They think it's all over for the government...and it almost is

As soon as I'd finished writing my blogpost last night, I thought I'd made a bit of a hostage to fortune by saying "the one thing we're sure of is that Boris Johnson will lose his majority today".  On reflection, I thought that surely the threat to withdraw the whip from Tory rebels on an industrial scale wouldn't really be carried out, because it would be such an unprecedented act of self-harm.  But amazingly it's happened, and among many others, the following people are no longer Tory MPs...

Ken Clarke: Longest serving member of the House of Commons, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, minister in the governments of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron, candidate in multiple Conservative leadership elections

Philip Hammond: Chancellor of the Exchequer as recently as July

Rory Stewart: International Development Secretary as recently as July, one of Boris Johnson's fellow candidates in this summer's leadership election, pride of "The Middleland"

David Gauke: Justice Secretary as recently as July

Ed Vaizey: Culture Secretary for six years

Justine Greening: Education Secretary for two years

Dominic Grieve: Attorney-General for four years

Comparisons are being made with the nine 'whipless wonders' who John Major stripped the whip from after a Maastricht rebellion, but really there is no comparison at all: those were a collection of oddbods who (with the exception of Teddy Taylor) had never got anywhere near high office.  I can't believe the purpose of this draconian action was to produce a deterrent effect either before or after the event, because it must have been obvious that was never going to work.  So I suspect the rebellion tonight was used as a pretext for squaring a circle that I was never sure could be squared - ie. how could Boris Johnson fight an election on a No Deal platform with the likes of Dominic Grieve standing under Tory colours.  But if purifying the Tory candidate base was the real aim, that must mean that Johnson and Cummings have been committed to an autumn election for some time, because they've just moved past the point of no return.  No matter what happens in the votes tomorrow, the parliamentary arithmetic can quite simply no longer sustain a Tory government this side of an election.

Incidentally, it's not strictly true to say that the government have just lost their majority, because they've actually been a minority government since June 2017.  I've been as guilty of a loose use of language as anyone else.  A confidence and supply deal is not the same thing as a coalition - the DUP remained outside the government and were not committed to following the government whip on all votes.  But what was previously a minority government that commanded the confidence of the House is now clearly a very different beast.

Today is a crossroads in history

Welcome to the 3rd of September 2019, which as it happens is the 80th anniversary of Britain and France declaring war on Nazi Germany, but also seems certain to be remembered in its own right as one of the most important days in modern British political history, perhaps on a par with 28th March 1979 (when the Callaghan government was toppled in a no confidence vote), or 22nd November 1990 (when Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign).  What isn't yet clear is exactly how today will be important, but then if we knew what was going to happen in advance, it wouldn't be such a historical crossroads. 

It's possible, but unlikely, that the government's threats and browbeating may pay off, and that the Tory rebellion will be minimised to such an extent that a No Deal Brexit becomes virtually inevitable by the end of the day.  There would still be the opportunity for Jeremy Corbyn to table a motion of no confidence later in the week, but there's no reason to think that would succeed where the legislative path failed.

On the other hand, if the rebels succeed today, a pre-Brexit general election on 14th October will be on the cards, although not before another putting to the test of Mike Smithson's theory that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act makes early elections practically impossible.  If he's proved wrong about that twice in the space of two years, I'll try very hard not to laugh. 

Given that we don't know who would win a snap election, it's very difficult to assess the significance of one being called.  I'm unconvinced by the polls showing a handsome Tory lead - 30% of the vote is not usually a winning position, and it's only enough for a lead at the moment because of the strange way in which the opposition vote is split.  The electorate is more volatile than ever, and there'll be plenty of time during the campaign for the Remain vote to coalesce in a much more effective way.  In normal circumstances tactical voting websites have only a minimal effect, but I suspect this time a large fraction of the population will have one question on their minds: how do I cast my vote in this constituency to prevent No Deal?  Everything will be up for grabs once minds start to focus.

