On the narrowest of margins does history turn. If the Spelman amendent had been defeated (and it would have taken just two MPs voting the other way for that to happen), the most likely outcome might well have been a No Deal Brexit, either on the scheduled date this month or after a very short last-ditch extension. As it is, Theresa May has clearly shifted her ground and started to countenance the possibility of a longer extension. She did it in her customary "nothing to do with me guv" sort of way, but the change is real - before tonight she was definitively ruling out an extension of more than a few weeks, while now she is accepting that it could be an unavoidable and unwelcome consequence of parliament's decisions.
Which seems to leave us with a binary choice between a) the Brexiteers being spooked by the threat of delay into voting for May's deal at the third time of asking, or b) an Article 50 extension of sufficient length that the UK would be forced into taking part in the European elections in two months' time. (Admittedly the latter would cause such fury among Brexiteer MPs that the government might well be toppled.) Either way, a moment of truth is coming for the independence movement - the passing of the deal would mean that the clarity Nicola Sturgeon has been awaiting would arrive imminently, at which point we could expect a decision about an independence referendum. Or if the European elections are held in Scotland, the SNP would presumably use them to attempt to further reinforce their mandate for an indyref - with a good result being vitally important.
For the second time in a few days I have to query the editorial priorities of the Herald in dealing with opinion polls - their take on the new Survation poll is "Nicola Sturgeon faces strong public opposition to Indyref 2", which is a tad odd, because the poll actually shows that 60% of respondents want a second independence referendum at some point, rising to 65% if Don't Knows are removed. The only negative side of the poll for independence supporters is when respondents say the referendum should be held, with many saying it shouldn't be for at least five or ten years. However, for my money that has a lot to do with the way the question is posed - it's a five-option question, which will lead strong supporters and opponents of a referendum to choose the option at either extreme, with everyone else likely to be drawn to an option somewhere in the middle to show their moderation. And of course it was entirely at Survation's discretion to decide what "in the middle" would actually look like. If you want a meaningful verdict on the referendum the SNP are proposing, you have to ask a more direct question - "do you support or oppose the SNP's call for an independence referendum once the terms of Brexit are known?" We can only guess what the outcome would have been if Survation had posed that one.
On the voting intentions for Westminster and Holyrood, it's pretty much unalloyed good news for the SNP and the independence movement more generally.
Scottish voting intentions for Westminster: SNP 40% (+1) Conservatives 24% (-2) Labour 23% (-1) Liberal Democrats 8% (n/c)
Like the recent Panelbase poll, the above figures represent a swing to the SNP from both the Tories and Labour since the June 2017 election, but the swings are bigger, and the SNP's own vote share is up on 2017 as well. In the unlikely event of a totally uniform national swing, this would see the SNP win 46 seats (up 11), the Tories just 8 (down 5), the Lib Dems 4 (no change) and Labour 1 (down 6).
In a perverse way, Labour might think their 23% vote share is not too bad, because it's within their normal range for recent Survation polls, albeit at the lower end of it. Panelbase, by contrast, had put Labour on a post-June 2017 low, which appeared to reflect the impact of the Independent Group breakaway.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot: SNP 43% (+5) Conservatives 24% (-2) Labour 22% (-3) Liberal Democrats 9% (n/c) Scottish Parliament regional list ballot: SNP 32% (n/c) Conservatives 22% (-1) Labour 19% (-4) Greens 11% (+2) Liberal Democrats 11% (+2)
Remarkably, the Scotland Votes predictor suggests that the pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament would slightly increase on these numbers - the SNP and Greens between them would have 70 seats, rather than the 69 they won in 2016 when the mandate for a second independence referendum was secured. That once again gives the lie to Robin McAlpine's claim from a few weeks ago that all recent polls have suggested the pro-indy majority would be lost. In all honesty, though, Survation's methodology is making it very difficult to work out what would really happen, because it's been blindingly obvious for ages that the question wording they use for the list vote ("your second vote") is confusing respondents and producing distorted results - the SNP's vote share is likely to be a few points too low and the Greens' vote share is likely to be a few points too high.
