Is the end NIGH for Ruth? SHOCK YouGov poll sets SNP on course for LANDSLIDE victory

The mystery I mentioned in the previous post has been solved much quicker than expected - and to be fair, it appears (just this once) that nothing sinister was going on.  The reason why the Scottish subsample was missing from the datasets of the YouGov mega-poll commissioned by the People's Vote campaign was, it seems, that it was being withheld for publication later on as a full-scale poll in its own right, which has now happened.  The results are devastating for Labour, and they're not much better for the Tories either.

Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster election:

SNP 40% (n/c)
Conservatives 25% (-2)
Labour 21% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)
Greens 3% (+1)
UKIP 2% (+1)

The percentage changes listed above are from the last published full-scale Scottish poll from YouGov, which was conducted many months ago.  If anything, the SNP's 40% share might be seen as being on the lower end of expectations, given how well they've been doing in recent YouGov subsamples (never lower than 40% and reaching as high as 46%).  But of course what really matters in a first-past-the-post election is the gap between a party and its competitors - and the SNP's lead over both the Tories and Labour has essentially doubled since the June 2017 election.  On a uniform swing, the SNP would make a big jump from 35 seats at the moment to around 45 - and the big difference from some recent polls is that they'd be making significant seat gains from the Tories and not just Labour.  One of the constituencies they'd recover from the Tories would be Gordon - which might be of some interest to a certain Mr Salmond if he fancies taking his old Westminster seat back once he rejoins the SNP!

The main propaganda purpose of the Britain-wide poll from the point of view of the People's Vote campaign seemed to be to put pressure on the Labour leadership by demonstrating that they will lose massive support to the Liberal Democrats if they are seen to facilitate Brexit.  I wondered in the previous post whether the missing Scottish figures would show that Labour votes in Scotland would drift to the SNP rather than the Lib Dems, and that's broadly proved to be the case.

Hypothetical Scottish voting intentions for Westminster if a Brexit deal is passed by Conservative and Labour MPs, but opposed by SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs:

SNP 43%
Conservatives 27%
Labour 15%
Liberal Democrats 9%

People are generally bad at answering hypothetical questions, so those figures should be taken with a huge dose of salt.  It might well not be anything like that bad for Labour once the page is actually turned - although I also wouldn't rule out the slight possibility that it could be even worse for them if a legend really takes root that they were responsible for dragging Scotland into a hard Brexit.  Either way, it's heartening that voters in Scotland seem to instinctively see the SNP rather than the Lib Dems as the most natural repository for anti-Brexit votes.  That could be a sign that Nicola Sturgeon's post-2017 strategy is paying dividends.

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YouGov and the mystery of the missing Scottish subsample

The remarkably well-resourced "People's Vote" campaign decided, for some reason, to commission a ridiculously enormous GB-wide YouGov poll of 25,537 respondents over the course of Christmas and New Year.  One possibility is that it was really a sequence of daily polls for private consumption, which were later aggregated for publication.  It shows Labour dropping to an unusually low 34%, six points behind the Tories.  In normal circumstances you'd say "it's just one poll, we have to wait for more information", but the reality is that this is the equivalent of an average of more than ten polls conducted over a span of two weeks, so it has to be taken very seriously.  The only saving grace for Labour is that polls taken over Christmas sometimes produce weird results which are later reversed, but there's certainly no guarantee that will prove to be the case on this occasion.

Oddly, and in a complete departure from normal YouGov practice, figures from the Scottish subsample are not provided in the datasets.  Even more oddly, the figures from the London subsample are there, which simply serves to make the omission even more blatant.  At first glance it almost looks like an accidental error, with the non-London subsamples being chopped off from the edge of the page.  But if it was an honest mistake, it's one that YouGov have now had plenty of opportunity to rectify.  So it seems more likely that the People's Vote campaign requested that the Scottish numbers should be withheld.

Although the SNP have pledged their support for a People's Vote, the campaign is presumably still very much under the control of "centrists" and "moderates" in the three main London-based parties.  You can certainly see why it might not be in the interests of such people to publish a Scottish subsample of a size equivalent to a full-scale poll, if by any chance it shows a handsome SNP lead.  And one of the obvious purposes of the poll is to put pressure on the Corbyn leadership by demonstrating that in the hypothetical scenario of a Brexit deal going through with Tory and Labour support, Labour would then lose a huge chunk of its voters to the Liberal Democrats.  If it shows those Labour votes would in Scotland actually be lost to the SNP rather than to the Lib Dems, that may be an inconvenient detail that the People's Vote campaign would rather we didn't hear about.  It's perfectly possible that's the case, because the SNP and Plaid Cymru have a combined GB-wide vote of 5% on the hypothetical question about a Brexit deal passing with Labour support, compared to 4% on the standard voting intention question.

