Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie has made the most despicable comment of the pandemic - and lives may be lost as a result

Whatever the stereotypes about 'Cybernats', there can be very few independence supporters who truly think that border restrictions with England would be some sort of optimal outcome.  An infinitely preferable way to keep the public safe would have been for the whole UK to follow the careful path that Nicola Sturgeon has charted, and for the number of infections to be uniformly low across all four nations.  Trying to stop imported cases from a neighbouring country, where the virus is being allowed to circulate at a higher level, can only be a poor second-best.  It's bound to be somewhat less effective, and it curtails all of our freedoms in an undesirable way.

But our leaders have to deal with the situation as it actually is, and not as we would like it to be.  Countries all over the world have grappled for months with the problem of differential infection rates in different territories, and border controls have often proved to be an important tool in preventing the virus from spreading from a hotspot to a lower-intensity area.  It's got nothing to do with politics, or ideology, or nationalism, or racism, or chauvinism.  It's purely a question of public health.

In that context, a comment made two days ago by Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie about the mere possibility of restrictions at the Scotland/England border was close to being unforgivable.

"We are one nation. Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish. We are in this together. Please stop this divisive, nasty talk of closing borders to 'others'."

He knew that was profoundly dishonest on multiple counts when he said it.  The use of the word 'others' in inverted commas falsely implied that border restrictions would be motivated by prejudice based on nationality or ethnicity.  In reality, the rules would apply to anyone crossing the border regardless of who they are - there would be no discrimination between Scottish people returning home and English people coming up for a visit.  The freedoms of English people already in Scotland would be totally unaffected.  Bowie is also well aware that the whole idea of asking travellers from England to quarantine is not something the SNP leadership would be instinctively keen on doing, precisely because they'd want to avoid hysterical suspicions in certain quarters about their motives.  The fact that they're even considering it suggests that government advisers must be sending a very clear message that it may be necessary to save lives.

Bowie therefore had a choice.  He could make it easier for the Scottish Government to save lives by assuming their good faith, or he could make it harder.  He chose the latter course.  Make no mistake - by saying what he did, it's not totally inconceivable that he may have prevented a vitally important public health measure from being implemented, and that people will die as a result.  SNP politicians are human, and once the suggestion that a health intervention is xenophobic becomes normalised as part of political discourse, it does become psychologically more difficult for them to act.  I truly hope they find the courage to completely set aside the disgraceful antics of their opponents and to take whatever steps are warranted by the scientific evidence.

Incidentally, it was pointed out on social media that the border has previously been closed since Scotland became part of the UK.  It happened in 1950, to be exact, when the police were trying to recover the Stone of Destiny so it could be returned to Westminster Abbey.  Odd how it's perfectly OK to compromise the sacred indivisibility of Our Precious Union in order to locate a symbol of subjugation, but it's apparently not OK to do it to keep thousands of people alive.  British Nationalism 1, People 0. 

This "Our One True Glorious United Kingdom" schtick is normally, at worst, mildly irritating and sometimes even entertaining. But when you get to the point where people are being asked to *die* for Andrew Bowie's nationalism...well, take a hike, Andrew.https://t.co/knHOPNvTyN

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2020

Why is your government "othering" the people of Leicester, @AndrewBowie_MP ? Are you hellbent on splitting Our Precious Indivisible Union into "Leicesterites" and "Norms"? We're all in this together, blah, blah, etc, etc.https://t.co/knHOPNvTyN

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2020

People who don't have coronavirus owe a duty to show solidarity with those who do have it by catching it themselves. After all, we're all in this together and so must all try to catch it. Last time I looked that's what "We're all in this together" means, Ms. Sturgeon.

— David Halliday (@DavidJFHalliday) June 30, 2020

The only way we'll defeat this virus is by us all catching it as one United Kingdom.

— David Halliday (@DavidJFHalliday) June 30, 2020

Remember that day? The day that the UK Gov closed the border between Scotland & England all because some pranksters stole an ancient stone? @AndrewBowie_MP @DavidMundellDCT @ScotTories pic.twitter.com/ZbvsWILCJx

— Nicola's No1 Comrade (@no1_nicola) June 30, 2020

A solution in search of a problem

Just a quick note to let you know I have a new article on The National's website, responding to Ruth Wishart's piece that advocated tactical voting on the regional list.  You can read it HERE.

