I've been trying to make sense of what happened in the House of Lords on Wednesday without putting myself through the torture of reading every single word of the debate in Hansard. Having done a skim-read, it looks like the story of the session was of government amendments on the power-grab being passed on the nod, while non-government amendments that would have made the Bill more reconcilable with the devolution settlement were withdrawn without even being put to a vote. That probably happened partly because no-one outside the SNP (who aren't represented in the Lords) is truly passionate about protecting devolution, and also because the UK government fobbed off the proposers of the amendments with the vague possibility that changes might still be made at Third Reading after further negotiations. I'm not an expert on parliamentary procedure, but a Google search reveals that amendments can indeed be made at Third Reading in the Lords, although in practice any such changes tend not to be substantive.
Here's the thing: at the start of the week, Richard Leonard made clear that the 'deal' on offer wasn't good enough and that the UK government would have to compromise further. So why on earth did Labour roll over in the Lords just two days later and effectively remove the last remaining obstacle (other than the Supreme Court) to the government imposing the existing 'deal' without Holyrood's consent? Labour and the Liberal Democrats between them outnumber the Tories in the Lords, so if the will had been there to defeat the government and strengthen Nicola Sturgeon's negotiating hand, that's probably what would have happened. Unless you truly believe that some heroic stand is suddenly going to be made at Third Reading, it's clear enough that the Labour leadership has put a directive out that the power-grab is to be enabled, not resisted. That means in the worst-case scenario, if the Continuity Bill is struck down by judges, Jeremy Corbyn will be the co-author along with Theresa May of a substantial reduction in the Scottish Parliament's powers. He shouldn't be allowed to conceal his responsibility for the decision he's made.
The House of Lords is also collectively culpable as an institution. We hear so much about how the Lords is "an anachronism that works" and how it functions counterintuitively as a guarantor of democracy. But that all depends on the strict adherence to conventions, without which the unwritten constitution would start to fall apart. Over the decades, the Salisbury Convention (requiring that the Lords must allow any manifesto commitment of the elected government to pass) has been more or less religiously followed. Why, then, are the Lords allowing a coach and horses to be driven through the equally important Sewel Convention, without which the devolution settlement is rendered a sham? If you're conceited enough to think you're an unelected custodian of the constitution, you can't arbitrarily pick and choose which parts of the constitution you think are worth the bother of upholding. Or if you do, you should expect unsettling consequences to flow.
* * *
From what I've written above you can see that I hold no brief for Labour, but my eyes still rolled to the heavens a number of times overnight at Laura Kuenssberg's transparent attempts to get a "disaster for Labour in the local elections" narrative to take root. John McDonnell made a fairly unanswerable point at the start of the results programme - he reminded everyone that Labour took just 27% of the vote in the local elections last May, but then 40% in the general election only one month later, which should have been utterly impossible if the conventional wisdom was to be believed. But that reality-check didn't deter Ms Kuenssberg from breathlessly telling us throughout the night that Labour's performance was falling well short of what is supposedly "needed" to put the party on course for a general election victory. Question: if a 27% showing in May 2017 didn't preclude Labour from coming very close to victory in June 2017, why on earth would a mid-30s showing in May 2018 prevent Labour from winning an election that might still be two, three or four years away?
The reality is that the Corbyn surge at the general election was dependent on demographic groups that are less likely to turn out in local elections. The polarisation of public opinion on Brexit is perhaps also undermining the usual phenomenon of casual protest voting for opposition parties in mid-term elections. It's no longer the case that you can automatically say "Labour need to be twelve points ahead now if they want to win the general election by four." It may actually be that people voted yesterday in a very similar way to how they would have voted if they were electing a government.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Whatever happened to Scotland's "second government"?
The Twitter account of Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson is generally of most use if for some reason you enjoy being trolled on a slow-burn setting, but in fairness he came up with something genuinely intriguing and surprising today. It appears that the Scotland Office has been quietly renamed as "the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland", and its Edinburgh base is not even using that name - it's now just calling itself "the UK government". The message appears to be that the former Scotland Office isn't so much a government department, but rather the UK government's "embassy" in Edinburgh. That seems a distinctly odd way of selling the notion that we're all one big happy family and that London is in no sense the capital of a different country.
Under David Cameron the schtick used to be that "Scotland has two governments", and continuing to brand the UK government's presence in Edinburgh with the word "Scotland" seemed the ideal way of underlining that point. But I suspect Theresa May's hardline British nationalism is getting in the way of strategic good sense here. Everything British must be uniformly British with a Union Jack on it, and if that creates a Scottish backlash there's always "now is not the time" and "non-consent is consent" to fall back on. The lack of a public announcement of the name change (which would generally be expected) is a strong clue that officials or ministers at some level understood that the whole thing wasn't really such a wizard idea.
Judging from the revision history of the relevant Wikipedia article, it looks like someone first spotted the change in early January of this year. Before that, the department name was given as "the Scotland Office", and afterwards as "the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland, informally known as the Scotland Office".
I do hope someone is going to ask the Prime Minister how much the pointless rebranding has cost hard-working families up and down this precious united country.
Under David Cameron the schtick used to be that "Scotland has two governments", and continuing to brand the UK government's presence in Edinburgh with the word "Scotland" seemed the ideal way of underlining that point. But I suspect Theresa May's hardline British nationalism is getting in the way of strategic good sense here. Everything British must be uniformly British with a Union Jack on it, and if that creates a Scottish backlash there's always "now is not the time" and "non-consent is consent" to fall back on. The lack of a public announcement of the name change (which would generally be expected) is a strong clue that officials or ministers at some level understood that the whole thing wasn't really such a wizard idea.
