Eurovision 2011 prediction : Tuesday's semi-final

I've been so wrapped up in the Holyrood election and its aftermath that I've barely paid any attention at all to the Eurovision rehearsals this year. Anyway, I thought it was high time I got my priorities straight, so I've put myself through a bit of a crash-course over the last hour or two. In no particular order, these are the ten countries I think might qualify from the first semi-final...

Greece
Switzerland
Norway
Albania
Turkey
Serbia
Finland
Azerbaijan
Russia
Iceland

I'm more than a touch surprised to find myself including Albania in that list, and with a fair bit of confidence at that - I didn't hold out much hope for them after I first heard the song back in December, but the traditional Cinderella effect has kicked in yet again. Compared to other predictions I've seen, the song I seem to be going out on a limb with is Switzerland - but I'm guessing its simplicity and charm might just see it through. Strictly on merit, Hungary really should be on the list and Russia shouldn't, but I've learnt from long experience that you don't get anywhere from a) betting on dance tracks at Eurovision, or b) betting against Russia at Eurovision. Hungary seem to have had problems in the rehearsals in any case.

This is the semi that UK viewers are allowed to vote in. I of course have my long-standing personal rule of only voting for songs performed entirely in a language other than English, but depressingly that doesn't leave me with many options on this occasion. Although Portugal are sticking with their usual practice of singing in their native tongue, I'm afraid I won't be able to vote for them for a fourth successive year - the song is unspeakably dreadful. So that only leaves Poland and Serbia. I'll need to have a think...

Is this the unanswerable case for SNP involvement in the next round of UK leaders' debates?

Well done to Stewart Stevenson MSP for spotting this incredible statistic -

"SNP now have 77 elected Parliamentarians, same as LibDems - Scot/Wales/UK/EU LD=5/5/55/12 SNP=69/0/6/2"

There's a slight error there, because the Liberal Democrats actually have 57 seats at Westminster. Nevertheless, if you take the SNP and their sister party Plaid Cymru together, they are clearly ahead of the Lib Dems by 92 to 79, which I would have thought is the final nail in the coffin of any notion that the Lib Dems have a 'national' presence that gives them a special entitlement to participation in televised general election debates that the nationalist parties do not share.

Of course the SNP shouldn't even need to pray in aid their strength in the Scottish or European Parliaments - their established position in Westminster politics ought to be reason enough. They have had continuous parliamentary representation since 1967, and are comfortably beyond the threshold of seats that affords official recognition as a Westminster parliamentary party. They outpolled both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom at the last election (in spite of the debates being rigged against them), and won more seats than the Conservatives. They also stood in 59 constituencies - two more than the number of seats that were required for Nick Clegg to become Deputy Prime Minister. And, of course, just like two of the three parties that actually did feature in the 2010 debates, they are a 'territorial' party, rather than a UK-wide one. However, if these facts aren't enough, the SNP's thorough-going dominance of the Scottish political scene over the next five years is going to make their total exclusion from the debates look ever more ludicrous.

A toast to Nick Clegg, the accidental midwife of Scotland's independence referendum

I have a kind of cherished personal memory of the moment on 2005 general election night when it suddenly dawned on me that the unfolding result was almost ideal for the SNP. That would have seemed a peculiar thing to say out loud at the time - in spite of a couple of constituency gains, Alex Salmond's resumption of the leadership had failed to prevent the party recording its lowest share of the vote since 1987, and unexpectedly slipping behind the Liberal Democrats on the popular vote for the first time since the same year. The political X Factor everyone was marvelling at in Scotland was not the Alex Salmond Factor, but the Charles Kennedy Factor. However, as we all know, Scottish Parliament elections are a very different proposition, and looking ahead two years it just seemed to me that a perfect storm was brewing. By the time of the 2007 Holyrood vote, a tired UK Labour government would be bang in the middle of its third term, with the SNP the obvious recipient of any protest vote. Better still, Labour had done just about well enough in 2005 to make it likely that Tony Blair, weighed down by the baggage of Iraq, would still be in harness as Prime Minister. And of course that's exactly how it all played out - the timing really couldn't have been better. If Blair had called it a day even a few weeks earlier than he did, the 2007 election would have been fought in the midst of a Brown honeymoon, and it seems likely that Labour would have clung on to power.

