Remember that song about "when Nigel is in Number 10"...?

I was interviewed on Radio Sputnik yesterday (you can listen to the clip HERE), and I happened to hear the item that was on before me, which contained the startling suggestion that a No Deal Brexit won't come about because of pressure from the Brexit Party, but instead because the Brexit Party actually wins an election and forms a government.  Now I don't want to alarm anyone unduly, but consider the following...

* Even before the European elections, the Brexit Party was just one point off the outright lead in a poll of Westminster voting intentions.

* With the momentum from Sunday night's result, it's perfectly possible (and arguably highly likely) that polls will be published in the coming days showing the Brexit Party with a lead for Westminster.

* The Peterborough by-election is still to come, and looks like a shoo-in for the Brexit Party.  That'll be a sensational outcome in what should be a Labour-Tory marginal, and could be one of those iconic by-election results that decisively change the political weather (think Hamilton '67, Govan '73 or Darlington '83).

* Some snowball effects just keep rolling.  In 2015 it was unthinkable that Jeremy Corbyn was going to maintain his lead in the Labour leadership election...until it suddenly became apparent that he couldn't be caught.  In 2016 it was obvious that Donald Trump wouldn't really become the Republican nominee.  And then when he became the Republican nominee, it was equally obvious that he couldn't really defeat Hillary Clinton.  But he did.  The most improbable outcome of a presidential election in living memory actually happened, and we're all living with the consequences.

* You might think that if there was any danger at all of Farage reaching Number 10, a coalition of Remain voters and sane Leavers would turn out in droves to stop him, in much the same way that French voters backed "the crook not the fascist" when Chirac ended up in a run-off with Le Pen.  But the thing is that in a first-past-the-post election, you would actually need to know which party to coalesce around to stop the bad guy - and that call wouldn't necessarily be clear-cut.  At the moment it's not clear at all.

It's not all doom and gloom, though.  Farage as PM implementing a No Deal Brexit wouldn't just win soft Nos over to independence.  Even the hard Nos would start coming over in a torrent.

And now we're being asked to believe that the SNP's support consists mainly of hapless unionists who didn't know they were voting for a pro-indy party

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've thoroughly enjoyed the last couple of days.  It's been years and years since we last saw the anti-independence parties flailing about like this.  Having tried and failed to get some purchase out of the optimistic line that the highest share of the vote anywhere in western Europe wasn't really good enough for the SNP, they're now attempting to convince us that the SNP's voters are all unionists who were blissfully unaware on polling day that they were voting for a pro-independence party, and are now profoundly shocked at the discovery that Nicola Sturgeon is planning an independence referendum.

Honestly. That's what they're saying. Don't believe me?  Here's Exhibit A from the ever-reliable Alex Cole-Hamilton of the Lib Dems -

"Nicola Sturgeon will shortly betray pro-UK Remainers who lent SNP vote by presenting it as mandate for #indyref2"

(I've spared his blushes by tidying up the punctuation a bit.)

And Exhibit B from a Twitter troll called Patrick Branchfield -

"I don’t know if I’m more angry at @NicolaSturgeon for these lies or the plonkers who vote for her?

EVERY election she says a vote for them isn’t about independence, minutes after the polls close these votes are weapons for #indy2

Waken up to this woman please Scotland"

Hmmm. Not for nothing is the SNP's support for independence known as "Scotland's best kept secret". And of course Nicola Sturgeon cunningly ramped up the concealment by publicly announcing her intention to hold an independence referendum a few weeks before the election. These hapless unionist SNP voters really didn't stand a chance.

Why has the political weather transformed so completely since Sunday? Basically because the shock to the system that the SNP suffered two years ago has just been precisely reversed. In 2017, Nicola Sturgeon announced an independence referendum just before a national election was held (although of course she didn't know that election was coming) and there was a significant swing against the SNP. Interestingly, John Curtice noted on Sunday that the swing was misinterpreted, and it wasn't so much a backlash against an independence referendum as it was a rejection of the SNP's pro-Europeanism by a minority of Leave voters. But nevertheless, it was widely perceived to be the turning of the tide against independence, and the unionist parties were emboldened to believe that the more intransigent they were in their opposition to an indyref, the more voters would reward them.

That theory has just been tested to destruction. Once again, Nicola Sturgeon made a referendum announcement just before a national election, but this time there was a dramatic swing in the SNP's favour. Once again, the Tories ran a single issue "No to Indyref 2" campaign, but this time they took a hammering. On some sort of level, the unionist parties must be questioning the lessons they thought they learned two years ago. The cognitive dissonance in Labour ranks will be particularly extreme - they'll be thinking "the voters weren't supposed to react like this".

I can only repeat the question I've been asking for four years. Given that Labour's disaster in 2015 was caused pretty much exclusively by the loss of Yes voters who were appalled by the party's behaviour during the indyref, how do they think they're going to reverse that result by doubling down on British nationalism? OK, I understand that they've also lost unionist support to the Tories since 2015 and they're having to fight a rearguard action to deal with that, but ultimately they're never going to regain their previous dominance of Scottish politics unless they start making their peace with Yes voters.

It's big, it's decisive: the SNP have won the European elections in Scotland by a landslide

So, as I quite often do in the immediate aftermath of an election, here are a few random thoughts in no particular order...

* Yesterday I posted a list of benchmarks for SNP success, and the party has sailed past all of them - including the one I was most dubious about, ie. the 36.9% share of the vote achieved in the 2017 general election.

* The most important thing from the point of view of both the SNP and the wider independence movement is that the 2017 result is no longer a problem.  It should never have been a problem in the first place, because it was a landslide for the SNP of 1987 Thatcher style proportions.  It saw them win 60% of the seats and almost as big a share of the vote as they won tonight.  There was only ever an issue because of the ludicrous media spin on the result - but that spin is now at an end.  In terms of political momentum, the swing in the SNP's favour tonight supercedes the swing against them two years ago, meaning that we'll hear no more about Ruth Davidson's supposed fightback against an independence referendum - or at least not until and unless she reverses tonight's result in a subsequent election, which looks a very remote prospect.  For now the SNP are indisputably the ascendant party, and to the extent that any party can claim to speak for this country, the SNP have earned the right to make that claim.

* That said, I have a sneaking suspicion that the 2017 tribute act in the Tory leaflets may have been the crucial factor in saving Ruth Davidson's sole Scottish seat.  It would seem plausible that the tired old "no more referendums" pitch may have won back just enough of the hardline unionist voters who would otherwise have been tempted by the Brexit Party.  If so, we should raise a glass to Ms Davidson's lack of imagination, because the Tories' success in clinging on to their seat contributed to the Brexit Party's failure to take a second seat.  If the final result had been SNP 3, Brexit Party 2, Lib Dems 1, the perception would have been that the SNP win wasn't quite so clear-cut.  As it is, no-one can really doubt the SNP's dominance.

