @jameskelly for his misleading kneejerk SNP propaganda.Or vice versa. https://t.co/1nElTeB4uX

— Kevin Williamson (@williamsonkev) May 2, 2016

It's going to be vice versa, Kevin.  I'm still extremely hopeful the SNP will win an overall majority, but it now looks likely they'll need list seats to do it.  It also looks likely that their constituency share of the vote will be very slightly down on what they achieved last year, and they're obviously going to win a slightly lower share of constituency seats.  But as long as the vast bulk of SNP supporters ignored the vote-splitting propaganda from the likes of Bella Caledonia, as I suspect (and hope) they did, we should still be OK when all the list results are in.

As a number of us have been saying all along -

* Opinion polls are snapshots, not predictions.
* Opinion polls are not necessarily even accurate snapshots.
* There's no way of knowing for sure how constituency votes will translate into constituency seats - it all depends on geographical distribution.
* The claims that "everyone knew" the results of 73 individual constituency elections in advance were utterly fatuous.

We took a lot of abuse and mockery for pointing out these simple truths, but I'm very glad we did.

In most parts of Scotland it's actually been just as good for the SNP as last year - it mostly seems to be in a small number of No-voting areas that the going is a little tougher.

Final YouGov poll confirms the SNP majority is under threat. If you want an SNP majority government, you need to vote SNP on both ballots.

The final YouGov poll of the campaign has been released tonight, and rather troublingly, it puts the SNP at their lowest share of the constituency vote since way back before last year's UK general election.  (And I mean the lowest with any polling firm, not just with YouGov.)  Over the last twelve months, there have been only four polls putting the SNP below 50% - and three of those have come in the last week.  There can be no credible room for doubt that the SNP have been slipping downwards over the course of the campaign - which is exactly what many of us warned would probably happen when they were getting wildly unrealistic 60%+ figures with TNS.  Luckily, they still have a decent chance of a majority on 48% of the constituency vote and 41% of the list vote - but it's getting far too close for comfort.  They're now polling just 3% better on the constituencies than in the final result five years ago - and they're polling 3% worse on the list.  Remember they failed to win twenty constituency seats last time, leaving them needing a minimum of twelve list seats for a majority.  Hopefully, this will shake some of the SNP supporters who have been treating the list vote as a "bonus" or "luxury" vote out of their complacency - and if so, it's not a moment too soon.

Constituency ballot : 

SNP 48% (-2)
Labour 22% (+1)
Conservatives 19% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+2)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 41% (-4)
Conservatives 20% (+2)
Labour 19% (n/c)
Greens 9% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (+1)
UKIP 4% (+1)

Pumping those numbers into the Scotland Votes calculator gives the SNP 69 seats - just four clear of the target for an overall majority, and crucially, four of the seats come from the list.  Any further slippage on the list due to so-called "tactical voting" or any other reason could prove extremely costly.

If the SNP do lose their majority, it looks like it could well be The Greens Wot Done It (with a little help from the vote-splitting propaganda campaign run by the Sunday Herald and Bella Caledonia, it has to be said).  Although we know from past history there's a significant chance that the Greens are being overestimated by the polls, it's also the case that their 9% share in this poll is 3% higher than they managed in the equivalent YouGov poll exactly five years ago.  So they could well be on course to gain a few seats - but if they do so at the expense of an SNP majority, it could set back the cause of independence by years.  The unionist media aren't going to be remotely impressed by a nominal pro-indy majority consisting of the SNP and Greens - in fact, they probably won't even acknowledge it as an arithmetical fact.  All you'll hear about from now until Christmas is how Nicola Sturgeon and her separatist army were humbled, against all the odds.

Meanwhile, the Tories are crowing about their second place on the list in this poll, but actually I'm not sure that's going to be good enough for them.  It's true that second place will almost certainly be decided exclusively be the list result, but the problem is that polling on the list also tends to be less accurate than constituency polling.  Labour's 3% advantage on the constituency vote could be a better guide to what's about to happen, especially as YouGov have been the most Tory-friendly pollster throughout much of the last few months.

If UKIP really do get 4% of the list vote, they could easily nick a seat or two in their more favourable regions, leading to the ultimate calamity of David Coburn as a dual mandate MSP and MEP.  However, they haven't been doing as well as that in other recent polls, so let's not despair just yet.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Please bear in mind that the SNP only remain slightly above 50% in this update of the Poll of Polls due to the older polls in the sample - an average of the three most recent polls puts them at 48.7% of the constituency vote.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 50.3% (-0.4)
Labour 21.3% (+0.1)
Conservatives 17.7% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6.5% (+0.3)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 44.2% (-0.5)
Labour 19.8% (n/c)
Conservatives 18.7% (+0.4)
Greens 7.8% (+0.1)
Liberal Democrats 5.7% (+0.2)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - Panelbase, Survation, BMG, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

Burning questions for tomorrow - and a few tentative answers

Will the SNP remain the largest single party?

Yes.

Will Nicola Sturgeon remain First Minister?

Yes.

Will Labour suffer a net loss of seats?

Highly likely, barring very significant polling error or an implausible late swing.  But it should be remembered that they only took 26% of the all-important list vote in 2011, so their losses may not be all that dramatic if the more Labour-friendly polls are closest to the mark.  The most recent Panelbase poll has them on 22% of the list vote.

Who will finish second?

Probably Labour, but it's too close to call and the Tories are in with a shout.

Who will finish fourth?

Too close to call between the Greens and the Lib Dems.  The polling average favours the Greens, but not by much, and we know that polls have significantly overestimated the Greens in previous elections.  The fact that the Greens are virtually a list-only party may also prove a disadvantage - it's not inconceivable, for example, that the Lib Dems could get one more seat in the Highlands than the d'Hondt formula warrants if they hold onto both constituency seats in the Northern Isles.

Will RISE win a seat?

Highly unlikely.  No poll to date has shown the slightest scrap of evidence that they are in contention for seats.  However, there is one previous example of a fringe party winning a seat against all the odds (the Scottish Senior Citizens' Unity Party in 2003), so it can't be ruled out entirely.

Will Solidarity win a seat?

