Just a quick note to let you know that I have an analysis piece in today's edition of The National about the local election results and what they tell us about the future of Scottish politics. You can read it HERE.
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Why you should give a ranking to all (or almost all) of the candidates in today's election: text version
A couple of people have asked me to post a transcript of my podcast from yesterday about how the voting system for today's election works, and why it's so important to give a ranking to all or almost all of the candidates (and certainly to use your top rankings on all of the pro-independence candidates in your ward). Now of course normally I wouldn't want to divert people away from the delights of my dulcet tones (the audio version can be found HERE, by the way), but given the level of confusion about the voting system, it might not be a bad idea on this occasion. Voila...
It's known for being a relatively simple system from a voter's point of view, but a fiendishly complicated system when you get into the counting stage. In Irish elections, the counts go on for an absolute eternity, and journalists from other countries are generally baffled about what is going on, what all the terminology like "quotas" and "surplus votes" refer to, and most of all why the same votes need to be counted so many times. But the million dollar question really is this: as long as the process of casting a vote is relatively simple and easy to understand, does it actually matter that the way the votes are counted is so complex? Well, in a way it does matter, because as a voter you'd need to know how your vote is going to be counted before you can really know how best to use it.
In STV, you use numbers to vote rather than a cross, and you rank the candidates in order of preference using the number '1' for your top preference, '2' for your second preference, '3' for your third preference, and so on. However, there's no rule that says you have to rank all of the candidates. Instead, you can rank as many or as few candidates as you wish. And that is the crux of the dilemma for voters who don't understand how their votes will be counted - they don't know whether it's best to rank all of the candidates, or whether there's somehow an advantage to being very selective and only ranking maybe two or three candidates. Well, I can answer that question very simply. If you want to use your vote properly, and if you want to make very sure that you don't unwittingly help candidates that you don't like, you should rank ALL or ALMOST ALL of the candidates on the ballot paper. That is the way to do it, and if you're prepared to take my word for that, we don't need to go any further and you can stop listening now. However, the snag is that there are a lot of siren voices out there giving the completely opposite advice, and they also want you to just take THEIR word for it. There was the notorious letter that the SNP sent out to their members and former members a few weeks ago, that idiotically told people to rank the SNP and no other party. That advice was stupid, it was electorally illiterate, it was counter-productive, and from the point of view of the cause of independence it was destructive. So I want to take some time to explain why it's so important to rank as many parties and as many candidates as you can bring yourself to do.
The clue, actually, is in the name of the system. Single Transferable Vote. That's a very literal name, so you just have to think about the meaning of those words. Single: that means you have a single vote, rather than multiple votes. Transferable: that means your vote CAN be transferred from one candidate to another, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it WILL be transferred. So what is your single vote? Well, in the first instance it's your first preference vote. Whoever you give your first preference to is the candidate you are giving your single vote to. In many cases that's the end of the process, and your lower preferences will not even be taken into account. I know that'll be a stunning revelation for many people who probably imagine that by putting numbers against the names of multiple candidates, they must be giving votes to all of those people. They probably think that there's some sort of elaborate points system going on, like the scoring system in the Eurovision Song Contest, and that's why they wrongly get the impression that there's some terrible danger to using their lower preferences, and they imagine that it can somehow backfire and dilute the effect of their top preferences. No. Categorically no. It doesn't work like that at all, and that's the first and most fundamental thing you need to understand. As far as the counting system is concerned, you just have that one single vote for one candidate, and that's your first preference vote. The only way that can change is if your vote is transferred from one candidate to another, and that will only happen in one of two specific circumstances.
Now, again, this is where some people will panic and they'll start thinking "Oh my God, I've got to make sure my vote ISN'T transferred, I don't want to unwittingly end up voting for the wrong candidate". But if you are thinking like that, you need to get into a totally different mindset, because believe me, you should WANT your vote to be transferred. I'll say that again: having your vote transferred is something you should want to happen. If you reach one of the two circumstances in which your vote CAN be transferred, you want to make very sure that your vote IS transferred, because if it's not, your vote will either be totally wasted and count for nothing at all, or else it won't count for as much as it could have done. And the only way to make sure that your vote is transferred is to rank all of the candidates, or almost all of them.
So what are these two circumstances in which your vote can be transferred? The first is if the candidate you gave your top preference to is eliminated altogether because they didn't receive enough votes. If that happens, your vote will be transferred to the candidate you gave your next highest preference to. But if you didn't actually give a next highest preference, or if you only gave preferences to other candidates who have already been eliminated as well, your vote will be declared 'non-transferable'. In other words it'll be completely wasted and you'll be sitting out the remainder of the process. So you need to make sure that doesn't happen by using all or almost all of your preferences.
