Jo Swinson CBE - is this some sort of joke?

More than a few eyebrows were raised when the news leaked out that Nick Clegg was to be knighted in the New Year's Honours list.  He is, after all, the man who inherited a party that won a post-war record of 62 seats under Charles Kennedy in 2005, and somehow managed to reduce that to just 8 by the time he stepped down in 2015.  There was also a touch of scepticism as to whether Britain's fourth party collectively deserved the bumper number of knighthoods they have received of late.  But at least you can make a semi-plausible case for Clegg getting some sort of recognition from the honours system - he was party leader for seven-and-a-half years, Deputy Prime Minister for five years, and he was also the first Liberal or Liberal Democrat to lead his party into government at Westminster level since the wartime coalition of the 1940s.

No such excuse can be made for Jo Swinson, who I've just seen has been given a CBE.  Does anyone have the faintest idea what she's supposed to have done to deserve that?  She hasn't yet been party leader, she's only been deputy leader for a few months, and in the coalition government she never made it beyond junior ministerial rank.  Perhaps more to the point, she's only 37 years old, which in all likelihood means the meat of her political career is still ahead of her.  Honouring her at this stage is an unfathomable decision, and one that surely brings the system into further disrepute.  The obvious suspicion is that the Lib Dems, who pose as radicals but are establishment to their bones, have given up on collecting votes and are getting their kicks by collecting undeserved gongs instead.

Ironically, this development coincides with an article in the Guardian the other day which suggested that senior Lib Dems are increasingly looking towards Layla Moran as their party's future.  Swinson's name wasn't even mentioned.  That's an astonishing turnaround from a few short months ago when it looked like Swinson would only need to wait a couple of years for Vince Cable to step down, and then enjoy a coronation.  She may have miscalculated very badly by sitting out this year's leadership contest.  And that could well be a stroke of luck from our point of view, given that home-grown leaders tend to produce at least a modest vote boost in Scotland.

Not that I'd want to take sides in a matter that doesn't concern me, of course, so here's my totally unrelated Eurovision video of the day.

Was the SNP's victory in June 2017 the last time Scotland will participate in a UK general election?

You might remember that a few months ago Alastair Meeks royally entertained us by claiming, in all apparent seriousness, that the SNP could never even hope to 'recover' from the terrible setback of comfortably winning the general election in Scotland unless it ditched Nicola Sturgeon as leader.  Quite honestly, even if the narrative of 'SNP crisis' hadn't been so obviously bogus, Alastair's advice would still have been pretty dreadful because the alternatives to Nicola Sturgeon would all - at least for the moment - be a step backwards.  Humza Yousaf is presumably the long-term heir apparent, but he's still a bit too young and inexperienced if a vacancy were to occur any time soon.  Angus Robertson would be the best available replacement for now, but he doesn't currently have a seat in the Scottish Parliament and trying to engineer one for him via a constituency by-election would be fraught with danger.  That would probably leave us with John Swinney as a safe pair of hands - but we know from his own track record as leader between 2000 and 2004 that he'd be unlikely to prove more of an electoral asset than Nicola Sturgeon.  In a nutshell, regardless of your interpretation of the election result in June, the SNP would be completely nuts to change leader.

Alastair still seems to be banging the same drum today, albeit with a tad more circumspection: "The SNP meanwhile...[lost] seats to both Labour and the Conservatives in a unionist pincer movement. The risk of this being extended at a future election is obvious to all. The SNP need a strategy for dealing with this, and fast." That's fair comment as far as it goes, but it is, of course, only one side of the coin.  The SNP now hold a number of ultra-marginal seats that could be lost on a tiny swing, but exactly the same is true of the two main unionist parties, and especially of Labour, who could find themselves once again facing a near-wipeout if they suffer the kind of modest swing to the SNP that was being suggested by a couple of opinion polls in the early autumn.  Presumably Labour need a strategy for dealing with that risk - and fast - every bit as much as the SNP do.  For some strange reason we don't hear as much about Labour's extreme vulnerability, though.

As far as the SNP's electoral strategy is concerned, it's surely pretty obvious that they made a tactical error in May and June by downplaying their own USP.  People who voted Tory believed they were voting "against Indyref 2", and people who voted Labour reckoned they were voting for a real Labour government of the type that hadn't been seen since at least the 1970s, if not earlier.  The SNP weren't offering anything that could compete with the clarity of those pitches - which is ironic, given that the party's whole raison d'etre is as radical and inspiring as you can possibly get.  They did make a half-hearted attempt to mobilise the pro-independence vote by suggesting that if they won a majority of Scottish seats, that would constitute a triple-lock mandate for a second independence referendum - but then mystifyingly gave the impression of backtracking a little on that pledge for the first few days after the majority was duly achieved, which will have sent the dangerous message to some indy supporters that their vote for the SNP was not the vote for a referendum that they were explicitly told it was.  What is needed is the rectification of those tactical mistakes - not a change of leader.

