A bit more on that incredible JL Partners poll

Just a quick note to let you know I have a piece in The National about yesterday's JL Partners poll, which showed the pro-independence vote at an all-time high (in online polling) of 56%.  You can read the article HERE.

History made again as Yes vote soars to 56% - the highest ever in an online poll

Today brings word of something of an oddity - the first ever poll on independence conducted by a firm called JL Partners, which doesn't seem to be affiliated to the British Polling Council (or not yet, at any rate).  However, the pedigree of the people running it appears to be beyond question.  How and why the poll was commissioned is unclear, because the fieldwork took place well over a month ago, meaning it is less recent than the Savanta ComRes poll that put Yes on 53%, or the legendary Ipsos-Mori telephone poll that had Yes on an all-time high of 58%. For some reason the results have been held back until publication today in Politico, who don't appear to have been the clients.  

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (JL Partners, 17th-21st September 2020)

Yes 56%

No 44%

As far as I can see this is the highest ever Yes vote in an online poll, slightly exceeding the 55% recorded in a Panelbase poll commissioned by Business for Scotland in August.  I would usually add the caveat that it's difficult to find records of polls conducted in the early days of devolution, when TNS/System Three quite often reported pro-independence majorities.  However, to the best of my recollection those were all face-to-face polls, and I don't think there was anything quite like this anyway.

I think there may well be something in the suspicion that has been expressed in the comments section that this was originally an internal poll - maybe for the UK government, maybe for a political party, or maybe for a very well-financed unionist organisation.  The giveaway is the sheer number of supplementary questions that were asked.  I can imagine a pollster self-funding a poll on independence to advertise its services, but there's no way it would go to quite these lengths.  So the million dollar question is: why would a unionist client want to belatedly publicise some extremely negative results? Perhaps there's some kind of internal battle going on, and someone wants to change the narrative.  The poll has been framed as reflecting very badly on Boris Johnson's leadership (and in fairness it objectively *does* reflect very badly on Boris Johnson's leadership), so that may be a little clue.

Scottish voting intentions for next UK general election: 

SNP 56%

Conservatives 18%

Labour 15%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Greens 3%

This appears to be the SNP's best ever vote share in a Westminster poll - even in the run-up to the 2015 election they didn't exceed 54%. It's also the Tories' worst showing, and their first sub-20 showing, in a Westminster poll since last year's election.  Labour, meanwhile, have equalled their lowest share since last December.

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions: 

SNP 58%

Conservatives 18%

Labour 12%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Greens 2%

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 54%

Conservatives 18%

Labour 13%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Greens 5%

Those are obviously catastrophic results for the Tories, but it gets worse.  There's also a question on public attitudes towards the Conservative party, and it brutally unmasks the extent of hatred among people who don't vote Tory.  73% have a negative view, and only 22% have a positive view - just barely above the actual current Tory vote, which is already down to the abysmally low levels John Major was receiving in the mid-to-late 90s.  The whole Ruth Davidson circus might as well never have happened.

Starmer foolishly chooses the path of internal division

It seems a very long time ago now that the Labour leadership contest was underway and Paul Mason was describing Sir Keir Starmer, seemingly with a straight face, as one of the "left" candidates.  That looked a bit of a stretch even at the time, but it's true that Starmer was presenting himself as reasonably equidistant between Corbynism and Blairism, and as someone who wouldn't trash either period of the party's history and who could bring different factions together.  Today that pretence has been cast to the wind.  There has clearly been a pre-planned drive, straight out of the Blair play-book, to demonstrate to the public by some theatrical means that Labour has "changed".  The sacking of Rebecca Long Bailey and the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn wouldn't have been precisely mapped out in advance, but there can be little doubt that the new leadership were just waiting for even the slenderest of opportunities.

