Brexit Or Not Brexit, that is not the question

Find Your Way Back

There has been some media and political agitation recently about the idea of holding some sort of popular vote about Brexit. The exact formula still remains unclear. What Vince Cable called a 'confirmatory referendum' is definitely seen by some as an actual rematch of the 2016 referendum, while People's Vote campaign for a referendum on the final Brexit deal only.

The SNP has so far cautiously stayed away from People's Vote though a couple of MPs (aye, that's ye Steve'n'Pete) seem 'open to the idea' (Wishart's words) of supporting it. It has already been argued (and demonstrated?) that officially backing People's Vote would be a very bad idea for the SNP. Simply because 'UK Better Together in the EU' has a cable-thick (pun intended) string attached: 'Scotland Better Together in the UK'.

This being said and regardless of anyone's personal stand on the issue, the idea of a 'confirmatory referendum' has some traction in public opinion if recent polling is any indication. The average of the six most recent polls shows that voters are (for once) consistent as about 52% (after undecideds removed) think that leaving the EU was the wrong choice and support holding a second referendum. Though of course it might not be the exact same 52%.

Obviously an almost even split is well within most polls' margin of error and falls far short of a landslidish change in public opinion. And of course it's all wishful thinking as the second referendum will never happen and the only option on the table is the infamous 'meaningful vote' that was so painfully strongarmed from the government last June.

Interestingly, in their latest 'poll-toll-you-boak' UK-wide survey, Survation added a question about 'who has a better plan for Brexit?' with a prompted choice between May and Johnson only. Unsurprisingly, as neither has any plan worth mentioning, 'Don't know' wins by 3% but both Theresa and Boris get their fair share of support.

What raises eyebrows here is that, given the choice between the one who made a pig's ear of the whole shebang and the one who jumped ship to avoid being held accountable for anything, a majority of people are still willing to give one or the other a chance. Survation should have added Kermit, Peppa and Ernie to their prompts, juist fur laffs.

But of course Boris can be trusted with having the better plan. After all his expert opinion two years ago was that Brexit would be a titanic success. Or wasn't it?

© Comedy Central, 2017

I Want to See Another World

Now let's just pretend for a moment that the Second EU Referendum is actually a possibility. This has been polled on a regular basis multiple times since June 2016 and here is what the trend says:

The trendlines here bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Scottish Independence polling though the two issues are completely unrelated, aren't they? Or are they? And here is what the average of the six most recent polls would deliver:

Of course this not a major upset as these voting intentions are roughly within MOE and you never know what could happen after an actual campaign, especially if some sorts of dark money and election fraud were at work again. After all if a resurrected Vote Leave was fined again for electoral malpractice, Tory-crony donors would only be too happy to foot the bill as it would be only a droplet in the ocean of profits they would make from post-Brexit NHS privatization, to name just one of many likely money trees.

Which Side Are You On?

Once again I used Survation's last comprehensive poll for crosstabs that may shed a light on why remaining in the EU is now the preferred option. It is slightly less Remain-leaning than the current average (51-49 instead of 52-48). But the differences between the various subsamples and the national average, and the patterns they show, matter more than the absolute values per se.

Women being more supportive of Remain than men comes as no surprise as they are also generally more supportive of Labour in England and of Scottish Independence if polls are to be believed. So we may have some sort of global pattern here. The usual Generation Divide is also painfully obvious here. Baby Boomers are in full I'm-Allright-Jack-And-Fuck-Them-All mode again, no matter the consequences, contrary to all the other generations. And the older they are the worse it is.

The education and income crosstabs are trickier as some certainly would love to interpret them as some Uneducated-Proles-vs-Public-School-Elite sort of thing. I guess only a three-dimensional crosstab with age would show that it's again more complex than you might think at face value. Some sort of combination of a reverse correlation between age and education level and a direct correlation between age and income would certainly be more enlightening than the raw education and income data.

Survation's results on the Geographical Divide look a bit off compared to other recent polls. London is certainly more supportive of Remain than their subsample shows and closer to their actual 60-40 vote. There is also circumstantial evidence in other polls that Wales is now at least evenly split and likely slightly leaning towards Remain. What everybody agrees on anyway is the revival of the North-South Divide in England with the frontier somewhere between the Severn-Humber line and the Severn-Wash line. Midlands evenly split is in itself a plus for Remain as the region was almost 60-40 Leave in 2016.

Last but not least the Political Divide is pretty much what you'd expect. Only Conservative voters massively back Leave. And surely need to be reminded that 70% of Tory voters is barely 30% of the 2017 GE votes and just a wee smitch above 20% of the electorate. Then of course these are bound to dictate the final say about being dragged down into the unknown or not. But Labour are the ones with a real problem with Brexit. Which is why we shouldn't expect to get any better from them than variations on "we don't rule out not ruling out" or something as half-baked.

To sum it up your Arch-Brexiteer would be like a not too educated male Tory pensioner from Southern Little England. The type that spends holidays in Benidorm and comes back whining there are too many foreigners there.

But of course none of this matters because Brexit was never about Brexit, wasn't it?