Probably not, but they arguably have a better chance than RISE, simply because of Tommy Sheridan's personal popularity in Glasgow.  Their description on the ballot paper will apparently contain the words "Tommy Sheridan" and "Indyref2", and you can see how that might catch a few eyes.

Will the SNP win a second overall majority?

Probably, but the chances of them failing to do so are higher than is generally realised.  Some projections based on recent polls have had them below 70 seats, which doesn't leave much margin for error if there is a small late swing against the party, or if the polls aren't entirely accurate.  It's perfectly possible we could wake up on Friday morning with an almighty hangover, and be left wondering how exactly we let this one get away.

Will there be a pro-independence majority?

Very likely, but not certain.  The votes should be there for it even if the SNP themselves fall slightly short, but the biggest risk would be misguided "tactical" switching on the list to either RISE or Solidarity - because any such votes would in all probability be totally wasted.

Will the SNP win at least some list seats?

Highly likely.  I've yet to see a plausible scenario in which they take zero list seats - and of course they may take well over ten if they do just slightly less well in the constituency ballot than the polls currently suggest.

Will Kezia Dugdale have resigned as Labour leader by the weekend?

The odd thing is that if the answer to that question is "no", Kezia probably already knows it.  There isn't going to be the same pressure on her that Jim Murphy faced one year ago. because another crushing defeat won't cause quite such an emotional spasm within the party, and she isn't as hated as Murphy anyway.   If she goes, it'll probably be because she makes a personal decision that it's the decent thing to do, as Tavish Scott did five years ago at a time when nobody was really blaming him for the Lib Dems' losses.  The big question is what sort of scale of defeat might tip her over the edge.

Will the Conservatives have a successful election? 

YES.  The actual result doesn't matter - however well or badly they do, it'll be a continuation of the Scottish Tory renaissance, and will be a personal vindication for their tremendously popular young leader Ruth Davidson.  Read the forthcoming post-election columns from Fraser Nelson, Alex Massie, Alan Cochrane and Chris Deerin if you don't believe me.

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As it's Election Eve, one last punt for the video I recorded for Phantom Power about how the voting system works, and why tactical voting on the list ballot is so risky.  Feel free to share it on social media if you know anyone who might find it helpful - the direct link on YouTube is HERE.

Proposal for a reformed voting system : the Single Proxy Vote

A guest post by John S Sharp

We get a lot of speculation (including much self-interested misinformation) on the effect of different voting strategies under AMS for the Scottish Parliament; and beyond that I've seen a few people suggesting reforms. We indulge in endless discussion of voting strategies and outcomes when I think that a simple form of proxy voting - as you might do as do to authorise a delegate to vote on your behalf at a congress or AGM - could entirely solve just about all the problems commonly discussed. This might be termed Single Proxy Vote (SPV) - although it has a somewhat different context from what is normally meant by proxy. None of this can be an original idea (it's all too obvious, I think) but I have not been able to find any documents describing anything similar for an elected chamber.

There is only really one big idea (which admittedly might be a cultural shock to traditionalists) and it is that after a voter has cast his or her single electoral vote within a constituency, then the MSP so elected, instead of casting one vote in the parliament, will cast the number of votes that (s)he gained in the election, along with a further adjusted share of the votes for their party. With electronic voting it should be easy enough to administer this at the time of votes within the partliament.

How constituency and list voting could work

Starting with the votes cast at the polling booth, a voting form would show :

(a) a list of constituency candidates - one entry for each party / named person

(b) a list of parties that have put up some regional list candidate(s) - one entry for each party

Effectively this latter part (b) resembles the current regional list, but each entry, whether a constituency person/party, or a list party entry, has equal status - and the elector has only a single vote, to be placed against any entry.

A constituency MSP will be elected, taking into account only the votes cast for the constituency candidates. One may expect that most electors would cast their single vote directly for a constituency candidate, but the voter may alternatively choose to vote for a party with list candidate(s) only, if preferring this to any constituency candidate. Votes cast for losing constituency candidates, and for list-only parties, would be accumulated, according to party.

We might also start with the idea that the total number of list MSPs in the parliament will remain fixed at 73 constituency seats and 56 regional seats. We can assume that there will generally be more votes cast for losers than for winners (perhaps up to twice as many) and also note that there are fewer regional seats than constituency seats. Hence, if reallocated party votes were simply divided levelly to each of the regional MSPs (and this could be done either within each of the 8 regions, or nationally) then on average each one might end up with more votes than a constituency MSP - typically up to twice as many votes in parliament. We might want to stick to the principle that the constituency MSPs should have most of the voting power (73 / 129 = approx 57% as at present). It is not difficult to address this: once list MSPs have reached some threshold of votes, then the remainder would be spread back to constituency MSPs (still within party, of course - thus, the addition per MSP would vary between parties).

The Electoral Commision would have to set the broad principles of this in advance. For example, we might think that in principle, the average voting power of a Regional MSP should be the same as an average constituency MSP. In that case, only 56/(56 + 73) of the total votes cast should be allocated to the list MSPs, and the remainder then spread back to the constituency MSPs (all calculations being made within party). If we think that, in principle, constituency MSPs should typically have more voting power, the votes allocated to list MSPs can be proportioned down.

There would be some problems in trying to treat fairly parties with small shares of the vote. Firstly, a party polling a reasonably uniform, say, 2% across the country, would fail to get any constituency MSPs, and would also fall below the threshold needed to justify a "whole" list MSP in any of the Regions. However a party getting 2% ought to get some representation in a parliament of 129 MSPs. This could be addressed by having a "National List" to support the election of a list MSP from a party that has accumulated enough votes, in comparison to those counted on a genuine Regional basis. Secondly, a number of parties will not attract enough votes to justify any list MSP, even on a nationwide scale (in 2011 there were 16 parties which gained less than 1% of the total vote). It is perhaps an open question as to whether votes for these parties simply do not count; or whether they could be reallocated, either according to a binding declaration in advance of the election, or determined by the party post-election).

The Electoral Commission would have a job to do in setting actual thresholds after total votes were known; this should be uncontroversial, as the balance of voting power between the parties would not be affected by such decisions.

