Question Time sensation : Liam Byrne thinks Gordon Brown should be banned from the "Prime Ministerial" Debates

Labour's Liam Byrne on Question Time tonight : "these debates are for the parties that are standing in every single seat in the United Kingdom".

Labour are standing in only 631 seats out of 650. By Mr Byrne's standard - which was absolutely crystal-clear, leaving no conceivable room for misunderstandings - Gordon Brown, remarkably, does not qualify for inclusion in the Prime Ministerial (sic) Debates.

The Liberal Democrats' Julia Goldsworthy on Question Time tonight : "these debates are for the parties standing in every part of the United Kingdom".

The Liberal Democrats are not standing anywhere in Northern Ireland. As Northern Ireland is indisputably one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, Ms Goldsworthy has just added Nick Clegg to the list of those automatically disqualified from the Prime Ministerial (sic) Debates.

The slightly depressing thing is that these politicians probably aren't even consciously engaging in sophistry here - they're so Anglo-centric that they genuinely believe that standing in every area of England automatically equates to standing in every area of the United Kingdom. And as superbly as Alex Salmond performed tonight (demonstrating what an asset he would be to the leaders' debates, even leaving aside all questions of fairness), the one thing that slightly disappointed me was that he didn't draw attention to these blatant own goals from Byrne and Goldsworthy. To be fair, of course, he was too busy trying to cram in all the other innumerable reasons why the SNP's total exclusion from the debates is such an affront to the principles of a free and fair election. And he wasn't even given the opportunity to point out why Goldsworthy's predictable jibe of "you're not even a candidate in this election" is such an idiotic red herring - what has Alex Salmond's status as an individual got to do with the SNP's case as a party to be included in the debates? As I've pointed out many times, I'm quite sure the SNP don't really give a monkey's whether they're represented in the debates by Salmond or by their Westminster leader Angus Robertson, who is also an excellent debater.

Salmond did, fortunately, have a chance to show up Sayeeda Warsi when she resorted to one of the other standard red herrings.

Warsi : "Much as I like Alex Salmond, he is not going to be Prime Minister after this election, and therefore shouldn't be in the Prime Ministerial (sic) Debates."
Salmond : "Is Nick Clegg going to be Prime Minister?"
Warsi : "Well...maybe Julia can answer that."

As weak responses go, that one really is in a league of its own. We're in truly Alice in Wonderland territory if a Tory can't even bring herself to dismiss the Liberal Democrat leader's prospects of becoming Prime Minister, when given an open initation to do so!

Even more bizarre was David Dimbleby's own jibe, when Salmond suggested that the SNP and Plaid could put up candidates in England, if that was supposedly all that was required to qualify them for the debates -

"You'd better be careful, people in England might vote for you, because they want Scottish independence".

Hmmm. I'm starting to wonder if Mr Dimbleby has entirely grasped the basics of the SNP's aims and objectives.

SNP take rare lead in YouGov subsample

I hesitated about posting this, because it's only a few hours until the details of a newer poll are published, which in all probability will show a completely different picture. However, on reflection I think it is well worthy of note that, for the first time in ages, a GB-wide YouGov poll (published in Tuesday's Sun) has shown an SNP lead in its Scottish subsample. Here are the full figures -

SNP 27% (+10)
Labour 24% (-10)
Conservatives 23% (-4)
Liberal Democrats 18% (+5)
Others 7% (-2)

Labour's low percentage once again gives the lie to the CyberTory delusion that the tightening GB-wide lead (just four points in this case) can be easily explained away by Labour racking up votes 'where it doesn't need them' in its Scottish heartlands.

Can I come in for a gloat?

Not that I would want to be remotely triumphalist about the afternoon's events in Dublin, but nevertheless this might be an opportune moment to recall a comment left here by a certain 'liberal' Northern Ireland blogger less than two weeks ago -

"Flower of Scotland is certainly a neat emblem for your rugby team. A long ago victory which was followed by a series of humiliating defeats."

At the time it did occur to me to respond by saying "if by any chance Scotland spoil the party a week on Saturday, I may return to this subject at some length", but as the chances of that happening seemed slim, I reckoned discretion was the better part of valour. I should have had more faith...

