Mainstream media's narrative lies in TATTERS as SNP vote increases across the board in sensational new Survation poll

"Mike Smithson, calling Mike Smithson...Mike Smithson, come in please."  If you happen to be sitting next to a certain 'impartial election expert' who demonstrated such an inspiring willingness to 'help' the voters of East Dunbartonshire last year, you might want to give him a wee nudge.  Before tonight, there had been six full-scale Scottish polls since the general election, of which four could reasonably be described as good for the SNP - ie. they showed the SNP on a higher share of the Westminster vote than was achieved in June.  Mr Smithson literally pretended those four didn't exist (and even made mind-boggling comments such as "in the complete absence of any Scottish polling...").  He was all over the other two polls like a rash.  But I'm sure that this apparent pattern is just totally coincidental, and that he'll set our minds to rest first thing in the morning with a big splash on Stormfront Lite about tonight's remarkable Survation poll, which shows the SNP making progress at both Westminster and Holyrood level.

Scottish voting intentions for next Westminster election:

SNP 39% (+1)
Labour 27% (-2)
Conservatives 24% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 7% (n/c)

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 42% (+3)
Labour 25% (-3)
Conservatives 25% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 33% (+1)
Conservatives 23% (+2)
Labour 23% (-1)
Greens 9% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 8% (-2)
UKIP 3% (n/c)

Don't be thrown off the scent by the fact that the Tory vote has proved reasonably stable between the last Survation poll and this one.  The single most important fact about Scottish polling at the moment is that the gap between the SNP and the Tories at Westminster level has undoubtedly widened since the general election, meaning there is every chance that some of the Tory gains last June will be reversed if there is another general election any time soon.  If this particular poll is correct, the SNP lead over the Tories has essentially doubled from eight points in June to fifteen points now, but no post-election poll has had the gap at less than twelve points.

By contrast, although this poll suggests that the SNP lead over Labour has also increased since the election, it's harder to be sure whether that's what has really happened.  Three of the seven post-election Scottish polls have shown Labour making minor inroads into the SNP's lead, so there may have been a small swing in either direction.  Because the SNP and Labour both hold seats with wafer-thin margins over each other, either party would be equally justified in feeling optimistic about making significant gains in SNP-Labour battleground areas.  But obviously if tonight's poll is exactly right, the SNP would be in luck and would take seats from both the Tories and Labour, increasing its tally of Westminster seats from 35 to well over 40.

Now, I know some people will caution that the SNP's improvement in this poll could easily be margin of error 'noise', and that's undoubtedly true.  The 3% swing from Labour to SNP on the Holyrood constituency vote looks more dramatic than changes elsewhere in the poll, but even that could potentially be explained by margin of error effects.  But in a sense that misses the crucial point - what really matters about this poll is that the SNP's vote hasn't fallen.  You might recall that there was a YouGov poll that took us by surprise recently by showing a sharp 4-point drop in the SNP's vote to 36% - the first time the party had fallen below the 37% share recorded at the general election.  (The aforementioned Mr Smithson wasted no time in painting that as an unmitigated disaster for Nicola Sturgeon.)  If Survation had shown something similar tonight, it would have looked very likely that YouGov had been the first to detect a genuine new trend.  As it is, it now looks more probable that the changes reported by YouGov were just a margin of error illusion, and that the SNP's Westminster vote has held steady - perhaps somewhere in the high 30s.

Oddly enough, Labour have more or less re-established themselves as Scotland's second party at Westminster level, but have failed to do so at Holyrood level.  Five of the seven post-election polls, including tonight's, have had Labour ahead of the Tories at Westminster.  But five of the seven have also had the Tories either ahead of Labour, or level with Labour, on the Holyrood constituency vote.  The explanation for this phenomenon is probably a small degree of cross-voting - ie. a modest percentage of people who would vote SNP on the Holyrood constituency ballot, and either SNP or Green on the Holyrood list ballot, are backing Labour at Westminster.  That's proving just enough for the moment to keep Labour ahead of the Tories in Westminster terms.

Survation also asked the independence question...

