Tories tormented as super SNP secure staggering swing in cracking Kintyre contest

Is the South Kintyre by-election result an early tremor, presaging the earthquake to come next May?  Well, maybe, but we shouldn't jump to conclusions - this is the sixth local by-election since the SNP's post-referendum opinion poll surge started, and although there's been more good news than bad, there certainly hasn't been a consistent trend.  Tonight's numbers are pretty extraordinary, though.

South Kintyre by-election result (11th December) :

SNP 62.2% (+37.2)

Liberal Democrats 14.1% (-0.1)

Conservatives 13.4% (-32.5)
Labour 10.3% (+10.3) 

Swing from Conservatives to SNP : 34.9%
Swing from Liberal Democrats to SNP : 18.7%
Swing from Labour to SNP : 13.5%

Although the SNP were technically defending the seat, the Tories had a commanding lead in the ward in 2012, as you can probably gather from the off-the-scale swing from Tory to SNP.  Of course at a national level the SNP had a narrow lead over Labour of just under 1% in the 2012 local elections, so if we "just for a bit of fun" apply the above swings on a Scotland-wide basis, the SNP would be leading by the small matter of about 28%.

However, local factors obviously come into play, and without being familiar with the facts on the ground it's impossible to know how much to read into this result.  The Tories might have run a particularly dreadful campaign this time, or the personal vote for their incumbent councillor Donald Kelly may have flattered them last time around.  The most recent batch of by-elections two weeks ago demonstrated that it's possible for the SNP to have an excellent result in one part of the country while falling short elsewhere on the same day, so for all we know the Elgin result (to be announced in a few hours' time) might paint a completely different picture.  In the meantime, though...

*puts on Canadian accent*

It's another terrrr-ible night for the Conservatives.

It's time for Glaswegians to stop alienating themselves from their own linguistic heritage

I've always felt (or have felt for some time anyway) that supporters of independence can't afford to bang on about the Gaelic and Scots languages too much, because there's a danger of getting stuck in a ghetto inhabited only by people who are interested in language/cultural issues, and irritating everyone else.  For the proof of that, we need look no further than the way the Quebec sovereignty movement enjoys almost no support outside the French-speaking population.

But when you see how poorly educated people are about Scots, and how they don't even seem to notice when they're speaking the language themselves, it's difficult not to want to weep, or to do something about it as a matter of some urgency.  I've just had an exchange on Twitter with an STV journalist called Peter A Smith, whose heart is entirely in the right place on this subject - he sees Scots as a language not a dialect, and thinks it's harmful to the credibility of the language if something which is not really Scots is held up as an example of the language.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, that leads him to look upon the Glaswegian dialect as something completely different from Scots - a language which is spoken "elsewhere". Even more astonishingly, he claims that Scots has never been spoken in Glasgow.  This misconception appears to be based on a garbled recollection of being taught about a language similar to Welsh that was once spoken in these parts, plus a "Lancashire dialect", both of which were superseded by "standard English".  He well and truly gives the game away by using the word "accent" when he mocks an attempt to replicate spoken Glaswegian on a menu.  That implies Glaswegian is simply heavily accented standard English, which it plainly isn't - standard English looks like standard English when it's written down, regardless of accent.  Glaswegian looks rather different from standard English when it's written down, and for a simple reason - it's a dialect, not an accent.

When I suggested to Peter that Glaswegian is actually a debased dialect of Scots, or a transitional dialect on a continuum between Scots and English, he insisted that the Scots elements of speech that exist in the dialect are just "borrowed words and expressions" - similar to the borrowed words and expressions we have from Gaelic and Latin.  I mean, where to begin?  The most basic words used by Glaswegians, the fundamental building-blocks needed to construct a sentence like "doon" and "aff", are Scots.  These are not "loan-words" - they are words which have been passed down through generations since a time when the Scots spoken in Glasgow was as distinct from standard English as modern-day Doric is.  It's the more complex Scots words, phrases and idioms that have been lost, due to the influence of English-medium education and the media.

(Incidentally, speakers of Glaswegian do of course also use the English forms of words like 'doon' and 'aff' at times, but that's simply code-switching, which is a completely normal phenomenon where a language continuum exists.)