* In every other sense apart from the fact that they won a seat, it was a truly awful result for the Scottish Tories - they hit an all-time low in the popular vote.  Only proportional representation saved their bacon.  We've all seen the map - if this had been a first-past-the-post Westminster election, the Tories would have been completely wiped out and the SNP would have won almost every single seat.  The trend was no different in the north-east seats that the Tories gained two years ago and that had looked absolutely rock-solid for them until a few short weeks ago.  This is happening partly because of the resurgence in SNP support, and partly because the natural Tory vote is split down the middle between two parties.  So the SNP's chances of winning back their former north-east heartlands in a snap general election depend to some extent on whether the Brexit Party vote holds up in the coming months, and indeed on whether the Brexit Party decide to contest every Westminster seat.  (I suspect they'll feel obliged to, because any party that wants to present itself as seeking to win an election can't give its opponents a free pass in selected seats.)

* Although the SNP's 38% share of the vote tonight looks similar to the 37% achieved in 2017, pound-for-pound it was a much better result, simply because this was a proportional representation election and there was more competition to beat.  The Brexit Party are the most obvious example of that, but the Greens also took 8% of the vote, in complete contrast to the general election in which they barely put up any candidates.  Ian Blackford made a telling point on the BBC results programme - the SNP's winning share of the vote in Scotland was larger than the share achieved by the first-placed party in England.  That wasn't the case in 2017.

* As far as the interminable discussions about tactical voting are concerned, the SNP could only have gained a fourth seat if a very large number of Green and Lib Dem voters had switched to them, and the Greens could only have won a seat if a very large number of SNP and Lib Dem voters had switched.  The reality is that the whole idea that any party just needed a modest number of tactical votes to tip them over the edge was proved to be bogus.  Anyone who followed the advice of the Remain Voter website to "tactically vote Lib Dem" in Scotland must be feeling a bit foolish, because the Lib Dems would have comfortably won a seat anyway, and they were nowhere near to winning a second seat.

* If there's a cloud on the horizon for the SNP, it might be Jo Swinson.  I know some people will scoff at that idea, and I entirely share the view that she's going to be an uninspiring leader and that the Lib Dems' Britain-wide interests would be best served by choosing someone else.  But history does show that British party leaders with a Scottish accent tend to be worth a few extra percentage points to their party in Scotland (for example the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy unexpectedly outpolled the SNP in 2005).  The problem may have been exacerbated by the fact that Swinson will not, as we assumed until recently, be leading a party that no-one is paying any attention to, but rather one that suddenly seems to have captured the zeitgeist south of the border.  But the impact of that might be counterintuitive - if she primarily takes Scottish votes from Labour and the Tories, that could split the unionist vote in such a way that would make it easier for the SNP to win certain Westminster seats.  We'll just have to see how it all plays out.

* Does the Scottish Labour wipeout mean that the game's up?  Maybe, although some people made the same assumption after 2015, only for Labour to show some signs of life in the 2017 local and general elections.  This may not be the final twist in the tale, but Richard Leonard's party are certainly in a highly vulnerable position, and a few more results like tonight could mean that they eventually cease to exist as a credible electoral force.

* Although the UK result was a complex one, the London media and political establishment love winners and losers, so I suspect that the Brexit Party's twelve-point lead over the second placed Lib Dems will be more than enough to ensure that the No Deal Brexiteers in the Tory party will remain emboldened during the forthcoming leadership election.

* It's to the credit of the new BBC Scotland channel that it ran its own results programme, but having dipped in and out of it I did think it was odd that it didn't seem to cover the Scottish results as they came in, which you would have thought was the main point of such a programme.  Viewers found out about the results almost indirectly - a presenter would say something like "oh, by the way, a few more local authorities have declared since we last spoke..."

Some benchmarks for the SNP's performance tonight

It's almost terrifying to consider the impact that the results of the low-turnout election we'll see tonight could have on our future.  Think of the transformative effect of the English local elections earlier this month - by historical standards the Liberal Democrats didn't actually do all that well, but because they were the only one of the main London parties that made gains, the momentum generated was all for them and the political weather was decisively altered.  In one fell swoop, Change UK was effectively taken out of the game.  In the early 80s, the late and disgraced Liberal MP Cyril Smith argued that his party shouldn't be seeking to cooperate with the SDP, but rather to "strangle them at birth".  A few decades on, it looks like the Lib Dems have heeded that advice in a strikingly similar situation.

The biggest impact of a surprise result tonight could be on the prospects for a no deal Brexit.  The main reason that no deal has suddenly become acceptable language for Tory leadership candidates to use in polite company is the surge for the Brexit Party in the polls.  But if the Brexit Party underperform expectations tonight, and particularly if the Lib Dems do well, the internal mood within the Tories could swing back in the opposite direction.  We already know that turnout has risen more in English local authority areas that voted Remain, so that's not an entirely implausible scenario.  European elections have a history of throwing up major shocks, perhaps because there's so much scope for differential turnout to come into play.  The 1999 outcome, with a clear Conservative victory and several seats each for UKIP and the Greens, stands out as a result that was way outside the parameters of what most commentators thought was possible.  I wouldn't be totally amazed if we see a very close run thing in the popular vote between the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems tonight.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting slightly jittery about the Scottish result.  It was a bit troubling to hear the estimates that the overall turnout in Scotland, along with the increase in the turnout, was lower than in England.  Turnout was never going to be super-high, but a tolerably high figure would probably have suited the SNP better.  And you might think that the English pattern of turnout going up more in strongly Remain areas would also apply here, but I'm not so sure.  The voting patterns in the EU referendum were so different in Scotland, with socio-economic groups that went heavily to Leave just over the border in north-east England going the opposite way here, partly because pro-Europeanism is so closely associated with support for an independent Scotland.  One possibility is that there may be a difference in turnout between leafy, affluent Remain strongholds and the more working-class areas that voted strongly Remain, and if so, that could favour the Lib Dems more than the SNP.  The good news, though, is that the D'Hondt formula favours larger parties, and it may be possible for the SNP to take a third seat even if the polls have overstated their support (although they'd still need to exceed the 29% of the vote they took last time).

Here are a few benchmarks to look out for...

2 seats: This would keep the SNP on the same number of seats they've had continuously since 1994, and would technically equal their all-time high.

3 seats: This would beat the SNP's all-time high, and would also be the highest proportion of Scottish seats that any party has won since proportional representation was introduced twenty years ago.  (Labour took three seats in 1999, but there were eight Scottish seats back then rather than six.)

29.0% of the vote: This would equal the SNP's performance of five years ago.

29.1% of the vote: This would equal the all-time high for the SNP (and for any other party in Scotland) since proportional representation was introduced.

32.6% of the vote: This would equal the all-time high for the SNP in all European elections.  But it's arguably an unfair comparison, because that figure was recorded in 1994 under first-past-the-post, which is a system that incentivises voters to back larger parties.

36.9% of the vote: This would equal the SNP's performance at the last Westminster general election.  It's a real 'apples and oranges' comparison, but you can guarantee the media will still attempt it.

