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Final YouGov poll for Scotland is utterly clear

May 22

Posted by James in Holyrood | 12 Comments

Last night I blogged about the downsides of the Euro electoral system and the tactical voting it encourages. I argued that there were two seats in contention, and they could be between any of the Tories, the Greens, the SNP, UKIP and the Lib Dems. Just after I posted it, though, YouGov’s final Scottish poll was published. It’s got a 533 sample size, so the margin of error is bigger than with a normal 1000 person poll (up to 4.2%, rather than around 3%), but even so..

LAB – 28%
SNP – 26%
CON – 15%
UKIP – 13%
GRN – 11%
LDEM – 6%

The way this would work under the Euro electoral system is as follows (it shows the SNP on double UKIP’s vote, let’s assume they’re a notch above that, which only affects the order in which the last two seats are won):

Parties Votes 1 Seat 1 Votes 2 Seat 2 Votes 3 Seat 3 Vote 4 Seat 4 Vote 5 Seat 5 Vote 6 Seat 6
SNP 26% 26% SNP 13% 13% 13% SNP 8.7%
Lab 28% Lab 14% 14% 14% Lab 9.3% 9.3%
Con 15% 15% 15% Con 7.5% 7.5% 7.5%
Lib Dems 6% 6% 6% 6%  6%  6%
Greens 11% 11% 11% 11% 11% 11%
UKIP 13% 13% 13% 13% 13% 13% UKIP

The last two vote columns are key. If this were the result, the last two seats would go SNP/UKIP, with both parties’ votes at 13% at that stage (the SNP having been halved because they won the second seat). But look at the Votes 6 column. The Greens would, on this poll, fall just 2% short of claiming that last seat from UKIP. No-one else is even close at that stage – Labour would need 39% instead of 28% to take it, the SNP likewise, the Tories would need 26% instead of 15%, and the Lib Dems would need 13% instead of 6%. With a 4.2% margin of error, even assuming it all went in favour of Labour, or the SNP, or the Tories, or the Lib Dems, they couldn’t stop UKIP.

Only a boost to the Green vote, on this showing, could realistically stop Scotland electing a UKIP MEP.

If we took that two percent from the SNP, that’d leave the last two seats as Green/UKIP rather than SNP/UKIP, which cannot be the objective. So the tactical message to all non-SNP voters who don’t want to see UKIP in is lend the Greens your vote. This applies most of all to Lib Dem voters: your seat is lost, as all the polls agree. Your final message is about in or out of Europe – a Green MEP for Scotland rather than a UKIP MEP makes that case better than a wasted vote for the Lib Dems.

Tomorrow’s forgotten voters

May 21

Posted by James in Elections, Europe | 5 Comments

A preferential ballotThe very roughly proportional electoral system for the Euro elections gives us no more nuanced a vote than Westminster, a simple crude X with not even a second preference. As with all systems that don’t let us express the range of our views, tactical voting becomes inevitable, and indeed the dominant debate on Twitter has been about whether the Greens or the SNP are better placed to stop that sixth seat going to UKIP.

It’s a double shame – personally, with a proper preferential ballot paper I’d vote Green 1, SNP 2, Labour 3, Tory 4, Lib Dem 5 on the tactical level if I could (the Tories and the Lib Dems being separated purely by honesty, i.e. both seem determined to grind the faces of the poor, but at least the Tories admit it). That way I know I’d definitely 100% be casting a vote designed to block UKIP. I’d even rather see George Lyon go back to Brussels than whichever swivel-eyed racist happens to top UKIP’s Scottish list.

The SNP would come second for me, incidentally, primarily for fairly poor reasons: the referendum is more important to me than whether one more Labour MEP or one more SNP MEP is elected, and the results from tomorrow will be seen in that light. In terms of values, the third on the SNP’s  list, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, was “unashamedly enthusiastic about the virtues of the Conservative Party” just 15 years ago. No-one who felt that way that recently can be one of us in any meaningful sense. It’s also incidentally amusing that the SNP leadership promoted someone who described Alex Salmond as “hopelessly out of his depth” and “utterly naive”.

But the absence of a preferential vote of some sort is a shame on a non-tactical level, too. I know SNP and Green voters who have been convinced by the other’s tactical arguments, and who are voting accordingly. I understand why, and I’ve done it myself, but I’d always rather vote my principles first, and a Green MEP in the form of Maggie Chapman wouldn’t be just yet another voice in the European Parliament backing unsafe oil exploration in sensitive waters, like all our current MEPs, just to pick one issue.

