Saturday, December 12, 2020

The omelette of strategic naivety

No-one has been clearer than I have that the SNP must have a Plan B ready to go if the UK government continue to refuse a Section 30 order.  But I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that Plan B has to be something that actually has a chance of working, as opposed to, you know, no chance under any conceivable circumstances whatsoever.  Which brings me onto a familiar drum being banged by Wings - 

"For much of last year, this site advocated a rational but unpopular position – namely that the SNP, which at the time held the balance of power in the UK parliament, should offer to support Theresa May’s soft-Brexit deal in exchange for the transfer of powers to hold a second independence referendum."

What's wrong with that sentence?  Well, where to begin.  First of all, the SNP didn't hold the balance of power in the UK parliament - if that had been the case, Jeremy Corbyn would have been Prime Minister, not Theresa May.  Secondly, the position Wings advocated was not "rational but unpopular" - it was in fact popular (with Wings readers) but irrational.  Yes, the SNP could have made Theresa May an offer, but it would have achieved absolutely nothing.  Her reply would have been - 

"Our Precious United Kingdom is not for sale.  We do not do deals with separatists."

You might argue that would have made her crazy when somebody was trying to save her bacon, but nevertheless it's indisputably what she would have said.  And actually from her own point of view it would have made perfect sense, because the SNP weren't in a position to deliver the deal anyway.  They didn't have enough votes to put the matter beyond dispute, and more to the point some of the Tory MPs who voted for the deal would have immediately swung the other way if they knew that "the precious" was at stake.

So by all means criticise the SNP for not doing the things they could have done to bring about independence or a choice on independence.  But don't criticise them for not attempting something that was never in their power, and that would have simply have left them looking a bit foolish, a bit cynical, and above all else strategically naive.
Posted by James Kelly at 8:48 PM 160 comments

Thursday, December 3, 2020

YouGov indy polling gossip

First of all, if you'd like to read more analysis of yesterday's Ipsos-Mori poll putting support for independence at 56%, I have an article in today's edition of The National HERE.  

I've also just received an email from a reader to let me know that another YouGov poll on independence is underway - which might be a cause for dismay, because I suspect that YouGov may be the firm most likely to break the long sequence of Yes majorities (they had Yes ahead by 'only' 51-49 in their last poll).  However, it remains to be seen whether the new poll is even intended for publication, because some of the supplementary questions are a bit odd and have the look of a private poll.  There's a question about how the army should be branded in Scotland, and also one about whether the unionist parties should form an electoral pact on the constituency vote in May.  (Seems a bit of a pointless query, because it's surely unthinkable that Labour in particular would be willing to go down that road.)

Posted by James Kelly at 9:20 AM 211 comments
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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Make that fourteen/fifteen in a row: Ipsos-Mori shows yet another huge majority for Scottish independence

I wasn't sure if we'd see any more independence polls before the end of this calendar year, but today brings word of something really important - it's only the second telephone poll conducted in 2020, and it's another cracker.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Ipsos-Mori/STV)

Yes 56% (-2)
No 44% (+2)

This is the fourteenth poll in a row which has produced a Yes majority on the standard independence question - although many people will say it's the fifteenth by adding in one poll with a non-standard question.

Unionists will of course point to the apparent small swing back to No, but the fact is that this is the second-highest ever Yes vote recorded in a telephone poll, and indeed the joint second-highest ever Yes vote recorded in any sort of poll.  What's more, the previous Ipsos-Mori poll in October contained significantly too many respondents who recalled voting Yes in 2014, and the new poll doesn't, so there's a genuine case to be made that the 56% in this poll is as good as, or better than, the 58% in the last one.  

The latter point makes it hard to read the general trend, because the last two polls from other firms gave a contradictory indication - YouGov suggested a small drop for Yes, while Panelbase reported a small increase, taking Yes to a new high watermark.  It still looks entirely possible that nothing much has changed since independence support reached its peak in the summer, but we'll have to await further polls to be sure.