I'll also be keeping an eye out for any sign of the ex-YouGov propagandist Peter Kellner on the BBC's results coverage.  I've told this story a number of times, but at the last European elections (held just a few months before the indyref) Kellner wrongly announced to viewers that Labour had emerged victorious in Scotland, at a stage in the evening when it was already pretty obvious from the average swing that the SNP were going to hold on for the win.  He never corrected that rather convenient error or apologised for it, and it was quite some time before Alex Salmond was able to point out that the SNP were in fact on top in the popular vote.

There has been some talk (mainly from Iain Dale and Daniel Hannan) that the Tories might be wiped out completely across the UK, but I can't see that happening.  Even if they have a spectacularly bad night, they should hold on to the odd seat in larger regions.

Setting the record straight on the D'Hondt formula

A commenter on a previous thread has alerted me to a piece of polling analysis on Newsnet that is based on an entirely false premise.  The article claims that Best For Britain are wrong to suggest that the figures from their recent YouGov poll would translate into three SNP seats in the European Parliament, and that the correct figure should be two.  It also goes on to say: "Why Best for Britain have allocated 3 seats to the SNP when their poll results actually only give them just 2 is strange. Perhaps because of an unexplained adjustment or wider polling influence."

In fact, the Newsnet piece is wrong and Best For Britain are right.  The 38% of the vote that the SNP are given by the poll would comfortably be enough to win them three seats, and it would actually leave them not that far away from four.  This is not because of any "unexplained adjustment" or "wider polling influence" - it's simply because of how the D'Hondt formula works.  The Newsnet author wrongly believes that D'Hondt divides a party's vote by two every time it wins a seat, but that's not the case at all.  As Newsnet is a pro-indy website, this is clearly an honest mistake rather than anything malicious, but it's still important to set the record straight because it could lead to further confusion about how the voting system works.  (And Alex Cole-Hamilton would be only too delighted about that!)

The D'Hondt formula actually divides each party's original vote by the number of seats it has already won, plus one.  So this is how the calculation would play out if the Best For Britain poll happens to be accurate...

First count: SNP 38, Brexit Party 19.8, Greens 11, Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Liberal Democrats 7, UKIP 2, Change UK 2

SNP win first seat

Second count: Brexit Party 19.8, SNP 19 (38 ÷ 2), Greens 11, Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Liberal Democrats 7, UKIP 2, Change UK 2

Brexit Party win second seat

Third count: SNP 19 (38 ÷ 2), Greens 11, Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Brexit Party 9.9 (19.8 ÷ 2), Liberal Democrats 7, UKIP 2, Change UK 2

SNP win third seat

Fourth count: SNP 12.7 (38 ÷ 3), Greens 11, Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Brexit Party 9.9 (19.8 ÷ 2), Liberal Democrats 7, UKIP 2, Change UK 2

SNP win fourth seat

Fifth count: Greens 11, Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Brexit Party 9.9 (19.8 ÷ 2), SNP 9.5 (38 ÷ 4), Liberal Democrats 7, UKIP 2, Change UK 2

Greens win fifth seat

Sixth count: Labour 10.2, Conservatives 10, Brexit Party 9.9 (19.8 ÷ 2), SNP 9.5 (38 ÷ 4), Liberal Democrats 7, Greens 5.5 (11 ÷ 2), UKIP 2, Change UK 2

Labour win sixth seat

Final seat allocation: SNP 3, Brexit Party 1, Greens 1, Labour 1

Here's the proof that the 'Remain Voter' website can't be trusted

So just to recap: yesterday I expressed my suspicions that the 'Remain Voter' website might have some sort of agenda, because the explanation for their advice that pro-EU voters in Scotland should cast a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats appeared to be absolute gibberish.  They stated that switching to the Lib Dems on Thursday could somehow help the SNP win a fourth seat - which is arithmetically impossible.

Today someone on Twitter wrongly stated that Remain Voter were claiming that people should vote for the Lib Dems because the SNP don't even have a chance of a fourth seat, and that any extra SNP votes would therefore be wasted.  This was my reply -

"They actually don't say that. Their advice is much more nutty than that. They say that the SNP *can* win a fourth seat, and that voting Lib Dem will help them do it. Mysteriously (or perhaps I should say understandably), they don't explain how that is arithmetically possible."

That attracted the attention of 'Remain Voter' themselves, who foolishly tried to cover their embarrassment with a grossly misleading response -

"No we don't say that. We say: "Recent polling shows SNP confidently gaining 3 seats with undecided Labour voters blocking a 4th. Remain Voter modelling shows LDs have the momentum to win a seat..""

And my reply -

"You little fibber. You've hurriedly edited your page - you know perfectly well that the previous wording was exactly what I said. It was as follows: "Remain Voter modelling shows LDs have the momentum to win a seat while helping the SNP win the 4th seat.""

In case you want to see the proof with your own eyes, click HERE to see what their website looked like two days ago.

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you want to contract out your voting choices to an Anglocentric website that has proved itself to be so slippery and deceitful.

And this might also be a suitable moment to give another plug to the new Phantom Power film I was involved in.  I make the point in it that the SNP do indeed have a realistic chance of winning a fourth seat on Thursday - but only if they receive 40%+ of the vote.  Switching your vote to a unionist party like the Lib Dems sure as hell isn't going to help.

Your four-minute guide to how Thursday's European election could be a giant leap towards an independence referendum

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Bannockburn with the legendary pro-indy film-maker Phantom Power to record a short piece about the forthcoming European elections.  You can watch it below, and I think you'll agree that it ends on a suitably rousing note!

If anyone tells you that "tactical voting" is possible on Thursday, they're either misleading you or they don't know what they're talking about

Over the last few weeks I've made the point a number of times that it's not possible to "vote tactically" in the European elections, regardless of whether the intended effect is to increase the chances of Scottish independence or to increase the chances of Britain remaining in the European Union.  We all just have one vote for one party, and seats in the European Parliament will be allocated in proportion to the share of the vote received by each party.  It's hard to think of a voting system less conducive to tactical voting than that.  And yet in recent days there have been two determined attempts to convince the public that pro-Remain tactical voting is both feasible and desirable.  First of all Gina Miller gave a suspiciously hazy summary of research based on "machine learning" that claimed, among other things, that Remain supporters in Scotland should tactically switch to the SNP on Thursday.  Then a website called 'Remain Voter' gave an even sketchier explanation for their advice that Scottish voters should switch tactically to the Liberal Democrats.

As there is a direct contradiction between the two recommendations (Miller and 'Remain Voter' also contradict each other in Wales and some of the English regions), it hopefully won't be too controversial if I say that both can be safely ignored.  But what's going on here?  I suspect Miller's initiative is well-intentioned but misguided - she's probably seen the dramatic effect of tactical voting in first-past-the-post elections (it cost the Tories a lot of seats in 1997, for example) and imagines that the same can be achieved in any election, regardless of the voting system.  She's used opinion polling to estimate the state of current voting intentions and then commissioned experts to judge which tactical movements between one Remain party and another would maximise the total number of seats won by Remain parties.  But that's where she hits the age-old problem: the results you get out are only as good as the data you put in.  She's betting the house on her poll results being exceptionally accurate, and if they're not, her recommendations will have no sound basis.  Yes, she's using the most advanced polling methods, but the extreme level of accuracy required for the exercise is simply beyond what is actually possible.  I would guess her experts must understand that perfectly well, but if you're being paid handsomely it's easy enough to turn a blind eye to that sort of fundamental snag.