To an extent Peter is right that it's counter-productive to parade modern-day Glaswegian as an example of Scots without any qualification, because that unintentionally plays into the hands of those who regard the idea that Scots is a separate language as being laughable.  But it's also counter-productive to set up an artificial Berlin Wall between Scots and Glaswegian, and to pretend that Glaswegian belongs only to English and has nothing to do with Scots apart from a few "borrowed words" here and there.  The much better approach is to clear-sightedly recognise the dialect for what it actually is - namely a transitional dialect between Scots and English, one that is probably closer to English these days, but which is undoubtedly an authentic blend of both languages.  In that way, Glaswegians can proudly take ownership of the Scots speech-forms they still retain, rather than needlessly regarding them as alien borrowings from a Burns theme-park.

Then raise the scarlet standard high...

I have a new article at the International Business Times, pondering whether a post-election Labour-SNP deal would provide Britain with its most left-wing government since Attlee left office.  You can read it HERE.  (It's also on Yahoo HERE.)

In an attempt to 'research' the piece, I visited the Labour party website for the first time in ages, and I discovered that they apparently think the visiting public is a three-year old child.  This isn't progress, guys.

And make that a hat-trick - yet again, the SNP and Plaid are just 1% behind the Lib Dems in a Britain-wide YouGov poll

Today's Britain-wide YouGov poll is the third out of the last four to put the SNP and Plaid Cymru just 1% behind the Liberal Democrats.  Given the consistency of these results, there must be a reasonably high chance that sooner or later a YouGov poll will put the SNP and Plaid ahead of the Lib Dems across Britain.

Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 7th-8th December) :

Conservatives 34% (+2)

Labour 33% (+1)

UKIP 15% (-2)

Greens 6% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)

SNP/Plaid Cymru 5% (+1)

In the Scottish subsample, the SNP hold a commanding 47% to 25% lead over Labour.  That marks a reversion to the norm of the latter part of last week, after the Sunday subsample showed a somewhat narrower gap.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Today's update of the Poll of Polls will hopefully put yesterday's nonsense about Populus in some kind of perspective, because as usual (or as usual in the absence of any full-scale Scottish polls) it's based on an average of all Scottish subsamples from GB-wide polls conducted within the last seven days by all firms.  Taken into account are four subsamples from YouGov, two from Populus and one from Ashcroft.  The latest Opinium poll is omitted because the Scottish subsample hasn't been published.

Scottish voting intentions for the May 2015 UK general election :

SNP 42.6% (-1.0)

Labour 26.9% (+0.9)

Conservatives 16.1% (+0.5)

Liberal Democrats 6.3% (n/c)

UKIP 4.6% (n/c)

Greens 2.4% (+0.1)

(The Poll of Polls uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)

Piffle pertaining to Populus

Even if it wasn't for my past history at Political Betting, I would have sighed heavily at the latest post from Mike Smithson, which makes a big drama out of the fact that Labour are "only" 3% behind the SNP in a published aggregate of Populus subsamples from the month of November -

SNP 35%
Labour 32%
Conservatives 17%
Liberal Democrats 9%
UKIP 4%
Greens 2%

This of course only tells us what we already knew, because the individual Populus subsamples were all published and were freely available for anyone to tot up (but only if that person could "be arsed", of course).

Smithson does add a couple of half-hearted caveats to the figures, but still comes to the silly conclusion that Labour "will be delighted".  As we've been saying for weeks, Populus stick out like a sore thumb as the one and only pollster that has produced subsamples since the referendum putting the SNP behind Labour - and they haven't just done it once, but several times.  By contrast, every other pollster has put the SNP ahead in every single post-referendum subsample to date - and that includes YouGov, who produce at least five subsamples per week.  If you aggregated subsamples from every firm other than Populus, or even if you aggregated subsamples from every firm including Populus, you'd see a very handsome SNP lead - as this blog's Poll of Polls demonstrates.

There's no mystery about why Populus are different - they downweight the SNP much more severely than anyone else does, based on target figures for party identification from way back in 2010, when of course the SNP had much less core support.

In other words, the above figures are a red herring.  Nothing to see here.

On a vaguely related point of pedantry, Smithson keeps saying that there have only been three full-scale Scottish polls since the week of the referendum.  That's quite simply wrong, but naturally I haven't been able to correct him because of my random lifetime banning from his site.  There have in fact been six full-scale Scottish polls since September 18th - two from Survation, two from Panelbase, one from Ipsos-Mori and one from YouGov.  Even if you discount the first Survation poll because it was conducted immediately after the referendum, that still leaves five.