This is all supposition, but what we do know for sure is that the SNP have been doing startlingly well in YouGov subsamples over the last few weeks.  The sequence of SNP results since mid-November has been 40 - 46 - 44 - 41 - 43 - 45.  That's the longest sustained run of 40+ results for a very long time.  There's only been one full-scale Scottish poll during that period (a Panelbase poll showing no change in SNP support at Westminster level), so it's difficult to be sure that the SNP have genuinely been performing better of late.  But if they have, what impact will the resolution of the Alex Salmond case have?  In the very short term, it might be a mildly negative impact, because anything that gives the impression of internal disunity is generally frowned upon by voters.  In the longer-term, though, I suspect the effect will be the complete opposite.  We still need to wait for the outcome of the police investigation, but if this proves to be the start of Alex Salmond's reintegration into the SNP, possibly with a view to him standing as an MP or MSP once again, that can only be a good thing from an electoral point of view.  The SNP is unlikely to be truly at ease with itself until the man who led it for almost one-quarter of its entire existence to date is back in the fold.  And that would certainly put a definitive end to controversial journalist David Leask's bizarre attempts to open up a rift between what he calls "the real SNP" and "alt-Nats" (the latter, incredibly, referring in part to the former First Minister and those most supportive of him).

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I was interviewed on Radio Sputnik yesterday about the increasing likelihood of Nicola Sturgeon setting out a prospective timetable for a second independence referendum quite soon.  You can listen to the interview HERE.

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Would a snap Holyrood election in 2019 really be such a risk?

I'm beginning to realise what it must have felt like to be a social democrat in about 1980, finding yourself by default in a shrinking middle ground as political debate becomes ever more polarised around you.  It seems to me that the two extremes of the debate on how to achieve independence are just as hopeless as each other at the moment.  On the one hand, I had people responding to my post on New Year's Day by saying that Nicola Sturgeon shouldn't even be asking for a Section 30 order, but should instead simply be "repealing the Act of Union".  I asked how that would even be possible, given that the constitution is explicitly reserved to Westminster.  The response was either pseudo-legal gibberish about how the Act of Union supposedly gives the Scottish Parliament a unilateral right to withdraw from the UK (hint: it really doesn't) or a link to Craig Murray's piece explaining that it is normal for countries to become independent without a referendum, and that it is usually done simply by securing recognition from other states.

In principle, I actually agree with Craig that independence is ultimately a matter for international law rather than UK domestic law.  But the snag is that none of the countries that bypassed the hurdle of domestic law in the manner that Craig suggests (for example Slovenia or Croatia) did so just four or five years after their own citizens rejected independence in a free referendum.  Few states, if any, are going to recognise an independent Scotland until it has been demonstrated that the No vote of 2014 has been unambiguously overturned by a fresh vote, which ideally would mean another referendum, or less ideally an election.  So even if you go down the road Craig wants, it just takes you straight back to the original problem of needing a clear mandate for independence.  There isn't any shortcut.

But equally unpromising is the position that some people are attributing to the SNP leadership, which implicitly recognises an absolute Westminster veto by accepting that a) independence cannot happen without a referendum, and b) a referendum cannot happen without a Section 30 order.  The only plan for getting around a veto would appear to be to shame London into backing down by securing mandate after mandate for a referendum, no matter how many years or decades that takes.  So if London says "now is not the time", we campaign some more for an independence referendum, and "take it to the people" in the 2021 Holyrood election.  And if we get another mandate but the reply is "now is still not the time", we campaign even harder and "take it to the people" in the 2026 Holyrood election.  And on and on into infinity: in other words a recipe for Scotland never becoming independent.  The example of Catalonia gives the lie to the notion that no central government would have the nerve to keep saying no indefinitely.

Is there a compromise position between these two extremes that might actually be more effective anyway?  I would guess that the "dissolve the union" camp would be less hostile to the notion of securing another seemingly needless mandate for an indyref if there were two assurances: firstly, that only one more mandate will be sought, meaning that if London are still intransigent after that an alternative course of action will be followed, and b) the new mandate will be sought very quickly.  If, for example, a snap Westminster general election was held this year, and the SNP decided to use that to have one last go at securing a mandate that London might actually respect, that wouldn't slow things down much at all.  The snag, of course, is that the timing of the next Westminster election is not in the SNP's control.

