It was short-sighted, it was suspicious, and it was Swinson

With thanks once again to John Motson for inspiring the title, here is a quick note to let you know I have a new article at the TalkRadio website about the mystery of the Lib Dem "invisible money" in East Dunbartonshire.  You can read it HERE.

Scottish Labour may be dinosaurs, but it wasn't a dead cat bounce

As you may have seen on social media, there was a post on the LSE politics blog yesterday arguing that the notion of a "Corbyn bounce" in Scotland at the general election is a "myth" and a "mirage", and that the SNP should not be sidetracked into strategies to fend off Labour when the Tories are the real enemy.  It would be comforting to agree with that, and to tell ourselves there is only one unionist party worth worrying about, but I do think the conclusion is wrong.  The main flaw of the blogpost is that it treats the results of the 2015 and 2017 general elections as if they are the only pieces of information available to us.  When you look at it that way, it does appear superficially that the entire drop in the SNP vote can be explained by a natural 'correction' after the freakish result of 2015, and that the very small revival in the Labour vote (from 24% to 27%) was an inevitable side-effect of that readjustment, rather than being caused by the phenomenon that generated a much bigger Labour surge in England.

However, if you widen your gaze to take account of opinion poll evidence (and indeed the Holyrood election of last year), the picture suddenly looks very different.  There is overwhelming evidence that Labour's true recovery in Scotland was not from the low of 24% recorded in 2015, but from the much worse position that the party slumped to after that election.  Survation, who proved to be the most accurate pollster, had Scottish Labour languishing at just 18% as recently as mid-April, but by the end of the campaign that had jumped to 29%.  Other firms showed a similar trend (even if the exact figures were very different).  That sort of big shift is much more in line with the Corbyn surge that occurred in England, and given that it happened at exactly the same time, it's not unreasonable to suppose that it probably happened for much the same reason.  It can't really be explained by the correction in the SNP's vote share, because the SNP had dropped to the low 40s (and the Tories had risen to the high 20s) before the Labour surge even started.  It looks much more likely that the SNP suffered a drop from an unsustainable high, and then suffered a further small drop as a direct result of voters switching to Labour because of enthusiasm for the Corbyn project.

Even though the premise of the LSE blogpost is wrong, I do think it's correct to argue that the SNP shouldn't head off on a radical left wild goose chase to try to deal with the Corbyn threat.  If you're losing voters who are inspired by the prospect of a radical left government at Westminster, you can hardly counter that by offering a radical left opposition at Westminster (and an opposition with third-party status at that).  You can only compete by putting forward an alternative inspiring vision that Corbyn can't/won't offer - and that means a much greater focus on independence than we saw in the recent campaign.

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Elsewhere in the LSE blogpost, a reasonable point is made about the SNP's "heroic" determination to conflate support for independence with support for remaining within the European Union, which may have cost the party votes from Brexit supporters.  That factor may also go a long way towards explaining the Tories' seemingly puzzling failure to defeat the SNP in places like Perth & North Perthshire and Edinburgh South-West - both constituencies that voted Remain by a much more emphatic margin than the rural north-east did.

But this is not just a dilemma for the SNP.  Could the Scottish Tory surge be a similar phenomenon to the SNP surge of 2015?  In other words, was it partly caused by temporarily energised Brexit supporters who were determined to reinforce their vote from the referendum last year?  If so, the Scottish Tories are very likely to suffer their own natural 'correction' at the next general election (as long as it doesn't take place in the near future).  Those new north-east Tory MPs, especially the ones with the narrowest majorities, probably shouldn't get too comfy in their seats.

No, Jeremy Corbyn would not be Prime Minister right now if the Scottish Tories had failed to make gains

This post is really just an indulgence of a point of pedantry, but it's been bugging me since the election that people keep saying that Jeremy Corbyn would currently be Prime Minister if it hadn't been for the twelve Tory gains from the SNP (indeed, in my weaker moments I may even have retweeted the people who are saying it).  It's not strictly true.

Holding the constituency of Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk would have been an almost miraculous feat for the SNP.  Given the enormous tactical switch from the Lib Dems to the Tories, the SNP would actually have needed a significant increase in their own vote just to hold the seat, and that was obviously never going to happen.  However, as a 'bit of fun', let's imagine for the sake of argument that they had somehow pulled it off, and also held onto all of the other eleven seats that the Tories gained.  This is what the result of the general election would have been -

Conservatives 306
Labour 262
SNP 47
Liberal Democrats 12
DUP 10
Sinn Féin 7
Plaid Cymru 4
Greens 1
Independent 1

From there's it's a simple calculation - the Conservatives and DUP combined would have had 316 seats, and an informal progressive alliance consisting of Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens would have had only 314.  Sinn Féin are irrelevant because they don't take their seats, so the balance of power would have been held by the 12 Liberal Democrats and the sole independent MP Lady Hermon (who we know is minded to support the Tories in confidence votes). That means the only way the Queen would have been able to justify not inviting Theresa May to form a government would have been if the Liberal Democrats had clearly indicated a preference for Jeremy Corbyn. Based on the commitments they made prior to the election, it seems highly unlikely they would have done so.

What would have happened after May's reappointment as PM?  Without an overall majority for the Tory/DUP alliance, it's theoretically possible that the Queen's Speech would have been defeated, triggering a second election almost immediately.  The public would not have looked kindly on that, so much more probable is that the Tory government would have introduced a limited and uncontroversial Queen's Speech, allowing the Lib Dems (and possibly even Labour) to abstain with dignity, on the implicit understanding that there would be a general election in the autumn.