At this point, I'd say that the principles are well-defined and the rest is just a matter of detail. Before looking at this in some more detail (using example figures from the 2011 Scottish Parliament election) consider some of the advantages we might obtain from such a system.

Advantages and potential problems

Advantages :

1. Electors cast only one vote.

2. Every vote counts, and eventually has exactly the same weight in parliament, whether the constituency is large or small, and whether the candidates are running neck and neck or the result looks a foregone conclusion.

3. Each constituency is represented in proportion to its population (or rather its population x turnout rate) - which means that differences in size do not create a democratic imbalance.

4. If preferred, we could have single member, or multi-member constituencies, or a combination of types, even within one election.

5. There is little motivation for tactical voting - in the present sense of voting for a party candidate you don't really want in order to stop one you really hate succeeding in a FPTP election. Doing so will always damage your preferred party.

6. Devious gerrymandering of boundaries has little reward, and so we can be relaxed about setting of boundaries.

7. Each elector has a link to a constituency MSP (a point that many adduce in favour of maintaining FPTP).

Problems?

Some might think the following could be described as problems. I think that they are really just differences.

1. Commentators might have a bit more of a problem in speculating on resuts of a vote in parliament, but if they can't fix that with a spreadsheet, then they are not up to much.

2. Some MSPs might be said to be more important than others, measured by voting entitlement; but why should they not be, if they have drawn the electors' votes.

3. You might not like the idea of seeing votes in parliament recorded as numbers such as 12,306 (Sturgeon), 4,462 (Scott) etc. (using examples from the 2011 election as described below). We could make the numbers smaller by some formula such as 1 parliamentary vote for each 100 electors' votes (so 123 for Sturgeon, 44 for Scott). Or the MSP with the highest total of electors' votes would get 100 parliamentary votes, and all others indexed to that scale. I think that any of these "simplifying" schemes just make things more complicated and it's best just to stick to the original figures.

4. There could be slightly different incentives to commit electoral fraud. At present there is a significant gain from fraud only if it affects the FPTP result in that constituency. In many, probably most, constituencies the result is not close enough to be affected unless fraud is carried out on a large scale, and in any case there would be focus on any suspicious activity around a close result. Under SPV proxy voting, there would be some gain from any undetected fraudulent voting, or corrupt loss of valid voting, wherever it might occur. A few hundred votes added to a fourth place gives as much fraudulent gain in the parliament as would adding it to the winner, or adding it to a near second place to swing it it to a win. Overall, however, SPV should make it more difficult to achieve any significant scale of influence through fraud.

5. It becomes more difficult for any single party to get an absolute majority of votes in the partliament. You can firmly and exactly say that a party must exceed 50% to do it. However, I'd suggest that this voting system might have some direct effect on fragmentation of parties, as in next point.

6. This voting system might encourage parties to fragment, on the grounds that this could be done with no or minimal impact on the total strength of the party in parliament. For example, if some SLab members wanted to stand on Labour / Independence platform and drew some votes away from mainstream SLab (and SNP) they could argue that this would not reduce the total Labour-aligned vote in the parliament (I recognise however that there would be a lot more to be said about party whip). Similarly, any major policy splits within SNP, could lead to group(s) prepared to compete separately within the banner of independence.

7. All the calculation part sounds horribly complicated, and therefore would put people off.  However, once you convince yourself that it is all fair, I'd suggest that the only point at which this matters is in the few hours between the close of polls and the announcement of the new crop of MSPs, each with their numbered voting entitlements.

How might things have worked in 2011

To illustrate with results from constituencies in the 2011 election

- in Glasgow Southside, Nicola Sturgeon would have been elected for the Scottish National Party, with a basic entitlement to cast 12,306 votes in the parliament, plus some "spread back" top-up to be calculated as above. Unsuccessful candidates' votes would be reallocated as follows: Labour 7957, Liberal Democrats 612, Conservative 1733.

- In Shetland Islands, Tavish Scott would have been elected for Scottish Liberal Democrats, with a basic entitlement to cast 4,462 votes (plus spread back top-up) in the parliament. Unsuccessful candidates' votes would be reallocated as follows: Conservative 330, Scottish Labour 620, SNP 1,134, and Independent* 2,845. Obviously, the redirection of votes for an Independent is problematical in comparison with that for party allegiance, but I see no reason why an Independent could not be required to state in advance of election how (or if) reallocation would be applied to his/her votes in the event of an unsuccessful candidacy.

The overall result, based on constituency vote only, would have given SNP 902,915 votes available for their MSPs to cast in the chamber (45.39%); Labour would have had 630,461 (31.69%) etc.. For smaller parties such as Scottish Greens, we'd have to guess that their region vote (4.37%) is more representative of the votes that they might have aggregated under what I am describing as STV. Thus, in 2011, pro-independence parties would have fallen short of being able to assemble a pro-independence majority in the parliament.

But if we wanted a guide to how things might turn out in a future election, such as May 2016, then instead of looking back at 2011 votes, we'd be better just to look at current polling and guess that parties would poll somewhere between constituency intention and list intention figures returned by the pollsters.

Could this actually happen?

I'd assert that this style of SPV would provide excellent democratic accountability, and if by some chance we were already using it, very few would want to change it for FPTP or multiple-vote AMS. However, starting from where we are, is there any chance that we could move to SPV? I would think not. It's just too big a change in one step from what we do now. If we had a need to elect another assembly on a party political basis - i.e. not our main parliamentary chamber - then perhaps there might be more readiness to trial a break from our tradition of one vote per member in the chamber.

*  *  *

Just a reminder, because people often seem to forget what's written at the top of the post by the time they get to the bottom : this has been a guest post by John S Sharp, and the proposal outlined in it is his own.

The Sunday Herald's advice to voters is, quite simply, contradictory

Not for the first time in this campaign, the Sunday Herald's lead story yesterday was hugely controversial, with the claim that Nicola Sturgeon was setting her sights on a second referendum now that a "Holyrood win" was guaranteed.  There was no direct reference to so-called "tactical voting on the list" on this occasion, but many assumed - probably correctly - that the story formed one of the subtler parts of the paper's ongoing propaganda campaign to convince pro-independence voters that the election is in the bag for the SNP, and that the list vote should therefore be treated as some kind of "bonus" or "luxury" vote that will not affect the meat of the result.