I'm rather less charitable about the motivations of the 'Remain Voter' website, because their stated logic for the Lib Dem recommendation in Scotland is so mind-bogglingly perverse that it's hard to believe there isn't some sort of agenda behind the whole thing.  Here it is in all its glory -

"Scotland is interesting! Recent polling shows SNP confidently gaining 3 seats with undecided Labour voters blocking a 4th.

Remain Voter modelling shows LDs have the momentum to win a seat while helping the SNP win the 4th seat.

Smart voting can win a seat from a pro-Brexit party while capitalising on Labour's lack of commitment to their majority Remain membership."

Yes, folks, they really are saying that "tactically voting for the Lib Dems" can somehow "help the SNP to win a fourth seat".  Which is arithmetically impossible.  The lack of explanation for how they think the laws of mathematics can be bent on this occasion is rather deafening.  Someone suggested to me on Twitter that if a very large number of Labour voters were to switch to the Lib Dems, that could achieve the claimed effect, with the Lib Dems taking one seat and the SNP taking four.  But that's not "tactical voting" - that's voters switching sides from a Leave party to a Remain party.  The whole thing is absolute gibberish.

The only limited sense in which there's a grain of truth in the claims about tactical voting is that if you vote for a pro-Remain party that has no realistic chance of winning a seat in your electoral region (that would apply to Change UK in Scotland and in most other electoral regions), you're wasting your vote and you'd be better off voting for a more popular Remain party (ie. the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens or the Liberal Democrats).  But beyond that very narrow point, the system really can't be gamed, and you should just vote for whichever party you like best and agree with most.

An all-out independence push would have been better, but 'Stop Brexit' is still a far more inspiring message than 'Stronger for Scotland' was

There were two obvious possibilities for the SNP's pitch in the European elections - they could either make it all about independence and seek a 'quadruple lock mandate' for an independence referendum, or they could urge Remain voters to use the SNP as a vehicle to stop Brexit.  It's clear from the campaign launch that they've plumped full-bloodedly for the latter option.  There's a paradox here, because that may well prove to be a strategically sound decision from the SNP's own party interests - it does seem intuitively likely that favourable showings in recent opinion polls can be partly attributed to the clarity of the 'stop Brexit' message, and after all the Remain constituency in Scotland is somewhat bigger than the Yes constituency.  But ultimately the SNP exist to bring about independence, and any strategy that maximises the party's support while squandering an opportunity to win an independence-specific mandate may be counterproductive in the long-run.

It's important to stress, however, that this doesn't mean that the SNP have entirely failed to learn the lesson of the 2017 general election.  One reason why refusing to campaign hard on independence in 2017 was such a mistake was because there was no alternative message that was going to inspire people to go to the polling stations - all we had was the vague "Stronger for Scotland", which couldn't even begin to compete with the directness of the Tories' "No to Indyref 2" as a get-out-the-vote device.  This time, the alternative to a straightforward independence pitch does have every chance of capturing people's imaginations.  And because it's only a couple of weeks since Nicola Sturgeon restated her intention to hold a pre-2021 independence referendum, a good result for the SNP is bound to be seen as some kind of endorsement of an indyref, regardless of the exact campaign message.  So although I would have preferred this election to be used for an in-your-face push towards independence, it's fair to say I can live with the decision that's been made.

*  *  *

Somebody posted the Euro ballot paper on Twitter, and what leapt out at me is that Nigel Farage appears to have missed a trick by registering his party name as "The Brexit Party" rather than "Brexit Party", which means he misses out on being top of the ballot on alphabetical order.  (I had actually been assuming for months that one of the main reasons he chose the name was precisely because it started with a 'B'.)  Instead, pride of place goes to Change UK, whose presence on the ballot as an independent force may spell trouble for the Liberal Democrats.  I wouldn't by any means dismiss the Lib Dems' chances of nicking a seat in Scotland - although their success in the English local elections was wildly exaggerated, they'll still have gained momentum from the way in which it was reported.  But they're fishing in the same pond as Change UK - both parties appeal to hardline Remain voters who oppose independence, and if that vote is split, it could make it much harder for the Lib Dems to reach the de facto threshold for a Scottish seat, which in turn could create an opening for other parties (including the SNP).

If the European elections go ahead, the SNP's chances could be boosted by a split Kipper vote

Just as an interesting addendum to the previous post about the increasing possibility that the UK may take part in this May's European Parliament election after all, here is the result of the 2014 Euro-election in Scotland...

SNP 29.0%
Labour 25.9%
Conservatives 17.2%
UKIP 10.5%
Greens 8.1%
Liberal Democrats 7.1%

Scotland has six seats in the European Parliament, and there was never any real doubt about where five of them would go - the SNP and Labour were both bound to take at least two each, and the Tories at least one.  But the final seat was a dogfight, and several parties were able to make a plausible case for being in the running to win it.  You might remember that the Greens did their usual thing of telling SNP voters to switch "tactically" - supposedly to thwart UKIP.  But in fact if UKIP hadn't been there, the SNP would have claimed the elusive third seat that they had been trying and failing to win ever since proportional representation was first introduced in 1999.

Under the d'Hondt system, each seat is distributed individually, with the vote for each party being divided by the number of seats they have already won, plus one.  So using percentages rather than absolute numbers for convenience, here is how the calculation looked for the final seat in 2014 -

UKIP 10.5%
SNP 9.7%
Labour 8.6%
Conservatives 8.6%
Greens 8.1%
Liberal Democrats 7.1%

Why does this matter for any forthcoming election in May?  Because we know that the "Kipper" vote is likely to be split in a way that it wasn't five years ago.  Nigel Farage, David Coburn and others will stand for their new Brexit Party, and will take a lot of UKIP voters with them - but probably not all, simply because the UKIP brand is so well-established.  (Indeed, a lot of people may well vote UKIP on the false assumption that Farage is still a member or even the leader.)  I suspect the two parties may 'knock each other out', and divide the hardline Brexit vote in such a way that it's impossible for either to win a seat in Scotland.

The Lib Dems have been quietly doing quite well in recent Scottish polls, but they may suffer a similar fate if the Independent Group feel compelled to enter the fray.  At least in Britain-wide polls, the Lib Dem vote generally seems to be significantly lower if the Independent Group are offered as an option, presumably because the Lib Dem and TIG votes are drawn from the same centrist pool.

Effectively this means that the SNP's chances of winning a third seat this year may not be seriously threatened by either UKIP or the Lib Dems.  The likelihood is that the Tories will comfortably win two seats this time, which could leave the final seat as a straight fight between the SNP and Labour.  If, for example, Labour take 21% of the vote, the SNP would probably win the final seat with 32% or higher.  (It may seem obvious that the SNP should be doing a lot better than 32%, but voting patterns in European elections have traditionally been a little different.)