Judging from the revision history of the relevant Wikipedia article, it looks like someone first spotted the change in early January of this year. Before that, the department name was given as "the Scotland Office", and afterwards as "the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland, informally known as the Scotland Office".
I do hope someone is going to ask the Prime Minister how much the pointless rebranding has cost hard-working families up and down this precious united country.
Scot Goes Pop is 10 years old today!
I'm not quite sure whether I should be excited or terrified about this milestone, but there's no point denying it - the calendar doesn't lie. It all started on 3rd May 2008 with this post about Plaid Cymru's impressive (but under-reported) gains in the Welsh local elections, and Boris Johnson ousting Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London. If memory serves me right, the blog was read by literally only three or four people on the first day, and I had to actively promote it just to get that far.
By complete chance I had a huge political story to get my teeth into a couple of days later, when Wendy Alexander (then Scottish Labour leader) started hinting that Labour was about to make an unanticipated U-turn by supporting an independence referendum. What unfolded from there is one of the most dramatic, but strangely also one of the least-remembered, episodes in recent Scottish political history. If Ms Alexander hadn't been ousted as leader a few months later, the likelihood is that the first independence referendum would have taken place in 2010 rather than 2014, and would effectively have been jointly sponsored by the SNP and Labour. We can only speculate as to how differently things might have turned out as a result.
All the same, being a Eurovision fan, the vast bulk of my blogging for the remainder of May 2008 was non-political and was instead dedicated to the upcoming song contest in Belgrade. The blog was basically a diary for my own benefit - practically nobody was reading it, although I was excited to get a sudden spike of search engine traffic on Eurovision weekend itself. I can't remember if it was the Saturday or Sunday, but on one or other of those days I hit the giddy heights of 71 unique visitors - which for two or three years afterwards I regarded as the benchmark for an exceptionally successful day.
I abandoned the blog for the time being at the end of the 2008 Eurovision season - it was too time-consuming, and I couldn't quite work out why I was even bothering with it. But at the start of 2009, the commissioning of Andrew Lloyd-Webber to write the UK's Eurovision entry caught my imagination, and I felt the sudden urge to start writing again. So Scot Goes Pop was revived as an essentially Eurovision blog, with just the occasional political post chucked in here or there. But strangely enough it was the political posts that started attracting comments (I think this was the first one to be published), and that was probably the biggest factor in the blog eventually becoming politics first, Eurovision second.
The ten year history of Scot Goes Pop can basically be split into two distinct halves, with a short transition in between. There was the period up to early 2013 when the daily audience was typically in the dozens or at most the hundreds, and the period since 2014 which has seen thousands of unique readers per day, and tens of thousands per month. There's no magical secret to how the transformation from obscure personal blog to leading alternative media site occurred - it was simply down to the chance factor of the independence referendum, and the fact that people were suddenly looking for something (hard polling information without the customary unionist spin) that only Scot Goes Pop seemed to be providing. I wasn't doing anything different to before, and the spontaneous change required quite a tricky mental adjustment. I had to get used to the fact that if I said something that was a bit too close to the bone for some people, it was likely to get a strong reaction, whereas in the past nobody would have noticed or given a monkey's.
At present, if the website Traffic Estimate is to be believed, Scot Goes Pop is the fifth most-read alternative media site in Scotland, with approximately 80,400 unique visits in the last thirty days. That places it only just behind CommonSpace (a site that enjoys far more free exposure in the mainstream media) which is in fourth place with 84,500 unique visits. Indeed, for several consecutive weeks earlier this year, Scot Goes Pop was estimated to be slightly ahead of CommonSpace. Quite a contrast from the days when I considered myself freakishly lucky to get 71 visitors on a Eurovision weekend!
Would I recommend this blogging lark to others? Well, put it this way. As a direct result of writing Scot Goes Pop, I've been interviewed on TV four times, and on radio twice. I've written more than ten articles for The National newspaper. I've been a columnist for the International Business Times, the TalkRadio website, and iScot magazine. I've addressed a rally outside the Scottish Parliament. I've participated in a theatre show (of sorts). I've taken part in umpteen short films, podcasts and live-streams - including the blind terror of a 55-minute live debate with Tommy Sheridan.
So think carefully before taking the plunge. You might imagine you're safe enough when you start out with an audience of two men and a dog. But you just never quite know what you're letting yourself in for...
By complete chance I had a huge political story to get my teeth into a couple of days later, when Wendy Alexander (then Scottish Labour leader) started hinting that Labour was about to make an unanticipated U-turn by supporting an independence referendum. What unfolded from there is one of the most dramatic, but strangely also one of the least-remembered, episodes in recent Scottish political history. If Ms Alexander hadn't been ousted as leader a few months later, the likelihood is that the first independence referendum would have taken place in 2010 rather than 2014, and would effectively have been jointly sponsored by the SNP and Labour. We can only speculate as to how differently things might have turned out as a result.
All the same, being a Eurovision fan, the vast bulk of my blogging for the remainder of May 2008 was non-political and was instead dedicated to the upcoming song contest in Belgrade. The blog was basically a diary for my own benefit - practically nobody was reading it, although I was excited to get a sudden spike of search engine traffic on Eurovision weekend itself. I can't remember if it was the Saturday or Sunday, but on one or other of those days I hit the giddy heights of 71 unique visitors - which for two or three years afterwards I regarded as the benchmark for an exceptionally successful day.