Only one thing seems reasonably sure: this is the day the Tory/DUP majority in the Commons will finally be wiped out.  If the government are true to their word, a large number of Tory MPs will lose the whip today, irrespective of whether the rebellion is large enough to actually win the vote.  Boris Johnson's democratic authority for holding the office he does, even over the few weeks needed to hold a general election, will instantly go from being tenuous to non-existent.

The SNP must make this an independence election

Just a quick blogpost, because the point I want to make can be expressed very simply.  If a snap general election is called this week, as now seems 70-80% probable, I hope the SNP will put independence at the front and centre of their campaign.  I don't mean that they should necessarily seek an outright mandate for independence this time, because of course the McEleny/MacNeil Plan B (which I strongly support) is about what we would do after a Section 30 request is formally rejected, and it looks like there won't be enough time for us to get to that point before a possible election in October.  But what we mustn't do is repeat the mistake of 2017, when we talked about an independence referendum before the campaign started, but then shut up about it during the campaign itself.  That was the worst of all worlds, because the "threat" of Indyref2 gave the unionist parties a target to aim at, while the failure to actively promote Indyref2 meant that independence supporters weren't motivated to go to the polls.  You might remember the post-election research (I think from Ipsos-Mori?) showing that much of the SNP's lost support did not go to the unionist parties - it was caused by abstention.

A full-blooded pro-independence campaign will ensure that committed Yessers do not sit this one out, and it will also mean that there'll be no alibi for the unionist parties if the SNP get a good result - they won't be able to say it wasn't really about independence.  Of course there's a danger it could go the other way if the SNP don't get a good result, but sometimes you have to take a calculated risk when circumstances look particularly favourable, and they certainly do right now.

*  *  *

My jaw dropped to the floor a couple of hours ago when I saw Gavin Barrie on Twitter claim that he had done modelling that showed the worst-case scenario if the Wings party goes ahead is that the SNP would lose two list seats and the Wings party would gain sixteen seats.  He also said that the best-case scenario is that the Wings party would take thirty-two seats, and that there is "no downside".

I'll save you the trouble of getting your calculator out.  There is no modelling that can prove that sixteen seats is the worst-case scenario, because that self-evidently isn't true.  The actual worst-case scenario (and also the most likely one) is that the Wings party will take no seats at all, which means that any votes it takes on the list will make it harder for the SNP (and indeed the Greens) to take list seats, and therefore easier for unionist parties to take list seats.  That's not necessarily to say that the Wings party would gift the unionist parties bonus seats, but there's a very real risk of that.  I gave a hypothetical example in the comments section the other week to illustrate how it could happen, and I'll repeat it here for anyone who missed it.

Scenario A (without Wings party):

Constituency vote -

SNP 37%
Conservatives 27%
Labour 24%
Liberal Democrats 9%

Regional list vote -

SNP 32%
Conservatives 25%
Labour 22%
Greens 8%
Liberal Democrats 5%
Brexit Party 4%

Seats -

SNP 54
Conservatives 33
Labour 28
Greens 9
Liberal Democrats 5

Pro-indy seats: 63
Anti-indy seats: 66

Scenario B (with Wings taking 3% of the list vote away from the SNP):

Constituency vote -

SNP 37%
Conservatives 27%
Labour 24%
Liberal Democrats 9%

Regional list vote -

SNP 29%
Conservatives 25%
Labour 22%
Greens 8%
Liberal Democrats 5%
Brexit Party 4%
Wings 3%

Seats -

SNP 52
Conservatives 34
Labour 29
Greens 9
Liberal Democrats 5

Pro-indy seats: 61
Anti-indy seats: 68

As you can see, with the Wings party intervention there are two more unionist seats than there otherwise would be, and the Tories and Labour are the beneficiaries.  That's just one example of the many that are possible, and it's what Nicola Sturgeon was getting at this morning when she said that people who tried to game the Holyrood voting system could end up achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted.  They'd think they were voting "tactically" to increase the number of pro-indy MSPs, but they could actually be reducing the number of pro-indy MSPs, and in the real worst-case scenario could even cost us the pro-indy majority.