However, all of the above assumes that the SNP will actually have to face another national election prior to independence, and it's by no means clear that they will.  The only one that is sort-of-scheduled to take place before May 2021 is the European election of 2019, which will not go ahead in the UK if Brexit happens on the planned date (although to be honest I don't have a clue if it'll go ahead if Brexit is delayed by a few months).  There is no better strategy for avoiding any risks attached to the next UK general election than making sure that Scotland is an independent country by the time it is held.  As I've noted many times, the SNP will have no option but to do their best to help bring about an early general election if the opportunity arises - but at the moment no such opportunity is on the horizon, and if that continues to be the case, a Yes vote in a 2019 indyref would ensure that the last ever Scottish contribution to a UK general election was the handsome SNP victory of June 2017.  Now, there's a thought to conjure with.

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Five new Scottish subsamples from GB-wide polls have been published since my last update...

BMG: SNP 36%, Labour 24%, Conservatives 22%, Liberal Democrats 8%, Greens 7%, UKIP 2%

ICM (a): SNP 34%, Conservatives 29%, Labour 23%, Greens 6%, Liberal Democrats 5%, UKIP 3%

YouGov: Conservatives 37%, SNP 34%, Labour 21%, Liberal Democrats 4%, UKIP 2%, Women's Equality 1%

Opinium: SNP 37%, Labour 27%, Conservatives 25%, Greens 5%, UKIP 2%, Liberal Democrats 2%

ICM (b): SNP 41%, Conservatives 27%, Labour 26%, Greens 2%, Liberal Democrats 2%, UKIP 1%

No cause for alarm in any of that.  The YouGov results are a bit of an oddity, because since the election YouGov subsamples have more or less consistently put the Tories in third place, and yet this time the Tories are suddenly in the lead - but that just demonstrates what a large margin of error any individual subsample has, even when it's correctly weighted (as YouGov subsamples apparently are).

Across all firms, thirty-one of the last thirty-four subsamples have put the SNP ahead.

Momentous Panelbase poll suggests Brexit could lead to majority support for independence

You've probably seen by now that Wings has a new Panelbase poll out.  It looks like this is merely the first of several questions from the poll that will be published over the coming days (making it an almost unique example of a political poll that was commissioned with the specific intention of keeping people entertained over Christmas!).

The UK is currently scheduled to leave the EU in March of 2019.  If a referendum on Scottish independence was held around this time, and if a Yes vote meant that Scotland would definitely stay in the EU when the UK left, which way do you think you would vote?

I would vote for an independent Scotland in the EU: 49%
I would vote for Scotland to stay in the UK and leave the EU: 51%

For the avoidance of doubt, this can't be taken to indicate a recent increase in support for independence, because the poll asks a non-conventional and hypothetical question, and indeed offers a choice between two non-conventional and hypothetical answers.  It's not directly comparable with more standard independence polls, which over the last few months have had the Yes vote hovering between 43% and 47%.  Nevertheless, it's an extremely interesting finding because it directly contradicts a narrative that is almost beginning to be regarded in some quarters as indisputable fact - namely that the SNP leadership made a serious miscalculation in 2016 and early 2017 by assuming that Brexit could in itself bring about majority support for independence.  The theory is that the Yes side has lost as many (or perhaps more) votes as it has gained, because too many people who voted Yes in 2014 and Leave in 2016 do not regard continued membership of the EU as a price worth paying for independence, while not enough Remain voters regard independence as a price worth paying for EU membership.  This poll suggests the opposite is the case - that explicitly tying independence to EU membership actually produces a net gain in Yes support, which is precisely what the SNP leadership thought would be the case all along.

As it happens, the proportion of Remain voters in the poll who say they would vote against independence (32%) is significantly higher than the proportion of Leave voters who say they would vote in favour of independence (21%).  But because there are far more Remain voters than Leave voters in Scotland, that's still enough to produce a net boost for Yes.