What is effectively in their control, though, is the timing of the next Holyrood election, because there is provision for an early election in certain circumstances.  Nicola Sturgeon can't literally "call" a snap election, but it would be relatively easy for her to engineer one for the purposes of securing another indyref mandate.  It's widely assumed she would never do that because of her instinctive caution, but I'm not actually sure the risks of an early Holyrood election would be as great as they appear.  Yes, elections can throw up surprise results, but that generally only happens when the underdog party has an inspiring leader capable of turning things around on the campaign trail.  Scottish Labour have...Richard Leonard.  OK, Ruth Davidson is a different proposition, but there appears to still be a natural ceiling of around 30% on Scottish Tory support, so any real danger would have to come from Labour, and at the moment I just can't see that happening.  Barring a very weird chain of events, I would suggest the worst-case scenario in an early Holyrood election would be the SNP returning to power once again as a minority government, but without a pro-independence majority.  That would clearly be a sub-optimal outcome, but I'm not sure it should be considered awful enough to deter us from chasing a potentially huge reward if the election went well.

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Welcome to the year in which Nicola Sturgeon will *probably* renew her demand for a Section 30 order

As I've said a number of times, political prediction is usually a mug's game, and that could hardly be more true than at this exact moment.  Britain might be about to leave the European Union, or to remain in the European Union for good, or various options in between.  Anybody who says they know for sure what the first three months of this year will bring is deluding themselves.

If most of us had the chance to know just one thing, it would be whether 2019 will be the year in which an independence referendum is called.  But that's the wrong question as far as any hope of making a meaningful prediction is concerned.  There are too many imponderables once the indyref ball is set rolling.  Will London's "now is not the time" line hold?  If it does hold, will the SNP leadership take decisive action to break the logjam, or will we go round in perpetual circles for years to come as we repeatedly secure new mandates for a referendum which are repeatedly ignored?

None of us can know exactly how it will play out, but we'll never get a chance to find out unless Nicola Sturgeon first of all renews her demand for a Section 30 order.  So for now, the most interesting and straightforward question is whether that will happen at some point in 2019.  And it seems to me that, on the balance of probabilities, it will.  There are a few things that could prevent it happening, though -

* A soft Brexit is negotiated which keeps Britain in the single market and customs union indefinitely.  As this has been the SNP's main stated objective throughout most of the last two years, it would be very difficult to press ahead with an indyref if it happened.  But it's highly unlikely - there's no sign of a parliamentary majority for it, and there's a question mark over whether our European partners would faciliate it anyway.

* A "People's Vote" is called.  The odds are still against this, but it's a possibility.  Remember, though, that a Remain vote is by no means a foregone conclusion even if a People's Vote does happen.  A second Leave vote would leave the casus belli for an indyref intact.

* A snap election is called.  If the SNP were to be defeated in a general election - and I mean a genuine defeat rather than the phony unionist triumphalism over the SNP "only" winning 60% of the seats in 2017 - that would obviously make it psychologically much harder to push for a Section 30 order.  But, just like a People's Vote, a general election could go either way - if, as opinion polls currently suggest, the SNP gain seats rather than lose them, the drive for an indyref would have renewed momentum behind it.  It's also possible that a Section 30 request could be made before any snap election anyway.

* Article 50 is extended beyond the end of this year.  That's unlikely - all the mood music suggests that EU countries would only agree to a limited extension for a specific reason (to facilitate a referendum, for example).

* Theresa May's deal is somehow approved, and the SNP leadership then decide to kick the can down the road for another couple of years until Britain's long-term relationship with the EU is decided.  There might be a temptation to do this, but I don't think the rank-and-file SNP membership would stand for it.  They've been patient thus far, but they're not going to accept a "tomorrow never comes" approach.

Taking all of the above into account, I'd suggest there is around a 70% chance that the Section 30 request will be renewed at some point before 31st December of this year, thus returning us to the status quo ante of spring 2017.  And then we'll see.

How will Nebulous Theresa answer the Lorraine Mann Question?

Over at Stormfront Lite, Alastair Meeks has made a set of rather bold political predictions for the coming year - including that Britain won't leave the European Union on schedule in March, and that there will be a fresh referendum.  I don't agree with that - although a referendum is certainly possible, I think the odds are still against it, and it's probably around 50/50 whether Brexit will happen on 29th March.  In particular, where I think Alastair is going wrong is that he believes Article 50 will be revoked by parliament if that's the only way to avoid No Deal.  I just can't see that happening, because both Tory and Labour MPs know the optics of that would be that they are arrogantly overturning the 2016 referendum result.  (OK, theoretically it could be argued that a revocation is just intended to provide breathing space and that Article 50 will be re-invoked again later on, but nobody will buy that, and rightly so.)  So the only way Brexit will not occur on schedule is if Article 50 is extended rather than revoked - which is an important distinction, because if my hazy understanding of the legal position is correct, the impetus for an extension can only come from the government, and it's not something parliament can insist upon.  And unlike a revocation, an extension can't be decided upon unilaterally by the UK.

