Nothing has changed: vote-splitting in Holyrood elections is still a mug's game

So I've just been catching up with today's news (gleefully announced by Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson) that Wings Over Scotland editor Stuart Campbell is pondering the idea of setting up a new pro-independence party to stand in the 2021 Holyrood election, in direct competition with the SNP.  As you know, I've always been very sympathetic towards Wings, but I'm not going to be a hypocrite about this: vote-splitting in Holyrood elections is still a mug's game, irrespective of whether we're talking about a Wings party or RISE or any other small party.  What do I mean by vote-splitting?  I mean people who want an SNP government, but are lured into wrongly thinking they can somehow maximise the number of pro-independence seats by only voting for the SNP on the constituency ballot, and giving their list vote to another pro-independence party.

You might recall that analysis by John Curtice suggested it was possible that "tactical voting for the Greens" was directly responsible for costing the SNP their overall majority in 2016 - without vote-splitting by SNP supporters, the SNP could potentially have won an extra two list seats, which would have given them an overall majority of exactly one.  Vote-splitting enthusiasts like Kevin Williamson had been absurdly claiming for months before the election that the SNP were absolutely guaranteed to win at least 65 of the 73 constituency seats, and therefore didn't need any list votes at all.  Kevin was proved hopelessly wrong about that, as many of us had pointed out was pretty likely.  You just can't know in advance how many constituency seats a party will win - opinion polls are snapshots, not predictions, and often they're not even accurate snapshots.  A few percentage points one way or another can make the difference between winning 50 constituency seats and winning 20.  And if you don't have a clue how many constituency seats a party is going to win, by definition you also don't have a clue whether that party will be in desperate need of as many list votes as it can possibly get.

How much difference would it have made if the SNP had got their overall majority in 2016?  It's impossible to know, but it would at least have made a psychological difference, and the debate over whether the mandate for a second independence referendum is a "real" mandate might have followed a slightly different course.  (Doubtless the unionist parties would have still come up with some excuse for denying the mandate, but they'd have really been scraping the bottom of the barrel.)  I don't want us to repeat the mistake of 2016 by giving the unionist parties any more gift-wrapped excuses.

The biggest danger of the proposed Wings party is that it might fall between two stools, ie. it could take enough votes on the list ballot to do the SNP and the Greens significant damage, but still fall below the de facto threshold for winning any seats itself - in other words, it could lead to a net increase in the number of Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat seats.  We don't yet have enough information to judge whether that is likely to happen, but I have to say I'm a tad sceptical that the Wings party would top 5% of the list vote. Stuart has today pointed to Panelbase polling showing that Wings is a highly recognised 'brand', with only 45% of respondents saying they had never heard of it.  But the reality is that online polling is likely to produce skewed figures on that sort of question, because people who read a great deal about politics are disproportionately likely to join volunteer online polling panels.  Don't get me wrong, there's no doubt that Stuart has an absolutely enormous following - but Esther Rantzen and Robert Kilroy-Silk are also both household names, and they still failed to break the mould of British politics when they attempted to do so.  It's always a mistake to underestimate people's tendency to revert to the major parties in a key election.

I'd imagine Stuart would point out that his proposed initiative isn't just about attempting to game the Holyrood system - it's also being mooted because the SNP aren't pursuing independence strongly enough at this moment of national crisis, and are also in danger of disappearing into a US-style identity politics quagmire.  Voters, he would say, are crying out for an alternative.  And I'm not going to deny that if we ever reached the point where it was rational to conclude that the SNP are never going to be serious about delivering independence, I'd probably be looking for an alternative myself.  But we are a long, long, long way from reaching that point, especially when the bulk of the SNP membership are itching for action on independence as soon as humanly possible.  I'm not any keener on the identity politics stuff than Stuart is: for example, it's now (at least on paper) SNP policy to introduce the Swedish model on prostitution law, which I've always felt infantilises women and is discriminatory against men.  But there's a bigger picture here, and that sort of thing would never make me walk away from the SNP.  You're never going to find a party with a set of policies that you can agree with 100% on every dot and comma.

