The joys of Twitter

Words fail me.  My light-hearted 'poem' poking fun at the lack of self-awareness among a few people (most of whom have long since broken off contact after making some sort of abusive comment towards me - "arse", "idiot", "zoomer", "Cybernat tube", etc, etc) provoked a torrent of rather baffling fury in certain quarters this afternoon.  Christopher Silver accused me of being unable to take a bit of gentle mockery...which seems a distinctly odd way of saying that a blogpost that has the sole purpose of gently mocking people is by definition bad.  Laura Waddell complained that my "frankly creepy" poem was misrepresenting people, and that I was failing to accurately capture the nuance of their own positions.  When I offered to take her through examples of all of the things in the poem having been actually said by specific individuals, she told me not to bother (effectively that means she didn't even want to hear the answer to a string of angry questions she had only just asked me).

It seems a rum sort of day when I have to put explanatory footnotes on jokes, but here goes anyway -

* Most of the poem was derived from a tweet posted a couple of months ago by David Officer, who expressly told people never to use the word "Yoon", not to complain about BBC bias, not to even mention JK Rowling's name (!), not to link to any blogposts by Stuart Campbell...and in true kitchen sink mode, he declared that the front pages of The National were part of the problem as well.  When I took issue with him, he then launched into a bitter complaint about the fact that I had put a full stop at the start of my tweet (ie. making my reply publicly visible).

* Gerry Braiden said that I was an "idiot" for writing blogposts about Brian Spanner, and clearly felt that it was unspeakably ridiculous that anyone at all should be devoting even a single micro-second to the task of uncovering Spanner's true identity - in spite of the strong evidence that he is not just some random bloke.  In fairness, Scott Reid and Professor James Chalmers were less abusive, but expressed much the same sentiment.  There was widespread condemnation of the anonymous guest poster on this blog who employed some initiative to track Spanner down to Ardrossan.

* James Mackenzie does not regard it as sufficient to merely block Stuart Campbell.  He has an explicit policy of breaking off all contact with anyone he sees interacting with Campbell, in even the most trivial of ways.  He has made abundantly clear on numerous occasions that he believes Yes people must literally pretend that Wings Over Scotland - by far the most popular pro-independence blog - does not even exist.

* Leo Mikłasz told an MP yesterday that a tweet saying that the BBC should not have "campaigned against people" was unacceptable and should never have been posted. Bizarrely, he also suggested that the sentiment expressed in the tweet was somehow equivalent to support for Donald Trump (although unsurprisingly he never explained why).

I'm sure we've all encountered Mike Small and James McEnaney, so I don't really need to fill in the blanks there.

* * *

Note on the Wings block list : Stuart Campbell is once again inviting people to block everyone on Twitter that he currently blocks, and is offering an automated way to do that.  Please note that if you take up his offer, you will automatically be blocking me.  After my dispute with Stuart over US election polling, a number of you said that you would be continuing to read both blogs, so it's probably fair to warn you of the consequences of what might superficially appear to be an innocent enough idea.  I strongly suspect I might not be the only surprising name on that list.

For full disclosure : I was still on good terms with Stuart when he first came up with the plan of exporting his block list, and I didn't go down that road even then.

UPDATE : Having had a proper look, it turns out that I'm far from being the only surprising name on the block list.  Also there are Maurice Smith, Angela Haggerty, Jenny Lindsay, Allan Grogan, Kirstin Innes, Sarah Beattie-Smith, and many, many others.  It seems to me pretty tough to defend the idea that these are individuals who thousands of people should be blindly blocking without having the slightest clue as to the reason why.  Stuart claims that he only ever blocks people for being a "troll" or an "idiot".  That self-evidently is not true.  Whatever you may think of someone like Angela Haggerty, she is plainly neither a troll nor an idiot.  To a large extent, this is simply a list of people that Stuart has had particularly heated arguments with.  That's fine - it's a perfectly valid reason for blocking someone on Twitter.  But it's not a valid reason for encouraging thousands of other people to block them.