*  *  *

Undoubtedly the most amusing part of tonight's votes was when the commentator on BBC Parliament revealed that David Mundell had abstained on the main motion, and mused that this might lead to resignation.  Obviously nobody had bothered to tell this particular BBC employee about the only cast-iron law of modern politics - ie. that David Mundell never, ever resigns under any circumstances whatsoever.  Sure enough, it turned out that the traditional rules had been relaxed to allow ministers to defy a three-line whip without resigning or being sacked, as long as they 'only' abstained rather than voting with the opposition.  A government that has to go to such extreme lengths because it can't afford to lose David Mundell is in a very dark place indeed.

And I doubt it will prove to be a cost-free action - Brexiteer ministers will now expect (and demand) the same right to abstain on future important votes with impunity.  Collective cabinet responsibility as we know it has ceased to exist, which could make an early general election unavoidable.

An intriguing straw in the wind from YouGov

Because of the Bank Holiday we've only had three YouGov daily polls of GB-wide Westminster voting intention this week, but the Scottish subsamples from two of them have shown the SNP in the lead, and the other one had a relatively narrow Labour lead.  Here are today's figures -

SNP 34%
Labour 31%
Conservatives 16%
Liberal Democrats 7%
Greens 6%
UKIP 6%

This could still be a fluke caused by sampling variation, but YouGov's methodology for GB-wide polls is so unfavourable for the SNP that it's extremely unusual for them to be in the lead in two subsamples in the space of three days.  With anecdotal reports of an increased number of people coming forward to help the Yes campaign as a direct result of UKIP's success south of the border, this could be one worth watching.

It seems, however, that I may have spoken too soon about the limited effect of UKIP's surge on the GB-wide headline numbers.  Today's poll has the highest Labour lead in a couple of months (albeit only by 1%), which will have been partly caused by Tory voters switching to UKIP, who are up to an unusually high 16%.  What happens from here may depend on whether the Tories can hold off the UKIP challenge in next week's parliamentary by-election in Newark.

*  *  *

Something very peculiar has happened to the BBC referendum poll tracker since I posted about it yesterday.  They seem to have removed the first of the two Panelbase polls conducted for the Sunday Times this year, meaning that they're now acknowledging the existence of only ONE out of SIX Panelbase referendum polls to have been conducted in 2014 so far!

Sign the petition : the broadcasters MUST give David Coburn and UKIP a fair chance to speak on behalf of the No campaign

I've never started a petition before, but when I think of what a democratic outrage it would be if the BBC and STV don't ensure that "Scotland's newest political force" is fairly represented within the No campaign's allotted 50% of broadcast time between now and September...well, I struggle to contain my fury, quite frankly.  I'm sure Labour's Margaret Curran will sign the petition even if no-one else does, because by all accounts she kept whispering "yes!" every time she saw a pile of UKIP votes at the count, so she seems to be particularly keen on having the delightful David Coburn speak on her campaign's behalf on a regular basis.

We demand that the broadcasters give UKIP a fair chance to speak on behalf of the No campaign

Until now, broadcasters such as the BBC and STV have rarely permitted UKIP to make the case for the anti-independence campaign. This is clearly now an unsustainable state of affairs given that 17% of the votes cast for anti-independence parties in the European elections went to UKIP, who now hold one of Scotland's six seats in the European Parliament. We call upon the broadcasters to ensure that the full range, breadth, depth, diversity and complexity of anti-independence opinion in Scotland is appropriately represented in future, and specifically that where there is a head-to-head debate between Yes and No, the "Better Together" representative is replaced on approximately one-fifth of occasions by David Coburn, Nigel Farage, or ideally Lord Monckton.

Click HERE to sign the petition.

It's true : a sizeable minority of UKIP voters will say Yes to (Scottish) independence in September

Scottish Skier mentioned on an earlier thread that one-quarter of people who voted UKIP in Scotland last Thursday will vote Yes in the independence referendum.  That was quite a startling thought, so I had a look at the last poll from each of the three firms that conducted full-scale European voting intention polls in Scotland.  Unfortunately YouGov's one and only full-scale poll (which in some ways was the most accurate) did not appear to ask the referendum question, so cross-referencing isn't possible.  But figures are available from both ICM and Survation.

Referendum voting intention of people who planned to vote UKIP last week (excluding Don't Knows) -

ICM :

Yes 23%
No 77%

Survation :

Yes 24%
No 76%

The subsamples involved are too small to be reliable, but they do tell us something - if UKIP supporters were as monolothically opposed to independence as we might lazily assume, the figure for Yes would be highly likely to be close to zero even in a small subsample.  So at the very least there's clearly a statistically significant "UKIP for Yes" niche out there - and it appears to be bigger than "Tory for Yes", for example.

Standard Eurosceptic rhetoric probably goes some way towards explaining this phenomenon. The likes of Farage tell us that they offer "real independence" as opposed to the SNP's "phoney" independence within Europe.  So the "UKIP for Yes" voter is essentially calling that bluff - he/she may think that Brussels rule is inconsistent with true independence for Scotland, but they sure as hell think London rule is inconsistent with it as well.

The mainstream London parties may have also helped things along with their scaremongering over whether an independent Scotland would be able to remain in the EU.  Scotland may be a significantly more pro-European country than England, but we nevertheless have a sizeable Eurosceptical minority, and it's not hard to predict the effect of telling such people that a Yes vote is likely to instantly produce Farage-style "real independence" against the SNP's wishes.

We shouldn't forget that even readers of this blog (somewhat to my dismay) voted in a poll that they would prefer EFTA membership to EU membership!

*  *  *

There's been no YouGov daily poll tonight, probably due to the Bank Holiday.  But tomorrow night we should get the first indication of whether there's been a snowball effect for UKIP in GB-wide Westminster voting intentions.  The answer to that question could prove crucial for the referendum - as indeed could the answer to the question of how long any temporary UKIP surge might last.

In numbers : the yawning chasm between Scotland and the rest of the UK

Where UKIP finished -

England and Wales : FIRST
Scotland : FOURTH

UKIP share of the vote -

England and Wales : 29.1%
Scotland : 10.5%

UKIP share of seats -

England and Wales : 35.9%
Scotland : 16.7%

So yeah, as UKIP's friends and allies in the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem parties have been pointing out all day, these numbers look ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL to me.

In truth, what you see above actually understates the enormous gulf between Scotland and the rest of the UK.  In every region of England, a splinter party from UKIP stood, and used a clever strategy to get themselves placed at the top of the ballot paper by having a name beginning with 'A', while still giving the impression with their party description and logo that they might be the authentic UKIP.  It worked to some extent, with the party receiving between 1.21% and 2.29% in every region - quite a bit higher than you'd expect for a new fringe party that hardly anyone has heard of.  So it seems overwhelmingly likely that most of their support came from 'accidental' voters who should have been in the UKIP column.