BOMBSHELL POLLING ANALYSIS: Average of YouGov's Scottish subsamples since Boris Johnson became PM puts SNP on course for SEVENTEEN GAINS, and the Scottish Tories on course for ELEVEN LOSSES

The frustration continues: for some reason, we still haven't had a full-scale poll of Scottish voting intentions for Westminster (or indeed for Holyrood) since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.  The change at the top has altered the trajectory of GB-wide polling, so it seems likely that the same will prove true in Scotland, but to what extent?

It's high time that we had a look at the next best thing to a full-scale poll.  YouGov announced a few years ago that they were starting to correctly structure and weight their Scottish subsamples for GB-wide polls, and it looks pretty likely from the relative stability of their figures that they've continued to do that ever since.  That doesn't mean that an individual Scottish subsample from YouGov can be treated as the equivalent of a full-scale poll - the margin of error on a correctly structured subsample of 150 or 200 is still much higher than the margin of error on a full sample of 1000 or 2000.  But averaging the figures over time can give you more meaningful results, and we're now in a position to do that, because there have been eight published YouGov subsamples with fieldwork that took place entirely after Mr Johnson entered Number 10.

YouGov Scottish subsample average since 24th July:

SNP 44.4%
Conservatives 19.3%
Liberal Democrats 12.8%
Labour 11.4%
Brexit Party 7.0%
Greens 4.0%

Westminster seat projection:

SNP 52 (+17)
Liberal Democrats 4 (n/c)
Conservatives 2 (-11)
Labour 1 (-6)

We shouldn't forget that, although the Tories have opened up a GB-wide lead, they haven't recovered to anything like the kind of levels of support that they had even a few months ago - they're still languishing in the low 30s, which normally wouldn't be enough to top the popular vote in a general election.  They're leading by default because their main opponents are polling at an unusually low level too.  In Scotland, it looks like they're not being so fortunate - yes, they've recovered a bit due to the Boris effect, but that's not doing them much good because their main opponent actually appears to be polling higher than in 2017.

The SNP are so far standing firm in the face of both the 'Boris bounce' and the 'Swinson surge' (the latter being a largely mythical thing anyway - the Lib Dem recovery preceded the change of leader).  I thought the result of the East Kilbride by-election last night was really interesting - Labour's vote slumped by eleven points, and it looked possible that a lot of those votes might have gone direct to the Lib Dems, who enjoyed a ten point boost.  The SNP seemed unaffected by the Lib Dem surge, and saw their own vote increase by four points.

OK, that's only one by-election and there may well have been local factors.  But if the Lib Dems start taking significant numbers of unionist/Remain votes away from Labour in seats that the Lib Dems can't possibly win in a million years, and if there is no substantial movement of votes from the SNP to the Lib Dems, the stars might just be aligning for a dramatic SNP landslide in terms of seats.

And who knows what effect Ruth Davidson's resignation will have on the above figures - if there are any moderate Scottish Tory voters left, they might start drifting off to the Lib Dems or somewhere else.

Two by-elections, two big swings to the SNP

As expected, the Shetland by-election proved to be just too big a mountain for the SNP to climb, but by any normal standards the swing in their favour was enormous.

Shetland parliamentary by-election result (29th August 2019):

Liberal Democrats 47.9% (-19.5)
SNP 32.3% (+9.3)
Independent - Thomson 10.9% (n/a)
Conservatives 3.7% (-0.1)
Greens 1.6% (n/a)
Labour 1.3% (-4.6)
Independent - Stout 1.1% (n/a)
Independent - Scott 0.6% (n/a)
UKIP 0.5% (n/a)
Independent - Tait 0.3% (n/a)

That's a swing of more than 14% from the Liberal Democrats to the SNP. If that had been the result of a by-election on the mainland, it would look like an unmitigated disaster for the Lib Dems and their new leader Jo Swinson, because if national polls are to be believed they should be closing the gap in seats they don't hold, and sailing out of sight in seats they do hold. They certainly shouldn't be seeing their vote slump in a previously rock-solid heartland. However, we've known since the European election in May that the Northern Isles were bucking the national trend for whatever reason, and we've always known that localised trends in island constituencies don't usually have any wider significance, so the Lib Dems will probably just feel relieved to get out of this with a win of some description. The SNP will also be pleased, though, at this demonstration that there aren't any no go areas for them in Scotland.

