Leonard left red-faced as Labour propaganda site admits SNP is still ahead in internal polling

The new Scottish Labour and anti-independence propaganda site The Red Robin has until now been best known for the inexplicable decision of CommonSpace (an ostensibly pro-independence news outlet) to actively promote it as if it was practically a sister site.  But tonight it's gaining new attention by breathlessly claiming an exclusive about "Labour internal polling" that supposedly shows the party has "dramatically closed the gap on the SNP".

Yeah, up to a point, Lord Copper.  The polling was conducted by Moonlight Research, and if the name doesn't sound familiar to you, there's a good reason for that. I cannot recall them ever having conducted a political poll before - or at least not one that's seen the light of day.  The Red Robin are correct in stating that Moonlight are members of the British Polling Council [see below for an update on that point], so it would be wrong to dismiss them out of hand as some sort of Mickey Mouse outfit.  But with no track-record whatsoever, it's impossible to know how likely their figures are to be even vaguely close to the truth.  And because they have never conducted a published Scottish political poll before, there are no baseline figures to measure percentage changes from, which means The Red Robin's repeated claims that Labour have gained ground in the poll are quite simply wrong.  Because of house effects and methodological differences, you simply can't look at two polls conducted by different firms and measure percentage changes from one to the other.  It just doesn't work that way.  You can only measure from previous polls conducted by the same firm - and in this case there aren't any.  For all we know, Moonlight may have a Labour-friendly methodology that would have produced very similar results at any time during the last few months.

As a general rule, "internal polling" is always less satisfactory than public polls commissioned by media organisations, because we only get to see internal figures if they're favourable for the party that commissioned them.  So, for example, in a series of eight internal polls you might only see the one that happened to be most favourable for Labour, which could well give you a completely distorted impression of the significance of an outlier result.  But at least with internal polling that is properly published, it's brought into the open, and we eventually get to see the datasets, allowing us to judge how much credibility to give the figures.  This particular case falls well short of that standard, because it looks as if Labour have no intention of publishing the poll, but have just conveniently decided to leak partial figures to a friendly website.  We don't even have a clue whether the figures are being accurately reported, let alone whether the sample size was sufficient, or a hundred other questions we'd need to know the answer to.

For what it's worth, these are the purported figures for Westminster voting intention: SNP 34%, Labour 30%, Conservatives 24%.  Take those with a bucketload of salt.

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UPDATE: As you may have seen, Nick Moon of Moonlight Research has told Wings Over Scotland that his firm is not in fact a member of the British Polling Council, and is not even eligible for membership as it only has one client (presumably the Labour party).  He implies that the confusion has an innocent cause, because as an individual he has a senior role in the BPC.  I don't think that's good enough, because the organisation's website specifically lists Moon as the "company representative" of Moonlight Research on the BPC.  That gives a grossly misleading impression, to put it generously - any reasonable person would feel entitled to conclude that Moonlight are full BPC members and are bound by BPC rules.

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The Parable of the Reasonable Tory Thieves

Tories:  Hey, Scotland!  We're going to have to break into your house soon and steal 111 items.  Don't worry, we'll only be taking what we need, and you'll still have plenty.  Next Tuesday suit you?

Scotland:  This is absolutely outrageous.  Stealing is totally unacceptable in a civilised society.   Please keep your hands off our possessions.

Tories:  OK, OK, maybe 111 is a bit excessive.  We'll only steal 25.  So, next Tuesday?

Scotland:  It is not acceptable for you to steal anything at all.

Tories:  Come on, be reasonable.  We're offering you a very substantial compromise.

Scotland:  We're sorry, but if you don't stop talking about breaking into our house and stealing our possessions, we'll have no option but to reinforce the locks on our doors, and to install advanced anti-intruder devices.

Adam Tomkins:  Reinforcing the locks on your doors simply because someone is threatening to steal from you is an unnecessary, ill-thought-through, incoherent and provocative step.  Scotland must stop sulking, fling its doors wide open, and rejoice at every item that is generously left behind by the benevolent intruders.

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You'd be forgiven for thinking the London Tories actually WANT an early independence referendum

Regular readers of the Herald will be aware that Iain Macwhirter has rarely missed an opportunity in his recent columns to state, supposedly as an established fact, that there isn't going to be another independence referendum any time soon.  I believe he's wrong about that, although obviously I would be foolish to completely exclude the possibility that he knows something the rest of us don't, because he's very well-connected.  However, I thought it was interesting in his most recent piece that he seemed to be relying mainly on gossip from the Westminster side of the equation - ie. that the UK government have convinced themselves that Nicola Sturgeon doesn't have the "authority" to push for a referendum.  Why doesn't she?  Perhaps because she "only" leads a minority government.  (Just as Theresa May does without fretting for a moment about "authority".)  Or perhaps because the SNP lost 19 seats at the general election.  (An election the SNP nevertheless won by a 1987 Thatcher-style landslide majority.)