What's interesting, though, is the creative ambiguity in the phrase "Holyrood win".  What does that actually mean?  Does it mean an overall SNP majority is guaranteed?  If so, that would be an extraordinary claim given the state of the polls.  Or is it simply a statement of the bleedin' obvious that the SNP are certain to be the largest single party, and are also virtually certain to form a government?

We perhaps get a little clue to the answer in an editorial which gives a complicated endorsement/non-endorsement to the SNP.  The paper has two basic wishes for the election result -

1) That the SNP are returned to government with a majority.

2) That other pro-independence parties are strengthened.

In view of which, voters are given just one specific piece of advice -

"We see no reason why progressive Scots voters should not consider using their second list vote to back a social democratic party like the Greens - who also support independence for Scotland."

Well, there is one extremely good reason, of course - namely that a vote against the SNP on the list is a vote against an SNP majority government. The advice might make perfect sense if the paper took the same view as some Green and RISE supporters who say that the SNP would govern better without a majority, and indeed that they did govern better without a majority prior to 2011. But if we take the very specific wish for an SNP majority at face value, what is being suggested is a complete nonsense - because nobody can seriously imagine that the way to go about getting an SNP majority is by voting against the SNP on either or both ballots. I suppose if we were being ultra-charitable, we might characterise the Sunday Herald's advice as being to vote both for and against an SNP majority, because there is a path - albeit a phenomenally tough one - to a majority based on constituency votes alone. But it is simply a statement of fact that switching to a different party on the list significantly reduces the chances of a majority, because it cuts away the safety net of SNP list seats.

It seems pretty likely that if the SNP poll in the mid-40s on the constituency ballot, they will fall well short of the 65 constituency seats that would give them a majority without needing any list seats. In 2011, their 45% of the vote netted them just 53 constituency seats. Now, it's true that the arithmetic is different this time, because Labour look certain to lose further ground. The SNP could probably gain a number of Labour seats just by standing still. But the flipside of the equation is that standing still might lose them seats to the Tories, and possibly even to the Lib Dems, whose vote proved amazingly resilient in a handful of key constituencies last year. To a large extent, that was presumably down to anti-SNP tactical voting, which thanks to the referendum will be a factor this year in a way that it wasn't five years ago. So the new advantages that the SNP have this time around are balanced out by new disadvantages, and it's murderously difficult to imagine them getting 65 constituency seats on 45% of the vote.

In this blog's latest Poll of Polls, the SNP have slipped to 51.3% of the constituency vote. So is it conceivable that polls could be overestimating a party's support by as much as 6% at such a late stage of the campaign? Answer : yes, of course it is. One week before polling day in 2007, a YouGov poll reported that the SNP were on 40% of the constituency vote - in fact, they got 32.9%. And on election night itself in 2011, a Progressive Scottish Opinion poll gave the SNP 51% of the constituency vote - 6% more than they actually got when the votes came in a few hours later.

The fact that something may happen doesn't mean that it necessarily will. But even if the SNP were currently being overestimated by only about half as much as that (putting them at roughly 48%), it would be touch and go as to whether they would win a majority on constituency seats alone.

I've no idea whether the Sunday Herald's claim to want an outright SNP majority is intellectually dishonest, or whether they've genuinely managed to convince themselves - in defiance of all logic - that an SNP majority is assured regardless of how people actually vote.  Either way, the functional meaning of their advice is that voters should give a lower priority to an SNP majority than to success for the Greens and RISE, and at best should rely on blind faith to ensure that a vote against the SNP will somehow not harm the SNP.

My own view, for what it's worth, is that blind faith is never the most promising plan.  Let's take control of our own destiny.

Mayday! Mayday! She cannae take anymore, cap'n! Pitiless Panelbase poll puts Dugdale on course for crushing defeat on Thursday

May Day is of course International Workers' Day, and it shows you just how catastrophically Scotland's very own "workers' party" (ahem) has fallen that a new poll putting Labour TWENTY-SIX points behind the SNP with just four days to go until the election is being painted in some quarters as "good news for Kezia Dugdale".

Constituency ballot :

SNP 49% (-2)
Labour 23% (+4)
Conservatives 17% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 44% (-3)
Labour 22% (+4)
Conservatives 19% (n/c)
Greens 6% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 4% (n/c)
UKIP 3% (n/c)

As you know, I've felt all along that the likelihood is that Labour will cling on to second place - that's mostly because I think there's a pretty firm ceiling on potential Tory support in Scotland, meaning that Labour would have to lose a hell of a lot of core voters to parties of the left before it can be overtaken.  But I also think that certain parts of the mainstream media are monumentally jumping the gun in heralding this single poll as proof that the danger to Dugdale has passed.  When we have a very recent telephone poll showing a swing in the opposite direction, and reporting essentially a tied race for second place, we need to consider the very real possibility that the apparent boost for Labour in the Panelbase poll is just a mirage caused by sampling variation.

The other slightly odd thing about this poll is the apparent drop in support for the Greens, which flatly contradicts Ipsos-Mori's suggestion that they've surged to a heady (if not quite record-breaking) 10%.  Even TNS had them steady at 8%, which is towards the upper end of their normal range with that firm.  If by any chance Panelbase are right and the others are wrong, the predicted Green breakthrough may simply fail to materialise.  6% is actually a little lower than the average support the Greens were enjoying in the late polls in 2011 - when of course they won just two list seats across the whole country, and failed to trouble the scorer in six out of eight regions.