I know it's almost a waste of breath to complain when newspapers run misleading headlines about opinion polls, but it has to be said that the Herald's choice of "Poll blow for Yes movement" (in relation to the new Panelbase poll) is particularly eccentric when self-evidently the big story is the slump in the Labour vote. At worst, the poll can be described as a curate's egg for independence supporters, because the Holyrood numbers are so-so, and the Westminster numbers are highly encouraging. Yes, the SNP remain stuck on the 37% of the Westminster vote they received in 2017, but in a first-past-the-post election all that matters is the gap between the leading party and its opponents, and the SNP's lead over both the Tories and Labour has increased over the last two years. Seat projections based on polls need to be taken with a heavy dose of salt, but for what it's worth this is what would happen on a uniform swing...
On what planet is that a blow for the Yes movement? If the SNP winning more than two-thirds of Scottish seats in the House of Commons is bad news, I can't wait to see what a good poll would look like. Indeed, this may confirm that Scottish politics has quietly crossed a Rubicon over recent weeks. If you remember, in the aftermath of the general election there was considerable concern that the momentum behind Labour could result in the SNP being replaced as the leading party in Scotland - and we knew that only Labour could ever achieve that, because there is still a natural ceiling on Tory support. It now looks like the fallout from the Independent Group breakaway may have finally killed any lingering chance of Labour overtaking the SNP in the foreseeable future, and that an SNP victory at the next Westminster election is close to being assured - with the only real question mark being over the scale of the triumph. There's always an outside chance of another twist in the tale, but at the moment it looks like 'success' for Labour would just mean holding what they have.
As far as Holyrood is concerned, SNP support is holding steady at a creditable 41% of the constituency vote. It's true that there's been a two point drop in the SNP's list vote, but given that there's no change in the party's popularity on other ballots, that could well be just a random polling fluctuation that doesn't really signify anything. The seats projection puts the combined pro-independence forces four seats short of an overall majority, but that's been the story of the majority of recent polls and isn't especially newsworthy in itself. In any case, the last three Holyrood elections have all produced results that bore little resemblance to pre-campaign polls. In 2007, the SNP started with a substantial lead that was whittled away to almost even-stevens by polling day, probably due to cold feet over putting a pro-indy party into power for the first time ever. In 2011, a huge Labour lead evaporated at astonishing speed and the SNP ended up with an overall majority - probably largely due to the fact that nobody could imagine Iain Gray as First Minister, while Alex Salmond seemed made for the role. And in 2016, wildly implausible pre-campaign numbers for the SNP (which led to irresponsible claims from some quarters that SNP supporters didn't need to vote for their own party on the list ballot) came back down to earth with seeming inexorability.
For my money, it's the leadership factor that could once again be the game-changer in the next Holyrood campaign. Richard Leonard may well look totally out of his depth against Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson in the TV leaders' debates, which could lead to a further substantial squeeze in Labour support. And it could be that all we'd need to maintain the pro-indy majority in the Scottish Parliament is for a reasonable percentage of Yes-supporting Labour voters to migrate to the SNP.
Apologies for not being all over the latest Wings Over Scotland / Panelbase poll - I'm a bit under the weather today. But I'll post the numbers and hopefully do some analysis later.
Scottish voting intentions for Westminster:
SNP 37% (n/c)
Conservatives 27% (+1)
Labour 22% (-4)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)
Independent Group 2% (n/a)
Greens 2% (n/c)
UKIP 2% (n/c)
SNP 41% (n/c)
Conservatives 27% (+2)
Labour 19% (-4)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+2)
Greens 3% (n/c)
UKIP 2% (+1)
Scottish Parliament voting intentions (regional list ballot):
SNP 36% (-2)
Conservatives 26% (n/c)
Labour 19% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 9% (+2)
Greens 6% (n/c)
UKIP 3% (+2)
I don't think we should be too concerned that the SNP appear to still be stuck on the 37% they achieved at the 2017 Westminster general election, because that's looking increasingly like a 'house effect' of Panelbase's methodology. They've consistently shown the SNP at around 36-38%, while other firms have often put the number a bit higher. Even on 37%, the SNP would be gaining seats, because there has been a 1% overall swing from Tory to SNP since the election, and a 2.5% swing from Labour to SNP. 22% is Labour's lowest Westminster share in any Panelbase poll since June 2017, and indeed in all but one poll from any firm. The slump is likely to be largely caused by the fallout from the Independent Group breakaway, and of course has been mirrored in GB-wide polls.
