In case you missed it : the debate on the voting system between myself and Tommy Sheridan

If you didn't catch the live debate about the Holyrood voting system between myself and Tommy Sheridan earlier, it's available to watch at your leisure HERE.

The rest of my evening has been dominated by Eurovision and rugby.  I am absolutely dumbfounded by the public's choice for the UK's Eurovision entry.  Just for once, I had been totally relaxed about the outcome - there was no John Barrowman on the "experts' panel" steering the public towards the wrong decision, and yet somehow they managed to screw it up all by themselves.  I can only assume it was a young female audience voting for good-looking guys, regardless of the song.

I don't think Bianca's song (which was so obviously the best of the six, it was almost painful) was quite a Eurovision winner, but with good staging it might have had an outside chance.  Ah well.  At least nobody will have to worry about success at Eurovision influencing the EU referendum one way or the other!

Friday, 6.45pm : I'll be debating Tommy Sheridan on live-stream

Just a quick note to let you know that if everything goes according to plan (and obviously I'll let you know if it doesn't), you'll be able to watch a live-stream of an Independence Live debate between myself and Tommy Sheridan on Friday at 6.45pm.  The topic, you won't be surprised to hear, will be so-called "tactical voting" on the Holyrood regional list.

I've attempted to embed the live-stream below, but if that doesn't work it'll be available to watch HERE.

Cacophonic ComRes contribution conceivably confirms that the EU referendum gap has contracted

The first referendum poll to be conducted after the Brussels agreement on Friday night wasn't terribly helpful, because it was the first in a new series of telephone polls from Survation, meaning there were no baseline figures to work from.  The second and third post-deal polls out tonight are more useful, although they actually point towards slightly contradictory conclusions on the trend.  And, as you might well expect in the Alice in Wonderland world of EU referendum polling, the ComRes poll showing Remain in a 12-point lead is actually more encouraging for the Leave side than the YouGov poll showing a single-point Leave lead.

The reason?  ComRes conducted their poll by telephone, and it's extremely unusual for a telephone poll to produce a Remain lead as low as 12 points.  In fact, over the last few months there has only been one other phone poll that showed a Remain lead of lower than 15 points, and that was the most recent ComRes poll from earlier this month.  So we do now have one phone pollster that is pointing in successive polls to at least a moderate narrowing of the gap since the shape of the deal began to become known.  Ipsos-Mori have so far failed to corroborate that trend, but there has only been one recent Ipsos-Mori poll, so it's possible it will still happen.

The online YouGov poll is less encouraging for Leave because it shows the state of play firmly back into the 'normal range' for online pollsters, after a brief period when it looked like Leave had achieved a telling swing on the back of the reaction against the emerging deal.  The last two online ICM polls have also shown a return to business as usual, and that's probably not a coincidence.  So we could - and it's still only a possibility - be starting to see an indyref-style convergence between telephone and online polls, with the Remain lead drifting downwards in the telephone polls, while the online polls show a broadly static position.

There's a new article on the YouGov website suggesting that the massive divergence between telephone and online polls can be mostly explained by the reluctance of some people to admit to a telephone interviewer that they are undecided, and their inclination to instead opt for the easy answer of saying they support the status quo.  That's just speculation, but it is consistent with the fact that there are significantly fewer Don't Knows in telephone polls (which is the complete opposite of what you'd normally expect).  If there's any truth in that theory, it means the sizeable Remain lead in phone polls could be quite soft, and it also means there's no reason to suppose that online and phone polls will show the same trend over the remainder of the campaign - a dramatic convergence could be on the cards as the 'knee-jerk Remains' among telephone respondents start to give more considered answers.  We may be starting to see the very early signs of that.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.9% (-0.8)
Leave 38.8% (-0.4)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 40.0% (-1.4)
Leave 40.7% (-1.2)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 51.8% (-0.2)
Leave 36.8% (+0.4)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on ten polls - five from ICM, three from YouGov, one from BMG and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on six polls - three from ComRes, two from Ipsos-Mori and one from Survation.)