Of course, some will argue that the results of the poll are meaningless because the hypothetical scenario presented by the question will never come to pass - ie. if there's an independence referendum in early 2019, voters won't have absolute 100% certainty that an independent Scotland would remain in the EU (or rejoin after a short hiatus, which amounts to the same thing).  But if EU leaders are interested in the unexpected bonus of retaining one-third of the UK's land mass after Brexit, and it's not hard to see why they might be, it's quite conceivable that they could find a way of dropping sufficiently heavy hints about how easy an independent Scotland is likely to find it to remain a member.  That might produce much the same effect on public opinion as absolute certainty would.

By the way, don't be dismayed by the fact that the No side are slightly ahead even on the hypothetical question.  This poll is the quintessential statistical tie - meaning it's not possible to know which side is really ahead due to the standard 3% margin of error.  Looking at the raw numbers in the datasets, the result appears to be fractionally closer than even the headline numbers suggest - something like Yes 49.2%, No 50.8%.

One slight reason for caution is that people minded to vote No on a standard independence question seem to have been disproportionately likely to have said "Don't Know" to the question tying independence to EU membership, and thus many are excluded from the headline figures.  But that in itself is an intriguing finding.

Catalan election dramatically reinforces mandate for independence

With almost all the votes in, this looks like being the result -

Pro-independence parties: 70 seats
Anti-independence parties: 57 seats
Neutral party: 8 seats

Pro-independence parties: 70 seats
All others combined: 65 seats

PRO-INDEPENDENCE OVERALL MAJORITY OF 5 SEATS

The statistic that the Spanish government and EU leaders will cling to for dear life is that the pro-independence parties didn't quite manage 50% of the popular vote, but don't be fooled by that - the pro-indy camp have a lead of around four percentage points over all of the unionist parties combined.  The neutral party's votes are the fly in the ointment, but there's no reason to doubt that they would break in both directions in the event of a binding independence referendum, making it overwhelmingly unlikely that the fabled "silent majority for Spanish unity" actually exists.  The turnout was exceptionally high, so there's no excuse there - it's not so much a silent majority as a 'vanished from the face of the earth majority'.

Obviously it would have been preferable, and would have removed the last tiny vestige of uncertainty, if the three pro-indy parties had won an absolute majority of the votes.  But let's be honest - even if that had happened, Spain would still be saying that independence is illegal, and the EU would still be sticking their heads in the sand.  An absolute majority of seats is the far more important thing from a strategic point of view, because it leaves the Spanish government in a right old pickle.  The election was called so that the Catalan parliament would no longer be a 'rebel' body, but instead that status quo ante has been reinstated - the parliament will presumably at least nominally continue to regard itself as the legislative body of an independent republic.  Will Spain now turn a blind eye to that?  Or will it call yet another election, and perhaps another one after that, and make itself look utterly ridiculous?  Or will it indefinitely suspend the Catalan democratic institutions?  All of those three options look untenable, and yet if Rajoy doesn't want to grant a binding independence referendum (or indeed to recognise the independence declaration that has already been issued) he'll have to select one of them.

There was a minor surprise in the battle between the two main pro-independence parties, with Carles Puigdemont's centre-right grouping Junts per Catalunya just pipping the left-wing ERC, despite having trailed in the pre-election polls.  However, once the small CUP party is taken into account, the pro-indy camp has a slight left-wing majority, making it a very different beast from the Catalan nationalist movement of old.  On the unionist side, Rajoy was utterly annihilated - his ironically-named Partido Popular seems to have finished seventh in the popular vote, and probably seventh in terms of seats as well.  (And you thought the Scottish Tories paid a heavy price for opposing devolution in the 1990s?)  His natural support seems to have defected en masse to the supposedly 'liberal and centrist' (but in reality right-of-centre and conservative) Ciutadans party, perhaps because that's more of a home-grown unionist outfit.

A modest and sincerely-intended suggestion for the EU: if they don't want to look ludicrously one-sided and anti-democratic, they ought as a minimum to call on Spain to grant Puigdemont an amnesty and allow him to resume his role as president without any further risk of imprisonment.  He is, after all, a newly re-elected head of government, and not a serial killer.

UPDATE: I see that the Madrid-based El Pais newspaper is not grouping the parties into the three camps of 'pro-independence', 'anti-independence' and 'neutral', but instead lumping the anti-independence and neutral parties together in order to claim that the 'No Independentistas' defeated the 'Independentistas' in the popular vote.  I suppose you have to admire their creativity if nothing else.