But while my crystal ball was almost uncannily accurate in 2005, I must admit it couldn't have been more faulty in 2010. I'd been convinced all along that, once again, the SNP's Holyrood hopes hinged almost entirely upon Labour somehow clinging on to power at Westminster. It seemed obvious that with (to coin a phrase) "the Tories back", many of the disgruntled 2007 switchers would revert to the Labour fold in 2011. On that fateful day in May that began with expectations of a Labour-Lib Dem deal, but ended with David Cameron walking up the steps of Downing Street, I felt a sense of hopelessness welling up inside me twice over - firstly because I quite simply despaired at the thought of a Tory-led government, and secondly because it seemed to me that the SNP's period in office was about to draw to a close through no fault of their own. I dearly hoped I was wrong - but the opinion polls in subsequent months followed a depressingly predictable pattern.

Yet here we are a year later with - almost unbelievably - an SNP majority government in place, and with the benefit of hindsight it's now clear that, just like 2005, the cards dealt by the 2010 general election prepared the ground for that outcome in almost ideal fashion. With either a Tory or a Labour majority at Westminster, the shift of the Lib Dem vote en masse to the SNP would never have happened. With a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, any backlash against Nick Clegg's party may well have seen a lot of the votes move in the obvious anti-Labour direction of the Tories. There was of course a direct swing from Labour to SNP on Thursday anyway, so perhaps a second term for Alex Salmond would still have been on the cards without Lib Dem assistance. But would there have been anything like 69 SNP seats if Clegg hadn't fallen for Cameron's charms twelve months ago? I doubt it.

So here's to you, Nick. You made a catastrophic decision, but just as Margaret Thatcher was the unwitting midwife of Scottish Home Rule, so it appears the hapless federal Lib Dem leader is the midwife of the independence referendum that so many thought could never happen.

John McTernan on one-man mission to thwart the democratic process?

It seems Scottish Labour's very own Prince of Darkness can't even let the dust settle on the election result before practicing the dark arts once again. Iain Macwhirter's jaw almost dropped to the floor last night when McTernan claimed that an independence referendum wouldn't happen on the grounds of illegality. McTernan loudly protested that this wasn't a political point, it was simply a matter of "fact". Which, however deluded, I was prepared to accept as an honest view until I spotted that he'd touched on the same issue from a slightly different angle in his latest Scotsman column -

"This leaves Labour with some stark choices. They need a candidate for presiding officer - a crucial position, given the SNP commitment to a referendum bill. The Scotland Act clearly states: "The following aspects of the constitution are reserved matters … 1 (b) the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England". The presiding officer has to assure themselves that any government bills are within vires before putting them before the chamber in Holyrood. Labour's Hugh Henry looks like the right man for this job."

Tell me, John, if an independence referendum's illegality is simply a matter of 'fact', why on earth would Labour need the 'right' Presiding Officer to interpret the matter in a favourable way?

I've no idea if Labour would be crazy enough to heed McTernan's advice - as Iain Macwhirter pointed out, it's these destructive neanderthal attitudes that helped to take the party into the wilderness in the first place. But I hope SNP members are at least alive to the danger, and bear it in mind as they vote in the secret ballot for the new Presiding Officer next week.

*

I've just caught up with the news that Tavish Scott has resigned as Liberal Democrat leader. In one sense I'm actually quite surprised, because a party that's been reduced to a rump doesn't have a lot of options. Well, to be precise, they now have four options, and by a process of elimination I presume it'll have to be either Liam McArthur or Willie Rennie.

SNP win overall majority of nine seats

Like a lot of people, I didn't get much sleep last night, so I'll write a more coherent post later (possibly!). In the meantime, I thought I'd just wallow in the sheer arithmetical poetry of the final result...

SNP 69 (+22)
Labour 37 (-9)
Conservatives 15 (-2)
Liberal Democrats 5 (-11)
Greens 2 (-)
Independent 1 (-)

Overall SNP majority of 9 seats (possibly 10 once a Presiding Officer has been chosen). Incredibly, that's slightly bigger than the one enjoyed by the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition in the 2003-2007 parliament.