The second circumstance in which your vote can be transferred is harder to understand because it's less intuitive. It doesn't happen when you've voted for a candidate who has too few votes, but instead when you've voted for a candidate who has too many votes. This is the concept of 'surplus votes', meaning votes that a successful candidate doesn't actually need and that can therefore be transferred. In each election in each ward, there will be an exact quota of votes that a candidate needs to hit in order to be declared elected, and that quota will be different in each ward. It depends on the total number of votes cast, and the number of councillors that are being elected in the ward. As an example, let's look at the Giffnock and Thornliebank ward in East Renfrewshire in the 2017 local elections. There were three councillors to be elected in that ward. You add one to that number of councillors, which gives you four, and you then divide the total number of votes cast by four to calculate the quota. There were 7595 votes cast, so that was divided by four, meaning the quota for a councillor to be elected in Giffnock and Thornliebank was exactly 1899 votes.
But of course in the real world, it's very unlikely that any candidate is going to end up with precisely 1899 votes. In 2017, the first person to be elected in Giffnock and Thornliebank was an SNP candidate who had reached 1990 votes after the four least popular candidates were eliminated. That meant he was over the quota by 91 votes - and those were surplus votes that could then be transferred. Once again, if you voted for the successful SNP candidate, you actively WANT your vote to be transferred in that situation, because what it's doing is giving you a second bite of the cherry, and it's not doing your favourite candidate any harm at all - he's already been safely elected.
So here's a hypothetical scenario. Imagine that after an SNP candidate you've voted for with your first preference is elected, the next seat in the ward comes down to a straight battle between the Tories and the Greens. If you haven't bothered ranking the Green candidate, you'll be sitting that battle out, because your vote will not be transferred as a surplus vote to the Greens. You'll effectively be abstaining and thus indirectly helping the Tories to win a seat.
There are many analogies that can be used to help get across how preferential voting works. Suppose you're ordering dinner from a very limited menu - you can have haddock, beef or chicken. So you order haddock, but then they tell you that there might not actually be haddock available. They ask you whether you want to give them a second preference just in case, or whether you want your fellow customers to decide for you what you'll be having for dinner if there isn't any haddock. But if you let the other customers choose, and you then end up with beef when you would actually have preferred chicken, there's no point complaining about it, because you had your chance to indicate a preference. That's effectively what's happening if you don't use your lower preferences in the local elections. It doesn't in any way increase your chances of getting your first choice candidate elected, but it does mean your fellow voters will be making the decision for you if your first choice falls short, or if it turns out that your first choice doesn't actually need your vote because he or she already has so many votes.
As independence supporters, the last thing we want to do is let other voters make the decision for us, because lots of those other voters will be unionists, and you can guarantee that THEY'LL be using the voting system smartly by ranking lots of candidates. At the very least, we should be using our top rankings to rank ALL of the pro-independence candidates in our ward. As you probably know, I'm an Alba member, so if there was an Alba candidate in my ward I'd be voting Alba with my first preference. My next highest preferences would go to the SNP candidates, and then I would rank the Greens. If there were any non-unionist independent candidates standing, I would probably rank them next, on the logic that non-unionists are generally preferable to unionists. And then lastly, I would give my lowest preferences to the unionist parties. The reason for using those lowest preferences is that I'm not neutral on who the worst unionist party is: it's the Tories, and if you want to bury the Tories you have to ensure that you've ranked every single other candidate ahead of them, including Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates. However, before you give a ranking to Labour and the Lib Dems, just doublecheck your ballot paper to be very sure you've already given higher rankings to all of the pro-independence and non-unionist candidates.
Which is a slightly long-winded way of saying: on Thursday, vote until you boak. And that was Episode 16 of the Scot Goes Popcast, my name's James Kelly, and until next time, bye for now.
Support for independence surges by 2% in eve-of-election ComRes poll - with more signs of a potential breakthrough for the Alba Party
As you may have seen, the very last day of campaigning for the local elections brought word of the first Scottish poll for just over a month, and on the independence question the results were pretty encouraging - perhaps surprisingly so.
