If the Tories imagined their narrow lead in the GB-wide Survation poll a few days ago was some kind of turning-point, they appear to have been mistaken. We've since had an ICM poll (albeit one with radical methodological changes) putting them two points behind Labour, and tonight brings word of a YouGov poll putting Labour eight points clear - the biggest Tory deficit for many a year.
Of most interest to us, of course, is the Scottish subsample, and the news isn't that great : Labour 36%, SNP 31%, Conservatives 25%, Liberal Democrats 5%, Greens 1%. This is the third subsample that's put the SNP in second place since the election, but it's the first one of those that I take remotely seriously, because the previous two were absolutely tiny Survation subsamples which you could tell were clearly skewed by looking at the past vote recall of respondents. As far as I know, YouGov still weight their Scottish results separately, which means they should produce results that are slightly more accurate and stable than other firms' subsamples. However, even when properly weighted, a subsample has a much greater margin of error than a full-scale poll - I make it roughly 8% in this particular case, which means YouGov's figures are entirely consistent with a small SNP lead. I still think that's the most likely state of play, because in total we've had six subsamples since the election, with three putting the SNP in the lead, two putting Labour in the lead and only one putting the Tories ahead. It's also significant that the SNP haven't been in third place in any of the subsamples, whereas both Labour and the Tories have. However, even if the SNP do still have the advantage, it's plain enough that we're faced with a fairly tight three-way battle for the time being.
'For the time being' are the operative words, because it's entirely predictable that a major political shock like the one we saw last month will radically shift the opinion polls in the immediate aftermath. Sometimes the change is superficial and temporary (for example the brief Conservative surge during the fuel crisis of 2000 which was completely reversed at astonishing speed), and sometimes it's meaningful and lasting (for example the Tory slump after Black Wednesday in 1992, which they didn't properly recover from for well over a decade). We'll just have to wait and see which category the current situation falls into. The irony is that if Labour have hopes of exploiting this apparent moment of relative vulnerability for the SNP and winning back a truckload of central belt seats, their own strength in the opinion polls may end up preventing them from doing so. The Tories aren't going to willingly call an election unless they think there is a good chance of winning an overall majority, and as I've noted before, there is no realistic prospect of them being forced into an election by a vote of no confidence in the Commons for at least three years (unless Tory MPs defect to other parties). The more I've thought about the parliamentary arithmetic, the more I've come to the conclusion that it's not totally inconceivable that the new parliament will stagger on for the full five-year term.
The Tories are very lucky that the exit poll was wrong about them only having 314 seats. The difference between 314 and 318 may not sound all that great, but it could well be enough to swing the balance between a very short parliament and a very long one - which apart from saving the Tories' bacon, could also rescue the SNP from having to defend their own 35 seats for a good number of years. Ideally Scotland will be an independent country by 2022 (Nicola Sturgeon's recent statement very much leaves that possibility open), but even if it isn't, Labour could be in a completely different place by then. There are already plenty of signs that the truce between the Corbynites and the "moderates" is starting to break down.
* * *
Stormfront Lite's notorious Deputy Editor is a reliable source of painful prose and unwitting comic genius, and yesterday morning's effort was no exception -
"I know I’m not the only Tory who somehow hopes Ruth Davidson becomes an MP before the next Tory leadership election but I suspect she sees her role for the next few years as ensuring Scottish Nationalism really is killed stone dead and that can only be achieved in Holyrood and not Westminster."
Which suggests that Scottish nationalism hasn't "really" been killed stone dead thus far? Well, quite. It's a tad difficult to boast about killing Scottish nationalism when you've only just been beaten by Scottish nationalists in a sixth successive nationwide election.
