If you want to, I'll change the situation. Right people, right time, just the wrong location...

A Scot Goes Pop reader found this Tory leaflet dropped through her letterbox in Upper Largo last night, beseeching her to cast her regional list vote for Ruth Davidson.  Upper Largo is in the Mid-Scotland and Fife electoral region.  Ruth Davidson is standing as a regional list candidate in Lothian.  Mind you, she's currently a Glasgow MSP, so perhaps her chicken run is leaving her army of leafletters feeling a little befuddled.  It's a bit like the joke in Doctor Who -

"Oh I do love the spring.  All the leaves...colours..."

"It's October."

"I thought you said we were coming here for May Week."

"I did.  May Week's in June."

"I'm confused."

"So was the TARDIS."

Interesting also that the Tories are using their intolerance of any internal dissent on independence as a selling point.  I thought uniformity of opinion was supposed to be one of the many, many things that make the SNP bad?

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At the weekend, Juliet Swann and I were tentatively talking about the possibility of publicly debating each other on the issue of "tactical voting on the list", possibly via live stream.  I know next to nothing about live streaming, though, and I see that the most popular platform is far from being free to use.  If anyone has any suggestions about how the idea can best be taken forward, feel free to drop me a line.

The SNP manifesto shouldn't just "not rule out" a referendum - it should make a conditional commitment

You may have seen earlier this evening that within two minutes of the Sunday Herald tweeting that they had a story about the SNP manifesto omitting a commitment to a second independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon had replied with the following denial : "News to me!  Manifesto not finalised yet."  Predictably, Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson went straight into all-out Brit Nat Troll Mode, describing Sturgeon's tweet as a "non-denial denial", and implying that the plan is to never hold a second referendum.  In truth, though, it's the Sunday Herald report that is a non-story story.  It simply states that SNP sources have indicated that there will not be a "firm pledge" for a referendum.  I suspect there are more people who think Saddam Hussein is alive and well and ready to attack Britain within 45 minutes than who think the SNP are about to make an unconditional pledge for a referendum.  The question at hand is whether the option of holding a vote before May 2021 will be left open, and if so, how strong the language is and what the potential triggers will be.

The Sunday Herald report doesn't have a concrete answer to that, although it hints that a significant shift in public opinion could be taken into account.  It also suggests that Brexit could be a trigger.  That's what we thought anyway, so Farquharson seems to be getting himself worked up over very little.  (Incidentally, the article characterises the chances of a new referendum as "remote" in the absence of a "dramatic event" such as Brexit.  In a two-horse race like the EU referendum, would it really be so dramatic if the side leading by 43% to 36% in the most recent poll were to win?)

Jim Sillars is quoted as saying he would prefer a "floating mandate", ie. a promise that a referendum would definitely be held if certain circumstances come about.  That would be my own strong preference as well.  It's not a million miles away from what is being hinted at anyway, because it would always be open to the SNP to decide for themselves whether the conditions had arisen.  But it's not ideal if SNP sources are allowing themselves to be interpreted as saying that the wording being planned wouldn't constitute a clear mandate to hold a referendum, if that proved necessary.  Hopefully, the effect of the reaction to this story may be to make the SNP leadership realise that they would be far better to upgrade the manifesto wording from "we don't rule out a referendum" to "we will only hold a referendum if X, Y or Z happens".

The danger of SNP supporters being seduced into "tactical voting" for smaller pro-independence parties may be rapidly receding, but there's still a chance that some of them might make a more principled switch if Nicola Sturgeon gives the impression (however misleading) that she is cooling on independence.  I gather that RISE, for example, are making an unambiguous promise of a second referendum within the next five years, which is clearly a potentially attractive pledge for many Yes voters.  There's a happy medium here that can easily keep the pro-SNP coalition united in May, and I would suggest the leadership ought to seize it with both hands.