Indeed, the Panelbase numbers pose a huge problem for the whole "tactical voting" lobby, because not only is there now a chance that the Greens will struggle, but we also have evidence that the SNP are at risk of failing to reach the magic number of 65 out of 73 constituency seats that they'll need for an overall majority if voters abandon them on the list ballot.  49% support in the constituencies is only 4% better than the SNP achieved in 2011, when of course they won just 53 constituency seats - a whopping TWELVE short of the target.  It wasn't a problem back then, but only because the vast majority of SNP constituency voters stuck with the party on the list.  It's really not hard at all to think of countless examples from Scotland, the UK and around the world of parties being overestimated by a few percentage points in the late polls, so the claims (which some people are still valiantly trotting out) that the SNP are guaranteed to win a majority on constituency seats alone now look utterly fatuous.  They may well manage it, but we won't know that until several hours AFTER we cast our votes, which will be a bit too late in the day to make "tactical voting" remotely feasible.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

The latest update of the Poll of Polls takes account of three new polls - Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and TNS.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 51.3% (-1.4)
Labour 20.7% (+1.0)
Conservatives 17.3% (+0.5)
Liberal Democrats 6.2% (+0.4)

Regional list ballot : 

SNP 44.7% (-1.5)
Labour 19.5% (+0.5)
Conservatives 18.0% (+1.2)
Greens 8.3% (+0.3)
Liberal Democrats 5.7% (-0.3)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - Panelbase, Survation, BMG, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

Explanatory note : As a fond tribute to the mainstream media's restrained take on the GERS report, Scot Goes Pop headlines will feature 50% bonus hysteria for an indefinite period.

Desperate Dugdale ducks for cover as latest polls reveal the Scottish people's message to Labour is simple and stark : "Exterminate! Exterminate! EX-TER-MI-NAAAAAATE!!!!!!"

Apologies for the three days of radio silence, during which we've had a couple of new Holyrood polls with slightly conflicting messages.  The TNS poll shows the SNP slipping down to comfortably their lowest share of the vote on both ballots since the UK general election one year ago.  It is, of course, the TNS figures that have been most commonly prayed in aid by the "tactical voting on the list" lobby in recent months, so the new poll vindicates the caution that many of us have been applying.  It looks like TNS may simply be converging with other firms that have never reported quite such an inflated SNP lead, because the new Ipsos-Mori poll still has the SNP very much within the firm's normal range (at least on the constituency ballot).

Constituency ballot (TNS) :

SNP 52% (-4)
Labour 22% (+1)
Conservatives 17% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)

Regional list ballot (TNS) :

SNP 45% (-2)
Labour 22% (+1)
Conservatives 18% (+3)
Greens 8% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 5% (-1)

Constituency ballot (Ipsos-Mori) :

SNP 51% (-2)
Labour 19% (-1)
Conservatives 18% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)

Regional list ballot (Ipsos-Mori) :

SNP 45% (-4)
Conservatives 19% (+4)
Labour 17% (-2)
Greens 10% (+4)
Liberal Democrats 7% (-1)

The fact that TNS still have Labour ahead of the Tories by a decent margin shouldn't necessarily lessen any sense of panic in the Dugdale bunker over the Ipsos-Mori findings.  The bulk of the TNS fieldwork was conducted before the Ipsos-Mori poll got underway, so it's possible that Ipsos-Mori are detecting a relatively recent swing to the Tories.  A more comforting thought for Labour is that Ipsos-Mori's constituency findings may be a better guide than the list findings to how the party is likely to fare on the all-important list ballot.  We know that constituency polling has tended to be more accurate than list polling over the years, and that a minority of poll respondents tend to misinterpret the question about list voting as if they're being asked for some kind of second preference vote.  To believe that Ipsos-Mori are exactly right about Labour being in second place in the constituencies but not on the list, you'd have to think that Labour voters are more likely to drift off to the Greens on the list than Tory voters are to drift off to UKIP or wherever, and I can't see any compelling evidence for that being the case.  That said, even if Ipsos-Mori's constituency numbers are the better guide, the race for second place suddenly looks like a virtual coin toss - unless of course the Tories are being flattered in this poll because of methodological issues or normal sampling variation.

Explanatory note : As a fond tribute to the mainstream media's restrained take on the GERS report, Scot Goes Pop headlines will feature 50% bonus hysteria for an indefinite period.

NEW FILM : How the voting system for the Scottish Parliament works, and why "tactical voting" is such a big risk

A couple of weeks ago, I jetted off (if you can jet off by train) to a top-secret mystery town somewhere between Dunblane and Bannockburn (it's got a big castle in it) to record a video about the Holyrood voting system for the brilliant Phantom Power.  The intention was very much to avoid this being a "propaganda" film - although I do explain my view that so-called "tactical voting on the list" is an enormous risk, I only do that in the final few minutes.  I've felt all along that the main reason some people find the arguments of the tactical voting lobby so seductive is that the basic principles behind the AMS voting system aren't widely understood.  So the bulk of the video simply explains in relatively neutral terms how AMS is supposed to work (with the composition of parliament determined by the list vote and not the constituency vote), but how the Scottish version of the system makes things a little less simple than they should be.  I then describe the theory of how "tactical voting on the list" is meant to deliver more pro-independence MSPs, before offering my own opinion that it's an extremely bad idea, and could easily backfire badly.

If you have any problem with the embedded video at the top of this post, the direct YouTube link is HERE.

Also, if you're looking for a video in which both sides of the argument get an equal airing, don't forget my Independence Live debate with Tommy Sheridan from a few weeks ago - that can be viewed HERE.

Reader's questions : a Patrick Harvie conundrum

Niall posed an interesting question on the previous thread, which I thought might be worth responding to in a bit of detail...

"You know, these kinds of discussions usually take place between people who post on blogs about politics, and one characteristic that unites these people is that they are much more likely than your average citizen to be hyper-partisan.

So let me come to the discussion from another angle. I was speaking last week with my aunt who is a floating but generally centre-left voter. She lives in Glasgow Kelvin (note that this is the only part of Glasgow where the Greens are putting up a candidate: Patrick Harvie).

Her thoughts "I think the Greens have good policies and I like Patrick Harvie so I will vote for him for my MSP. But I will also vote SNP on the regional list because I want to see Nicola Sturgeon back as first minister"

I remarked that considering her two objectives it would make more sense, because her votes would be more efficient and effective, to vote the other way around: SNP on the constituency ballot, Green on the regional ballot. Was that wrong?"