If you want independence, you must be more like me

If you really want indy
You must be more like me
You must stop mentioning JK Rowling
And quit protesting outside the BBC
Stop claiming abuse from unionists is a thing
But repent always for Cybernattery
Stay well away from Ardrossan
And throw that homing device into the sea
In fact just forget all about Brian Spanner
And invite Adam Tomkins to tea
Never utter the word "Yoon"
It renders you a zoomer, you see
You must ignore the existence of Stuart Campbell
(He hurt the feelings of my fave minoritee)
Don't put a full stop in front of a tweet
Instead give pounds to a billionaire's charidee
Look away from the front page of The National
Or normal people will say you need psychiatry
For the love of God vote Green or RISE on the list
CAN YOU NOT THINK TACTICALLY?
Now naturally I don't expect you to actually do any of these things
My realism is a sign of my immense maturity
But just you remember, when we don't get indy
It'll be because you weren't enough like me!

(With many thanks to David Officer, James Mackenzie, Scott Reid, Gerry Braiden, Professor James Chalmers, Leo Mikłasz, Mike Small and James McEnaney for inspiring this, er...poem.)

The unionist media are in denial about it, but a second independence referendum moved even closer this week

As far as I can remember this has never happened before (which tells its own story), but it turns out that I owe a mainstream media journalist a comprehensive apology for taking him to task on Twitter a few months ago for what I took to be spin on behalf of the unionist establishment.  Not long after the EU referendum, Mark Mardell of the BBC claimed that the SNP were set to join the "forces of soft Brexit".  I retorted that this was a plainly ridiculous notion, because the SNP's stated aim was to keep Scotland within the European Union in line with how the country had just overwhelmingly voted.  But Mardell was completely right and I was completely wrong.  There's no two ways about it - Nicola Sturgeon has clearly modified her position somewhat, and the detailed plan she put forward the other day indicates a willingness to accept our enforced departure from the EU, albeit only if a great many extremely stringent conditions are met.

However, in spite of misjudging the trajectory a few months ago, I still feel extremely confident in saying this : the likes of Kenny "Devo or Death / Brexit or Bust" Farquharson and whoever it is that writes the Guardian editorials are deluding themselves when they imagine that there is a realistic chance we are heading for a compromise that will head off a second independence referendum.  Theresa May took only a few hours to reject Sturgeon's proposals out of hand, so to believe in the chance of a deal you must also believe that what we saw this week was merely some kind of way-station on the Scottish Government's journey towards accepting a semi-hard Brexit and departure from the single market, rather than a statement of Sturgeon's absolute bottom line.  The Greens (who have disorientated us all by reinventing themselves as the new indy fundamentalists) have demanded that it must be the latter, and I'm convinced that's how it will be.

I've never met Nicola Sturgeon (I've never even had a selfie taken with her, so I really am the lowest of the low), and therefore can't read her mind.  I've heard it said, as I'm sure we all have, that she's instinctively more cautious than Alex Salmond, although I also remember hearing it said in 2012 that she was actually much more bullish than Salmond about the all-or-nothing gambit of calling a single-question referendum on independence without a Devo Max option on the ballot paper.  Regardless of the truth about her temperament, though, the real reason why a second independence referendum now looks almost inevitable is that she has to take her party with her when she makes the final decision.  It's just a non-starter to imagine that the SNP rank-and-file are going to accept calling off the dogs on indy in return for departure from the single market, and no special status within Europe for Scotland - which is all that will be on offer from the UK government, barring a wildly improbable climbdown.  The only way I could imagine the membership signing up to that 'deal' would be if there is some kind of compensatory offer involving a massively beefed-up devolution settlement - but London seem to be showing zero interest in that idea as well.

The unionist media are, as is their custom, telling themselves precisely what they want to believe - that the SNP membership don't matter, and that Sturgeon will be guided solely by opinion poll numbers and a private acceptance of the economic importance of an entirely fictional concept known as "the UK single market".  It may be that it will continue to be possible to portray the opinion poll evidence as discouraging for Sturgeon over the coming months - Scottish polls are largely commissioned by anti-independence clients, after all, which means that the supplementary questions are often framed in a way that will produce the most negative answers.  But that will not be the determining factor on whether a referendum goes ahead.  Public opinion at the end of both the independence and Brexit referendums bore little resemblance to public opinion at the start of the campaigns.  It would be a brave unionist who felt sure that initial Yes support in the mid-to-high 40s will not prove to be a successful springboard to victory.  Which is a point well worth pondering - do the forces of unionism seem relaxed to you, in the way they would be if they really thought a referendum was unwinnable for Sturgeon?  No, they don't seem relaxed to me either.