Should Scotland be an independent country? (Savanta ComRes / Scotsman, 26th April - 3rd May 2022)
Yes 49% (+2)
No 51% (-2)
Although Yes miss out on the bragging rights for getting to 50% or higher, that's a solid result from a firm that has tended to be on the No-friendly end of the spectrum in recent times. It's also, of course, a statistical tie - meaning that it's impossible to tell for sure which side is in the lead, due to the standard margin of error.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:
SNP 46% (-)
Labour 25% (+1)
Conservatives 18% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 7% (-)
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:
SNP 31% (-3)
Labour 23% (+1)
Conservatives 18% (-2)
Greens 14% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)
Alba 3% (+1)
There don't appear to be any specific local election voting intentions in the poll, so instead we're left trying to glean indirect clues about what might happen today from the Holyrood numbers. However, I would guess that a local election question would have produced fairly similar results to the Holyrood constituency numbers anyway - and that would have almost certainly misled us by overestimating the SNP, who are unlikely to get close to 46% in the first preference vote. Based on past precedents, I'm sure they would be more than happy to end up somewhere in the high 30s. Their biggest concern will be that Labour are polling a few points higher than five years ago - which opens up at least the theoretical possibility of Glasgow changing hands. You can imagine how the unionist media would gloat about that - the coverage of it would obliterate any favourable results for the SNP elsewhere.
I suspect a certain individual who is rather precious about his "project", and who recently demonstrated himself to be stuck in the "box" (ahem) of his own partisan Green propaganda, may be a tad dismayed at Alba's fine showing in this poll. 3% in the recent BMG poll was the best result for Alba in any poll from any firm since last year's Holyrood election, and the fact that it's been replicated in the ComRes poll makes it somewhat less likely that the progress is an illusion caused by margin of error noise - however much some people might desperately want that to be the case! If there is an Alba resurgence, I don't think there's any great mystery about how it's happened - it's just sheer hard work by a committed membership that has succeeded in boosting the party's visibility. Bear in mind that under the STV voting system, any party will need far more than 3% of the first preference vote in any individual ward to have a realistic chance of grabbing a seat. I'm not convinced that will be an insurmountable hurdle for Alba, though, who should have the advantage of a strong personal vote in specific wards for high-profile candidates (such as Chris McEleny).
If I can be permitted to put on my own partisan hat just for a moment, I'd like to strongly urge any of you who live in a ward with an Alba candidate to give Alba your first preference vote. This will almost certainly be the last chance for Scotland to get serious about seeking a mandate for independence this side of the 2024 general election. If, like me, you don't believe for one moment that the SNP leadership are sincere about holding an independence referendum next year, an Alba vote is a no-brainer. But even if you're merely not sure whether the SNP leadership are sincere, a first preference vote for Alba is a totally risk-free insurance policy, as long as you give SNP candidates your next highest preferences. You can fire a warning shot across the SNP's bows while still voting for the SNP to defeat the unionist parties. That's the beauty of a preferential voting system - you really can have your cake and eat it.
To reiterate what I've said before, the best voting strategy for independence supporters today is as follows...
1) Rank all, or almost all, of the candidates in your ward.
2) Give your highest rankings to ALL of the pro-independence candidates, in your own order of preference. (For me it would be Alba first, then the SNP's candidates, then the Greens.)
3) Give your next highest rankings to any inoffensive non-unionist independent candidates who may be standing.
4) Give your lowest rankings to the unionist parties (but first make very sure you've ranked all other candidates ahead of them). This allows you to vote against the Tories properly by having them at absolute rock bottom, below even their unionist rivals.
For an explanation of the rationale behind this strategy (often called "vote until you boak"), you can listen to my new podcast about how the STV voting system works.
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Britain Elects have a prediction model out which gives a central forecast for the SNP of a net loss of twelve councillors. That's not a totally implausible outcome, but what is completely and utterly absurd is that the supposed best case scenario for the SNP is a net gain of just three councillors. My guess is that the Britain Elects model is an Anglocentric one that only takes account of GB-wide polls - which means, as far as Scotland is concerned, it's pumping nonsense in and getting nonsense back out. It can be safely ignored.
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
Explained: How the voting system for the Scottish local elections works, and the BEST voting strategy for supporters of independence to use (listen on the Scot Goes Popcast)
As promised, and just in the nick of time, I'm using Episode 16 of the Scot Goes Popcast to explain how the notoriously complicated Single Transferable Vote (STV) system works, and to set out why ranking all or almost all of the candidates in your ward is by far the best voting strategy for independence supporters tomorrow.