However, they didn't bother standing in Scotland and Wales.  If they had done, and accordingly made the results directly comparable across Great Britain, it's absolutely certain that UKIP's vote in Scotland would have been even lower, and it's at least conceivable that UKIP would have failed to take a Scottish seat.

*  *  *

An extra little observation about the BBC results show.  In the final summing up just after 3am, Jeremy Vine stood on his giant map of Great Britain, which was coloured in by the leading party in each council area.  He theatrically searched for any part of the country that had voted Lib Dem, before homing in on Farron territory and declaring that South Lakeland was the one and only place that had given Clegg's mob anything to cheer about.  And yet behind him, both Shetland and Orkney were clearly visible, and were brightly shining in Lib Dem orange.  It seems that Scottish island communities are still "Nowheresville" as far as the London media are concerned.

SNP win the European elections - and the big losers are blundering Peter Kellner, and the BBC results programme

If I can trust the BBC website, 31 out of 32 councils in Scotland have declared, and it's now absolutely clear that the SNP are going to win the popular vote in the European elections by about 3% or so.  Their share of the vote is going to be roughly 29%, which we know must be good, because it's exactly what UKIP are getting across Great Britain, and the BBC keep telling us that's an absolutely bloody fantastic result.  In fact, it must be even better for the SNP than it is for UKIP, because you'd expect the SNP to suffer as an incumbent government, whereas UKIP are a 'free hit' protest vote party that have never governed anywhere at any time.

(UPDATE : It now looks certain that the SNP's share of the vote in Scotland will in fact be HIGHER than UKIP's across Britain as a whole after the London result is declared.)

And yet just a couple of hours ago, YouGov's Peter Kellner smugly informed the nation that Labour were heading for victory in Scotland.  Viewers of the BBC results show will have been forgiven for taking that wildly implausible claim seriously, because it was shorn of all context - it was the first time any Scottish results had been mentioned (other than a very brief comment from Kellner himself about Aberdeen).  Now, of course, the trends of early results can sometimes be unrepresentative, and if that was the case he could be forgiven for leading people astray.  But that categorically isn't what happened.  He immediately explained the percentage changes that had led him to conclude that Labour were winning, and they made no logical sense whatever - they in fact suggested that the SNP were heading for victory by about 2% or 3%.  It seems he hadn't even bothered to check the baseline figures from 2009 before coming into the studio.  The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson then had an immediate opportunity to correct an obviously flawed piece of arithmetic, but clearly he didn't know the baseline figures either, and instead eagerly seized on the latest concocted "blow for Alex Salmond" narrative.

When Mr Salmond appeared on the show later and pointed out that the SNP were in fact winning, and John Curtice implicitly accepted that to be true, I waited to hear the apology from David Dimbleby for the incorrect steer earlier.  I waited in vain.  An utter shambles, and it just ain't on.  We should have been watching a dedicated Scottish results programme - on past form that probably would have been less than perfect, but there's still no way it would have made such an unforgiveable mistake and then failed to come clean about it.

So just how good is this victory for the SNP?  The first point to make is that they've increased their lead over Labour by roughly 2% since their historic local election triumph two years ago.  Part of that can be explained by the fact that the SNP don't have to face the same challenge from rural independents in European elections that they do in local elections, but nevertheless this can probably be regarded as a slightly better result than 2012.  The most direct comparison is of course with the last European elections in 2009, when the SNP were assisted on their way to a decisive win by the unpopularity of Gordon Brown's Labour government.  Remarkably, in spite of the fact that Labour are now the challenging party at Westminster and should be sweeping all before it (especially in a supposed heartland like Scotland), the SNP have retained exactly the same share of the vote.  Brian Taylor has just claimed that the Nationalists will be disappointed that their vote "eased down" - well, as far as I can see, it's eased down by precisely 0.07%.  Let's get real here - they've replicated the 2009 result.

The other extraordinary claim that Brian Taylor made was that UKIP's snatching of a Scottish seat would somehow prevent Alex Salmond from pointing out that the political cultures of Scotland and the rest of the UK have totally diverged.  To be fair, Taylor did go on to concede that UKIP receiving 10% of the vote in Scotland and finishing fourth is still a rather different result from UKIP receiving 29% of the vote in the UK and finishing first, but he maintained that UKIP's seat would "complicate" the message.  Hmmm.  I'd suggest that's a distinction between the SNP being in a position to hammer their point home, and them being in a position to hammer the point so hard that it falls out the other end attached to a large slab of wood.

Incidentally, I had a chat on Twitter a few hours ago with an anti-independence troll who claimed that the SNP had "the UKIP bunting out".  I'll just pause briefly to note the irony of that remark in the light of Brian Taylor revealing that Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are all privately celebrating the fact that UKIP have taken a seat in Scotland, because they think that a minor scrap of success for a borderline-racist, anti-European party will somehow assist their anti-independence campaign.  That appears to be all that matters to them at the moment.

The other important question is how this result tallies up with recent opinion polls, and what it can tell us about which pollster is most reliable in respect of the referendum.  As it turns out, all of the pollsters who produced European voting intention figures - No-friendly and Yes-friendly alike - have overestimated the SNP.  That doesn't surprise me, because ever since PR was introduced for European elections all of the parties have consistently failed to break through the 30% barrier in Scotland, regardless of their showing in the opinion polls.  Probably a more realistic guide is the gap between the SNP and Labour, and on that measure YouGov were closest to the truth - but only in their sole full-scale Scottish poll, which underestimated the SNP lead by just 1%.  By contrast, YouGov's subsample results (including some very large subsamples) tended to wrongly suggest that Labour were winning in Scotland, which is yet another powerful indication that the sampling and weighting methods that YouGov use for Scottish respondents in GB-wide polls is totally misconceived.

But if this means that the methodology that YouGov use for full-scale Scottish polling is more reliable than some other pollsters (and that can only be a very tentative conclusion), is that good news or bad news for the Yes campaign?  Probably neither.  YouGov are still a No-friendly pollster, but only just - they've moved a long way towards the middle in recent months, and their most recent poll showed a No lead that was only 1% higher than the current average for all BPC pollsters.

Perhaps a more encouraging indicator is the fact that across Britain as a whole, online pollsters have done quite well.  Indeed, one of the most inaccurate polls of all was the highly-regarded ICM telephone poll for the Guardian, which put the Conservatives in first place for the European elections.  That's significant because online polls have tended to be more optimistic for the Yes camp than telephone polls (albeit telephone polls have been very few and far between in the referendum campaign, and have thus far only been conducted by Ipsos-Mori).

All in all we probably shouldn't jump to too many conclusions about the inaccuracy of certain polls, because there's a special challenge in trying to take account of differential turnout in an election where only about a third of people bother to vote.  A referendum in which perhaps 75% or 80% of people turn out to vote will be an entirely different proposition, and it could well be that pollsters who got it wrong tonight may yet prove to be more accurate in September.