There's no doubt that without the Scottish Tory gains we'd be in a radically different situation from the one we actually find ourselves in - the Tory government would be merely a caretaker administration with almost no capacity to get its policies through the Commons, and a quick second election would be a near-certainty rather than just an intriguing possibility.  But even so, it's simply not true to say that the Scottish Tory gains are literally responsible for there being a Tory government as of this moment.  In the longer run, what would have happened in a second election is entirely a matter for speculation - for all we know, the urgency of the situation would have concentrated Tory minds, and they would have quickly found an alternative leader who might have delivered a much better result in the autumn.

There is no shortage of little paradoxes to be found in politics, and it's not totally inconceivable that the Scottish Tory gains will ultimately leave the Tory government in a weaker position than would otherwise have been the case.

Sturgeon sticks firmly with the policy of an independence referendum at the end of the Brexit negotiations

For those that heard Nicola Sturgeon's speech, the title of this blogpost may seem like a statement of the bleedin' obvious, but I gather from a tweet written by Ipsos-Mori's Mark Diffley that some MSM outlets only took a few minutes to completely misrepresent what she had said -

"Funny seeing how this is being reported as #indyref2 being withdrawn - not what I heard at all"

As I said the other day, I was fully ready to say I thought Nicola Sturgeon had made a terrible mistake if she reversed policy on an independence referendum, but I'm delighted and relieved to say I'm not going to have to do that, because the speech ticked absolutely every box I was looking for -

* Ms Sturgeon stressed that the SNP won the general election in Scotland and that this reinforced the mandate for a referendum initially received in the Holyrood election of May 2016.

* She upheld the policy that a referendum should be held at the end of the Brexit process.

* By stressing the mandate to hold a referendum within the current Holyrood parliament, she strongly hinted the vote should take place before May 2021.

* She gave a clear timetable (autumn 2018) for making a decision on the timing of a referendum, which removes the concern that today's decision is going to later mutate into an 'indefinite postponement'.

* She undertook to step up campaigning for independence even before a referendum is called - the complete reverse of assumptions that the topic is going to be "parked".

* Although she acknowledged that the Tories losing their majority reopened the possibility of a soft Brexit (which presumably would remove the need for a referendum altogether), she didn't pretend that this was a remotely likely outcome - I think her exact words were "however slim".

* Most importantly, she didn't renounce the decision on a referendum taken by the elected Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago, and she didn't revoke the request made for a Section 30 order on the basis of that vote.  (She did note that the resolution of the request has become less urgent, but it remains active.)

As far as I can see, the one and only change in the SNP position is that the referendum bill will not be brought forward in the immediate future, but instead a decision about its exact timing will be taken next year.  That is a change of process, not a substantive change of policy, and I have no great problem with it.  (Although it's heartening to see Patrick Harvie and the Greens acting as a counterbalance against the unionist parties and media by keeping the pressure up for the speediest possible progress.)

G A Ponsonby said the other day that he had no concerns at all about what Nicola Sturgeon was going to say, but he had great concerns about what the media were going to pretend she had said.  I now see his point entirely.  The media and unionist parties have a problem, though - they clearly want to say Nicola Sturgeon has performed a "humiliating U-turn" on an independence referendum, but they also want to say that Nicola Sturgeon has "ignored the wishes of the people of Scotland" by "doubling down" on an independence referendum.  I have a feeling some people out there are intelligent enough to spot that those two claims are not actually consistent with each other.

The DUP's "defeat", in numbers

It may be a surprise to you to learn that the DUP lost the general election in Northern Ireland, but as we all know the SNP's "defeat" in Scotland has become the accepted benchmark for electoral "failure" across the globe.  I'm afraid the direct comparison makes for pretty bleak reading from Arlene Foster's point of view.

SNP's performance in Scotland :

Percentage of seats : 59.3%
Vote share : 36.9%

DUP's performance in Northern Ireland :

Percentage of seats : 55.6%
Vote share : 36.0%

Ouch.  Bit of a mystery why the London government wants to have anything to do with a party that did even worse than the SNP.  But then again, the Scottish Tories are still welcome in polite circles, so it appears exceptions can be made...

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Did some SNP supporters stay at home because the party downplayed independence?

A number of people on social media today raised an eyebrow or two at YouGov findings that show people who voted SNP in 2015 were significantly more likely to simply stay at home in the 2017 election than voters for any other party (with the exception of UKIP).  This has raised the possibility that much of the swing from the SNP to the Tories and Labour was caused by SNP abstentions, rather than net movement from one side to the other.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough information in the datasets to draw such a strong conclusion.  This is a GB-wide poll, and the SNP's abstention rate is not being compared with that of the Scottish Tories or Scottish Labour, but with the Tories and Labour across Britain as a whole.  That's bound to give a misleading impression, because turnout in Scotland dropped by several points this year, whereas it rose south of the border.

The most that can be said, therefore, is that this poll is consistent with the theory that the SNP suffered from differential turnout, but it doesn't provide proof.  If that is what happened, presumably there were independence supporters who were fired up in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 referendum, but who this time weren't sufficiently inspired by the rather vague (and bland?) "Stronger for Scotland" message.  I suspect the SNP missed a trick by downplaying independence during the campaign - they were probably worried about losing No voters, but the pre-election polls suggested most of those people had already drifted off anyway.

The poll's oddest finding is that, even after abstainers are excluded, only 33% of people who voted Plaid Cymru in 2015 stuck with the party this year.  The equivalent figure for the SNP is 71%.  It's hard not to be sceptical about that finding, because Plaid's vote share only slipped 1.7% (and they made a net gain of one seat!).

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Survation poll gives the lie to the notion that people are "scunnered" with referendums

Anyone who buys into the theory that people have just had enough of voting (and of referendums in particular) ought to take heed of the recent GB-wide YouGov poll showing a narrow majority in favour of a second general election as early as this autumn, and also tonight's UK-wide Survation poll showing a similar majority in favour of a referendum on the final Brexit deal.