I've been meaning for some time to try to explode some of the myths relating to STV that have been doing the rounds. Here are three myths I've heard recently -
"It can be very dangerous to use your lower preferences, because you may find that you're accidentally helping to defeat the candidate you give your top preference to" - RUBBISH. Using your lower preferences is, in fact, an entirely risk-free thing to do and cannot harm your favourite candidate in any way whatsoever.
"There is no effective way of voting against a party or candidate in this system" - RUBBISH. If you rank every other candidate ahead of your least favourite party or candidate, you are voting against the latter comprehensively, and with great precision and effectiveness.
"Lower preferences are still votes, and nobody should be voting for unionist parties, therefore you shouldn't use your lower preferences at all" - RUBBISH. Voters who rank all of the candidates with the Tories rock bottom are voting against the Tories properly. Voters who don't rank unionist parties with their lowest preferences are not fully voting against the Tories, and may in some circumstances be helping the Tories to win seats.
Hopefully I've managed to explain all of these points and more in the podcast, which you can listen to via the embedded player below, or via the direct Soundcloud link HERE, or on YouTube HERE. The Scot Goes Popcast is also available on Stitcher and Spotify.
You can also catch up with previous episodes of the Popcast -
Monday, May 2, 2022
Predictions for the local elections
As many of you have correctly deduced, I've been held hostage by PIRATES over the last two weeks, so all my plans for local election blogging and podcasting were sent into total disarray. However, in an act of inspiring humanity, they did give me my mobile phone back for long enough for me to pass on my predictions for the election to the Sunday National. You can read the predictions HERE. As you'll probably spot, there's a small error close to the top - my reply to the "what's changed for the SNP since 2017" question is attributed to "MM" rather than "JK".
I'm off the pirate ship now, so if I can recover from my ordeal in time I'm hoping to record a podcast explaining the voting system at some point before Thursday.
Monday, April 18, 2022
Just two hours left to register to vote in the local elections
If there are any independence supporters in your life who aren't yet registered to vote (young people, for instance), now is the time to give them an extremely urgent reminder that they have until just before midnight tonight to register in time for the local elections. The link they'll need is HERE.
And of course tell them to vote til they boak as well, but save that advice until after they've registered - time is very short!
Could we have stopped the SNP from losing its way on independence?
The SNP's messaging for the local elections is dire. I'm not saying that because I'm an Alba member, I really, genuinely think they've lost the plot. Two years after a forced EU exit, apparently all we want to do is "send a message" and that message is "ease the squeeze". What?
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 17, 2022
Fergie Kate replied to the above with: "Far too many fawning, obsequious members have allowed them to f*** up the best chance of Indy we ever had. Every month it recedes further into the past."Maybe Nicola Sturgeon's Clause 4 moment is the replacement of independence with squeeze-easing.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 17, 2022
This raises the interesting question of whether SNP members, including current Alba supporters who were still in the SNP until a year ago, share responsibility with the leadership for the grotesque direction the Scottish Government have taken. At the very moment the SNP should be moving into the endgame for independence, with Brexit as the casus belli, they've instead settled into a bizarre comfort zone with the help of bland and meaningless buzz phrases such as "ease the squeeze".
As I've noted a couple of times recently, there's a difference of view among Alba members about exactly how we're going to help bring independence about. The majority view is that we'll do it as a relatively small party, using electoral pressure to nudge the SNP in a more radical direction. There's also a minority 'utopianist' view that we'll soon replace the SNP as the most popular party and directly deliver independence ourselves. Whichever interpretation you subscribe to, though, there's no question that we're talking about a huge amount of additional work which really should have been unnecessary. It would have been far more optimal if we'd been able to march together towards independence within an SNP that had maintained a laser-like focus on the prize. So could we have rescued the SNP from the inside?
The short answer is "not with Nicola Sturgeon as leader". That was pretty conclusively proved in late 2020 by the aftermath of the victory of "the good guys" in the SNP internal elections, which the leadership swiftly and effortlessly nullified by procedural chicanery. Most famously, Fiona Robertson carried on as if nothing had changed, as if being voted out of office was a mere technical detail. She undoubtedly continued to wield more power than her elected successor. This circumvention of SNP internal democracy was perhaps analogous to the dying days of the Weimar Republic, when a supposedly democratic system proved to be a hollow shell due to the massive overuse of centralised presidential powers - which were technically constitutional, but which no-one had ever really envisaged the potential significance of.