Imagine what would have happened if Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and the rest of the Labour left had prematurely concluded during the Blair years that the game was up and that they should set up a new socialist party to compete with Labour.  Would they have achieved anything?  Well, the new party might have recorded a respectable 3% or 4% of the vote in general elections, thus making it easier for the Tories to win.  And that would have been about it.  They'd never have got anything like as close to power as they did in June 2017.

Every Loser Wins: How "democracy" works in Scotland as part of the UK

Scottish Labour seem to be slipping deeper and deeper into an Alice Through the Looking Glass world where the acceptance of reality is, at best, an optional extra.  First we had a letter from Labour candidates waffling about the "uncertainty and economic upheaval that leaving the UK would cause", and then adding as an afterthought that the Tories are also "threatening our place in Europe".  Er, the Tories aren't "threatening" anything, this isn't David Cameron in 2012 making vague noises about an EU referendum in the medium-term.  The Tories are actually taking us out of Europe, probably without any deal, in a matter of a few short weeks.  Scotland is indeed facing "uncertainty and economic upheaval", and that'll be caused entirely by the prospect of a No Deal Brexit, which itself has been caused indirectly by the mistake of voting to stay in the UK in 2014.  We've essentially reached the point where it's intellectually dishonest to claim (as the likes of Alex Cole-Hamilton do) to be in favour of both EU membership and remaining part of the UK.  Those two things are now irreconcilable, and a choice will have to be made.  And that hasn't happened as a result of some sort of dastardly SNP plot - the people of England freely chose in the 2016 referendum to change the nature of the 'deal' that was on offer for Scotland as part of the UK.

Then we had Richard Leonard "slapping down" John McDonnell (a slightly odd thing for a branch office manager to be doing to the Shadow Chancellor) by insisting that the majority of people in Scotland are opposed to a second independence referendum.  To state the bleedin' obvious, he's making himself look a bit bloody ridiculous saying that sort of thing, because the last two opinion polls - including one published just two days ago - showed a slim majority in favour of holding a second indyref within the next couple of years.

To reiterate, though, the whole notion of a Scottish party branch pulling its errant London leadership "back into line" is really rather peculiar.  The logic of saying that Nicola Sturgeon can't just hold a referendum when she wants to is that "constitutional matters are for the United Kingdom government to decide", not for devolved politicians.  In other words, if there's a Labour government in the near future, it's for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to decide.  And yet the likes of Ian Murray and Richard Leonard are indignantly saying: "Oh no no no, this is not a matter for the UK government, but for a Scottish party.  And not for the party that was actually elected to government in Scotland, but for the second-largest opposition party in the Scottish Parliament."

What do you have to do to decide the future of Scotland?  Stand for election and be soundly beaten, it seems.

*  *  *

UPDATE: And the ever-reliable Stephen Daisley has joined Scottish Labour through the looking glass...

"Every so often, Jeremy Corbyn pops up to throw the SNP a bone, much to the horror of his Scottish foot soldiers, who know how toxic the independence issue is with their voters."

Well, it can't really be all that toxic, can it, Stephen, given that the Ashcroft poll shows 40% of Scottish Labour voters want an independent Scotland?

Has Ashcroft poll turned Our Precious Union to ASHES? Westminster in shock as a MAJORITY of Scots now support independence

Apologies for the slight delay in getting this post up - I was writing an article for The National about the Ashcroft poll, which you can read HERE.  But here are the rather wonderful figures that you've probably already seen...

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 52%
No 48%

It's not possible to give percentage changes from the last comparable poll, because Ashcroft hasn't been polling on independence in recent years.  That means, strictly speaking, that we shouldn't talk about "Yes moving into the lead", because it's conceivable that previous Ashcroft polls (if they had existed) would also have shown a Yes lead.  However, even the most Yes-friendly pollsters had No consistently in the lead last year, so it does seem overwhelmingly likely that the Ashcroft methodology would have shown a No lead giving way to a Yes lead at some point - but what we don't know is exactly when that would have happened.  Is the Yes breakthrough a direct consequence of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister?  We'll only find out for sure if Panelbase (the only firm to have polled fairly regularly on independence this year) shows a Yes lead in their next poll.