The roll of shame for Ruth is : the 2012 local elections, the 2014 European elections, the 2015 general election, the 2016 Scottish Parliament election, the 2017 local elections, and the 2017 general election. Every single one an SNP victory.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Scottish Labour may be dinosaurs, but it wasn't a dead cat bounce
As you may have seen on social media, there was a post on the LSE politics blog yesterday arguing that the notion of a "Corbyn bounce" in Scotland at the general election is a "myth" and a "mirage", and that the SNP should not be sidetracked into strategies to fend off Labour when the Tories are the real enemy. It would be comforting to agree with that, and to tell ourselves there is only one unionist party worth worrying about, but I do think the conclusion is wrong. The main flaw of the blogpost is that it treats the results of the 2015 and 2017 general elections as if they are the only pieces of information available to us. When you look at it that way, it does appear superficially that the entire drop in the SNP vote can be explained by a natural 'correction' after the freakish result of 2015, and that the very small revival in the Labour vote (from 24% to 27%) was an inevitable side-effect of that readjustment, rather than being caused by the phenomenon that generated a much bigger Labour surge in England.
However, if you widen your gaze to take account of opinion poll evidence (and indeed the Holyrood election of last year), the picture suddenly looks very different. There is overwhelming evidence that Labour's true recovery in Scotland was not from the low of 24% recorded in 2015, but from the much worse position that the party slumped to after that election. Survation, who proved to be the most accurate pollster, had Scottish Labour languishing at just 18% as recently as mid-April, but by the end of the campaign that had jumped to 29%. Other firms showed a similar trend (even if the exact figures were very different). That sort of big shift is much more in line with the Corbyn surge that occurred in England, and given that it happened at exactly the same time, it's not unreasonable to suppose that it probably happened for much the same reason. It can't really be explained by the correction in the SNP's vote share, because the SNP had dropped to the low 40s (and the Tories had risen to the high 20s) before the Labour surge even started. It looks much more likely that the SNP suffered a drop from an unsustainable high, and then suffered a further small drop as a direct result of voters switching to Labour because of enthusiasm for the Corbyn project.
Even though the premise of the LSE blogpost is wrong, I do think it's correct to argue that the SNP shouldn't head off on a radical left wild goose chase to try to deal with the Corbyn threat. If you're losing voters who are inspired by the prospect of a radical left government at Westminster, you can hardly counter that by offering a radical left opposition at Westminster (and an opposition with third-party status at that). You can only compete by putting forward an alternative inspiring vision that Corbyn can't/won't offer - and that means a much greater focus on independence than we saw in the recent campaign.
* * *
Elsewhere in the LSE blogpost, a reasonable point is made about the SNP's "heroic" determination to conflate support for independence with support for remaining within the European Union, which may have cost the party votes from Brexit supporters. That factor may also go a long way towards explaining the Tories' seemingly puzzling failure to defeat the SNP in places like Perth & North Perthshire and Edinburgh South-West - both constituencies that voted Remain by a much more emphatic margin than the rural north-east did.
But this is not just a dilemma for the SNP. Could the Scottish Tory surge be a similar phenomenon to the SNP surge of 2015? In other words, was it partly caused by temporarily energised Brexit supporters who were determined to reinforce their vote from the referendum last year? If so, the Scottish Tories are very likely to suffer their own natural 'correction' at the next general election (as long as it doesn't take place in the near future). Those new north-east Tory MPs, especially the ones with the narrowest majorities, probably shouldn't get too comfy in their seats.
Monday, July 3, 2017
Live stream
Just a very quick note to let you know I took part in a live stream on Independence Live earlier today, answering questions on a variety of topics related to the current political situation. You can watch it HERE.
Sunday, July 2, 2017
I'm going to make some mild criticisms of an article written by Neal Ascherson (some viewers may find these scenes distressing)
Just very, very occasionally (maybe once every four months or so) Christopher Silver sends me a passive-aggressive tweet with a "Don't diss the intelligentsia, man!" subtext. Today was one such occasion. Clearly even the mildest criticism of Neal Ascherson was just too much to be borne.
Free from the constraints of 140 characters, allow me to briefly set out why I did not misread Ascherson's Sunday Herald piece, whether wilfully or unwilfully, "in the service of latent insecurity" or otherwise.