My own view is that Niall is half-right and half-wrong. It's certainly true that Patrick Harvie doesn't have a hope in hell of actually winning the Glasgow Kelvin constituency outright (he's presumably standing as a candidate to make an investment for the future) and that his chances of returning to Holyrood as an MSP depend entirely on list votes. So, if your number one priority is getting Harvie re-elected, you should vote Green on the Glasgow regional list. But that's the nub of the matter - you really have to choose a number one priority, because the Additional Member System (unlike the Single Transferable Vote system used in local elections) doesn't really lend itself to pursuing two entirely different priorities simultaneously, except in a relatively narrow range of circumstances. If the first priority of Niall's aunt is instead to see Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister, she should probably vote SNP on both ballots. There really is no way of giving equal weight to both of her specific objectives, because depending on how the election result turns out (and that's unknowable at the moment you actually cast your vote) a Green list vote could harm the SNP. Remember the example of the North-east in 2011, when a relatively small amount of switching from SNP to Green/SSP/Solidarity could have cost the SNP the final list seat, and handed it to the Tories.

You might be looking for an example of the small number of circumstances that allow a voter to do something a little more sophisticated with AMS. Well, in a normal state of affairs, when no party is too dominant in the constituencies (ie. not this year), you can be reasonably confident that how you vote in any individual constituency is pretty unlikely to affect the overall composition of parliament. For example, if you live in an SNP/Conservative marginal constituency, the only effect of the Conservatives winning the seat would probably be to reduce the number of Tory list seats by one, and increase the number of SNP list seats by one - thus leaving the overall result totally unchanged. That might offer you a relatively 'free hit' on your constituency vote if you have a strong preference between the individual candidates. Imagine you're in Paul Kavanagh's situation, and can't bring yourself to vote for your local SNP candidate because of his views on gay marriage, or whatever. Voting against the SNP on the constituency ballot, but for the SNP on the all-important list ballot, might conceivably help 'replace' the candidate you don't like with a more palatable SNP candidate from the list. But that sort of opportunity is quite rare, because you don't have any control whatever over the ranking of the SNP's list candidates - that's predetermined by an internal ballot of SNP members. And even when an opportunity does crop up, there are still risks involved - albeit nowhere near as extreme as the risks of "tactically" giving your list vote to a fringe party like RISE, which is highly unlikely to win any list seats at all.

Just for clarity, what I've outlined above does not apply in this particular election.  Because the SNP have a chance (and it is only a chance) of total constituency dominance, voting against the SNP on the constituency ballot might well cost the party "bonus" seats that they won't be compensated for on the list.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Three new polls have been published since I last updated the Poll of Polls, with BMG entering the sample for the first time. The percentage changes are therefore a tad less glacial than normal.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 52.7% (+0.5)
Labour 19.7% (-0.7)
Conservatives 16.8% (+0.4)
Liberal Democrats 5.8% (n/c)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 46.2% (-0.4)
Labour 19.0% (-0.4)
Conservatives 16.8% (+0.6)
Greens 8.0% (+0.6)
Liberal Democrats 6.0% (-0.6)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - Panelbase, Survation, BMG, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

One week on, have the Sunday Herald learned the lessons of their wildly inaccurate reporting on so-called "tactical voting on the list"?

The short answer to that question is "only partly".  As editor Neil Mackay hinted would probably be the case, they've gone big on the subject for a second Sunday in a row, with the lead story once again penned by Peter Swindon.  It's basically another propaganda piece that is pretty unsubtle in attempting to steer readers towards abandoning the SNP on the list, but Swindon has chosen his words somewhat more carefully this time, and in particular has ditched the pretence that John Curtice actually "advised" people to vote Green or RISE. He's also replaced all traces of the totally inappropriate word "predict" with the much more sound "project".  The problem, however, is that he mostly writes as if the two words are basically synonymous, ie. "[Curtice] projected that the SNP will win all but three constituencies". That means the impression conveyed is almost as misleading as last week - but a very hurried caveat of "if an average of recent polls are correct" at least ensures that the new article can technically be claimed not to be inaccurate.

To be fair, there are some contexts in which "project" can be used as if it means exactly the same thing as "predict" - an example would be "CNN projects that Bernie Sanders has won the Michigan primary", which is a call that is never made until it is felt there is near-certainty. But that's not the sort of thing we're talking about in this case. John Curtice's report collated the results of opinion polls which were conducted well before the election, and projected what the election result would be if : a) those polls were bang-on accurate, and b) no changes whatever in public opinion occurred between the dates on which they were conducted and polling day. That's more akin to taking the pre-election polls in Michigan and using them to "project that Hillary Clinton will win comfortably", without bothering with the irritating formality of counting any votes. Indeed, as regular readers of this blog know, that sort of projection was actually made, and it was utterly meaningless - Sanders defied polls giving Clinton a double-digit lead, and won by a whisker.

Do we live in a world where that magnitude of polling fiasco only occurs once in a blue moon? Och, don't be silly. Last year's UK general election was supposed to result in a nailed-on certain hung parliament - but the Tories won an overall majority. Just a few weeks earlier in Israel, everyone thought Benjamin Netanyahu was a dead man walking, but on election night he dismayed the world with a famous victory that bore no resemblance at all to the pre-election polls. And although the Liberals certainly looked set for a return to power in Canada last autumn, the polls offered Justin Trudeau little hope of an overall majority. Come election night, he won a comfortable majority of 30.

Now, perhaps you're on the brink of offering the familiar objection that the polls may have severely misled us in many contests around the world last year, but they did pretty well here in Scotland. OK, so let's take that observation to its logical conclusion. Presumably what you'd be getting at is that the polls can always be relied upon to give an accurate indication of election results in Scotland. That would explain, for example, why we all knew well in advance that the SNP were going to win an overall majority in 2011. Oh, wait. We didn't know that at all, did we? In fact, every single projection in 2011 based upon the pre-election polls put the SNP short of a majority. It was occasionally projected that there might be a slender pro-independence majority consisting of the SNP, Greens and Margo MacDonald, but even that was thought to be reasonably unlikely.