Essentially what that means is that Theresa May can ensure that Britain leaves in March if she is determined to do so, but that might well involve her accepting No Deal.  So the key to understanding what is about to happen is inside May's head - would she actually do that?

In the mid-1990s, Alex Salmond and George Robertson took part in a televised head-to-head debate on the respective merits of independence and devolution.  Towards the end of the programme, the audience member Lorraine Mann coined what became known as "the Lorraine Mann Question" - she asked each leader what their second preference would be for Scotland's constitutional status.  In other words, she wanted to know whether Alex Salmond would prefer devolution or continued direct rule from London, and whether George Robertson would prefer direct rule from London or independence.  Both men looked as if they wished the question had never been asked, but Mr Salmond answered it clearly - his second preference was devolution.  Mr Robertson, by contrast, made a complete fool of himself - he refused to answer, and suggested (wrongly) that Lorraine Mann was an SNP plant.

Mr Robertson did, however, have the luxury of knowing that it was an academic question - he was never going to be forced to publicly reveal that he preferred London rule to independence.  Theresa May isn't so lucky.  She says the choice is between her deal, No Deal and No Brexit.  If that's right, when and if her deal is defeated in the Commons, she's going to finally have to reveal what her own second preference is.  We know what some of her Cabinet colleagues would do in her shoes - Andrea Leadsom's second preference would clearly be No Deal, and Amber Rudd's would be No Brexit.  But which way will May jump?  If she prefers No Deal, Brexit will probably happen on schedule, but if she prefers No Brexit, we could be looking at an extension of Article 50 and possibly a second referendum.

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What happens if a "People's Vote" is won by Leave?

Quite often when the SNP introduce a new policy or strategy that I'm not sure about, I "sip it and see", and end up realising it was a good idea all along.  But with this whole "People's Vote" thing, I find I'm going at a rate of knots in the opposite direction.  When the change in policy was first announced, I could see some value in it, because it ended the bickering on social media between SNP supporters and the People's Vote diehards, and it also headed off any suggestion that the SNP weren't truly sincere in their efforts to keep the UK in the single market and customs union.  But what I didn't anticipate was the sheer unbridled enthusiasm with which the SNP were going to end up campaigning for a UK-wide referendum (in which Scotland could very easily be outvoted again), at a time when they're very noticeably not actively campaigning for a referendum in which Scotland can take charge of its own destiny.  Ian Blackford has been cheered to the rafters at slickly-choreographed People's Vote rallies down south, where he's shared platforms with the likes of Jo Johnson, Vince Cable and Anna Soubry.  It's fair to say that the SNP are now more popular with liberal opinion in England than they've been for a very long time, possibly ever, which is scarcely surprising given that they've 100% fallen in behind a London-led liberal agenda, and have put an independence referendum to one side for the moment.  

Where is this actually getting us?  Is the idea that the SNP are building up a reserve of goodwill with liberal England that can be cashed in later?  Do they reckon a centrist, pro-European government, perhaps led by Chuka Umunna or Yvette Cooper, is going to eventually take power and will be so grateful to the SNP that they'll feel compelled to grant a Section 30 order?  I'm not sure power politics works that way. Gratitude will only get you so far - ultimately any Westminster government will act in its own self-interest.

I've already pointed out how damaging a UK-wide referendum could be for the cause of independence if it results in a Remain vote.  Fretful swing voters in Scotland would look back on the last two years of chaos as a bad dream, and would not countenance the risk of repeating that process in order to negotiate independence.  But what if the opposite happens?  What if a People's Vote produces a second victory for Leave?  It was easy in 2016 for the SNP to say that Scotland's decision to stay in the EU had been ignored, but it won't be so easy this time.  They'll be asked one simple question: "You've spent months demanding a UK-wide referendum rather than a Scottish independence referendum.  You even romanticised that UK-wide referendum as a 'People's Vote'.  How can you possibly not accept the result now?"

What will be the answer?  Has this been adequately war gamed?