As forced choices go, this one isn't the most promising

We're used to Labour politicians desperately trying to defuse the SNP threat with the claim that the general election is a straight choice between Labour and the Tories, which is a well-worn line that may or may not still have some mileage in it.  But I was absolutely baffled to see Anas Sarwar go a step further and say that "the people of Scotland know" the choice is between Mr Miliband as PM and Mr Cameron as PM.

He'd better hope the people of Scotland "know" no such thing, in the light of the absolutely unambiguous opinion poll evidence we've seen on this subject for years now -

Which of these would make the best Prime Minister? (Respondents in Scotland)

David Cameron : 26%
Ed Miliband : 15%
Nick Clegg : 4%
Don't Know : 55%

That's from the most recent YouGov poll to ask that question, on 2nd-3rd December.  The Don't Know figure was much higher than in any other region of Britain, so it seems reasonable to suppose that many people were using it as a de facto 'none of the above' option.

Sarwar notoriously said within minutes of the referendum result becoming clear that we could all get back to normal politics now (and presumably eat some cereal).  The tragedy is that he still honestly seems to believe that - even with the benefit of the last ten weeks of hard truths, he's yet to notice that Scottish politics as "normal" is now utterly dead.  It's not that people in Scotland want David Cameron as Prime Minister for a single moment - it's just that they think the Labour alternative would be even worse, and are determined to escape altogether from such a grim false choice.

How Alex Salmond could become Deputy Prime Minister of the UK - at Labour's request

The expression "hung parliament" is an adaptation of "hung jury", explained Vernon Bogdanor on the BBC's election results programme in May 2010.  A hung jury is one that has no prospect of reaching a majority verdict, and therefore must be dismissed by the judge to make way for a fresh trial.  Bogdanor concluded that the parliament that had just been elected had no prospect of producing a sustainable government, and therefore would be dismissed in short order, leading us back to the polls within a few months.

Bogdanor was completely and utterly wrong, but to be fair he was only wrong because he was making a basic assumption that was very widely held at the time - namely that the Conservatives were unable and unwilling to enter into coalition with the Liberal Democrats.  As it turned out (only a few hours later), the Tory leadership were actually even keener on coalition than the Lib Dems were, for a number of good reasons -

* They feared, in Norman Lamont's famous phrase, being "in office but not in power".  Compromise with the Lib Dems and the prospect of getting at least most of the Tory manifesto implemented was preferable to treading water for an unknown period as a minority government and getting nothing of any substance done.

* A weak Tory minority government could have become unpopular very quickly, and if they had been forced to call an early general election, there was a risk of being defeated by a Labour party which would by then have had a chance to regroup and elect a new leader.

* Having the Lib Dems inside the government, rather than offering limited support from outside, meant that there would be more than one party taking the blame for unpopular decisions.  Indeed, there was a chance that the Lib Dems might end up taking more than their fair share of the blame.

* Adding on a ready-made "liberal wing" to his government appealed to Cameron in some ways - it meant that he would be at the ideological centre of the administration.

Now let's try and imagine what would happen next May if the arithmetic works out as we hope, and Labour's only chance of cobbling together a governing majority is to do a deal with the SNP that delivers Devo Max, or at the very least something much closer to Devo Max than the Smith Commission has proposed.  As has been well-established, the SNP would prefer that deal to be a confidence-and-supply arrangement, rather than a coalition.  But what would Labour prefer?  I doubt if even they know the answer to that question yet, because they're still in denial about the very real prospect of the SNP taking most of their Scottish seats.  But when and if that reality hits home, it's not impossible that they might come to the same conclusion that Cameron did in 2010, meaning that they would take the experts by surprise and press hard for full coalition with the hated Nats.

Confidence-and-supply might be of limited appeal to Labour, because even if it was a firm deal that was guaranteed for a full parliament, it would leave them with the "in office but not in power" problem - especially given that the SNP would continue abstaining on England-only votes.  If Labour were going to make big and painful concessions to the SNP, it might only be worth it if they were sure of being able to win parliamentary votes consistently for five years, or four, or three, or however long the agreement is proposed to last.

Or perhaps they detest the SNP and the whole idea of Scottish self-government so much that they would refuse to do a deal at all, no matter what the cost?  Maybe, but they would be fully aware that the potential cost could be very substantial indeed.  If the Tories feared in 2010 that a Prime Minister Cameron at the head of a weak minority government might lose an early general election after six months, the mind boggles as to what Labour think would happen to a Prime Minister Miliband in similar circumstances.