So, no, there is no Scottish exceptionalism that means we don't have to allow for the very significant possibility that the polls and seats projections based on polls are leading us astray. Professor Curtice knows that as well as anyone - he's repeatedly pointed out on his blog that polling on the list was significantly less accurate in 2011 than constituency polling (thus explaining why nobody saw the SNP majority coming), and also that the Greens have historically been substantially overestimated on the list. And that's exactly why he went out of his way in his report to indicate that his projection based on the polls was not a prediction of the election, or functionally indistinguishable from a prediction. He specifically entertained the possibilities that the polls may be understating or overstating the SNP's support, and noted that in either scenario, attempts by SNP supporters to vote "tactically" on the list could easily backfire. And that was absolutely not, as somebody tried to make out in a comment on this blog the other day, some kind of routine, going-through-the-motions "health warning" along the lines of "we all know that the polls will probably be broadly right, but we can't totally exclude the possibility that they won't be". He was deadly serious in what he said - nobody who read the report could be in any doubt that he regarded polling error as a significant risk. That was the whole basis for his verdict that pro-independence voters face a "dilemma" on the list ballot.

Last week, the Sunday Herald totally ignored that side of the Curtice report - they literally pretended it didn't exist. This week, they've belatedly acknowledged it, but are downplaying it for all they're worth. They have a direct quote from Curtice, which in terms of tone seems to offer some comfort to their original misrepresentation of the report, but a close reading confirms that his position hasn't changed one iota. Forgive my cynicism, but I'm inclined to suspect that they conducted quite a long interview with him, and cherry-picked the quote in which he happened to place the weakest emphasis on "risk" and "dilemma". Even so, those words are still very much present.

The other experts quoted in the article are Ipsos-Mori's Mark Diffley and Dr Craig McAngus from Aberdeen University. In contrast to Curtice, I don't have any suspicions that they've been quoted selectively, because what they say seems fairly clear-cut, although obviously it's impossible to know whether the Sunday Herald kept phoning around until they found experts who said exactly what they wanted to hear (perish the thought!). I just think Diffley and McAngus are plain wrong, and some of what they say doesn't actually make any logical sense. Diffley very unwisely uses Swindon-like language and says that Curtice's projection shows that the SNP "will" only get two regional seats. I'm sorry to have to make the obvious point here, but Ipsos-Mori were as wrong as every other pollster last year - a projection based on their final poll in May 2015, and couched in Diffley's choice of words today, would have read : "Ed Miliband will be Britain's new Prime Minister". I'm sure that would make a great alternative history novel, but it wasn't much cop as a prediction.

McAngus, meanwhile, makes the extraordinary statement that "To vote for another party other than the SNP on the list as a pro-independence voter is a rational thing to do. I mean, the way that the numbers stack up, the SNP are not going to win a lot of seats on the list." I can only conclude that he actually hasn't thought this through for more than five seconds, because what all the polls are unanimous on is that the SNP are on course to win some list seats, and that both RISE and Solidarity are light-years away from winning even one list seat. So yes, let's talk about rationality - is McAngus seriously saying that it's more rational to cast a "tactical" vote that seems guaranteed to be wasted than it is to stick with the SNP and at least have a chance of contributing towards the election of a pro-independence MSP on the list? Perhaps we could be charitable and assume that "another party other than the SNP on the list" is code for the Greens, and definitely not for RISE or Solidarity - but a) that's not my impression of what he's saying, and b) even if that is what he means, it's deeply irresponsible of him not to spell it out. It would, in any case, still be a very weak argument, because while the polls offer grounds for optimism that list votes for the Greens will not be wasted in at least some regions, they fall well short of providing conclusive evidence that the Greens are set to win more list seats than the SNP.

I'm also a tad bemused by the article's suggestion that Diffley and McAngus have "backed" Curtice's projection. As the projection simply takes the raw poll numbers and directly converts them into a hypothetical number of seats, "backing" the projection amounts to no more than agreeing that Curtice is adept at using a calculator. In that sense, I'm more than happy to "back" the projection as well, but I'm not sure what that's supposed to tell us in concrete terms.

Finally (and this has nothing to do with the Sunday Herald piece), I want to tackle a line of argument that Tommy Sheridan used in the debate I had with him, and that seems to be taking root in some other quarters as well. Basically he claimed that if the SNP win all nine constituency seats in Glasgow, the d'Hondt formula will ensure that "nine out of every ten SNP list votes will be wasted, and that only one in ten will actually count". This is complete garbage, because it wrongly implies that d'Hondt literally throws away a certain number of votes, which are then not taken into account at any point during the distribution of list seats. In fact, the d'Hondt calculation is made afresh for every individual list seat, and is always based on the actual number of votes cast. The following hypothetical example in which only two parties are involved will hopefully illustrate what I mean.

Actual list vote :

SNP 99,950 votes
Solidarity 10,000 votes

Because the SNP won all nine constituency seats in the region, the d'Hondt formula divides their raw list vote by ten (nine plus one) in the count for the first list seat. Because Solidarity didn't win any constituency seats, their raw vote remains unaltered.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for first list seat :

Solidarity 10,000 votes
SNP 9,995 votes

So Solidarity take the first list seat, and on the face of it the SNP's advantage in terms of votes has been completely wiped out. If you believe Tommy Sheridan's notion about 90% of the SNP's original list votes being literally thrown away, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the two parties are now on an equal footing as far as the distribution of the remaining six list seats are concerned, and perhaps will win three apiece. But that isn't the case at all, because for each remaining seat, the d'Hondt formula refers back to each party's actual number of votes. For the second list seat, Solidarity's original vote is divided by two (one plus one), because they now have one seat under their belt. The SNP's vote remains divided by ten.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for second list seat :

SNP 9,995 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

For the third list seat, the SNP's original vote is divided by eleven (ten plus one), because they now have ten seats. Solidarity's vote remains divided by two.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for third list seat :

SNP 9,086 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

For the fourth list seat, the SNP's original vote is divided by twelve (eleven plus one), because they now have eleven seats. Solidarity's vote remains divided by two.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for fourth list seat :

SNP 8,329 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

For the fifth list seat, the SNP's original vote is divided by thirteen (twelve plus one), because they now have twelve seats. Solidarity's vote remains divided by two.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for fifth list seat :

SNP 7,688 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

For the sixth list seat, the SNP's original vote is divided by fourteen (thirteen plus one), because they now have thirteen seats. Solidarity's vote remains divided by two.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for sixth list seat :

SNP 7,139 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

For the seventh and final list seat, the SNP's original vote is divided by fifteen (fourteen plus one), because they now have fourteen seats. Solidarity's vote remains divided by two.

