We can, citizens

If the Portuguese election result a couple of months ago was a touch complicated, tonight's Spanish election result is truly epic.  Once again, we have the conservatives emerging as the largest single party, but without any real prospect of forming a stable government in the absence of a deal with the socialists.  Unlike Portugal, however, this state of affairs has come about in spite of the combined centre-right forces having the slight upper hand in the parliamentary arithmetic.  If the preliminary results are correct, this is how it works out...

Right and centre-right : 178 seats
Left and centre-left : 172 seats

The reason why the centre-right majority is meaningless is that eight of those 178 seats will be held by a "separatist" Catalan party, which for obvious reasons is not about to reach an accommodation with the incumbent Madrid government.  So a more realistic way of looking at the result is this -

Right and centre-right : 163 seats
Left and centre-left : 172 seats
Catalan centre-right nationalists : 8 seats
Basque and Canarian centre-right nationalists/regionalists : 7 seats

I've no idea what attitude the Basque and Canarian centre-right take towards Mariano Rajoy, but even if you hypothetically assign those seven seats to the combined centre-right forces, the left still can't (quite) be outvoted.  So, on the face of it, it seems almost inevitable that the socialists will be involved in the next government - either as the junior partner in a grand coalition, or as the senior partner in a left-wing coalition involving Podemos and others.  The only possible alternative is that the current government might limp on for a few months on a caretaker basis until a new election can be held, but that would probably only happen if there is genuine deadlock in the negotiations.  Unfortunately, deadlock isn't inconceivable, because the socialists will need to cobble together an absolute majority (ie. 176 seats) to override any vetoes from the Senate, which remains firmly in the hands of the conservatives. 

Whatever arrangement is reached, it's already clear that this election won't in itself resolve the Catalan dispute, because the anti-"separatist" centre-right have the blocking minority they need to prevent any constitutional changes.  (The current constitution outrageously precludes even the theoretical possibility of Basque or Catalan independence.)

All the same, those of us with radical left sympathies should certainly keep our fingers crossed for a socialist-led coalition, because if that happens, there'll never have been a time when the radical left have held such influence within the European Union.  We'd have Podemos as junior coalition partners in Spain, Syriza as senior coalition partners in Greece, and a  Portuguese government that owes its position to a formal deal with the communists and the Left Bloc.

"Just forget about Scotland", part 2

I've been having a listen to the Polling Matters round-up of 2015, in which Rob Vance has once again been doing his "just forget about Scotland" routine.  He doesn't use those exact words this time, but the basic sentiment hasn't changed at all from his last offering on the subject a few months ago.  It's very telling - and rather amusing - that he starts out by saying that Labour can't take power without putting together a majority in the "British parliament".  That of course is absolutely right, but he actually means the opposite, ie. that Labour need an English rather than a British majority, and therefore that the Scottish component of the British parliament can be largely ignored.  He doesn't even properly correct himself after 'mis-speaking', which tends to confirm my theory that certain London commentators are literally incapable of differentiating between an English and a British parliament, between English and British public opinion, between an English and a British party system, etc, etc.  To them, it's inconceivable that Scotland could ever matter in a British general election, because Britain is England.

The problem for Vance is that arithmetical laws and basic constitutional principles don't really yield to what is essentially a chauvinistic cultural conceit.  You kind of sense that the rational part of his brain knows this, which explains why he feels he has to hang his assumptions on the vague notion that English Votes for English Laws will progress in such a way as to render SNP MPs practically irrelevant in the formation of a British government.  He adds almost as an afterthought that he's not sure of how that will happen.  But here's the thing - if he can't at least make one or two realistic suggestions of how it's even possible for Scottish voters to be disenfranchised to quite such an extreme extent, what he's saying is effectively gibberish.  The moment that Scottish MPs are barred from voting on motions of confidence (and thus helping to determine who forms the government) is the moment Scotland has ceased to be part of the United Kingdom.  We'd essentially have the same status as Gibraltar or Bermuda or any other dependent territory that lacks representation in the UK parliament.  That just isn't going to happen.

A fairer point to make is that a more radical form of English Votes for English Laws could leave a Labour-led government that has a British but not an English majority in the position of being 'in office but not in power', ie. without the ability to drive through its programme on English health, education and possibly even taxation.  But the bottom line is that it would still be in office, which is not nothing.  And in any case, there is no sign so far of such a radical version of EVEL emerging - all we have to date is a very casual change in the House of Commons' Standing Orders, which an incoming Labour government could easily change back in the space of a single day.