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 55% (-3)
Conservatives 22% (+3)
Labour 14% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)
Greens 1% (n/c)

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 47% (-1)
Conservatives 22% (+4)
Labour 16% (+2)
Greens 7% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)

Seats projection (with changes from 2016): SNP 73 (+10), Conservatives 27 (-4), Labour 19 (-5), Greens 5 (-1), Liberal Democrats 5 (n/c)

So a small apparent recovery for the two largest unionist parties since the last Ipsos-Mori poll, but again that can perhaps be partly explained by the fact that there were too many 2014 Yes voters in the sample for the previous poll.  Either way, the SNP remain on course for a comfortable overall single-party majority of 17 seats, with pro-independence parties in combination taking more than 60% of the seats.
Posted by James Kelly at 5:17 PM 17 comments
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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

A quiet revolution inside the SNP

Just before Tony Blair invaded Iraq, something which he had plainly already made up his mind to do, he sent out junior ministers to claim they were making a "last push for peace".  It was the ultimate Orwellian linguistic trick - framing the warmongering government as peace-lovers, and the anti-war resistance to the government as the obstacle to peace.  I was reminded of that episode the other day when Alyn Smith started his rather brazen crusade against "factionalism" within the SNP - which was really a pitch for people to vote for his own diehard faction in the name of anti-factionalism.  And yet we know that one or two souls were naive enough to be impressed by his words and to take them at face value.  So the question was whether enough people would be hoodwinked to change the trajectory of the SNP's internal elections over the weekend.  Judging by Mr Smith's own result, his gambit failed.

Policy Development Convener Election (first preferences):

Chris Hanlon 43.3%
Alyn Smith 37.5%
Graeme McCormick 19.3%

Final count:

Chris Hanlon 54.8%
Alyn Smith 45.2%

That really is an astounding result when you consider that Mr Smith is far, far better known than Mr Hanlon.  OK, conference delegates are perhaps a little less likely to be 'starstruck' than the rank-and-file membership, but even so.

I've lost count of the number of times over the years that it's been suggested that SNP members might use an internal election to push the party in a more radical direction.  Usually nothing materialises, which makes this batch of results all the more remarkable.  Perhaps delegates could sense that independence was on the ballot this time, and that it was now or never if we were to get back on track in terms of strategy.  Take a look, for example at the contest for President - everyone knew that Mike Russell would win, but what we were waiting to see was whether Craig Murray would secure a big enough minority of the vote to send a message about members' unease in regard to the lack of urgency on an independence referendum. I think it's fair to say that he exceeded expectations.

SNP President election:

Mike Russell 61.7%
Craig Murray 24.5%
Corri Wilson 13.9%

The headline result is Joanna Cherry's triumphant return to the NEC - a body that has lost its way to such an extent that, under the control of Alyn Smith's anti-faction faction, it made a botched attempt to bar Ms Cherry from standing in last year's general election.  Her unofficial running-mate Neale Hanvey was well off the pace on the NEC vote, but managed to win a place on the Conduct Committee - quite an achievement for someone who was himself suspended from the party until only a few months ago.

Arguably the most important results symbolically are the oustings of Rhiannon Spear and Fiona Robertson as Women's Convener and Equalities Convener respectively.  Both had narrowly won their positions last year in the face of a fierce challenge, and I had thought they might hold on with a bit more to spare this time due to Colette Walker and others decamping to a new fringe party.  Their unexpected defeats will surely make it a lot harder for the leadership to press ahead with plans for self-ID.

But in a sense this outcome poses a dilemma for one or two of the rebels too - having won the party back to some extent, won't it be harder to justify sabotaging the party next May by splitting the vote on the list?