D'Hondt-adjusted count for seventh list seat :

SNP 6,663 votes
Solidarity 5,000 votes

As you can see, and entirely contrary to Sheridan's claim, the fact that the SNP has ten times as many list votes as Solidarity matters enormously. It ensures that after the initial big hit on the first count, the SNP's vote only comes down very, very gradually in subsequent counts. By contrast, Solidarity never recover from having their vote cut in half on the second count, and they lose ALL SIX remaining list seats to the SNP. Final number of list seats in this hypothetical scenario : SNP 6, Solidarity 1.  So much for nine-tenths of those SNP list votes "not counting", eh?

Devastated Dugdale starts praying for a "Bobby Ewing in the shower" moment after savage Survation survey extinguishes all other hope for Scottish Labour

Constituency ballot :

SNP 53% (+1)
Lab 18% (-3)
Conservatives 17% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 43% (-1)
Conservatives 18% (+2)
Labour 17% (-2)
Greens 11% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (n/c)
UKIP 4% (n/c)

A Poll of Polls update can be found HERE.

Explanatory note : As a fond tribute to the mainstream media's restrained take on the GERS report, Scot Goes Pop headlines will contain 50% bonus hysteria for an indefinite period.

In the unlikely event that RISE win a seat, they'll be doing a John Swinburne, not a Colin Fox

You've probably already seen RevStu's "five cold, hard facts about the election".  You might think this is ironic coming from me, but the only one of the five I would very, very slightly take issue with is that RISE won't win a seat.  I think it's overwhelmingly unlikely that they will, but it can't be completely ruled out because we do have one past example of a fringe party taking a list seat in even less promising circumstances than RISE currently find themselves.  In 2003, the Scottish Senior Citizens' Unity Party somehow won a seat on the Central Scotland list with an astonishing 6.5% of the vote, in spite of receiving only a fraction of the media attention lavished on RISE this year.

So how did they do it?  Partly it was down to a very clever (albeit charmingly amateurish) leaflet that played up the support and nominal candidacies of two "Old Firm legends".   The rest of it can be explained by the fact that the 2003 election wasn't competitive - the SNP didn't look even remotely like a government in waiting, and many people who would ordinarily have voted SNP (or indeed Labour) on the list decided they had nothing to lose by being a little more adventurous, or even frivolous.

With the benefit of hindsight, the very odd events of the weekend look like a carefully-planned "shock and awe" operation intended to recreate the special conditions of 2003, albeit in a slightly different form - ie. the hope was that voters would begin to see the SNP's position as so unassailable that they could afford to be as daring with their list vote as they were in 2003.  That line of argument had been hitting a brick wall in recent months, so it seems that somebody, somewhere made the calculation that a concerted (and totally bogus) appeal to the ultimate authority - John Curtice, naturally, not God - could turn things around for the tactical voting lobby at a crucial moment in the campaign.  I initially subscribed to the view that a single journalist had innocently (albeit catastrophically) misunderstood Curtice's words, and the whole thing had snowballed out of control as a result.  But in the light of what's happened since, it's hard to maintain such a charitable interpretation.

*  *  *

For anyone who thinks that the "tactical voting" scam is new, here's a little nostalgia - a blogpost I published exactly five years ago today, in the midst of the 2011 election campaign.  My belated commiserations to the three people who actually fell for the idea that a vote for the Scottish Christian Party would be less wasted than a vote for Labour!

Confirmed by the servants of the Lord : the regional list vote decides who forms the Scottish Government

I received an election leaflet today from the militantly anti-homosexual 'Scottish' Christian Party - led somewhat incongruously by the man who wrote (and still receives royalties from) the song So Macho. You might think it would have been mostly concerned with telling me about God and lesser-known details of the Old Testament, but not a bit of it. In fact the meat of the leaflet is about the minutiae of the party's split and subsequent glorious reconciliation with their 'brothers' in the Christian People's Alliance (no-one mention Life of Brian), followed by this rather convoluted explanation of how, for some unspecified reason, they're planning to help Iain Gray become First Minister -

"If you want Labour to form the next Scottish Government vote Christian Party - CPA on the Central Region List.

In 2007 Labour had to look on powerlessly as the SNP took five (5) of the list seats in the Central Region, including the very last seat. As a result, the SNP beat Labour by just one (1) seat in the Scottish Parliamentary Election. Had the Christian Party won that last Central Region seat, instead of the SNP, then Labour would have won the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary Election...

DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE THIS TIME! VOTE CHRISTIAN PARTY - CPA."

So there you have it on the Highest Authority - the list vote decides who becomes First Minister. In other words, the SNP's invitation for people to vote for Alex Salmond as First Minister on the list ballot is a helpful clarification of the vital importance and effect of that vote, while the Greens' '2nd Vote Green' slogan (implying that the list vote is - as many people mistakenly believe - some kind of second preference) is a misleading ruse. No-one is blaming the Greens for trying to maximise their vote by using any tactic within the rules - but what is slightly more galling is that they do this while at the same time brazenly condemning the SNP for 'confusing' the electorate with their 'sloganising'. It's the rough equivalent of hitting another child in the playground, then bursting into tears and saying "Miss, he hit me"...

A few nagging doubts do arise from the Christian Party's 'Trojan Horse for Iain Gray' pitch, though. For instance -

1) Perhaps they should have waited to see the opinion polls before concluding this was quite such a winner.

2) If they're really only interested in receiving votes from Labour sympathisers, does that mean us nationalists are all heathens?

3) They could have done with investing in a calculator. If the Christian Party had nicked a list seat from the SNP last time round, Labour would not have been the party with most seats, but instead would have been deadlocked 46-46 with the SNP. Even if the Christian MSP had voted for Jack McConnell as First Minister, Alex Salmond would still have won if the two Green MSPs had voted for him (as they did).