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The controversial journalist David Leask doesn't seem to have much of a fan base, but after my blogpost of the other day one or two people did speak up to defend his obsession with Russia.   Basically they suggested that Putin is trying to erode western democracy by undermining our "unity", ie. by identifying pre-existing differences of opinion, exacerbating them, and turning them into full-blown conflicts.  I can't help noting the irony of that line of argument, because undermining unity from outside is exactly what Leask himself is attempting to do in respect of the SNP.  He's taking relatively minor differences of emphasis between various people within the party and trying to turn it into a full-blown civilisational war between two supposedly incompatible factions that he calls "the real SNP" and "alt nats".  It's not working, partly because of the indescribable silliness of the notion that Alex Salmond and Angus MacNeil are not part of "the real SNP", but nevertheless that's what his game is.

There's also a sense in which Leask himself is undermining western democracy.  He's trying to get us into the mindset of war by arguing that the threat from Russia is so overwhelming that we must maintain monolithic unity to defeat it, and avoid taking positions that echo Russian "messaging".  I'm not at all convinced that we face such a state of emergency.  What is Russia actually doing?  Funding political parties?  Engaging in astroturfing?  We've faced that kind of interference in our politics for decades from non-state actors, and we generally regard it as a nuisance rather than as a threat to our civilisation that we must surrender our freedoms to face down.

And surrendering our freedoms is what Leask is demanding we must do.  Democratic politics is about the freedom to take opposing views.  In other words it's about division, which Leask tells us we must avoid at all costs if we are to stand up to Russia.  To coin a phrase, 'now is not the time' to self-indulgently argue for Scottish independence, or for withdrawal from NATO, if that would damage the 'unity' of the Anglo-American alliance.  And you can forget all about the democratic freedom to express your own views if they happen to coincide with Russian "messaging".  The example given in the CommonSpace piece was Leask's attack on Neil Findlay for calling the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament a "fascist", a descriptor that has a strong basis in fact.  It seems we must avoid even making reference to facts if they happen to have already been mentioned at some point by Mr Putin.

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The "impartial election expert" Mike Smithson, known for writing letters to thousands of people in East Dunbartonshire out of the sheer goodness of his heart, has a long and proud history of producing the most risibly shallow 'analysis' of politics in the Celtic nations.  I call it "Bedfordsplaining".  My favourite example was when he Bedfordsplained to us the true meaning of the phrase "ninety-minute nationalists", which apparently we had misunderstood for all these decades.  

Smithson has outdone himself over the last two days with a fatuous claim that the DUP will be so spooked by the new Lucid Talk opinion poll (showing support for Irish unity in the event of a no deal Brexit) that they will do a U-turn and back the draft deal.  The funniest bit was when he doubled down yesterday by saying he had "dealt with" the DUP's position and that May could therefore regard their votes as being in the bag.

I mean, where do you start?  The DUP have been taking their hardline position in the full knowledge that opinion polls have shown for months that a no deal Brexit would dramatically increase support for a united Ireland.  They haven't been spooked, and there's no reason why that's suddenly going to change just because Mike Smithson has finally noticed one of the polls.  Their position may be entirely rational, because people are notoriously bad at answering hypothetical questions in polls.  Of course the DUP would in an ideal world prefer to avoid any theoretical risk of a united Ireland by getting a Brexit deal through, but they're not going to do it at absolutely any cost.  They would need a substantial renegotiation of the deal to neutralise the backstop - and at the moment there's no indication that the EU are willing to go down that road.  If the deal remains unchanged and is put to the vote, the DUP will vote against it - that is simply a fact.

Smithson may be on marginally stronger ground in speculating that Corbyn secretly wouldn't mind if the draft deal went through, because it would prevent him having to make a decision about a People's Vote that his party wants but he doesn't.  That sounds plausible enough, but whether he can actually engineer that outcome while remaining publicly opposed to the deal himself is more doubtful.

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The controversial journalist David Leask, and the notes from THAT shady meeting : a factcheck

You probably saw yesterday that CommonSpace had some rather uncomfortable questions for controversial "alt-journo" David Leask, who in recent years has moved to the fringes of media discourse as he peddles increasingly wild and paranoid conspiracy theories about the supposed links between certain Scottish politicians/bloggers and the Putin regime in Russia.  (His general rule of thumb is that if someone disagrees with his own basic worldview and they're not a Putin agent, they must instead have been planted by MI5 to make the pro-indy movement look bad.)  It's now been confirmed that Leask gave a private briefing to the Integrity Initiative, a "shadowy charity" which is funded by the British state, and which has been accused of seeking to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour party.