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I'm hearing (as Laura Kuenssberg would say) that there is yet another Scottish poll from Panelbase currently in the field, featuring the standard independence question, voting intentions for Holyrood and Westminster, and a wide range of supplementary questions.  Some of the questions look distinctly Wings-like to me (GRA and a list party) and others don't, so I'm wondering if it's another composite survey for more than one client.

A plea to both sides of the "game the system" debate - stop using misleading terminology that will increase the risk of independence supporters spoiling their ballots by mistake

I was reading the Barrhead Boy blog yesterday, and just for a moment or two I thought I felt my ears burning.  But then I realised that "one blogger in particular" probably referred to Peter A Bell and not myself.

"The glass half empty brigade are having the time of their lives. One blogger in particular who for years has been demanding that the SNP and Movement needs to stop playing by Westminster rules and do things differently has gone full circle. No, no, we must keep voting SNP 1 2 he cries we need to keep doing the exact same things I said for years weren’t working."

I'm not sure off the top of my head whether Mr Bell does use language like "SNP 1 & 2", but I would once again urge people on both sides of this debate to stop doing so.  That would actually be in everyone's interests, because we live in a country that uses three different voting systems for different elections (until Brexit it was four), which means there's plenty of room for dangerous confusion.  Voters have become familiar with using numbers to vote in STV elections for local councils, and if we say it's possible to vote "SNP 1 & 2" for Holyrood, they might just take us literally and put those numbers on the ballot paper.  The last thing we need is a disproportionately high number of spoilt ballots from independence supporters.

In a way I can understand why the "game the system" lobby are willing to risk sowing that confusion, though, because "SNP 1 & 2" gives the false impression that the list vote is a sort of "second preference" vote - which they might hope will lead people to feel that the SNP are being "greedy" in "hoarding" those votes.  The reality is that the Additional Member System is not a preferential system, and the expectation in all countries that use it is that the vast majority of people will vote for the same party on both ballots.  The only reason for having two ballots in the first place is to give the voter some discretion to vote tactically or for a favoured individual on the constituency ballot.  For example, a Green supporter in Edinburgh Central at the last election might have concluded that their party had little chance in the constituency vote, and so could have voted for the SNP to attempt to keep Ruth Davidson out, safe in the knowledge that they would still be voting Green on the really important ballot - ie. the list ballot.  The composition of the whole parliament is roughly proportional to how people vote on the list ballot, not the constituency ballot - and for that reason people should always vote for their first-choice party on the list.

As an SNP slogan once put it, "with the constituency vote you're choosing an MSP, with the list vote you're choosing a government".  There's more than a grain of truth in that.

I've thought once or twice recently about responding to the commentary on Barrhead Boy about the possibility of gaming the system, because to be perfectly frank it's contained half-truths, wild conspiracy theories and a skipload of wishful thinking.  However, as I said yesterday, it seems to me that the belief that there's a way of "hacking" AMS is like crack cocaine for some people, and once they're addicted they effectively become immune to rational argument.  One thing I do want to address, though, is the repeated claim that a "voting system that makes it virtually impossible for a single party to govern on its own" is some kind of weird aberration that could only have come about due to a conspiracy by the British state against independence.   What Barrhead Boy appears to be talking about here is simply proportional representation, which is the norm across the entire continent of Europe - the UK is practically the only European country that doesn't use it for national elections.  The idea that reverting to first-past-the-post would represent some kind of national liberation from London tyranny is, let's be honest, completely nuts and doesn't stand up to more than a moment's scrutiny.