Posted by James Kelly at 8:44 AM 107 comments
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Sunday, November 29, 2020

It's hard to defend the BBC on a day like today

The BBC always innocently claim to be scrupulously impartial on the Scottish political debate and independence in particular, but they really do make it hard for themselves to hold that line when they attempt stunts like the one we've seen today.  An article on the BBC news website is titled "Sturgeon defends handling of the pandemic", framing her from the start as being on the back foot and having something to defend.  The opening paragraph states that Scotland's death rate is higher than England's - but then we discover that what is being referred to is not the overall duration of the pandemic (which has of course seen a much worse outcome in England than in Scotland), but "the week to 15 November", in which the per capita death toll was slightly higher in Scotland.  Such figures are scarcely surprising, given that England went into a nationwide lockdown when Scotland did not - which was made possible by the fact that Scotland has had the virus under better control in preceding months.  And we know from past experience that the BBC would have been the first to hammer Nicola Sturgeon if she had imposed extra restrictions any earlier than she did.

The rather pathetic impression is given of a state broadcaster just eagerly waiting for months until the first opportunity came along to claim on a thin technical basis that Scotland is performing worse than England, and then pouncing in a less than subtle manner.
Posted by James Kelly at 5:22 PM 58 comments

SNP vote surges in two Perth by-elections

So just a brief round-up of a couple of local by-election results I overlooked the other day... 

Perth City South: 

SNP 32.9% (+5.2) 
Liberal Democrats 31.6% (-3.1) 
Conservatives 29.4% (+4.2) 
Labour 3.5% (-2.9) 
Greens 2.3% (-0.8) 
UKIP 0.3% (n/a) 

This is one of those bonkers results that can only occur due to the STV system, and which we know from past experience that poor old Mike "impartial Lib Dem election expert" Smithson struggles to get his head around. The Lib Dems topped the poll in the ward in 2017, and the SNP have overtaken them this time. The SNP vote has gone up, and the Lib Dem vote has gone down. The net swing from Lib Dem to SNP is a very healthy 4%. And yet technically the result of the by-election is a Lib Dem gain from the SNP. How is that even possible? Well, it's because STV is a proportional system with multi-councillor wards, and the by-election was caused by the death of an SNP councillor who was elected in 2017 after finishing in third place in the ward on the first preference vote. However, as soon as a vacancy occurs, STV suddenly stops being a proportional system, and all the voters of the ward get to choose a replacement, which naturally gives an in-built advantage to whichever party topped the popular vote in the ward last time around.

But hang on, didn't the SNP top the popular vote in the by-election? So how come it's a Lib Dem gain? That's because STV is also a preferential system, and the lower preferences of Tory voters will have broken heavily for the Lib Dems. A tight head-to-head between the SNP and the Lib Dems on first preferences when there are lots of Tory transfers sloshing around is essentially an unwinnable scenario for the SNP. 

Perth City North: 
 
SNP 61.0% (+12.5) 
Conservatives 22.9% (-2.7) 
Labour 9.5% (-6.3) 
Liberal Democrats 3.9% (+0.4) 
Greens 2.6% (n/a) 

Not much need to worry about transfers when you have 61% on first preferences! The SNP's average increase across the two by-elections is more than 8%, which tends to suggest the mildly underwhelming recent result in Clackmannanshire was - as we suspected at the time - an aberration caused by local factors.
Posted by James Kelly at 8:15 AM 7 comments

Saturday, November 28, 2020

So where are all the good guys? You could be looking at them...