I abandoned the blog for the time being at the end of the 2008 Eurovision season - it was too time-consuming, and I couldn't quite work out why I was even bothering with it. But at the start of 2009, the commissioning of Andrew Lloyd-Webber to write the UK's Eurovision entry caught my imagination, and I felt the sudden urge to start writing again. So Scot Goes Pop was revived as an essentially Eurovision blog, with just the occasional political post chucked in here or there. But strangely enough it was the political posts that started attracting comments (I think this was the first one to be published), and that was probably the biggest factor in the blog eventually becoming politics first, Eurovision second.
The ten year history of Scot Goes Pop can basically be split into two distinct halves, with a short transition in between. There was the period up to early 2013 when the daily audience was typically in the dozens or at most the hundreds, and the period since 2014 which has seen thousands of unique readers per day, and tens of thousands per month. There's no magical secret to how the transformation from obscure personal blog to leading alternative media site occurred - it was simply down to the chance factor of the independence referendum, and the fact that people were suddenly looking for something (hard polling information without the customary unionist spin) that only Scot Goes Pop seemed to be providing. I wasn't doing anything different to before, and the spontaneous change required quite a tricky mental adjustment. I had to get used to the fact that if I said something that was a bit too close to the bone for some people, it was likely to get a strong reaction, whereas in the past nobody would have noticed or given a monkey's.
At present, if the website Traffic Estimate is to be believed, Scot Goes Pop is the fifth most-read alternative media site in Scotland, with approximately 80,400 unique visits in the last thirty days. That places it only just behind CommonSpace (a site that enjoys far more free exposure in the mainstream media) which is in fourth place with 84,500 unique visits. Indeed, for several consecutive weeks earlier this year, Scot Goes Pop was estimated to be slightly ahead of CommonSpace. Quite a contrast from the days when I considered myself freakishly lucky to get 71 visitors on a Eurovision weekend!
Would I recommend this blogging lark to others? Well, put it this way. As a direct result of writing Scot Goes Pop, I've been interviewed on TV four times, and on radio twice. I've written more than ten articles for The National newspaper. I've been a columnist for the International Business Times, the TalkRadio website, and iScot magazine. I've addressed a rally outside the Scottish Parliament. I've participated in a theatre show (of sorts). I've taken part in umpteen short films, podcasts and live-streams - including the blind terror of a 55-minute live debate with Tommy Sheridan.
So think carefully before taking the plunge. You might imagine you're safe enough when you start out with an audience of two men and a dog. But you just never quite know what you're letting yourself in for...
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
The Cost of Caution
What will Scotland's situation be eighteen years from now? I mean that quite literally - how will things be on Friday, 2nd May 2036, which unless the relevant legislation changes will be the day after the ninth Scottish Parliament election? My iScot column for this month ponders that very question. It's an 'alternative future' look at how events may have played out if the SNP leadership heeds the siren voices and allows its current mandate for a pre-2021 referendum to expire. In that scenario, will Scotland be independent by 2036? Or will it at least be on the brink of independence? Surely all that pragmatism and prudence and patience and caution and carefulness and canniness must have paid off handsomely? Here's a sneak preview: no.
But you can find out for yourself, because the article is available to read on Twitter HERE. Needless to say, you should still buy the whole magazine - a digital copy can be bought inexpensively HERE.
Oh, and an advance warning: today we're looking ahead exactly eighteen years, but tomorrow we'll be looking back exactly ten years. More on that in due course...
But you can find out for yourself, because the article is available to read on Twitter HERE. Needless to say, you should still buy the whole magazine - a digital copy can be bought inexpensively HERE.
Oh, and an advance warning: today we're looking ahead exactly eighteen years, but tomorrow we'll be looking back exactly ten years. More on that in due course...
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
More red faces at Labour propaganda site as "exclusive poll" finds electorate split down the middle on whether independence should be a priority
For the second time in a few short weeks, CommonSpace's very favourite Labour propaganda site "The Red Robin" has come bob-bob-bobbin' along with some dubious coverage of Scottish polling. In fairness, this time they've jointly commissioned the poll themselves, and they've used a proper BPC pollster so that we can see the datasets. They may wish they hadn't done that, though, because the datasets reveal that either Survation or the Labour propagandists themselves made a schoolboy howler when framing one of the questions, which asked for views on the coalition SNP-Green government led by Nicola Sturgeon. Somebody had better let Patrick Harvie know that he's been Deputy First Minister all this time, because I'm fairly sure he's still in the dark about it.
The website claims that the poll shows voters want the Scottish government to prioritise public services over independence. At best, that's a rather misleading claim, because respondents were never actually presented with that straight choice. Instead, they were asked separately whether the Scottish government should be prioritising the improvement of public services, and unsurprisingly gave a resounding yes to what is essentially an "Are motherhood and apple pie good things?" question. When asked if they thought independence should be a priority, they were split roughly down the middle - 36% said yes, and 41% said no, which is more or less a statistical tie once the margin of error is taken into account. Again, it was always utterly predictable that the result on that question would closely reflect what we already know about public opinion on independence itself - ie. that approximately half are in favour and approximately half are opposed. What the Labour propagandists think they've proved with the new figures is anyone's guess.
Even more mysterious is what they think they were proving by asking whether respondents would prefer a Labour government or a Conservative government at Westminster. For what very little it's worth, 60% said they preferred Labour and 40% said the Tories. That's right up there with the poll that found that 97% agree with the statement that "the Pope is a Catholic" - except of course that 60% is a much lower number than 97%, and is humiliatingly low for a party that once utterly dominated the politics of Scotland. How far must they have fallen to have reached the stage where 4 in 10 of the population prefer the hated Tories to them?