Yet another 'final' - and very silly - poll of the campaign

The polls have already closed, but is there ever going to be an end to these "final opinion polls of the campaign"?! Here's one more from Progressive Scottish Opinion...

Constituency vote :

SNP 51% (+6)
Labour 26% (-9)
Conservatives 12% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)

Regional list vote :

SNP 53% (+12)
Labour 22% (-14)
Conservatives 12% (+4)
Greens 5% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 3% (-2)

In all honesty I think these are very silly figures that can be safely ignored. The fieldwork overlapped with the far, far narrower YouGov poll - and of course YouGov itself overstated the SNP by several points last time round.

How's everyone's nerves?

UPDATE (1.15am): OK, as I watch Linda Fabiani jumping up and down in East Kilbride, maybe it wasn't quite such a daft poll!

Colour coding genius, and a grand polling day for ducks

Well, what a wizard idea it was to make the referendum ballot paper grey. I almost put it in the wrong ballot box because it was barely distinguishable from the faded lilac paper in the gloom, but that's as nothing compared to what's happening in England - apparently the local election ballot papers are white. So no danger of confusion there! Reports are also surfacing of polling station staff not handing over referendum ballot papers unless specifically requested to do so - which if true ought to cause a monumental stooshie, but will probably be glossed over as per usual.

One thing that interested me was to see how well the 'Alex Salmond for First Minister' description stood out this time - after all, unlike 2007 it wasn't at the top of the ballot paper for alphabetical reasons, and wasn't the sole wording in the SNP box. But to my surprise I think it actually was quite eye-catching - probably because most other parties didn't bother with an additional description.

As for myself, I've spent part of polling day being royally entertained by right-wing Tories (ie. the most natural of all Yes to AV voters) who assure me that my 'arrogance' in pointing out the lies of the No campaign has single-handedly persuaded them all to "switch from Yes to No" at the last minute. Now, obviously I'll be gutted to be solely responsible for any defeat, but I can't deny it's rather thrilling to discover that I unwittingly wield such enormous power. Even better, one of the "Yes voters" I alienated was none other than Martin Coxall, the former Tory council candidate who you may remember had his fifteen seconds of fame last year after donning a John Prescott mask, allegedly assualting two female Labour party workers, and being arrested for his troubles. Yup, these are quality votes I've been squandering.

Last but not least, I have a nagging worry there may be something symbolic about a campaign of glorious weather that concludes with a polling day of relentless drizzle. Let's hope it's not a grey day presaging a Gray outcome...

The wall-to-wall insult to our intelligence that has been the 'No to AV' campaign

As we move into polling day for only the second UK-wide referendum in history, I think this recent tweet sums up the position rather succinctly -

"Having spoken to a few & watching Facebook.. those voting YES tomorrow understand why. Those voting NO don't. Which is scary."

There's no great mystery as to why that's happening - the Yes campaign have actually been making the case for AV, while the No side have utterly failed to make a case for the current system. Their main strategy has been to sow confusion and doubt over what AV would mean, often contradicting themselves to the point of absurdity in the process. In fact, it's been such a cynical effort that many opponents of electoral reform haven't even bothered trying to defend the campaign - their holding line has been "but the Yes campaign has been just as bad". Well, it hasn't. It hasn't been perfect by any means, but the closing broadcast fronted by Dan Snow was 100% focussed on illuminating for voters how AV actually works (as opposed to the fantasy) and the strong case for concluding that it produces outcomes that reflect the will of the electorate much more accurately. The final No broadcast, by contrast, served up yet more drivel about how AV would mark the end of "one person, one vote", and the entirely invented "cost" of the system. (And that's leaving aside the appearance of a Rogue's Gallery of some of the most thuggish and illiberal politicians this country has produced in recent times, who have all - coincidentally - lined up on the No side.)

The magnus opus of the campaign of deception was of course the glossy leaflet the No side sent out to every household in the land a couple of weeks ago. I meant to dissect it at the time, but now is as good time as any. Let's take it in bite-sized chunks...

