SNP's mammoth lead increases further in Scot Goes Pop Poll of Polls

I had some technological problems before Christmas, and wasn't able to update this blog's Poll of Polls for the Holyrood election when the most recent TNS poll came out.  So I sat down to do it today, and suddenly realised that the rules I decided upon a few months ago are coming back to haunt me.  I said that only pollsters that have conducted at least one poll within the last three months would be taken into account (that was to prevent a repeat of the situation during the indyref when an ancient Angus Reid poll was left in the sample for almost a year), and that now means Panelbase and Survation will have to drop out, because neither have carried out a (published) voting intention poll since September.  The trend figures will therefore become somewhat less meaningful, but I may as well stick with the original plan.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 53.0% (+0.2)
Labour 20.7% (-1.3)
Conservatives 16.3% (+0.9)
Liberal Democrats 5.3% (-0.3)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 48.3% (+1.7)
Labour 19.7% (-1.7)
Conservatives 15.7% (+0.9)
Greens 7.3% (+0.3)
Liberal Democrats 5.7% (-0.3)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are three - YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

The Tories' moderately good showing can be explained by two factors : a) YouGov are a Tory-friendly pollster in Scottish terms and make up a bigger portion of the sample than usual, and b) the Tories did unusually well in the most recent Ipsos-Mori poll, which may well be a freakish finding because other firms haven't shown a similar increase.  Even with these advantages, though, Ruth Davidson's mob still find themselves several points behind Labour, so the right-wing media are probably deluding themselves with their belief that Labour can be displaced as the leading opposition party.

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Alex Massie in the Spectator -

"Everyone loves Ruth Davidson. No one will vote for her."

Not for the first time in his life, he's half-right.

The Glasgow Effect : why do the anti-independence media think Ellie Harrison's nationality is important?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, about the controversy over the awarding of £15,000 to an artist in return for her not leaving the city of Glasgow for a year, and about the anti-independence media's curious obsession with the fact that the said artist is "English" and "London-born".  You can read the article HERE.

Spoiler alert : There are no spoilers. We don't know the election result until the votes are counted.

There's yet another "tactical voting on the list" (sic) article out today, this time from Fraser Stewart at Common Space.  This is becoming incredibly repetitive, but I'll just briefly deal with his central claim...

"Thus, if a party was to win nine constituency seats in Glasgow, say, their second vote share would be reduced to one-tenth of the original figure. Large parties doing well on first votes systematically cannot do anywhere near as well on the list: a simple and effective reality of the d’Hondt method.

Yet many remain defiant to stand by the SNP on both constituency and list votes, in the face of this systemic impenetrability. Spoiler alert: if a pro-independence Holyrood is your ambition, both votes SNP can not and will not work."

The word "say" covers a multitude of sins. By definition we cannot possibly know how many constituency seats the SNP will win in any region until the votes are counted, by which point it's too late to do anything about your "tactical" vote on the list if all of your assumptions turn out to be wrong. But OK, let's "say" for the sake of argument that the SNP will clean up in the constituencies. The snag is that one-tenth of a huge numbers of votes is still a lot of votes, and will quite probably be a greater number than a small party like RISE has received. It may well meet the de facto threshold for winning at least one list seat in the region.

Suppose you and a friend are both SNP supporters, but are both avid fans of RISE press releases on Bella Caledonia, and are tempted by the idea of a "tactical vote on the list" (sic). Suppose you have second thoughts at the last minute and stick with the SNP, but your friend goes through with it and switches to RISE. The SNP win a list seat in spite of their list vote being divided by ten, while RISE receive a derisory vote and fall well short of the de facto threshold of 5%. Question : whose vote has "worked", and whose vote has been "wasted"?

By the way, if a pro-independence Holyrood was your aim in 2011, it may be news to you that "both votes SNP cannot work". We currently have an outright SNP majority, and it simply wouldn't have been won without list votes - if they'd been relying on constituency votes alone, the SNP would have fallen a whopping twelve seats short of the target of 65.

Oddly, the rest of Fraser's article moves on from "tactical voting", and instead makes the case that you shouldn't vote SNP on the list because it would be a really bad thing if the SNP won a huge majority. Er, haven't we just been told the system makes that impossible, and that SNP votes on the list won't even count? Jeez, get it sorted, guys...

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I thought I'd give a quick New Year's plug to this blog's Facebook page, because I know some people who only use the mobile version of the site may not be aware of its existence. Basically, if you 'like' the page, you'll see a link on your Facebook feed whenever I post here. So it shouldn't be too obtrusive! The link to the page is HERE.