(PS. Medieval history isn't my strongest suit, but does anyone have the faintest idea what Chekov's 'string of humiliating defeats' in the aftermath of 1314 are supposed to be? As it secured independence for no fewer than four full centuries, Bannockburn looks like a fairly decisive sort of battle to me.)

YouGov admits 'we got it wrong, gov'

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of the most diverting spectator sports over the last few weeks (it even marginally beats the curling, seeing as we haven't been winning) has been keeping up with the increasingly fantastical array of theories that panic-stricken CyberTories have dreamt up in an attempt to explain away the reality that their party's once-impregnable YouGov poll lead has pretty much receded to nothing. No wonder YouGov have just given their website a dodgy makeover - the old version must have been creaking under the weight of all the rather tired and emotional number-crunchers who had turned up, desperate to spot The Killer Flaw. With truly delicious irony, their efforts have finally coaxed an official response out of YouGov's chairman Peter Kellner, in which he refreshingly concedes that a mistake has indeed been made with the weightings - but that the party whose support has been underestimated is not the Tories, but the SNP! Kellner candidly spells out the precise extent of the blunder -

"These [new weightings] will typically reduce Labour’s recorded share of support in Scotland by two-to-three percentages points and increase the SNP’s recorded share by a similar amount."

In other words, Labour's lead over the SNP has been regularly overstated by a whopping four to six percentage points in YouGov polls. This doesn't entirely clear up the mystery of the disparity between the Scottish findings of YouGov and Ipsos-Mori, but it certainly narrows what had previously been a yawning chasm between the two.

Perhaps the only disingenuous part of Kellner's statement is when he suggests that the discovery of the mistake doesn't really materially alter the 'big picture' of the Scottish political scene. I beg to differ. Only a man who reckons that 'only Westminster matters' could possibly make such a statement, because (unless I'm missing something) Labour's recent five-point YouGov lead in Holyrood voting intentions has essentially just been shown to be a mirage. But even on the issue of Westminster voting intentions, a great many overblown 'big picture' claims were being made on the back of YouGov's recent flawed Scottish polls, most notably that the Tories may be on the cusp of overtaking the SNP in the battle for second place at the general election. That prospect now, at a stroke, looks considerably more distant. As an illustration, here is YouGov's latest Scottish poll/subsample aggregate for the Sun (covering Westminster voting intention only), with the figures reweighted under the new system -

Labour 39%
SNP 26%
Conservatives 18%
Liberal Democrats 12%
Others 6%

Now, those numbers could of course be better still, but doesn't that look a lot healthier for the Nats?

Murphy's Law

Call me a sadist, but what a pleasure it was to see Jim Murphy well and truly floundering on Reporting Scotland tonight on the subject of tidal and wave power. You might say that, in fairness, it's impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but isn't this guy supposed to be Scottish Labour's latest Messiah? Water into wine is the required standard, I'm afraid, and any party that freely chose to elect Iain Gray as its leader is in dire need of some miracles soon.

Murphy would have been even sicker when he saw the context in which his feeble soundbite had been inserted into the report. First, it was pointed out in a straightforward factual way that it costs £21 per kilowatt to connect this new source of renewable energy to the National Grid from the north of Scotland, whereas in Cornwall you would actually be paid £6 per kilowatt for your trouble. Then, we heard from Alex Salmond in full statesmanlike mode noting that, while this outrageous discrimination wouldn't stop developments like this, it clearly wasn't helping matters. And only then did Murphy have his chance. So not the most helpful build-up when all you've got to offer is a load of incoherent mumbling about how "there is no evidence to suggest" that any of this is really a problem. If it turned out it was a problem, the UK government might just get round to doing something about it eventually - but no promises, mind.

And surely Jim missed his cue? Given that the UK government had just been shown to be cynically stacking the economic odds against Scottish renewable energy, could there ever have been a more propitious moment to break into some passionate Brian Wilson-style evangelising about how nuclear is the only conceivable option, given that renewables are famously so 'uneconomic'?