I'll leave it for others to judge whether Leask's role as informant for a state actor is a breach of journalistic ethics.  That's probably not the most important question from his own point of view anyway, because we know that the one thing he absolutely can't bear is not being taken seriously, and the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier..." mockery on social media last night was pretty relentless.  (Probably just as well that he's long since blocked half the planet on Twitter!)  From my own perspective, what I find most interesting are the contents of the notes from the meeting, as obtained by CommonSpace, because they reveal as never before the sheer blinkered fanaticism of Leask's Russian-obsessed worldview.  I mean, that's fine if the Integrity Initiative were just looking to have their own views reinforced by someone of like mind, but if this stuff is actually being taking seriously as an "information" gathering exercise...well, the mind boggles.

"Dr Paul Monaghan - lost seat due to intemperate comments on social media, including pro-Kremlin views."

There can't be a single other person who truly believes that Paul Monaghan's supposed "pro-Kremlin views" (presumably a reference to the fact that he refused to join in with the knee-jerk demonisation of RT and Sputnik) played a significant role in costing him his seat.  The notion that Monaghan's general social media persona played a part is somewhat more commonly heard, but even that is a theory rather than an established fact.  The SNP vote in Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross fell by 17.1% last year - not dramatically higher than the 13.1% drop across Scotland.  It can only be speculation as to whether the extra 4 point slip was caused by local demographic factors, by personality factors, or by a bit of both.  And even if Monaghan had managed to limit the drop to the national average, it looks pretty likely that he would still have lost the seat narrowly.  So Leask's claim that the seat was lost "due to intemperate comments" is hyperbole, and it has no basis in hard fact.

"Wings Over Scotland is extreme and soft on Putin, constantly equating Russia and its broadcasting with the UK."

Interesting use of the word "constantly" there, because Wings mentions Russia once in a blue moon, which is scarcely surprising for a Scottish politics website.  And what exactly is "extreme" about Wings?  He has well-known specific views on the causes of the Hillsborough tragedy, which most people would probably disagree with - but those views rarely come up and they have nothing to do with his general political standpoint anyway.  He has strong views about certain aspects of identity politics, which are undoubtedly provocative and controversial, but which probably chime with the centre of gravity in public opinion.  Beyond that, he simply reflects the views of the half of the population of this country who support independence.  If anything, he's something of a hard-headed pragmatist - he once suggested that an independent Scotland should enter into a sort of grand bargain that would allow Trident to remain in Faslane in return for hefty payments from London which could be used to finance Scottish public services.  I suspect that view is somewhat closer to Leask than it is to the SNP mainstream (or indeed to me for that matter).

"Mainstream Scotland more left-wing than England.  See Corbyn as positive - overtaking SNP from left."

There is no evidence at all that Corbyn-led Labour is "overtaking" the SNP.  Quite the contrary - the current polling average suggests that the SNP have extended their lead over Labour since last year's general election. It's true that Corbyn is doing a little better in Scotland than Ed Miliband did, but that's not remotely the same thing as "overtaking the SNP".

"No credible Corbyn-like figure to take over the SNP at the moment."

I'm not even really sure what that's supposed to mean, because the SNP under Sturgeon is just as radical as Labour under Corbyn, if not more so.  Maybe Corbyn's instincts are more radical than Sturgeon's, but he's heavily constrained by Labour internal politics and by what he thinks the voters of Middle England will stomach.  Perhaps Leask means that Sturgeon and her likely long-term successor Humza Yousaf are better dressed than Corbyn, or something like that.  Heaven only knows.

"Salmond is mainly shunned now but some are still beholden to him - 'alt nat'."

That reminds me of Alan Cochrane saying that something or other was "more commonly known as the Nat Tax", which meant more commonly known to himself, because no-one else actually used that name.  The only people I've ever heard use the words "alt nat" are Leask himself and a handful of his most sycophantic followers.  Bless his heart, he's doing his level best to paint support for Alex Salmond as some kind of lunatic fringe position, light-years outside the SNP mainstream - but that's a losing battle, for the very obvious reason that Salmond was leader of the SNP for almost one-quarter of its entire existence to date, and only stepped down four years ago.  Of course we're in a period of limbo at the moment because Salmond is facing allegations of sexual harassment, but if his name is cleared (and I only say 'if' - I'm not prejudging anything), you'd quickly find that he's not "shunned" by many people in the SNP.

"[Nationalist] fringe sees English (Anglo-American/Anglo-Saxon) as the enemy; they're easily led by Kremlin activities aimed at dividing.  They see British media as mouthpieces of the 'occupying state'.  Nasty when challenged."

