Salmond eases to debate win - as expected

First things first - if we're only having three leaders' debates, what on earth was the point of staging the opener five-and-a-half weeks out from polling day? The cynic in me wonders if the ITV network schedule might have been a factor in that decision, and even as it is the Border TV area seems to have been deemed as having only 'associate membership' of the Scottish nation for the evening.

I also intensely dislike STV's habit of starting debates with opinion poll findings. They've done it for years, but it really isn't good practice. Debates are supposed to provide a level playing field for the parties to reach out to the electorate on the basis of the quality of their arguments, and presenting Tavish "Two Hoots" Scott with a poll showing that only (concidentally) Two Per Cent of the public think he would make the best premier left the tallest of the party leaders looking about Two Feet Tall. It was rather funny, admittedly, but still wrong as a matter of principle.

Bernard Ponsonby generally did a good job of persistently homing in on the leaders' most vulnerable points, and seeing if they could wriggle free. There was one glaring exception, though - perhaps because of time constraints, Iain Gray's utterly fantastical assertion that Megrahi wouldn't have been freed if he had been First Minister went completely unchallenged. The Labour leader claimed there were three tests for whether compassionate release should have been granted - well, in fact in his case there would have been a fourth and absolutely decisive one, namely what his overlord Gordon Brown privately wanted him to do. A Labour government in Holyrood would indeed have made a fundamental difference to the outcome of the process - Megrahi would have been released for the wrong reasons, not for the right ones.

The general impression I got from watching Iain Gray was that his advisers must have urged him in advance to be consensual wherever possible and at all costs to resist the overwhelming temptation to snarl - but he just kept forgetting, especially when he had to depart from his prepared lines and think on his feet. The 'Snarl' effect is multi-faceted - it's not just the facial contortions, it's also the jabbing finger and the vengeful 'neutered Dalek' voice. He might just about be able to get away with such pointless belligerence in the bearpit of First Minister's Questions, but in the context of a more conversational TV debate it looks utterly ghastly.

Alex Salmond was in such fine form that he didn't need a lot of external assistance, but even so the opening question about whether Scotland had become a fairer place over the last four years worked in the SNP's favour in an unexpected way. Both Annabel Goldie and Tavish Scott were keen to highlight their own achievements in the Scottish Parliament, but that necessitated a concession that, yes, indeed, Scotland had become fairer, which left Gray entirely on his own as he surveyed a landscape of SNP pestilence and devastation. An audience member - who didn't seem to be a Nationalist plant - delivered the coup de grâce by noting that after all the predictions of disaster of what would happen if the SNP came to office in 2007, they'd actually done pretty well. Nothing fantastic, but pretty well. For an incumbent government at the end of a four-year term, that's high praise indeed.

Gray's convoluted answer on the potential for a post-election coalition was telling - it seemed consistent with the conventional thinking that he is still personally hellbent on a toxic pact with the Lib Dems, but is keeping the option of minority government open to mollify colleagues who have thought the matter through rather more carefully. If the direction of travel for both Labour and the Lib Dems in recent polls continues, that may of course prove to be a somewhat academic dilemma.

Anyway, here is how I scored the leaders on their performances tonight -

Alex Salmond 9/10
Annabel Goldie 7/10
Tavish "Two Hoots" Scott 5/10
Iain "the Snarl" Gray 4/10

More encouragement for the SNP from Angus Reid

Thanks to Marcia on the previous thread for alerting me to the detailed results from this month's GB-wide Angus Reid poll. Given that the numbers relate solely to Westminster voting intention, the Scottish subsample is another very positive straw in the wind for the SNP. Here are the full figures -

Labour 43% (+2)
SNP 38% (+5)
Conservatives 10% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 5% (-1)
Others 4% (-3)

At the risk of repeating myself for the umpteenth time, it's worth pointing out that Angus Reid subsamples are of rather more interest than those of other pollsters, because they tend to be much more stable over time, suggesting they have been weighted as full-scale polls would be. Whether they have been accurately weighted is of course the million dollar question!