In my view this is a terrible strategic misjudgement from Starmer.  You don't suspend the person who was leader of your party only six months ago (and at the general election less than a year ago) on such feeble grounds, or if you do, you can expect to reap the consequences.  This is how you entrench intra-party warfare, and the electorate generally punish parties perceived to be divided.  Blair got away with it in the 1990s because the left had essentially already been vanquished by Neil Kinnock and John Smith.  That is not the situation just now - Corbynism remains a strong force within Labour, and research shows that a large proportion of the Labour membership regard Corbyn as having been one of their party's best ever leaders.  One extreme outcome could be a Corbynite exodus to a new party, which would be a lose/lose for all concerned - a new left-wing force would be highly unlikely to win any seats at the next election, but it could well knock a few percentage points off Labour's own vote and help keep the Tories in power.

With the current witch-hunt mentality, some would probably say this is grounds for suspension. Which begs the fascinating question: is Leonard a branch office manager or something more? Can the "leader of Scottish Labour" be suspended by UK Labour?https://t.co/GWJlDQFERS

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 29, 2020

 

"Replace Jeremy Corbyn as MP for Islington North with Luciana Berger." This is the kind of zealotry that could rip Labour apart. Do please carry on, guys.https://t.co/lNPOajY9f4

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 29, 2020

Housekeeping Note

Apologies to everyone for switching pre-moderation on, then off, then back on again.  I'm afraid this Hokey Cokey routine may be the pattern of things to come, because I'm simply no longer willing to tolerate our resident troll, and he just doesn't seem to have got the memo.  I know people will say "oh but you put up with GWC for years", but this latest character is much darker - he's profoundly racist (against Scots and others), homophobic, and just about every other facet of bigotry you can think of.  A fair proportion of the Jockbashing trolling is directed at me personally ("Hey Scotty the Scrounger, Get Bedxit Done", etc, etc) and I make no apology for saying that has played a part in my decision.

Of course there are also troll comments from other directions, and I was particularly bemused by a lengthy anonymous comment yesterday from a chap who pompously informed me that he was going to stop reading the blog because I had failed to apply any critical thought to the story about my sister's phone being found under twenty feet of sand on Gullane beach.  Honestly, if you feel the need for a self-important rant of that sort, take it elsewhere.  I simply related the story as I had picked it up, and no, I didn't stop to consider whether the twenty feet thing was feasible.  I now gather it was actually twenty centimetres.  A shout-out to Latvia, by the way, because at least one of the couple who found the phone is Latvian.  They go metal detecting in different locations every weekend and are hoping one day they might find a Roman coin.

Turning to another subject, the fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll has reached its target - in fact as things stand it's exceeded the target by precisely £1!  A million thanks to everyone who donated - both large and small donations were absolutely crucial to getting us there.  I had a real blast from the past earlier today - my old 'friend' from the 2014 indyref, Lap Gong Leong, contacted me from Hong Kong with a couple of suggestions for poll questions.  In fairness they were perfectly reasonable suggestions, and I'll consider them with all the other great suggestions that you've left in the comments section.  Hopefully we'll get some more good results from the poll - but, as always, remember there are no guarantees.

Viva Metal Detectors

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may recall that, several weeks ago, I mentioned that my sister had lost her phone on Gullane beach.  I tried all the obvious things - apart from Twitter, I also posted on several East Lothian buy & sell groups, and a couple of days later we went back to Gullane and retraced her steps.  It became painfully obvious at that point that high tide covers most of the beach, and the place where she thought she had most likely dropped the phone was submerged in water.  So we pretty much abandoned hope of getting it back.

But a few days ago, she was contacted by a couple in Edinburgh with a metal detector.  They had found it buried under twenty feet of sand.  They then dried it out with rice for three days, managed to get it charged up, and found my sister's contact details on it.  We've just received it back from them.  Almost unbelievable.

A good - if obvious - tip for the US presidential election

As I've mentioned before, I have a winning track record on political betting, albeit based on a very small number of bets over the years...

* A few months before the 2010 general election, I was bullied (all right, badgered) into a supposed mug's bet by a certain "international thriller writer" on Stormfront Lite.  He was convinced the Conservatives would win an overall majority, I begged to differ.  I won.  (He then sent me his latest novel in lieu of my winnings.)

* A couple of years before the 2014 indyref, I was bullied (all right, badgered) by another Stormfront Lite poster into another three "unwinnable" bets - a) that Yes would win, b) that Yes would not lose by more than a 15% margin, and c) that 16 and 17 year olds (or "children" as someone sneered) would have the right to vote.  I won two of the three, and made a net profit.