In the fourth paragraph of his article, Ascherson says this : "What’s true is that the SNP and their leader have been seriously damaged – possibly holed below the waterline in ways which aren’t yet visible. What isn’t true is the assumption that independence sinks or swims with the SNP’s fortunes." In paragraph 8, he expands on what he means by that : "Neither can we know who will surf that tide. But it might well not be the SNP...it could be some hybrid, say a rebel Scottish Labour Party linked with the Greens and radical seceders from the SNP, which finally leads a free Respublica Scotorum out into the world. Less probably, it could be a much angrier, more impatient formation now hidden in its chrysalis. Remember how Sinn Fein came from behind and wiped out the Irish parliamentary Home Rulers in 1918?" In paragraph 9, he also speculates about the possibility of Tories leading Scotland to independence.
In fairness to Ascherson, there is plenty of "possibly" and "might well not be" in there, but I scarcely think it's unreasonable to detect in those segments of the article an assumption that the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon are probably on the way out (and that unambiguously refers to the general election result which saw the SNP win almost 60% of the seats), that the independence cause will survive this upheaval, and that independence supporters will find another vehicle to deliver their goal - which might involve some wildly implausible alliance of pro-indy Labour rebels and the Greens.
For those like Christopher who think that anyone who is dubious about this prospectus must simply be an 'insecure SNP supporter', I'd suggest it might be a useful exercise to look at the current political landscape in Scotland in a hard-headed way and try to work out what a truly objective person would think is the most promising road-map to independence in anything like the foreseeable future. Is it likely to involve in some way a pro-independence party that currently holds almost 60% of Scottish seats at Westminster and almost 50% of the seats in the Scottish Parliament? Or is the vehicle more likely to be an as yet unformed splinter group from a much smaller party that has been rabidly anti-independence for as long as anyone can remember? The answer seems self-evident to me, and if others disagree, perhaps they'd better explain their reasoning in a rather more credible way than they have thus far. Pipe-dreams could tie us up in knots for decades.
The notion of a new right-of-centre pro-independence party perhaps isn't quite so fanciful, because at present pro-indy Thatcherites don't have a remotely comfortable home in either the Tories or the SNP. However, people have been talking about that sort of thing for decades and nothing ever materialises, so it appears the critical mass simply isn't there. Even it did happen, the chances are that the new party would have to work with the SNP to bring independence about (and that the SNP would be the senior partner in that arrangement).
Leaving aside his musings about how the SNP might be replaced, Ascherson's article is primarily about the notion that Scotland should act as if it already is independent, and that the Scottish government should essentially exceed its legal powers and only stop doing so when the UK government forces it to. I don't have any objection in principle to that, but a more practical objection is that the UK government won't necessarily be the obstacle - where legislation is involved, it would first have to get past the Presiding Officer and his legal advisers.
No, Jeremy Corbyn would not be Prime Minister right now if the Scottish Tories had failed to make gains
This post is really just an indulgence of a point of pedantry, but it's been bugging me since the election that people keep saying that Jeremy Corbyn would currently be Prime Minister if it hadn't been for the twelve Tory gains from the SNP (indeed, in my weaker moments I may even have retweeted the people who are saying it). It's not strictly true.
Holding the constituency of Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk would have been an almost miraculous feat for the SNP. Given the enormous tactical switch from the Lib Dems to the Tories, the SNP would actually have needed a significant increase in their own vote just to hold the seat, and that was obviously never going to happen. However, as a 'bit of fun', let's imagine for the sake of argument that they had somehow pulled it off, and also held onto all of the other eleven seats that the Tories gained. This is what the result of the general election would have been -
Conservatives 306
Labour 262
SNP 47
Liberal Democrats 12
DUP 10
Sinn Féin 7
Plaid Cymru 4
Greens 1
Independent 1
From there's it's a simple calculation - the Conservatives and DUP combined would have had 316 seats, and an informal progressive alliance consisting of Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens would have had only 314. Sinn Féin are irrelevant because they don't take their seats, so the balance of power would have been held by the 12 Liberal Democrats and the sole independent MP Lady Hermon (who we know is minded to support the Tories in confidence votes). That means the only way the Queen would have been able to justify not inviting Theresa May to form a government would have been if the Liberal Democrats had clearly indicated a preference for Jeremy Corbyn. Based on the commitments they made prior to the election, it seems highly unlikely they would have done so.
