Nineteenth subsample in a row puts the SNP ahead

A new Britain-wide YouGov poll is out today, so this may be a good moment to round-up the Scottish subsamples that have been published since my last update.  There have only been a couple...

Ipsos-Mori: SNP 43%, Labour 24%, Conservatives 23%, Liberal Democrats 9%

YouGov: SNP 36%, Labour 28%, Conservatives 25%, Liberal Democrats 5%, UKIP 4%, Greens 1%

That means nineteen subsamples in a row have put the SNP in an outright lead.  Just the usual reminder - any individual subsample should not be regarded as reliable, but an aggregate/average of a large number of subsamples can give you a rough indication of what is happening.  The sheer consistency of the SNP lead in subsamples since early September is probably indicative of quite a healthy SNP advantage on the ground, and is very much in line with the message from full-scale Scottish polls (although admittedly we haven't had any of those for a few weeks).

Are there any clouds on the horizon?  Obviously the hysteria over Alex Salmond's new TV show has only just happened, so we'll have to wait and see how that plays out.  It goes without saying that the criticisms of Salmond are hypocritical bilge given that leading politicians from all major parties have been willingly interviewed on the same channel, but on the other hand it is unusual (probably unprecedented) for Nicola Sturgeon to put out a personal statement distancing herself from something Salmond has done.  She and her advisers may have thought that was a safety-first approach, but I suspect the truly dangerous thing is for parties to allow themselves to look divided.  However, it's a very polite division on a relatively minor issue, so in spite of the mainstream media's valiant demands that their readers and viewers should care about this, I expect the likelihood is that we'll look back on it as a 72-hour wonder. 

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

Earlier today, I had a brief exchange with Nick Robinson (former Political Editor of both the BBC and ITV News, and now presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme) on the subject of Alex Salmond's new TV show - which is made with complete editorial control by Salmond's own production company, and will be broadcast on RT.

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This is my cue to use the immortal words "He didn't answer" (albeit with rather more accuracy than they were originally used).

I realised as I was writing those tweets that I am - somewhat to my surprise - a fan of Twitter's new 280-character limit.  Until a couple of days ago, if I had tried to make points like those I would have given up in despair after realising that it's impossible to condense them into 140 characters.

No, Nicola Sturgeon does not need to apologise for someone else's personal opinions

Good Morning Scotland presenter Gary Robertson raised a few eyebrows last night by taking a clear stance on an issue of party political controversy -

Now, first things first - there's nothing wrong in principle with a BBC journalist expressing a political opinion on Twitter.  That's what the standard disclaimer "my views, not my employer's" is there to cover - he wasn't tweeting with his BBC hat on.  Nevertheless, there presumably is a line that has to be drawn somewhere - it would, for example, be a problem if Brian Taylor was constantly telling us which party he votes for in general elections, because we would inevitably view all of his political reporting through that prism.  What troubles me is not so much that we now know Gary Robertson thinks the SNP should have declined large game-changing donations in 2007 and 2011, but rather that he believes he's merely stating the obvious and is evidently offended by the idea that any right-thinking person would not dutifully fall in behind him.

Let's be absolutely clear what it would have meant for the SNP to turn down Souter's donations.  In 2007, the odds were - as since the dawn of time - stacked against them.  They were up against much wealthier opponents who could tap into UK-wide funds, and the media were relentlessly hostile.  The Souter donation helped level a hopelessly skewed playing-field, and there was simply no other way that was going to happen.  In a nutshell, Gary Robertson thinks the SNP should have opted out of the chance to properly compete for power on something approaching a fair basis, just so they could look as pure as the driven snow.  That would have been a betrayal of anyone who had pounded the streets for the SNP since 1934 on the assumption that the party was not playing a futile game of cricket, but was instead engaged in a serious attempt to overcome the dirty war fought against them by the media and London establishment, to attain power, and ultimately to win maximum self-government for Scotland.  The 2007 election was so desperately close that it's entirely plausible to say that without the Souter donation there would have been no independence referendum (because the 2011 overall majority was only possible due to the success of the 2007-11 government), meaning that we wouldn't now have a more powerful Scottish Parliament and an enormous contingent of pro-independence MPs at Westminster.  And what noble point of principle would the SNP have been sacrificing their raison d'être for?  None at all.  The donation came without strings.