If it's true that the London Tories have got carried away with the bogus narrative of Nicola Sturgeon losing her capacity to act, that could explain the seemingly insane decision today to curtail negotiations with the Scottish government and unilaterally press ahead with plans to reduce the Scottish Parliament's powers, thus driving a coach and horses through the Sewel Convention, which has been faithfully upheld for nineteen years.  They must truly believe that they can get away with just about anything without having to worry about triggering an independence referendum.

In that they're mistaken.  My own guess (and it is only a guess) is that Nicola Sturgeon has always been genuine about the possibility of a pre-2021 referendum.  But even if by any chance it turns out she hasn't been genuine, it would still be the case that she and the wider independence movement have their breaking-point.  The idea that Scotland can be dragged out of the EU, the single market and the customs union against its will and the Scottish Parliament's powers can be reduced in defiance of the Sewel Convention and the UK government can go to court to get a law of the Scottish Parliament overturned and all of the above can happen despite the Scottish government making efforts in good faith to reach a negotiated settlement...SNP members will be screaming to themselves "if that isn't the change in circumstances that demands a second indyref, what on earth would be?"  The pressure on Nicola Sturgeon to act would be overwhelming, and I doubt if she'd even want to resist it. 

We now have a precedent of a Bill being introduced in spite of doubts over the Scottish Parliament's competence to pass it.  There's no reason why a Bill to legislate for a consultative independence referendum couldn't be brought forward in similar circumstances, with the SNP content to try their luck in the courts.  The current constitutional crisis could well be taking us in that direction - unless, ironically, the Supreme Court or the House of Lords step in over the coming weeks to save the Tories from themselves.

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London's legal challenge to the Continuity Bill perfectly illustrates how "The Vow" was betrayed

Something suddenly crystallised in my mind the other day when I saw a tweet stating that the UK government were going to court in a bid to grab powers back from the Scottish Parliament.  Of course strictly speaking that isn't what's happening (or what's seemingly just about to happen) - the legal challenge to the Continuity Bill will be based on the technical argument that the Scottish Parliament doesn't currently have the legal right to depart from EU law, and won't have until the day after Britain leaves the European Union.  Theoretically, if the UK government win the challenge, all the Scottish government would have to do is wait until immediately after Brexit, and they would then be perfectly free to introduce exactly the same Continuity Bill without legal impediment.  But the snag, as we all know, is that by then Westminster's EU Withdrawal Bill will have been passed, and the Scottish Parliament will have been stripped of some of its current powers and thus will no longer be able to pass the Continuity Bill in its current form.  To all intents and purposes, then, the legal challenge may as well be a bid to destroy the devolution settlement, because if the Supreme Court doesn't uphold the Continuity Act, the Scottish Parliament will be left utterly defenceless in the face of a power-grab.  (The only remaining hope would be a blocking move in the House of Lords.)

And yet...do you remember something?  A major strand of the Smith process which followed on from "The Vow" in 2014 was about supposedly putting the Sewel Convention on a statutory footing.  The convention, among other things, forbids the UK government from removing powers from Holyrood without consent.  If that principle had been meaningfully written into law as promised, it would have been possible for the Scottish Government to go to the Supreme Court to block the power-grab.  Instead, the British government are somehow able to go to the Supreme Court in an attempt to effectively enable the power-grab.  It's utterly grotesque - and that's what betrayal looks like.

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Scot Goes Pop: the fifth most-read alternative media site in Scotland?

Well, it's been several years since I last did a self-indulgent stats post, so it's probably long overdue.  I spotted that a few hours ago the Indyref2 site had compiled a list of "the top six alternative-media sites" based on traffic estimates from the helpfully-titled Traffic Estimate website. I was a bit surprised that Scot Goes Pop wasn't on it, because I knew from having looked into this subject in the past that this blog has very similar traffic levels to both Wee Ginger Dug and Indyref2. So I punched the Scot Goes Pop web address into Traffic Estimate, and found that, sure enough, it should have been on the list, just below Wee Ginger Dug but ahead of CommonSpace. Assuming nobody else has been accidentally left off, this is the correct top seven -