SNP's mammoth lead increases further in Scot Goes Pop Poll of Polls

I had some technological problems before Christmas, and wasn't able to update this blog's Poll of Polls for the Holyrood election when the most recent TNS poll came out.  So I sat down to do it today, and suddenly realised that the rules I decided upon a few months ago are coming back to haunt me.  I said that only pollsters that have conducted at least one poll within the last three months would be taken into account (that was to prevent a repeat of the situation during the indyref when an ancient Angus Reid poll was left in the sample for almost a year), and that now means Panelbase and Survation will have to drop out, because neither have carried out a (published) voting intention poll since September.  The trend figures will therefore become somewhat less meaningful, but I may as well stick with the original plan.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 53.0% (+0.2)
Labour 20.7% (-1.3)
Conservatives 16.3% (+0.9)
Liberal Democrats 5.3% (-0.3)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 48.3% (+1.7)
Labour 19.7% (-1.7)
Conservatives 15.7% (+0.9)
Greens 7.3% (+0.3)
Liberal Democrats 5.7% (-0.3)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are three - YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

The Tories' moderately good showing can be explained by two factors : a) YouGov are a Tory-friendly pollster in Scottish terms and make up a bigger portion of the sample than usual, and b) the Tories did unusually well in the most recent Ipsos-Mori poll, which may well be a freakish finding because other firms haven't shown a similar increase.  Even with these advantages, though, Ruth Davidson's mob still find themselves several points behind Labour, so the right-wing media are probably deluding themselves with their belief that Labour can be displaced as the leading opposition party.

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Alex Massie in the Spectator -

"Everyone loves Ruth Davidson. No one will vote for her."

Not for the first time in his life, he's half-right.

The Glasgow Effect : why do the anti-independence media think Ellie Harrison's nationality is important?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, about the controversy over the awarding of £15,000 to an artist in return for her not leaving the city of Glasgow for a year, and about the anti-independence media's curious obsession with the fact that the said artist is "English" and "London-born".  You can read the article HERE.

Spoiler alert : There are no spoilers. We don't know the election result until the votes are counted.

There's yet another "tactical voting on the list" (sic) article out today, this time from Fraser Stewart at Common Space.  This is becoming incredibly repetitive, but I'll just briefly deal with his central claim...

"Thus, if a party was to win nine constituency seats in Glasgow, say, their second vote share would be reduced to one-tenth of the original figure. Large parties doing well on first votes systematically cannot do anywhere near as well on the list: a simple and effective reality of the d’Hondt method.

Yet many remain defiant to stand by the SNP on both constituency and list votes, in the face of this systemic impenetrability. Spoiler alert: if a pro-independence Holyrood is your ambition, both votes SNP can not and will not work."

The word "say" covers a multitude of sins. By definition we cannot possibly know how many constituency seats the SNP will win in any region until the votes are counted, by which point it's too late to do anything about your "tactical" vote on the list if all of your assumptions turn out to be wrong. But OK, let's "say" for the sake of argument that the SNP will clean up in the constituencies. The snag is that one-tenth of a huge numbers of votes is still a lot of votes, and will quite probably be a greater number than a small party like RISE has received. It may well meet the de facto threshold for winning at least one list seat in the region.

Suppose you and a friend are both SNP supporters, but are both avid fans of RISE press releases on Bella Caledonia, and are tempted by the idea of a "tactical vote on the list" (sic). Suppose you have second thoughts at the last minute and stick with the SNP, but your friend goes through with it and switches to RISE. The SNP win a list seat in spite of their list vote being divided by ten, while RISE receive a derisory vote and fall well short of the de facto threshold of 5%. Question : whose vote has "worked", and whose vote has been "wasted"?

By the way, if a pro-independence Holyrood was your aim in 2011, it may be news to you that "both votes SNP cannot work". We currently have an outright SNP majority, and it simply wouldn't have been won without list votes - if they'd been relying on constituency votes alone, the SNP would have fallen a whopping twelve seats short of the target of 65.

Oddly, the rest of Fraser's article moves on from "tactical voting", and instead makes the case that you shouldn't vote SNP on the list because it would be a really bad thing if the SNP won a huge majority. Er, haven't we just been told the system makes that impossible, and that SNP votes on the list won't even count? Jeez, get it sorted, guys...