Yes campaign's legacy is now secure

Although pro-independence people on social media have appeared to be united in their reaction to the UK government's intransigence over the fiscal framework, I think there's actually been a subtle divide.  The largest group always quite fancied the idea of the Scotland Bill being vetoed and were only too delighted that London seemed to be handing the Scottish Government a good reason for doing that.  A smaller group wanted the extra powers in the Scotland Bill, and considered it a matter of extreme regret that London were sabotaging the whole process and leaving Holyrood with little option but to veto.  I was part of the latter group, and I'm therefore delighted that a fair deal has been belatedly reached.

The Yes campaign was by any standards an extraordinary phenomenon - and yet its only concrete achievement was the Smith package.  (I know some people would say the SNP landslide was also a direct result of the Yes campaign, and that's true, but election results are ephemeral.)  If the new powers had never materialised, there was a danger that we could have ended up looking back at the 2014 referendum as an event that ultimately achieved absolutely nothing - which is pretty much how the sovereignty movement in Quebec look back at their near miss in 1995.

It may well be that the UK government honestly thinks that more devolution is in itself a trap for the SNP - but they're wrong, just as every previous UK government transferring powers as a "brilliant tactic" has been proved wrong.  Consider this, for example - how much harder is it going to be for the BBC to resist the case for a Scottish Six now that income tax rates will be entirely set in Scotland?  How can a one-size-fits-all "national" news programme broadcast from London possibly cope with that degree of asymmetric devolution?

For the attention of Boris Johnson : your cut-out-and-keep guide to the overwhelming evidence that Scotland will NOT vote in line with the rest of the UK in the EU referendum

I'm getting the slight impression that the outgoing Mayor of London may have read one too many of those endless "Scottish public opinion is basically the same as English public opinion" articles from his mate Fraser Nelson. I can't think of any other explanation for this utterly bizarre claim in his long-awaited Telegraph column last night -

"I also accept there is a risk that a vote to Leave the EU, as it currently stands, will cause fresh tensions in the union between England and Scotland. On the other hand, most of the evidence I have seen suggests that the Scots will vote on roughly the same lines as the English."

Luckily for all of us, the evidence on this subject is publicly available, and to state the bleedin' obvious, "most" of it does not suggest that Scotland is in line with English public opinion. In fact, absolutely all of it suggests the complete opposite.

SCOTLAND : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE ONLINE POLLS

Remain 53.7%
Leave 28.3%

BRITAIN-WIDE : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE ONLINE POLLS

Remain 40.0%
Leave 40.0%

Remain lead in Scotland is 25.4%

Remain lead across Britain is 0.0%

Remain lead in Scotland is 25.4% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

SCOTLAND : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE TELEPHONE/FACE-TO-FACE POLLS

Remain 57.0%
Leave 23.0%

BRITAIN-WIDE : AVERAGE OF LAST THREE TELEPHONE/FACE-TO-FACE POLLS

Remain 50.3%
Leave 36.7%

Remain lead in Scotland is 34.0%

Remain lead across Britain is 13.6%

Remain lead in Scotland is 20.4% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

Now, to be fair, full-scale EU referendum polls are conducted less frequently in Scotland than across Britain, so the above numbers aren't directly comparable - some of the Scottish fieldwork is quite a bit older, which might potentially give a distorted impression.  But that's where the Scottish subsamples of Britain-wide polls come in so handy...

Ipsos-Mori telephone poll (13th-16th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 18%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 57%

Remain lead in Scotland was 39% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

TNS online poll (11th-15th February) :

Across Britain, the Leave lead was 3%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 25%

Remain lead in Scotland was 28% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

ICM online poll (12th-14th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 4%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 19%

Remain lead in Scotland was 15% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

ComRes telephone poll (11th-14th February) :

Across Britain, the Remain lead was 8%

In Scotland, the Remain lead was 28%

Remain lead in Scotland was 20% higher than in Britain as a whole

*  *  *

On and on it goes. Heaven only knows what "most of the evidence" is showing on Planet Boris, but back here in the real world it's pointing in one direction only. There are two realistic outcomes - either a) Britain will vote to Remain, and Scotland will vote to Remain by a much bigger margin, or b) Britain will vote to Leave, and Scotland will vote to Remain. We all know what the likely consequences of the latter would be.