On holding a referendum to accept or reject Brexit deal (Survation) :

Support 48%

Oppose 43%

The poll's Scottish subsample is tiny - but for what it's worth, it shows a somewhat bigger majority of 43% to 33% in favour of a referendum.  As the entire rationale of Indyref 2 is to give people the choice between Hard Brexit (assuming that's still what we're heading towards) and the only viable alternative, it would seem from these numbers that there are reasonable grounds for optimism that people will be receptive to the arguments in favour of holding a vote, if they are presented in a thoughtful way.

There's mixed news for Remainers in the other questions in the poll - the centre of gravity of public opinion appears to be support for remaining within the customs union from outside the EU.  Single market membership seemingly wasn't asked about, and that's arguably the more important aspect of the Soft/Hard Brexit divide.  (Norway is inside the single market but outside the customs union - and the reverse is true of Turkey, which speaks volumes.)  Extraordinarily, in spite of her catastrophic loss of general support, a narrow majority of respondents would still trust Theresa May's judgement if she decided that no deal was better than the deal on offer - although unsurprisingly respondents in Scotland take the opposite view by an overwhelming margin.

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I noticed a comment on Wings earlier today saying there had been a poll showing that the SNP would gain seats in an early general election.  I did a search and drew a complete blank, so I assumed it was probably just some sort of 'voodoo poll'.  But oddly enough, when I checked Survation's Twitter feed tonight, there was indeed a projection that the SNP would win 41 seats in a new general election (a gain of 6), and it was supposedly based in part on the notorious poll commissioned by the Record the other day.  That's peculiar, because as far as I can see there were no voting intention figures in the Record's reporting, and there are none in the published datasets either.  Could there have been voting intention results which have been withheld by the Record?  If so, did they do it because they didn't want anything to contradict the "disaster for SNP" narrative?  

I must stress this is just wild speculation.  But if by any chance there has been an unpublished Survation poll of Scottish voting intentions showing the SNP making ground rather than losing ground, that would be very significant.  The results would have been weighted back to 2017 recalled voting, which means they ought to be more accurate than the pre-election polling was.  I've been quite concerned that any new poll might actually show the SNP slipping behind Labour - that seems an odd thing to say given that Labour finished third only ten days ago, but shock election results can generate momentum like nothing else can.

An open suggestion : if anyone on the pro-indy side has ever thought about commissioning an opinion poll, this would be the optimum moment to do it

Most of you have probably come across Peter Hitchens' famous quote about the purpose of opinion polls -

"Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense."

That is, of course, a massive over-generalisation. Almost all of the voting intention polls we saw in the run-up to the general election were genuine, if mostly extremely poor, attempts at measuring public opinion. Based on the past history of polls having an in-built pro-Labour skew, ICM and ComRes honestly believed they were improving accuracy with their extreme Tory-friendly methodologies. It's doubtful whether the polling errors worked in the Tories' favour anyway - if people had actually known that Labour were only a couple of points behind the Tories, it's likely that scare stories about a Corbyn premiership would have had far greater potency.

There's a 'but' here, though. Voting intention polls using standard, neutral wording are one thing, but non-standard, non-neutral poll questions about other matters have an entirely different purpose. Even more famous than Hitchens' quote is the Yes, Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey demonstrates how it's easily possible to get exactly the same poll respondents to say that they both support and oppose the reintroduction of National Service. All you need to do is use wording which makes the desired answer seem like the 'natural', 'obvious' one.

In Scotland we've just seen a particularly sinister example of that dark use of opinion polls, with the Daily Record commissioning Survation to ask a ludicrously leading question designed to produce a result that made it seem as if Scotland had turned decisively against a second independence referendum. Whether or not the stunt was done in direct collusion with the Tories, it may as well have been, because within a few short hours Ruth Davidson was brandishing the poll at First Minister's Questions as 'proof' that her narrative about the meaning of the election result was the correct one.

And there you see pretty plainly what the function of the poll was - it's no exaggeration to say that it formed part of a 'soft coup'. You can't steal people's votes with a poll, but what you can do (especially in our present quasi-colonial set-up) is steal the meaning of their votes. You can turn black into white, and establish a narrative that people were somehow voting against the flagship policy of the winning party. So how was it done? Obviously the first indispensable step was a 2014-style 'shock and awe' media propaganda campaign that relentlessly portrayed the SNP's election victory as an unmitigated disaster for the party. Bang in the middle of that hysteria, you run a poll that doesn't ask about an independence referendum as a matter of principle, but specifically ties it to the general election result - thus inviting people to agree that it's only 'natural' that a referendum should not take place in the light of the general election result, as helpfully interpreted by the media. In order to dispute that such a conclusion is 'natural', a respondent would have to consciously resist the near-unanimous media verdict on the election, which is not easy to do, particularly given that the SNP did not challenge it strongly enough themselves.

It doesn't end there, though. The proposition was also framed negatively - respondents had to agree or disagree with the statement that "Following the General Election result, Nicola Sturgeon should remove her demand for a second independence referendum". Given that 'demand' is a pejorative word, and that groundwork had been done to establish in people's minds that Nicola Sturgeon was the loser of the election she won, it would take a good bit of psychological effort to actively disagree with what is intentionally presented as a 'perfectly reasonable' point of view. Indeed, to indicate disagreement, a respondent would have had to check the box next to the following faintly ridiculous formulation of words : "Following the General Election result, Nicola Sturgeon should not remove her demand for a second independence referendum".  The result of the poll was utterly predictable, and that was the Record's plan from the start.