Demand your voice on the election issues that won't affect you

I gather that during the televised leaders' debates, selected email questions from the public will be asked of the three leaders lucky enough to have the novel and extra-constitutional status of 'Prime Ministerial Candidate' conferred upon them by the broadcasters, in addition to the questions posed by the live studio audience. In which case, could I strongly suggest that it might be a good idea in the debate covering 'domestic' matters for Scottish viewers to send in highly pertinent questions, such as "do you propose to abolish the Scottish Parliament, in order that you will have the chance to implement your health or education policies in Scotland, and if not, why are you talking as if your policies apply to the whole UK?".

You see, we've been constantly told that the reason why it is legitimate to ban one - just one - of Scotland's four principal parties from the three main debates to be shown here is that these are "UK" debates, and as such the programmes must reflect the political balance across the whole UK, not just in Scotland. Of course, this makes a mockery not only of the broadcasting regulations but also of clear-cut precedents spanning decades, but let's just for a moment take this bogus proposition at face value. As Scotland has 9% of the population, and as each debate will be ninety minutes long, it stands to reason that any accurate reflection of the make-up of the UK as a whole necessitates that approximately eight minutes of the domestic debate be taken up with a discussion of the entirely separate situation that exists in Scotland in respect of nearly all the issues to be covered over the course of the evening - namely that the outcome of this election is utterly irrelevant, since the issues concerned are the province of the Scottish Parliament. I must confess I haven't a clue how this could be done with a straight face - perhaps an air of benevolent colonialism could be affected as Scottish viewers ponder how they should exercise their onerous responsibilities for helping to decide the fate of another country's health and education system. Such a scenario would, I freely concede, be "pure Monty Python" (in the immortal words of Charles Wheeler), but it's nevertheless precisely what logic demands. The much more likely alternative - that the entire domestic debate will be conducted under the false premise that the policies being discussed are equally and uniformly relevant to every elector watching, regardless of where they live - means that the broadcasters will be making the basic error of confusing a debate that truly reflects the political reality of the whole UK with one that reflects the political reality of England alone. Simply showing it outside England does not somehow magically confer upon it the status of a "UK debate".

And one thing's for sure - if the Scottish public want to use their right to submit questions as a last-ditch opportunity to put things right and force the Scottish dimension onto the agenda, they'll absolutely have to do it by email, because they'll be banned - literally banned - from taking part in person on the night. Only people who live within thirty miles of the three English venues will be entitled to be part of the studio audience. Call me naive, but I was genuinely flabbergasted when I first heard of this a day or two ago. A few weeks back, it occurred to me to raise the issue of whether the make-up of the audience would be politically balanced (thus including SNP and Plaid supporters) even if the panel itself was not. But I didn't bother, because when I reflected on it for a moment, it seemed self-evident that the broadcasters would put together audiences that reflected the make-up of the UK as a whole, not just England. It would, it seemed clear to me, make a mockery of their whole "UK-wide" logic for excluding the nationalist parties if they followed any other course. But, astonishingly, they have.

So in absolutely every sense of the word, these are English rather than UK debates. The three leaders have been chosen because they are the leaders of the three main parties in England - certainly not the UK, because two of the three will not be standing candidates in any of the eighteen Northern Ireland constituencies. The audience will be selected to form a representative cross-section of the population of England - certainly not the UK, because residents of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be specifically banned from taking part. And the issues up for debate will reflect what is at stake in this election in England - certainly not the UK, because the only issues uniformly at stake throughout all four constituent parts of the country are non-devolved issues.

So, morally at least, it seems the SNP have got the broadcasters pretty much bang to rights over this. All that remains to be seen is whether the law views things in the same way, or indeed whether some compromise can still be reached at this late stage that would head off the unfortunate need for legal action. So far, though, there's precious little sign of progress. Having said that, the SNP did secure a minor, almost comic moral victory by persuading ITV to consider ensuring that their Scotland-specific side-debate is shown throughout the whole of Scotland, not just in the regions covered by STV - by the sounds of it this problem hadn't even occurred to them until the SNP pointed it out! It's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry...