If the Labour propagandists had got the emphatic result they evidently expected on that question, we'd have been entitled to ask why they didn't ask more salient questions, such as "Do you agree that your preference for Labour over the Tories means you should never vote SNP in a Westminster election?" But it seems Labour's problems run much deeper than the fact that voters are not returning to the fold from the SNP (or not in sufficient numbers, anyway).
* * *
Your cut-out-and-keep guide to what is and is not news (source: the mainstream media) -
The fact that the UK government want to use Brexit as an excuse for removing powers from the Scottish Parliament: Not News
The fact that the Scottish Tories failed to make good on their promise to use their "influence" to ensure that the EU Withdrawal Bill was amended at the Commons stage to prevent the power-grab: Not News
The fact that the Scottish Parliament voted overwhelmingly, and on a cross-party basis, to pass an emergency Continuity Bill to protect devolution from the power-grab: Not News
The fact that the Tories, having been soundly defeated on the floor of the Scottish Parliament, are going to the Supreme Court in London in an attempt to have the Continuity Bill struck down: Not News
The fact that the Welsh Government caved in and accepted the power-grab, thus allegedly leaving Nicola Sturgeon "isolated" and "under pressure": HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
The fact that Labour and the Liberal Democrats belatedly backed Nicola Sturgeon's decision to continue resisting the power-grab, thus demonstrating she is neither "isolated" nor "under pressure": Not News
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
The inconvenient truth the media don't want you to know about: the Scottish government's negotiating position may have just been strengthened
I'm sure by now you've heard the unanimous verdict in the unionist media that the Welsh government's cave-in on the power grab has left Nicola Sturgeon "isolated", "under pressure", etc, etc. But what the media don't want you to know is that the Welsh decision may actually have significantly strengthened the Scottish Government's negotiating position in one key respect. Here's how.
Earlier today, a BBC Wales political correspondent appeared on BBC Scotland, and claimed that the Labour government in Wales had made a strategic decision to "bank" the concessions made by the UK government so far, because of the fear that London might not deliver them if a formal agreement wasn't reached. He added that the Welsh government remained more than happy to "piggyback" on any further concessions secured by the Scottish government. (If true, this raises the obvious question of why Scottish Labour are sabotaging their Welsh colleagues' strategy by demanding that Nicola Sturgeon should back down.) I've no idea how much credence to give to the idea that London could have backtracked on the offers they'd already made, but let's assume for the sake of argument that there was something in it. Now that there is a formal agreement between London and Cardiff, the concessions made until now are to all intents and purposes locked in as far as Scotland is concerned as well. It would be politically inconceivable for the UK government to grab more power from the Scottish Parliament than from the Welsh Assembly. What that means is that Nicola Sturgeon now has much less to lose from the rest of the negotiations than she previously did. If the UK government fail to offer anything more of substance, she can afford to stand her ground on the Continuity Bill safe in the knowledge that, even in the worst-case scenario of the Supreme Court striking the Bill down outright, the deal announced with Wales would still be the minimum that would have to be delivered in Scotland. There is no real option for London to row back on that.
In snooker parlance, Nicola Sturgeon suddenly has the luxury of a 'shot to nothing'. Not too shabby for someone who is supposedly "isolated" and "under pressure".
Monday, April 23, 2018
How a vote to stay in the customs union could trigger another snap general election
As I've noted a number of times before, Stephen Bush of the New Statesman has an uncanny habit of making political predictions that either prove correct, or that prove a hell of a lot closer to being correct than the conventional wisdom of the moment. For example, although he wrongly predicted a Conservative majority at last year's general election, he nevertheless stuck his neck out and said that the Corbyn surge being picked up by the polls was real, at a time when most commentators were absolutely convinced it wasn't.
That said, I'm extremely unsure about the logic that has led him to conclude today that Theresa May can't use the threat of Corbyn as Prime Minister to bring Tory rebels into line, and that she will therefore probably be forced into making a U-turn on remaining in the EU customs union. Basically Bush makes the point that under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the Prime Minister can't designate a vote on the customs union as a vote of confidence in the government. So Remainer rebels would know that even if that vote was lost, and even if Theresa May felt compelled to resign as a result, the most likely outcome would be a Tory Brexiteer such as Michael Gove becoming PM, rather than Jeremy Corbyn. And then the new Brexiteer PM would have his hands tied by the pro-customs union arithmetic in the Commons anyway.
I think what this ignores is that staying in the customs union would cross enough of a red line for anti-European Tory MPs that they might actually prefer taking their chances with a snap general election, in the hope of getting a rebel-proof Tory majority that could overturn what had been decided. So if Gove or Boris Johnson stood in a leadership contest, they could find themselves under tremendous pressure to indicate that they will call an election in short order. And as we learned last year, if a Tory PM asks parliament to approve an early general election, the Labour opposition does not say no. What that means in the first instance is that pro-European Tories will know that rebelling on the customs union might lead to a general election that would carry not one but two possible risks - a) that Corbyn might win, or b) that the parliamentary arithmetic might become much more favourable for a Hard Brexit than is currently the case.
That said, I'm extremely unsure about the logic that has led him to conclude today that Theresa May can't use the threat of Corbyn as Prime Minister to bring Tory rebels into line, and that she will therefore probably be forced into making a U-turn on remaining in the EU customs union. Basically Bush makes the point that under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the Prime Minister can't designate a vote on the customs union as a vote of confidence in the government. So Remainer rebels would know that even if that vote was lost, and even if Theresa May felt compelled to resign as a result, the most likely outcome would be a Tory Brexiteer such as Michael Gove becoming PM, rather than Jeremy Corbyn. And then the new Brexiteer PM would have his hands tied by the pro-customs union arithmetic in the Commons anyway.