Maybe once we have public funding of political parties, and once the media has put its own house in order, the SNP will have the luxury of turning down unconditional donations of £500,000.  But not until then.

I'm also slightly baffled as to why Robertson thinks Brian Souter has "policies".  Politicians have policies, but private citizens - no matter how wealthy - merely have opinions.  Perhaps Robertson thought it was only by indulging in the pretence that Souter is the equivalent of an SNP government minister that he could justify the otherwise incredibly silly notion that Nicola Sturgeon should be "apologising" for someone else's personal views.

As for Robertson's question about whether Souter's donations took place within the historical period Sturgeon apologised for in her statement, he should have known the answer to that, because she gave a pretty strong hint that she regarded 2001 as the watershed - that being the year in which the age of consent was equalised at 16.  The vast bulk of what she was apologising for took place on Westminster's watch - most notably, it was UK-wide Labour and Tory governments that eccentrically kept sex between men a criminal offence in Scotland for well over a decade after it had been legalised in England and Wales.  The short post-devolution period covered by the apology was during the Labour-Lib Dem coalition government at Holyrood, and ended six years before Souter's first donation to the SNP.

Penny for the Guy

A few years ago I stumbled across a BBC drama series from the 1970s, confusingly called 1990 because it was set in a dystopian Britain of the near-future.  It starred Edward Woodward at the peak of his powers, but it doesn't seem to be as well-remembered as his other series like Callan and The Equalizer.  I think probably the reason is that it's a bit of a mixed bag - some aspects of it work very well, while other things occasionally snap you out of the fake reality you're presented with.  For example, in Britain of 1990 the crown jewels have been literally sold off, the House of Lords has been turned into a politicians' drinking club (how would you tell the difference?), and the pound sterling has been replaced by the "Anglo-Dollar", which just doesn't ring true as a name.  (Unless it was imposed by the Americans themselves, of course, but that's not the storyline.)  There's an unintentionally hilarious bit in the final episode of Series 1, where an old man recounts the sorry tale of Britain's descent into totalitarianism, and he says something like "it all began when they brought in that Value Added Tax in the early 70s..."  That must have sounded a bit daft even at the time of broadcast.  

And then there's the whole issue of Europe.  Weirdly, Britain is supposed to have remained in the European Community and the Council of Europe, and therefore is still fully subject to the European Convention on Human Rights - which it circumvents by means of various technicalties, even though citizens are routinely denied all sorts of basic rights such as the right to travel, the right to free expression, and the right to a private life.  When I first saw the series, I thought it was wildly implausible that European leaders would ever allow any country to get away with such a thing, or at least not without facing expulsion...which means I now need to urgently introduce my naive former self to a certain Mr Guy Verhofstadt, who seems hellbent on ensuring that 1990 proves to be an uncannily accurate prophecy - albeit in real life the rogue state is Spain rather than the UK.

Verhofstadt's latest Facebook post about the Catalan crisis is typically grotesque.  It's thinly disguised as a rare criticism of Spanish actions, but in truth his only quibble seems to be that the taking of political prisoners is a tactical blunder that might allow the filthy law-breaking "separatists" to paint themselves as martyrs, thus helping them to do well in the December election.  He suggests that there should be "other ways" to ensure that the jailed politicians "receive a fair trial", by which he seems to mean a delay of legal proceedings until the election is over.  At no point does it even occur to him to question why elected politicians in an EU member state should be facing trial at all for the supposed "crime" of implementing the manifesto on which they were elected.  He fatuously signs off with an image of demonstrators holding up a banner reading "all we need is talk" - well, exactly what interest has Verhofstadt ever shown in genuine dialogue that puts the two sides of this dispute on an equal footing, rather than putting one side in the dock of a Spanish court?  I think we know the type of dialogue he has in mind - it'll be a cosy chat between the Spanish government and a puppet Catalan regime, in which they furiously agree with each other about how the Spanish constitution must be respected and how independence is a complete non-starter.

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If you were particularly 'lucky', you might have heard me on the radio this morning.  The Bauer network (ie. Clyde 2, Forth 2, etc.) invited me on because of something I tweeted the other day about what appeared to be an enormous Comic Relief-style red nose on the front of a car - but actually proved on closer inspection to be a 'poppy'.  I suppose, in fairness, the whole problem with "poppy fascism" is the denial of freedom of choice, so it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that people shouldn't be free to be as ostentatious as they like with their own poppy-wearing.  But I do feel that there's an inverse correlation between how large or tacky a poppy is, and how close the sentiment behind it is to the original intention of the poppy symbol.