I know it's part of Yes mythology that the Holyrood voting system was chosen to stitch up the SNP, but as far as I can see that belief is based on a single-word response by Jack McConnell at a press conference many years ago.  Would we take McConnell's word as gospel on any other subject?  It may well be that concerns over an SNP majority government made it easier for the Lib Dems to persuade Labour to accept the case for proportional representation, but the bottom line is that it's quite simply a superior system to first-past-the-post and it empowers the voter more.  It actually doesn't prevent voters from choosing a single-party majority government, but it does mean that the party in question will need something close to a majority of the votes to get into that happy situation, which is exactly as it should be.  You basically get whatever you vote for - there's no extra bang for your buck by voting for a smaller party, and indeed in many cases there's less bang for your buck, because if you vote for a fringe party that doesn't hit 5% or 6% of the list vote in your region, you might as well have abstained.

In truth, AMS has worked out pretty well for the independence movement - it delivered an SNP majority government in 2011 on a minority vote, and it also delivered a pro-independence majority in 2016 on a minority vote.  In 2007 it gave us an SNP minority government when first-past-the-post would have given us a Labour majority government.  And in 1999 and 2003 it ensured that the SNP opposition to the Labour-Lib Dem coalition was far stronger than would have been the case under first-past-the-post.  In those days, the vast majority of pro-independence seats were list seats, and it was the unionists who used to complain about those MSPs being "unelected".  Barrhead Boy seems to think that unionists have an in-built advantage because their vote is split between multiple parties, but the complete opposite is true - it's the SNP's dominance of the pro-indy vote that has led to the combined forces of Yes being slightly over-represented in recent years.

Barrhead Boy also uses a number of dubious examples to support his theory that it will somehow be possible for a fringe party to come out of nowhere and win loads of list seats.  The dodgiest example of all is -

"Have they forgotten that the SNP went from 6 to 56 MPs in one election?"

Yup, you're away ahead of me here.  That's an apples-and-oranges comparison because it happened under first-past-the-post.  The 2015 surge was a remarkable phenomenon, no question, but if the election had been conducted under proportional representation, the SNP's seat numbers would only have increased from around 12 to around 30.

Want to know how to maximise pro-indy representation at Holyrood? The dull (but correct) answer is "vote for a party large enough to have a chance of winning seats"

It was brought to my attention the other night that a few people have been falsely claiming that my position on "tactical voting on the list" has changed, and that for some unspecified reason I now regard the idea as workable.  That is categorically untrue.  My jaw dropped to the floor when I heard about the misrepresentation, because I've banged on so much about the subject that it's very hard to see how anyone who reads this blog or follows me on Twitter could sincerely have got the wrong end of the stick about my stance.

My guess is that Stuart Campbell's self-interested propagandising may have something to do with this, because a few months ago he theatrically pretended to think I had driven a coach and horses through my opposition to "gaming the system" by reiterating a point I've actually been making for a long time - namely that Alex Salmond is pretty much the only person who could make the idea work, because he's the one politician who has an extremely large personal following that could be confidently expected to vote for any party he decided to front.  But that exception to the rule is not particularly important unless you actually think Mr Salmond is going to lead a list-only party in opposition to the SNP.  At the moment I'm not aware of any indication that he is minded to do so.  RevStu's implicit claim was that "James is saying that you only need a well-known person on board and it'll work fine", but that's absolutely not what I'm saying.  The more I've thought about this, I've come to the conclusion that I literally cannot think of a single other person apart from Alex Salmond who has a big enough following to make a success of a pop-up list party.  Jim Sillars could maybe have pulled it off if it was 1990, but it's not 1990 anymore.

I'm not sure how much time it's worth devoting over the next year to warning people about the risks of so-called "tactical voting on the list", because it's increasingly like a dialogue with a brick wall.  People become so infatuated with the tantalising prospect of a "voting system hack" that can supposedly get rid of Murdo Fraser and his ilk that they refuse to engage with the inconvenient reasons why it won't actually work in the real world.  Indeed, as we've seen, they'll sometimes convince themselves that you're telling them that it will work.  It's like a sort of deep trance.  What I would compare it to is a gambler who spends all his time fantasising about how he's going to spend his vast winnings on a 100-1 bet, and refuses to face the fact that there's a 99% chance (or higher) that he's actually going to lose money.