The BBC's guidelines for Holyrood election don't merely defy natural justice - they also defy logic and precedent

I'm finding it hard to work myself up into my customary state of moral outrage over the BBC's (provisional) decision about which parties should be treated as 'major' in the coverage of this year's election, because this time it's not really the SNP that is being disadvantaged - although admittedly it's possible that overly-generous coverage of the Liberal Democrats could harm the SNP in its bid to prize away the Northern Isles constituency seats.  But in spite of my relative inner calmness (and it's genuinely a novelty), I can't deny that the decision and the reasoning behind it is just as indefensible as ever.

Consider this.  In 2003, the Green party won 6.9% of the list vote, and seven out of the 129 seats.  At the subsequent election in 2007, they were still treated as a second-string party, and were barred from most of the leaders' debates, which were still the traditional four-way affairs between the SNP, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.  In 2011, the Liberal Democrats won 5.2% of the list vote, and five out of 129 seats.  That was clearly inferior to what the Greens achieved in 2003, and yet for some reason the Lib Dems are still being defined as one of four parties who attained "substantial representation" in 2011.  There's no explanation at all of why the goalposts have shifted over the last nine years.  It's murderously hard not to conclude that the BBC's flexible definition of "substantial representation" boils down to "whatever the Lib Dems have, and whatever the Greens don't have".

Of course, those sympathetic to the Greens are framing this as an injustice towards Patrick Harvie's party, but it could just as easily (perhaps more easily) be argued that both the Lib Dems and the Greens should be barred from the main debates. I'm not saying that would in any way be fair or desirable, but it's the only real conclusion that can be drawn from the 2007 precedent.  It should be noted that prior to last year's general election, Ofcom made clear that it was only the Lib Dems' performance in 2010 that justified their status as a major party in Scotland - their support in the most recent Holyrood, local and European elections wasn't sufficient.  It's hard to see how Ofcom will be able to avoid the conclusion that last year's result is the final piece of the jigsaw, and that the Lib Dems should now be relegated to the second tier alongside the Greens.  OK, Ofcom is not the BBC, but it will be distinctly odd if the two organisations diverge on such an important point.

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Tom "Bomber Admin" Harris, now very much an ex-MP, quoted at Stormfront Lite yesterday -

"Corbynistas bang on about their man’s “mandate”.  If party rules had been respected, he wouldn’t even have been on the ballot paper."

Those ridiculous anti-democratic rules, requiring that any candidate for the Labour leadership can only go forward to the ballot if they are nominated by 15% of Labour MPs, were of course respected to the letter.  Jeremy Corbyn received the requisite number of nominations, fair and square.  It's Harris, McTernan and their ilk who disrespected the process by making a bogus distinction between "real nominations" and "nominations by moron".  All a bit reminiscent of their fallen hero Tony Blair unilaterally rewriting the rules of the United Nations Security Council to incorporate the novel concept of the "unreasonable veto" (ie. a veto exercised by any country other than Britain or the United States).

Happy New Year

2014 was referendum year, 2015 was election year...

Welcome to election AND referendum year!  (Unless Cameron loses his nerve and puts the EU referendum off until 2017.)

I'm on the long journey back from the Edinburgh street party, so I may torture you with my traditional low-quality photos later.

VOTE : What is your favourite type of dictatorship?

Some more festive fun for you, ie. I'm feeling too lazy to do a proper post.  If Britain had to abandon its democracy tomorrow (OK, semi-democracy, semi-aristocracy), what system should we replace it with?  The options are...

1) Marxist-Leninist one-party state
2) Fascist one-party state
3) Dominant-party state
4) Authoritarian presidential republic 
5) Jackie Baillie
6) Theocratic state
7) Absolute monarchy
8) Military rule
9) Anarchy

You can find the voting form at the top of the sidebar (desktop version of the site only).  Voting for multiple options is enabled, in case anyone is feeling particularly indecisive.  But for heaven's sake don't abstain because you don't like any of the options - we can't let fascism win by default, can we?  Hilary Benn will be having a stern word with you, and quite possibly dropping a bomb on your mother-in-law's cottage.

Seven things that will happen if Britain votes to leave the EU in 2016

1) The cause of a united Ireland will be back with a vengeance.  We've become used to polls showing that a large chunk of the nominally 'nationalist' community in Northern Ireland are content to remain in the UK for the time being.  That may change rapidly if the Irish border becomes the frontier of the EU.

2) The centre of gravity in what remains of the EU will shift a little to the left.  That's simply a question of basic arithmetic - the bulk of British members of the European Parliament are right-wing (more UKIP than Tory), and Britain casts a right-wing vote in the Council of Ministers, which is effectively the second chamber of the EU legislature.  (It used to be said that even New Labour was the most right-wing government in the EU, although admittedly that was before the admission of the former Eastern Bloc states.) Our representative on the European Commission is also a Tory.