Before I proceed any further, I'd just like to observe again that Mike Smithson, known and loved by thousands of East Dunbartonshire residents as a keen letter-writing impartial Lib Dem election expert, is utterly unspoofable.  Here we have a poll that shows a majority in favour of independence for the first time in two years, that shows a majority want a second independence referendum by 2021, and that shows Nicola Sturgeon is comfortably the most popular leading politician in Scotland, well ahead of Ruth Davidson and Jo Swinson.  And yet what is Smithson's choice of headline?  "Lord Ashcroft poll has Swinson beating Johnson, Corbyn and Farage in Scotland."  Technically true, Mike, but I'd gently suggest to you that there's a bigger picture here that you might be missing through those Lib Dem goggles of yours.

In fact, a direct comparison between the personal ratings of Nicola Sturgeon and Jo Swinson makes for pretty depressing reading for the new Lib Dem leader.  Respondents were asked to give each politician a score between 0 and 100, with 0 being the worst possible figure and 100 the best.  In spite of the hatred (I don't think that's too strong a word) that some unionists feel towards Ms Sturgeon, and in spite of the fact that Ms Swinson is significantly less well-known than Ms Sturgeon, the 30% of voters who gave Ms Swinson a basement rating of between 0 and 10 is virtually identical to the 34% who did the same for Ms Sturgeon.  Meanwhile, a measly 4% gave Ms Swinson a high rating of between 81 and 100, compared to a very substantial 24% who did so for Ms Sturgeon.

Although it's true that Ms Swinson's average rating of 31 (that's 31 out of 100, remember!) is higher than that of deeply unpopular politicians such as Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, it's not that much higher in the overall scheme of things.  She's only seven points ahead of Mr Johnson on 24, and nine points ahead of Mr Corbyn on 22.  That's not really much to write home about.

Average (mean) rating of each politician out of 100:

Nicola Sturgeon 45
Ruth Davidson 36
Jo Swinson 31
Willie Rennie 30
Boris Johnson 24
Jeremy Corbyn 22
Richard Leonard 22
Nigel Farage 18

Average (median) rating of each politician out of 100:

Nicola Sturgeon 50
Ruth Davidson 26
Jo Swinson 25
Willie Rennie 25
Richard Leonard 10
Jeremy Corbyn 9
Boris Johnson 3
Nigel Farage 2

You can just imagine the mounting panic of unionist politicians and strategists when they first read through this poll.  Normally it's possible for them to find a silver lining to cling to somewhere, but on this occasion the Yes side seem to have managed a full house...

Majority for independence - CHECK
Majority in favour of holding an independence referendum by 2021 - CHECK
Majority who think maintaining EU membership is more important than staying part of the UK - CHECK
Majority who think Brexit strengthens the case for independence - CHECK
Majority who think Brexit makes independence more likely - CHECK
Majority who predict a second independence referendum would result in a Yes win - CHECK
Nicola Sturgeon the most popular politician - CHECK

I'm slightly dubious about the wording of the question that asks whether EU membership or staying part of the UK is more important if it's not possible to have both, because there's an implicit presumption there that it would be desirable to have both, which may have caused some pro-indy people to opt out of the question altogether.  In spite of that, though, 45% say EU membership is more important, and only 43% say remaining in the UK is more important.

A few people have been asking whether it's true that 16 and 17 year olds were not interviewed for the poll.  As far as I can see from the datasets that's the case, so it's possible that the Yes vote should be a little higher and the No vote should be a little lower.  It's unlikely that it would make more than a 1% difference in each case, although that would still be enough to turn a 4% Yes lead into a 6% Yes lead.  That said, it's worth pointing out that there was a poll a few months ago that appeared to exclude 16 and 17 year olds...but that turned out to be an error in the datasets.

Remaining open-minded about a Remain alliance in Scotland

I have a new article in The National about the Brecon and Radnorshire result, entitled 'Could by-election-winning Remain alliance work in Scotland?'  You can read it HERE.

I see that the reference to a Remain alliance has already attracted one or two hostile comments on social media.  In fact, that point is only a small part of the article, but to avoid any misunderstanding about what I'm suggesting (and more importantly what I'm not suggesting), I'll expand on it here.

In my view, offering a Remain alliance to the Liberal Democrats in any pre-Brexit snap election would be a good each-way bet for the SNP,  because...