What this is really about is that Vance finds it emotionally impossible to accept that Labour will either have to defeat the SNP in Scotland to take power at Westminster, or else do a deal with the SNP.  But barring an implausibly enormous pro-Labour swing in England, that's exactly the position.

The state of play in the EU referendum remains as clear as mud

I've been meaning to update the EU referendum Poll of Polls for quite some time, but because I had settled on a method that gives equal weight to telephone and online data collection, it wasn't possible to do it in the absence of any recent telephone polls. But it seems that phone polls are like the proverbial London buses - you wait months for one, and then two come along at the same time.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 50.1% (+1.4)
Leave 37.6% (+0.4)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 43.1% (-0.7)
Leave 41.7% (+3.4)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 57.0% (+3.5)
Leave 33.5% (-2.5)

(All polls conducted at least partly within the last month are taken into account. The online average is based on nine polls - four from ICM, two from Survation, one from ORB, one from BMG and one from YouGov. The telephone average is based on one poll from ComRes and one from Ipsos-Mori.)

As you can see, the trend is far from clear.  If only online polls existed, we'd probably be halfway towards convincing ourselves that Leave have made significant progress in recent weeks and have practically drawn level.  But the two new telephone polls suggest public opinion is moving in completely the opposite direction, so much so that in the 50/50 average, the online trend is more than cancelled out, and the Remain lead has slightly increased.

I'm fairly confident that the method I'm using is the best one available, because almost any alternative you can think of would give too much weight to online polls, which are conducted far more frequently.  That might not be such an issue if the gulf between the results produced by the two types of poll was not quite so huge and consistent, but it is.  However, the problem with what I'm doing is that each telephone poll is given a disproportionate amount of weight, and so if there's any specific problem with an individual poll, it becomes greatly magnified.  Unfortunately, I'm a bit sceptical about the approach Ipsos-Mori are using for their phone polls, because they ask about referendum voting intention in two different ways, and they use the actual referendum question second, not first.  Logically, I have to use the results from the real question, but I can't help wondering if the first set of results are more meaningful.  If we used those instead, the average Remain lead in telephone polls would be significantly lower, at 54.5% to 35.5%, and the 50/50 average would be Remain 48.8%, Leave 38.6%.  If that's a better reflection of reality, it could be that Leave have indeed made some modest progress of late.

UPDATE :  I see from John Curtice's analysis that I've misunderstood Ipsos-Mori's approach slightly - they don't ask respondents the question two different ways, but instead split the sample in two and ask each half of the sample one of the two versions of the question.  That makes the numbers for the actual referendum question much less problematical, but quite what the value of the exercise is escapes me.  OK, it helps Ipsos-Mori make a comparison with the question they've been asking for years, but surely that consideration is more than outweighed by the detrimental effect of cutting the sample size in half.

Genuine question for Dan Hodges : if Jeremy Corbyn has already killed the Labour party four times, how can it possibly die again?

Merciful Dan Hodges has at last given Jeremy Corbyn some respite.  Just for once, it's Hodges' own fellow travellers in the PLP who are responsible for "killing" the Labour party, because (you've guessed it) they're not doing enough to get rid of Corbyn.  However, regular readers of Hodges' column may be a tad puzzled as to exactly how, in practical terms, it's even possible for these "spineless" parliamentarians to be killing the Labour party - an organisation which has apparently already been put to death by Corbyn on no fewer than four separate occasions since August.

Dan Hodges, 31st August : "Labour has ceased to be a real political party...we’ve now reached the point where it isn’t really possible to call Labour a political party at all."

Dan Hodges, 12th September : "The day the Labour party died. The Labour Party as we know it – and as some people once loved it – died today. Each and every one of us will be touched by its passing."

Dan Hodges, 5th October : "The Labour movement is dead."

Dan Hodges, 25th November : "The Labour party has ceased to exist."

Hmmm. I think we can only conclude that a key part of the cruel Corbyn/McDonnell masterplan is to keep bringing the Labour party back to life every few weeks, just so they can kill it all over again. Will this non-singing, non-bowing, Albanian-quoting, party-going, peace-loving Marxist madness never stop?

* * *

Meanwhile, Hodges' even more unhinged Blairite brother John "the Gardener" McTernan has excelled himself with possibly the most hypocritical paragraph that has ever been written in the history of the English language. Indeed, if McTernan's name hadn't been at the top of the article, I might have assumed it could only have been written by the Professor of Hypocrisy at Hypocrite University.