The Cost :

In spite of the fact that the figure has been long since discredited, the leaflet lies through its teeth with the headline "The Cost of AV is £250 Million". It then brazenly begins its breakdown of that number by revealing that £91 million of it is the cost of the referendum itself. In other words, money that will have been spent regardless of whether the result is Yes or No. By this logic, we'd be equally justified in calling the £91 million "the cost of retaining the current electoral system". Or perhaps their implicit pitch is "Vote No and this referendum will never have happened"?

The bulk of the remainder of the "£250 million" is the cost of counting machines - which it has been repeatedly pointed out won't be needed, since all the countries that use AV count votes by hand, just as we do at present. Of course counting machines can be used under AV - but equally they can be used under the current system, or under any other system. Perhaps the No campaigners would like to take up this issue if we ever have a referendum on whether to switch to using counting machines - but we're not having one of those at the moment. Indeed, the best reason of all for being reassured that we wouldn't use such machines if we move to AV is that the decision would be taken by the UK government - which is dominated by the very No to AV campaigners in the Tory party who have been prattling on about the subject for months. You can't get a much more effective 'double-lock' than that.

The last bit of the breakdown of the "cost" is £26 million for explaining the system to voters. Well, the Electoral Commission runs information campaigns before each and every significant election, so it seems reasonable to assume that explanations of the new system could be easily incorporated into those.

In a nutshell, switching to AV would cost virtually NOTHING.

What the "money saved" could be spent on :

(Note - to deal with the idiocy of this bit of the leaflet, we have to assume for the sake of argument that the £250 million figure has some validity, which of course it doesn't.) We're offered some startlingly specific examples of what we could have "instead of AV" - 2,504 doctors, perhaps, or if it's more to your taste, 35,885 hip replacements. The implicit argument here is that it's a moral outrage if good money is ever spent on absolutely anything other than these core priorities. Well, that's intriguing, because one thing that the sight of the aforementioned Rogue's Gallery of No supporters brought home the other night is that there's a considerable overlap between opponents of AV and those who are most keen on wasting billions of pounds on the utterly useless status symbol of Trident. Perhaps they'd like to talk to us some time about the 2,457,519,874 teachers they decided were far less important than the nominal capacity of David Cameron to annihilate the population of St Petersburg on a whim?

And it has to be said that the No campaign have spent rather a lot of money themselves. Surely according to their own laudable strictures that money ought to have been donated to a medical charity instead, or some such other good cause?

The Map :

It's a tough call, but arguably the most ludicrous part of the leaflet is the map which splits the world into just two camps - those countries that use AV, and those that don't. So apparently all the many things that divide countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and the UK (you know, whether they have Islamic theocracy, absolute monarchy, communist dictatorship, or "good old" first-past-the-post democracy) pale into insignificance compared to the one and only thing that unites them - that they don't use AV. This argument becomes even sillier when you bear in mind that many of the "non-AV countries" (France, for instance) use run-off systems that are actually much closer in principle to AV than to our current system.

Now, if I was going to split the democratic world into two camps (and it can really only be done for the democratic world - praying in aid the likes of Burma is daft and offensive beyond words), the division would be between those countries which have introduced some kind of electoral reform, and those that still use first-past-the-post - mainly because they inherited it from the British colonial era and haven't got round to changing it. The primary reason that only three countries specifically use AV is quite simply that most countries go the whole hog when they introduce electoral reform, and jump direct to full-blown proportional representation. Most Yes campaigners would like to do that here. Who stopped us from making that choice? Why, that would be the No campaigners in the Tory party, who brought forward a referendum on AV alone as "a final offer" to the Liberal Democrats, to "go the extra mile". It's a bit rich for them to now claim that the wrong sort of electoral reform is on the ballot paper, when they were the ones who put it there and denied us every other choice.