3) Much of Labour will become totally disorientated, because a belief in Britain's European destiny is part of their DNA.  Their instincts will be screaming at them to campaign to get back into the EU as soon as possible, but they won't want to be seen to overturn the referendum result straight away.  They may settle on a compromise position of going all out to keep Britain in the European Economic Area, on the same basis as Norway and Iceland.  That would at least make it easier to return to the EU in future decades.

4) David Cameron will resign as Prime Minister.  I was never entirely convinced by the claim of John "the Gardener" McTernan that Cameron's position would have been untenable if there had been a Yes in the indyref - but this vote is one of his own choosing.

5) The Tory party will not split.  Ironically, there's much more likely to be a schism if Remain wins by a narrow margin.  Most Tories who vote to Remain will be easily reconciled to a Leave outcome, because they're mild Eurosceptics anyway.  The handful of genuine pro-Europeans in the party will probably feel that Cameron did his level best.

6) The powers of the Scottish Parliament will effectively increase.  There may be a Sewel Convention preventing Westminster legislating on devolved matters, but that doesn't apply to the EU - and indeed EU law always has primacy.  The Scottish Government's freedom to act on devolved matters will therefore be much less constrained if Britain is outside the EU.

7)  There will be a second independence referendum in Scotland.  I make no prediction about the outcome of that referendum, and clearly there are one or two people in the SNP (such as Kevin Pringle) who think it will be harder to make the case for independence if Britain has decided to withdraw from Europe.  But as long as Scotland votes to Remain and finds itself outside the EU against its will, the case for a referendum will be unanswerable, because we were endlessly told last year that a No vote was a vote to stay in the EU.

Should the SNP support Cameron's plans to weaken the powers of the Lords?

Here's an interesting discussion point, given that I know how most of you feel about the House of Lords.  At some point next year, the Commons will probably be invited to vote on whether to abolish the power of the Lords to block secondary legislation.  If so, we'll enter into Alice Through the Looking Glass territory, because we'll have the Tories posing as modern-day Asquiths and Lloyd-Georges and trying to transfer power from unelected peers to the elected chamber, while the constitutional 'reformers' in the Corbyn-led Labour party and the Liberal Democrats will be standing up for the ancient rights of the Barons and the Bishops.  To be fair, there's a pragmatic case to be made that almost any check on the power of a government "elected" on just 37% of the vote has to be better than nothing.

But for the SNP, there isn't such a straightforward conflict between principle and pragmatism.  Unlike Labour and the Liberal Democrats, they have no stake at all in the Lords (through their own choice), so it's arguably in their interests to see the Lords stripped of more powers, and for the focal point of opposition to the government to be in a chamber where the SNP are the third-largest party and hold almost a tenth of the seats.

The decision they make could be crucial, because there is a smattering of right-wing libertarians on the Tory backbenches who will be instinctively mistrustful of an executive that is trying to make itself too powerful.  If the SNP and the DUP join with Labour and the Lib Dems to vote the plans down, it would only take a handful of Tory rebels for the government to be defeated.  Even without the DUP, the Tory rebellion wouldn't have to be huge.

So what do you think the SNP should do?  Should the priority be to chip away at the powers of the Lords, even if in the short term that further empowers the Tory government?

YouGov poll suggests SNP voters oppose the bombing of Syria by an overwhelming margin

Thanks to my namesake James on the previous thread for drawing my attention to the fact that a full-scale Scottish YouGov poll seems to be on its way.  It was conducted between Thursday and yesterday, and Joe Twyman has already revealed the results of a supplementary question in order to make a rather dubious point.  He notes that 97% of Scottish MPs voted against the bombing of Syria, but that Scottish voters are "much more divided" on the issue, including "even SNP voters".  In reality, the poll shows that SNP voters oppose the bombing by an overwhelming margin of 56% to 31%.  If the London establishment can call a 55% to 45% margin "decisive" when it suits them, I'm not sure they're going to get away with implying that 56% to 31% is a relatively even split.

Overall, 44% of Scottish voters support the bombing, and 41% are opposed.  That's a statistical tie, meaning that the standard 3% margin of error makes it impossible to know for sure whether most people are in favour or not.  It does, however, suggest that we probably weren't being led astray by the two YouGov subsamples at the time of the Commons vote, both of which reported that public opinion in Scotland was finely balanced.

Incidentally, there's clear opposition to putting British and American ground forces into Syria or Iraq - and that opposition is strongest in respect of Iraq, even though the conflict in Syria is more complex.  It's probably safe to say that there's now something of a stigma attached to any form of military action in Iraq.