"This strategy of ridiculousness – so ridiculous, to adopt the immortal words of Blackadder, it could only be thought up by the Professor of Ridiculousness at Ridiculous University – has as its current emblem the proposal to make Ken Livingstone a peer of the realm. Pause for a minute to savour the delicious irony – and total stupidity – of that concept. The "new politics" is about making appointments, rather than electing parliamentarians and then making them Shadow Cabinet members? New precisely when? The mid-eighteenth century?"

Tell me, John - in which parallel universe did the Labour Prime Ministers you worked for appoint only elected politicians to the government? Is it a figment of my imagination that, for example, Gordon Brown appointed the ultra-right-wing Digby Jones of the CBI (who wasn't even a member of the Labour party, let alone the House of Commons) as Trade Minister, and then immediately made him a Baron so he could continue in the job?

Corsica follows in the footsteps of Scotland and Catalonia by electing a nationalist administration

Understandably, the mainstream media in the UK have been most interested in the French regional elections because of the failure of the National Front to make a really telling breakthrough and seize control of at least one council.  But we shouldn't lose sight of the historic result in Corsica, which represents the biggest challenge for decades to the French state's Neanderthal notions of absolute sovereignty.  Of the large European states, France is the most backward in that respect, even more so than Spain, which at least allows nations like Catalonia a very substantial measure of autonomy.

Corsican Assembly second round election result (vote shares, changes are from second round in 2010) :

For Corsica 35.3% (-0.4)
French Centre-left 28.5% (-8.1)
French Centre-right 27.1% (-0.6)
National Front 9.1% (n/a)

Seats :

For Corsica 24 (+9)
French Centre-left 12 (-12)
French Centre-right 11 (-1)
National Front 4 (+4)

It may seem slightly bizarre that the nationalists have achieved victory in spite of their vote edging down slightly, but the explanation is that the National Front didn't make the second round last time, so the presence of the far-right has had an impact on all of the other three parties/alliances - but the nationalists less than the others.  In any case, the nationalist vote was split last time between two parties in direct competition with each other.

The constituent parties of the alliance are the Party of the Corsican Nation, which is actually anti-independence but in favour of significantly increased autonomy, and the pro-independence Corsica Libera.  It would be interesting to know whether the Party of the Corsican Nation have come under fire for deciding that the most natural alliance is with other civic nationalists, and not with other 'unionists'.  It certainly makes perfect sense that they've taken that view, because as long as Corsica Libera have a pragmatic understanding that autonomy within France is the necessary first step towards their goal, the two parties' immediate constitutional priorities coincide entirely.

As you can see, the alliance has fallen just short of an absolute majority (they have 24 seats, and the combined opposition have 27), but there doesn't seem to be much doubt that they will form the new administration.  What this result reminds me of most is the SNP's minority victory in 2007, when unionist parties in combination retained an overwhelming majority of the popular vote.  The big question now is whether the Corsican nationalists will be able to use their limited power as a springboard to greater things, as the SNP did so successfully.

UPDATE : The UK media's early reporting of the results in mainland France was disappointingly ill-informed.  For example, the presenter on the BBC news channel wrongly told viewers that the National Front's vote had "collapsed".  In reality, the far-right party achieved its highest ever raw popular vote in any election, and seemed in terms of vote share to be fractionally up on the 27.7% achieved in the first round.  The fact that it didn't win outright in any region can be entirely explained by massive tactical voting, and in a few cases by the complete withdrawal of the centre-left from the contest.

Ten things that Scotland should be grateful to Donald Trump for

America's leading Hitler impersonator Donald Trump reckons that Scotland should stop criticising him for Islamophobia, and should instead get on with being grateful to him for all he's done for us.  And, you know, he's got a point.  Here are the top ten ways in which he improved our country...

1.  "Stabilised the doons."  (Translation : Destroyed one of Scotland's last great wildernesses - the most extensive and scientifically important area of shifting sands in the UK.)

2.  Made the destruction worthwhile by delivering only a tiny fraction of the 6000 jobs he promised.

3.  Made the destruction even more worthwhile by delivering, as promised, the "greatest golf course in the world".  (Actually, the most authoritative list rates it as only the 65th best golf course in the world, but what's 64 places between friends?)

4.  Entertained the nation with repeated spectacular failures to prevent an offshore wind farm "spoiling the view" from the 65th greatest golf course in the world.

5.  Gave us such an easy answer whenever anyone says that SNP supporters are just automatons who mindlessly agree with everything the leadership does.  "Well, we didn't agree with them letting Trump stabilise the doons."