1) There's a 95% chance that the Lib Dems would say no.  That would allow the SNP to fight the election exactly as planned, while claiming the moral high ground and demonstrating that the Lib Dems are not serious about stopping Brexit at all costs or about working with others to stop Brexit at all costs.  Why would the Lib Dems say no?  For a number of reasons.  A pact would destroy their long-term strategy in Scotland, which is based on dogmatic, unyielding British nationalism and the securing of tactical votes from natural Tory supporters in selective seats.  It would also be humbling for a self-styled "national UK" party to have to stand aside in more than 90% of Scottish  constituencies, which is bound to be the condition of any pact.  (The Lib Dems are only the strongest Remain party in the four Scottish constituencies they currently hold.)

2) Even in the highly unlikely event that the Lib Dems say yes, the pact would actually work in the SNP's favour.  The four seats they would be standing aside in are among the small handful of seats they'd be highly unlikely to win anyway, while Lib Dem support for SNP candidates on an "emergency stop Brexit" basis could be a game-changer in Tory-held seats.  There's a Remain majority even in Moray.

3) As you know, I'm a strong supporter of the McEleny/MacNeil plan to use an election to secure an outright mandate for independence in the event that a Section 30 order is refused.  For the avoidance of doubt, if the SNP were to accept that plan for the next general election, an alliance with the Lib Dems would be completely out of the question, because there would have to be a pro-independence candidate in every single constituency.  But we've all heard the mood music from the SNP leadership: in a snap pre-Brexit election, they're more likely to emphasise their plan to stop Brexit, albeit with a pledge to hold an independence referendum.  That being the case, they might as well maximise the number of seats they win.

The real winner in Brecon and Radnorshire was the Welsh language

So a few quick thoughts about the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election result...

* The big paradox is that the Liberal Democrats won, and they won essentially because they are a Remain party, and yet this is a constituency that voted Leave in the referendum and that voted for Leave parties again tonight.  Even if you don't count Labour as a Leave party, there was a narrow majority for the Tories, Brexit Party and UKIP in combination.  The Lib Dems were able to come through because the minority Remain vote was united and the majority Leave vote was badly split.

* The narrowness of the result means that it's pretty likely that the Tories would have held on if a) Boris Johnson had become Prime Minister before the postal ballots went out, or b) the Brexit Party hadn't put up a candidate.  It's also quite conceivable that the Lib Dems would have fallen short if it hadn't been for the unprecedented decision of Plaid Cymru to stand aside in their favour.  Many Plaid members must be privately wondering whether that was a wise tactical move.  The leadership may have thought that the Lib Dems were going to win anyway, so it was best to get a share of the credit...but now that it looks like Plaid may have swung the balance, there could be some regrets if considerable momentum is generated for the Lib Dems in Wales.  But who knows, maybe the Lib Dems will act honourably for once in their lives and return the favour in constituencies where Plaid are the strongest Remain party.

* The real victor tonight was the Welsh language.  Although Brecon and Radnorshire is very much in the more Anglicised part of Wales (hence Plaid's relative weakness in the constituency), the result was intended to be announced in both Welsh and English, but in the case of the main candidates, the returning officer only read out the numbers in Welsh and forgot to give the English version.  The BBC and Sky well and truly got their comeuppance for covering a Welsh by-election without thinking to have a Welsh speaker on hand, because they literally didn't know what the result was for several minutes after it was announced.  A far cry from the Welsh devolution referendum of 1997, when the BBC results programme was presented by a young Huw Edwards, who in one or two cases translated the results from Welsh in real time so that viewers would know them a few seconds early.

* As was widely trailed, the Tory/DUP majority in the House of Commons has been technically reduced to just 1, although in practice it's slightly higher than that because Charlie Elphicke remains a Tory MP in all but name.  The majority will also revert to being 2 temporarily if Jared O'Mara sticks to his plan to resign his seat after the summer recess.