What makes it even more bewildering is that a lot of the people currently caught in the trance were utterly scathing about "gaming the system" in 2016 when it was the Greens and RISE pushing the idea.  It's as if they think it was only unworkable in 2016 because of the "wokeness" of its proponents.  And the reverse is true as well - people on the radical left who were adamant in 2016 that gaming the system was feasible have now changed their view, but only because of their horror at the possibility of "TERFs" picking up a few list votes.  Speaking as the rarity of someone who has remained totally consistent on this, and who has pointed out that the laws of mathematics and the nature of the voting system aren't affected by the wokeness of the candidates, it would be rather nice to at least gain some credit for my consistency rather than having people make up fairy-tales about my position.  But it seems that's too much to ask.

*  *  *

I see that Ruth Wishart has a piece in The National today about how to "maximise pro-indy seats".  It's not online yet, but I know from what she's said on Twitter that she's going to come out in favour of the "gaming the system" wheeze.  Let me yet again set out the real way in which it's possible to maximise pro-indy representation, even though it won't be what people want to hear -

Vote for pro-indy parties that are large enough to have a hope in hell of winning seats.  That means voting for the SNP on the constituency ballot, and either the SNP or the Greens on the list.  The important caveat on the latter point is that you should always vote for your first-choice party on the list - if you're an SNP supporter, switching "tactically" to the Greens on the list is pointless and possibly counterproductive, because there's no reason whatever to think that the Greens have a better chance of winning list seats than the SNP.  Some people did chase shadows in that way in 2016, and all they succeeded in doing was contributing to the loss of the SNP overall majority, with all the negative consequences of that in terms of squandered momentum for the independence movement.  To put it in perspective, in 2016 the SNP won four list seats and the Greens won six.  In 2011 the SNP won sixteen list seats and the Greens won only two.  The SNP are absolutely capable of winning list seats even when they poll strongly on the constituency ballot.

But who won't win list seats?  Fringe parties.  It takes at least 5% or 6% of the vote in an electoral region to win a seat, and fringe parties almost never reach that level of support.  The only exception was the Scottish Senior Citizens' Unity Party, which won a single seat in 2003 by putting up Celtic legend Billy McNeill as a candidate.  (That was a stunt, because McNeill was far enough down the list to ensure he wouldn't be elected, but it did the trick and the unknown John Swinburne became an MSP instead.)

In almost all circumstances, if you vote for a fringe party you might as well be abstaining, and you simply make it easier for unionist parties to win more seats.

*  *  *

I'm the guest on the latest edition of the podcast A Broken World, hosted by Grant Parker - you can listen to it HERE.  (Bear in mind it was recorded two-and-a-half weeks ago.)

New podcast

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm the guest on the latest edition of the podcast A Broken World, hosted by Grant Parker.  It was recorded more than two weeks ago when I was still publishing the results of the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll (in fact I think I had to surreptitiously hit "publish" in the middle of the recording), so that was one of the topics of conversation, but there were plenty of others - it's over an hour long, so we had well and truly set the world to rights by the end of it.  You can listen HERE.

Plan A is dead, long live Plan B

Sir Keir Starmer may have unwittingly done the SNP a huge favour yesterday by more or less putting the luckless "Plan A" out of its misery and forcing us to look at more viable options. If there had been any realistic prospect of a future Labour government looking more favourably upon a Section 30 order than the Tory government do, the 'delay' faction within the SNP would undoubtedly have been tempted to hold on until 2024 or 2029 or however long it might have taken, and in the meantime just string the rank-and-file membership along with the illusion of activity. Of course Starmer's stance doesn't mean that the 'delay' faction will automatically embrace "Plan B", but it does massively complicate any efforts they might make to hold the line. It'll be difficult for them to credibly claim that they're still in favour of independence if they're angrily denouncing any suggestion that we should actually try to bring our objective about in any circumstances that are remotely likely to exist within the next ten or fifteen years. Back in the 1990s, we used to scoff at the London media's ignorance in referring to the "devolutionist" and "pro-independence" wings of the SNP, but we're perhaps on the verge of genuinely seeing a small, de facto devolutionist wing take shape for the first time, particularly at Westminster - and that will fundamentally change the relationship of those parliamentarians with activists and members who are for the most part deadly serious about making independence happen.