Fresh blow for Leask as "Kremlin-backed alt-Nat TV show" conquers the ratings

You might be interested to know that the Alex Salmond Show have issued a press release that deals robustly with a couple of taunts that have been directed against the programme - firstly that it hasn't been a ratings success, and secondly that it's struggled to attract prominent guests because of the reputation of RT.  On the latter point, it's stressed that over the first few weeks the show has already interviewed two heads of state (President Michel Aoun of Lebanon and President Carles Puigdemont of the new Republic of Catalonia), two knights of the realm, a former member of the Scottish Cabinet, four Westminster MPs, and also Alastair Campbell, who has recently reinvented himself as one of the leading anti-Brexit commentators.  I'm not totally convinced that the BBC's Andrew Marr or Sky's Sophy Ridge could claim to have beaten that line-up over an equivalent time-frame.

As far as the ratings are concerned, they've actually increased significantly since the triumphant headlines about "Alex Salmond's Kremlin TV show getting the same number of viewers as a Taggart repeat" (which on the face of it struck me as an accolade rather than a mark of failure).  The 6.30pm showing on 7th December attracted 19,000 viewers, up around 20% since the first episode in November.  If anything, the improvement is a surprise, because a programme launched in a blitz of publicity will often lose viewers after the initial novelty wears off.  Presumably it remains the case that the overwhelming majority of the show's UK audience live in Scotland, which means roughly 1 in 300 of the entire Scottish population were watching at just one moment in time - pretty healthy for a minority TV channel that not everyone has heard of, and that some don't have access to.  But more to the point, the 19,000 figure doesn't even include viewers for the other two broadcasts on the same day, or those who saw some or all of the programme on YouTube - which in reality is most people's point of contact with RT.

By the way, if like me you have a TV package like Virgin Media that doesn't include RT, the channel is live-streamed for free on the website HERE.  The next Alex Salmond Show is tomorrow at 7.30am, 6.30pm, and 11.30pm.

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It looks like the Catalan election tomorrow is going to be a frighteningly close-run thing.  Barring widespread voting irregularities (which admittedly can't be ruled out), there's not much risk that the anti-independence parties will win a majority between them - but of course this is not really a fair contest, because the pro-independence parties effectively need to clear a tougher hurdle than their opponents do.  It's not enough simply to be the bigger of the two camps - only an absolute majority of seats will be interpreted as reinforcing the mandate for independence.  The estimates of seats in most recent opinion polls suggest that the majority is on a knife-edge, with potentially just one or two seats tipping the balance in either direction.

There's also an intriguing battle within the pro-indy camp - both the left-wing ERC and Puigdemont's centre-right Junts per Catalunya are vying the be the largest single grouping.  Puigdemont has made up ground recently, but still hasn't quite drawn level with the ERC.  It's possible (perhaps even probable) that the split in the pro-indy camp will allow the virulently anti-independence Ciutadans to come through the middle and claim 'victory' - although that won't really matter as long as Junts per Catalunya, the ERC and the smaller CUP have a combined majority between them.

A gentle word in the ear of Tommy Sheppard: let's get real

My jaw has just dropped to the floor upon reading an article in The National in which SNP MP Tommy Sheppard argues that if Kezia Dugdale defects from Labour to the SNP, she should be required to stand down and fight for re-election under her new colours.  Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe for one moment that Kezia Dugdale is going to defect - I think the idea that she must be a secret SNP sympathiser because of her father and her partner is a paranoid fantasy put about by the Ian Smarts of this world.  But let's say for the sake of argument that she (or more likely somebody else entirely) were to make the jump.  Are we really supposed to accept that the SNP should turn down the golden chance to move closer to overall majority status at Holyrood, and to make the pro-independence majority in parliament more emphatic, just on some point of principle that no other party is signed up to?  Are the SNP going to treat politics as a game of cricket when other parties would be completely ruthless if the circumstances were reversed?

At Westminster, there have been instances of Labour MPs defecting to the Tories or Liberal Democrats without a by-election, Tory MPs defecting to Labour or the Liberal Democrats without a by-election, and even one instance of a Labour MP (Dick Douglas in 1990) defecting to the SNP without a by-election.  Why would we suddenly get squeamish at a time when the stakes are so much higher?  If we assume that Mark McDonald can still be relied upon to informally follow the SNP whip, just one more MSP would take the party to exactly 50% of the seats in Holyrood (excluding the non-voting Presiding Officer), thus making it much harder for the opposition parties to inflict any defeats.  By contrast, if Ms Dugdale or any other Labour list MSP were to simply resign, the SNP wouldn't even have a chance to win the seat in a by-election - a slavishly loyal replacement Labour MSP would simply be appointed from lower down the list, and we'd be no further forward.