On Robertson v McAlpine

I've just been catching up with the indirect war of words the other day between Fiona Robertson (the SNP's highly controversial Women's and Equalities Convener) and Joan McAlpine (SNP MSP for South of Scotland).  It was a reminder that, although I'm a lot closer to McAlpine's views on the self-ID issue than to Robertson's, this debate has essentially become a fight to the death between two different currents of radical identity politics that both I and the vast majority of the population aren't actually signed up to: radical feminism on one side, and radical trans activism on the other.  It's noticeable that almost everyone opposed to self-ID, even if they're the last person in the world you'd think of as a radical feminist, adopts the language of radical feminism when talking about the issue.  It's as if no-one is comfortable addressing the issue from any other angle whatsoever, and of course Fiona Robertson and her fellow travellers would probably tell you that's because many people are merely using feminism as a figleaf to cover up their "transphobia".  (Certainly not a view that I share.)

The dispute between Robertson and McAlpine was over the now-notorious case of Jessica Yaniv, a trans woman in Canada who demanded that women should perform an intimate waxing on her, even though she is anatomically male.  Although this episode is hugely problematic for Robertson, because it bears out many of the fears over self-ID that she has insisted are completely unfounded, she nevertheless offered a degree of support to Yaniv by suggesting it would still be wrong to "misgender her", and that Yaniv should be regarded as a "female predator" rather than a male predator.  To support this rather unconvincing view, she placed Yaniv's actions within the context of broader female predatory behaviour, which she claimed often involves women using their femininity to access victims.  That infuriated McAlpine, who as a radical feminist regards predatory sexual behaviour as something that men do to women.  The irony is that Robertson agrees with her on that point - as an all-round identity politics obsessive, nobody is more passionate than Robertson about preaching the gospel that one gender is still oppressed in a one-way direction by the other.  It just goes to demonstrate that the ideology of radical trans activists is so Orwellian that it leads its proponents inexorably into saying things that are the polar opposite of what they actually believe.  Because self-identifying trans women are women, that means Yaniv must be a woman, no ifs, no buts, and that she therefore must be a female predator, and that female predatory behaviour must therefore be a thing, even though Robertson's own radical feminist worldview would normally tell her that it can't possibly be.

McAlpine's brand of feminism is more impressive than Robertson's because it's logically consistent.  But I still winced when I saw some of the specific arguments that McAlpine deployed against Robertson: for example, the claim that 98% of sexual assaults are committed by men.  I would recommend that everyone reads this recent BBC article about male victims of serious and violent sexual assaults committed by women, and the reactions they received when they spoke out about their experiences.  One was told by a police officer that "you must have enjoyed it or you'd have reported it sooner".  It's very difficult, and arguably impossible, to compile accurate and meaningful statistics when male victims know they won't be believed if they come forward.  Exactly the same problem exists with domestic violence.  It almost certainly is the case that the majority of sexual assaults are committed by men against women, and that the problem can therefore be regarded as "gendered" (in exactly the same way that many disadvantages of being male, such as significantly lower life expectancy and a higher suicide risk, can be regarded as gendered).  But there's a very big difference between saying that men are mostly the cause of a problem, and saying that they are more or less exclusively the cause of a problem.  Facts matter and truth matters - and if we know there may be gaps in our knowledge of the facts, that matters as well.  I was also uncomfortable with McAlpine telling Robertson that she "sounded like a men's rights activist".  That's exactly what was once said to me by a certain actor (when he took a rare break from bragging about his desire to thump his political opponents).  I regarded it as a lazy cop-out then and I regard it as a lazy cop-out now.  An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on whether it "sounds like something X or Y would say".

But, at the end of the day, you don't need to agree with every aspect of McAlpine's reasoning to accept that she's reached the correct basic conclusion.  You don't need to believe that the ideology of trans activists is some sort of  'conspiracy of the patriarchy' (a somewhat paranoid view if ever there was one) to agree that there are safety issues in allowing anyone to access female-only spaces at will, or that women's sport will be devalued by the participation of biological males, or that statistics on crime will become even less meaningful if they are unable to distinguish accurately between male and female perpetrators.  These points are really just plain common sense, which is why they are the centre of gravity in wider public opinion, and not just in radical feminist circles.