And what about the other side of the equation - would the SNP be willing to accept the painful sacrifices that would be required to enter into formal coalition?  Like the Lib Dems, they would be risking deep unpopularity as the junior coalition partner, and would also have to deal with the awkwardness of dispensing with their long-held position of not voting on England-only matters.  But IF the coalition agreement contained a cast-iron guarantee of Devo Max within a short timescale, my guess is that any amount of pain would be worth accepting.  To borrow Alex Salmond's phrase from the referendum campaign : "it's an opportunity that may not come our way again".

So on the day that Mr Salmond confirms he'll be seeking to return to Westminster, it's worth pondering the irony that his return might lead to him to become Deputy Prime Minister of the UK - and that if it does happen, it may well be at Labour's specific request.

Constituency spotlight : Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East

A few hours ago, I received an email revealing that our local SNP candidate for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East has been selected (Stuart McDonald, in case you're wondering).  It reminded me of a vague plan that I had of doing occasional blogposts to assess the SNP's chances of winning individual constituencies.  So where better to start than with my own home patch?

Within my lifetime, the SNP have always put up Westminster candidates here more in hope than expectation.  That's in spite of the fact that there is actually a very long-standing SNP tradition in the town of Cumbernauld.  Perhaps because of its status as a New Town, Labour have never been able to weigh the votes here as they've customarily expected to do in most nearby towns.  The SNP even controlled the old Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council for a spell in the 1970s, and were very unlucky not to regain control in 1988 (Labour and the SNP won an equal number of seats, but Labour retained power after a cut of the cards).  Hopes of SNP control were dashed for a generation as a result of the Tory gerrymandering of local authority boundaries in the 1990s, which saw Cumbernauld and Kilsyth chucked into the huge North Lanarkshire authority, even though neither town had historically been part of Lanarkshire.  Logically Cumbernauld should have become part of East Dunbartonshire, and Kilsyth should either have returned to Stirlingshire, or gone with Cumbernauld into East Dunbartonshire.  But at the time John Major's colonial government was still deluding itself that Stirling and East Dunbartonshire were going to be Tory fortresses, which meant that the inclusion of large working-class towns without Tory representation was unthinkable.  So a cacophony of protests was totally ignored, and the whole area was conveniently chucked into a "big Labour dustbin" - albeit a Labour dustbin that was destined to vote in favour of Scottish independence twenty years later!

Cumbernauld's former Dunbartonshire connection meant that it was part of the old East Dunbartonshire constituency until 1983.  As a result, Cumbernauld (but not Kilsyth) does have a past history of being represented at Westminster by the SNP - Margaret Bain (later to become Margaret Ewing) was the MP for four-and-a-half years after winning by just 22 votes in October 1974.  In Holyrood terms, Labour won the Cumbernauld and Kilsyth seat comfortably enough in the first election in 1999, but thereafter came under severe pressure due to the success of the SNP's list MSP Andrew Wilson in providing a high-profile "shadow" constituency service.  In 2003 he defied gravity by almost snatching the seat on an enormous swing, but his failure to make it over the line meant that he was out of parliament altogether.  Four years later the SNP fielded the lesser-known candidate Jamie Hepburn, who suffered a small swing in the wrong direction against the national trend - although in truth that was probably just an inevitable unwinding of Wilson's extraordinary personal success.  In 2011, the dam finally burst, and Hepburn became the first SNP constituency representative in the area since Margaret Bain lost her seat in 1979.

(While I'm on the subject of Jamie Hepburn, I must just mention how impressed I was that he turned up on my doorstep on referendum day in a sharp suit, asking me if I'd voted Yes yet!)

When you bear in mind that pedigree, it's a bit startling - and sobering - to recall just how far back the SNP will be starting from at the Westminster general election next May.

Swing required for the SNP to gain the constituency from Labour = 16.7%

Any other parties in realistic contention? = No

Now here's the good news, which explains why the SNP are standing a candidate in expectation and not just hope for the first time in decades...

National swing from Labour to the SNP implied by the most recent Poll of Polls = 19.9%

So if an election was held tomorrow, it's logical to conclude that the SNP would probably win the constituency with a bit to spare - an outcome that would have seemed utterly impossible until very recently.  Unfortunately, though, the SNP wouldn't have to drop back very much over the next five months for the national swing to be too low, meaning they would have to 'over-perform' locally to still have a chance.  Could that be achieved?  Well, this was one of the highest Yes-voting areas in the whole country (I believe the result was Yes 58%, No 42% within the Holyrood constituency boundaries), so if anywhere is going to produce a significantly bigger Labour-to-SNP swing than the national average, you'd think this would be the place.