So how do we combat this cynical tactic? The only way would be for someone on the pro-indy side to commission their own poll as a matter of urgency.  In theory it could use a scrupulously neutral question, such as "Do you think there should be an independence referendum within the next five/ten years?". In my view, that would probably produce a majority against a referendum in the current mad climate, but I doubt if the size of the majority would be anything like the one found in the Record's dodgy poll. Probably more useful, though, would be to deliberately approach the issue from a different angle - someone suggested today on Twitter that people should be asked whether the Scottish Parliament or the UK government should decide the timing of a referendum. We've had polls like that in the past which have shown decisive majorities backing the Scottish Parliament's right to choose, and it would be very helpful to have that principle reinforced in a post-election poll.

Here are another couple of possibilities -

Q.  At the recent general election, the SNP won 35 Scottish seats, the Conservatives won 13, Labour won 7 and the Liberal Democrats won 4.  Who do you think won the election in Scotland?

a) SNP
b) Conservatives
c) Labour
d) Liberal Democrats
e) Nobody won

Q.  At the recent general election, the SNP won 60% of the Scottish seats at Westminster.  Do you think this gives them a mandate to call an independence referendum once the terms of Brexit are known?

a) Yes
b) No

One thing is for sure - we're at a crucial turning-point in Scottish history, and dark forces are stopping at nothing in their attempts to neutralise our pro-indy movement for good. A 'counter-poll' would be a very useful tool to deploy, and as soon as possible.

The SNP performed BETTER last week than in most recent elections

Someone suggested on an earlier thread that the SNP's performance last week was "by far the worst in seven years".  That's completely and utterly untrue, and it's perhaps another sign of how the relentless media propaganda campaign is starting to mess with people's heads.  Here is how the SNP's 36.9% of the popular vote at the general election actually compares with the other elections that have been held over the last seven years...

SNP vote shares in each election :

2010 UK general election : 19.9%
2011 Scottish Parliament election : 45.4% (constituency), 44.0% (list)
2012 Local elections : 32.3%
2014 European election : 29.0%
2015 UK general election : 50.0%
2016 Scottish Parliament election : 46.5% (constituency), 41.7% (list)
2017 Local elections : 32.3%
2017 UK general election : 36.9%

As you can see, the SNP's performance last Thursday was actually significantly better than in no fewer than four of the other seven elections that have taken place since 2010.  It was also better than in any set of local elections in history (the 32.3% in both 2012 and 2017 is the high watermark to date), and better than in any European election in history (32.6% in 1994 is the all-time high).  It was better than the 32.9% of the constituency vote and 31.0% of the list vote achieved when the party won its first Holyrood election in 2007.  And it was far better than the vote share achieved in any UK general election prior to 2015 - the previous record had been just 30.4% in October 1974.

When you bear in mind that UK general elections tend to be the toughest contests that the SNP faces (due to voters becoming transfixed with the Tory v Labour battle for power in London), hopefully you can see how 37% of the vote last week and a comfortable 8.3% lead over the second-placed party was an extremely creditable performance.  It may have been below pre-election expectations, but it wasn't below-par in any other sense.

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Michael Portillo made two confident predictions on tonight's This Week that completely startled me : 1) that Theresa May will not even survive as Prime Minister until the autumn conference season, and 2) that the government will decide to keep Britain in both the single market and the customs union.  I've been strongly convinced that the opposite is true, and it has to be said that plenty of Portillo's predictions have proved wrong in the past, but let's suppose just for a moment that he's right.  The most obvious consequence would be that an early general election would become much more likely.  A new Tory leader might seek a personal mandate, but even if they don't, a bona fide Soft Brexit (as opposed to a fudge that falls short of single market membership) will surely lead to at least a few Eurosceptic Tory MPs resigning the whip on the grounds that the British public has been betrayed.  They might even jump direct to UKIP if Nigel Farage becomes active again and gets his party back in the game.  The arithmetic supporting the Tory-DUP pact would then become severely imperilled.

Survation poll reinforces the need for the SNP to strongly speak up for their mandate to hold a referendum

The Daily Record are full of beans about a poll they've commissioned from Survation showing that, by a roughly 2-1 margin, respondents think "Following the general election result, Nicola Sturgeon should remove her demand for a second independence referendum".  The most important thing to say straight away is that this poll question is about a billion light-years away from being neutrally-worded - it frames the issue as being about Nicola Sturgeon, rather than about Scotland, and implants the idea that she is someone who makes petulant "demands" rather than takes decisions.  It also explicitly ties the issue to the general election result, making it harder for respondents to ignore what they've read in the papers and seen on the TV about how Scotland has apparently just said "no" to a referendum by electing a majority of pro-independence MPs.  It seems overwhelmingly likely that a more neutral question (such as "Do you think there should be an independence referendum within the next five/ten years?") would have produced a more favourable result.

In spite of the poll's extreme shortcomings, though, it's important to note that it flatly contradicts the findings of a poll only a few weeks ago that found the public thought that the SNP would have a clear mandate for a referendum if they won a majority of Scottish seats at the general election.  This apparently irrational 180 degree shift in public opinion would suggest that the SNP have been extremely foolish in not strongly challenging the narrative of their opponents and the mainstream media that their victory at the general election was somehow a rebuff for a referendum.  Yes, it's incredibly difficult to fight against the tide when even the BBC abandon all pretence at objectivity and describe a landslide SNP triumph as a "rejection of independence", but nevertheless it seems likely that the problem could at least have been ameliorated if the SNP had stood up for the mandate they had just received in the hours following the election.  It would have been perfectly possible to acknowledge painful setbacks in certain regions of Scotland while emphasising that the nationwide SNP victory reinforced the mandate for a referendum.

Having made that tactical error, though, the important thing now is that the SNP hold their nerve in the face of polls like this.  We know that polls conducted immediately after an election tend to produce extreme results which are often quickly reversed as politics returns to normal.  (Witness the Panelbase and Survation polls in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum showing a majority for independence - presumably they were one of the reasons that Kezia Dugdale panicked and almost reversed Labour's stance on an indyref.)  If everyone just holds tight, it's not unreasonable to suppose that we'll soon see a return to the status quo ante as far as attitudes towards both independence and a referendum are concerned.  Even in this poll, there is still a 43% Yes vote, which suggests an extraordinary resilience in support for independence.