So realistically if the SNP was to be kept on track, it would have meant Nicola Sturgeon never gaining those centralised powers in the first place, which in turn would have meant her not becoming leader in 2014. And that would have been a tall order. The most straightforward way it could have been achieved is if Alex Salmond had simply never resigned as SNP leader, thus preventing a vacancy arising. Funnily enough, just a few hours before he resigned, I was asked by the BBC to go on the breakfast programme the following day, and in the preparatory phone conversation the producer/researcher said to me very emphatically: "Now obviously Alex Salmond isn't going to resign because of the referendum result, no-one would expect him to do that, there's no reason for him to do that." Those words seemed very authoritative, and I was bit stunned when the opposite occurred so quickly. Perhaps it would have been perfectly feasible for Mr Salmond to ride out the referendum result, because after all the Yes campaign had performed a lot better than most observers had expected. It's a borderline call, though, because remember he was less than three years away from a decade in Bute House, and there comes a point where any leader will be accused of trying to "do a Thatcher" and stay in office forever. But maybe, just maybe, he could have held on for four more years, giving him just about enough time to hold a second indyref in 2018 in the wake of the EU referendum result. The snag is that he had no way of knowing when he resigned that an EU referendum would take place or that Leave would win.
Without Mr Salmond staying in office, is there any other way Nicola Sturgeon could have been thwarted? Well, someone could have challenged her in the 2014 leadership election. As a matter of principle that would have been a good thing because it would have prevented a coronation and facilitated a debate about strategy, but in the long run it would have changed nothing - she would undoubtedly have beaten any challenger by a country mile.
More realistic would have been to prevent her becoming recognised as the undisputed heir to the throne prior to 2014. There was nothing inevitable about her gaining that status - remember that if it hadn't been for Alex Salmond's last minute entry into the race, the 2004 leadership election would have been a three-way contest between Nicola Sturgeon, Mike Russell and Roseanna Cunningham, and it was almost universally accepted that Roseanna Cunningham would have won comfortably. However to know the importance of preventing Ms Sturgeon becoming seen as 'the anointed one' you would have needed a hell of a lot of foreknowledge about how any administration she led would prove to be pro-independence in theory but devolutionist in practice. I'm not sure there were any real clues in advance.
Hindsight really is a wonderful thing. I recall the former blogger Jeff Breslin saying in 2014 that it broke his heart that Alex Salmond had chosen to stay on as leader, rather than allowing the supposedly wider appeal of Nicola Sturgeon to win the referendum for us. But whether or not it's true that Ms Sturgeon is the ideal person to lead a referendum campaign, that's not of much use if no government she leads will ever take the action required to actually bring a referendum about. I think we just have to accept that there was a lot of fate involved in where we've ended up, and instead of beating ourselves up about things that would have been hard to control or predict, we need to think about how we're going to drag ourselves into a better position. In my view, that has to involve some kind of electoral progress for Alba, and we can make a start on that in the local elections.
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Thursday, April 14, 2022
So what WAS the thinking behind the SNP's notorious "and for no other party" leaflet?
I'd just like to draw your attention to yesterday's column in The National by the chair of the Alba Party, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, in which she expresses her astonishment at the now-notorious leaflet and letter that the SNP have been sending out, urging people to "ask their friends and family" to only rank SNP candidates and "no other party". I'm still trying to make some sense of what happened, because even from the SNP's narrow partisan interest, the message seems utterly self-defeating. Imagine you saw a TV advert for Travelodge that told you to "never stay in any other hotel", or an advert for Twix that told you to "never eat any other biscuit". Would those brands become more attractive to you, or would you just think you were viewing the last days in the bunker?
It was fascinating that the message was totally contradicted a day or two later by the controversial SNP MSP Emma Roddick, who wrote a lengthy Twitter thread correctly urging people to use the "vote til you boak" strategy in the local elections - meaning that you rank as many candidates/parties as you feel you can bear to. She obviously knew she was repudiating her own party's letter and leaflet (even thought she didn't mention them directly), but the million dollar question is: was she speaking only for herself, or had she been urged to post the thread by a leadership that knew a terrible mistake had been made? In other words, was the letter and leaflet the work of some naive and over-excitable interns, and had it slipped through the net in a catastrophic failure of quality control?
When I praised Ms Roddick for her thread (quite possibly the first and last time I'll ever praise her for anything), she became deeply uncomfortable, probably because she saw that I'm an Alba member, and in the hysterical McCarthyite atmosphere currently gripping the SNP she regarded it as vital to distance herself instantly. She made two points of supposed 'clarification': a) she's not part of the SNP leadership, and b) she would "boak" before reaching Alba on the ballot paper, if there was an Alba candidate in her ward. The latter point isn't especially important, because it doesn't change the fact that her thread was 100% correct about how the STV voting system works. Exactly where and when a voter "boaks" is very much an individual thing. That said, it was a fascinating insight into Ms Roddick's own mindset as a supposedly pro-independence parliamentarian, and raises the obvious question of whether she would rank unionist candidates ahead of pro-independence Alba because she regards identity politics issues as more important than independence.