Jason McCann ran a Twitter poll yesterday, asking whether a new pro-independence party should be set up if the SNP fail to use their mandate to hold an independence referendum. Now, it's no secret that I think it would be a historic error to let the mandate expire in 2021, and that I'm deeply troubled that there seem to be a few senior people in the SNP who don't take their manifesto commitment to voters seriously. But nevertheless, and regardless of what happens, setting up a rival party to the SNP would be a terrible idea.
First of all you'd have to be clear on what your objective is - are you trying to replace the SNP as the largest pro-independence party, or are you trying to pressure them from the outside into changing course? If the former, it's a pipe-dream, and if the latter, it's a very, very dangerous game, because to have any chance of applying that external pressure you'd have to take significant numbers of votes away from the SNP, which could cost us the pro-independence majorities both at Holyrood and among the Scottish contingent at Westminster.
Take the example of Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum Party, which by historic standards actually achieved relative success for a new party by securing 2.6% of the Britain-wide popular vote in its first (and only) general election in 1997. But its aim was to either replace the Tories as the government for long enough to hold a referendum on the future terms of EU membership, or more realistically to pull the Tory government in a more Eurosceptic direction. All it actually succeeded in doing was increasing the huge parliamentary majority of the newly-elected pro-European Labour government (indeed, if Tony Blair had got his way, that was a government that would eventually have taken the UK into the euro).
Imagine if a new pro-independence party succeeded in taking 2.6% of the vote away from the SNP at the next Westminster general election. If everything else stayed the same from last time, the SNP would lose no fewer than TEN of their 35 seats. That's the immense damage relatively small changes can do under the first-past-the-post system. The SNP would win just 25 seats, the Tories would go up to 16, Labour would go up to 13, and the Liberal Democrats would go up to 5. There would be a clear unionist majority among Scottish MPs, purely because a small number of voters had moved from one pro-independence party to another. Similar damage would be done in the constituency section of the next Scottish Parliament election.
One or two people suggested last night that the new party could avoid this problem by sitting out Westminster elections and Scottish Parliament constituency votes altogether, and only standing on the Holyrood list. I'm not sure it's realistic to think it would do that - more likely is that it would feel obliged to build its profile by standing in at least a few constituencies, as the Greens have done over the years. That would mean less damage to the pro-independence cause, but still some damage. (For example, it seems highly unlikely that Ruth Davidson would have won Edinburgh Central in 2016 if the Greens hadn't put up a candidate.) But even in the unlikely event that the new party only stood on the list, nobody should be under any illusions that it wouldn't probably still be doing harm. On 2.6% of the vote or lower, it wouldn't be coming close to winning any list seats, and those are wasted votes that would otherwise presumably be mostly going to pro-indy parties that do actually have a chance of winning list seats (ie. the SNP and the Greens).
I know some people have truly boundless optimism and will argue that a new party can defy historical precedent by winning a lot more than 2.6% of the vote, and will therefore be in contention for list seats. But I would suggest that to have any chance of doing that, it will need to recruit some very well-known people from the Yes movement. And if it succeeds in rivalling the SNP to that extent, it's very hard to imagine it being content to be a second-string party and to sit out the majority of electoral contests, which takes us back to the original problem of splitting the vote under first-past-the-post.