You can hear the radio show on catch-up HERE.

That ever-shrinking Tory minority government

After the SNP suspended Michelle Thomson and Natalie McGarry a couple of years ago, there were various articles in the unionist media gloating about 'the mystery of the vanishing SNP MPs'.  It might be worth noting, then, that other parties seem to have recently mastered the art of shrinking their own parliamentary representation.  This is the direction of travel since the general election in June...

Composition of the House of Commons:

Conservatives 314 (-2)
Labour 258 (-2)
SNP 35 (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 12 (n/c)
DUP 10 (n/c)
Sinn Féin 7 (n/c)
Independents 5 (+4)
Plaid Cymru 4 (n/c)
Greens 1 (n/c)

Conservatives 10 seats short of a majority

(The Speaker and Deputy Speakers are excluded from the above figures. Note also that Sinn Féin have not taken up their seats. Theoretically they can do so at any time, but in practice are highly unlikely to.)

Of course in one sense the Tory and Labour losses might be viewed as a mere technicality, because Jared O'Mara can still be expected to vote in line with the Labour whip and Charlie Elphicke can still be expected to vote in line with the Tory whip.  But I do wonder if there may eventually prove to be a distinction between an MP who still harbours realistic hopes of being readmitted to the party fold (such as Anne Marie Morris), and an MP who is accused of something of sufficient seriousness that it becomes hard to imagine any way back.  In the latter case, such a person may feel they have nothing left to lose, and the whips would have nothing left to bribe or threaten them with.

Those of you with a long memory may recall that nine Eurosceptic rebel Tory MPs had the whip withdrawn in late 1994, which technically and temporarily meant that John Major's majority was wiped out.  Robin Oakley, then the BBC's Political Editor, assured viewers that this was a masterstroke by the Tory whips, because suspended MPs typically show obsessional loyalty in an effort to be readmitted as soon as possible.  But the MP Rupert Allason, who'd had the whip withdrawn a year earlier, predicted that precisely the opposite would happen, and he was proved correct.  The whipless MPs became an informal grouping, and with safety in numbers became emboldened to vote against the Major government even more often.  They were eventually readmitted without providing any guarantees about their future conduct.   That was merely embarrassing for the Tories, but it won't even be regarded as a credible option now if the reason for an MP's suspension is suspected wrongdoing of a serious nature (unless the individual is completely cleared).

Take a bow, Anne McElvoy: the competition is stiff, but you may have just said the most ridiculous thing in the history of Question Time

OK, so let's just briefly recap.

* In 2015, the Catalan people freely elected a parliament in which the absolute majority of members were pro-independence.

* In the popular vote in the 2015 election, pro-independence parties comfortably outpolled anti-independence parties by 48% to 39%.

* The elected pro-independence government held a referendum last month to definitively determine whether the population wanted independence or not.

* The pro-independence campaign won the referendum by an overwhelming margin of 92% to 8%.

* In spite of violence, intimidation and vote theft by the Spanish authorities, 38.5% of the entire registered electorate successfully cast a vote in favour of independence, meaning that even had there been a very high overall turnout of as much as 76%, a victory for the pro-independence campaign would have been statistically certain.

* Braving a very real threat to their own personal liberty, government ministers acted to respect the will of the electorate by declaring an independent republic.

* An opinion poll published this week shows that there continues to be a majority in favour of independence (roughly 53% to 47%).

* Two very recent voting intention polls suggest that the pro-independence parties are on course to retain their overall majority in parliament in the December elections, and to win the popular vote once again.

Presumably aware of most or all of the above, Anne McElvoy of The Economist somehow felt able to indulge in the following musings on the BBC's Question Time tonight: "The facts are that there is not an overall appetite in Catalonia for independence, and sometimes the debate is conducted as if there were.  And sometimes some of the framing of news reporting seems to suggest that there is.  AND THERE IS NOT.  If you want a LEGITIMATE pro-independence movement, then go out there, campaign for it, and get people on your side. The push for independence is, I think, over for the moment."

There comes a point where it's actually quite difficult to know how to argue with stupidity like that.  What's truly inexplicable is that the host David Dimbleby didn't step in to correct (or at least challenge) such an obvious factual inaccuracy, and instead simply allowed viewers to be grossly misled.