There have been some suggestions that the SNP's biggest failing in this campaign was in the realm of expectation management, ie. that they allowed the impression to take root that they might actually win Shetland outright, which now leaves the big swing in their favour looking like a disappointing result. But I think sometimes you have to build a sense of excitement about a campaign if you want a decent outcome. There's not going to be much of a bandwagon effect if people think your aim is a distant second place.

Oh, and it shouldn't go unmentioned that the Tories specifically said in their election leaflets that if voters wanted Brexit, their only option was to vote Tory.  So presumably this result means that 96.3% of Shetlanders don't want Brexit?

*  *  *

There was also a substantial swing to the SNP in a local council by-election in East Kilbride...

East Kilbride Central North by-election result (29th August 2019):

SNP 46.5% (+4.2)
Labour 20.3% (-11.3)
Conservatives 14.6% (-4.1)
Liberal Democrats 12.4% (+9.9)
Greens 4.5% (+0.6)
UKIP 1.4% (n/a)
Scottish Libertarians 0.4% (n/a)

It's worth bearing in mind that the above percentage changes are from the baseline of the 2017 local elections, when the SNP's national vote stood at 32%. So the SNP are not necessarily setting the heather alight with a 4% increase. But what really matters here is the catastrophic drop in the Labour vote - if that trend continues, the SNP will sweep the board wherever Labour are their main opponents in any snap Westminster election. There still appears to be every chance that Scottish Labour will once again by reduced to just one seat (Edinburgh South).

* * *

How can you tell the difference between a Westminster by-election and a local council by-election? The declaration of a Westminster by-election result is pretty much always broadcast live by the BBC, either on their news channel, or on BBC1, or on a simulcast between the two channels. By contrast, local council by-elections are for obvious reasons never covered live, and indeed are hardly ever mentioned on air after the event. Judging from the complete lack of live coverage of the Shetland result on BBC1, BBC2, the BBC news channel, the BBC Scotland channel and Radio Scotland, it appears that the BBC think that a Holyrood by-election is closer in nature to a council by-election than to a Westminster contest. It's not all that surprising to see London news editors stuck in the dark ages, taking the view that Holyrood is - in the immortal words of Tony Blair - comparable to an English parish council. But BBC Scotland have no excuse after twenty years of devolution, and it's a real dereliction of duty that they didn't broadcast some sort of live by-election special. On past form, it's highly likely they would have done if this had been a Westminster by-election in Scotland.

Scottish Tories locate their Ruth-less streak

So there have been two big developments in Scottish politics today (so far - the day is young!).  One is unalloyed good news for the SNP, the Yes movement, and humanity at large.  The other is not-so-good news, but nuanced.

Let's start with the good news - the departure of Colonel Ruth.  It's very hard to see how this is going to be anything but electorally harmful for the Tories, and therefore electorally beneficial for the SNP.  Her popularity was always wildly exaggerated by her adoring fans in the media, but nevertheless she did have personal ratings that were much healthier than you'd expect for the branch office leader of the most toxic London party.  As baffling as it may be to us, there's no doubt that she was a net asset for her party, and even if she's replaced by someone reasonably telegenic and likeable, it'll take a long while to build up that person's profile.

The alternative to her being replaced by someone telegenic and likeable is of course for her to be replaced by Adam Tomkins, and his decision about whether to stand will tell us a lot about the man.  He comes across as a fanatical British nationalist, so the million dollar question is: does he care more about that nationalist ideology than about his personal ambitions?  If so, you'd expect him not to stand, because he'd be clear-sighted enough to recognise that he'd be a voter-repellent and that he'd make "the partition of Britain" more likely to happen.  But if he does stand, we'll know he's in this game for personal advancement.