The talk of the town among independence supporters in recent days was the question of which party was best-placed to deny UKIP a seat.  As I and a number of others have been predicting, the answer turned out to be the SNP.  When the d'Hondt formula is applied for the final seat (which will divide the SNP and Labour votes by three and the Tory vote by two), the SNP will be significantly ahead of Labour, the Tories and the Greens - and probably in that order, unless the Western Isles throws up a major shock.  Doubtless the Greens will still try to make the case that any extra votes for the SNP would also have been divided by three, and therefore tactical voting for the Greens could have closed the gap on UKIP at a faster rate.  But really that's a hopeless argument - if the Greens were to have any chance of claiming a seat, they needed to give some indication of being capable of breaking through the 10% barrier on their own merits, before taking into account the effect of the relatively small number of 'politically aware' people who were considering a tactical switch from the SNP.  Not a single opinion poll placed them anything like that high, and although the 8% share they claimed tonight is at the absolute higher end of my expectations, they were clearly never seriously in the running.  In relative terms they would have needed to increase their raw vote by a full third to overhaul the four parties that were ahead of them for the final seat, whereas the SNP would only have needed to increase theirs by less than a tenth to pip UKIP at the post.

I was firmly taken to task on a Hearts forum (ie. the football club) by an SNP supporter on Thursday, who suggested I was "incredibly patronising" for saying this -

"Maggie Chapman is a very fine candidate (and an asset for the Yes campaign), and if your number one priority is to have her as an MEP representing Scotland, then by all means vote Green - even though the chances of success look very slim indeed. But just be aware that it isn't going to stop David Coburn or UKIP."

I suppose I can see how that might look patronising when taken out of context, but in my defence I would say two things -

1) The point I made did turn out to be true.

2) When I wrote the post it was already deep into polling day, and it was becoming frustratingly clear on social media that some SNP supporters were being misled by James Mackenzie's spin on an unweighted YouGov subsample that put the Greens on 11%, and that had the SNP behind Labour.  In those circumstances, there didn't seem to be much point in pussyfooting around.

However, if anyone felt offended or patronised, I do apologise, and I'll try to be more tactful in future!

Final thought - this result is another hammerblow for the No campaign's resident referendum "seer", Ian Smart.  If his oracular insights into the trends shown by recent local by-elections had been on the right track, Labour should have won easily in Scotland tonight, rather than being beaten by the SNP in yet another national election.  Smart has also been relentlessly talking up the Scottish Tories recently - and that theory has fallen flat as well.  Ruth Davidson's troops have increased their share of the vote, but only by a measly 0.39%.

Ignore the siren voices - it's the SNP who are best placed to stop UKIP today

Just a quick warning in case anyone is being taken in as we speak by James Mackenzie's latest attempts on behalf of the Greens to claim that only they can stop UKIP in Scotland.  YouGov's "final Scottish poll" of which he speaks is no such thing - it's a subsample of a GB-wide poll.  Yes, it's a larger than usual subsample, but it's still a subsample.  So it's not possible to claim as James does that "the margin of error is bigger than with a normal 1000 person poll (up to 4.2%, rather than around 3%), but even so..." The margin of error is in fact incalculable, because the figures almost certainly won't have been weighted properly - ie. they'll only have been weighted on a GB-wide basis. What weightings were applied will have been based on YouGov's party ID system, rather than the 2011 vote recall they use for full-scale Scottish polls. That almost always leads to SNP identifying respondents being downweighted massively. In this poll, 165 SNP and Plaid Cymru identifiers were downweighted to count as just 104 'virtual' respondents.

The facts remain the same - not a single full-scale Scottish poll in this campaign has shown the Greens even close to winning a seat today. Most polls (including from YouGov) show that the SNP are best placed to stop UKIP, although there's certainly still a chance that Labour or the Tories could be the ones to pull it off. But if you vote Green you're not "voting tactically" at all - you're effectively abstaining on the question of whether UKIP should have a Scottish seat or not.

Maggie Chapman is a very fine candidate (and an asset for the Yes campaign), and if your number one priority is to have her as an MEP representing Scotland, then by all means vote Green - even though the chances of success look very slim indeed. But just be aware that it isn't going to stop David Coburn or UKIP.

Who will weep for the Liberal Democrats this week?

As long-term readers may remember, I've voted for a whole array of weird and wonderful political parties in American elections (including a Vermont "separatist" party, you'll be thrilled to hear).  But in this country, rather boringly, I've only ever voted for the SNP.  I have a feeling that only independence offers the slightest chance of "liberating" me from that habit, because until and unless it happens the SNP will always look like the most rational choice.

However, I did once vote for the Liberal Democrats in a school mock election.  It may seem a rather quaint idea now, but back in those days I had the genuine impression that the Lib Dems were the most radical party on constitutional reform, more so even than the SNP.  I remember hearing Russell Johnston speaking about the state effectively withering away within Europe, being replaced by tiers of governance enjoying equal prestige, of which none would have absolute sovereignty vested in them, even on a theoretical basis.  So in Scotland that would mean four tiers of government sharing sovereignty - local government, Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels.  To the idealistic teenage me, that sounded like a more modern and forward-thinking vision even than independence within an interdependent Europe.

Although I moved away from the Lib Dems long ago, it's actually only been relatively recently that I've realised that they don't actually believe in any of this stuff - it's all just words.  (I'm only talking about the party leadership, by the way. I'm sure that many of the activists and rank-and-file members have much stronger convictions.)  With the enviable position of holding the balance of power in a hung parliament for the last four years, they've actually had the chance to do something to bring their vision closer to fruition, but almost every step they've taken has had the opposite effect.  They've propped up the most anti-European government this country has seen since entering the Common Market, one that is doing what would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago - inching us closer to the EU exit door.  They moved heaven and earth to block a second question in the independence referendum, meaning the only option voters aren't allowed to choose in September is the one the Lib Dems are supposed to support.  And having achieved that perverse objective, they haven't taken the nuanced stance on the straight Yes/No independence question that the logic of their "federalist" beliefs demands, but have instead gone gung-ho for a No vote irrespective of consequences.

Their actions betray them.  When it really comes down to it, tribalistic British nationalism trumps everything for the Lib Dem leadership - it trumps federalism (a Yes vote would produce an outcome much closer to federalism than a No vote), it trumps electoral reform (a Yes vote would ensure that every tier of government in Scotland is elected by proportional representation), it trumps repugnance at an unelected second chamber (a Yes vote would lead to a wholly elected national parliament for Scotland, with no equivalent to the House of Lords), it trumps support for a written constitution and reform of the royal prerogative (only on offer with a Yes vote). Almost every constitutional reform that Lib Dem activists have pounded the streets to evangelise for over the last few decades is on the ballot paper this September - and their leadership is telling them to turn it all down.  Forever.

There's an opinion poll out from Opinium today suggesting that the Lib Dems will take just 5% of the vote in the European elections on Thursday.  That would probably be just about enough to ensure that they win no seats at all across the UK, and move them closer to the fringe status throughout this island that they've already been reduced to at Holyrood (Willie Rennie leads a parliamentary group that is smaller than the Scottish Socialist Party had in 2003).  Unfortunately, their relative strength at Westminster means that they won't become an out-and-out fringe party this side of the referendum, but anything that moves the morale-sapping voices of these phony "radicals" further to the margins can only be a good thing.