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 46% (n/c)
No 54% (n/c)

In a sense that corroborates YouGov's findings, which also suggested there has been no statistically significant changes in public opinion on independence.  The difference, however, is that YouGov continued to suggest the Yes vote is slightly lower than the 45% recorded in the 2014 referendum, whereas Survation are continuing to suggest it is slightly higher than 45%.  There seem to be 'house effects' at play here.  But whichever firm you choose to believe, the post-election bandwagon effect for No that was predicted by some has plainly failed to materialise.

An independence referendum in 2019 or 2020 is looking increasingly likely

Somebody with more patience than I have will doubtless work their way line-by-line through Gerry Hassan's latest update of 'The Article'.  There are the familiar highlights - the claims that Nicola Sturgeon was "out-manoeuvred by Theresa May" during the spring of 2017 (presumably by the tactical brilliance of May calling an unnecessary election and throwing her majority away) and that the SNP are too "proprietorial" about the indy cause and don't give enough space to "independent initiatives" such as Common Weal and RISE.  (It's an abuse of the language to call RISE an "initiative" - it was/is a fully-fledged political party set up with the intention of taking list votes from the SNP and possibly depriving them of an overall majority at Holyrood.)

What really made my jaw drop to the floor, though, was this passage -

"It is understandable that Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t taken a future indy referendum officially off the table. Not only does it work as a discipline on SNP and indy supporters; critically it acts as a hypothetical big stick towards the UK Government in relation to Brexit. Yet, what the SNP leadership has failed to point out is that there is next to no chance of an indy referendum in 2019 or indeed before 2021 (and before the next Scottish elections)."

There is of course a very good reason why the SNP leadership have "failed to point that out" - ie. it isn't actually true.  It's the polar opposite of the truth.  I have no doubt that there are people in the SNP, including at quite a senior level, who wish that the whole idea of a second indyref before 2021 would just go away so that they can get on with other things.  But all of the mood music suggests that those people have lost the internal argument and that Nicola Sturgeon is serious about the option of a referendum in 2019 or 2020.  That doesn't necessarily mean it will happen - she's made clear that continued single market membership is her main red line, so if that improbable outcome emerges from the negotiations, an indyref will presumably be off the table until after 2021.  But the fact that the party leadership have made no effort whatever to downplay expectations that an indyref will be called if Scotland is dragged out of the single market is highly significant.  The idea that this is just empty talk intended to function as a "discipline" and a "big stick" just doesn't stack up - they would have been far, far cagier with their language if they were secretly gearing themselves up for a massive climbdown this autumn, because they know full well what the consequences for SNP internal unity would be if members feel they have been led up the garden path.  If anything, the statements have only been getting bolder in recent weeks.

Now, it's true that the mainstream media (especially in London but also in Scotland) have been paying precious little attention to the SNP's public comments about an indyref, and will probably be completely stunned if and when the starting-gun is fired.  But on the balance of probability, that is what appears set to happen.

'I don't know what a sense of Britishness is anymore'

Sorry that blogging has been light recently - I've been a bit under the weather and rushed off my feet, which is never a great combination. Here are a couple of things to tide you over, though - firstly, my new article on the TalkRadio website, entitled 'Time to wake up to the false realities of Jeremy Corbyn and Ruth Davidson'. You can read it HERE.

And secondly, here's the latest in the Journey to Yes series from PhantomPower, featuring a couple who decided to move to Scotland from the north-east of England as a result of the Brexit vote.

The ultimate betrayal: Scottish Tory MPs vote to destroy the devolution settlement as we have known it for the last twenty years

I wasn't following the notorious events in the Commons the other night very closely, so I was intrigued to see what the wording of the Labour amendment on protecting devolution actually was.  Hansard is murderously hard to make sense of sometimes, but as far as I can see this is the one -

"(4) The Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament proposals for replacing European frameworks with UK ones.

(5) UK-wide frameworks shall be proposed if and only if they are necessary to—

(a) enable the functioning of the UK internal market,

(b) ensure compliance with international obligations,

(c) ensure the UK can negotiate, enter into and implement new trade agreements and international treaties,

(d) enable the management of common resources,

(e) administer and provide access to justice in cases with a cross-border element, or

(f) safeguard the security of the UK.

(6) Ministers of the Crown shall create UK-wide frameworks only if they have consulted with, and secured the agreement of, the affected devolved administrations."

And the explanatory note on the effect of the amendment -

"This amendment removes the Bill’s proposed restrictions on the ability of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly to legislate on devolved ​matters and creates new collaborative procedures for the creation of UK-wide frameworks for retained EU law."