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I touch on the subject of Catalonia in my article for this month's iScot magazine, which is now available.  A preview of the article has been posted HERE, and you can purchase a digital copy of the magazine HERE.

Opinion poll confirms what we already knew: Catalonia wants to be an independent state

I don't often wade through polling datasets in the Catalan language for this blog, but it may be worth doing it in this particular case.  As I've noted a couple of times over the last few weeks, the result of the Catalan referendum makes it phenomenally improbable that the anti-independence side would have won if they hadn't boycotted the vote.  You'd have to believe in an ultra-high turnout and that practically all of the extra voters would have voted No - which stretches credibility beyond breaking-point, given that we know large numbers of Yes supporters were prevented from voting by the police.  The only other possibility to cling to is that there was widespread falsification of results - essentially the mirror image of the wild conspiracy theories about the Scottish indyref result that unionists here love to scoff at.  Judging from the reports of observers, there in fact seems to be compelling evidence that the vote was extremely well and fairly conducted under the circumstances.  And yet, in spite of the compelling mandate for independence staring them in the face, the BBC website has taken to innocently finishing articles about Catalonia with a variant on the following: "Catalans are split on independence.  An opinion poll earlier this year showed 41% in favour, 49% against."  The pretty obvious subtext being that outdated opinion polls are more authoritative than actual referendum results.

Even if you believe that the BBC's favourite poll was bang-on accurate at the moment it was conducted, is it really so implausible that public opinion has changed since then, allowing us to reconcile the poll result with the referendum result?  Of course it's not.  Scottish public opinion proved extremely volatile over the final few weeks of indyref campaigning, and we didn't have the provocation of state authorities telling us it was illegal to vote and attacking us with truncheons and rubber bullets if we attempted to reach a polling station.  The new Catalan poll today confirms that there has been a significant swing in favour of independence since the pre-referendum period, sufficient to give Yes a majority.

I, més concretament, vol que Catalunya esdevingui un Estat independent? (And, more specifically, do you want Catalonia to become an independent State?)

Yes 48.7% (+7.6)
No 43.6% (-5.8)

The fieldwork dates were 16th-29th October, and with Don't Knows excluded the results are roughly: Yes 53%, No 47%.  Percentage changes are from the same polling organisation's figures in June.

The 'less specific' question asked by the poll is a multi-option question on various constitutional options - a bit like Scottish polls that chuck in a 'Devo Max' option.  Outright independence is the most popular single option with 40.2% support.  It's true that if you combine support for all of the options that involve Catalonia remaining within the Spanish state, you reach an overall majority - but, crucially, one of those options is Catalonia becoming a state in its own right within a federal Spain, which is clearly not on offer in the real world.  That explains why there is a pro-independence majority on the binary Yes/No question.

Spanish democracy : doubleplusgood

I wanted to vote but Big Brother told me it was illegal.

I went to the polling station, and Big Brother's police smashed me in the face with a truncheon.

They did it to save democracy and protect my human rights.

I checked with Big Brother's European allies to make sure he hadn't malfunctioned in some way, but they said "no, this is all perfectly normal".

The votes were counted and the result was announced, but Big Brother explained there hadn't been an election at all.  It had just been my imagination.

Some people attempted to implement the result of the imaginary election, but Big Brother's judges tried to arrest them and they had to flee to another country.

Then Big Brother decided to hold an election of his own.  It would be much better than the imaginary election because it wouldn't be imaginary, and because everyone would be able to take part. 

I tried to vote for my favourite candidates in Big Brother's election, but found I couldn't because they were in jail for organising the imaginary election. 

So I tried to vote for my second favourite candidates, but found I couldn't because Big Brother had banned their party for campaigning in the imaginary election.

I did manage to vote for my third favourite candidates.  And they won.   Hurrah!

But then Big Brother annulled the election results because it was undemocratic for the winners to win.

I went on a demonstration because I didn't think this was fair.  Big Brother's police smashed me in the face with a truncheon again and I suddenly remembered it was all totally fair.

Freedom is Slavery.

Dictatorship is Democracy.

I love Big Brother.