The not-so-good news today is the Labour leadership in London changing their position on a Section 30 order for the 749th time.  This was probably inevitable, because the Scottish and London leaderships of the party were always going to have to come up with some kind of agreed position they could just about unite behind in a coming general election.  The silver lining is that it's a genuine compromise, and the Scottish leadership have had to cede some ground as well - Richard Leonard is now accepting the possibility, however reluctantly, of a Section 30 order after a "fresh mandate".  (What's supposed to be wrong with the current mandate remains a mystery.)

The new position contains an obvious contradiction - we're told that a Section 30 order will be denied in the "formative years" of a Labour government but would be granted if there was a fresh mandate, which doesn't explain what will happen if the fresh mandate occurs during or before those formative years.  Remember that the next Holyrood election is still  theoretically scheduled to take place before the next Westminster election, and could easily be brought forward even further if Nicola Sturgeon decides to call Corbyn's bluff and get a new mandate quickly.  If she does go down that road, I'd suggest it's imperative that the SNP and Greens get together in a sort of pre-election 'summit' and agree a shared wording about independence and a referendum to put in both parties' manifestos, so that this time there can be no pedantic or semantic quibbles about the quality of a shared mandate.  In an ideal world, smaller pro-indy parties would also use the same manifesto wording, because although the SNP and Greens are the only pro-indy parties likely to win Holyrood seats, smaller parties may contribute to a popular vote mandate.

Yes, what happened today is a suspension of democracy, and the Queen may not be able to wash her hands of it for much longer

There was some discussion on the previous thread about whether today's announcement that parliament will soon be prorogued can appropriately be described as a "suspension of democracy", given that brief prorogations in preparation for a Queen's Speech are a normal part of the Westminster system.  But there is something (beyond the obvious cynicism of the timing) that makes this prorogation unusual.  James Cleverly noted today that it's absolutely routine for a "new government" to present a Queen's Speech - but if this is a new government (and it obviously is, given that its policy platform is a radical departure from what went before), who elected it?  No-one, unless you count the tiny percentage of the population who are card-carrying members of the Conservative party.  It hasn't received a direct mandate at a general election, and crucially it hasn't even received an indirect mandate from the elected parliament - it has yet to be tested in a confidence vote.  Incredible though it may seem, after a month it still hasn't been established that there is any democratic basis whatsoever for Boris Johnson to be our Prime Minister.  He owes his position simply to appointment by the unelected monarch on the advice of his predecessor.

The legitimacy of those who govern us during brief spells of prorogation derives from them enjoying the confidence of parliament - and in this case that legitimacy will be lacking, unless Jeremy Corbyn tables a vote of no confidence next week and loses it.  So, yes, I think it's entirely appropriate to characterise today's decision as a suspension of democracy.

Before the news officially came through that the Queen has approved Boris Johnson's prorogation request, this was my reaction on Twitter -

"Rather appropriate that the Queen is in Scotland as she receives the phone call asking her to suspend democracy. I wonder if she'll 'purr' down the line. I certainly hope she 'thinks very carefully' about her decision..."

Of course I was being slightly mischievous there, because I'm sure the Queen's advisers will have told her that she didn't really have a decision to make.  Convention dictates that she must accept a request for prorogation prior to a Queen's Speech.  However, there are other circumstances in which convention does still allow her some discretion, and we may be hurtling towards those circumstances.  ITV's political editor Robert Peston reported earlier that a government source had told him: "If MPs pass a no confidence vote next week, then we'll stay in No10, we won't recommend any alternative government we'll dissolve Parliament and have an election between 1-5 November -- and that means no time for legislation."  