For the reasons I've given previously, it would be a historic error for the SNP to panic in the face of this media onslaught and abandon their commitment to an independence referendum at the end of the Brexit process.  This is a difficult moment, but it will soon pass.  Let's make sure we've kept the flame alight for when it does.

The landslide winner is supposed to resign, apparently

London-based Alastair Meeks of Stormfront Lite has followed up yesterday's more measured piece with a barking mad article claiming bewilderment that Nicola Sturgeon hasn't resigned in the wake of last week's general election.  Well, let's see - she's by far the SNP's most successful leader of all-time, and she's just won a fourth successive national election victory in the space of less than three years.  During the campaign, YouGov showed that she remained the most popular of the Scottish party leaders in absolute terms.  On the face of it, these would all appear to be excellent reasons for holding on to her, but I dare say things look different when viewed from the metropolis.

Of the SNP's landslide victory last week, Alastair says : "Nor was this a narrow defeat."  The new post-arithmetic politics is getting rather comical.

Alastair also expands on his theory from yesterday that the Tories can safely regard the SNP as "reliable enemies", because both parties will be desperate to avoid an early election.  He reckons that this will allow Labour the opportunity to present themselves as a more authentically anti-Tory party than the SNP.  All of this is in the realms of utter fantasy.  For the avoidance of doubt, if there is a vote on the floor of the House of Commons to bring the government down, then regardless of strategic judgements over whether an early election would be in the SNP's interests, they will walk through the lobbies with Labour to bring that election about.  Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't 'get' Scottish politics, and certainly doesn't understand the long-term penalty that any centre-left party in Scotland would pay for helping to keep the Tories in power for even a week longer than necessary.

Stormfront Lite is of course heavily dominated by Tory contributors, and it does appear that Alastair is lulling them into a false sense of security.  If any smaller parties are going to sustain Tory rule for five years, it'll be the DUP, Lady Hermon, and maybe the Lib Dems after Brexit.  But the SNP...you can forget it, I'm afraid.  Just not going to happen.

Of course the SNP will vote to bring down the Tories - if they can

Over at Stormfront Lite, Alastair Meeks has mused that an early general election is unlikely to happen, and that part of the reason is that the SNP would not vote for it -

"The SNP also seem to be staring down the barrel of a gun. Unless their poll ratings recover markedly, they look set to lose many more seats at the next election simply because those voters who wish to defend the union now have a clear route map which party to back in most constituencies. So there looks likely to be an enduring majority opposed to an early election, with or without the DUP."

With all due respect to Alastair, this is a classic case of a southern commentator not really 'getting' the political realities in Scotland.  As I said in my article in The National the other day, I do think the SNP would probably prefer there not to be an election for a while, but it's a much more finely-balanced call than Alastair thinks - lots of SNP seats are vulnerable to Labour, but there are also a hell of a lot of new Tory seats that look very precarious, and in which the SNP are the only realistic challengers.  If you can imagine the psychological impact of Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson reclaiming their seats (what would Peter "only Salmond's result matters" Kellner say then?!), you can see why the SNP might reckon that an early election is not an entirely unattractive prospect, especially if Tory support starts to drop even a little.

There are two other key points - firstly, although Alastair is correct that SNP seats in the central belt look vulnerable to Labour, he's largely wrong about the reason.  "Defending the union" tactical voting obsessives were not exactly thin on the ground in the campaign we've just had, so it's hard to see how that problem is suddenly going to get dramatically worse.  No, the real problem is the sheer momentum behind Corbyn, and the way it may carry along left-wing voters who in many cases actually believe in independence.  From that point of view, an October election could look a tad scary, but the momentum may well have fizzled out if things drag on until next year or beyond.

Secondly, regardless of the strategic judgement on whether an election is in the SNP's best interests, there is no real doubt that they will vote in favour of one if they get a chance, and that they will vote against the Tory government in any vote of no confidence.  Yes, they abstained on the calling of the election we've just had, but they were able to justify that on the basis that it looked overwhelmingly likely that the Tories would significantly increase their majority.  If there looks to be the remotest chance of getting the Tories out, they will have no choice at all - the long-term consequences of being seen to "keep the Tories in" hardly bear thinking about.

All of this is fairly academic, because the arithmetic supporting a Tory-DUP deal is reasonably secure - even if the Tories suffer a string of by-election defeats, it would probably take at least three years before there would be any chance of a defeat on a vote of confidence.  That's unless there are defections - Alastair dismisses that notion on the grounds of the wide ideological gap between the parties, but I would have thought the Liberal Democrats might start to look like a tempting alternative home for one or two liberal Tory MPs if the Brexit negotiations go badly.

More realistically, though, if an early election happens it will not be because the Tories have literally been brought down - it'll be because they can't get their business through the Commons, and start looking for an escape route, or because Theresa May is replaced and the new leader decides to gamble (and it would obviously be a huge gamble) on gaining a personal mandate.

The SNP mustn't allow itself to become hobbled for decades by the legend of a "defeat" that never actually happened

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the TalkRadio website, with more thoughts on why the SNP would be extremely unwise to reverse policy on an independence referendum.  In particular, going down that road would create a dangerous legend that a referendum didn't happen because the British Prime Minister "bravely stood up to the SNP", rather than because she outrageously ignored a clear democratic mandate.  You can read the article HERE.

The barking mad benchmark

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at The National, reflecting on the SNP's general election victory in Scotland.  It ponders how the exceptional triumph of 2015 may in retrospect have been a curse rather than a blessing, because other parties have been able to use it to set an absolutely absurd benchmark for SNP success and failure.  You can read the article HERE.