What would have happened after May's reappointment as PM? Without an overall majority for the Tory/DUP alliance, it's theoretically possible that the Queen's Speech would have been defeated, triggering a second election almost immediately. The public would not have looked kindly on that, so much more probable is that the Tory government would have introduced a limited and uncontroversial Queen's Speech, allowing the Lib Dems (and possibly even Labour) to abstain with dignity, on the implicit understanding that there would be a general election in the autumn.
There's no doubt that without the Scottish Tory gains we'd be in a radically different situation from the one we actually find ourselves in - the Tory government would be merely a caretaker administration with almost no capacity to get its policies through the Commons, and a quick second election would be a near-certainty rather than just an intriguing possibility. But even so, it's simply not true to say that the Scottish Tory gains are literally responsible for there being a Tory government as of this moment. In the longer run, what would have happened in a second election is entirely a matter for speculation - for all we know, the urgency of the situation would have concentrated Tory minds, and they would have quickly found an alternative leader who might have delivered a much better result in the autumn.
There is no shortage of little paradoxes to be found in politics, and it's not totally inconceivable that the Scottish Tory gains will ultimately leave the Tory government in a weaker position than would otherwise have been the case.
Holding the constituency of Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk would have been an almost miraculous feat for the SNP. Given the enormous tactical switch from the Lib Dems to the Tories, the SNP would actually have needed a significant increase in their own vote just to hold the seat, and that was obviously never going to happen. However, as a 'bit of fun', let's imagine for the sake of argument that they had somehow pulled it off, and also held onto all of the other eleven seats that the Tories gained. This is what the result of the general election would have been -
Conservatives 306
Labour 262
SNP 47
Liberal Democrats 12
DUP 10
Sinn Féin 7
Plaid Cymru 4
Greens 1
Independent 1
From there's it's a simple calculation - the Conservatives and DUP combined would have had 316 seats, and an informal progressive alliance consisting of Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens would have had only 314. Sinn Féin are irrelevant because they don't take their seats, so the balance of power would have been held by the 12 Liberal Democrats and the sole independent MP Lady Hermon (who we know is minded to support the Tories in confidence votes). That means the only way the Queen would have been able to justify not inviting Theresa May to form a government would have been if the Liberal Democrats had clearly indicated a preference for Jeremy Corbyn. Based on the commitments they made prior to the election, it seems highly unlikely they would have done so.
What would have happened after May's reappointment as PM? Without an overall majority for the Tory/DUP alliance, it's theoretically possible that the Queen's Speech would have been defeated, triggering a second election almost immediately. The public would not have looked kindly on that, so much more probable is that the Tory government would have introduced a limited and uncontroversial Queen's Speech, allowing the Lib Dems (and possibly even Labour) to abstain with dignity, on the implicit understanding that there would be a general election in the autumn.
There's no doubt that without the Scottish Tory gains we'd be in a radically different situation from the one we actually find ourselves in - the Tory government would be merely a caretaker administration with almost no capacity to get its policies through the Commons, and a quick second election would be a near-certainty rather than just an intriguing possibility. But even so, it's simply not true to say that the Scottish Tory gains are literally responsible for there being a Tory government as of this moment. In the longer run, what would have happened in a second election is entirely a matter for speculation - for all we know, the urgency of the situation would have concentrated Tory minds, and they would have quickly found an alternative leader who might have delivered a much better result in the autumn.
There is no shortage of little paradoxes to be found in politics, and it's not totally inconceivable that the Scottish Tory gains will ultimately leave the Tory government in a weaker position than would otherwise have been the case.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Davidson seeks solace in titillating photos as Opinium subsample puts SNP 10% ahead
Opinium have today become only the third pollster to produce a GB-wide poll of voting intentions since the general election. Given the hammering the SNP have taken in the media over the last few weeks, and given that the SNP probably haven't been strong enough in defending the comfortable victory they won on June 8th, the poll's Scottish subsample is hugely reassuring : SNP 38%, Labour 28%, Conservatives 27%, Liberal Democrats 3%, UKIP 2%, Greens 2%.