6.  Helped Martin Ford see the light about the Liberal Democrats.

7.  Allowed us to spend so much quality time with the delightful George Sorial, and thereby made us realise that Alastair Campbell is not (quite) the most odious spin doctor of all-time.

8.  Changed the name of Turnberry golf course, which has hosted four Open championships since 1977, to "Trump Turnberry".  Perhaps people will start taking it seriously now.

9.  Gave us a timely reminder of our recent political history, ie. that Jack McConnell was First Minister for five-and-a-half years.  (How did we forget that?)

10.  Transformed Katie Hopkins overnight into a respected columnist.

Corbyn's top priority for internal reform should be changing the nominations system for Labour leadership elections

Some of Stephen Bush's political predictions this year have proved uncannily accurate (admittedly he didn't call the general election correctly but was much closer than most), so we should probably take heed of his claim that Corbynistas are increasingly confident of being able to remain in control of the Labour party for the next decade, and that anti-Corbynistas are increasingly despondent about their chances of averting that fate.  If that's true, the first thought that occurs to me is that it makes an SDP-style split highly likely at some point between now and 2020.  The only reason that Blairites are still rubbishing the idea of a breakaway party is that they're still trying desperately to convince themselves that Corbyn is just a passing nightmare.  To use a Daisley-esque analogy, it's a bit like the Arab reaction immediately after the Six Day War - it's initially hard to believe that something that happened so quickly can possibly have such lasting consequences.  But it only took Mrs Thatcher a couple of weeks to seize control of the Conservative party from Edward Heath, and nothing was ever the same again.  The Tory "wets" eventually accepted that harsh reality, and if the Labour right start to do the same now, it's hard to see how they will reach any other logical conclusion than that their future lies in a different party.  It might take a few years to emotionally reconcile themselves to that logic, however.

The second thought that occurs to me is that Bush's belief that Corbynism is safe depends entirely on Corbyn himself not voluntarily standing down.  He'll be almost 71 by the time of the next general election, so it's hardly inconceivable that a health or stamina issue might crop up.  If he does decide to step aside for any reason, it's far from certain that whoever he anoints as his preferred successor will even get onto the ballot paper in the subsequent leadership election, because he or she would require nominations from 15% of Labour MPs, who won't feel under the same obligation to 'play fair' that they might do if it was a question of renominating Corbyn himself.  So I would have thought the left's most urgent internal reform priority should be to give themselves an insurance policy by changing the nomination system.  Perhaps the most elegant solution would be to allow nominations from constituency parties to be taken into account.

*  *  *

You might be interested in Alasdair Soussi's article about the Scotland Bill on the Al Jazeera website, which includes quotes from myself, James Mitchell, Paul Cairney, and (brace yourselves) Duncan Hothersall.  You can read it HERE.

SNP secure 8% swing in bilious Blantyre by-election brawl

Just for once, we have an STV by-election in which the party 'defending' the seat actually won the popular vote in the ward last time around. (So no need for any 'confusion' over at Liberal Democrat Voice or Stormfront Lite.)  Labour have clung on in Blantyre, but as you'd expect their 23% lead over the SNP from 2012 has been slashed.  It's interesting to see that Labour people on Twitter think that this result is "great", "AMAZING", "fantastic", "one hell of a hold", etc, etc - just how low are their expectations these days?

Blantyre by-election result (10th December) :

Labour 47.2% (-7.1)
SNP 39.6% (+9.0)
Conservatives 4.5% (+0.6)
SSP 3.9% (n/a)
Liberal Democrats 2.9% (+2.2)
UKIP 1.9% (n/a)

The SNP of course had a 1% nationwide lead in the 2012 local elections, so an 8% swing in a local by-election is considerably better than an 8% swing at the general election in May would have been.  This is the rough equivalent of a 19% or 20% swing at the general election - which admittedly is lower than the SNP actually achieved in most former Labour heartlands, but is still extremely impressive.

Even though Labour weren't far short of 50% on first preferences, the full five counts were required for their candidate Mo Razzaq to reach the quota.  That means we can see the whole picture of how the smaller parties' votes transferred, and not for the first time Labour have suffered the embarrassment of proving rather popular with Tories.  53 Conservative votes transferred to Labour on the final count, and just 13 to the SNP (107 were non-transferable).  Predictably, SSP votes broke more for the SNP, although not as overwhelmingly as you might think - 55 went to the SNP, 32 to Labour, and an eccentric 1 to the Tories!  UKIP transfers were fairly evenly spread, which will surely be something of a disappointment for the Tories, who would have hoped to capture the lion's share.