* * *

Many thanks to the 577 people who voted in this blog's readers' poll yesterday. 87.7% of you want the UK to remain in the EU, while 12.3% of you want to leave. That's almost identical to the result of the previous poll a few months ago (although the Remain lead has grown very slightly).

VOTE : Have you changed your mind about the EU referendum?

A few months ago, I posed the EU referendum question in a readers' poll, and was quite startled that there was an overwhelming vote (in the region of 85% to 15%) in favour of Remain.  Perhaps that shouldn't have been a surprise on a pro-independence blog, but I had asked a similar question back in 2011 (albeit when the blog had far fewer readers) and found a narrow majority were in favour of leaving the EU and rejoining EFTA instead.

I thought it might be interesting to repeat the exercise, because we now know the package we'll be voting on, the date of the referendum, the Rogue's Gallery of Tories that will be lining up on both sides, and there's also been a long-overdue discussion about the fact that an unintentional side-effect of Brexit would be a substantial and more-or-less automatic increase in the Scottish Parliament's powers.

You can find the voting form at the top of the sidebar (desktop version of the site only), and the poll will close overnight.

Implausible Welsh figures put a slight question mark on first post-agreement EU referendum poll

The first EU referendum poll conducted since the Brussels deal was finalised on Friday night has already been released, and strangely it's not all that helpful.  It's a Survation telephone poll, and as Survation haven't previously conducted any telephone polls during the campaign, it's impossible to reach any firm conclusions about whether Remain or Leave have made any progress as a result of the agreement, or whether the effect has been neutral.  We're also not really any closer to solving the mystery of the sudden and unexpected divergence between the telephone findings of Ipsos-Mori and ComRes.  The most that can be said is that if the 'house effect' of telephone polling by Survation is roughly the same as that of telephone polling by Ipsos-Mori and ComRes, and if the agreement on Friday has had little impact on public opinion (two very big ifs), then the new poll might lend some weight to my theory that Ipsos-Mori and ComRes diverged mainly because of very extreme sampling variation, and that if they had repeated the exercise immediately afterwards they would probably both have produced results somewhere in between the two extremes.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? (Survation, telephone)

Remain 47.6%
Leave 33.2%

With Don't Knows excluded, that's a 59-41 lead for Remain, which is roughly similar to the advantage the Better Together campaign enjoyed among the three No-friendly pollsters with a few weeks to go until the independence referendum. The important difference with 2014, of course, is that the Leave campaign already have a small outright lead in the polls that tend to be most favourable for them (ie. online polls).

The oddest feature of the Survation datasets is that Wales, not Scotland, is the region of the UK with the biggest Remain lead. That doesn't tally up with the polling evidence we've already seen that suggests public opinion on the EU in Wales is roughly the same as in England. OK, freakish subsamples can even themselves out within a poll, but the fact that the raw Welsh sample has had to be sharply upweighted from 34 to 63 isn't ideal. It's not impossible that the sampling issues in Wales may have led to the overall Remain lead being slightly overstated.

If the rumours that Boris Johnson will declare for Leave today are true, Survation's figures will soon look out of date anyway, and we'll start looking ahead to the first post-Boris poll. I know that very few people who read this blog rate the guy, but if he actually fronts the campaign and represents it in high-profile TV debates, I think that could make a huge difference and potentially swing the balance. Apart from charisma, he brings a bit of optimism and sunshine to the table - the six Tory cabinet ministers who came out for Leave yesterday look like such a dreary bunch in comparison.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 46.7% (-0.8)
Leave 39.2% (-0.7)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 41.4% (-0.6)
Leave 41.9% (-0.5)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 52.0% (-1.0)
Leave 36.4% (-0.9)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on nine polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, one from BMG, one from ORB and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on five polls - two from ComRes, two from Ipsos-Mori and one from Survation.)