Is there no hope at all that Plan A could still work? I can only see two paths by which it might be reactivated as a viable option, and both of them are long shots -

1) Labour might do so badly in next year's Holyrood election that they embark on yet another round of soul-searching. I discuss this possibility in a forthcoming column for iScot magazine - Labour are probably nursing the hope that they're going to make some sort of recovery in the election due to Keir Starmer's encouraging Britain-wide polling numbers, but at the moment Scottish polls still put them firmly on course to lose yet more seats and slump to a new all-time low, which would be a shock to their system. It doesn't necessarily follow that Starmer will provide a boost once the campaign is actually underway, because it's Richard Leonard that will be leading the campaign and facing up to Nicola Sturgeon in the TV debates - a comparison that could look almost embarrassing. Remember that this time Ian Murray won't be able to disingenuously blame any seat losses on Corbynism - his own fingerprints will be all over the results, and his constitutional extremism may take a hefty share of the blame. From the SNP's point of view, this outcome is certainly worth pursuing, and probably the best way of maximising the chances of a Labour slump is to foreground the question of independence and coax the electorate into making a polarised choice between SNP and Tory. However, the reason it's a long-shot is that bouts of Labour soul-searching always seem to follow the same pattern - once the initial shock of an election defeat wears off, they revert to type and decide that the fault lies with the voters and not with themselves.

2) The 2024 election could result in a hung parliament, thus forcing Starmer to do a deal with the SNP if he wants to become Prime Minister. No-one can deny this is theoretically possible, but the problem is that hung parliaments happen by random chance - there's no way of campaigning for them or making them more likely to occur. There have been twenty-one general elections since 1945, and only three of them have not produced a majority for a single party - a 14% strike rate. And of course one of the three hung parliaments was in 2017, when the SNP had more than 5% of the seats in the Commons, but still didn't hold the balance of power. So you don't just need a hung parliament, you need the right sort of hung parliament. I would guess the chances of it happening in 2024 are 10% at the absolute most, and we simply can't bet the house on that kind of outside hope.

Which moves us on, if we're sensible, to "Plan B". Fortunately, the people of Scotland seem to be firmly behind both of the two main options for seeking an independence mandate in the absence of a Section 30 order...

Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, 28th-31st January 2020:

There are differing legal opinions on whether the Scottish Parliament currently has the power to hold a consultative referendum on independence without Westminster’s permission. If the UK government continues to refuse to give permission, do you think the Scottish Parliament should legislate to hold a referendum and then allow the courts to decide whether it can take place?

Yes 50%
No 39%

With Don't Knows excluded...

Yes 56%
No 44%

Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll, 1st-5th June 2020:

If Boris Johnson and the UK Government manage to block an independence referendum, do you think that pro-independence parties such as the SNP and the Greens should consider including an outright promise of independence in their manifestos for a future election, to give people an opportunity to vote for or against the idea?

Yes 49%
No 29%

With Don't Knows excluded...

Yes 63%
No 37%

And the choice between those two possibilities isn't necessarily binary. I think the most logical approach is to legislate for a consultative referendum first, and if the Supreme Court blocks it (a very big "if"), use that ruling to demonstrate to voters that the referendum route has been closed off, and that an election will have to be used instead.

Back to school?

Wikipedia lists the ideology of the Scottish Tories as "conservatism", "British unionism" and "economic liberalism". To which we must now add "pro-virus".https://t.co/0f2ta2vyUS

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

If the Scottish Tories are claiming full credit for "forcing" the Scottish Government to reopen schools in August, will they also take full responsibility for any negative consequences, such as infections and deaths?
No. Of course they won't.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

The perception is that parent pressure led to a change of tack from the Scottish Government, but I know of parents who are frightened and upset at talk of legal action if they don't send their children to school. It's sometimes a mistake to heed only those who shout the loudest.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

There should be no talk of legal action. If parents aren't sufficiently reassured to send their children to school during a pandemic, that's a failing of the authorities, not of the parents.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

Shows the danger in Swinney's announcement today.