Yes, individual subsamples are not reliable, and these figures do not necessarily mean the SNP are actually 10% ahead. However, we've now had four post-election subsamples, of which three have put the SNP ahead. The other one put Labour ahead, but looked (on the basis of past vote recall) like an obviously skewed sample. You'd have to say on the balance of the available evidence that the SNP are probably still ahead on Westminster voting intentions - and if that's true, they're weathering the storm much better than many commentators would have expected.
The headline Britain-wide figures put Labour ahead of the Tories by 45% to 39%. Perhaps most significantly, they suggest the Tories are not only suffering from a direct swing to Labour, but also from a mini-recovery by UKIP (presumably because a hard-core of Leave voters fear the Tories may be about to sell them down the river). The standard response to this sort of finding is "this is why there won't be an election any time soon", but in truth the Tories would probably be extremely wary of another snap election even if they had a small lead themselves - after all, they've only just managed to blow a lead of more than 20 points. If an early election happens, it'll likely be for one of two reasons -
1) Discipline breaks down on the Tory backbenches, making the parliamentary arithmetic unmanageable.
2) Theresa May is replaced, and the new leader decides to cash in on his/her honeymoon with the voters (if such a thing occurs).
* * *
UPDATE : Survation have just muddied the waters with a poll that has the Conservatives moving back into the lead (albeit only just) across Britain, with no sign of a UKIP recovery, and with a Scottish subsample that has the Tories ahead of the SNP by 42% to 29%. Does this change what I said earlier about the SNP weathering the storm? Probably not. As with the previous Survation subsample that had Labour ahead, you can tell that the sample is somewhat skewed by looking at past vote recall - more respondents recall voting Tory on June 8th than recall voting SNP. The situation now is that three out of five post-election subsamples have had the SNP ahead, with the other two unable to agree on whether the SNP have been overtaken by the Tories or Labour. Additionally, by far the largest subsample had the SNP ahead of the Tories by 4 points, and ahead of Labour by 5. It does still look like the SNP are probably in the lead, albeit perhaps not by a huge margin.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
And this is why Indyref 2 is not going away...
As you may have seen, the House of Commons has just voted on an amendment to the Queen's Speech, tabled by Labour MP Chuka Umunna, calling on the UK to remain within both the EU single market and the customs union. The Corbyn leadership whipped Labour MPs to abstain (yet again), leading to confident predictions among the London commentariat that there would be a huge rebellion against Corbyn. Well, I don't know how we're supposed to define 'huge', but given that 75%+ of the PLP are known to be Corbyn-sceptic, and given that the vast majority of the PLP are also pro-European, I have to say I'm somewhat underwhelmed by just 49 of the 262 Labour MPs voting in favour of the amendment, which was defeated by more than 200 votes. No Tory MPs at all voted in favour, meaning that less than 16% of Commons members (even after the Speaker, Deputy Speakers and tellers are excluded) backed single market membership.
We've been constantly told since election night that there is no majority in the Commons for leaving the single market, but I'm not sure what use it is having a 'silent majority' on your side if those people are not prepared to vote for what they believe in. Unless something dramatic changes, we are still heading for a very hard Brexit, meaning in turn that the prospect of Indyref 2 is simply not going to go away.
We've been constantly told since election night that there is no majority in the Commons for leaving the single market, but I'm not sure what use it is having a 'silent majority' on your side if those people are not prepared to vote for what they believe in. Unless something dramatic changes, we are still heading for a very hard Brexit, meaning in turn that the prospect of Indyref 2 is simply not going to go away.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Sturgeon sticks firmly with the policy of an independence referendum at the end of the Brexit negotiations
For those that heard Nicola Sturgeon's speech, the title of this blogpost may seem like a statement of the bleedin' obvious, but I gather from a tweet written by Ipsos-Mori's Mark Diffley that some MSM outlets only took a few minutes to completely misrepresent what she had said -
"Funny seeing how this is being reported as #indyref2 being withdrawn - not what I heard at all"
As I said the other day, I was fully ready to say I thought Nicola Sturgeon had made a terrible mistake if she reversed policy on an independence referendum, but I'm delighted and relieved to say I'm not going to have to do that, because the speech ticked absolutely every box I was looking for -
* Ms Sturgeon stressed that the SNP won the general election in Scotland and that this reinforced the mandate for a referendum initially received in the Holyrood election of May 2016.