As you can see, the amendment would not, if it had been passed, have changed the status quo in respect of devolution - it would instead have upheld the status quo, and rectified the parts of the EU Withdrawal Bill that are intended to repeal the central principle of the Scotland Act 1998, namely that anything not specifically reserved to Westminster is fully devolved, without exceptions.  (You might recall that this principle has been so watertight until now that it was discovered a few years ago that powers relating to Antarctica had been devolved to Holyrood in 1999 without anyone even noticing.)

As has been well-rehearsed, if the Scottish Tory MPs had voted as a bloc for the amendment, it would have narrowly passed by two votes, and the devolution settlement they are supposed to regard as sacred would have been preserved.  Instead, they voted against what they claim to believe in, and the amendment was defeated by twenty-four votes.  It's important to stress that the Bill has now entirely completed its passage through the elected chamber, and will automatically pass into law in its current devolution-busting form unless the Lords amend it, which self-evidently is something that Scottish Tory MPs (let alone SNP MPs) can have no direct control over.  It is literally the case that the Scottish Tories have voted to rip apart the devolved settlement as we have known it for the last twenty years, and are now relying on a ragtag of hereditary peers, Anglican bishops and Tony's Cronies to put it back together again for us.  And this is standing up for Scotland, Ruth?  This is "bloody well getting it done", is it?  This is what "producing results that the SNP's grievance politics can't" looks like, yeah?

It's become the fashion among unionist commentators to scoff at the notion that the pre-referendum "Vow" was never implemented. One frequently-heard (and extremely cynical) argument is that the promises made were so vague and unspecific that the UK government could have done or not done pretty much anything and still accurately claimed to have delivered the Vow. But let's take one component of the Vow that was pretty specific, namely that "the Scottish Parliament is permanent". No reasonable person would have taken that to mean "there will permanently be an institution called the Scottish Parliament, but whether it retains any or all the powers it currently has will be decided at the whim of the UK government". The pledge was quite properly interpreted as meaning that the powers held by the Scottish Parliament in 2014 were the minimum that could now be regarded as permanently protected. As things stand, the EU Withdrawal Bill that the Scottish Tories have just voted through will therefore directly breach the Vow. That's the default position Ruth Davidson's handiwork has left us with. But perhaps the 7th Marquess of Salisbury and the Bishop of Durham will step in and save the day? Fingers crossed, eh?

Body blow for hapless Leonard as Labour slip back in first Scottish poll of 2018

Many thanks to Stuart Dickson for alerting me to the first full-scale Scottish poll of the New Year, conducted by YouGov for the Scottish edition of The Times.

Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster general election (YouGov, 12th-16th January):

SNP 36% (-4)
Labour 28% (-2)
Conservatives 23% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (+1)
Greens 3% (+2)
UKIP 3% (+2)

Scottish Parliament voting intentions (constituency ballot):

SNP 38% (-4)
Conservatives 26% (+1)
Labour 23% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+2)
Greens 3% (+1)
UKIP 2% (+1)

Scottish Parliament voting intentions (regional list ballot):

SNP 32% (-3)
Conservatives 25% (+2)
Labour 22% (-2)
Greens 10% (+4)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
UKIP 3% (+2)
SSP 2% (-1)

It may seem obvious that a drop of four points for the SNP is significant, but it's impossible to know that for certain.  If, for example, support for the party in Westminster terms has remained steady at around 38%, the margin of error could have flattered them by two points in the last YouGov poll in October, and understated them by two points in this poll, thus producing an entirely illusory four-point shift.  It's also conceivable that there has been a genuine drop, but that margin of error effects are exaggerating it.  Certainly there was no sign at all of the SNP going backwards in the Survation poll conducted in early December, so I'd be more inclined to the view that nothing much has changed - at least until we see another poll confirming the trend reported by YouGov.

Should Scotland be an independent country?  

Yes 43% (-1)
No 57% (+1)

The Times' interpretation of the above finding is ludicrous to the point of being almost embarrassing - they claim that support for independence has "dwindled", but in fact a 1% drop is of no statistical significance whatever in a poll with a margin of error of 3 points.  The 43% share for Yes is firmly within the 'normal range' produced by recent YouGov polls - indeed the last-but-one YouGov poll had Yes on exactly 43%.  So this is essentially a no change result, and categorically not a "setback for Yes".