I'd suggest to Tommy Sheppard that if we're going to win independence, it might be an idea not to turn our noses up at golden opportunities, especially any that may fall gift-wrapped from heaven.

Ruth Davidson set for "future of demeaning irrelevance" as yet another Scottish poll puts the SNP on course for Westminster gains from the Tories

Stuart Campbell of Wings has tweeted the following Survation polling figures, which appear to be from a new full-scale Scottish poll.  I can't find any other reference to them yet, so I suppose there's an outside chance they may turn out to be from a subsample or something like that, but I doubt it.  If it is indeed a full poll, it's the fifth to be published since the general election, and the fourth of those to suggest that the SNP's support is higher than it was on polling day.  (The exception was the previous Survation poll a few days ago that had the SNP on exactly the same 37% vote share they managed in June.)

Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster general election (Survation):

SNP 38% (+1)
Labour 29% (+1)
Conservatives 24% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 7% (n/c)

Note: the percentage changes listed above differ from the ones in the Sunday Post graphic tweeted by Stuart, because I'm using the most recent Survation poll as the baseline, whereas the Post are using the last Survation poll but one.

We've now had three Survation polls since the election, and the sequence of results for the SNP has been 39-37-38.  That's the kind of minor fluctuation that is easily consistent with margin of error noise, so it could well be that SNP support bounced back a little after the general election aftermath and has remained steady over the last two or three months.  It's also worth recalling that the two non-Survation polls in the early autumn had the SNP in the low 40s, which leaves open the possibility that SNP support has been running steady at an even higher level than Survation are suggesting.

It's easy to become distracted by the eye-catching detail of Labour overtaking the Tories to reclaim second place, but the bottom line is that the SNP are the challengers in all of the Scottish seats held by the Tories.  What will determine whether the Tories can hold what they have is the lead held over them by the SNP - and, according to this poll, that lead has increased from eight points at the general election to a whopping fourteen points now.  And the direction of travel could be the most troubling thing of all for Ruth Davidson - if the lead grows to twenty points or more, the Tories could be facing carnage at the next election.

As for the SNP v Labour battle, it's much harder to judge.  This poll, just like the last Survation poll, implies a trivial net swing of 0.5% from SNP to Labour, which because of the large number of ultra-marginal seats would be enough to move several to the Labour column.  But the snag is that no poll can really be that precise due to the margin of error.  The figures are also perfectly consistent with a small swing from Labour to SNP, which could see the SNP regaining seats from Labour as well as the Tories.

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 39% (n/c)
Labour 28% (+3)
Conservatives 24% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 7% (-1)

Unlike the Survation poll a few days ago which dented the "progress for Labour" narrative by suggesting Labour's Holyrood support was absolutely static, this one does suggest a bit of an advance.  Obviously it's unlikely that anything significant has changed over such a short time-scale, so the difference can probably be explained by the margin of error, and we'll have to wait for more information to discover where the truth lies.

Voting intentions for next Scottish independence referendum:

Yes 46% (-1)
No 54% (+1)

No statistically significant changes on independence, but what very much is significant is that this is the third Survation poll in a row to put Yes support higher than the 45% recorded in the September 2014 referendum, and indeed substantially higher than the 43% recorded in the post-election Survation poll in June.

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UPDATE: Confirmation from Stuart on Twitter - "It's a full-size poll. 1006 respondents, 1-5 December."  It looks like Survation didn't send out the usual embargoed information about the poll (perhaps at the Sunday Post's request), because even several hours later it's barely been mentioned anywhere online.  Britain Elects haven't reported it, and it hasn't made it onto the Wikipedia list yet. 

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UPDATE II: The regional list results from the poll have now been revealed, and oddly enough Labour's step forward on the constituency ballot hasn't been mirrored at all on the list.

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 32% (-1)

Labour 24% (-1)

Conservatives 21% (-1)

Greens 10% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

It's IMPOSSIBLE for a devolved parliament to have a Brexit veto (except when it's in the Tories' own interests, in which case it's obviously totally possible)

In my last blogpost, I posed the question: given the entrenched positions of the DUP, the Irish government and anti-European Tory MPs, how was it even possible for a deal to be reached?  Ireland required no hard border, which meant either that Britain as a whole had to remain closely aligned to the EU (ie. a soft Brexit), or there had to be a special status for Northern Ireland.  The DUP's red line was no special status for Northern Ireland, which left no other option for Theresa May but to concede the principle of a soft Brexit right now - except, of course, that would be totally unacceptable to anti-European Tory MPs.