*  *  *

Theresa May seems to have an unconscious desire for a career in comedy.  Only two years ago, her party told Scots to vote No because it was supposedly the only way to keep Scotland in the European Union.  As a direct result of the electorate falling for that line and voting No, we are now on course to be forced out of the EU against our will.  And yet Ms May innocently says that there is still "no need or reason" to revisit the decision on independence.  It's a bit like someone saying to you "OK, I will marry you, but ONLY if you never, ever steal ANY of my chocolates EVER again", and you absolutely promise to go along with that, and then two months later you express bafflement about her decision to call the whole thing off while you're busy munching on her After Eights.

Yes, "The Vow" could have been delivered - but the UK government chose not to do it

I've been meaning to make an additional point about the UK government's outrageous legal arguments relating to the Sewel Convention. I noticed on Twitter a few days ago that some independence supporters seemed to be getting two different concepts muddled up, and as a result were grotesquely (albeit unwittingly) giving the Tories something of a free pass. Basically the confusion relates to the words 'unenforceable' and 'repealable'. There is a strong argument (not unchallengeable, but strong) that it would be next-to-impossible to enshrine the Sewel Convention into law in a way that is unrepealable, simply because of the principle of absolute parliamentary sovereignty. Any law can in theory be repealed by simple majority vote. But the crucial point is that for as long as any such law is on the statute book, it ought to be perfectly enforceable.

To give an example : the Canada Act 1982 terminated Westminster's power to pass laws for Canada. Even if you argue that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty theoretically means that decision can be unilaterally reversed (a point that might be accepted by the UK courts but certainly not by the Canadian ones), there would actually have to be an "Act to Repeal the Canada Act" before Westminster could return to regulating the drains in Toronto, or whatever. So here's the problem - the Scotland Act 2016 didn't even get us that far in respect of Sewel. It used self-sabotaging language to render itself unenforceable, even while it's on the statute book. That was a deliberate choice of the UK government - there was nothing inevitable about it, and they have quite openly boasted in the Supreme Court about how the law was framed to ensure that nothing whatever changed (in particular by the insertion of the words "it is recognised" and "normally").

It's a distinction we must be absolutely clear about. That the Sewel Convention is not unrepealable is arguably part-and-parcel of the UK's most fundamental constitutional principle. But that the Sewel Convention is unenforceable right now was a political choice made by the London government - and that choice was made in brazen contravention of the "Vow" that secured the No vote in September 2014. They mustn't be allowed to get away with the fiction that an unenforceable declaration of commitment to Sewel was the best they could possibly have done within the confines of the constitution, because that simply isn't true.

*   *   *

Even by his own exalted standards, Mike "can't be arsed" Smithson of Stormfront Lite fame has been making some dubious comments of late, so I just thought I'd take a moment to deal with a couple of his daftest points.  Firstly, he ludicrously claimed last week that the polls on Brexit were not actually wrong, and that anyone who says otherwise is talking "rubbish".  To support this notion, he pointed out that 59% of polls in the last month of the campaign showed "non-Remain leads" (meaning either a tie or a Leave lead).

There's a hole in that logic that a poorly-educated hamster could see through.  If public opinion changes during an election campaign, as it clearly did in the run-up to polling day in June, it will very often be possible to artificially select a time-frame that makes the polls look much more accurate than they actually were.  For example : everyone knows that the polls (with a single honourable exception) got the 1970 general election hopelessly wrong.  They pointed to a Labour overall majority, and the real outcome was a Conservative overall majority.  But between 1967 and 1969, the Tories had actually been way in the lead in the polls, before Labour seemingly turned things around.  Mike Smithson would doubtless argue that, contrary to the universally-held perception, the 1970 polls were not wrong, because over a three-year period they showed the Tories ahead on average.  That would technically be accurate, and is no more or less silly than what he's said about the Brexit polls.

To credibly pray in aid a poll that gets the result broadly "right" a month before polling day, there must at least be an absence of evidence that public opinion changed significantly in the intervening weeks.  Unfortunately for Smithson, the evidence that there was a late swing to Remain as June progressed is overwhelming.  In early June, YouGov "correctly" gave Leave a 4% lead, but the eve-of-referendum poll from the same firm put Remain 2% ahead, and the on-the-day poll saw the Remain lead extend to 4%.  Other firms showed a similar trend.  The likelihood is that all of those polls were inaccurate, and that when Leave appeared to be slightly ahead, they were actually ahead by a significant margin.