Putting the SNP's latest landslide victory into historical perspective

I don't know about anyone else, but I punched the air when Stephen Gethins won the final Scottish seat by just two votes.  In spite of the recounts and the relentless optimism of SNP supporters on social media, I had almost given up on that one, because the Liberal Democrats were reported to be anything between one and three votes ahead, and recounts so rarely reverse the original result even when it's that tight.  Psychologically it was an important win - it meant the SNP outperformed the original exit poll prediction (albeit only just), and probably outperformed Nicola Sturgeon's own expectations even at quite an advanced stage of the night, when she told David Dimbleby she expected to finish with "a little over 30" seats.

It also means the SNP have taken roughly 60% of the seats in Scotland.  For the avoidance of doubt, a result like that can quite properly be called a landslide victory.  Here's how it compares with various historical landslides at UK-wide level...

2017 (SNP landslide, Scotland only) :

SNP 59.3%
All other parties 40.7%

1945 (Attlee landslide) :

Labour 61.4%
All other parties 38.6%

1959 (Macmillan landslide) :

Conservatives 57.9%
All other parties 42.1%

1966 (Wilson landslide) :

Labour 57.8%
All other parties 42.2%

1983 (Thatcher landslide) :

Conservatives 61.1%
All other parties 38.9%

1987 (Thatcher landslide) :

Conservatives 57.8%
All other parties 42.2%

1997 (Blair landslide) :

Labour 63.4%
All other parties 36.6%

2001 (Blair landslide) :

Labour 62.5%
All other parties 37.5%

Even the SNP's popular vote share of 37% compares favourably with some previous UK majority governments - it's identical to the mandate received by the Tories in 2015, and on which they've been governing us over the last two years.  It's also better than the 35% mandate on which Labour governed for a full five-year term between 2005 and 2010.

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I'm beginning to have my doubts about whether there's going to be another election any time soon.  The polling companies will doubtless hold yet another inquiry, and will presumably this time move methodology in a much more Labour-friendly direction, with less aggressive turnout weighting from the likes of ICM and ComRes.  That makes it significantly less likely that a Tory Prime Minister will be able to convince herself or himself that a snap election is winnable on the basis of the polling evidence.  We could be in for a John Major-style scenario where a weak Tory government holds on for grim death over a period of years, while being ground down by defeats in by-elections and being constantly held to ransom by extremist backbenchers and Northern Ireland unionists.  In fact, it'll be even worse this time, because at least John Major had a small majority to play with.

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As some of you may have seen, I took part in Independence Live's election show last night.  The whole thing (six hours' worth!) is available to watch HERE - I'm on about 58 minutes in.

The case for pessimism...and the case for mild optimism

One of the great dramatic rituals of British democracy will play out tonight when, at the exact moment Big Ben strikes 10, the main broadcasters simultaneously reveal the results of their jointly-funded exit poll.  (In days gone by, the BBC and ITN each used to have their own exclusive exit poll, but now they put their combined eggs in one basket.)  If past form is anything to go by, the results of the poll will probably not be leaked in advance - although we can be sure that the Neil Lovatt brigade will be interpreting every little movement in the betting markets from the afternoon onwards as a sign that somebody has found out something.

There are two key points that need to be borne in mind about the exit poll -

1) There is a significant chance that it will throw up a major shock.  That's happened in all of the last three general elections.  The 2005 exit poll forecast Tony Blair's majority to be "only" 66 seats, which was significantly lower than most people expected.  In 2010, it was predicted that the Cleggasm had melted away and left the Liberal Democrats with fewer seats than they started with - something that hardly anyone had entertained as a serious possibility.  And in 2015, expectations were completely turned on their heads as the Conservatives were predicted to have achieved a net gain, Labour were predicted to have suffered a net loss, and the SNP were forecast to have taken all but one seat in Scotland.

2) If a shock is predicted, it's highly likely to be reflected in the actual result.  In 2005, Labour ended up with exactly the 66 majority that was suggested.  And I'm sure we all remember Paddy Ashdown simply refusing to accept the exit poll's pessimistic estimates for the Lib Dems in both 2010 and 2015, and how he was later forced to eat his words.

So this is my worry.  We're all a little bit too cosy in our assumptions about the minimum number of seats we think the SNP are practically guaranteed to win.  Based on previous shocks, we should really be braced for almost any number to flash up on the screen - it could be below 40, in theory it could even be below 30.  And if the prediction is much worse than expected, we'll almost immediately have to reconcile ourselves with the likelihood that we're not looking at a 1992-style dud poll, but rather at a reasonably accurate prediction.

It's not too hard to construct a case for why the SNP might underperform expectations.  The polls we saw last night basically put the SNP in the same position - or perhaps a marginally worse position - than they were in at the time of the local elections.  None of us need any reminders that the SNP's lead over the Tories in those elections was only 7%, rather than the 10-15% that the polls would have led us to anticipate.  If you factor in the impact of independent candidates standing in areas where the Tories are strong, it's arguable that the SNP's de facto lead on the day was even lower than 7%.  Now, we've tended to assume that the SNP only suffered in those elections because of particularly extreme differential turnout - Tory supporters were whipped up into a frenzy over the issue of an independence referendum, while the SNP fought a rather bland campaign that didn't motivate their own core support.  I still think that's an extremely plausible theory...but what if it's wrong?  What if, plain and simply, the polls have been systemically and significantly overstating the SNP's true lead over the Tories?  In that case, all bets would be off for tonight.