It's noted in some quarters that UKIP succeeded in doing what this new party would be trying to do - ie. by changing another party's stance on holding a referendum. I'm not sure that's quite right - although in the long-run it turned out that UKIP was indeed a genuine threat to Conservative chances at the 2015 general election, it was far from clear that would be the case at the moment David Cameron actually embraced an in/out referendum on EU membership. But even to the limited extent that UKIP did play a part, it shouldn't be forgotten just how perilously close they eventually came to defeating their own objective. They won 12.6% of the national vote in 2015 - if they hadn't been around, and if the bulk of their votes had instead gone to the Tories, David Cameron would have won an overwhelming majority and a referendum wouldn't have been in any doubt. As it was, he won a wafer-thin overall majority of just 12 seats. If UKIP had deprived him of just a few more seats, a referendum would never have taken place, and Britain would not be currently leaving the European Union. All because too many people voted for a hardline anti-European party. Bonkers, but true.
It's also worth considering the varying fortunes of those who abandoned a major party when they were unhappy with the direction it was taking, and those who stayed put and fought their corner. The MPs who broke away from Labour in 1981 to form the SDP had given up hope of pulling Labour back to the centre, and intended to replace the two traditional parties with a new centre-left party of government. Instead they delivered an extra decade-and-a-half of hard-right rule from the Tories, and by the time that was over, Labour had grotesquely somehow ended up as a right-of-centre party as well. Contrast that with the fate of the Corbynites, who appeared to be in a 'nuclear winter' situation during the Blair/Brown years (Tony Blair even openly joked about the idea of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader as if that was the most improbable thing he could think of). And yet they didn't break away. They stayed, argued for what they believed in, and eventually the pendulum swung back in their direction and they took control of the Labour party. Corbyn even came pretty close to the keys of 10 Downing Street in 2017.
I know that some of you are not just unhappy with the SNP for its excessive caution on a second independence referendum, but also for its recent full-on embrace of identity politics - for example, the role that Fiona Robertson played in Grouse Beater's expulsion from the party after a highly dubious allegation of anti-Semitism. Mhairi Hunter quite accurately pointed out to someone at the time that Ms Robertson had only just been elected "by your fellow SNP members" as Equalities Convener. But the correct response to that fact is not to give up in despair and think that you have to make a straight choice between a) agreeing with everything Ms Robertson says, and b) leaving the SNP. The best course of action is to stay in the party, fight your corner and seek a better result in future internal elections. One thing is for sure - those internal elections will not go your way if you and enough of the people who agree with you walk away from the SNP.
* * *
Here's the latest in Phantom Power's acclaimed Journey to Yes series of films - this time featuring Jenny Constable, who supported the Better Together campaign in 2014 but now wants to see an independent Scotland.
This has only just occurred to me, but it should have occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. What do we know, or think we know, about the seven Scottish Labour seats at Westminster? That six of them would be under severe threat if there is a swing to the SNP at the next general election, but that the seventh (Ian Murray's constituency of Edinburgh South) is absolutely rock-solid in almost all circumstances. But, as it happens, Ian Murray is also the only one of the seven MPs to have been dropping hints about the possibility of defecting to the Independent Group. And it's not even irrational for him to have done so. For almost any other Labour elected representative in Scotland, it would be electoral suicide to join TIG, because the traditional Labour vote would not follow them across. But Murray doesn't primarily owe his position to the traditional Labour vote, but rather to industrial-scale anti-SNP tactical voting, and those voters would in all likelihood see Murray under any party label as the best prospect for keeping the SNP out. At the very least the odds would be against Labour holding Edinburgh South if Murray is standing against them - if we're being super-optimistic, there's a chance that he might split the unionist vote and let the SNP in through the middle, but more likely is that he'd retain the seat himself.
So if Murray defects, it could be a double-whammy - it would generate anti-Labour momentum that might make it even more likely that the other six seats will fall, while also depriving Labour of the one seat they thought they could bank on. But even if they were completely wiped out in Westminster, would it actually matter in the long-run? After all, the Scottish Tories were wiped out in 1997, but regained a toe-hold in 2001 and then eventually came back with a vengeance in 2017. Perhaps the difference is that the Tory core vote had nowhere else to go (or nowhere credible) even when the game seemed to be up, whereas there are a great many alternative homes for hitherto committed Labour supporters - if they're pro-indy, there's the SNP, if they're socially liberal, there's the Lib Dems, if they're dogmatic unionists, there's the Tories, and if all else fails there's the Independent Group itself. Voters might just take a signal from a wipeout in the Commons that would lead to a total and irreversible collapse of the Scottish Labour vote. I'm not making a prediction, but it's a plausible possibility.