1) Wings Over Scotland: 215,900 unique visitors in the last 30 days
2) Craig Murray: 128,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days
3) Bella Caledonia: 112,200 unique visitors in the last 30 days
4) Wee Ginger Dug: 75,500 unique visitors in the last 30 days
5) Scot Goes Pop: 74,200 unique visitors in the last 30 days
6) CommonSpace: 59,800 unique visitors in the last 30 days
7) Indyref2: 30,800 unique visitors in the last 30 days

In all honesty I'm a bit sceptical about those figures.  I use Google Analytics, and the figures I get there are significantly less than an average of 74,200 per month.  Admittedly there's some traffic that Analytics doesn't pick up, but even so.  It's also intuitively difficult to believe that CommonSpace, a multi-author site that is updated far more frequently than Scot Goes Pop, and that gets free advertising on the mainstream media of the sort that the rest of us can only dream of, is only in sixth place.  Possibly the above figures are just ballpark estimates with a very wide margin of error.  Nevertheless, I can certainly believe that Scot Goes Pop is at least competitive with the likes of CommonSpace and Bella, which is pretty incredible for a one-man operation.

*Self-indulgent post ends*

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#ScotRefBefore2021

I had an exchange with Peter A Bell last night about his "#Referendum2018" hashtag, the frequent use of which he thinks is an important tool to establish support for an early independence referendum.  I told him that I wished I could get behind that hashtag, but I couldn't, because I believe 2018 has already been timed out as a possible date for the vote, and that 2019 or 2020 are now much more probable.  I suggested something like "#ScotRefBefore2021" as a better alternative.  He replied (and this was not a surprise because he's said it many times before) that I might as well opt for #ReferendumNever, because if there isn't a referendum by the autumn of this year, the British state will take some unspecified action to make a vote impossible to hold, or unwinnable.

I think on its own merits the #Referendum2018 thing is harmless enough.  It's pretty obvious that its adherents are heading very shortly for a 'Free by 93' moment, but that's not the end of the world.  However, it becomes more problematical when anyone who doesn't sign up to the 2018 date is told that they effectively oppose an early referendum.  That creates a needless split among people who are essentially on the same side of the debate about timing.  The real debate is between those who think the SNP's mandate for a referendum before the May 2021 election should be honoured, and those who either don't think that or are extremely sceptical.  A unity of purpose among the supporters of a pre-2021 referendum is important, because as we've seen, we'll need to make our case against at least a few well-known and influential people within the SNP who are minded to allow the mandate to expire.  The last thing we need is some artificial division among ourselves over the exact date.  I also worry that Peter is getting himself so boxed in with his insistence on the absolute necessity of a September 2018 vote that he might give up on campaigning for a referendum when he finally accepts his preferred timing isn't going to happen (and that moment can't be far off).  He might even react angrily towards those of us who are continuing to push for an early referendum, which could be rather unhelpful at a time when the prize may be closer than ever.

#ScotRefBefore2021 is just a suggestion, and it may be too unwieldy.  But please, let's come up with a more inclusive hashtag than #Referendum2018 - one that we can all get behind full-bloodedly, and hopefully get trending.

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Tory hubris cruelly exposed AGAIN as even the Beast From The East can't stop the SNP from winning the Clackmannanshire North by-election

To quote the immortal words of Ruth Davidson herself: "Well done, Clacks!"  When it was revealed that the turnout in yesterday's Clackmannanshire North by-election had somehow almost reached one-quarter of the registered electorate, many of us feared the worst, because it seemed obvious that a lot of that must have been postal votes - which could quite reasonably be expected to favour unionist parties, and especially the Tories.  But we should have had more faith - the news has filtered through that the SNP have won.  This is the second outright victory for the SNP in local by-elections in the last three weeks - and the third outright defeat for unionist parties.

UPDATE: Here is the full result on first preferences -

SNP 37.0% (-3.3)

Conservatives 31.7% (+7.7)

Labour 23.7% (-3.0)

Liberal Democrats 4.0% (-1.1)

Greens 3.6% (-0.2)

I gather that quite a few Conservative supporters are extremely keen for us to believe that this is not, as appearances would suggest, a defeat for their party, but rather a stunning triumph - ie. because their vote went up and everybody else's went down.  There are even a few wildly optimistic claims that this result is evidence that the opinion polls are wrong to suggest that the tide is going back out on Scottish Tory fortunes.  Well, good luck to them in attempting to make that narrative stick.  I think most sensible people fully appreciate that this by-election was fought under almost unique circumstances, and ones which favoured the Tories heavily.  The SNP have done extremely well to overcome their disadvantages and squeeze out a victory.