It's fascinating that Leask apparently views anti-Americanism as an extension of ugly anti-Englishness, because his own rhetoric has become unmistakably anti-American over the last few years.  Specifically he uses the word "Trumpist" ad nauseam as a synonym for extremism.  In other words the President of the United States is just about the worst thing in the world he can think of.  I wouldn't necessarily disagree with him about that, of course, but coming from a man who clearly sees slavish loyalty to the Anglo-American alliance as a test that must be passed to avoid being a 'useful idiot for Moscow'...well, it looks a trifle odd, that's all I'm saying.

"Does [Scotland] need to be independent?  Doesn't need to be independent.  Not laying the groundwork for foreign policy expertise: can't do the equivalent of an A level in Russian.  Politicians still talking about student issue politics rather than big issues of now."

Leask loves to publicly paint himself as a "neutral" on the independence issue, perhaps because he wrongly thinks that will give him licence to paternalistically "guide" pro-indy people towards accepting his rather eccentric notions of what constitutes the "real SNP" and what constitutes "alt nats".  But let's be honest - what we're looking at here are the words of a man who voted No in 2014 without a second thought.  He didn't necessarily do it because he has any problem in thinking of Scotland as a country (he's actually surprisingly progressive on Scottish cultural issues such as the Gaelic language), but it's clear enough that he doesn't think Scotland is even close to being "ready" for independence - a standard Project Fear, "eat your cereal" position.

No, Mr Kellner, support for staying in the EU has not "rocketed"

Just a quick one, because I see Peter Kellner has gone into full-blown propaganda mode on behalf of the "People's Vote" campaign, and is using his status as a prominent former pollster to attempt to convince people that the "polls are clear" and that support for staying in the EU has "rocketed".  His evidence?  A new YouGov poll showing that people prefer staying in the EU to leaving on the basis of Theresa May's deal by a margin of 59-41, which he contrasts with polls earlier this year showing Remain ahead by around four to six percentage points.  But he knows perfectly well, indeed he knows better than anyone, that the comparison he's making is not remotely meaningful or like-for-like.  The poll he's referring to also asked the standard question that YouGov have been asking since the EU referendum, about whether the UK was right or wrong to leave the EU.  The results on that question were much more familiar -

Right to leave: 41%
Wrong to leave: 47%

YouGov haven't provided figures with Don't Knows excluded, but it must be either a 53-47 or a 54-46 split, depending on how the rounding worked out.  On the high side for Remain, yes, but hardly evidence of "rocketing".

So why were the results so different on the new question giving people a straight choice between Remain and May's deal?  It's probably partly a "question ladder" effect.  Before being asked that question, respondents were first asked whether they support or oppose the draft Brexit deal, and by a margin of almost 2-1 they said they were opposed.  It would have been difficult for some people who are essentially Leave supporters to say they think the deal is awful one minute, and then say they would vote in favour of it the next minute.  After all, several prominent Brexiteers have said that they would prefer to remain in the EU to leaving on the basis of the deal.  But if it ever actually got to the point where there was a straight choice in a referendum between Remain and May's deal, it's safe to assume that almost all Brexiteers would get behind the deal (however grudgingly) and those numbers would in all likelihood start to look very different.

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Nebulous Theresa has made a U-turn, so it must be Wednesday

The BBC are reporting that Theresa May has changed her mind (yet again) and is now planning to hold a series of indicative votes in parliament on various alternatives to her own deal.  When that idea was originally trailed, the purpose of it was to break the deadlock and find an alternative that actually worked, but the implication now is that May would like all the alternatives to be defeated, thus concentrating minds when the main vote on her deal takes place at the end of proceedings.  In other words she's taking a punt on psychology - she reckons MPs won't want to look ridiculous by dismissing the only deal on the table when every other hypothetical option has been rejected anyway.  I'm not entirely sure whether that'll work, because presumably opposition MPs will receive their instructions from the whips about how to vote on the deal before the indicative votes take place.  It's a lot easier to cope with looking faintly ridiculous if you're simply adhering to party discipline.

Whether any of the alternatives to the deal have a chance of passing depends essentially on two questions - a) will a second referendum be one of the options?, and b) if so, will Labour back it?  On a strict reading of Labour's policy as agreed at conference, they shouldn't vote for a referendum at that stage because they wouldn't have yet tried to force a general election, which is supposed to be Step 1.  But presumably Corbyn will come under pressure to bend the policy if Labour pro-Europeans feel that they've arrived at the only realistic time at which a "People's Vote" could be secured.  He might try to square the circle by giving his MPs a free vote - which would almost certainly lead to the proposal being defeated.  Even if he can bring himself to whip his MPs to vote in favour, though, the arithmetic would be tight.