I think what this ignores is that staying in the customs union would cross enough of a red line for anti-European Tory MPs that they might actually prefer taking their chances with a snap general election, in the hope of getting a rebel-proof Tory majority that could overturn what had been decided. So if Gove or Boris Johnson stood in a leadership contest, they could find themselves under tremendous pressure to indicate that they will call an election in short order. And as we learned last year, if a Tory PM asks parliament to approve an early general election, the Labour opposition does not say no. What that means in the first instance is that pro-European Tories will know that rebelling on the customs union might lead to a general election that would carry not one but two possible risks - a) that Corbyn might win, or b) that the parliamentary arithmetic might become much more favourable for a Hard Brexit than is currently the case.
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Sorry, Mr Wishart, but you are factually wrong: there is no "indy-gap"
So, with a certain amount of weariness, I've taken a look at Pete Wishart's latest 'contribution to the debate' on the timing of a second independence referendum (at least this time it's not a phoney 'right of reply'). First things first: let's deal with the outright inaccuracy which essentially proves that Pete hasn't been bothering to properly read the many responses to his previous articles. As I and others have pointed out to him again and again and again, his notion that there is a so-called 'indy-gap' (meaning that there is supposedly far less support for the holding of an early referendum that there is for independence itself) is simply not borne out by the evidence. Both of the two most recent polls, from Ipsos-Mori and Panelbase respectively, have shown that support for an early referendum is essentially identical to support for independence. But Pete isn't letting the evidence get in the way of his mythologising, and yesterday doubled down by ludicrously claiming that: "Optimal conditions are not when a significant gap exists between support for independence and support for an ‘early’ independence referendum. Every test of public opinion has shown that this gap is real..."
Every test? What? If the two most recent opinion polls on independence do not qualify as 'tests of public opinion', what the hell is he even talking about? Pete can't be allowed to get away with this false claim indefinitely - he's been proved factually wrong on the 'indy-gap' point, and as the old saying goes, he's entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts.
The alarm bells in the cynical part of my brain were ringing when I saw that Pete had started his post by noting that it was a good thing that the SNP depute leadership contest looked set to be dominated by the issue of indyref timing. Pete of course pondered the idea of standing himself for depute on a "delay" platform, but decided against it because he didn't have enough support to mount a credible challenge. I do hope that he isn't now planning to misrepresent a hypothetical victory for Keith Brown as an endorsement of "delay". It's true that Mr Brown had until recently come across as the most sceptical of the three candidates about an early indyref, but he was always a long way from Pete's position of actively campaigning for the current mandate to be allowed to expire. Personally, I'll be voting for Chris McEleny because I want to give the most emphatic thumbs-up possible to an early referendum, but regardless of which candidate wins, there will be no endorsement of the Wishart position. I believe the Wishart position is essentially an unelectable one, and I also believe that Pete clearly acknowledged that fact by pulling out of the race. You can't stand aside because of lack of support and then still claim a proxy victory later on.
In the second paragraph of his post, Pete says this: "We are so close to securing our historic objective that to throw away a victory that we’ve so patiently and constructively worked for over the decades through impatience would be the worst type of defeat." Would that really be the worst type of defeat? What about if we opt not to use our mandate for a referendum, and then fail to secure another mandate for another twenty years? (Twenty years is, after all, a mere four elections, and given the way the Additional Member System works, it's far from implausible that the pro-indy parties in combination could repeatedly fall just short of the magic number of 65 seats, even if the SNP itself remains relatively popular and manages to stay in minority government.) And what if over that interminable period, there are prolonged spells where the polls make obvious that a referendum could have been won, but we're powerless to do anything about it because we don't have the parliamentary arithmetic to call a referendum? That's a defeat every bit as real as a defeat in an early referendum. It takes independence - you know, the prize we've so patiently and constructively worked for over the decades - off the table for a generation, and it does so because we threw away a golden opportunity out of fear. How is that sort of defeat any better than one that we might suffer by having the moral courage of using our mandate and actually trusting the verdict of the electorate? It plainly isn't any better. It's a million times worse. Democracy is something we should be running towards, not away from.
Pete says: "I want to see evidence [the referendum] can be won." That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? He doesn't want evidence that it can be won, because we already have that. He actually wants evidence that it definitely will be won, which is a lovely idea, but in the real world no such evidence is even possible. Huge and rapid swings in public opinion happen frequently during the official campaign stage of referendums around the world, so even if Yes started out with 65% support, there would be no guarantees of victory at all.
He also says: "I want [the referendum] held at the time of our choosing when the optimum conditions are in place for success." Again, the certainty of being able to hold the vote at the time of our own choosing is a beautiful thought, but is completely impracticable unless he's planning to abolish parliamentary elections. The main barrier to being able to hold a referendum at the best possible moment is the possibility that there will be no pro-independence majority at Holyrood after 2021. It's Pete who is arguing we should just recklessly take our chances with that, and his only justification is the absurd claim that if we can't win a pro-indy majority at Holyrood, we wouldn't have been able to win a referendum anyway. Really? If we win 48% of the seats in the 2021 election, it would be completely impossible to win 51% of the vote at any time between then and 2026? A seven-year-old child would be able to spot the flaw in that argument.