Having said all that, Murray might be given pause for thought by the latest Opinium poll including the Independent Group as an option on a standard voting intention question. Opinium are the only polling firm to be taking that approach, and it's unsurprising that they're producing much lower numbers for the Independent Group than firms who ask hypothetical questions that make a song and dance of reminding respondents about the group's existence.
Britain-wide voting intentions including the Independent Group (Opinium): Conservatives 37% (-3) Labour 33% (+1) UKIP 7% (n/c) Liberal Democrats 7% (+2) Independent Group 5% (-1) SNP 4% (n/c) Greens 4% (n/c) Plaid Cymru 1% (n/c) Scottish subsample: SNP 44%, Labour 25%, Conservatives 23%, UKIP 3%, Greens 1%, Independent Group 1%, Liberal Democrats 1%
That's probably the most reliable guide we have to the Independent Group's true popularity at present, and it's not hard to see how it could deter further defections. And yet, ironically, the only way the group are likely to improve their standing is by attracting a lot more defectors.
There's a famous quote attributed to Peter Hitchens that always does the rounds when an opinion poll that people don't like the results of is published: "Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense." Of course that's not true, or at least it's not the whole truth - opinion polling is a spectrum, with cynical American-style push-polling at one extreme, polls produced with the honest intention of discovering the current state of play at the other extreme, and all sorts of shades of grey in between. But what we're living through at the moment is a clear-cut example of a scenario in which decisions made by pollsters and those who commission polls are likely to shape the outcome of future elections. There's a clear incentive for those sympathetic to the Independent Group to downplay the credible Opinium results and instead commission (or talk up) more of the fantasy polls that purport to put their heroes in the teens or even higher. As misleading as those polls are, they could prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if they hoodwink potential defectors into thinking they would be joining a party that is already a going concern.
There's a sub-plot here, though, because Heidi Allen has told ITV in a new interview that the Independent Group are actually trying to discourage any more than two or three Tory MPs from defecting for the time being, because that would "destabilise the government". As bonkers as that may sound, you can kind of see her point - even if a much-expanded Independent Group abstain on confidence motions, the likelihood is that a Conservative-DUP alliance without a working majority would not be able to plough on, and a snap election would see the Independent Group project snuffed out before it really got started. And yet if the Independent Group limit their own critical mass in the Commons, they'll make a breakthrough less likely anyway. It's a real Catch 22 for them - it's certainly hard to see how they'll overtake the SNP as the third largest group in the Commons without a decent number of Tory defectors.
So just a few miscellaneous thoughts about the BBC's latest reporting on where the indyref2 saga goes from here. I know some people always get irritated with me if I take the BBC's account of anonymous briefings on trust, but let's just assume for the purposes of this blogpost that the report isn't entirely a work of fiction.
* First of all, it's encouraging that the expectation is still that Nicola Sturgeon will shortly renew her demand for a Section 30 order. There was a brief spell a few weeks ago when the mood music from one or two key people in the SNP seemed to suggest that even the Section 30 request might be subject to an indefinite delay, so I'm relieved that doesn't appear to be the case after all.
* There's no mention (as far as I can see) that the Section 30 request will be accompanied by an announcement of an intended date for the referendum. On the other hand, there's no indication that it won't be. My own view is that specifying a date would be highly desirable, because it would bring into sharper relief the fact that Westminster are attempting to obstruct an exercise in Scottish self-determination.
* Obviously the indications from Tory sources that Theresa May will deny a Section 30 request are no great surprise. We may have all been shocked two years ago when the Prime Minister reversed decades of British government policy by announcing that Scotland no longer had an unconditional right to democratic self-determination, but we now fully understand that the United Kingdom has become Scotland's prison, and the only question is what action we are going to take on our own initiative to escape.