* She upheld the policy that a referendum should be held at the end of the Brexit process.
* By stressing the mandate to hold a referendum within the current Holyrood parliament, she strongly hinted the vote should take place before May 2021.
* She gave a clear timetable (autumn 2018) for making a decision on the timing of a referendum, which removes the concern that today's decision is going to later mutate into an 'indefinite postponement'.
* She undertook to step up campaigning for independence even before a referendum is called - the complete reverse of assumptions that the topic is going to be "parked".
* Although she acknowledged that the Tories losing their majority reopened the possibility of a soft Brexit (which presumably would remove the need for a referendum altogether), she didn't pretend that this was a remotely likely outcome - I think her exact words were "however slim".
* Most importantly, she didn't renounce the decision on a referendum taken by the elected Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago, and she didn't revoke the request made for a Section 30 order on the basis of that vote. (She did note that the resolution of the request has become less urgent, but it remains active.)
As far as I can see, the one and only change in the SNP position is that the referendum bill will not be brought forward in the immediate future, but instead a decision about its exact timing will be taken next year. That is a change of process, not a substantive change of policy, and I have no great problem with it. (Although it's heartening to see Patrick Harvie and the Greens acting as a counterbalance against the unionist parties and media by keeping the pressure up for the speediest possible progress.)
G A Ponsonby said the other day that he had no concerns at all about what Nicola Sturgeon was going to say, but he had great concerns about what the media were going to pretend she had said. I now see his point entirely. The media and unionist parties have a problem, though - they clearly want to say Nicola Sturgeon has performed a "humiliating U-turn" on an independence referendum, but they also want to say that Nicola Sturgeon has "ignored the wishes of the people of Scotland" by "doubling down" on an independence referendum. I have a feeling some people out there are intelligent enough to spot that those two claims are not actually consistent with each other.
"Funny seeing how this is being reported as #indyref2 being withdrawn - not what I heard at all"
As I said the other day, I was fully ready to say I thought Nicola Sturgeon had made a terrible mistake if she reversed policy on an independence referendum, but I'm delighted and relieved to say I'm not going to have to do that, because the speech ticked absolutely every box I was looking for -
* Ms Sturgeon stressed that the SNP won the general election in Scotland and that this reinforced the mandate for a referendum initially received in the Holyrood election of May 2016.
* She upheld the policy that a referendum should be held at the end of the Brexit process.
* By stressing the mandate to hold a referendum within the current Holyrood parliament, she strongly hinted the vote should take place before May 2021.
* She gave a clear timetable (autumn 2018) for making a decision on the timing of a referendum, which removes the concern that today's decision is going to later mutate into an 'indefinite postponement'.
* She undertook to step up campaigning for independence even before a referendum is called - the complete reverse of assumptions that the topic is going to be "parked".
* Although she acknowledged that the Tories losing their majority reopened the possibility of a soft Brexit (which presumably would remove the need for a referendum altogether), she didn't pretend that this was a remotely likely outcome - I think her exact words were "however slim".
* Most importantly, she didn't renounce the decision on a referendum taken by the elected Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago, and she didn't revoke the request made for a Section 30 order on the basis of that vote. (She did note that the resolution of the request has become less urgent, but it remains active.)
As far as I can see, the one and only change in the SNP position is that the referendum bill will not be brought forward in the immediate future, but instead a decision about its exact timing will be taken next year. That is a change of process, not a substantive change of policy, and I have no great problem with it. (Although it's heartening to see Patrick Harvie and the Greens acting as a counterbalance against the unionist parties and media by keeping the pressure up for the speediest possible progress.)
G A Ponsonby said the other day that he had no concerns at all about what Nicola Sturgeon was going to say, but he had great concerns about what the media were going to pretend she had said. I now see his point entirely. The media and unionist parties have a problem, though - they clearly want to say Nicola Sturgeon has performed a "humiliating U-turn" on an independence referendum, but they also want to say that Nicola Sturgeon has "ignored the wishes of the people of Scotland" by "doubling down" on an independence referendum. I have a feeling some people out there are intelligent enough to spot that those two claims are not actually consistent with each other.