There was a poster on the Vote UK forum yesterday who was absolutely incredulous at suggestions that the by-election should have been called off - "what, for snow?" he asked.  I'm not sure if people outside the affected areas quite realise just what an extreme weather event this has been.  I live about twenty miles from the Clackmannanshire North ward, and when I went out for a short walk yesterday afternoon the scenes were almost medieval.  It must have been physically impossible for some people to get to the polling stations, and highly risky for others to attempt it.  Grant Thoms suggested yesterday morning that it was irresponsible for political parties to even encourage people to vote, but the other side of the equation is that some people who wanted to vote were denied their democratic rights by the decision not to postpone the by-election - or more accurately by the fact that it was apparently not possible under the rules for it to be postponed simply because of the weather.  (In 1974 there was a general election on February 28th - the mind boggles as to what would have happened if the weather had been like this.)  It's simply a fact that more affluent people who are more likely to vote Tory are also more likely to succeed in casting a vote in these difficult circumstances.

To the extent we can draw any lessons at all from this result, though, this is how I would look at it.  The SNP have had a few very bad results in local by-elections since last June, and they've all followed the same pattern - they've been in traditional SNP-Labour battleground areas, and the swing to Labour has significantly outstripped anything suggested by the opinion polls.  The Clackmannanshire result very much bucks that trend.  It's a ward that in the past has seen straight SNP-Labour contests, with Labour even managing to just about fend off the Tories for second place last year.  And yet on this occasion there has essentially been no swing at all from SNP to Labour, and Labour have been pushed into third place by the Tories.  OK, the weather might explain some of that, but there's certainly no sign here of the SNP being swept away by a Corbyn juggernaut in the central belt.

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On why the SNP must honour its mandate to hold an indyref before May 2021

Welcome to "spring", and if you weren't aware that "spring" in Scotland is supposed to resemble a routine day in central Antarctica, you obviously haven't been paying enough attention.  (My own personal theory is that our notion of when seasons start and end is about ten days out of sync with reality - ie. winter really finishes on around March 10th, summer really finishes on around September 10th, and so on.  I have a feeling average temperatures would lend some credence to that idea.)  Anyway, regardless of whether this is "spring" or not, it's most certainly the first day of the month, which means it must be iScot day.  My column this month explains my view that, if the SNP depute leadership contest is to be a proxy vote on the timing of the next independence referendum, it's vitally important that the winner is someone who believes that the current mandate to hold an indyref before 2021 should be honoured.  That might mean James Dornan, or it might mean someone who has yet to throw their hat into the ring.  As you'll probably gather, though, the article was written before Pete Wishart announced that he wouldn't be putting himself forward after all, a development which may mean that any proxy vote won't be quite as clear-cut as we were expecting at one point.  It remains to be seen whether any candidate will explicitly put forward the "let the mandate expire" view.

If you're not a subscriber to the print edition of iScot, you can see a Twitter preview of the first part of the article HERE, and a digital copy of the whole magazine can be inexpensively purchased HERE.

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Although there was immense satisfaction to be drawn from watching Adam "IT'S THE LAW!!!!" Tomkins fail to land any punches on a legal expert of 'even' greater eminence than himself, it remains the case that only the UK Supreme Court can decide whether Tomkins or the Lord Advocate is correct about the legality of the Scottish Government's Continuity Bill.  That'll only happen, of course, if the UK government's law officers are reckless enough to escalate this constitutional crisis into a full-scale Bush v Gore-style showdown by referring the Bill to the courts in the first place. 

The more definitive part of the Lord Advocate's remarks yesterday came in response to Neil Findlay.  Labour have been trying to have their cake and eat it by posing as defenders of the devolution settlement, while arguing that the Scottish Government are blameworthy for not ensuring that the Continuity Bill is "compliant" in the same way that the Welsh Government have done.  The Lord Advocate pointed out that, although there are differences between the devolution settlements in Scotland and Wales, and although there are a few differences between the Continuity Bills put forward in the two countries, none of those differences are actually relevant to the reasons for the Welsh and Scottish Presiding Officers reaching different conclusions about "compliance".  What we were witnessing was simply different individuals coming up with different interpretations of the legal position.  That seems to me to be an unanswerable point.  It's hard to see how Labour can now oppose the Scottish Continuity Bill given that the Welsh equivalent, put forward by a Labour administration in Cardiff, is no more or less "compliant".

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I'm sure at least a few people reading this blogpost are residents of the Clackmannanshire North ward.  If you're one of them, please try to brave the weather to cast a vote in the by-election today (within reason, obviously).  The SNP won the popular vote in the ward last May, but there's a strong enough Labour vote for today's contest to go either way, with the Tories also potentially in the running if there's a low turnout (which, given the circumstances, there almost certainly will be).