That's the pessimistic side of the coin, but here's the optimistic side.  A couple of threads ago, Calum identified some of the SNP-to-Labour switchers among his own peer group - young people who support independence, but who wrongly believe that a vote for Labour is the most effective way of getting the Tories out.  I have a sneaking suspicion that if those people lived in Moray or in Perth & North Perthshire, they would be well aware by now, either from leaflets or through word of mouth, of the folly of that way of thinking in the context of the local battle.  It's just possible that the polarisation of this campaign along Tory v anti-Tory lines is actually working in the SNP's favour in Tory-SNP battleground seats, with natural Corbyn supporters swinging heavily behind the SNP.  If that's happening, the swing to Labour must be disproportionately taking place in ex-Labour heartlands - but even if that's true, the numbers might still be insufficient for Labour to take back very many seats from the SNP.  They're starting from such a long way back almost everywhere.

So that's the scenario in which it's feasible that the SNP might just about get the strong mid-40s result that everyone seems to be expecting - but if it does happen, it looks like it could be a bit of a tightrope-walk.

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As long-term readers know, I have a great regard for the predictive powers of Stephen Bush (in spite of the brief slanging-match I had with him after the Brexit referendum).  So I've been waiting with bated breath to hear his verdict on the suggestions that English Labour are doing much worse on the ground than the opinion polls suggest.  Intriguingly, he departs from the conventional wisdom in saying that the Labour surge is real, and that he's found evidence of it from speaking to local organisers.  However, he also thinks the extra votes are very inefficiently distributed and that Labour still face a net loss of seats even if their vote share increases markedly.

In a perverse way, I take some heart from that assessment.  If there's to be even the remotest chance of a hung parliament, the number one prerequisite is that the change in public opinion detected by the polls at least has to be real.

Devastation for Davidson as full-scale Scottish poll from Survation shows Tories slumping to third

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (Survation, telephone fieldwork) :

SNP 39% 
Labour 29% 
Conservatives 26% 
Liberal Democrats 6% 

The obvious health warning here is that Survation have established themselves as the most Labour-friendly pollster at GB-wide level, so if that (potential) skew has carried through to their Scottish polling, they may well be overstating Labour in this poll.  Which, ironically, would actually be good news for Labour, because the only party that is going to benefit from a Labour surge of this type in Scotland is the Conservative party.  If SNP voters are switching to Labour in SNP/Tory marginal seats because they think it's going to help get the Tories out...well, it's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.

As you may have seen in the previous post, the average of tonight's six Scottish subsamples is more in line with the recent full-scale poll from YouGov.  It puts the SNP on 42%, the Tories on 27% and Labour on 24%.

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UPDATE : A new full-scale poll from Panelbase shows a vaguely similar trend to Survation, but because of the different starting-point it still puts Labour in a distant third place.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (Panelbase) :

SNP 41% (-1)
Conservatives 30% (n/c)
Labour 22% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 5% (n/c)

Obviously it's a bit troubling to have two polls showing SNP leads of 10% and 11% on the eve of the election - but the odd thing is that, because there's a different party in second place in each one, averaging them produces a more favourable picture...

Average of Survation and Panelbase polls :

SNP 40.0% 
Conservatives 28.0% 
Labour 25.5% 
Liberal Democrats 5.5% 

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UPDATE II : There's also been a full-scale Scottish poll from BMG published tonight, but as with the last one from the same firm, it's of limited use because the fieldwork is out of date.  It was conducted between the 27th and 31st of May, and as we know, there may have been further movement to Labour since then.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (BMG) :

SNP 42% (-1)
Conservatives 27% (-3)
Labour 21% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+3)

One thing we can do with these numbers is make a comparison with the Survation and Panelbase polls that were conducted at roughly the same time.  A 15% SNP lead is higher than either of those two firms were showing (Panelbase had a 12% lead and Survation had a 13% lead), which at least raises the possibility that a more up-to-date BMG poll might have shown a slightly bigger SNP lead than we've seen from Panelbase and Survation tonight.  That's highly speculative, but it's perhaps a minor point of reassurance.  It certainly looks unlikely that a BMG poll conducted this week would have put Labour in second place.

Election Eve : Polling Roundup

We're midway through the barrel-load of GB-wide polls we're going to see tonight, so I'll use this post for rolling updates.  So far we've only seen three of the most Tory-friendly pollsters, and the picture they've been painting is one of stability -

* ICM have the Tory lead edging up 1% to 12%, but that could well just be margin of error noise.  It's also only 1% better than the lowest Tory lead ICM have reported at any point during the campaign.

ICM Scottish subsample : SNP 47%, Conservatives 30%, Labour 21%, Liberal Democrats 2%

* ComRes have the Tory lead falling from 12% to 10%, which could also be margin of error noise - but on the other hand it may be more significant than that, because 10% is the lowest lead ComRes have reported so far.

ComRes Scottish subsample : SNP 45%, Conservatives 27%, Labour 16%, Liberal Democrats 9%

* Panelbase show the gap steady at 8%, which means the Tories have failed to reverse the big drop in the last poll.  It's hard to make a meaningful comparison with the Panelbase polls in the early part of the campaign, because the firm's methodology was overhauled a couple of weeks ago to make it more similar to ComRes and ICM (which automatically made it more Tory-friendly).  However, it seems likely that if the new methodology had been used throughout, the Tory lead would never have been lower than it is now.

Panelbase Scottish subsample : SNP 40%, Conservatives 30%, Labour 24%, Liberal Democrats 4%

UPDATE : Here comes more...

* Kantar/TNS have a potentially significant poll showing the Tory lead cut in half from 10% to 5%.  That may exaggerate the trend because the previous poll from the firm showed a slight increase in the Tory lead, but nevertheless 5% is comfortably the lowest gap they've reported so far, and arguably moves the race into hung parliament territory.  Some of the fieldwork is a little out of date, though - although the poll concluded today, it's been running for a full week.

Kantar/TNS Scottish subsample : SNP 38%, Labour 31%, Conservatives 21%, Liberal Democrats 7%  (Note : This is a very rough estimate based on the raw numbers in the datasets, and doesn't take turnout weighting into account.)