* At some point prior to the 2015 general election, I made a final private bet with a Stormfront Lite poster (Antifrank, no less), although there wasn't any bullying involved this time.  He thought Labour would gain more seats from the Scottish Lib Dems than the SNP would, and I took the opposite view.  I won.

* On the day of the 2016 EU referendum, although I still thought Remain were the most likely winners, I placed a bet on Leave because it seemed to me the odds were ludicrously out of kilter with opinion polls that were still very tight.  In retrospect people's reasons for being so certain of a Remain victory were extremely circular - one group of people was convinced because another group of people was convinced.  There were always dark murmerings about private polls, but the reality is those would have been showing much the same as the public polls.

* Six months later at the US presidential election, I toyed with a bet on Donald Trump on a similar basis to my Leave bet.  In the end I held off until well after the polls closed, but remarkably, even after it started to become clear that things were going Trump's way, Hillary Clinton remained the clear favourite and it was possible to get extremely good value odds on Trump.  I've noticed that when surprise election results occur, there often seems to be a 'lag' effect on the betting markets.  It's as if punters can't quite accept what they're seeing with their own eyes.  The same thing happened in the EU referendum, and also when Bernie Sanders won Michigan.  

* On the day of the run-off for the 2017 French presidential election, I spotted an opportunity for a value bet on Macron securing between 65% and 70% of the vote.  The provisional exit poll figures suggested he could go very close to 65%, yet the odds on that outcome remained very steep.  As soon as the official exit poll predicted he'd be slightly above 65%, I cashed out and took a partial profit straight away to be on the safe side (although obviously with hindsight I wish I hadn't).

* In this year's Polish presidential election, I placed a bet against Andrzej Duda, who was mysteriously the strong odds-on favourite in spite of being more or less level in the polls.  I lost, but I'm still convinced it made perfect sense as a value bet.

So, armed with that track record, let me point out something that should be blindingly obvious - there is overwhelming evidence that Joe Biden is heading for a convincing victory next month, and yet the odds on the betting exchanges imply that Trump still has a roughly 1 in 3 chance of winning.  It just doesn't add up.  I'm not saying that a bet on Biden is 'free money', there's still an element of risk, but for Trump to win something pretty improbable would have to happen - either there would have to be a systemic polling error of a magnitude much greater than was seen in 2016, or a random event would have to occur to totally change the trajectory of the campaign, and it would have to be a dramatic enough event to overcome the substantial lead Biden presumably already has as a result of early votes that cannot now be changed.

The bottom line - if you don't mind your money being tied up for a couple of weeks, a bet on Biden (or perhaps a lay bet against Trump for extra security) is just about the most clear-cut value bet you'll ever see.

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Click HERE for the Scot Goes Pop poll fundraiser - just £300 away from reaching its target!

An SNP Plan B is essential for neutralising the Tories' leaked tactics for thwarting an indyref

 

Leaked Tory memo confirms their plan to ignore the result of the next Scottish election, after ignoring Scotland’s Remain vote, & rejection of the Tories since 1955. An anti-democracy strategy that will only strengthen support for independence. 👍

— Michael Gray (@GrayInGlasgow) October 19, 2020

I normally agree with Michael Gray about most things, but I can see a rather huge logical problem with his reaction to the Tory war gaming on how to thwart an independence referendum.  The leaked tactics are not really about changing minds on independence - they're about subverting the democratic process even while support for independence is high. So if the SNP and the wider Yes movement define 'success' as strong opinion poll support for independence, in the absence of concrete progress towards an indyref or towards independence itself, we'd be playing straight into Westminster's hands.

One suggestion is that Westminster will not give a definitive 'No' to a Section 30 order in the aftermath of an SNP majority victory next year, but will instead imply that it's merely a 'No' in the short-term - essentially a rehash of Theresa May's "now is not the time" wheeze.  If the SNP leadership remain boxed in by their insistence that the Section 30 process is the only valid route to a referendum, it's not hard to see how they could be successfully strung along for years without a great deal of effort.  A vague (false) sense that a concession might be around the corner would be enough.