Listen to the real FM, Kenny

As you may already have seen, Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson fell hook, line and sinker for a tweet from a parody Nicola Sturgeon account stating that "Scotland does not recognise the Republic of Catalunya" and that "the Spanish constitution must be respected".  Emboldened by his belief that the real Sturgeon had made such a wildly implausible intervention, he rather amusingly scolded me for not falling into line with my party leader's edict.  "Listen to the FM!" he said, sternly.

(Click screenshots to enlarge.)

As Kenny's appeal to authority has blown something of a puncture, I'll just take this opportunity to amplify my original point.  17,410,742 people voted Leave in the EU referendum last year, out of a total registered electorate of 46,500,001.  That means just 37.4% of the electorate voted Leave - and yet, on the whole, the UK's political and journalistic establishment don't seem to have any problem with the idea that Britain must withdraw from the European Union on the basis of a mandate that would have fallen short of the notorious 40% rule in 1979.

In the Catalan independence referendum, 2,044,038 people voted in favour of independence, out of a total registered electorate of 5,313,564.  That means 38.5% of the electorate voted for independence - a slightly higher percentage than Leave achieved.  It would of course have been even higher if Spanish police hadn't stolen votes, closed polling stations, and used violence to prevent people from voting.

In fairness to Kenny, I saw the fake Sturgeon tweet when I did a Google search last night, and although I was dismayed by it, for just a split-second I thought it might be real.  It was the "to be clear" that did it - that sounds like Sturgeonesque language.  But when I thought about it I quickly became suspicious and decided to check, because I realised that an explicit rejection of the mandate for independence would have directly contradicted what she has been saying for weeks.  It tells us quite a bit about Kenny's fundamental misreading of the SNP that he didn't become suspicious about a tweet like that, even after reflection.  In reality, given the strength of feeling about Catalonia, there were only really two options open to the Scottish Government - either offer a symbolic "recognition" of Catalan independence (even though a non-sovereign country like Scotland has no power to recognise a state), or just opt out of the problem by neither recognising nor disputing the independence declaration.  They've gone for the latter option - I'm not sure that will be enough to satisfy most SNP members, but I can certainly understand why they've done it.

Barcelona, like a jewel in the sun

Depressingly (in one sense), I'm just about old enough to clearly remember Slovenia's unilateral declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.  I recall the TV reports dripping with scepticism about the prospect of the new "state" receiving recognition from the international community, and positive derision about its ambitions for membership of the European Community (as the EU was then called).  And yet in the blink of an eye, Slovenia had attracted widespread recognition, and within just thirteen years it was a full member of the EU.  None of this is to say that history is bound to repeat itself in Catalonia, but it's a useful reminder that it pays dividends to be sceptical about journalistic scepticism.  These situations often have a momentum all of their own.

I suspect that if the events of the last 24 hours do eventually lead to authentic independence, Catalonia may have a more tortuous journey to follow than Slovenia did.  A hard notion though it is to countenance amid the euphoria of the moment, there may yet have to be a strategic and temporary renunciation of the independence declaration if Spain is prepared to offer a binding independence referendum in return.  Why would the comically intransigent Spanish political establishment offer such a thing in a million years?  Most likely because there is a reasonable chance that Catalonia will prove to be ungovernable under Madrid's puppet regime, if enough public servants switch their allegiance to the new republic and if civil disobedience is widespread.  We don't know yet if that will prove to be the case, but we're about to find out.

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Since my last update, four more Britain-wide voting intention polls have been published, and yet again, the Scottish subsamples from all of them put the SNP in the lead.

Survation: SNP 37%, Labour 28%, Conservatives 16%, Liberal Democrats 13%, UKIP 3%, Greens 2%

YouGov (a): SNP 42%, Labour 24%, Conservatives 22%, UKIP 6%, Liberal Democrats 5%

ICM: SNP 39%, Conservatives 27%, Labour 24%, Greens 6%, Liberal Democrats 4%

YouGov (b): SNP 36%, Labour 30%, Conservatives 25%, Liberal Democrats 5%, Greens 2%, BNP 1%

That means an extraordinary seventeen subsamples in a row have now put the SNP in first place - quite a contrast with the pattern seen between election day and the end of August, when a substantial minority of subsamples were putting Labour ahead.  It does look very much like the SNP's lead dropped significantly during the summer before recovering.  That trend will never be part of the 'official record', though, because the first full-scale Scottish poll after the election wasn't conducted until early September, which if the subsamples are to be believed is roughly the point at which the political weather changed back in the SNP's favour.