Anyway, we’re stuck with a partly tactical election, although attention has been unduly focused on the final seat. Personally I think the final two are in play, and between the two they could go to any of the following parties: Tory, Green, SNP, UKIP, and even the Lib Dems. The nature of the electoral system makes it very hard to predict how votes will divide down for the largest party, the SNP, and polls are also less accurate for the smaller parties jostling in the 6-12% region. My best guess is that the Tories will indeed win a seat, and that it could in fact be between the Greens and the SNP for the last one, with UKIP beating the Lib Dems. But it’s just a guess.

That list leaves out one party, what looks like the one great certainty of this list. The Labour Party will surely win two seats comfortably but be nowhere near winning a third seat. In a way, this should make their less dogmatic voters most susceptible to persuasion to go elsewhere.

If defending the Union is their priority, then a Tory or Lib Dem vote might make more sense. If their priority is stopping UKIP, or indeed if they’re Labour For Indy voters, then maybe a Green or an SNP vote could be considered. If climate change or inequality are the most important issues for them, maybe they’d decide they could make more of an impact again with a Green vote. If they’re racist “Blue Labour” and “concerned about immigration”, well, they can draw their own conclusions. Or, of course, they could stick to their usual party. But, ironically, it looks to me like folk who normally vote Labour are those who should most obviously consider putting their X next to another party tomorrow.

Have we reached peak Guardian?

May 16

Posted by Dom in Holyrood | 1 Comment

peak guardianFor a while I was the only one reading the Guardian, or so I thought. It started off with me reading the paper Guardian with a cup of coffee. Occasionally I’d laugh at the odd meta-article that crept through, and at myself. Then I found out other people were reading the Guardian too. Not only that, the amount of Guardian produced was being increased exponentially.

There used to be a relatively small range of Guardian, and long term Guardian fans will remember trademarks such as Ian Traynor’s excellent foreign reporting and how good G2 used to be when it first appeared.

Then came Guardian Australia, and Guardian US. Then The Guardian was playing a major role in global politics as Alan Rusbridger was ordered by MI-5 to smash up some hard drives containing sensitive information.  Shortly before an article about Alan Rusbridger, by Alan Rusbridger, documenting Alan Rusbridger’s difficulty in playing the piano appeared.

The fact you can get all different types of Guardian, and the fact seemingly everyone is either reading or writing for the Guardian, means that you can now find out what it is like to be Anna Wintour’s (the editor of American Vogue) daughter. Peak oil is actually quite boring, but peak beard is not. You can also attend Guardian workshops on everything from twitter to urbanism run by Guardian affiliated celebrities, and read Chris Huhne (who is apparently not the one who went to prison for lying in court) talk about how bad British politics is. It is now possible to find a Guardian article commenting on any aspect of your life if you type in your area of interest to Google next to the word Guardian. Oddly enough, this rule does not always hold true if you live in Scotland (and Severin Carrell deserves better than being relegated to the Scotland blog, stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of what he can write and what click rates demand is read)

Like good beer, and good beards, good journalism takes time and cannot be knocked off by anyone with a pen and a view on something – that way blogging lies – any more than reading a lot of books about space makes you an astrophysicist. Like the cause of good beer being appropriated by the hungry brand hipsters of capitalism and the climactically sensible growing of facial hair by the sons of Nathan Barley, I’m not sure I’ll ever get my paper back after peak Guardian. In the last week I’ve attended some exciting meetings on where journalism goes next, and in Scotland that may mean following a different path and a different model to London’s new media.

It was Scotland’s Oil (and we spent it)

May 16

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 3 Comments

The Sunday Herald, turncoat commercialist opportunists that they are, ran with a splash on a second recently discovered McCrone report written in the late 70s which had recommended establishing an oil fund, as had been done in Norway.

There’s a bit of a difference though: during the late 1970s through most of early 1990s and ever since Norway ran budget surpluses which enabled it to save money without raising taxes, cutting spending or borrowing more.

Which are, unfortunately, the choices that the UK was faced with at the time and which Scotland would also have been faced with had it been independent. They’re also the choices that an independent Scotland would face now.

Not establishing an oil fund wasn’t actually a failure of government but rather an almost inevitable consequence of the proportionally bigger share of North Sea reserves Norway has and the almost immediate, but slightly accidental, involvement of the state (do read that link, it’s a great story).