Plaid Cymru make history by TAKING THE LEAD in a Welsh poll for the first time ever

Today's much-hyped Welsh poll from YouGov didn't disappoint: it shows Plaid Cymru taking the lead for the first time, and they've done it on both the constituency and the regional list ballots.  That said, as you can see from the percentage changes below, they weren't far off the lead in the previous poll, so perhaps the fact that this historic moment has arrived shouldn't be such a surprise.  In fact, on the regional list vote it's the Brexit Party they've overtaken and not Labour!

Welsh Assembly constituency ballot:

Plaid Cymru 24% (n/c)
Labour 21% (-4)
Brexit Party 19% (+2)
Conservatives 19% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 12% (+3)

Welsh Assembly regional list ballot:

Plaid Cymru 23% (+1)
Labour 19% (-2)
Conservatives 18% (+6)
Brexit Party 17% (-6)
Liberal Democrats 12% (+5)
Greens 4% (-4)

Although the Welsh Assembly uses the same Additional Member System that we use to elect the Scottish Parliament, the ratio between constituency and list members is slanted much more towards constituency members, and that of course was done deliberately by Labour to make the system less proportional and to give themselves more seats than they would otherwise be entitled to.  It's certainly doing the trick in this instance: the seats projection shows that Labour would remain the biggest party despite losing the popular vote.  However, they would only have a little more than a quarter of the seats, leaving Plaid Cymru with scope to lead a coalition that freezes out Labour.  On past form, though, Adam Price might actually prefer a coalition with Labour, which would leave Plaid as the junior partner in a government still led by Mark Drakeford.

Predictably, London commentators (and Duncan Hothersall) are missing the point entirely by focussing on the Westminster results from the poll, which show a narrow Tory lead.  As I pointed out last night, that isn't actually unprecedented - the Tories have led in Wales before, and as it's a slim lead it wouldn't be surprising if it disappears once the Boris honeymoon is over.

*  *  *

I want to say something about all the chatter on social media (and indeed in the comments section of this blog) about how Jo Swinson will "have to look for an English seat" because she's "on course to lose East Dunbartonshire".  I really do think this is making us look a bit silly.  Jo Swinson will not be looking for a new seat in England or anywhere else for the simple reason that she already has a safe one.  Yes, I know that the SNP won it in 2015, but there are three crucial differences between then and now: 1) the SNP were on an insanely high 50% of the national vote, 2) the Lib Dems were at a historically low ebb, and 3) Swinson didn't have the traditional leader's bonus that she can now expect.  Even with all those factors working against the Lib Dems in 2015, they only lost the seat very narrowly.

I'm sure the SNP will throw the kitchen sink at East Dunbartonshire when the election is called, but that will not really be with a view to winning the seat.  They'll be looking for a respectable result in a high profile contest, and to demonstrate that even the constituency of the Lib Dem leader is not a no go area.

Memo to Boris Johnson: "awesome foursome" doesn't actually rhyme properly in Scottish and Northern Irish accents

Just to return briefly to the subject of Boris Johnson's bizarre appointment of the MP for Worcester as a junior minister in the Scotland Office, I think we can gain a little sense of the warped thinking behind the decision in Robin Walker's own tweet about it.

"A huge honour to be made Minister for the union working with @BorisJohnson @ScotSecofState & @NIOgov - our precious union deserves to thrive through brexit & beyond. I will work with colleagues all across the UK to ensure that it does"

So he's not describing himself as a Scotland Office Minister or a Northern Ireland Office Minister, but rather pompously as "Minister for the Union" (which is supposed to be Johnson's own new title, as it happens).  You can imagine the conversation: "Here's a wonderful way to bring together all the parts of our precious, precious union.  Let's merge a junior post at the Scotland and Northern Ireland Offices and give it to someone who represents one of the other nations of our glorious United Kingdom."  They probably barely even noticed that the actual optics of that wheeze was to install an English MP as a colonial Deputy Governor-General of both Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Two servings of imperialism for the price of one.  Maybe they'd have got on a little better if they'd tried a Welsh MP instead.  We could have done a completely fair swap and put Ross Thomson in the Wales Office.