It seems Smithson would like to think that the high level of advance postal voting is an adequate excuse for the inaccuracy of the later polls - but it isn't.  If people had already voted by post, the polling firms asked them how they had actually voted, rather than how they planned to vote.

*   *   *

Elsewhere, Smithson rather desperately used aggregate numbers from a tiny handful of by-election results to demand that the BBC should revert to treating his own party (the Lib Dems) as more important than UKIP.  Now, it may well be that the BBC have been guilty of giving UKIP disproportionate coverage over the years and thus unleashing the Brexit monster, but what's done is done - they can't now ignore the fact that UKIP received almost one-and-a-half million more votes than the Lib Dems in the general election, and have remained ahead of the Lib Dems in most opinion polls over recent months.  Even since Richmond Park, there has been a poll giving UKIP a slight lead over the Lib Dems.

I would hope that somewhere, deep down, Smithson has just enough self-awareness to be embarrassed about his wildly unrealistic demands on behalf of his own party - especially bearing in mind his offensive and downright Orwellian claim a few years back that the SNP were guilty of "censorship" for simply trying to gain fair access to the televised leaders' debates.

Lashings of loveliness in Leven as SNP score key by-election triumph

Leven, Kennoway and Largo by-election result, 15th December 2016 :

SNP 37.0% (-4.0)
Labour 28.4% (-6.9)
Conservatives 18.5% (+11.7)
Liberal Democrats 14.3% (+4.3)
Greens 1.8% (n/a)

Things have come to a pretty pass when Labour are quite genuinely 'celebrating' a defeat in a former heartland, a 7% drop in their own vote share, and a 1.5% net swing from Labour to SNP.  But it's probably fair to say that, in the context of the times, this is a tolerably good result for them.  If extrapolated nationally on a 'just a bit of fun' basis, it would put them only a few points behind the SNP.  The snag is, of course, that there is absolutely no evidence from any opinion poll or from any other recent by-election to suggest that their resilience tonight is anything more than a freakish one-off.  The chances are that there were local or personality factors that worked in their favour in this particular contest.

Should we be at all concerned about the slippage in the SNP vote, given that the party had only a modest national lead in the last local elections in 2012?  A loss of support is certainly more noteworthy in this sort of by-election than it would be in areas of traditional Tory strength - we can't just neatly put it down to a small number of No-voting ex-SNP supporters finding a way of resolving their cognitive dissonance.  However, the most recent national opinion poll (conducted only two or three weeks ago) gave the SNP almost half of the popular vote, and in spite of the question marks that now hang over the polling industry, it's unlikely that polls would completely fail to detect a dramatic shift in public opinion.

The small increase in the Liberal Democrat vote is very much in line with last week's Scottish local by-election, the parliamentary by-election in Sleaford and North Hykeham, and also a couple of Britain-wide opinion polls.  So there does seem to have been a genuine post-Richmond Park bounce for the party.  The problem is that they'll need to follow up that win at some point if they want to maintain their momentum, and respectable third or fourth place finishes aren't really going to be enough.  The afterglow of a single by-election success - no matter how spectacular - is generally pretty short-lived, and if what we're seeing now is as good as it gets for the Lib Dems, they're not really back in the game in any meaningful sense.

Heartbreak for Rennie as Carnoustie by-election fails to show much trace of a Richmond Park bandwagon effect

Immediately after the Richmond Park result became clear a few days ago, Professor John Curtice speculated about the possibility of an 'Eastboune effect' - a reference to a by-election gain out of the blue in 1990 that got the Lib Dems back into the game after a couple of years during which they had appeared to be fading into irrelevance.  Well, the first little test of whether we're about to see something similar came in yesterday's Carnoustie by-election, and although there was an increase in the Lib Dem vote, it was pretty trivial in scale.

Carnoustie & District by-election result, 5th December 2016 :

Independent - Cheape 43.5% (n/a)
SNP 32.1% (-4.2)
Conservatives 17.7% (+11.6)
Labour 4.4% (-1.8)
Liberal Democrats 2.3% (+1.4)

I think the reason why a full-blown Eastbourne effect is unlikely is that British politics is much more fractured than it was in 1990.  Not only are there more 'major' parties to choose between, but Scotland is also now much more psychologically detached from the rest of the UK.  People here will have regarded the Richmond Park result as almost irrelevant to us - if you want to back an unashamedly 'Remain' party here, you'll generally do it by voting for the SNP, and not for a party that incomprehensibly voted against European single market membership in the Scottish Parliament only the other week.