Setting expectations now that Scotland will be in a position to have full re-entry of schools on 11 August is a big gamble. Six weeks is a long time.https://t.co/0LnOBRlEQO

— Ben Wray (@Ben_Wray1989) June 23, 2020

Jason Leitch: "We are going to learn to live with this infectious disease, like we live with tuberculosis and flu."
You kind of get the feeling that, even at this stage, he can't quite stop hankering after the herd immunity 'solution'.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

Coming to the Fringe next year

JASON LEITCH - THE MUSICAL

Featuring the show-stopping numbers...

'Everybody's Going To Get It (But Not Twice)'

'From Ben Nevis To Arthur's Seat'

'Hug Your Granny MORE'

'I Don't Like To Use That Term (But Yes)'

'My Masters Degree, Piers'

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2020

Make your choice: 👇significant amount of virus circulating into 2021 & then re-group (current strategy) versus make a concerted push now to get rid of the virus.

Do you really want to be in the current situation in winter (esp with virus which thrives in damp/cold)? https://t.co/evTsA9OqEo

— Devi Sridhar (@devisridhar) June 23, 2020

This is unacceptable! Thousands of new cases each day & significant daily death toll is where England is today. We need to eliminate the virus. That's happening in Ireland and Scotland. Proper local case finding, testing, tracing, isolation and support needs to be in place. https://t.co/TOubZqb9DP

— Gabriel Scally (@GabrielScally) June 23, 2020

Today, Boris Johnson announced that the 2m rule is to be reduced to 1 metre plus.

Chris Whitty warned that the 2m rule would "need to be in place as long as the pandemic lasts".

I guess the government are now clearly following the money rather than the science.

— Katy (@KatyJane_101) June 23, 2020

Chris Whitty asked whether all members of the SAGE committee signed off today's package of measures, replies that "the job of advisers is not to sign things off.”

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) June 23, 2020

Memo to Pete Wishart: "Plan A" has left Scotland in a "hellish limbo" already. Do you have a single credible proposal for getting us back out of it?

There's a principle in science that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".  I sometimes think that certain leading figures within the SNP regard any suggestion that "Plan A" might not work, and that there might be a more viable alternative means of obtaining an independence mandate, as such an extraordinary claim that it must be held to a higher standard of proof.  It's hard to think of any other explanation for the double-standards that abound in this debate.  "Plan A" simply isn't subjected to the same degree of scrutiny and scepticism as its rivals.  We are told that one of the hurdles that any plan must clear is that it has to be capable of actually delivering independence - and yet "Plan A" clearly fails that test catastrophically.

What is "Plan A"?  It's the idea that if you just ask for a Section 30 order persistently enough, it will be impossible for the Westminster government to say no.  Well, that's been proved wrong.  Twice.  Theresa May said no, and Boris Johnson said no.  There's every indication that even if we twiddle our thumbs for the next four years and wait for a Labour government that might never actually arrive, Sir Keir Starmer would then say no anyway.  It's unclear why "Plan A" fans are so convinced that a strategy that has so conspicuously failed to work for several years will suddenly start working if we wish hard enough, but if they do believe that, the onus is on them to supply some proof that they're not asking us to flog a dead horse for another few years.  The onus is most certainly not on those who make the eminently reasonable point that a failed strategy must be replaced - and that if you don't replace it, you don't believe in independence in any meaningful sense.

And that's the nub of the issue, isn't it?  "Plan A" diehards demand to be shown absolute certainty that "Plan B" will lead to independence, but the reality is that "Plan B" would be demonstrably superior to "Plan A" even if it only has a chance of delivering indy.  There is no such chance with "Plan A", which requires the Scottish Government to take no further action when the Westminster veto is deployed.  If anyone can explain to us how quite literally doing nothing can lead us to our objective, I'm sure we're all ears.

But you'll search in vain for any answers of that sort in Pete Wishart's latest blogpost (which like all his previous ones he'll inevitably describe as "the blog that everyone is talking about!").  His lack of self-awareness is truly astounding - he sneers at the idea that, having refused a referendum, the UK government will accept an election result as a mandate for independence.  And yet Pete's own implicit argument is that, having refused a referendum, the UK government will suddenly do a U-turn and grant a referendum because of opinion polls showing that Scots aren't happy.  In other words, Boris Johnson will be far more impressed by opinion polls than by election results.  Oh-kaaaaay, Pete.  Best of luck with that one.