Incidentally, the magnificent irony of Boris Johnson's characterisation of the four nations of the UK as the "awesome foursome" is that the rhyme doesn't actually work properly in Scottish or Northern Ireland accents.  Most English and Welsh accents are non-rhotic, meaning that the letter 'r' is effectively silent in certain circumstances, and the word 'foursome' is pronounced 'fawsome'.  But Scottish and Northern Irish accents are rhotic (unless your name is Alister Jack) meaning that the 'r' is fully pronounced.  Absolutely everything about this new government is dripping in unthinking Anglocentricity - its vocabulary, its jokes, its gimmicks, its colonial appointments, and its dogmatic obsession with forcing through a No Deal Brexit against the democratically-expressed wishes of the people of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

*  *  *

There's a new article by Alasdair Soussi on the Al Jazeera website in which I'm quoted a few times - it's titled 'Could Boris Johnson be the UK's last Prime Minister?', and you can read it HERE.

*  *  *

Marcia has provided figures from the first YouGov Scottish subsample since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, and on the face of it they're exceptionally good news for the SNP, and disappointing for Jo Swinson.  However, I'm going to ca' canny just for the moment, because I can't actually see any sign of the datasets yet.  (I may just be looking in the wrong place - the YouGov website is getting less user-friendly with every passing year.)

*  *  *

Professor Roger Awan-Scully is known to millions as "the John Curtice of Wales" (well, that's how he's known to me, anyway) and he posted this tantalising tweet a few hours ago...

"A new Welsh Political Barometer poll by @YouGov will be published tomorrow by @ITVWales

The results go well beyond ‘gosh’ territory, or even ‘blimey’: by some way the most dramatic poll I have ever analysed.

And in some respects a genuinely historic poll for Welsh politics."

Given the Boris bounce that we saw in GB-wide polls last night, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he's hinting at a Tory lead.  But the thing is that the Tories have been in the lead in Welsh polls before, so in itself that wouldn't qualify as "the most dramatic".  So I'm wondering if we'll be looking at either an outright lead for Plaid Cymru, or Labour slipping to third place.

*  *  *

UPDATE: Many thanks to Anon in the comments section below for providing the YouGov datasets, which confirm the subsample figures that Marcia gave us earlier...

SNP 47%, Conservatives 21%, Liberal Democrats 12%, Labour 11%, Brexit Party 5%, Greens 3%, Plaid Cymru 1%

This is the second YouGov subsample since Boris Johnson became Tory leader, but the first since he became Prime Minister.  That's a crucial distinction, because in GB-wide polls the Boris Bounce only occurred after Theresa May actually left Downing Street.  And sure enough, the Tory surge appears to have been replicated in Scotland - but not at the expense of the SNP, who are in an even more commanding position than usual.  What that would mean in Tory-SNP marginal seats is anyone's guess.

You wouldn't have expected the SNP to suffer directly from a Tory surge in any case - the greater concern would have been SNP voters drifting off to the Lib Dems.  That doesn't appear to be happening at all, although I remain of the view that Jo Swinson could yet be a small-to-medium-sized problem for the SNP.  People haven't really got to know her yet, but they will do courtesy of blanket coverage during the campaign proper, and that could be the danger point.

In case you're wondering why 1% of the Scottish subsample are backing Plaid Cymru, that's just one of the oddities that's sometimes thrown up by GB-wide polling.  It may be Welsh people living in Scotland temporarily, or it may even be people who selected the wrong option by mistake.

Swinson Bounce? What Swinson Bounce? Despair for overrated new Lib Dem leader as three new BOMBSHELL polls show her party flatlining

On Wednesday, when the first poll came out after Boris Johnson became Tory leader, I suggested that there had been no Boris Bounce over and above what had already been factored in for weeks. I realised within just a few hours that I'd been a bit premature in saying that, because I hadn't anticipated the bloodbath reshuffle that transformed the Tory government into a vehicle for delivering No Deal.  That, rather than Johnson becoming leader, was the 'shock and awe' moment that had the potential to produce a sizeable swingback from the Brexit Party to the Tories, and so it has proved.