The circle has theoretically been squared today by allowing Tory MPs to retain hope that a soft Brexit can be averted by means of a special status for Northern Ireland, while also keeping the DUP on board by giving the Northern Ireland Assembly a veto on such a deal (which, given the cross-community voting arrangements in the Assembly, amounts to a DUP veto).  Essentially, it's a temporary truce that hinges on the stupidity of Tory MPs - they have to believe it's possible that the DUP will eventually sign off on Northern Ireland becoming a "special administrative region", which is plainly never going to happen.  When that realisation hits home, it's not hard to imagine how everything could quickly unravel, and an extreme 'no deal' Brexit could be back on the cards.

As far as the consequences for Scotland are concerned, arguably today's developments leave the Tories in an even worse position than the proposed agreement on Monday would have done.  The Monday text merely conceded that one part of the UK could remain more closely aligned to the EU than other parts if it so wishes, which the Tories had previously said was impossible for Scotland.  Today's text goes further and gives a devolved legislature a veto on one aspect of Brexit, which was also supposed to be completely impossible.  The SNP are quite right to scent blood.

*  *  *

Two new Scottish subsamples have been published since my last update -

ICM: SNP 33%, Labour 27%, Conservatives 24%, Greens 8%, Liberal Democrats 6%, UKIP 1%

YouGov: SNP 38%, Labour 30%, Conservatives 23%, Liberal Democrats 5%, Greens 2%, BNP 2%, UKIP 1%

Across all firms, twenty-seven of the last twenty-nine subsamples have put the SNP in first place.

A paradox: did Tory losses at the general election make a hard Brexit more likely?

There was a great deal of speculation back in June about whether the election resulting in a hung parliament - albeit, crucially, one in which the Conservatives and DUP held a majority between them - made a hard Brexit significantly less likely.  The theory was that Labour would wield much more influence, and that even the DUP would help steer the government towards a softer Brexit because of their pragmatic desire for a 'frictionless frontier' with the Republic.  Well, the latter point is now looking distinctly ropey, because the one and only reason a hard Irish border even remains a possibility today is because the DUP vetoed the deal yesterday.  It's still the case that the DUP would probably sign up quite happily to a soft Brexit as long as there were explicit guarantees that the degree of 'softness' would be uniform throughout the UK, and that Northern Ireland wouldn't end up in a 'one country, two systems' scenario.  But any such guarantees would trigger a mass Tory rebellion and quite possibly bring the government down.

The trouble with trying to bounce people into an agreement they wouldn't ordinarily sign up to is that you have to move so fast that they don't know what's hit them until it's too late.  The gambit almost worked yesterday, but a miss is as good as a mile, and Theresa May's game has now been well and truly rumbled.  Having taken such open satisfaction in foiling Dublin's plans, the DUP will presumably only be able to get back on board if the Irish government are seen to publicly back down on points of substance, and that's surely very unlikely.  Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics are now wise to May's willingness to concede a soft Brexit if that's the only way of squaring the Northern Ireland circle, and they'll move over the coming days to close that option off.   Where else is there to go?

Right at this moment, it does appear that the loss of the Tory majority has - against all expectations - created a dynamic that makes a hard Brexit more likely, not less so.

Schrodinger's No Regulatory Divergence

I've just been catching up with the fudge on Northern Ireland that looks set to save the Brexit negotiations - but at what price?  My first reaction was that it would bring down the Tory government because the DUP would withdraw support, but it looks like what we're actually moving towards is a situation where the EU and Ireland insist that a special status has been agreed for Northern Ireland, while the DUP insist the deal doesn't mean any such thing.  Or to put it another way, the DUP have seemingly decided to "explain" a sellout to their own voters, rather than oppose it.  I'm not sure that's sustainable, but if the DUP leadership do try to hold the line, they could quickly find themselves facing the same fate as David Trimble and Reg Empey.

And what of Scotland?  It seems to me there is one answer, and one answer only, to the question of why Scotland can't have the same deal as Northern Ireland.  That answer is "because it would create a border on the island of Great Britain".  But the moment the Tories actually say that out loud, the unionist population of Northern Ireland will hear the message loud and clear that a border is being created between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the DUP leadership will be toast.

There are two political parties that are suddenly in a pickle today - and the SNP isn't one of them.