I was amused yesterday to see that someone had set up a website called "the SNP Good Guys", a name given by some Twitter users to Denise Findlay's list of preferred candidates for this weekend's set of internal elections. Cheekily, the site purports to have been created on behalf of the candidates in question, who it portrays as a sort of collective. That's highly unlikely to be the case - it's more like a 'fan site' intended to drum up support. A harmless enough wheeze, you might think, but if you listen to certain hysterical voices on Twitter you'd think it was somehow akin to Mussolini's March on Rome. The TV actor David Paisley (nope, me neither) penned a risible 'Sherlock Holmes' thread, and obviously expected everyone to gasp with astonishment when he pointed out the blindingly obvious connection with Denise Findlay, who he described darkly as "a former SNP member who resigned from the party following antisemitism accusations" and "an outspoken anti-trans activist attempting to influence SNP NEC elections". Well, perish the thought that any female activist should be "outspoken", eh, David? And I'm not sure it's really all that surprising or outrageous that someone who was an active SNP member for years and was on the Conduct Committee until only twelve months ago should still take a keen interest in the party's internal democracy. Needless to say, the antisemitism allegations against her were hotly disputed, and she also questioned whether the narrative that she had "resigned" was actually accurate - she felt she had been pressured in the heat of the moment into saying she would resign and that the proper resignation process had not in fact occurred.

Sherlock Paisley's investigation then uncovered the 'shocking' information that SNP Good Guys, ForWomenScot and the LGB Alliance all share the same internet hosting, that Denise Findlay follows ForWomenScot, LGB Alliance, WomensPledge and TransgenderTrd, and that - get this - they all follow her back. And that's pretty much it. Yes, I know what you're thinking - with this standard of cutting-edge investigative journalism we could have the makings of the dullest episode of Panorama ever. (And it would still only last twenty seconds.) 

Not to be outdone, the MP John Nicolson then ratcheted up the absurdity to a whole new level by claiming that the entirely circumstantial link with the LGB Alliance means that the SNP Good Guys literally are the LGB Alliance, and are therefore a "sinister far right" organisation. He then urged his followers not to vote for anyone endorsed by the "far right" - including several of his current and former SNP colleagues in the House of Commons, even though a) by definition no-one has any control over whether someone else endorses them, and b) the whole "far right" characterisation is a pile of nonsense anyway. Essentially Mr Nicolson is making a dog-whistle attempt to (deniably) paint highly respected fellow parliamentarians such as Joanna Cherry and Neale Hanvey as quasi-Nazis. I think he's jumped the shark on this one, and that SNP members aren't nearly as stupid or as gullible as he seems to imagine. 

Where does the "far right" accusation come from? Presumably the idea is that the LGB Alliance and the SNP Women's Pledge are "transphobic" and therefore "bigoted" and therefore "far right". Which is odd, because the standard term of abuse chucked at alleged transphobes is "TERF", in which the "RF" stands for "radical feminist". And whatever other criticisms might be legitimately levelled at radical feminists, it's a bit of a stretch to argue that they're on the right of the political spectrum, let alone the far right. Denise Findlay makes no secret of why she backs the candidates she does - she wants people who put independence first, and who will prioritise the rights of women and girls (ie. sceptics on GRA reform). I'm not as preocuppied as she is with the trans debate, but I'm certainly on the same page as far as putting independence first is concerned, and I do worry that some current SNP office-holders are culture warriors first and independence warriors second. It's ironic that the likes of John Nicolson, David Paisley and Alyn Smith should characterise "SNP Good Guys" as the work of "entryists", because to me and to many others it looks like the entryism has actually been in completely the opposite direction, and that there are now an awful lot of people in positions of influence within the SNP who care a hell of a lot more about their own identity politics zealotry than they do about independence. 

For that reason, if I had a vote this weekend, I'd probably end up voting for quite a few of the people on Denise's list. Not necessarily all of them, because I don't know enough about some of them, but it goes without saying that I'd vote for high-quality and high-profile candidates such as Douglas Chapman, Joanna Cherry, Neale Hanvey, Amanda Burgauer, Corri Wilson, Roger Mullin, Catriona MacDonald and Chris McEleny. (Far right, John? Really?!) I'd also give serious consideration to Denise's recommendations for the Women's Convener and Equalities Convener votes, because frankly I think the incumbents in those two positions have been far too divisive. Here's a suggestion - why not ignore John Nicolson's silly slurs and make up your own mind by checking out Denise's list of endorsements HERE. Whether you vote for them or not, I think you'll agree with me that they're impressive people and that there's not a Nazi amongst them. 