* I'm heartened that the SNP leadership have clearly been giving serious consideration to that question, but I'm troubled that they might be coming up with unwise answers. We seem to be looking at the next Holyrood or Westminster election (whichever comes soonest) being used to produce an even more emphatic mandate for a referendum than the mandate we already have. Essentially that means that unless a snap Westminster general election happens to be called prior to May 2021 (something we have very little control over), the current mandate for an independence referendum will be allowed to expire. That seems to me a wholly unnecessary admission of defeat - albeit defeat only in one battle, rather than the whole war. But if it's really deemed necessary to seek a renewed Holyrood mandate, surely consideration should be given to doing so via an early election held well before 2021. Yes, that would be a drastic step, but if we're serious about Brexit being an emergency situation, there's nothing inappropriate about taking emergency action. If an early election is called for the express purpose of securing an indyref mandate, and if that mandate is duly secured, it would arguably become politically much more difficult for Westminster to continue saying "no".
* Nevertheless, there is a chance they will continue to say "no", and we need to have a Plan B ready for that eventuality. The Glasgow SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter suggested a few weeks back that we should respond to every successive rejection of a Section 30 order by just "campaigning some more for a referendum". That is not a sustainable position - if we go to the people asking for yet another mandate for a referendum, we have to be clear that if the mandate is secured we will expect it to be respected this time, and that we won't just keep going round in circles forever. That would mean moving forward to an alternative method of winning independence if there is a further refusal to grant a Section 30 - probably either a consultative referendum or a decision to use the next available election to seek an outright mandate for independence. Why the SNP leadership appear so squeamish about those options is beyond me, given that they would both be perfectly legal (a consultative referendum could only take place if it was upheld by the Supreme Court). And as it happens, the SNP have already moved beyond strict constitutionality anyway - as I understand it, Mike Russell has said that the Scottish Government does not accept the legitimacy of the EU Withdrawal Act as it affects the devolution settlement, even though there is no dispute that it is the law of the land.
* In a perverse way it's helpful that an SNP source from the 'delay' lobby was more specific than usual in claiming that we won't be ready for a referendum before 2025 at the earliest. Leaving aside the fact that this seems to be a random date plucked out of thin air, it makes abundantly clear that at least one of the 'delay' parliamentarians does not take seriously the manifesto commitment he or she was elected on to hold an independence referendum in the event of Brexit. I don't think any SNP voter who read that pledge would have thought they were in fact voting for a referendum six years after Brexit, and four years after the parliament they were electing had been dissolved.
As ever, trying to tease out Theresa May's real objective is the riddle at the heart of this latest Brexit development. Using the threat of a vote on No Deal to coax Remainers into voting for the deal wouldn't make any sense, because everyone knows parliament will vote against No Deal anyway. So logically that only leaves the possibility that the threat is intended to bring Brexiteer Tory MPs back on board. But even if that worked, would it actually produce a majority for the deal? There's been a theory that the deal might go through thanks to a coalition of spooked Tory Brexiteers and self-styled "responsible" Labour rebels. But the main reason a fair number of Labour MPs were thinking of backing May was to prevent No Deal, and if everyone knows that a vote the next day will produce a thumbs-down to No Deal, that reason diminishes somewhat. So I think we still have to assume that the likelihood is that the Commons will vote down the deal again, albeit probably by a significantly narrower margin than before.
Once again today, we've been treated to a depressing display of slipperiness and imprecision in the way that journalists have reported the latest twist. The BBC website claims that the vote on the day after the deal is rejected would be on "ruling out no deal". My understanding is that it would actually be about avoiding a No Deal exit in March, but wouldn't seek to remove the option of No Deal at a later date. And in any case, it's not actually in parliament's gift to rule out No Deal (unless it revokes Article 50 altogether). Any extension would have to be agreed with all of the other 27 EU member states, and the mood music suggests that the EU would only grant a temporary extension if the UK has come up with a credible Plan B. If there is no clear alternative way forward, the EU would be looking for a very lengthy extension lasting almost two years. As things stand, there is no sign of a Plan B, and May has ruled out an extension beyond the end of June, so once again we're heading for a direct collision between two irreconcilable positions, with No Deal on 29th March remaining the default outcome if neither a deal nor an extension is agreed.