A short EU referendum campaign doesn't shut down the risk for the Tory party

Last night, I happened to stumble on a Twitter discussion in which Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson and Paul Sinclair swapped examples of lessons that the Prime Minister had supposedly learned from the indyref as he plotted his tactics for the European battle.  I'm not really convinced that either of them were barking up the right tree.  Farquharson reckoned that the Scottish experience had taught Cameron that he needed to have a firm offer of a reformed union before going to the people.  The problem here is that the plan for a pre-negotiation on Europe was in place long before the indyref, and I seem to recall a number of people pointing out the blatant contradiction of Cameron's stance (especially when he insisted that it was absolutely essential to get the decision on independence out of the way before discussions on more powers could begin).

Sinclair's suggestion sounded more plausible - that Cameron had learned from Scotland that it's necessary to have a short, sharp campaign to prevent the referendum having an impact on party voting patterns (ie. to prevent Out-voting Tory supporters switching en masse to UKIP in the same way that Yes-voting Labour supporters switched en masse to the SNP).  But let me present to you Exhibit A - the Scottish result of the 2014 European Parliament election, held just four months before the indyref...

SNP 29.0% (-0.1)
Labour 25.9% (+5.1)
Conservatives 17.2% (+0.4)
UKIP 10.5% (+5.2)
Greens 8.1% (+0.8)
Liberal Democrats 7.1% (-4.4)

As you can see, Labour did pretty well - at least relative to the SNP's performance.  You certainly wouldn't look at that and think they were heading for complete meltdown only a year later.  You would also think they were shaping up to at least be reasonably competitive in the next Holyrood election.  Opinion poll evidence paints much the same picture - the last few polls before the referendum gave Labour their customary commanding lead in Westminster voting intentions, and gave the SNP a relatively modest lead (of less than 10 points) for Holyrood.

The reality is that the long referendum campaign passed most voters by.  It wasn't until a very late stage that Yes voters looked deep into the soul of the Scottish Labour party, and found what they saw profoundly ugly.  I would imagine that the set-piece TV debates (including even the one that Alex Salmond supposedly 'lost') played a big part in that, with a senior Labour figure so visibly and miserably making the case for unelected Tory rule in Scotland.

So a short campaign isn't necessarily going to eliminate the risks for Cameron.  Having said that, the EU referendum is a very different beast, and the fact that several Tory cabinet ministers are being allowed to campaign for Leave may draw some of the poison as far as Tory voters are concerned.  Perhaps the more pertinent question is whether the Tory party itself can hold together after a divisive campaign.  The 1975 precedent is inconclusive - although Labour didn't split immediately, many people think the referendum sowed the seeds for the SDP split six years later, as some Labour pro-Europeans realised they had far more in common with their fellow Yes campaigners in the Liberal party than with the likes of Tony Benn.

OK, OK, Donald Trump might start a nuclear war, but at least that'll "stabilise the doons"

When I was at university, I remember reading a book about nuclear weapons that had been written in the early 1980s.  (It's quite a famous book, I think, but the name of it temporarily escapes me.)  It started by pointing out that opinion poll evidence showed that roughly half of the UK's population expected that, at some point within their own lifespans, human civilisation would be destroyed by a nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  It then pointed out that it was somewhat odd that it wasn't the number one political priority of both the electorate and the government to prevent that seemingly imminent catastrophe from occurring.