As for the point about her not being part of the SNP leadership, that was a statement of the obvious but it was also very carefully worded. It doesn't exclude the possibility that she was speaking at the leadership's urging. She's known, after all, as one of the darlings of the leadership, and it would be startling if she ever spoke on questions of electoral strategy without their blessing.
Another possibility is that the message on the leaflet was the work of the leadership, but they hadn't anticipated the fallout from it. Because it was apparently only sent out to SNP members, former members and people who had at some point donated to the party, the leadership maybe thought they could get the "no other party" message to spread by word of mouth, while keeping it deniable by not putting it on leaflets aimed at the general public. If so, that was extraordinarily naive. There are enough former members who are alienated from the party that the message was bound to become publicly known within about fifteen seconds of it landing through people's doors.
As has been pointed out many times, the SNP telling its voters not to use lower rankings on other pro-independence parties will not help SNP councillors to get elected. Literally the only effect it will have is to make it easier for unionist candidates to get elected at the expense of the Greens and Alba. So if the message on the leaflet was leadership-approved, the only rational conclusion to draw is that they think it is strategically important that non-SNP representation in local councils should be as unionist-dominated as possible. That would make no sense if it's really true, as the likes of Paul Kavanagh believe, that the SNP are serious about holding an independence referendum next year. If that was the case, you would want as you head into a referendum campaign to have as many pro-independence elected representatives as possible, and as few anti-independence elected representatives as possible. But it might start to make a sort of perverse sense if the strategy is instead geared towards a world in which the SNP have privately decided that a referendum isn't going to take place for the foreseeable future, and in which they're just trying to maintain their own power within the devolved settlement beyond 2026. Looked at in that way, paranoid fears about Alba winning a modest number of local council seats have a kind of logic, because 'great oaks from little acorns grow'.
In other words, if the messaging in the leaflet was intentional and properly thought through, it indicates that the overriding strategic objective of the SNP in these elections is not to bring independence closer. It's instead to try and ensure that a fellow pro-independence party is "strangled at birth", to borrow the ugly words Cyril Smith famously used about the nascent Social Democratic Party in 1981. Readers must decide for themselves whether they want to have any part of such a breathtakingly cynical and self-serving project.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Alba's allure affirmed: Alex Salmond's new pro-independence party storms to best poll result since 2021 election in BMG belter
I'm not entirely sure when the Herald published them, and an online search has drawn a blank, but it's been brought to my attention that there are Holyrood numbers from the new BMG / Herald poll - and they're extremely healthy for the Alba Party.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:
SNP 44%
Labour 22%
Conservatives 21%
Liberal Democrats 8%
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:
SNP 33%
Labour 22%
Conservatives 20%
Greens 10%
Liberal Democrats 8%
Alba 3%
That's the first time Alba have been above 2% in any poll from any firm since the 2021 Holyrood election, and confirms the impression of other recent polls that Alba have recovered from a very rocky patch in the latter half of last year when they were barely registering. One explanation for the rebound is probably the determination of Alba members to keep the party visible. Certainly anyone who travels on the M80 between Glasgow and Stirling will be reminded in a very in-your-face way that Alba is still very much around.
Again, it looks like the SNP might be suffering a bit of a dip in popularity, although BMG's polls are so infrequent that it's hard to be sure. I'd imagine Labour will be a bit underwhelmed by their own showing, because although they're in second place on both ballots, they haven't opened up a significant gap in the way they have on the Westminster results.
And talking of the Westminster results, it turns out that the Herald reported the wrong numbers - a bit amateurish of them given that they commissioned the poll themselves. Here are the correct figures...
Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:
SNP 42%
Labour 26%
Conservatives 19%
Liberal Democrats 6%
Greens 4%
Reform UK 1%
So not as bad for the SNP as we originally thought, although 42% is still unusually low for them. And Labour's showing is also better than we were led to believe - placing them roughly where they were at the time of their mini-recovery in the 2017 general election (although the SNP's lead over Labour is still bigger than it was in 2017, which is absolutely crucial in a first-past-the-post election).
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Monday, April 11, 2022
Impudence! Betrayers! Puffins! TIME!!!!