If the government goes down that route of temporary, outright dictatorship, then the Queen can stop them.  She has the power to sack Boris Johnson as Prime Minister with immediate effect if she concludes that he no longer has the confidence of the House - and if he's just lost a vote of no confidence, such a conclusion would be a no-brainer.  Convention does not prevent her from taking action, and the modern precedents are clear.  In 1975, the Governor-General of Australia sacked the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and replaced him with the opposition leader.  The Governor-General exercises exactly the same powers on behalf of the Queen that she exercises on her own behalf in the United Kingdom.  And within her own reign, there's an example of her using her discretion on the selection of a Prime Minister - in 1963, she went ahead and appointed the Earl of Home as PM, ignoring advice from Harold Macmillan to wait until further soundings had been taken among Tory MPs.

My guess is that the Queen is so allergic to being seen to intervene in the political process (except to stop Scotland governing itself, obviously) that there isn't a cat in hell's chance of her using her power to eject an illegitimate Prime Minister.  But the problem for her is that the government will have put her in a position where she has no option but to make a political decision, one way or the other.  Doing nothing will in itself be a decision, and it'll make her the midwife of a No Deal Brexit.  That could be a catastrophic error that would destroy the monarchy's reputation among a whole generation of pro-EU citizens.

SNP remain firmly in the driving seat in latest YouGov subsample

Strictly speaking we've had one full-scale Scottish poll since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister - the now-legendary Ashcroft poll that gave Yes a narrow lead on the independence question, and that also showed that Nicola Sturgeon was the most popular of the leading Scottish and UK politicians.  But oddly there were no Westminster or Holyrood voting intention numbers in the poll, and that's what we could really do with now.  We're in the highly unusual situation where it seems to me that some London commentators are possibly being a tad optimistic about the SNP's prospects in any autumn snap election - and that's specifically because they're assuming that nothing has changed since the pre-Boris polls that suggested the SNP were riding high and that the Scottish Tories were taking an absolute hammering.  Logically it seems possible that the Boris effect may have seen the Scottish Tories recover somewhat at the expense of the Brexit Party, which would mean that even if the SNP are still in a commanding position, they may find it harder to make heavy gains from the Tories.  Straws in the wind from Scottish subsamples of GB-wide polls have sent conflicting messages about the extent of any Tory recovery.  But, as it happens, the latest subsample from YouGov (which unlike subsamples from other firms is likely to be correctly structured and weighted) is very much on the troubling side for the Tories...

SNP 46%, Liberal Democrats 16%, Conservatives 15%, Labour 9%, Greens 6%, Brexit Party 4%, UKIP 1%

I don't think the SNP will be too concerned about the Lib Dems' recovery as long as it remains at that kind of level - all it means is that the Lib Dems will hold their four current seats and perhaps take North East Fife.  But the slight worry would be a Swinson bandwagon effect during the election campaign itself, similar to the Corbyn effect in 2017.  We should never underestimate the potential for Scottish voters to get swept along with Britain-wide trends during the heat of a Westminster campaign.  The SNP could counteract that problem by firing up their own potential support base with a strong campaign message on independence, but I have my doubts as to whether they'll be bold enough to do that.

*  *  *

It's disappointing but not surprising that the SNP leadership are not going to allow the McEleny/MacNeil "Plan B" amendment to be debated at the party conference.  As you know, I'm worried that the Wings party, if it goes ahead, could be damaging for the independence cause at the next Holyrood election - but the obvious way for the SNP leadership to ward off that threat is to make potential Wings party supporters feel that their voice is being heard inside the SNP.  I'm struggling to understand what the leadership are so scared of - the chances are that they would have won any vote with a "we've heard you, but please trust us" message.  The Blair-style control-freakery of trying to shut down all debate is wholly unnecessary and counterproductive, and will just further arouse suspicions (which may or may not be unfounded) that the leadership are not serious about ensuring that a vote on independence takes place in the relatively near future.

I'm also a tad concerned about possible fallout from the showdown on the gender self-ID issue that will take place at conference, with the elections of Women's Officer and possibly Equalities Officer functioning as proxy votes on the issue.  If there are clear losers, I hope they don't feel that they no longer have a home within the SNP.  The potential for a problem is probably much greater if the anti-self-ID side loses.  If it goes the other way, at least the trans lobby would still know that the leadership is highly sympathetic towards them.