We'll have to see the datasets to be sure, but the likelihood is that YouGov have persevered with their reprehensible practice of excluding 16 and 17 year olds from their independence polling, which leaves open the theoretical possibility that the reported Yes vote is 1% lower than it should be (after rounding).

Much is being made of the finding that 36% of respondents want an independence referendum within the next five years, and 54% don't - but that just appears to be a 'house effect' of YouGov's polling.  They've been asking that question for quite a while and have always produced a negative result, in complete contrast to the 50/50 splits that have often been reported in Panelbase's polling on whether there should be an independence referendum within as little as a couple of years.  We can only speculate as to whether YouGov's panel is for some reason more hostile to a referendum than Panelbase's, or whether there's something about the way YouGov pose the question that produces such markedly different results.

In fairness to The Times, it's not just the SNP and the independence movement they're spinning against - they're also reading far too much into a small drop in Labour support that may or may not prove to be genuine.  However, one detail from the poll can't even conceivably be explained away by the margin of error - Jeremy Corbyn's net personal rating has dropped catastrophically from +20 in October to -3 now.  I would imagine that has been caused quite simply by the fact that we're three months further away from the hoo-ha of the general election campaign, and that people are gradually reverting to the view they held of Corbyn before the Labour surge during May and June.  The million dollar question is whether they would once again swing to a more favourable opinion in the heat of a general election campaign - and on the answer to that question may hang the fate of several SNP-Labour marginal seats.

Do the SNP have three times as many members as the unionist parties combined?

Just thought I'd pass on a snippet of information sent to me by Stuart Dickson.  He spotted on Stormfront Lite that the ESRC-funded Party Members Project has found that 5% of Labour members live in Scotland, as do 6% of Liberal Democrat members, and 10% of Conservative members.  If those numbers are accurate (ie. if they're not a wildly misleading approximation or out of date), it's possible to use the UK-wide membership numbers to estimate how many members each party has in Scotland.  It would put the Lib Dems on roughly 6500, Labour on about 28,500, and the Tories on about 10,000.  That compares to an SNP membership of 118,000 as of August - roughly three times as much as the apparent combined membership of the unionist parties.

The Labour figure may seem a little higher than expected, but it's broadly in line with what we learned at the leadership election a few weeks ago, in which 17,664 full members cast a vote on a turnout of 62.3%.  The party does seem to have demonstrated a certain cockroach-like resilience during its historic crisis over the last three-and-a-half years.

Cable to the unknown

Just for the sake of completeness, and also because it happens to be a favourable one, here's what is presumably the last Scottish subsample from a GB-wide poll that was conducted during 2017.  It's from YouGov...

SNP 38%, Conservatives 24%, Labour 24%, Liberal Democrats 9%, UKIP 5%

Thirty-two of the last thirty-five subsamples have now put the SNP in the lead.

In the Britain-wide results of the poll's supplementary questions, one thing that leaps out at me is that Vince Cable clearly isn't setting the heather alight.  19% of respondents think he's doing a good job as Lib Dem leader, 29% think he's doing a bad job, and 53% don't know.  The stock excuse for the high level of don't knows on personal ratings for a new Lib Dem leader is that he hasn't had a chance to build up his profile yet, but that doesn't really apply to a readymade household name like Cable.  I'm inclined to wonder whether the bulk of those 53% of people weren't actually aware that he's become leader.  Either that or they can't think off the top of their heads of a single thing he's said or done as leader.

To lead or not to lead - that is the question

As you may have seen, there's been a new outbreak of the intra-Yes culture wars today, triggered by a post on Wings about another question from the Panelbase poll, showing that by a margin of 58% to 18% the Scottish public are opposed to the proposal that individuals should have the right to change their own legally-recognised gender without reference to anyone else.  I'm not going to get involved in any discussion on the substance of this issue - life's too short (elements of the radical left have spent a fair bit of the last twelve months complaining about me writing a light-hearted Christmas poem, for pity's sake), and as it happens my views on this particular subject aren't especially well-developed anyway.  However, what I do want to offer a view on is the dispute over whether the question the Wings poll asked was "leading" or not.  Here it is in full -

A new government review of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 has proposed that people should in future be allowed to legally decide which sex they are simply by self-definition, without the current medical or psychological assessments which can take two years or more.  This would mean abolishing all current single-sex public spaces, such as women-only changing rooms and men-only toilets, and it would become a hate crime to disagree with someone about which sex they were.  Broadly speaking, what is your view of this proposal?