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I thought I'd give a quick New Year's plug to this blog's Facebook page, because I know some people who only use the mobile version of the site may not be aware of its existence. Basically, if you 'like' the page, you'll see a link on your Facebook feed whenever I post here. So it shouldn't be too obtrusive! The link to the page is HERE.

The BBC's guidelines for Holyrood election don't merely defy natural justice - they also defy logic and precedent

I'm finding it hard to work myself up into my customary state of moral outrage over the BBC's (provisional) decision about which parties should be treated as 'major' in the coverage of this year's election, because this time it's not really the SNP that is being disadvantaged - although admittedly it's possible that overly-generous coverage of the Liberal Democrats could harm the SNP in its bid to prize away the Northern Isles constituency seats.  But in spite of my relative inner calmness (and it's genuinely a novelty), I can't deny that the decision and the reasoning behind it is just as indefensible as ever.

Consider this.  In 2003, the Green party won 6.9% of the list vote, and seven out of the 129 seats.  At the subsequent election in 2007, they were still treated as a second-string party, and were barred from most of the leaders' debates, which were still the traditional four-way affairs between the SNP, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.  In 2011, the Liberal Democrats won 5.2% of the list vote, and five out of 129 seats.  That was clearly inferior to what the Greens achieved in 2003, and yet for some reason the Lib Dems are still being defined as one of four parties who attained "substantial representation" in 2011.  There's no explanation at all of why the goalposts have shifted over the last nine years.  It's murderously hard not to conclude that the BBC's flexible definition of "substantial representation" boils down to "whatever the Lib Dems have, and whatever the Greens don't have".

Of course, those sympathetic to the Greens are framing this as an injustice towards Patrick Harvie's party, but it could just as easily (perhaps more easily) be argued that both the Lib Dems and the Greens should be barred from the main debates. I'm not saying that would in any way be fair or desirable, but it's the only real conclusion that can be drawn from the 2007 precedent.  It should be noted that prior to last year's general election, Ofcom made clear that it was only the Lib Dems' performance in 2010 that justified their status as a major party in Scotland - their support in the most recent Holyrood, local and European elections wasn't sufficient.  It's hard to see how Ofcom will be able to avoid the conclusion that last year's result is the final piece of the jigsaw, and that the Lib Dems should now be relegated to the second tier alongside the Greens.  OK, Ofcom is not the BBC, but it will be distinctly odd if the two organisations diverge on such an important point.

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Tom "Bomber Admin" Harris, now very much an ex-MP, quoted at Stormfront Lite yesterday -

"Corbynistas bang on about their man’s “mandate”.  If party rules had been respected, he wouldn’t even have been on the ballot paper."

Those ridiculous anti-democratic rules, requiring that any candidate for the Labour leadership can only go forward to the ballot if they are nominated by 15% of Labour MPs, were of course respected to the letter.  Jeremy Corbyn received the requisite number of nominations, fair and square.  It's Harris, McTernan and their ilk who disrespected the process by making a bogus distinction between "real nominations" and "nominations by moron".  All a bit reminiscent of their fallen hero Tony Blair unilaterally rewriting the rules of the United Nations Security Council to incorporate the novel concept of the "unreasonable veto" (ie. a veto exercised by any country other than Britain or the United States).

Happy New Year

2014 was referendum year, 2015 was election year...

Welcome to election AND referendum year!  (Unless Cameron loses his nerve and puts the EU referendum off until 2017.)

I'm on the long journey back from the Edinburgh street party, so I may torture you with my traditional low-quality photos later.

VOTE : What is your favourite type of dictatorship?

Some more festive fun for you, ie. I'm feeling too lazy to do a proper post.  If Britain had to abandon its democracy tomorrow (OK, semi-democracy, semi-aristocracy), what system should we replace it with?  The options are...

1) Marxist-Leninist one-party state
2) Fascist one-party state
3) Dominant-party state
4) Authoritarian presidential republic 
5) Jackie Baillie
6) Theocratic state
7) Absolute monarchy
8) Military rule
9) Anarchy

You can find the voting form at the top of the sidebar (desktop version of the site only).  Voting for multiple options is enabled, in case anyone is feeling particularly indecisive.  But for heaven's sake don't abstain because you don't like any of the options - we can't let fascism win by default, can we?  Hilary Benn will be having a stern word with you, and quite possibly dropping a bomb on your mother-in-law's cottage.