Fitamistakeatomake

Some small anecdoctal backing for the concerns I raised about the Scots langauge questions in the census - I discovered last night that my sister had left all four tick-boxes blank because she wasn't sure what Scots actually was, but her best guess was that it applied only to Doric speakers in the north-east. By any definition, she falls into the category of 'understanding' the language, and almost certainly 'speaking' and 'reading' it as well. It seems to me a much more high-profile public awareness campaign would have been in order to clear up the confusion - or even better, a brief clarification on the census form itself.

Note - I'm indebted to a comment someone left here a few months ago for the title of this post. I can't remember who it was, but thanks!

Angus Reid/Vision Critical subsample : SNP on 33% for Westminster

I must be slipping - it took an SNP press release to alert me to the latest Angus Reid/Vision Critical poll! I think I may have missed last month's as well. Here are the full figures from the Scottish subsample -

Labour 41% (-)
SNP 33% (-3)
Conservatives 13% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)
Others 7% (+1)

As I've mentioned a few times before, Angus Reid subsamples seem to be in a different category from those of other pollsters because the numbers are far more stable over time, suggesting they have been weighted. Whether they have been weighted accurately is of course the million dollar question - but on the face of it, these figures are far more encouraging for the Nationalists than the recent YouGov poll, because they relate solely to Westminster voting intention, and the SNP always score higher in Holyrood polls.

Labour are the party in greatest need of allies, whether they realise it or not

Via Joan McAlpine's blog, I've just caught up with the story about a "senior SNP figure" supposedly sounding out Labour about a post-election deal. Of course, in the terms in which it was reported by the Scotsman, the story is a pure slab of Labour delusion. It presupposes that the SNP are resigned to defeat (in spite of two opinion polls putting them just fractionally behind Labour), and are so desperate for a deal that Labour can essentially dictate its own terms - ie. the dropping of the policy of independence, only dealing with the bits of the SNP they find less objectionable, and naturally Salmond would have to go. The complacency that is seeping out from Labour's every pore at the moment makes me wonder how on earth they would cope with the psychological trauma of a second defeat next May that could still very easily happen.

But let's just assume for the sake of argument that Labour do emerge as the largest single party, and then find themselves entertaining the idea of a deal with the SNP. Obvious question - if they're doing that in the first place, doesn't it indicate that they have no real choice? And if that's the case, who exactly is going to be dictating terms to whom? The lesson of the Westminster coalition negotiations this spring is that it's the smaller party that holds the whip-hand - after all, it was Nick Clegg demanding Gordon Brown's departure, not the other way round. So if Labour-SNP talks take place after the Holyrood election, it's safe to infer that Labour are the party with the most to lose. Indeed, from where I sit, the SNP already look like the party with the greater range of options for post-election cooperation - Labour can't credibly do even an informal deal with the Tories, and while it would be premature to completely write off the chances of a renewed understanding with the Lib Dems, it's hard to imagine such a relationship being anything other than deeply uncomfortable and unstable for as long as the Westminster coalition is in being. So how are Labour going to function, even as a minority government? A deal with the SNP may be 'unthinkable' at present, but as the UK Tories discovered in May, when something is the lesser of several unthinkable options, it can often be the one you end up pursuing.

It's clear from the original Scotsman article that this penny hasn't quite dropped yet, but in such a scenario Iain 'the Snarl' Gray and co are going to need the SNP far more than the SNP will need them. So at some point they'll have to forget the hubris about remaking the SNP in their own image under a more pliant leader, and start thinking instead about what carrots they can offer - which probably means either the prospect of an independence referendum, or the beefing up of Labour's own policy on further devolution. The Scotsman cites the example of the Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition in Wales, suggesting that Plaid 'reduced its constitutional aspirations' in order to secure the deal. In truth, of course, it was entirely the other way round. Labour knew that without Plaid they might very well not have a role in government at all, and consequently simply swallowed hard and conceded what the nationalists had been seeking all along - an early referendum on Scottish-style powers for the Welsh Assembly. Something similar in scope will be required from Gray if he shortly finds himself in need of nationalist friends.