Yes folks, it's a blogpost title in the inimitable style of Peter A Bell (well, inimitable except in the sense that I've just imitated it), which can mean only one thing - after two and a half weeks of putting this off, I'm finally going to reply to Peter's latest blogpost about me, in which he refers to me with uncharacteristic restraint and maturity as a "lying wee s***e", "the Scot Goes Pffft blogger" and "James 'Creepy' Kelly".
Now, before we go any further, let's make sure we're all on the same page and have correctly identified who the man calling me "creepy" actually is. Here's a genuine poster from a few years ago that features Peter. (Posted without comment, as they say.)
Moving on to the actual content of Peter's post, I'm not going to deny that this has been a monumental struggle for me. As I've said before, I find Peter's prose to be almost physically painful to read, and usually the best I can bear to do is skim-read his posts to get the general gist and to pick out the two or three most pompous or ludicrous sentences. However, I've done my level best this time to read the whole thing so I can reply properly.
First of all, Peter seems deeply upset about me "misquoting" him (which apparently means he can't tell the difference between a direct quote and a tongue-in-cheek paraphrase) and about my use of "straw men". I must say that's a bit rich given his repeated attempts to put words in my mouth and to take issue with points that I simply never made. For example, he says this -
"Fully a year after I started asking questions about how Alba Party intended to honour the terms of its 2021 manifesto – far less live up to the overblown rhetoric of its more ‘enthusiastic’ devotees – someone giving the impression of speaking with some authority for the party has attempted some kind of response...According to James Kelly at least, Alba Party has retreated somewhat from the more grandiose assertions and notions contained in its 2021 manifesto...Where a year ago the talk was of a ‘supermajority’ and forcing an extraordinary election and making that election substitute for a referendum, now the aim is rather more modest."
That is complete fiction from beginning to end. I did not state that the Alba Party has "retreated" from anything in its 2021 manifesto. Nor, incidentally, do I think that holding an extraordinary election and using that as a de facto referendum is a bad idea - in fact I suggested such a course of action myself multiple times before Alba was even founded. And last but not least, I wasn't speaking on behalf of the Alba Party in anything I wrote, except to the small extent that I have one voice out of the 15 or 16 on the Alba NEC. As I explicitly stated in my blogpost, there are differences of view within Alba on what the party can realistically expect electoral success to look like over the next couple of years, but I do believe that the utopianists who think Alba can suddenly replace the SNP as the largest party are very much in the minority. I think most members realise that we'll be doing well if we start regularly polling at 4-5% of the vote or higher, thus forcing the SNP to start looking over their shoulders and thinking about what policy measures will be required to stop more of their own voters drifting to Alba.
"Alba Party’s ‘plan’ assumes we can afford to wait until the next Holyrood election in 2026 before acting to dissolve the Union and restore Scotland's independence."
Again, this is another straw man, on two different counts. Firstly, it wrongly characterises my own analysis of how Alba can be electorally effective and achieve its objectives as "Alba Party's plan". And secondly, it suggests that my analysis referred specifically to the 2026 Scottish Parliament. I did not state that, I did not imply that, and I certainly did not mean that. There are council elections next month in which Alba could start to achieve its electoral objectives and thus put pressure on the SNP to become more radical on its independence strategy. That pressure can also come, incidentally, from Alba doing well in opinion polls - and to state the bleedin' obvious, we won't need to wait until 2026 for opinion polls to be conducted.
"The aspect of reality that James Kelly chooses to disregard as he refutes claims not made by me is time. This blithe discounting of time is a ubiquitous feature of Alba Party rhetoric. He also denies political reality. But that may be a matter of perspective. Not so time. Time is real. The electoral cycle is real...What James takes absolutely no account of is what the British state will be doing while we wait for Alba to gain enough electoral support to have some influence."
Alba are currently on 2% of the vote. I'm suggesting they'll be doing well and can start producing results if they get to 4-5% of the vote. Now, I fully appreciate that jumping from 2% to 4% is not all that easy, but from the way Peter is talking you'd think I was proposing a manned mission to the third moon off Jupiter. In reality we're talking about something that in the best case scenario can be achieved within a few weeks or months. I dare say that the British state is more than capable of getting up to all sort of nefarious activities within a few weeks or months, but this begs the obvious question: why does Peter think his alternative strategy will be so much quicker that it can successfully head the British state off? What is it about Peter's plan that is just so God-damn speedy?