Seven things that will happen if Britain votes to leave the EU in 2016

1) The cause of a united Ireland will be back with a vengeance.  We've become used to polls showing that a large chunk of the nominally 'nationalist' community in Northern Ireland are content to remain in the UK for the time being.  That may change rapidly if the Irish border becomes the frontier of the EU.

2) The centre of gravity in what remains of the EU will shift a little to the left.  That's simply a question of basic arithmetic - the bulk of British members of the European Parliament are right-wing (more UKIP than Tory), and Britain casts a right-wing vote in the Council of Ministers, which is effectively the second chamber of the EU legislature.  (It used to be said that even New Labour was the most right-wing government in the EU, although admittedly that was before the admission of the former Eastern Bloc states.) Our representative on the European Commission is also a Tory.

3) Much of Labour will become totally disorientated, because a belief in Britain's European destiny is part of their DNA.  Their instincts will be screaming at them to campaign to get back into the EU as soon as possible, but they won't want to be seen to overturn the referendum result straight away.  They may settle on a compromise position of going all out to keep Britain in the European Economic Area, on the same basis as Norway and Iceland.  That would at least make it easier to return to the EU in future decades.

4) David Cameron will resign as Prime Minister.  I was never entirely convinced by the claim of John "the Gardener" McTernan that Cameron's position would have been untenable if there had been a Yes in the indyref - but this vote is one of his own choosing.

5) The Tory party will not split.  Ironically, there's much more likely to be a schism if Remain wins by a narrow margin.  Most Tories who vote to Remain will be easily reconciled to a Leave outcome, because they're mild Eurosceptics anyway.  The handful of genuine pro-Europeans in the party will probably feel that Cameron did his level best.

6) The powers of the Scottish Parliament will effectively increase.  There may be a Sewel Convention preventing Westminster legislating on devolved matters, but that doesn't apply to the EU - and indeed EU law always has primacy.  The Scottish Government's freedom to act on devolved matters will therefore be much less constrained if Britain is outside the EU.

7)  There will be a second independence referendum in Scotland.  I make no prediction about the outcome of that referendum, and clearly there are one or two people in the SNP (such as Kevin Pringle) who think it will be harder to make the case for independence if Britain has decided to withdraw from Europe.  But as long as Scotland votes to Remain and finds itself outside the EU against its will, the case for a referendum will be unanswerable, because we were endlessly told last year that a No vote was a vote to stay in the EU.

Should the SNP support Cameron's plans to weaken the powers of the Lords?

Here's an interesting discussion point, given that I know how most of you feel about the House of Lords.  At some point next year, the Commons will probably be invited to vote on whether to abolish the power of the Lords to block secondary legislation.  If so, we'll enter into Alice Through the Looking Glass territory, because we'll have the Tories posing as modern-day Asquiths and Lloyd-Georges and trying to transfer power from unelected peers to the elected chamber, while the constitutional 'reformers' in the Corbyn-led Labour party and the Liberal Democrats will be standing up for the ancient rights of the Barons and the Bishops.  To be fair, there's a pragmatic case to be made that almost any check on the power of a government "elected" on just 37% of the vote has to be better than nothing.

But for the SNP, there isn't such a straightforward conflict between principle and pragmatism.  Unlike Labour and the Liberal Democrats, they have no stake at all in the Lords (through their own choice), so it's arguably in their interests to see the Lords stripped of more powers, and for the focal point of opposition to the government to be in a chamber where the SNP are the third-largest party and hold almost a tenth of the seats.

The decision they make could be crucial, because there is a smattering of right-wing libertarians on the Tory backbenches who will be instinctively mistrustful of an executive that is trying to make itself too powerful.  If the SNP and the DUP join with Labour and the Lib Dems to vote the plans down, it would only take a handful of Tory rebels for the government to be defeated.  Even without the DUP, the Tory rebellion wouldn't have to be huge.

So what do you think the SNP should do?  Should the priority be to chip away at the powers of the Lords, even if in the short term that further empowers the Tory government?