That sounds ropey to me

I haven't got round to writing a Eurovision post so far this year, but that doesn't mean I haven't been keeping an eye on the national finals season - I managed to sit through most of the Latvian selection two or three weeks back, which I think should entitle me to some sort of medal. Suffice to say they chose the wrong song, and in any event the best performance of the night was the preview of the Swiss entry, which is never a great sign. It was exciting to see Niamh Kavanagh make an unlikely comeback for Ireland, but dismaying to see the song she's been given isn't a patch on In Your Eyes. What seems like an eternity ago (it must have been January) I also saw a Norwegian semi, and a bit of what I think was probably the Icelandic final. Bit sad to see that Maria Haukaas Storeng didn't quite make it in Norway, if only because her return to the Eurovision stage would probably just about have finished Keith Mills off, but admittedly the song wasn't as strong this time. What Norway ended up with instead is an intensely irritating entry, which even more intensely irritatingly probably has quite a good chance of winning. From the others I've heard, Denmark may provide Europe's only slender hope of salvation.

But it was the UK's turn tonight. And unfortunately, pretty much all the fears I'd expressed last year about the Your Country Needs You format proved to be justified. In a nutshell, those worries were - "this might work fine as a one-off with Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but what happens next year?" There simply wasn't any point in continuing with the same format unless a similarly big-name composer could be found - and Pete Waterman isn't it. By all accounts he's barely known in Europe.

That wouldn't have mattered if he'd come up with a knockout song capable of blowing the competition away, and if the auditions had produced a stellar assortment of undiscovered talent - but the exercise was a failure on both counts. Admittedly, Jade Ewen was the only really strong performer on the show last year, but one was all that was needed. As for Waterman's song...well, the most that can be said for it is that it might have finished about fourth in the Eurovision in 1985. It's obviously a competent composition, and few will absolutely loathe it, but the problem with the Eurovision voting system is that you don't get any points for being the least hated. Decent enough inoffensive songs have an uncanny habit of finishing last, especially when they're put forward by unpopular countries like the UK. It was slightly painful making the direct comparison between the three performances of That Sounds Good to Me and the rendition of Fairytale immediately afterwards, because it served to emphasise just how far short we've fallen of a potential winner yet again.

For what it's worth, I voted for Esma, but I think that was mainly because she won me over with her performance of This Time I Know It's For Real. On the strength of the performances of the actual entry, probably Josh was just about the right winner, but none of them inspired huge confidence.

What do all recent Eurovision winners have in common? They all came through conventional open national selections. (The only partial exception was Greece in 2005, when Elena Paparizou was pre-selected as the performer, but the public chose the song.) Hopefully the one silver lining of a seemingly inevitable dismal showing this year is that it might persuade the BBC to forget about quick fixes and instead go back to the hard graft of finding a range of quality songs for the public to choose from. It's an open question whether the performer should be pre-selected or not - the UK's experience in the 1990s suggests it can work either way. But the problem with pre-selecting a composer and giving him carte blanche is that you're at the mercy of one person's questionable idea of what makes a Eurovision winner, and there's no Plan B if it goes horribly wrong. The unveiling of the song tonight was such an anti-climax, because from that moment on there was no way back and no meaningful decision to be made.

I dare say if we have a conventional national final next year, I'll be straight back to spitting fury about someone like John Barrowman setting himself up as a Eurovision 'expert' on the basis of no discernible evidence, and on the back of that strongly steering the public towards voting for a disaster area of a song in preference to a potential winner (for the avoidance of doubt I'm talking about 2007!). But even that prospect seems like the lesser of two evils just at the moment. Graham Norton started the show by saying "last year the UK got serious about Eurovision". To which the response of Europe will surely be "so why did you stop?".

Final thought - ever since the wonder that was Yodel in the Canyon of Love way back in 1997, we have now had just one Scottish act perform in a UK Eurovision selection show (that was City Chix). No Scottish act has actually represented the UK since Scott Fitzgerald in 1988. As I observed last year, we don't even have to bother crying under-representation - the numbers speak for themselves. It seems that Eurovision mimics political reality - if Scotland ever wants to get anywhere in Europe, the only option is to go it alone...

Are the SNP re-establishing a clear lead over the Tories in the YouGov daily polls?