Avoiding No Deal is in the mutual interest of both the UK and the EU (although it's obviously more important to the UK side), so you'd think some sort of halfway house compromise on an extension would be the most likely outcome, although at the moment it's murderously hard to see what form that could possibly take, especially if the Prime Minister is as hellbent as she says she is on avoiding UK participation in the European Parliament elections in May.
A few days ago, I took a first look at the schedules of the new BBC Scotland channel and came to a sudden conclusion that the whole thing was a sham. It seemed to me that the BBC were so determined to finally settle the Scottish Six issue without making space on BBC1 that they were quite prepared to construct an entire channel of repeats around a single programme. Since the channel actually launched, my mind has been set to rest to some extent, because a lot of what looked like probable repeats have actually turned out to be new shows (or at least 'first looks' at shows that will appear on BBC1 later). But tonight I watched the first edition of the Scottish Six substitute, known as The Nine, and a different concern started to form in my head. Is the very programme the channel has been built around itself a sham? In a nutshell, is The Nine actually the integrated Scottish, UK and international news programme that was supposed to be the whole point of the exercise, or is it a different sort of beast entirely?
In fairness, the show kicked off with a genuine news story - Jeremy Corbyn finally committing Labour to a second EU referendum. But there was no actual report to cover that story - just a couple of two-ways with BBC journalists in London and Brussels, and then a live interview with Neil Findlay of all people. The subsequent stories were packaged more conventionally, but none of them (as far as I could see) covered actual 'news of the day' events. They were more like 'magazine' items that you might see on Scotland Tonight, or Eorpa, or in some cases even on an entertainment programme like The One Show.
A lot of people are complimenting The Nine for its relaxed presentational style, and are suggesting that sort of distinctiveness might carve out a niche and help attract viewers against the stiff competition from the network news programmes. But the thing is, if you depart too far from what is recognisable as a news bulletin, you're defeating the whole purpose of winning those viewers. I mean, if something almost indistinguishable from Scotland Tonight qualifies as "an integrated news programme", what have we actually been campaigning for all these years?
It's early days, of course. Maybe there were a disproportionate number of pre-cooked stories simply because it was the opening night. We'll see what the rest of the week brings.
* * *
For what it's worth, Jeremy Corbyn's decision has not changed my long-standing view that we are unlikely to be heading towards a "People's Vote". Both the Tories and the DUP are opposed to a referendum, and those two parties still hold a slender majority in the Commons between them. That essentially means pro-referendum Tory rebels would have to outnumber anti-referendum Labour rebels if the government is to be defeated. And as it happens, Stephen Bush (who in the past has often proved himself to be near-omniscient on such matters) seems pretty confident that the Labour rebels handily outnumber the Tory rebels. He's not completely ruling out the possibility that the arithmetic might change, and that being the case it can maybe be said that Corbyn's change of heart has made a referendum a bit more likely - but only a bit. Frankly, even in the unlikely event that parliament votes for a referendum, I think Theresa May would be brazen enough to sidestep it.
The real significance of tonight's announcement may be to staunch the Labour bleeding - ie. to deter further defections to the Independent Group, and maybe even to reverse some of the recent damage in the opinion polls, assuming that Remain-minded voters in England now start to coalesce around Labour as the best available vehicle for frustrating Brexit.
Heidi Allen revealed yesterday that the Independent Group have decided not to take any action that would precipitate a general election - an extraordinary public position for a small group seeking to exercise influence in a hung parliament, because if you want to win concessions from the government you need at least some measure of threat, even if you know privately you'd never see the threat through.