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Astonishing: London Tories double down on plans for a power-grab and send Scotland hurtling towards a constitutional crisis

Well, we can now say one thing for certain - Michael Settle's supposed exclusive in the Herald two weeks ago about how Westminster was running up the white flag on its plans for a power-grab from the Scottish Parliament, and how Nicola Sturgeon was poised to declare that she was satisfied with what's on offer, was a load of old hogwash.  It's clear from David Lidington's intervention in the Sunday Telegraph (apparently foreshadowing a key speech) that the London Tories still fully intend to take back some of the powers that were devolved to Scotland in July 1999, and more importantly that they're leaving themselves hardly any wriggle room for a dignified climbdown.  How can they declare today that a power-grab is essential for the UK's post-Brexit economic health, and then a few days or weeks later call the whole plan off?  Realistically, they can't.  And yet we already know that without some sort of substantive climbdown, the Scottish Parliament's pro-independence majority will almost certainly deny legislative consent for the EU Withdrawal Bill - and according to the Sewel Convention, the Bill should not proceed without that consent.  The convention is not legally binding (in spite of the con-trick of it being written into law in a completely unenforceable way), but if it's not honoured, "The Vow" will have been demonstrably betrayed.  In other words, the chances of a major constitutional crisis - one that would probably stiffen the resolve of the SNP to press ahead with an early indyref - have just increased markedly.

What's puzzling is the strategy behind London's latest move.  Whoever briefed Settle earlier this month was obviously guilty of a deception, but at least that person was plainly attempting to pave the way for a deal by giving the impression that Nicola Sturgeon had been given everything she wanted and that it would be totally unreasonable and irrational of her not to sign on the dotted line.  Suddenly we're hearing the complete opposite.  The new belligerent message that the success of Brexit depends on the powers of the Scottish Parliament being reduced will make it much easier for the SNP to simply say no.  Either this is simply dreadful psychology, with the Tories foolishly believing that the Scottish Government will for some reason buckle under pressure from pro-Brexit opinion south of the border, or they actually no longer even want a deal.  If it's the latter, hold onto your hats, because we could be moving into the endgame for the Union.

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Fresh humiliation for hapless Ruth Davidson as Tories LOSE by-election in "safe" Scottish Borders ward

The full result from Selkirkshire hasn't been published yet, but I thought you might enjoy the headline while we're waiting.  Before you get too excited, the Tories were defeated by an independent candidate rather than the SNP, but even so.

UPDATE: Here's the result, and a finer advert you could never see for why it's so important for SNP supporters to use their lower preferences in local council elections.  The Tories were leading on first preferences by a seemingly comfortable six percentage points (albeit their share of the vote was sharply down on their result in the ward last May).  But they still lost, because enough SNP, Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters gave their lower preferences to the leading independent candidate.  The beauty of preferential voting is that even if your favourite candidate or party is well off the pace, you can still help prevent your least favourite party from claiming the seat, and that's exactly what happened here.  Well done to the progressive people of Selkirkshire for using the voting system correctly.

Selkirkshire by-election result (first preference votes):

Conservatives 35.7% (-6.4)
Independent - Penman 29.7% (n/a)
SNP 19.8% (-2.4)
Independent - Gunn 6.3% (-3.5)
Labour 3.8% (+0.1)
Liberal Democrats 2.7% (-0.6)
Greens 2.0% (-1.0)

Even after five counts (ie. after four candidates were eliminated) the Tories were still narrowly ahead by 1307 votes to 1231.  But the decisive moment came when the sizeable pile of SNP votes were transferred on the sixth count - 291 went to the independent, and only 35 went to the Tories, leaving the independent victorious by a margin of 1522 votes to 1342.  If no SNP voters at all had used their lower preferences, Selkirkshire would now be stuck with another Tory councillor.

There's always the fascination of seeing how Labour votes transfer when both the SNP and Tories are still in contention.  In this case the winning independent was the biggest beneficiary of Labour transfers, but nevertheless more than twice as many Labour voters transferred to the SNP as transferred to the Tories.  Clearly the much-vaunted unionist voting bloc has its limitations, even in territory such as the Borders where you'd think the anti-Nat pitch would have some purchase.

The slight fall in the Liberal Democrat vote from 3.3% to 2.7% may not look terribly significant - but when you realise this was a ward in which the Lib Dems took 19.7% of the vote as recently as 2012, it puts things in a completely different perspective.  In Westminster terms, this is part of a constituency that was a Lib Dem heartland until very recently.  So much for the "fightback".

Although the SNP vote fell a little, the fact that the Tory vote fell significantly more means there was technically a swing from Tory to SNP of approximately 2%.

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