Back in the real world, it's the obvious fact that election results are harder to ignore than opinion polls that gives "Plan B" a realistic chance of gaining some traction.  I'm not necessarily claiming that it would "work" in the sense of forcing London to negotiate an independence settlement straight away, although I do think that's possible if the mandate is strong enough.  But at the very least I think that a crisis of legitimacy would be created, and that the UK government might end up at the negotiating table to resolve it.  That could, for example, lead to an agreed referendum.

Pete asserts that "Plan B" could take us into a Catalan-style "hellish limbo".  But let's turn that on its head for a moment and imagine what would have happened if the Catalans had adopted the "Scottish model" of asking politely for a referendum and then taking no as a valid answer.  It's not hard to work out: nothing would have happened.  Madrid would have said no, Barcelona would have said "that's fine", and Catalonia would currently be living through precisely the kind of "hellish limbo" that Scotland is living through.  What exactly is your point here, Pete?

Oh, and I must just address a very silly straw man from Pete's blogpost -

"[Plan B] would therefore mean that the 2021 election ceases to be a General Election in the conventional sense and instead becomes a single issue plebiscite exclusively on the proposition that if the SNP secures a majority we move towards becoming an independent state. If it was to happen there would be no programme for Government, no defence of a record in power, just a straight forward one issue independence question."

Absolute rubbish.  To gain a credible mandate, independence would have to be Item 1 in the manifesto, but there would be lots of other items as well.  Independence would take months or years to negotiate, and no party putting itself forward for government for such a long period would ever present the electorate with a blank sheet of paper.  So, no, it wouldn't be a single-issue election - merely one in which the independence issue is predominant.

Everyone else in Scotland: "But, Pete, we're already in a hellish limbo. How would we actually tell the difference?"
Pete Wishart: "It's the blog that everyone's talking about!"https://t.co/rrtyX28GGc

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 21, 2020

* * *

Yesterday, Iain Macwhirter gave Nicola Sturgeon what was quite possibly the worst piece of advice she's ever received. He told her to just "go with the flow" and abandon the 2 metre rule if that's what England decides to do. Has he learned no lessons at all from the catastrophe of March? How many more thousands of innocents must die because some people seem to perversely think that the purpose of devolution is to obediently rubberstamp decisions made in London?

I was trying to work out what Iain's tweet reminded me of, and I suddenly realised it was the philosophy of passivity put forward by a rather sinister rabbit in Watership Down -

"Take me with you, wind, high over the sky. I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind...

Take me with you, stream, away in the starlight. I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-stream..."

My hope and expectation is that the Scottish Government have well and truly learnt the lesson from March that "going with the flow" kills people by the thousand. Let's follow the science instead.https://t.co/cNNL7Oc4do

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 21, 2020

Unless you've been told by a Scottish Govt source that Scotland will be adopting the rule change on Tuesday (unlikely given the mood music), the use of "UK" in this tweet and headline is irresponsible, and increases the risk of people breaking the rules.https://t.co/n05ZNPDn5k

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 21, 2020

Whichever way you cut it, there's more support for independence now than there was in 2016

The news that the pro-independence vote has reached an all-time high of 54% with Panelbase was characterised by a certain website as Yes going "back to where it was four years ago" - a rehashing of the bogus claim from a couple of weeks ago that Yes support has not really budged for years.  This is getting a bit silly now.  There were twelve independence polls conducted between the EU referendum result becoming known and the end of 2016.  Eleven of them had a Yes vote lower than last night's poll.  Nine of them had No in the lead.  By contrast, six of the eight polls in 2020 so far have had Yes on 50% or higher, with an average Yes vote of 50.9%.  (And it's a smidgeon higher if the YouGov / Hanbury poll, which used a non-standard question, is excluded.)