And I also don't think Labour are going to enjoy that much of an incumbency bonus - I'm not an avid follower of local politics, but Gregg McClymont doesn't seem to have made an impact since taking over in 2010, and in spite of his recent stint on the Smith Commission is probably still less well known than Jamie Hepburn.

Overall verdict = I'm cautiously hopeful.

SNP and Plaid Cymru soar to Britain-wide vote of 6% in mesmerising YouGov poll

Apologies to Labour spin doctor John "I'm a gardener" McTernan, but your latest bright idea of using a column in an ex-fascist newspaper to brand the SNP as fascists doesn't appear to have worked terribly well.  Who'd ever have thunk it?

For the second day in a row, YouGov are putting the SNP and Plaid Cymru just 1% behind the Liberal Democrats across Britain - but this time with an almost unbelievably high 6% share of the vote.  You might remember there was a recent Ipsos-Mori poll in which the SNP had a Britain-wide vote of 8%, but it's much harder for the party to achieve abnormally high showings in YouGov polls, because YouGov don't take any account of differential turnout - ie. the number of Scottish-based respondents is fixed at the correct population share in the headline voting intention numbers.  So today's poll is the real deal - to get to this result, the SNP have had to reach 50% in the Scottish subsample, while also picking up some residual support in London and the rest of the south (possibly from people who expect to be casting their vote in Scotland next year).

Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov) :

Labour 32% (+1)

Conservatives 31% (-1)

UKIP 15% (-2)

Greens 8% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)

SNP/Plaid Cymru 6% (+1)

BNP 1% (+1)

Two other extraordinary things remain true for a second day in a row - the Liberal Democrats are languishing in a humiliating fifth place, and the combined share of the vote for the two so-called "major parties" is a dismally low 63%.

The enormous divergence between Scotland and the rest of the UK is illustrated in supplementary questions that ask about underlying attitudes towards the parties.  For example, 44% of respondents in Scotland say they would not apply the statement "The kind of society it wants is broadly the kind of society I want" to the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats, whereas the equivalent figure in the other regions of Britain ranges from 22% to 26%.

61% of respondents in Scotland say that none of the three above-mentioned parties are "led by people of real ability", whereas there is no other region in which more than 47% say the same.

SNP and Plaid Cymru are just 1% behind the Liberal Democrats in latest Britain-wide YouGov poll

These results are becoming positively commonplace, but it's always worth pointing them out, especially given that the broadcasters are still outrageously proposing to include the Liberal Democrats in two out of the three televised leaders' debates, but to wholly exclude the SNP and the Greens from all three.  That plan looks more untenable by the day.

Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov) :

Conservatives 32% (n/c)
Labour 31% (-2)
UKIP 17% (+1)
Greens 7% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)
SNP/Plaid Cymru 5% (n/c)

In case you're wondering, YouGov don't differentiate between the SNP and Plaid in their GB-wide polls at all, although the vast bulk of the combined vote for the two parties can be assumed to be for the SNP (indeed it's perfectly possible that the SNP on their own would be on 5% anyway, after rounding).

You know the drill by now - a general election result that was even vaguely close to the figures in this poll would see the SNP becoming the third largest party in the new House of Commons, comfortably ahead of both the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.  The Scottish subsample has Nicola Sturgeon's party on 49% of the vote, and Labour on just 21%.  The fieldwork coincided at least partly with the confected "outrage" over the incident in Paisley, so it doesn't look like calling the SNP "Nazi book-burners" has done the trick for Labour any more than the Smith report itself did.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

No great surprise to see the SNP's lead increasing again in the Poll of Polls, because the outlying Populus subsample which had Labour ahead has now dropped out.  This update is based on seven subsamples - four from YouGov, one from Populus, one from Ashcroft and one from ComRes.

Scottish voting intentions for the May 2015 UK general election :

SNP 43.6% (+2.6)
Labour 26.0% (-1.1)
Conservatives 15.6% (-1.0)
Liberal Democrats 6.3% (-0.7)
UKIP 4.6% (+0.7)
Greens 2.3% (-0.6)

(The Poll of Polls uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)