Thoughts on the upcoming Shetland by-election

So I've been asked by a few people to write a post about next week's parliamentary by-election in Shetland - a contest which has rather comically led the unionist parties to start talking as if Shetland is a foreign country.  (Nicola Sturgeon went campaigning there, and Labour propagandist Aidan Kerr's response was basically "how dare she leave the country on the day the GERS report is published!")  I'm not sure there's a huge amount I can usefully say, because the only people who have much chance of knowing the state of play are those with access to canvass data - but even they might not have the true picture, because there have been any number of by-elections in the past where canvass returns have proved to be misleading.  There was a "poll" of sorts in the Shetland Times at the start of this month which showed the SNP with a shock lead over the Liberal Democrats, but it had a tiny sample size of just 114, which means that even if it was conducted scientifically (and it sounds like it probably wasn't), it would have a very large margin of error.

I'd just make a couple of observations, though -

1) Nobody has ever made any money betting against the Liberal Democrats in the Northern Isles.  Pembrokeshire is known as "Little England beyond Wales", and perhaps we should call Orkney and Shetland "Westmorland and Lonsdale beyond Scotland".  Danus Skene did of course come astonishingly close to winning the Westminster seat for the SNP in the 2015 general election, but perhaps more to the point is that it was one of only three constituencies in the whole of Scotland that the SNP didn't actually win in that election.

2) There's no particular reason to expect trends in Northern Isles elections to bear much resemblance to Scotland-wide or UK-wide trends.  Two recent examples spring to mind.  In 2016, the year after Danus Skene's near miss, it was reasonable to expect that the SNP would be highly competitive in the Orkney and Shetland constituency seats for Holyrood, because their national vote had not fallen back much at all.  But Liam McArthur and Tavish "Two Hoots" Scott surprised everyone by holding the seats for the Lib Dems by landslide margins.  It was as if 2015 had never happened.  But then in the European elections in May of this year, at a time when the Lib Dems were riding high across the UK and you'd have expected them to be out of sight in their traditional heartlands, the SNP amazingly came within just 250 votes of outpolling them in Shetland.  So there's no real rhyme or reason to it, and that might be a point of encouragement for the SNP.  The people of Shetland might not be all that bothered one way or another about the media's fawning over the Lib Dems' shiny new Scottish school prefect.

If I was going to give you my gut sense of what to expect, it would be that the Lib Dems will hold the seat on a substantially reduced majority - it has that sort of feel about it.  But we won't really have a clue until the votes are counted.  If by any chance the Shetland Times poll is correct and the SNP gain the seat, it would be one of the most sensational by-election results in Scottish history, it would further boost the mandate for a pre-2021 indyref by increasing the pro-indy majority from 69-60 to 70-59, and it would reduce the Lib Dems to a humiliating all-time low of just four Holyrood seats at a time when they're supposed to be sweeping all before them.

Is the Holyrood voting system a unionist conspiracy?

One thing that has become clear in the discussions/arguments of recent days is that there is a real degree of paranoia among some independence supporters about how we ended up with the voting system for the Scottish Parliament, ie. "it was designed to shaft us, so we should use it to shaft them".  This is quite odd on the face of it, because by any objective measure the Additional Member System has so far worked out beautifully for both the SNP and the combined pro-indy forces.  There have been five elections since devolution in 1999, and three of them have produced SNP governments.  Two of them produced outright pro-indy majorities.  And in the two elections in which the SNP didn't come out on top, the list element of the system gave us far more pro-indy MSPs than we would have had under first-past-the-post.  For example, either 27.9% or 28.7% of the MSPs elected in 1999 were in favour of independence (depending on how you classify Robin Harper), but it would have been just 9.6% without list MSPs.