Doubtless the #LibDemFightback fantasists will be beside themselves with excitement at quadrupling their vote share and reaching the dizzying heights of 2.9%, but in all likelihood that can be explained by the lack of competition from independent candidates this time (there were two in 2012).  And there's certainly nothing very special about the Tory performance - we normally assume they benefit from differential turnout in local by-elections, so an increase of less than 1% is par for them, at best.

*  *  *

Alastair Meeks (the artist formerly known as Antifrank) claimed on SL this morning that most of the divergences that the Scottish Government has made from UK government policy over the years have been 'negative' rather than 'positive', and he offered the decision not to introduce tuition fees as an example.  That of course isn't correct - the Labour government at Westminster had already introduced tuition fees on a Britain-wide basis by the time devolution started in July 1999.  The Lib-Lab Scottish Executive had to make a 'positive' decision to replace them with the graduate endowment (with the Lib Dems insulting the intelligence of a generation by insisting that the endowment wasn't a back-end tuition fee, because it "didn't pay for tuition").  The SNP government later made another 'positive' decision to scrap payments altogether.

How to tell if you're a Dalek

I'll keep this very brief because I'm in the middle of a technological apocalypse.  I suppose I always had a vague instinctive understanding that tomato sauce and computer keyboards don't really mix, but now I have the irrefutable proof.

I just wanted to make a passing comment on the notorious Loki article at Bella -

"Yes, you, the morally certain, reactionary branch of the dead Yes campaign...If Scotland is a cheap haircut you are its puritanical fringe...You intend to vote SNP twice next year because you love democracy.  You call the First Minister Nicola.  You think Braveheart is a documentary.  You have The National delivered directly to your ego and you live in a world where the next referendum is always around the corner – should the right crisis occur."

I'll have to plead guilty to at least two of those charges, although oddly enough calling the First Minister Nicola isn't one of them.  I may have done it once or twice, but in general I don't because it just feels wrong somehow.  (Although I do sometimes refer to Kezia Dugdale as "Kezia", so I'm not quite sure what the difference is.)

So, yes, I'm one of the people Loki is referring to, and did you notice how blatant his implication is that simply voting SNP on both ballots is enough to make us fanatics?  I'm not sure that actually understanding how the electoral system works, and realising that the list ballot is not a second preference vote, is something that should trouble our consciences or cause tortured soul-searching in front of the mirror at the dead of night.

You, of course, may reach a different conclusion, but my own view is that as long as you don't think Braveheart is a documentary, you're probably not a Dalek.

Kevin Williamson launched into a partial defence of Loki by claiming it is "FACT" that Nicola Sturgeon will not be proposing a second referendum in the SNP manifesto.  That's a "FACT" of the non-fact variety, because I'm aware of no evidence that there won't - at the very least - be wording in the manifesto that leaves open the possibility of a referendum in the event of Brexit.  Indeed, it would be a contradiction of everything that has been said so far if that isn't the case.

(And I know people are always itching at this point to say "Brexit won't happen", but try to restrain yourselves.  In a two-horse race it's always a good idea to consider the possibility that either horse may win, unless one of those horses is being ridden by John McTernan.)

YouGov subsample suggests Scotland is opposed to bombing Syria

When YouGov produced its dramatic poll on the eve of the Commons vote on Syria showing that support for air strikes had slumped, the fieldwork was impressively bang up to date. So it's rather frustrating that the follow-up poll is based on fieldwork that is several days out of date, and that partly preceded both the vote itself and Hilary Benn's "better than sex" intervention. However, for what it's worth, as of Wednesday and Thursday the scepticism about military action had reached record levels.

Approve or disapprove of air strikes? (Britain-wide)

Approve 44% (-4)
Disapprove 36% (+5)

Among the Scottish subsample, there was a similar swing in opinion, but as support for air strikes had been lower in the first place, that proved sufficient to push 'Disapprove' into a clear lead -

Approve or disapprove of air strikes? (Scottish subsample)

Approve 39% (-5)
Disapprove 45% (+4)

We were all slightly dubious about the political composition of the Scottish subsample in the previous poll, because it looked like there were a little too many Tory voters and far too many UKIP voters. That probably would have led to opposition to military action being underestimated. No voting intention question was asked in the new poll, so there's no way of knowing whether that problem has repeated itself.

In the case of the Iraq conflict in 2003, public opinion suddenly swung in favour of war in the immediate run-up to the Commons vote, and that support (temporarily) became overwhelming once British military action was actually underway.  The first part of that pattern has been clearly broken by this poll, but we'll need polls with later fieldwork to discover whether the second part of the pattern has been broken as well.