If there’s an argument to be had about this it’s about the need to nationalise natural resource exploitation, but that’s not the argument that’s being made. The argument being made is that, essentially, the UK should have borrowed more to invest in non-UK assets (the Norwegian oil fund is entirely invested outside of Norway to avoid distorting the economy) which seems unwise. Would you take out a bank loan to invest in the stock market?

It was Scotland’s oil. And we spent the money. On Scotland.

Exclusive: May Holyrood poll by Survation

May 15

Posted by James in Holyrood, Polling | Comments off

It’s month three of our rolling sequence of polling, conducted as usual by Survation, in partnership with the Daily Record and Dundee University’s 5 Million Questions. Last month’s figures are here, and the Record have the indyref polling story here (in brief: Yes 44, No 56, i.e. no change on last month, but they also got numbers suggesting Salmond is unpersuasive).

This month, like last month, I’m comparing vote shares to the previous month’s figures: but seat numbers are still shown as the change on the 2011 result. Seat projections are from Scotland Votes again. The major caveat with the seat projections is that UKIP are shown at a point where they would almost certainly win a handful of regional list seats, but the Scotland Votes site doesn’t include them, so it is unclear at whose expense they would come. The model does show one independent: it’s not clear if this is a legacy result based on Margo or a seat based on the large “others” list score, mostly UKIP. My guess is they’d pick up perhaps five on this result, and a rough guess would be that each of the existing Holyrood parties might win one fewer each than shown here. So here are the figures, with that caveat.

Parties Constituency Region Total
Vote share (+/-) Seats (+/-) Vote share (+/-) Seats (+/-) Seats (+/-) %
SNP 43.7 (-1.2) 49 (-4) 39.1 (-0.7) 12 (-4) 61 (-8) 47.3
Labour 31.7 (-0.4) 19 (+4) 26.4 (+1.3) 18 (-4) 37 (±0) 28.7
Conservative 15.4 (+1.9) 3 (±0) 11.3 (-0.9) 11 (-1) 14 (-1) 10.9
Liberal Democrats 4.9 (-0.8) 2 (±0) 6.1 (-2.9) 4 (+1) 6 (+1) 4.7
Scottish Greens 1.0 0 (±0) 8.7 (+1.4) 10 (+8) 10 (+8) 7.8
UKIP 2.1 0 (±0) 7.1 (+3.1) 0 (±0) 0 (±0) 0
Others 1.2 (+0.5) 0 1.3 (n/a) 1 (±0) 1 (±0) 0

The SNP remain in unquestioned pole position: a small dip in both votes still leaves them winning more than sixty seats overall. As per last month, if this were repeated they could either return to an even more comfortable version of minority rule model they used from 2007 to 2011, or they could pick any one of the three smaller parties as a coalition partner. On these numbers, especially if we assume UKIP would take one further seat from each, the Lib Dems would provide them with the narrowest possible majority, something the SNP might well be reluctant to contemplate.

Labour have edged back up a little on the list and fallen less far on the first vote, and as a result would pick up four constituencies from the SNP while losing four of their list seats. No overall progress since they bore the brunt of the “tartan steamroller” in 2011, in short. Or slightly worse, if the ‘kippers were to take one off them. If I were advising Labour, I’d say it’s clear there’s something wrong with the team, or with the policies, or with the message, or with a combination of all three.

The Tories are broadly holding their position since 2011 here, with just one more seat lost. Managed decline, one might say. And the Lib Dems would win just one more than 2011, with their list vote showing the sharpest decline over the last month.

Which brings me to my favourite part of this result: the strongest Green list vote we’ve seen since this polling sequence began, indicating a Green group five times larger than that which currently sits at Holyrood, primarily because Labour would no longer be so substantially under-represented in the constituencies.

My guess is 10 Green MSPs would mean two each in Lothian, Glasgow, and Highlands & Islands, plus one each in North East, Mid Scotland & Fife, South, and West, although one in Central or even a third in Lothian at the expense of the second H&I seat is another possibility (again, as with the Coalition parties above, note the UKIP caveat here). A result like this would lead to the biggest celebration the Greens have ever had, and a strong hand in the session to come.

Whichever way the referendum goes in September, this result would also see a pro-independence majority at Holyrood almost as large as that elected in 2011, although clearly Holyrood polling this far out is pretty damn speculative, especially over that particular event horizon.