Furthermore, if you're going to compare one individual poll with another individual poll, both have to be conducted by the same firm.  If they're not, you're comparing apples with oranges, because each firm has its own 'house effects'.  The 54% recorded in June 2016 was in a Survation poll, not a Panelbase poll.  But as it happens there was a Panelbase poll conducted at around the same time, and it had Yes on 52%.  So, whichever way you cut it, there's more support for independence now than there was back then.

The new poll is also unusual in that it shows a Yes lead that is big enough not to be considered what the Americans call a 'statistical tie'.  In other words, even if the poll's margin of error is taken into account, Yes would still be ahead.  As far as I can see, this is only the third time that has happened in any poll from any firm since the indyref in 2014.  

Furthermore, this is only the second poll since the indyref that has shown Yes on 50% or higher even before Don't Knows are excluded.  (The other one was the Ipsos-Mori poll from 2015 that I mentioned last night.)  I'm not sure how important that is, because there's no good reason why undecideds should be left in.  But it does give us a useful response to unionist commentators who like to portray Don't Knows as "presumed No voters".

The earth shakes as support for independence soars to 54% - the highest EVER in a Panelbase poll

So you've probably seen the headline in the Sunday National about a poll that appears to show this...

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Panelbase)

Yes 54% (+2)
No 46% (-2)

I don't have any further information yet, but having done my usual Kremlinology on Twitter, it does look like a credible poll rather than a subsample - which makes sense, because we know there was a Panelbase independence poll in the field over recent days.  I don't know whether it was commissioned by Wings, or whether the Sunday National themselves commissioned a question as part of the same composite survey.  Either way, if it's confirmed as a full-scale poll this is the highest ever Yes vote in a Panelbase poll - the previous highest was 52%, which has been recorded on a few different occasions, most recently in the poll for Scot Goes Pop earlier in the month.

I'm also struggling to remember a higher Yes figure than 54% in any poll from any other firm.  The highest figure in the indyref campaign was 54% in an ICM poll published on the Saturday before polling day (although the firm pretty much disowned it straight away as being a likely rogue poll).  The highest since the indyref was 54% with Survation.  So if it's ever been 55% or higher, it must have been many, many years ago.

When the Scot Goes Pop poll showed a 2% increase to 52%, I did worry that it might be a temporary effect caused by anger over Dominic Cummings' jaunt to Barnard Castle, and that it would quickly recede.  But it now appears to have been more like a springboard than a high watermark.  The supplementary questions from that poll showed the handling of the pandemic had caused a remarkable shift in underlying attitudes towards constitutional change, and that probably explains the further boost.  Let's hope the transformation stands the test of time.

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UPDATE: I've been going through the records just to make sure what I said above is accurate.  There was an Ipsos-Mori poll conducted in August 2015 for STV which showed Yes on 53%, No on 44%, and Don't Knows on 3%.  I've looked and looked and none of the reporting seems to mention what the figures were with Don't Knows excluded, so perhaps Ipsos-Mori never made that calculation.  But it must have been either Yes 54%, No 46%, or Yes 55%, No 45%.  As far as historical polling is concerned, it looks like Yes might have slightly exceeded 54% with Don't Knows excluded in research conducted in 2006.  People forget that it wasn't unusual for polls to show a pro-independence majority in the early years of devolution, long before the surge during the indyref campaign.  But of course in those days any choice on independence seemed an extremely long way off, so it's debatable whether people who said they were in favour had thought about the issue in any great depth.  That caveat doesn't apply now.

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UPDATE II: It's just been confirmed that the new poll is indeed a full-scale Panelbase poll, and the client is Business for Scotland.  I think it's worth making the point that there have now been seven polls in this calendar year that have asked the standard independence question, ie. 'Should Scotland be an independent country?'.  Three were commissioned by alternative media sites (Scot Goes Pop and Wings Over Scotland), two were commissioned by pro-independence organisations (Business for Scotland and Progress Scotland), one appeared to be self-funded by the pollster itself (YouGov) and only one was commissioned by a mainstream media outlet (the Sunday Times).  Unionist journalists love nothing better than a good sneer about the pro-indy alternative media, but it's getting to the point where in one specific respect we're actually doing a job that the mainstream media used to do and is now failing to do.