By the way, a bonus point for anyone who correctly identifies the episode of Blake's 7 that I took the title of this blogpost from.
Posted by James Kelly at 6:25 AM 27 comments

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Backing Joanna Cherry's slate for the NEC elections

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may be aware of my confusion a couple of weeks ago at a cartoon that had seemingly been created and shared by the so-called 'woke' tendency within the Yes movement. It contained people who were presumably meant to be gay, trans and from ethnic minorities, looking dubious and alarmed as they were asked by a couple of well-meaning Yessers to "let's all just be friends" with people from the movement who are apparently supposed to be beyond the pale - including Wings supporters, feminists with concerns about GRA reform, and most oddly of all the SNP Common Weal group. I can't pretend to know much about the Common Weal group - I'm not sure if they're a full part of Common Weal itself, or if they're just inspired by the same principles. But given that those principles are firmly rooted in the radical left, you'd think the 'woke' faction would see them as natural allies rather than as mortal enemies. A clue to what is going on is that the Common Weal group are supporting a slate of candidates for the upcoming NEC elections who have given their backing to a 'Manifesto for Democracy' - and that slate includes Joanna Cherry and Neale Hanvey, who are hate figures for a small minority of young activists due to the trans issue. Some of them openly wanted unionists to defeat Ms Cherry and Mr Hanvey in last year's general election, and boasted on social media about campaigning in any constituency but those two. 

For my own part, I think both Ms Cherry and Mr Hanvey would make ideal members of the NEC, and I can't see much to disagree with in the Manifesto for Democracy - which includes an urgent push for independence, a fairer complaints process, and a long-overdue reform to give all party members (rather than just delegates) the right to vote in internal elections, such as NEC elections. Of course this runs into the age-old problem with reforming electoral processes - to get changes through you first have to win a vote among the existing franchise, which is often weighted towards those who may have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. 

It's unlikely anything I say will have much influence on conference delegates, who are highly politically engaged and will know their own minds. But for what it's worth, I would urge anyone with a vote at the weekend to back change on the NEC. Let's democratise the party and make independence our number one priority going forward.


Posted by James Kelly at 6:43 PM 14 comments

Monday, November 23, 2020

The SNP's defence submission is a 'modernisation' too far: it's time to reaffirm the long-standing commitment to *unilateral* nuclear disarmament

Posted by James Kelly at 6:24 PM 49 comments

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Pro-indy parties make progress in Clackmannanshire East by-election

A rare advantage of being forced to have pre-moderation switched on is that I was able to intercept a comment the other night by a well-known unionist propagandist who was attempting to portray the Conservative hold in the Clackmannanshire East by-election as some kind of glorious, game-changing victory for unionism. In reality, the vote share for both pro-independence parties actually went up slightly, and it looks like the unexpectedly sharp increase in the Tory vote can be explained mainly by an intra-unionist swing caused by yet another Labour collapse. 

Clackmannanshire East by-election result: 
 
Conservatives 51.2% (+9.7) 
SNP 32.0% (+1.8) 
Labour 8.1% (-12.1) 
Greens 5.8% (+2.0) 
Liberal Democrats 2.9% (-1.4) 

If we'd seen this result in late 2017 or 2018, I might have interpreted the Tories' relatively strong performance as being of wider national significance. But at the moment we have tonnes of polling evidence, and indeed evidence from other recent local by-elections, that the Tories are struggling across Scotland and that the Douglas Ross experiment is failing. So the Clackmannanshire East outcome has got 'local factors' written all over it. It was a reasonably solid Tory ward in 2017 anyway - it contains Dollar, so it's very much the posh end of the county.
Posted by James Kelly at 4:04 PM 9 comments
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