The snag is, of course, that to answer that question, we'd first have to work out what Peter's plan is, and that's far from a straightforward task. Indeed it's not entirely clear that he has a plan at all. Let's start with what we know for sure: he wants people to reject Alba and stick with the SNP as the sole vehicle for independence. So to that extent it's a 'do nothing' strategy and is unlikely to produce faster results than a strategy that involves taking some actual action. He does, however, want the SNP to be much more radical than they currently are. In fact, he wants them to do a lot of the things that Alba are proposing and that the SNP leadership have rejected out of hand. Or, to put it another way, he wants to achieve Alba policy by staying with the SNP and opposing Alba. In some respects, he also wants things to be done that are far more radical than what Alba are proposing. So he wants to bring about greater radicalism than Alba's policy by sticking with a party that is much less radical than Alba. Can anyone make sense of this? I can't.
My best guess is that we're supposed to believe that the sheer force of Peter's personality and the unique persuasiveness of his blogging skills is just about to completely transform the SNP out of all recognition. Any time now. Probably before breakfast tomorrow. Thanks to Peter, the SNP will suddenly be more Alba than Alba. Nicola Sturgeon will become a revolutionary who is just gagging to declare UDI. At the moment of epiphany, she'll probably break down in tears and scream "WHY couldn't I see that Peter A Bell was right all along?! He's a thinker AND listener."
Once we all realise that TIME is the enemy, we'll realise that we must avoid all distractions such as actually doing anything positive to try to bring about a change in strategy on independence, and instead turn with religious fervour to Peter's booming voice. Because that, and that alone, can slay TIME.
"I ask the questions James Kelly neglects to ask. Why would the SNP be troubled by Alba taking four or five per cent of the vote in the Council elections? Why would this bring about the change in Sturgeon’s approach to the constitutional issue when all else has failed to do so? How would Alba translate that relatively tiny vote in the almost wholly irrelevant (to the constitutional issue) local elections into a lever with which to move the Scottish Government?"
So yes, in a thrilling and unexpected plot twist, Peter suddenly seems to understand that we're not talking about waiting until 2026, which of course totally contradicts everything he has previously said. But hey-ho, let's not quibble. To answer his question, all I can do is refer him back to the blogpost he's replying to, because that's where the point is explained. If Alba's vote share can no longer be dismissed as negligible, then the damage being done to the SNP's own vote share also ceases to be negligible. Vote share is what wins you seats, vote share is what keeps you the dominant force in Scottish politics. The SNP can't afford to lose one-tenth, let alone one-fifth, of its vote to another pro-independence party. If there's a danger of that, they'll have to take action to stitch their coalition of support back together - and that means speaking to the concerns that SNP-to-Alba switchers have. Overwhelmingly, what those people want is greater urgency on independence and a U-turn on GRA reform.
Next, Peter quotes Jonathon Shafi saying "influence campaigns on the SNP leadership have failed" because the SNP organisation is so centralised. Peter appears to be completely missing the point here, because it looks like Shafi was talking about internal influence campaigns within the SNP. It's precisely because the internal influence campaigns failed that Alba was created, ie. to change the approach to that of applying external influence. It's Peter who wants to persevere with a strategy that has already failed.
"What rational reason is there to suppose that the SNP leadership would buckle under the weight of a 5% vote for Alba in the local elections? Does Nicola Sturgeon look like she might be impressed by this?"
What would you expect her to look like, Peter? What would be the big clue? Something to do with her eyebrows, perhaps?
"James Kelly would no doubt retort that the SNP would be bound to worry that they might lose 5% to Alba in the next Holyrood election. Again, I ask the question he neglects to ask. Why would they worry?"
Because, as I have been pointing out for well over a decade, the list ballot is the most important ballot in Holyrood elections. The SNP cannot rely on retaining such an abnormally high number of constituency seats forever, and once they start losing constituency seats they'll desperately need all the list votes they can get. Yes, Peter, losing five percentage points of support on the list to Alba would worry the SNP. It would worry them considerably.
"A certain success for Alba in the council elections might even suit the SNP. If the British parties end up with control of more local authorities then we can be sure Alba will be blamed. Whether they are culpable or not is irrelevant. If they can be portrayed vividly enough as the culprits then enough of the mud will stick to do some damage to Alba’s prospects in the 2026 Scottish Parliament election."That's a desperately weak line of argument, I have to say. In a preferential voting system, the only conceivable way Alba can do any damage to the SNP is if Alba voters don't bother giving second and third preferences to the SNP. In reality, Alba will be urging its voters to rank all pro-independence candidates - the complete opposite of the advice that the SNP themselves have been giving so far.
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