We'll have to wait and see whether Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers from YouGov appear overnight.

Despair for Dugdale as SNP soar to 34% lead on the Holyrood list in tumultuous TNS poll

It's been a long time since we've had a full-scale Scottish Parliament poll.  The most recent one was the Ipsos-Mori phone poll which completed its fieldwork in mid-November, and showed a slight drop in the SNP lead.  Since then, one or two of our unionist friends (naming no names, but Aldo) have got carried away with the odd glimmer of hope in subsamples and a local council by-election in Blantyre (I know, I know), and convinced themselves that there are finally signs that Labour are closing the gap.  I fear that today's new TNS poll is going to be something of a hammerblow for them. 

Constituency ballot :

SNP 58% (n/c)
Labour 21% (-3)
Conservatives 12% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 4% (n/c)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 54% (+2)
Labour 20% (-5)
Conservatives 12% (+1)
Greens 9% (+4)
Liberal Democrats 4% (-1)
UKIP 1% (-1)

A poll from TNS isn't the ideal way of breaking a long drought, because the firm's face-to-face fieldwork takes place over a period of weeks, and is always somewhat out-of-date by the time we see the numbers.  So there's still a theoretical possibility that there's been a very recent change in fortunes that this poll was unable to detect.  However, many of the interviews took place after the closure of the Forth Road Bridge (the latest in a long line of supposed turning-points for the unionist parties), and there's no sign of that having had any negative effect on the SNP's standing.  The Natalie McGarry controversy is also partly factored in.

As you may recall, the SNP scored 60% or higher on the constituency ballot in the first three monthly TNS polls after the general election.  They've been consistently below 60% since the late summer, so it looks like there was some genuine slippage after the post-May hoo-ha died down a little.  But it seems that the position has stabilised in recent months - the further drop to 56% in September now looks very much like a blip caused by normal sampling variation.  Weirdly, the SNP's 54% on the list ballot is a joint post-election high - it equals what they had when they were on 62% in the constituencies, and betters what they had when they were on 60% in the constituencies.  I can't think of any obvious explanation for that, unless SNP supporters are simply coming to the view that they don't want to split their two votes.  But, even now, almost half of the Greens' 9% support on the list is coming from people who plan to vote SNP on the constituency ballot.

There's no doubt that this poll will give the Greens a lot of heart after a string of disappointing findings for them (only Survation have offered them any comfort in recent months).  However, until their apparent bounce-back is confirmed by other polls, there remains the possibility that it's just an extreme example of margin-of-error noise.  And I'd certainly advise people to pay only limited heed to the excitement on Twitter about the Greens' 24% share of the list vote in Lothian, which is based on a regional subsample of just 85 people.

The biggest story of this poll is that Labour's mini-recovery since the spring seems to have been completely wiped out.  They were consistently on 23-25% of the list vote in the last three TNS polls, which was a few points higher than their showing in the early post-election polls.  But all of a sudden, they seem to be practically back to square one -  20% is just 1% higher than what they had in the May TNS poll.  Again, though, that may be a sampling blip - we'll just have to wait and see.

No such comfort for the Tories, who find themselves languishing on a dismal 12% of the constituency vote for a fifth consecutive month - that's 2-3% lower than they managed in the first two post-election TNS polls.  The pollsters are divided on whether or not the Tories are in a competitive race for second place, but if TNS are even vaguely close to being right, a few right-wing commentators are going to have egg on their faces after their recent musings about how their favourite party must be in line for a long-overdue breakthrough because Ruth Davidson is just so funny, so ballsy, and...ooooh, so smashing!

Irritatingly, TNS are still offering their respondents the SSP as an option, rather than RISE.  However, given that the SSP have once again scored a big fat zero on the list (or strictly speaking 0.2%), and given that RISE enjoy weaker brand awareness than the SSP, there is no particular reason to suspect that RISE would have registered any support in this poll.

There's more grim news for those who adhere to the Kenny Farquharson/Fraser Nelson worldview that Scottish public opinion is near-enough identical to English public opinion (once you strip away the inconvenient fact that the two countries keep voting for different parties).  One of the supplementary questions in the poll is about Britain's nuclear weapons, and the percentage of respondents who say that Trident should not be renewed significantly exceeds the percentage who say it should be.  (29% support renewal, 38% don't).  That's the opposite of what we know to be true about English public opinion on Trident, and it's a finding that should be taken very seriously, because this is not an online poll with a sample that is potentially skewed by having too many politically aware people - it's a 'real world' poll with a sample found by knocking on people's doors.