The Sporting Metaphor :

Ah, a No to AV leaflet simply wouldn't be complete without a picture of a sporting event, with an arrow pointing to a losing athlete, designating him as "the winner under AV". The problem here is that I can clearly detect a winning line in that picture, which makes it grossly unrealistic if it's supposed to be a depiction of the current voting system. AV has a clearly defined and logical winning post (50% of the vote) that everyone can understand - ironically, the so-called 'first-past-the-post' system has nothing of the kind. How many 100m races have you seen in which the contest was called off and a winner declared after 37 metres, because the judges felt it was "too complicated" to wait and see who would have been ahead after 100 metres? That's the present Westminster electoral system in a nutshell. The winning line might be 24% of the vote, it might be 48% - don't worry your pretty little heads about it, you'll find out after the race. See here for a jaw-dropping example of a candidate elected under first-past-the-post on the basis of just 7.7% of the vote. That happened in Papua New Guinea - which might just give you a small clue as to the rather good reason why that country switched to AV in the first place.

The Scottish Factor :

As far as I can see, the only nod to Scottish distinctiveness in the leaflet is some small print that indirectly acknowledges that we have already scrapped first-past-the-post for most elections, but asks us to consider this -

"There are already five different voting system in use in the UK - do we really need to complicate things with another?"

Just how slippery can they get - are they talking about "we in Scotland" (as Mrs Thatcher would say) or "we in the UK"? If the former, we in fact have four electoral systems at present - AMS for the Scottish Parliament, first-past-the-post for Westminster, a list system for the European Parliament, and STV for local elections. If we vote Yes to AV, we'll still have four - AMS, AV, list and STV. I don't know about you, but I make that exactly the same number.

* * *

I'm under no illusions here - if the polls are to be believed, the vested interests in the London establishment (not least in the odious right-wing press) are about to succeed in snuffing out hope for change. But this has been my potted guide to why they don't deserve to succeed - and I still hope that as many people as possible vote Yes, to keep the electoral reform torch burning, however dimly.

YouGov poll : SNP lead steady on both ballots

No rest for the wicked - no sooner had I finished saying that I wasn't sure if YouGov voting intention figures were going to appear today, they appear!

Constituency vote :

SNP 42% (-)
Labour 35% (+1)
Conservatives 11% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)

Regional list vote :

SNP 35% (-)
Labour 32% (-1)
Conservatives 13% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
Greens 6% (-1)

This is basically a steady-as-she-goes poll - the SNP lead has crept up a bit on the regional list ballot, but has slipped very slightly in the constituencies. Of course it's the regional list vote that essentially determines the outcome, so it's slightly concerning that the lead there remains within the standard margin of error (a 'statistical tie', as the Americans would put it). But the good news is that it really does now look like the Royal Wedding has had no impact at all.

As a reference-point, the YouGov poll at the equivalent stage four years ago showed SNP leads of 6% and 5% respectively - so if today's leads are being overstated by the same amounts, this could yet be very close. However, a significant difference this time is that we won't have the Sun attempting a hatchet job on the SNP tomorrow morning (quite the reverse, in fact).

UPDATE : One point of concern from the YouGov polling that I hadn't previously spotted is that the SNP lead is largely founded on support from younger age groups - an exact reversal of the pattern in 2007. The problem is that the younger you are, the less likely you are to turn out to vote. Of course reported likelihood to vote is already factored into the headline YouGov figures - but unfortunately an unrealistic 70% of respondents claimed they were 'absolutely certain to vote', leaving an important question mark hanging in the air.

YouGov : 56% of public want SNP to either have more seats, or same number won in 2007

I now know the answer to my own question from the previous post - the rumoured final YouGov poll of the campaign appears to have been privately commissioned by the Green party. They haven't released the voting intention figures (or at least not yet), but have instead published the results of a supplementary question, which reminded respondents of the seat totals in 2007, and asked them if they'd like each party to win more seats, the same, or fewer this time round. The press release does its level best to convince us that the Greens come out on top on that measure, but looking at the detailed figures that's in fact highly debatable - 40% of respondents want the SNP to win more than their previous tally of forty-seven seats, compared to just 34% who want the Greens to win more than their current two seats.

The good news is that all the other parties come out worse - only 31% want Labour to win more than the forty-six seats they held at dissolution, while as many as 41% want them to win fewer seats. So the message is clear - the public want the SNP to win this election. But do they realise that the way to get that desired outcome is to vote SNP on the regional list ballot? Unless the Greens release the voting intention figures, we'll have to wait until Friday to find out.