That said, there's clearly scope for a 'niche' Lib Dem comeback in parts of England with decent levels of Remain support.  I was shaking my head in disbelief on Thursday night at Diane Abbott's complacent line of argument that the Lib Dems' pro-European pitch will not play well in areas that voted to Leave.  It doesn't need to, Diane - they're not trying to win a general election.  46% of the English electorate voted Remain, and if the Lib Dems can win over just one-third of those people, they'll essentially double their vote and regain a number of their old seats.  Polls prior to Richmond Park suggested that the "Brexit Means Brexit" Tories were still comfortably outpolling the Lib Dems among Remain voters in England.  There is now a golden opportunity for the Lib Dems to reverse that.

To return to Carnoustie, the SNP vote has actually held up much better than in the by-election in the same council area last week.  There seems to be a pattern in the north-east of some No voters switching from the SNP to the Tories, but it hasn't happened on a big scale on this occasion - most of the boost in the Tory support came from elsewhere.  Technically, this result is an independent gain from the SNP, but as is so often the case in STV by-elections, that's pretty meaningless - the SNP didn't actually win the popular vote in the ward last time around (they finished second behind a different independent).

As was the case last week, when the lower preferences of Labour voters were distributed, there were more transfers to the SNP (35) than to the Tories (20).  Has Kezia backed the wrong horse?

UK government boasts that "The Vow" was a gigantic con-trick

As we all remember, a key part of the panic-stricken last-minute "Vow" that helped to secure a narrow No victory in the independence referendum was the promise that the devolved Scottish Parliament would be made "permanent".  Implicit in that pledge was that the Sewel Convention (which, among other things, prevents the powers of the parliament from being altered without the consent of MSPs) would be put on a statutory footing.  Without that safeguard, "permanence" would plainly be meaningless - the parliament could be left as an empty shell, unilaterally stripped by Westminster of all or most of its powers.

It was widely noted that, technically, it was next to impossible to guarantee either the permanence of the parliament or the inviolability of the Sewel Convention, because the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament means that any constitutional law can simply be repealed later on.  Nevertheless, the UK government insisted that the Scotland Act 2016 provided as much assurance as was humanly possible to give within the UK constitutional framework.

A number of us were a tad sceptical about that, and couldn't help wondering whether the use of weird and seemingly redundant wording within the legislation such as "it is recognised that" and "the UK Parliament will not normally legislate without consent" were deliberately intended to be self-sabotaging, and to render the whole thing unenforceable.  Not at all, we were told. That was just paranoia.  Yet more SNP grudge and grievance.

Hmmm.  As it turns out, all it's taken is eight months since the Scotland Act passed into law, and the UK government are already openly admitting that we were correct in each and every respect about the cynical game they were playing.  So desperate are they now to head off the risk of the Supreme Court granting the Scottish Parliament the kind of say over the Brexit negotiations that might actually befit "the most powerful devolved parliament in the world" (ahem), they've dropped all the former pretence, and have submitted a legal argument that explicitly argues that the wording of the relevant section of the Scotland Act deprives it of all credibility.

"The legal irrelevance of the Sewel convention is expressly accepted"

"the convention does not purport to prescribe an absolute rule. Its content is only that “Westminster would not normally legislate” (emphasis added). Whether circumstances are ‘normal’ is a quintessential matter of political judgment for the Westminster Parliament and not the courts. There are no judicial standards by which to measure such a question..."

"Nothing in that analysis is affected by the amendment of s. 28 of the Scotland Act 1998 (by s. 2 of the Scotland Act 2016) to include: “(8) But it is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament”. All s. 28(8) does is to recognise the terms of the political convention in legislation. That does not render the application of it in any particular instance a justiciable matter for the courts. It is trite that legislation may include provisions which do not give rise to justiciable legal issues. The content of s. 28(8) is the same as that of the convention, save that its purely political nature is further emphasised by (a) the opening wording that it is “recognised”, and (b) its placement immediately after s. 28(7) which affirms the unconstrained legislative competence of the Westminster Parliament."

In plain language, this is a boast that the supposed placing of the Sewel Convention on a statutory footing was a con-trick. Further, it's an invitation to the Supreme Court to confirm that the deception was pulled off successfully. That whole section of the Scotland Act, we're being told, was the equivalent of a pretty illustration in a textbook - ie. for decorative effect only. At best, it was like forgoing a marriage certificate in favour of a small tattoo saying "Jenny and Kevin 4eva".