Monday, June 26, 2017
Boost for SNP in massive Panelbase poll
My concern for the SNP over the last couple of weeks has been the risk they might slip to second place in Westminster voting intentions - not behind the Tories, who have probably come pretty close to hitting their natural ceiling of support in Scotland, but behind Labour, who now have considerable momentum behind them.
There have only been a tiny handful of voting intention polls since the general election - probably because most polling firms called the election wrong, and there's little point in commissioning a poll from those that did until they've reviewed their methodology. However, that hasn't applied to Survation, who famously got the election right (in defiance of Andrew Neil's clueless sneering in this extraordinary clip which has been charitably described as his "Michael Fish moment"). The Scottish subsamples of the two post-election Survation polls show a contradictory picture - the online poll had the SNP still in the lead with Labour in second place, but the phone poll had Labour ahead with the SNP in second. The good news is that the phone subsample seemed to be very obviously skewed - Labour also had a significant lead on how people in Scotland recalled voting in the general election, when they should actually have been in third place on that measure. So as of yet there's no convincing evidence from Survation that Labour have edged ahead of the SNP.
On Saturday night, word came through of an enormous GB-wide Panelbase poll which had Labour on 46% and the Tories on 41%. A combined total of 87% for those two parties is unusually high, giving rise to the obvious concern that the SNP were being squeezed out in Scotland. However, now the datasets have been released, it appears that isn't the case at all. Irritatingly, there are no Scottish subsample figures, but there's enough information to make some educated guesswork. The most important fact is that, unlike the Liberal Democrats, the SNP have retained the support of well over 90% of the people who voted for them earlier this month. As you'd expect, the small minority of votes they've lost have essentially gone as a bloc to Labour, but that direct swing would be nowhere near enough on its own to push Labour into the lead. Some of the SNP losses have been offset by new support from elsewhere, and a very rough calculation suggests that the SNP's share of the vote has probably only slipped from 37% to something in the region of 35% or 36%. An extra 2% for Labour wouldn't even take them to 30%, so unless there has been very substantial movement from the Tories to Labour, it's hard to see how the SNP can possibly have been overtaken in this poll's Scottish subsample (which, it must be stressed, is an unusually large subsample of several hundred people).
After the relentless 'shock and awe' media propaganda campaign of the last couple of weeks which has attempted to finish off both the SNP and the Yes movement for good, I'd suggest it's hugely heartening if the SNP still have some sort of lead in Westminster voting intentions, even if that lead is fairly modest.
[Update : Either Panelbase have updated their datasets over the last couple of hours or I somehow missed the relevant part earlier, but the Scottish subsample is now available. The figures are pretty close to the assumptions I made above : SNP 34%, Conservatives 30%, Labour 29%, Liberal Democrats 5%, Greens 1%.]
Bear in mind that the favourable wind behind Jeremy Corbyn isn't going to last forever, and Scottish Labour's chances of seizing the moment have been dealt a severe blow today by the nauseating Tory-DUP agreement, which on the face of it leaves Theresa May in a fairly healthy arithmetical position in parliament...
Conservatives + DUP : 328
All other parties (excluding Sinn Féin) : 315
That's a majority of 13, which means that it would take 7 by-election defeats or defections to put the government in an untenable position. By-elections have become rarer in recent years, perhaps simply because general life expectancy has risen. There were only three by-elections in Conservative-held seats in the entire 2015-17 parliament, and all three were caused by resignations rather than by deaths. I'd suggest that at the very least it would take three years to wipe out the Tory/DUP majority, unless there is a sudden spate of defections from the Tories to either UKIP or the Lib Dems (or both).
On the other hand, the current situation has revived the old concept of a 'working majority', meaning a few seats over and above the total required for an overall majority. Unless relations between the Tories and the Lib Dems warm up considerably, there is no real 'buffer' for the government outwith their own ranks and the DUP ranks. The only opposition MP that would probably vote for them on a confidence vote is the independent Northern Ireland unionist Lady Hermon, on the basis that she wouldn't be able to accept Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister (although even she has very well-known anti-Tory leanings). If the government lost as few as four or five by-elections, they would arguably have lost their 'working majority' because they wouldn't be able to get their business through the House reliably, and a general election would perhaps become inevitable at that point. But even that would take quite a while.