Arguably, we find ourselves in quite a similar situation now, because I genuinely think that if Donald Trump is elected US President in November, there is a non-trivial chance of a nuclear war occurring within his term of office.  That's not so much because of his insane right-wing views (it's difficult to know how many of those are genuine and how many are poses for the benefit of a Republican audience), but more because he's an ultra-belligerent narcissist with very little sense of restraint.  If he ever got the US into a serious dispute with Russia or China, it's not at all hard to see how it could escalate quickly.  The other day, I speculated that the chances of nuclear war under President Trump were at least 2% or 3%.  RevStu reckoned I should have stuck a zero at the end of those numbers.

Whichever of us is right, it's surely clear that the risk is unacceptably high.  As there can be nothing more important than preventing our species from being destroyed or mostly destroyed, it therefore follows that absolutely every other political consideration must play second-fiddle to the need to stop Trump.  The problem is that it's not at all clear how that is most likely to be achieved.  Most polls actually show that Bernie Sanders would have a better chance of beating Trump in a straight fight than Hillary Clinton would.  The cheerleaders for Clinton point out that the public at large haven't taken a close enough look at Sanders yet, and when it really comes down to it they would never elect a self-declared socialist.  But Clinton has her own disadvantages - she's a hate-figure for many moderate conservatives in a way that Sanders isn't, so it's far from inconceivable that she could genuinely prove to be the more unelectable of the two.

In view of that uncertainty, I think all that Democratic primary voters can reasonably do is forget about Trump for the time being, and vote for the candidate they really believe in.  For my own part, I had no hesitation in casting my postal vote for Sanders a few days ago.  It's almost painful to think what a huge step forward it would be for the world if he was elected - America would come into line with global opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear weapons would be drastically reduced, and there would be a passionate advocate in the White House for the eradication of the death penalty, which could have huge knock-on benefits for human rights in China and the Middle East.

But if by any chance the eventual contest is Sanders v Trump, it'll be a straight all-or-nothing choice between America becoming a normal western country at last, and a descent into madness and possibly darkness.  Without question it'll be the scariest election anywhere in the world since Germany went to the polls in 1932.

SNP's spectacular by-election gain is an oceanic Oban occasion

The SNP have gained a local council seat in the Oban North and Lorn by-election, which was bizarrely the third by-election to be held in the same ward since the 2012 election.  It's a genuine gain in both senses of the word - the vacancy was caused by the resignation of an independent councillor, and the SNP were also well behind the combined votes for the assorted independent candidates in 2012.

The full result doesn't seem to have been published yet - I'll post it here as soon as I know it.

UPDATE : Ruth Davidson is claiming the Tory vote is up by 14.1%.  I'll treat that with caution until it's confirmed.

UPDATE II : Here is the result -

SNP 42.3% (+11.5)
Conservatives 23.2% (+14.1)
Independent 23.1% (n/a)
Greens 11.4% (n/a)

For the avoidance of doubt, the percentage change figures above are measured from the 2012 result, and not from either of the subsequent by-elections.  However, there may be a tonne of confusion on that point, because each party or candidate will choose the baseline that casts tonight's result in the best light for them.  Oddly, the 'Britain Elects' Twitter account is quoting slightly different changes and yet is saying they're measured from 2012 - I think that must be an error.

At first glance, there doesn't appear to be much interest for Labour in this contest, because they didn't stand in 2012 and they didn't stand this time either.  However, the independent candidate today was Kieron Green, who stood for Labour in both of the by-elections in the ward in 2014.  There seems to be a perception that he was effectively a Labour candidate again in all but name, and had perhaps dispensed with his party label to avoid being dragged down by the national state of play.  If so, the scam may have worked, but only up to a point - his vote was about 1% higher compared to the July 2014 election, and about 3% higher than in October 2014. (Having said that, Labour's national fortunes have slipped even further since then, so he may have saved more votes than it appears.)

Although the increases in both the SNP and Tory votes look impressive, it's not very useful to directly compare today's contest with the 2012 result, because there were no fewer than six independent candidates four years ago, and I'm not sure whether any of them were bashful Labourites.  Technically, there has been a small net swing from SNP to Tory, but given the strangeness of the circumstances, I doubt if anyone will be losing too much sleep over that.