The eccentric notion that the government which crafted the law, and not the courts, should get to decide how to interpret the meaning of the word "normally" reminds me a touch of the Führerprinzip in Nazi Germany (ie. the government's word is above the written law), or the right of the communist Chinese National People's Congress to interpret the Hong Kong Basic Law. The rule of law in democratic countries does generally rest on a basic separation of powers - the political legislature passes the law, and then the non-political courts interpret and enforce it. That is the only way of ensuring non-arbitrary application of the law.  Apparently, Westminster's exercise of overlordship in Scotland is exempt from that general principle.

The UK government's lawyers could have saved themselves a lot of time by submitting a legal argument that simply read : "OUR CONTEMPT FOR THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND IS ABSOLUTE. WE LIED, WE CHEATED, AND WE NO LONGER CARE WHO KNOWS ABOUT IT. SUCK IT UP, JOCKS."

You've dunnit again, Gov.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the TalkRadio website about yesterday's YouGov poll on independence.  It also rehearses some of the many shortcomings of YouGov's polling during the indyref.  You can read the article HERE.

"Engrossing" YouGov poll finds that Scotland is behind Sturgeon's drive to remain in the EU after the UK leaves - and understands this will require independence

A new full-scale Scottish YouGov poll is out today, and the most significant finding is that there is narrow majority support (albeit within the margin of error) for Scotland seeking to remain in the European Union after the UK leaves...

Would you support or oppose Scotland seeking to negotiate with the European Union to remain part of the EU after the rest of Britain leaves?

Support 42%
Oppose 41%

The subsequent question reveals that, by a massive 62%-22% margin, people understand that independence will be required to remain in the EU after Brexit.

There's particularly vexing news for Kezia Dugdale here.  As you'd expect, SNP voters are firmly in favour of retaining Scotland's EU membership, and Tory voters overwhelmingly follow the 'Brexit Means Brexit for everyone' doctrine.  But Labour voters are essentially split down the middle on this point.  It appears that Dugdale may have miscalculated in her belief that the rump Labour support (which is all she appears to care about holding onto) shares the hardline unionist DNA of the Tory support.  Incredible though it may seem, therefore, there are clear grounds for optimism that even more Labour voters could be won over to the SNP if Dugdale maintains her inflexible stance on leaving the EU.

The poll was commissioned by a rabidly anti-independence client (The Times), who are naturally keen to draw attention to the portions of the poll they find more palatable.  In particular, they seem to be beside themselves with excitement to discover that, for the first time since 2014, a YouGov poll has found that headline support for independence is fractionally lower than it was in the indyref.  (The operative word here is 'fractionally' - the Yes vote in the referendum was 44.7%, and YouGov currently has it at 44%.)  But the reality is that the general pattern of recent times has been a Yes vote that hovers only a little higher than the 2014 result, with a figure of 47% being particularly typical.  If that's roughly where we are, you'd fully expect the odd individual poll to put Yes slightly below 45%, simply due to sampling variation (ie. margin of error).  It's theoretically possible that this poll is the first to detect a genuine dip in support, but there's absolutely no reason to jump to that conclusion - unless of course you're indulging in wishful thinking.

By the same token, The Times are ascribing significance that simply cannot be statistically justified to minor changes on the supplementary questions.  For example, opposition to a second independence referendum being held before the UK leaves the EU (ie. within a very tight two-year timescale) has increased since the poll in August from 50%-37% to 54%-35%.  But that change can be easily explained by the margin of error - if, say, the true 'oppose' figure has remained steady at around 52%, the margin of error means that the reported figure in individual polls would be expected to be anywhere between 49% and 55%.  So The Times' liberal use of words like 'slump' is, I'm afraid, a tad over-excitable.

One thing to watch out for today : YouGov have, frankly, become notorious over the years for their lack of objectivity on the topic of Scottish independence.  After their last poll in August, they posted a ludicrous article which brazenly misrepresented their own results.  They stated baldly that a majority of Scots were opposed to a second referendum, but, in fact, respondents hadn't even been asked such a broad question - they'd only been asked whether they wanted a referendum before Britain leaves the EU, which could be very soon indeed.  YouGov also stated that, if and when a referendum takes place, a majority would vote No again.  There was absolutely nothing in their results that would even begin to justify such a wild claim.  The headline question on independence had merely asked, in line with normal practice, how people would vote on independence if a referendum was held tomorrow.  Both of those facts also apply to today's poll, so just keep an eye out in case YouGov attempt the same misrepresentation on this occasion.  At time of writing, they haven't so far.