I may of course be foolishly tempting fate by posing that question, because subsamples are so volatile it's quite possible the new set of figures released in the morning will show the SNP slipping back to third place. However, for what it's worth, there have now been several YouGov subsamples in quick succession that have shown a clear lead for the SNP over the Tories, in one case by as much as seventeen points. This breaks the pattern of the previous few weeks, which had shown the two parties locked together in a close battle for second place. Here are the latest figures -

Labour 37% (-7)
SNP 23% (-)
Liberal Democrats 19% (+8)
Conservatives 15% (-2)
Others 7% (+3)

That raw 23% vote share is admittedly not fantastic, but has reached as high as the low 30s in recent days. If previous practice is followed, these recent subsamples should at some point be aggregated together to form the basis for a 'poll' to be reported in the Scottish Sun, so some slightly better headlines may be on the way for the SNP - unless of course the Scottish Sun pick and choose when it's convenient for them to report such figures!

Revealed (maybe) : the broadcasters' fallback position on the leaders' debates

A very interesting exchange I've just had on Political Betting - a poster called 'The Screaming Eagles' claims to have a source in Sky who has told him of the basis for the broadcasters' confidence that their proposals for a selective line-up of three in the forthcoming leaders' debates is law-proof. But, intriguingly, when pushed further the poster conceded that the broadcasters have a fallback position to cover the possibility that the SNP or Plaid Cymru might actually win a legal case -

"the debates will only air in England.

However the broadcasters will argue, that those with Sky in Scotland will be able to watch the debates on channel 974 (BBC1 London)

And with the freeview, BBC iplayer, you tube, and sky player, it will be impracticable to enforce a ban in Scotland."

In other words, another wheeze (to follow on from the 'Prime Ministerial Debate' rebranding) to artificially circumvent the inconvenient existence of a fourth major party in Scotland. What's extraordinary about this one, though, is that it tacitly acknowledges that the coverage will be grossly unbalanced, but essentially says to the court "nothing much you can do about it, gov, so you might as well let us get on with it". Now, I'm not a legal expert, but I'd have thought if such a stunt was pulled it would be perfectly open to the SNP's lawyers to simply say to the courts that they're reasonable people, and as such they would naturally only expect any block on a Scottish broadcast to be enforced to a practicable - and most certainly not an impracticable - degree. The percentage of Scots who would bother to seek out the debates by these theoretical exotic alternative methods would be fairly small, and thus the requirement for fair and balanced coverage between the four main parties in Scotland would essentially have been met. Everybody happy.

It's affection, Jim, but not as we know it

Northern Ireland's leading 'liberal unionist' blogger Chekov - who must be suitably thrilled to now find himself supporting the only major anti-agreement party in the province - has returned once again to his fixation with Scotland. It's all rather touching really, his general affection for us as a nation shines through his every word - he just can't stand our patriotism, our left-wing politics, our choice of government (especially our First Minister), and our national anthem. But if we could just get our act together and sort out those minor details for Chekov, rest assured there stands a man who desperately wants to love us. I'm guessing that Raffle Night at the Drymen Conservative and Unionist Association could well be the prototype for the 'real Scotland' that's just bursting to get out.

Anyway, it's our national anthem that's the theme of the day, with Chekov delightedly picking up on Jim Telfer's desire for Flower of Scotland to be replaced by a more 'mature' anthem. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the heavy spin on the Scotsman article he's quoting from, Chekov appears to be completely misinterpreting Telfer's words, with the suggestion that the former Scotland coach is in some way embarrassed by the 'nationalism' of the lyrics. What Telfer actually seems to be saying is that we've reached the stage of development as a nation where we can stop "defining ourselves through England" - which is in fact a solid, small 'n' nationalist argument that most SNP members would, I'm sure, be able to wholeheartedly agree with. Indeed, if there's one thing that almost guarantees that we will continue to 'define ourselves' through England, it's the continuance of the political union with our much larger neighbour. By definition, all parochial 'ninety-minute nationalists' are political unionists, if only by indolent default.

Where I part company with Telfer is that I simply don't recognise the problems he identifies with the lyrics of Flower of Scotland. It's categorically not an anti-English song, or even a song that's particularly about England - it's an anti-Edward II and anti-occupation song. Are Dutch celebrations of the liberation from Nazi rule deemed 'anti-German'?

In truth, Flower of Scotland is in many ways almost the perfect national anthem - its lyrics look to the past, present and future of our country simultaneously.