The Independent newspaper interpreted Allen's words as meaning that the Independent Group will "back Theresa May" on any no confidence motion. I suspect that's not quite right - I presume their plan would be to abstain, because it would be a dreadful look for the eight Labour defectors to be immediately voting to prop up the Tories. But the practical effect of abstentions will be exactly the same as voting with the government - it gives May a slender DUP-proof majority, and means that a general election can only now happen in the foreseeable future if May or her successor as Tory leader decides to call one in search of a more decisive mandate. That's far from impossible, as we know from recent experience, but it's still reasonable to conclude that the chances of an early election are now somewhat lower than they were before the breakaway. The only thing that might change that calculation would be if there's yet another breakaway, this time from the Tory right, although that will probably only happen if May softens her stance on Brexit in a way that nobody really expects her to do at the moment.
Would there be anything good about this parliament trundling on for another two or three years? Well, at least it would secure the SNP's position as the majority party in terms of Scottish seats at Westminster. At the moment, polls suggest that the SNP would make a few net gains in any snap election, mostly from Labour, but in the 2017 election campaign we saw how quickly things can turn around. The arithmetic is scarily tight in a lot of SNP-held seats, so if anything went wrong during the campaign, the outcome could be disastrous. There's also the point that 35 SNP MPs might actually have more influence in a hung parliament than 40 SNP MPs would have in a post-election parliament with a Tory majority. I know we haven't seen much sign of SNP influence over the last two years, but that might change if there are a few more Tory defections, because that would mean May or her successor can no longer cobble together a majority with the DUP alone.
On the whole, though, I've been hoping for an early election, if only because of the SNP's own hesitancy about getting on with an independence referendum. Psychologically, they might feel more ready to take a risk (and an indyref will always be a risk whenever it's held) if they've got firmly onto the front foot by gaining seats in the most recent election to be held. There's still some sort of chance of a European Parliament election being held in the UK in May, and that could be the best available substitute for a snap general election, although what worries me is that the SNP have repeatedly underperformed in European elections since proportional representation was introduced in 1999 (probably because the voting system has encouraged SNP voters to drift off to smaller parties). But who knows, past history is no guide to future performance, and this would be a very different type of European election campaign from any that have been seen before.
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Last night, Opinium became the first pollster to produce a Britain-wide poll featuring the Independent Group on the standard voting intention question, as opposed to asking a convoluted hypothetical question about how people would vote if the Independent Group stood. As could probably have been anticipated, the results are less favourable for the Independent Group than the hypothetical polls have been, although both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are still taking a big hit, while the Tories are mysteriously unscathed after the onslaught from Soubry and co -
Conservatives 40% (+3) Labour 32% (-5) UKIP 7% (n/c) Independent Group 6% (n/a) Liberal Democrats 5% (-3) SNP 4% (n/c) Greens 4% (n/c) Plaid Cymru 1% (+1)
So it looks like Chuka shouldn't start measuring up curtains for 10 Downing Street just yet. The Independent Group are going to need a lot more critical mass if they're to get anywhere (indeed if they're to have any chance of holding onto even a handful of their current seats), and just for the time being the defections seem to have ground to a halt.
Incidentally, just as a matter of principle I think Opinium have made a mistake by including the Independent Group as a standard option. The defectors have been quite explicit that for now they are not setting up a political party and that they are not standing candidates. That will probably change, but I believe I'm right in saying that the SDP were not included in polls until they had formally launched as a fully-fledged party. If I was in the Labour party, I'd be extremely annoyed with Opinium for taking a premature decision that will artificially deflate the reported Labour vote. It's also a bit odd that Opinium are including the Independent Group but not Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party, which is a registered political party, and already has a bigger contingent than UKIP in the European Parliament.
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For what little it's worth, the very small Scottish subsample from last night's GB-wide poll from Deltapoll suggested that the SNP's lead increases when the Independent Group are offered as a hypothetical option...
Without the Independent Group: SNP 41%, Conservatives 26%, Labour 26%, Liberal Democrats 5%, UKIP 2% With the Independent Group: SNP 45%, Conservatives 29%, Labour 13%, Independent Group 9%, UKIP 2%, Liberal Democrats 2%