As far as I can see, a lot of the paranoia seems to derive from a single-word answer that a young Jack McConnell once gave at a press conference when a journalist asked him whether proportional representation was introduced specifically to stop the SNP ever getting a majority.  He said "correct".  But we wouldn't regard Jack McConnell as a reliable witness about anything else, so why we treat that particular answer as gospel is rather unclear.  What we do know for sure is that at the outset of discussions in the Scottish Constitutional Convention in 1989, the Liberal Democrats (then known as "the Democrats") were insisting upon some form of proportional representation for the Scottish Parliament, and in complete contrast to their attitude in coalition negotiations with the Tories twenty-one years later, they were actually treating electoral reform as a genuine deal-breaker.  The chances of a cross-party agreement appeared remote, because it was so obviously in the narrow interests of the Labour party to hold the line on first-past-the-post - if they did, they looked set for indefinite majority rule in Edinburgh.

But, of course, Labour eventually made the seemingly irrational decision to give way.  Why?  I can think of three plausible explanations, and it may well have been a combination of all three.  Firstly, Labour did have some enthusiasts for electoral reform in their own ranks, so those people may have made their presence felt.  Secondly, given that the Thatcher/Major government seemed firmly entrenched in power at Westminster, Labour may have felt that a common front with the Lib Dems was essential to build the moral pressure for devolution.  And thirdly, it may have occurred to the likes of Donald Dewar that however dominant Labour appeared to be in Scotland, the SNP would only need a relatively short burst of popularity at some point in the future to win an outright majority under first-past-the-post - and just one SNP majority might be enough to make Scotland an independent country.  So proportional representation may have been partly an insurance policy against that distant eventuality.

But even if that was the reasoning, we have to bear in mind that once Labour had conceded the principle of proportional representation, they then hedged their bets by trying to limit how proportional the system would be in practice.  They brought in a regional list system rather than a national list, which effectively gives a dominant party a "winner's bonus" in its strongest regions.  They refused the possibility of German-style levelling seats which could have more or less guaranteed full proportionality.  And they insisted on there being fewer list seats than constituency seats, which makes proportionality even less likely to be properly achieved.  In fact, at one stage Labour were openly pushing for a ratio of just 40 list seats to the 73 constituency seats, which would have made single-party majority government very easily attainable, as has proved to be the case under a similar ratio in Wales.

All of these things were done to put Labour in command of the Scottish Parliament, but Dewar and co must have known that a somewhat less proportional system was bound to start working in favour of independence if the SNP ever became the most popular party.  And so it has proved.  Labour's greed for short-term power led them to effectively downgrade their own insurance policy, and in the long run they paid the price for it.

It's also worth making the point that the insurance policy was proportional representation as a general concept - the selection of an exact type of proportional representation wasn't so important.  There's nothing about a mixed system of constituency and list MSPs that in itself constitutes a conspiracy against independence.  In 1999, exactly half of the list seats were won by the SNP, and those SNP list members then proceeded to set up "shadow constituency surgeries" in Labour-held constituency seats across the central belt.  Unsurprisingly, that infuriated Labour activists, who demanded that the 'unelected' list MSPs should know their place.  SNP supporters were entirely guilt-free about the whole thing: the list seats had merely given their party something closer to its fair share of representation, and it was about time that Labour got used to not having a completely free run on a minority vote.

The only thing that's changed since then is that the boot is on the other foot because the SNP have replaced Labour as the dominant party in the constituencies.  There's nothing unfair or crooked about the fact that the list seats are now mostly held by unionists - that's the case simply because the list seats are there to make the overall composition of parliament roughly proportional to how people cast their votes.  If one side of the constitutional debate is under-represented in the constituencies, they'll be automatically compensated for that on the list.  The pro-independence side has benefited from that process in the past, and may well benefit from it again in future.

We would be foolish to casually throw away a system that is infinitely fairer to all sides than first-past-the-post.  However, it could certainly be improved - scrapping the regional lists in favour of a national list would increase proportionality at a stroke, and having a single vote to elect both constituency and list members would put an end to all the interminable nonsense about "tactical voting on the list", which - for the reasons that have been rehearsed on this blog a million times - is practically a contradiction in terms.