So, for better or worse, it looks like the SNP will have plenty of time to steady the ship before facing the electorate again - which is another good reason why they shouldn't panic and needlessly reverse their policy on an independence referendum.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
We must fervently hope there is no truth in the Sunday Mail's "U-turn exclusive"
Did I speak too soon last night in saying that any worries about the SNP making the historic error of reversing their referendum policy had receded? Today's Sunday Mail splashed with an "exclusive" claiming an indyref "U-turn", and suggesting that the plans for a vote "by 2019" are about to be scrapped. The reaction of independence supporters on social media has been interesting - most take the view that the Sunday Mail are playing games by misreporting a restatement of the original policy as a U-turn, but on the other extreme Ben Wray has taken the story at face value and accused Nicola Sturgeon of giving up Scotland's only leverage over Brexit.
It goes without saying that the Record and Sunday Mail must be regarded as hostile, cynical, and utterly unscrupulous actors in all this. It's perfectly possible that they've deliberately misrepresented the information they've received in pursuit of their anti-independence agenda. Apart from more mischief-making from Alex Neil (a former fundamentalist who has now practically reinvented himself as the one-man indy-sceptic wing of the SNP), the only fresh quotes in the article are from an anonymous source using very ambiguous language, which could be seen as vaguely consistent with the Sunday Mail's claims, but could just as easily be seen as merely pointing to a modest change of detail and emphasis as the existing referendum policy is essentially upheld.
If it's the latter, there's no problem. No-one is going to die in a ditch to keep open the theoretical possibility of a referendum in autumn 2018, as long as a date not too long after that remains firmly on the cards. By the same token, no-one is going to object if Nicola Sturgeon points out that the loss of the Tory majority has changed the dynamic on Brexit, and that we won't be 100% sure that a referendum is actually necessary until the possibility of maintaining membership of the single market is definitively excluded from the negotiations. (Incidentally, that change in circumstances would be an indisputable fact regardless of whether the SNP had won zero seats, fifty-nine, or absolutely any number in between.)
But if there is the slightest truth in the notion that Nicola Sturgeon will announce that a referendum has been 'called off for the time being' as a consequence of the general election result in Scotland, that would be a catastrophic error of judgement and an abandonment of the most basic democratic principles. It would mean repudiating a decision taken not by the SNP, but by the democratically-elected Scottish Parliament only a matter of weeks ago. It would not be done because the SNP had lost a subsequent election, but because their victory in that election had not been by a margin deemed acceptable by the unionist commentariat. Because Conservative votes in a minority of constituencies apparently carry more weight than SNP votes in the majority of constituencies. Capitulating to that grotesque logic would be a betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of people who helped the SNP win the election, and who did so in good faith on the basis that a majority of seats would complete a 'triple-lock' mandate for an independence referendum.
Here's what I don't understand : even looking at it from a hard-headed pragmatic point of view, what would be the point of waving the white flag now? If you think Indyref 2 cost the SNP votes in Aberdeenshire, that's all very well and good, but where's the time machine that's going to change what happened? The election is over, the hit has already been taken, and it probably isn't about to be undone. It's perfectly conceivable there won't be another election of any type until the Holyrood contest in May 2021 - very nearly four years away. Why wouldn't you get on with celebrating and defending the mandate you've just won in very difficult circumstances, rather than voluntarily surrendering that mandate as part of some 'grand bargain' with voters in the hope of winning a phantom election by an even bigger margin than you've just won the real election? I do fear that the hysteria of the last couple of weeks has led to a few people in the SNP losing their compass.
Peter A Bell said today that he would support any decision that Nicola Sturgeon takes, because it would be bound to be taken in the best interests of Scotland. I must say I take a somewhat different view - if I think a terrible mistake has been made, I'll say so. However, I await the actual announcement with interest, and I remain hopeful that the Sunday Mail are just spinning us a line, and that there will be no "U-turn" or "cancelling" of the referendum.
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