* YouGov, which in recent weeks has become regarded as one of the most Labour-friendly pollsters, has unexpectedly shown the Tory lead jumping back up from 4% to 7%.  That's a bolt from the blue, because this afternoon's update of the YouGov projection model continued to show a 4% gap in the popular vote.  The fieldwork for the new poll is probably very up-to-date, so we may be looking at the first evidence of a late and decisive swing away from Labour...or it may be meaningless noise caused by random sampling variation. (Update : It turns out YouGov have made methodological changes for this poll, so that may be the real explanation.)

YouGov Scottish subsample : SNP 41%, Conservatives 28%, Labour 22%, Liberal Democrats 7%

* For what it's worth, some firm I've never heard of called Qriously is actually putting Labour ahead by around 3%.  The poll is being billed as "the first poll of the campaign to show a Labour lead", but as this firm are presumably very inexperienced in the field of political polling, a large helping of scepticism is warranted.  It's highly unlikely we'll get Scottish subsample figures, but the SNP are on 3.8% of the GB-wide vote, which perhaps puts them somewhere in the 40s in Scotland.

* Leaving aside unheard-of newcomers, Survation have firmly established themselves as the most Labour-friendly pollster in recent days.  They haven't followed YouGov back into the pack tonight - their final poll continues to show a miniscule Tory lead of only around 1%.  In the unlikely event that this is a fully accurate call, Jeremy Corbyn would probably become Prime Minister with the SNP's help.

Survation Scottish subsample : SNP 41%, Labour 29%, Conservatives 25%, Liberal Democrats 5%

* Oddly, The Herald (yes, our Herald) have commissioned a GB-wide poll from BMG and it shows a 13% Tory lead.  I don't think that really tells us anything other than that they must have used similar methodology to ICM and ComRes.

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The average Tory lead in tonight's polls is 8% if you don't include Qriously, and around 6.6% if you do.  The latter figure is on the fringes of potential hung parliament territory, but would be more likely to produce a modest overall majority.  However, there's no particular reason to attach magical significance to the average lead - it may well be that the most accurate pollster will be the one on either the Labour-friendly or Tory-friendly extreme edge of the spectrum.  (And of course most pundits will tell you it's going to be the latter.)

The average of the six Scottish subsamples that have appeared tonight is...

SNP 42.0%
Conservatives 26.8%
Labour 23.8%
Liberal Democrats 5.7%

Those numbers are eerily close to the findings of recent full-scale Scottish polls.  Due to the even split in the unionist vote, they'd probably produce a pretty decent result for the SNP in terms of seat numbers.

YouGov's Election Eve projection suggests the SNP are on course to win three-quarters of Scottish seats

YouGov have just updated their projection model for what will presumably be the third-last time (I'm guessing there'll be the usual update tomorrow afternoon, and then a final one after the polls close).  Again, the news is mixed - the SNP are on 44 seats, which is two lower than yesterday, but two higher than the day before that.  And if you look a little closer, the picture seems to be considerably more reassuring than the update of two days ago, because the SNP's floor (the minimum number of seats they'd be expected to win within a 95% confidence interval) now stands at 30 rather than 17.  Their ceiling is now 53, which is only one down on yesterday.  The most logical conclusion is that there was a particularly good batch of interviews for Labour about three days ago which brought a large number of central belt seats closer to being competitive, but that the threat has receded somewhat since then.

At UK-wide level, the situation is utterly bizarre.  The consensus among pundits and "sources" that Labour are set for a pounding tomorrow is growing ever stronger, and you'd think eventually that would start to be reflected in what YouGov are hearing from their respondents.  Instead, today's update shows the Tories slipping to yet another new low - just 33 seats ahead of Labour in a hung parliament.

UK-wide seats projection (YouGov) :

Conservatives 302
Labour 269
SNP 44
Liberal Democrats 12
Plaid Cymru 2
Greens 1
"Others" 2
Northern Ireland Parties 18

HUNG PARLIAMENT : Conservatives short by 24, Labour short by 57

Even the Conservatives' ceiling would only put them on 334 seats, which would be an overall majority of just 18 seats (or perhaps 20 after John Bercow is taken into account) - barely any improvement at all on what David Cameron achieved two years ago.  I have to say these numbers aren't really passing the smell test, but we'll find out soon enough.

Will you be needing a new leader to INTERVIEW, Ruth? Staggering SurveyMonkey poll suggests Theresa May's majority could be EXTIRPATED

As I noted in my blogpost this morning, a consensus is emerging among the commentariat that the Tories are coasting to victory, and that some opinion polls bear little or no resemblance to what is really happening on the ground.  One popular theory is that polls are picking up too many Labour supporters because those people are more enthused, and thus keener to be interviewed.  I certainly don't dismiss that consensus out of hand - it may well be entirely right.  But when you see an enormous survey of 11,000 people, seemingly bang up-to-date, conducted by a firm that actually didn't perform at all badly in the 2015 election, and it points to the Tories losing their majority, you at least have to take a step back and consider the possibility that there may be two sides to this story.

GB-wide voting intentions (SurveyMonkey) :

Conservatives 42% (-2)
Labour 38% (n/c)

(Other parties' vote shares are not available yet.)

To put SurveyMonkey's limited track-record into perspective, in their final 2015 poll they put the Tories on 34% and Labour on 28%, which meant they slightly underestimated both parties but got the Tory lead almost exactly right.  It's possible they may have just got freakishly lucky in that individual poll due to sampling variation, but it has to be said there were hardly any other polls that were so close to being accurate (with the famous unpublished Survation poll being an obvious exception).

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You might be interested in Alasdair Soussi's article on the Al Jazeera website about the battle for Scottish seats at the general election - it features quotes from myself, Simon Pia, Ian Duncan and Professor James Mitchell.  You can read it HERE.