The truly 'pragmatic' thing to do is recognise that we have a mandate, that it's a precious thing that may not come our way again for a very long time, and that it therefore shouldn't be lightly squandered. That doesn't mean holding a referendum next week - it means choosing the best available moment between now and May 2021, when the mandate expires. That's where the centre of gravity for pragmatism lies - and not in the pie-in-the-sky notion that there will be some ideal moment in the distant future where the stars will align perfectly for a nailed-on victory, and that all we have to do is wait long enough for this magical process to occur.
Pete claims: "[Optimal conditions] are not when we are less than one year away from having lost over one third of our independence supporting MPs to candidates who had as their main campaigning message ‘No to a second referendum’". The problem with this theory is that we don't know what would have happened if the SNP had stood up to the uncompromising nature of the Tory message with an equally uncompromising "Say Yes to an Indyref" message of their own. It's possible that a third of the MPs wouldn't have lost if that had been done. Pete has previously claimed he has canvassing evidence that there was no appetite for a stronger pro-indy message from the SNP, but you'll have to forgive me if I'm a tad sceptical about anecdotal claims from a less-than-objective source. What we do know from polling evidence is that large numbers of people who voted SNP in 2015 went on to abstain in 2017. That suggests to me that there were a lot of people out there who wanted to be inspired, but didn't hear what they were looking for.
Pete says: "Optimal conditions are also not when a majority of our fellow Scots continue to tell us they still oppose independence by a significant margin when public opinion is tested." Sorry, but what is a "significant margin"? It's only a few weeks since an Ipsos-Mori telephone poll produced figures of Yes 48%, No 52%. Is Pete seriously arguing that four percentage points - a lead that is within the standard margin of error - is a "significant margin"? (It's true that Panelbase have shown a bigger gap since then, but that's simply a 'house effect' of a different firm's methodology. Nobody knows the true state of play in exact detail, and it's perfectly conceivable that Ipsos-Mori is right and that public opinion is split roughly 50/50.)
Pete claims: "That last five percent we need to win over in a renewed referendum will be the hardest five percent we have ever had to convert. It is a five percent that is deeply dug in with over five years of intense debate about our countries constitutional future." Hang on, hang on. If these No voters are as hopelessly entrenched as Pete claims, why have there have been several polls since 2014 (including one as recently as last year) showing Yes with more than 50% of the vote? It doesn't make sense, does it? In reality, polling trends since the last referendum clearly show that there is sufficient fluidity and volatility among the electorate for either side to have a realistic chance of winning. It just depends on who fights the most effective campaign.
Unfortunately, if Pete gets his way, we'll run away from the battle and we'll never find out what would have happened. But when another twenty years have passed and no referendum has been held and independence is further away than ever, at least we'll be able to console ourselves by saying "we didn't lose a second time". (So what?)
Every test? What? If the two most recent opinion polls on independence do not qualify as 'tests of public opinion', what the hell is he even talking about? Pete can't be allowed to get away with this false claim indefinitely - he's been proved factually wrong on the 'indy-gap' point, and as the old saying goes, he's entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts.
The alarm bells in the cynical part of my brain were ringing when I saw that Pete had started his post by noting that it was a good thing that the SNP depute leadership contest looked set to be dominated by the issue of indyref timing. Pete of course pondered the idea of standing himself for depute on a "delay" platform, but decided against it because he didn't have enough support to mount a credible challenge. I do hope that he isn't now planning to misrepresent a hypothetical victory for Keith Brown as an endorsement of "delay". It's true that Mr Brown had until recently come across as the most sceptical of the three candidates about an early indyref, but he was always a long way from Pete's position of actively campaigning for the current mandate to be allowed to expire. Personally, I'll be voting for Chris McEleny because I want to give the most emphatic thumbs-up possible to an early referendum, but regardless of which candidate wins, there will be no endorsement of the Wishart position. I believe the Wishart position is essentially an unelectable one, and I also believe that Pete clearly acknowledged that fact by pulling out of the race. You can't stand aside because of lack of support and then still claim a proxy victory later on.
In the second paragraph of his post, Pete says this: "We are so close to securing our historic objective that to throw away a victory that we’ve so patiently and constructively worked for over the decades through impatience would be the worst type of defeat." Would that really be the worst type of defeat? What about if we opt not to use our mandate for a referendum, and then fail to secure another mandate for another twenty years? (Twenty years is, after all, a mere four elections, and given the way the Additional Member System works, it's far from implausible that the pro-indy parties in combination could repeatedly fall just short of the magic number of 65 seats, even if the SNP itself remains relatively popular and manages to stay in minority government.) And what if over that interminable period, there are prolonged spells where the polls make obvious that a referendum could have been won, but we're powerless to do anything about it because we don't have the parliamentary arithmetic to call a referendum? That's a defeat every bit as real as a defeat in an early referendum. It takes independence - you know, the prize we've so patiently and constructively worked for over the decades - off the table for a generation, and it does so because we threw away a golden opportunity out of fear. How is that sort of defeat any better than one that we might suffer by having the moral courage of using our mandate and actually trusting the verdict of the electorate? It plainly isn't any better. It's a million times worse. Democracy is something we should be running towards, not away from.
Pete says: "I want to see evidence [the referendum] can be won." That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? He doesn't want evidence that it can be won, because we already have that. He actually wants evidence that it definitely will be won, which is a lovely idea, but in the real world no such evidence is even possible. Huge and rapid swings in public opinion happen frequently during the official campaign stage of referendums around the world, so even if Yes started out with 65% support, there would be no guarantees of victory at all.