*  *  *

For what it's worth (not very much), here is the result of Opinium's small and unweighted Scottish subsample in the European election poll -

SNP 43%
Labour 23%
UKIP 14%
Conservatives 11%
Greens 5%
Liberal Democrats 3%

In terms of seats, that would work out as three for the SNP, two for Labour and one for UKIP.  Under this rather improbable scenario, the best hope of stopping UKIP would be to vote Tory - which hopefully illustrates further why attempts at "tactical voting" under a pure list PR system are soul-destroying and counter-productive.

ICM poll : SNP on course to deny UKIP a seat in the European Parliament

The Scotsman have published further details from their ICM poll, and there must be a fair chance that this will be the final full-scale poll of Scottish voting intentions for the European Parliament prior to the election on Thursday.

SNP 36% (-1)
Labour 27% (-1)
Conservatives 13% (+2)
UKIP 9% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (n/c)
Greens 7% (+3)

That would translate into three seats for the SNP, two for Labour and one for the Tories - effectively meaning that the Lib Dems would lose their only seat to the SNP, who currently have two.  Under this scenario, it would be the SNP who take the last of the six seats and thus perform the almost mythically heroic role of "the party that stopped UKIP".  There are other scenarios in which it might be Labour or the Tories who assume that role, but barring something miraculous it won't be the Greens or the Lib Dems.  So a "tactical vote" for the Greens in the hope of stopping UKIP still looks utterly counter-productive.

In any case, the number one priority for any SNP supporter must surely be to ensure the SNP win the popular vote, because failure to do so might drain momentum away from the pro-independence campaign at a critical stage.  The party may look assured of top place on these numbers, but that could yet prove deceptive - YouGov are showing a much less clear-cut position, and previous European elections have often confounded predictions due to very low turnouts.

It's fascinating that the SNP's vote is virtually identical to last month's in spite of the change in referendum voting intentions.  There are two ways of looking at that - on the one hand it means that we can't put the referendum figures down to there being too few SNP supporters in the sample, but on the other hand it underlines that the referendum race is becoming increasingly decoupled from regular voting intention.  That suggests there's no automatic reason to be suspicious of a Yes-friendly referendum poll just because the SNP are doing particularly well in supplementary questions.  That said, it would still be a cause for some concern if the SNP's performance on Thursday doesn't live up to the forecasts of the broadly Yes-friendly pollsters.

Are the Tories about to tell us that "separatism" is OK after all - but only in Belgium?

Try not to guffaw too loudly, but it looks like David Cameron could be faced with an extremely painful dilemma over the coming weeks.  You might remember that a key part of his pitch to win the Tory leadership in the first place was that the party would leave the European Parliament grouping dominated by the supposedly "federalist" European People's Party, and instead set up a new Eurosceptic group that the likes of Bill Cash could just about live with.  It wasn't exactly easy to do it, because in order to reach the thresholds for official recognition as a group, they had to align themselves with some borderline nutters.  They got there in the end, though, and the "European Conservatives and Reformists" are currently the joint fourth largest group in the parliament, with MEPs from eleven of the twenty-eight member states.

But not, if the polls are anything to go by, for much longer.  The ECR group seems to be about to fall below one of the two thresholds for official recognition, which is representation in at least seven member states.  That doesn't mean the group will necessarily fold after next week's election, but it does mean that they will need to draft in at least one extra party.  This is where it gets interesting, because the general consensus seems to be that one of the obvious candidates is the New Flemish Alliance.  In many ways, they're an absolutely dream fit for Mr Cameron - they're centre-right rather than hard-right, they seemingly have no overtly racist or homophobic baggage, and they even bill themselves as "liberal conservatives" (ring any bells?).

Just one snag, though - they also happen to be what is known in Tory jargon as "separatists".  Here is how Wikipedia describes them...

"It is a regionalist and separatist movement that self-identifies with the promotion of civic nationalism. It is part of the Flemish Movement, and strives for the peaceful and gradual secession of Flanders from Belgium."

They are, in a nutshell, a rough Flemish equivalent of the SNP. They are even currently part of the same political family as the SNP, namely the European Free Alliance (EFA). They're seemingly planning to leave that grouping and seek a new home, not because they have renounced their "separatism", but because of left/right ideological differences, and because the EFA are in alliance with the Greens, which causes embarrassment at home.

But how can David Cameron possibly enter into a political marriage with "separatists" just months before the Scottish independence referendum? You might think he wouldn't be so foolish, but bear in mind that the alternatives could look even worse from his point of view. Getting over the threshold without the New Flemish Alliance might involve dealing with some extremely unsavoury characters, with all the bad press and "nasty party" connotations that come with that. A "prodigal son" return to the European People's Party group would be portrayed as a betrayal and is surely unthinkable. And it's highly unlikely that a major party like the Conservatives would consider not being part of any group at all, because that would freeze it out of much of the parliament's workings. So it could well be that Cameron feels his least worst option is to embrace his inner separatist.

Be sure to have some popcorn handy.

* * *

Meanwhile, it's perfectly conceivable that the SNP will overtake the Liberal Democrats next week as the fourth largest party in the UK contingent at the European Parliament. Both parties are currently forecast to win either two or three seats - but the difference is that the SNP have two definite seats in the bank, whereas the Liberal Democrats are in genuine danger of being completely wiped out.

Such an outcome wouldn't be unprecedented - between 1979 and 1994, every European Parliament seat in Great Britain was held by either Labour or the Conservatives, with the sole exception of the Highlands and Islands seat held by the SNP's Winnie Ewing. In the last first-past-the-post election in 1994, the Liberal Democrats finally made a breakthrough, but still only won two seats across the whole of Great Britain - exactly the same number as the SNP.

This one will make your head hurt

There's one advantage of Scotland being an independent country that isn't even up for debate - we'd have more seats in the European Parliament than we have as part of the UK. We currently have six, whereas independent countries of a similar size (Denmark, Finland and Slovakia) have thirteen. So surely having thirteen seats is better than having six? WRONG, say Scottish Labour in a leaflet I received the other day. See if you can make sense of this gibberish -

"Q. How does Labour make sure Scotland's voice is heard?

A. Smaller countries have much less clout but because we are part of the UK we have a voting block of 73 MEPs, and, along with 4 other countries out of 28, we make up half of all MEPs."

So Labour's explanation seems to be that MEPs representing English electoral areas (including UKIP and BNP members) are somehow representing Scotland as well, and not only that, but they're doing it as "a block". And it gets even better - the reference to "4 other countries" suggests that MEPs from France, Italy, Germany and Spain are also very kindly representing Scotland as "a block". This presumably includes French National Front MEPs. So by the end of one short sentence, we find that with just six MEPs Scotland in fact controls half of the entire European Parliament.

Crikey. No wonder Labour are so obsessed with the Union - we certainly won't see miracles like that after independence.