My simple verdict is: yes, of course that's a leading question, but that doesn't make it an illegitimate question.  This is an unfamiliar topic for most people, which means you're not going to get a considered response from them unless the question goes into a reasonable amount of detail about what the proposal actually is.  And as soon as there's detail, there's a bias, because the person framing the question is effectively making an editorial judgement about what to put in and what to leave out.  There's no such thing as absolute neutrality in such a long question.  This particular question was clearly framed by someone who thinks that the perceived negative consequences of the proposal are more worthy of mention than any positive effects.  Personally, I'd say the final bit about 'hate crimes' seems a bit gratuitous - it reads as a 'chucking in the kitchen sink' addition.  Nevertheless, it's valuable to learn how people react when confronted with the perceived negatives, and it would be equally interesting to see how people react when confronted with the positives - presumably other polls can enlighten us on the latter point.  I think, however, that it would be naive to assume that the result would be dramatically different even if the most favourable and reassuring slant was put on the question.  We know from the debate over equal marriage that social attitudes can sometimes change very, very rapidly, and that may well prove to be the case once again.  But as of right now, at this very moment in January 2018, legally-binding self-definition of gender doesn't seem to be something that the majority of the public are ready to fully embrace.

"Don't you DARE try to stop us!" say Scots in landmark Panelbase poll that REJECTS any Westminster veto on an independence referendum

OK, you've probably already seen this story earlier today on Wings, but you know me - I just couldn't resist the headline.  (It's a fond tribute to a characteristically unhinged headline that was run by either the Express or the Mail - God knows which - not long after Indyref 1.)

Which government do you think should make the decision about whether there should be a new referendum on Scottish independence? (Panelbase, Don't Knows excluded)

The Scottish government: 57%
The UK government: 43%

Tellingly, even if Don't Knows are taken into account, there is still an absolute majority (51%) in favour of the Scottish Government making the decision.

One of the problems we've had since the EU referendum is that a lot of voters seem quite ambivalent on whether a second vote on independence should take place over the next few years, meaning that polls asking about that point produce very different results depending on exactly how the question is framed.  As most polls are commissioned by anti-independence clients, it's unsurprising that in the majority of cases the question is worded in a way that produces a result that can be spun negatively.  That has given the UK government some cover for their "now is not the time" delaying tactics, but of course what those polls generally don't bother asking is whether this should even be any of the UK government's business.  Quite clearly, the majority view is that it should not be.

Indeed, given that it's common knowledge that the SNP are minded to hold a referendum in the relatively near future, it's highly significant that an absolute majority of voters are content that the Scottish government - not even the parliament as a whole, but a government consisting of the SNP only - should be left to make a unilateral decision.  That finding may well come in very useful over the months to come, depending on exactly what Nicola Sturgeon and her advisers have in mind.

*  *  *

I have a new article in the January issue of iScot magazine, and it's considerably more topical than I expected it to be, because it's partly about Neil Oliver.  If you're not a subscriber to the print edition of the magazine, a preview of the article can be found on Twitter HERE, and a full digital copy can be purchased HERE.

New Year hammerblow for the pro-nuclear wing of CND as Leonard fails to move Scottish Labour out of third place in latest Panelbase poll

I'm fairly certain I've never done this on New Year's Day before, but here is the latest Scottish Parliament voting intention poll, gleaned from datasets published today on Wings.

Scottish Parliament voting intention, constituency ballot (Panelbase):

SNP 39% (-3)
Conservatives 26% (-2)
Labour 25% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)
Greens 2% (n/c)

Percentage changes are from the last Panelbase poll a few months ago. 

We've been gradually getting used to the idea that Labour have regained their previous place as Scotland's second party and have pushed the Tories back to third, but perhaps we should hold our horses.  Across all firms, this is actually the fourth of the last five polls to show a virtual dead heat for second place in the Holyrood constituency vote, which suggests that Labour have made progress in recent months, but that it hasn't been sufficient to even get them over the first big hurdle as of yet.