One small piece of credit I can give YouGov, however, is that they've finally put their house in order and started interviewing the correct electorate - ie. over-16s, rather than just over-18s.  So we no longer have to worry about Yes and SNP support being underestimated for that specific reason.  It's very hard to understand why it's taken such a ridiculously long time for basic good practice to be followed - but better late than never.

It shouldn't be overlooked that today's poll makes fairly grim reading for Theresa May personally.  Her net personal rating has collapsed from +13 in August to -5 now.  Margin of error 'noise' certainly can't explain such a big change.  The Prime Minister still has a long way to go before she reaches Thatcher-style depths of unpopularity, but on her current trajectory (and bearing in mind that her honeymoon period has only really just ended), it's perfectly possible she could eventually arrive at that destination.  If she does, the consequences for opponents of independence could be catastrophic.

The final question of the poll is a bit of an oddity.  Unionists have gleefully leaped on it as proof that 'only' 13% of the population have been involved in the SNP's recent consultation process (which would actually be a pretty impressive figure).  But the wording of YouGov's question leaves a lot to be desired.  The survey is cited as the "National Conversation", whereas to the best of my knowledge it's actually been generally referred to as the "National Survey".  Respondents are also asked whether they have been "approached to take part" in the survey, which on the face of it would exclude anyone who took part without being "approached".  Whether the wording of the question is just clumsy, or whether it's deliberately intended to muddy the waters, is hard to say.

A general point that needs to be made about all polling at the moment : regardless of whether it's good or bad, we simply can't be sure it's reliable.  Fergus Ewing was asked about the headline independence results today, and he pointed out that polls in recent elections and referendums had mostly been wrong.  In years gone by, a politician trying to rubbish the polls would have been regarded as a bit desperate, but as things stand it's hard to deny he's got an excellent point.  It's particularly worth taking a look at the huge leads the Remain campaign had in telephone polls for such a long time.  No-one can say with any great confidence what the true support for independence is right now - let alone what it will be in a few months' time, or in a couple of years.  That's a statement of fact.  The era during which it was rational for political leaders to make strategic decisions on the basis of a couple of percentage points here or there in opinion polls is well and truly over.  At best, the polls of today are a ball-park guide - and that park seems to be getting ever bigger.

Amazement and astonishment in Arbroath, Angus as buoyant SNP bag a by-election belter

Not entirely sure why a by-election was held on a Monday - it's deeply unnatural, like an accurate John McTernan prediction, or something like that.  Anyway, here is the result...

Arbroath East and Lunan by-election result, 28th November 2016 :

SNP 35.0% (-8.8)
Conservatives 27.0% (+12.2)
Independent - Speed 17.2% (n/a)
Independent - Smith 11.8% (n/a)
Labour 6.7% (-6.0)
Liberal Democrats 2.3% (-0.6)

At first glance, that looks like a routine SNP hold on a reduced majority - but as is so often the case with STV by-elections, it's not that simple.  The vacancy was caused by the resignation of an independent councillor - so it's technically an SNP gain from independent, even though the independent was 18% behind the SNP in the popular vote in the ward last time around.  According to the 'Mike Smithson Doctrine', which ludicrously takes no account whatever of the previous result in the ward, this is therefore a result of unalloyed wonderfulness for the SNP (which is probably why Smithson hasn't mentioned it).

Back in the real world, there has been a significant swing from SNP to Tory, which very much follows the pattern of realignment we've been seeing recently - with Yes-voting ex-Labour supporters in west-central Scotland moving en masse to the SNP, and to a lesser extent No-voting ex-SNP supporters in the north-east moving to the Tories.  In a proportional representation election, that swap will always work out quite well for the SNP, but it could potentially lose them a few seats in the next first-past-the-post Westminster contest.  In retrospect, it seems a minor miracle that the post-indyref swing to the Tories in their former heartlands was delayed long enough for the SNP to clean up quite so comprehensively in last year's general election.

As the SNP candidate was elected on the sixth count, we're able to see where the various transfers went.  It's refreshing to discover that Scottish Labour's love affair with the Tories isn't shared by a majority of their own voters in Arbroath - 31 Labour transfers went to the SNP, and only 18 to the Tories.