He also says: "I want [the referendum] held at the time of our choosing when the optimum conditions are in place for success." Again, the certainty of being able to hold the vote at the time of our own choosing is a beautiful thought, but is completely impracticable unless he's planning to abolish parliamentary elections. The main barrier to being able to hold a referendum at the best possible moment is the possibility that there will be no pro-independence majority at Holyrood after 2021. It's Pete who is arguing we should just recklessly take our chances with that, and his only justification is the absurd claim that if we can't win a pro-indy majority at Holyrood, we wouldn't have been able to win a referendum anyway. Really? If we win 48% of the seats in the 2021 election, it would be completely impossible to win 51% of the vote at any time between then and 2026? A seven-year-old child would be able to spot the flaw in that argument.
The truly 'pragmatic' thing to do is recognise that we have a mandate, that it's a precious thing that may not come our way again for a very long time, and that it therefore shouldn't be lightly squandered. That doesn't mean holding a referendum next week - it means choosing the best available moment between now and May 2021, when the mandate expires. That's where the centre of gravity for pragmatism lies - and not in the pie-in-the-sky notion that there will be some ideal moment in the distant future where the stars will align perfectly for a nailed-on victory, and that all we have to do is wait long enough for this magical process to occur.
Pete claims: "[Optimal conditions] are not when we are less than one year away from having lost over one third of our independence supporting MPs to candidates who had as their main campaigning message ‘No to a second referendum’". The problem with this theory is that we don't know what would have happened if the SNP had stood up to the uncompromising nature of the Tory message with an equally uncompromising "Say Yes to an Indyref" message of their own. It's possible that a third of the MPs wouldn't have lost if that had been done. Pete has previously claimed he has canvassing evidence that there was no appetite for a stronger pro-indy message from the SNP, but you'll have to forgive me if I'm a tad sceptical about anecdotal claims from a less-than-objective source. What we do know from polling evidence is that large numbers of people who voted SNP in 2015 went on to abstain in 2017. That suggests to me that there were a lot of people out there who wanted to be inspired, but didn't hear what they were looking for.
Pete says: "Optimal conditions are also not when a majority of our fellow Scots continue to tell us they still oppose independence by a significant margin when public opinion is tested." Sorry, but what is a "significant margin"? It's only a few weeks since an Ipsos-Mori telephone poll produced figures of Yes 48%, No 52%. Is Pete seriously arguing that four percentage points - a lead that is within the standard margin of error - is a "significant margin"? (It's true that Panelbase have shown a bigger gap since then, but that's simply a 'house effect' of a different firm's methodology. Nobody knows the true state of play in exact detail, and it's perfectly conceivable that Ipsos-Mori is right and that public opinion is split roughly 50/50.)
Pete claims: "That last five percent we need to win over in a renewed referendum will be the hardest five percent we have ever had to convert. It is a five percent that is deeply dug in with over five years of intense debate about our countries constitutional future." Hang on, hang on. If these No voters are as hopelessly entrenched as Pete claims, why have there have been several polls since 2014 (including one as recently as last year) showing Yes with more than 50% of the vote? It doesn't make sense, does it? In reality, polling trends since the last referendum clearly show that there is sufficient fluidity and volatility among the electorate for either side to have a realistic chance of winning. It just depends on who fights the most effective campaign.
Unfortunately, if Pete gets his way, we'll run away from the battle and we'll never find out what would have happened. But when another twenty years have passed and no referendum has been held and independence is further away than ever, at least we'll be able to console ourselves by saying "we didn't lose a second time". (So what?)
Friday, April 20, 2018
SNP vote remains rock-solid in Highland Perthshire by-election
Just for once we have a by-election outcome where the terminology of 'hold' or 'gain' isn't misleading due to the quirks of the voting system. The Highland ward in Perth & Kinross was firmly Tory territory in the council elections last May, and the vacant seat was successfully retained by the Tories in the by-election yesterday.
Highland ward (Perth & Kinross) by-election result:
Conservatives 46.7% (+1.2)
SNP 35.9% (-0.6)
Independent - Taylor 6.9% (n/a)
Labour 5.8% (n/a)
Greens 2.5% (-1.4)
Liberal Democrats 1.9% (-1.6)
Independent - Baykal 0.3% (n/a)
For my money that's a very solid result for the SNP. Of course they were talking up their chances of winning outright, which any party with even an outside chance always has to do, but the reality is that they would have needed a hefty 4.5% swing from the Tories, which was always improbable given the greater tendency of Tory voters to turn out in lower profile contests. Essentially what we have is a no change outcome - there's been a tiny swing to the Tories, but nothing of any real consequence. That's consistent with the message of the national opinion polls, which suggests that despite all the media hoo-ha over the general election result, the SNP vote has actually held up admirably since June.
* * *
I think someone at Time magazine has a sense of humour - either that, or (and this is more probable) they're just completely clueless. The publication has named Ruth Davidson - I'm not making this up, Ruth Davidson - as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Well, let's put that seemingly improbable claim to the test, shall we? She's an MSP, so the main arena for her influence really ought to be the Scottish Parliament - but she doesn't have much there, even as the leader of the second-largest party. Yes, the SNP government is just short of an outright majority and is sometimes forced to seek arrangements with other parties to get legislation through, but for obvious reasons parties other than the Tories are the usual port of call for any deal-making. So if Davidson is frozen out of power in Scotland, the only conceivable influence she could possibly have would be indirect influence on her fellow Tories in government at Westminster. But what evidence is there that she even has that? She's made two main boasts about what 'her' bloc of MPs at Westminster would achieve over the last year - 1) that the devolution settlement would be protected with amendments made to the EU Withdrawal Bill at the Commons stage, and 2) that powers over fisheries would be repatriated to the UK immediately after Brexit. Both of those claims came to absolutely nothing, and all we've heard from Davidson is how "frustrated" she is that she can't do anything about it. As a general rule, the most influential people in the world get what they want, rather than whinge about being "frustrated" that the opposite of what they want is happening because other people are calling the shots.