Deltapoll (Britain-wide):

Conservatives 30% (+10)
Labour 25% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 18% (+2)
Brexit Party 14% (-10)

Opinium (Britain-wide):

Conservatives 30% (+7)
Labour 28% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 16% (+1)
Brexit Party 15% (-7)

YouGov (Britain-wide):

Conservatives 31% (+6)
Labour 21% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 20% (-3)
Brexit Party 13% (-4)

(Note: For reasons known only to our Anglocentric pollsters and media, the SNP and Plaid Cymru are often excluded from the initial results summaries, but we'll find out the results for those parties when the datasets appear.)

Any conclusions about these trends must be provisional, because if - as seems eminently possible - the next election takes place without Brexit having been delivered, there's likely to be a huge swing in the opposite direction back to the Brexit Party.  But what may be of greater long-term significance is that the media hype about Jo Swinson isn't being replicated in hard polling numbers.  Opinium and Deltapoll show only a minimal Swinson Bounce, while YouGov are suggesting that the lift the Lib Dems got in their Wednesday poll has already been fully reversed.  There was an expectation that any votes Johnson took back from the Brexit Party would be balanced out to some extent by moderate Tories moving to the Lib Dems, but there's no obvious sign of that happening so far.

UPDATE: It's the same basic story from ComRes, although the pro-Tory swing isn't quite so big...

ComRes (Britain-wide):

Conservatives 28% (+3)
Labour 27% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 19% (+2)
Brexit Party 16% (-3)

Boris Johnson has declared war on Scottish nationhood

I was thoroughly bemused a few hours ago by the muted reaction from Nick Eardley of the BBC to the extraordinary news that Boris Johnson has appointed Robin Walker, the MP for Worcester, as Minister of State at the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland (formerly known as the Scotland Office, and in pre-devolution times as the Scottish Office).  "A snub for Scottish Tories?" asked Nick, as if the only significance is that Ruth Davidson might be mildly embarrassed.  What this decision actually does is rip up decade upon decade upon decade of precedent and tradition.  God knows when the last time was that an MP representing an English constituency was appointed to the Scotland Office or Scottish Office, but I certainly can't recall it happening within my lifetime.  The universality of Scottish appointments was what always distinguished the Scottish Office from its Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, which were often full-on colonial outfits manned by English MPs.  In "Raj" terms, the Scottish Office was like an Indianised civil service - the appointments may have been made by a Prime Minister in London, but nevertheless individual Scots were in charge of the domestic government of Scotland.  That's why we can look back to a period long before devolution and recall iconic Scottish politicians calling the shots: Tom Johnston during the Second World War, Willie Ross in the 60s and 70s, and Donald Dewar in the late 90s.

What makes the selection of Walker even more bizarre is that the tradition of only appointing Scots was even maintained when there was only one Scottish Tory MP in Westminster.  The Scottish peer Lord Dunlop filled the breach as David Mundell's sidekick when Mundell was the entire Scottish Tory parliamentary party.  And yet now that Boris Johnson has got 12 Scottish Tory MPs to choose Alister Jack's deputy from, he's ignored them all, and he's ignored all the Scottish Tory peers.  Some people are putting this down to concern that the Scottish Tories may be wiped out at the next general election.  That's good as a taunt, but makes no sense if taken seriously: if a Minister of State were to lose their seat at the election, it would be the easiest thing in the world to just replace them.  No, this is Boris making a statement.  He's saying that London owns Scotland, and that he sees no reason why Scotland should be governed any differently from Worcestershire or Hampshire or Nottinghamshire.  The mind boggles as to what this portends for devolution if Boris has a longer tenure in office than most of us expect.

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Just as an aside, this means that neither of the men now running the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland actually has a recognisably Scottish accent.  Alister Jack appears from his biography to be 100% Scottish born and bred, but presumably owes his plummy accent to his education at Glenalmond.  This may be a good way to appeal to traditional Scottish Tory voters, but I'm not sure it's going to do much for the working-class unionist voters that Ruth Davidson has been courting over recent years (ie. the "Rangers vote").

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I'm hoping we might get an independence poll in the next few days, just to see if the No Deal revolution at Westminster over the last 72 hours has shifted the dial.  You might remember that there was a Yes surge in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, and that it quickly faded.  We'd never even have known it had happened if opinion polls hadn't been commissioned at the correct moment.  I hope the history books won't be left in the dark about Scotland's instant reaction to the events of the last week.