Other than a second referendum, I can't see any of the alternatives to the May deal having a chance of attracting a majority.  The Norway Plus idea would certainly be doomed to defeat, because it entails the retention of free movement, which both the Tory and Labour leaderships agree (wrongly, in my view) is inconsistent with the Leave vote in 2016.

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Is Jeremy Corbyn unwittingly saving us from ourselves by frustrating the push for a "People's Vote"?

Quite a few people have been wondering aloud whether Labour are holding off from a proper no confidence motion because they don't want to be in power at the moment Britain leaves the EU, and end up taking the blame for the ensuing chaos.  I must say I don't buy that.  If a genuine window of opportunity opened up where it looked like the arithmetic was there to defeat the government, I suspect the Labour leadership would take the risk of being tarred with the Brexit brush, because they'd know there might not be another chance to bring about a general election for up to three years, by which time the Conservatives might be back in a commanding position and the Corbyn moment might have passed.

The much more plausible explanation for the delay, fudge and inaction is internal Labour politics.  They now have a tortuous compromise policy which states that they will first try to bring about a general election and only then consider the option of a so-called "People's Vote".  So if we assume Corbyn himself doesn't want a referendum, there's every incentive for him to run down the clock and avoid getting to the point where he can be said to have failed to secure a general election.  Frankly, I think he may be doing us a favour, because for the life of me I don't see how it will do anything but harm the cause of independence if the SNP get what they say they want, and Britain as a whole stays in the EU after a second UK-wide referendum.  The Liberal Democrats are already making the case that "people are now seeing what major constitutional upheavals look like, and they don't want any more, thank you".  That line is unlikely to gain much traction for the moment, because people are actually looking for radical solutions to the current crisis, and independence is one obvious solution.  But if Britain unexpectedly stays in the EU, middle-of-the-road Remainers in Scotland will look back on the events of the last two or three years as a bad dream, and think to themselves "never again".  I know it may sound insanely unjust, but the independence cause will suffer tremendously because of the incompetent failure of British nationalists to negotiate an orderly exit from the EU.

I have a degree of sympathy with Craig Murray's view that the SNP should respect the democratic decision of England and Wales to leave the EU, and use that respect as a shining example to others of how to respect Scotland's decisive choice to remain in the EU.  That actually was the SNP's position in the aftermath of the EU referendum - indeed I can remember them saying that England and Wales "must" leave the EU in line with the wishes of voters.  I have no problem with them making a tactical switch to supporting a UK-wide referendum if they've calculated that it will never happen anyway and if they think they will win brownie points with Remain voters for at least trying their hardest to avoid Brexit for the whole UK.  But it's hard not to get the impression that it's gone way beyond that now, and that the SNP leadership really do want the People's Vote to happen.  If so, it's puzzling.

It was suggested to me by several different people in 2015 and early 2016 that, contrary to the assumption of cynical unionist commentators, the SNP were honestly hoping for a Remain vote.  That wasn't because they wanted to put off holding a second indyref until the fabled "generation" had passed by, but they did want to wait until the 2021-26 parliament, when they calculated they would have the best chance.  I do wonder if some senior SNP people would quite like a UK-wide Remain vote to take us back to that Plan A, and to be fair they have People's Vote diehards constantly whispering in their ears, trying to convince them that Scotland will have a better chance of becoming independent if England and Wales never leave the EU (averting a hard border and so on).  But the reality is that the current chaos is changing the calculation utterly, and from here on in it may be impossible to convince people to choose independence for any other reason than as a solution to Brexit.  I'll be expanding on that point in my column for the next issue of iScot magazine.

There's also the wider point that by becoming so wildly enthusiastic about a People's Vote, the SNP are unavoidably associating with people who are deploying arguments that should be deeply uncomfortable for anyone who believes in democratic self-determination.  It's being said, for example, that the Leave vote in 2016 doesn't have to be respected because it was a "stupid" decision that will cause harm to the people who made it - in other words, the elite knows better than the voters.  It's not hard to imagine a similar case being made in the wake of a Yes vote in Scotland.  It's also being said that the outcome in 2016 was somehow illegitimate because a majority of the registered electorate didn't vote Leave.  That's effectively an argument that no major constitutional change can happen without a 1979-style supermajority, which is very, very dangerous territory for the SNP to get into.

OK, I'll admit there's a flipside to the coin - we have Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and apparently some unnamed Tory MSP saying that a second EU referendum within three years would set a precedent for Scotland.  And it's true that it would make it harder for Westminster to justify refusing to grant a Section 30 order, although it's fairly likely they would still refuse.  I'm not convinced that a little discomfort in Whitehall will make up for all the immense disadvantages of another UK-wide referendum.

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