I think GA Ponsonby has it nailed - the bogus narrative of 'Ruth the Powerful' is a fairy-tale dreamt up from scratch by the media, and has somehow gained so much traction that even a few people in other countries have started to believe it. This accolade for Davidson will in a few short years look as mind-bogglingly silly as Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
Highland ward (Perth & Kinross) by-election result:
Conservatives 46.7% (+1.2)
SNP 35.9% (-0.6)
Independent - Taylor 6.9% (n/a)
Labour 5.8% (n/a)
Greens 2.5% (-1.4)
Liberal Democrats 1.9% (-1.6)
Independent - Baykal 0.3% (n/a)
For my money that's a very solid result for the SNP. Of course they were talking up their chances of winning outright, which any party with even an outside chance always has to do, but the reality is that they would have needed a hefty 4.5% swing from the Tories, which was always improbable given the greater tendency of Tory voters to turn out in lower profile contests. Essentially what we have is a no change outcome - there's been a tiny swing to the Tories, but nothing of any real consequence. That's consistent with the message of the national opinion polls, which suggests that despite all the media hoo-ha over the general election result, the SNP vote has actually held up admirably since June.
* * *
I think someone at Time magazine has a sense of humour - either that, or (and this is more probable) they're just completely clueless. The publication has named Ruth Davidson - I'm not making this up, Ruth Davidson - as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Well, let's put that seemingly improbable claim to the test, shall we? She's an MSP, so the main arena for her influence really ought to be the Scottish Parliament - but she doesn't have much there, even as the leader of the second-largest party. Yes, the SNP government is just short of an outright majority and is sometimes forced to seek arrangements with other parties to get legislation through, but for obvious reasons parties other than the Tories are the usual port of call for any deal-making. So if Davidson is frozen out of power in Scotland, the only conceivable influence she could possibly have would be indirect influence on her fellow Tories in government at Westminster. But what evidence is there that she even has that? She's made two main boasts about what 'her' bloc of MPs at Westminster would achieve over the last year - 1) that the devolution settlement would be protected with amendments made to the EU Withdrawal Bill at the Commons stage, and 2) that powers over fisheries would be repatriated to the UK immediately after Brexit. Both of those claims came to absolutely nothing, and all we've heard from Davidson is how "frustrated" she is that she can't do anything about it. As a general rule, the most influential people in the world get what they want, rather than whinge about being "frustrated" that the opposite of what they want is happening because other people are calling the shots.
I think GA Ponsonby has it nailed - the bogus narrative of 'Ruth the Powerful' is a fairy-tale dreamt up from scratch by the media, and has somehow gained so much traction that even a few people in other countries have started to believe it. This accolade for Davidson will in a few short years look as mind-bogglingly silly as Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Why the Tories want the SNP to let their mandate for a referendum expire
Not for the first time, David Halliday has hit the nail on the head with this tweet -
"If not having an independence referendum before 2021 is sensible then why has Ruth Davidson been fighting so hard to make sure that that's what happens?"
If you find yourself doing (or considering doing) exactly what your opponents want you to do, it's always worth stepping into their shoes and considering why they want you to do it so badly. From a Tory perspective, there are a number of very good reasons why an early independence referendum is something to dread -
1) The imminence of Brexit means that Project Fear would work in both directions this time. It will be easy enough for the Yes campaign to produce a steady stream of "There were warnings tonight about the impact of Brexit on..." stories. (How easy it will be to get the broadcasters to give those stories equal prominence is another matter, but an official campaign can help set the news agenda to some extent.) If voters are convinced that there are credible reasons to fear the uncertainty of Brexit, the effect of fear in the campaign may be neutralised in a way that was never possible in 2014.
2) Theresa May is absolutely the worst person to be a figurehead for the No campaign. She is tone-deaf in respect of Scotland. She could single-handedly lose the referendum for No.
3) Jeremy Corbyn clearly has some appeal in Scotland, but an independence referendum would not be his natural terrain. As was the case during the EU referendum, he probably wouldn't look terribly interested. He would also say random things about "SNP austerity" that just wouldn't have much resonance for people in that particular context.
4) Given that the Tories are now Scotland's second party at almost every level of representation, it would be hard to justify sitting back and allowing Labour to be the cuddly public face of the No campaign once again. And yet the alternative - an identifiably Tory-led No campaign - carries enormous risks. Notwithstanding Ruth Davidson's much-vaunted "popularity", the Tories remain the most disliked of the major political parties in Scotland. In a binary-choice referendum, there's not much use having 25% of the population solidly behind you if another 65% hate your guts.
5) The Vow may be a trick that was only ever going to work once. On the pro-independence side, we tend to think of what could go right or wrong in a referendum purely in terms of victory or defeat, but for the Tories, giving too much ground on devolution is a fate almost as bad as defeat. If a Yes vote looked like a realistic possibility with a few days to go, they would have to decide whether to make very painful concessions of new powers, or whether (and this is more probable) to offer absolutely nothing and just hope for the best. Neither option looks too appetising for them in advance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)