There's also an indication that Westminster could put together its own unilateral package on 'further devolution' (a complete joke given that the existing devolution settlement is in the middle of being gutted by the Internal Market Bill), hold a Yes/No referendum on it, and thus bypass the independence question altogether.  That could potentially be quite an effective tactic unless the SNP stand ready to force a consultative indyref at around the same time.  How else would they react to Westminster's referendum?  Urge a boycott?  Ask people to vote for new powers that are better than nothing, but spend the campaign complaining that they don't go far enough?  Neither of those options would be particularly fruitful, and afterwards Westminster would just say that the new settlement within the UK is Scotland's "settled will".

Incidentally, even the merest possibility of another Vow-style promise of more devolution should be a warning to us of the importance of making abundantly clear to people that devolved powers are being taken away right now.  The BBC are failing in their duty to keep the public informed, and the recent Progress Scotland poll confirmed that there is still considerable ignorance out there.  So it really is up to us - we can't let Westminster get away with a false narrative that the history of devolution has been a one-way process of powers being steadily granted to Holyrood.

The only part of the war gaming that looks pretty naive and hopeless is the idea that the EU can somehow be "co-opted" into saying that there is no road back to membership for an independent Scotland.  Quite how Britain is supposed to have gained sufficient goodwill with the EU during Brexit negotiations is something of a mystery.

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Steve Baker calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England in response to four bishops criticising the Internal Market Bill in a letter to the Financial Times is quite possibly the funniest thing I've read all year.

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Click HERE for the Scot Goes Pop poll fundraiser - just £500 away from reaching its target!

Your suggestions for poll questions, please

First of all, thank you to everyone who has donated to the crowdfunder so far.  I was particularly grateful to Paul Kavanagh for spontaneously helping to promote it, literally just a couple of days before he was taken ill.  It was great to see him in such good form in his telephone interview with The National the other day, and I know that all our thoughts and good wishes continue to be with him as he recovers.

After just over a week, £5208 has been raised of the £6000 target.  As always happens, the rate of donations has slowed as time has gone on, so there's no guarantee we'll make the target, but with a bit of luck it should now be possible to commission another opinion poll of some description.  I'm still mulling over the timing - it'll be at some point between now and mid-December.  But now is certainly not too early to be thinking about possible questions, so if you have any brilliant suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.

On a completely unrelated subject, someone raised concerns the other day about the supposedly unappealing range of candidates for President of Scotland we'd be faced with if we became independent and then abolished the monarchy.  So I'd also like to ask for your nominations for President, and then maybe I'll run a strictly unscientific internet poll about that.  I'm looking for serious nominations, mainly - I'll be interested to see if we can demonstrate that we can produce Presidents that are just as good as Ireland has managed of late.  (And remember that even if we retain the monarchy, we'd probably still need a Governor-General, which amounts to the same thing apart from the lack of democratic accountability.)

Even Jim Bergerac isn't safe from the Westminster power grab...

 

This is utterly extraordinary. If anyone has any doubts that Westminster is engaged in a power grab, watch this video from Jersey's Minister of External Relations (who was a Tory when he lived in the UK).https://t.co/bDq9E4rOpw

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 18, 2020

The Scottish Tories suddenly have a Lib Dem problem

I asked earlier how on earth the SNP had managed to hold on to win the Ellon & District by-election when there were more than enough Lib Dem voters to see the Tories home on transfers.  Well, the answer is very simple - here's how the Lib Dem votes transferred for the final count.

Conservatives 161

SNP 159

Non-transferable 165

Nobody could ever accuse the Lib Dem leadership of being equidistant between the Tories and the SNP, but it looks like their voters suddenly are.  And if you think about it, that's perfectly logical, because Lib Dem voters are typically opposed to both independence and Brexit, so there's no longer any particular reason why the Tories would automatically be the more attractive option.

The Tories would appear to have now lost a major advantage in constituency tussles with the SNP, because tactical votes from Lib Dem supporters will probably be going in both directions.  And arguably there's a warning here for the Lib Dems themselves - will their voters stay loyal if they train too much of their fire on the SNP and independence, and not enough on the Tories and Brexit?

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.