No Way Out

Brexit was always about scoring points in the never-ending Tory civil wars. Never about putting country over party but always about putting petty party infighting over the best interests of the country. It was painfully obvious that there never was any Brexit Plan A simply because David Cameron had deluded himself into believing Remain would prevail no matter what.

Rewind to Referendum Night and just remember the sighs of relief all over the Conservative Party when the infamous YouGov on-the-day poll predicted Remain winning by 4 points. Only a few hours later, when Sheffield and Birmingham declared for Leave, did it dawn on them all that the game was over and they had lost.

With Cameron gone all Theresa May achieved was going through all the improvised losing options from Plan B1 to Plan B12. And even that last variant failed to vitaminate her case enough for any meaningful results. So all that's left now is Plan C. C for Crashlanding.

Tories have locked themselves into a cage with no doors and then thrown away the key. And all they found to cover up their incompetence is lies and deceit topped with state-of-the-art poshtoff arrogance. Like the idle threat of refusing to pay the severance fee. Which would be reneging on international obligations, something no self-respecting Tory would ever consider doing, or would they? No wonder the whole posturing didn't go down too well with the EU's 27.

It's quite amazing May didn't figure out that going on live TV whining 'the dug did it' just wouldn't cut it. Especially not when dealing with the European Dug-O'Twenny-Seven-Heids who has loadsa both bark and bite in him. Only upside to her dismal performance is that now everybody is aware Tories have been knowingly leading the whole country up the garden path to the cliff edge all along. Until all what's left to do is jump.

Forget all the delusions. The EU will never offer better than a 'no-deal' deal that will be voted down by Commons and so will Chequers. Then Theresa May will limp on until 30 March when the Mogglodyte Rebellion puts an end to her misery and probably grants her a peerage as a consolation prize. Soon Baroness May of Maidenhead will be swallowed down a gaping black hole of oblivion on the Lords' backbenches, to be remembered only as the Worst Prime Minister Since H.H. Asquith. Unless she manages to better on that too in the meantime and becomes known simply as The Worst Prime Minister Ever.

Only in Edinburgh and Dublin will she be hailed a national hero, as the one who decisively paved the way for Scottish Independence and Irish Reunification. Let's just hope both happen soon enough to avoid Brexitocalypse taking too much of a toll.

Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path

If we make it we can all sit back and laugh

But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
© Peter Sinfield, 1969

Soar Alba Gu Bràth

© Pete Sears & Jeannette Sears, 1982

Westminster projection - 20.09.2018

Land of Confusion

Three more polls published in the last ten days, which is kind of a sluggish pace with a snap GE on the horizon. You know that thing that drifts away when you come closer to it. Anyway what we have now is something MSM could describe as a 'Conservative surge' even if they still poll 3-4% lower than their 2017 result.

Updated super-sample includes six UK-wide polls fielded between 4 and 13 September. Sample size is 9,393 with a 0.98% MOE. Here is the weighted average of voting intentions it delivers:

At face value, a 2% lead over Labour sounds like good news for the Conservatives but as always things are not as simple as they appear. Three other players are poised to disrupt the two-party game again: SNP, Liberal Democrats and UKIP more or less in that order. Of these only the SNP would have a real impact on the projected seats (more on this below). 

But the swings towards LibDems and UKIP are enough to generate some unstable situations for both major parties in a number of marginals where either LibDems or UKIP came third last year. Based on earlier patterns LibDems might appeal mostly to frustrated Conservative Remainers in the Southern 'Little England'. While UKIP might find friendly ears in the aborted Northern Powerhouse counties among Labour-Leave voters unsatisfied by Labour's current half-baked strategy on Brexit.

After the Ordeal

The updated seat projection unsurprisingly delivers a hung Parliament yet again. But with one interesting twist.

With Conservatives down to 307 seats the Con-DUP alliance would end up five seats short of a majority. While this would not preclude yet another Tory term with a minority government, it would still be an unwelcome symbol of Tories' inability to make their case convincingly enough, and would also fuel appetites for a Very Tory Coup.

And here comes the twist. If the Conservatives somehow managed to hold all their Scottish seats then they would bag 312 seats overall and the Con-DUP alliance would enjoy a one-seat majority. Not necessarily the most comfortable outcome in troubled times but still a majority. Which the strong SNP position in polls makes impossible for now. So much (again) for 'vote SNP get Tories'.

Get 'Em out by Friday

On this projection only 18 seats would change hands, a record low for over a century (aye, December 1910 again if you remember previous episodes). 

The detailed list of seats projected to change hands does not point to any obvious Portiballs (or should it be Ballsillo?) moments. Theresa Villiers is old news and Zac Goldsmith never was unless you count losing his seat once already, and even this feat made headlines for just one news cycle. 

Then the most interesting part obviously is that 11 of these 18 seats are in Scotland. With 3 others in London and only 4 in the rest of England, once more showing that Labour's liabilities lie South of the Wall and Scotland is not the key to Number 10.

The Battle of Epping Forest

Alternate scenarios factoring in MOE again point to a potentially unstable outcome with only roughly a 30% chance of an outright majority. Which would anyway require a statistically unlikely (for now) swing towards the Tories as they would need a 4% lead over Labour for a majority. But we've seen stranger things happen already, haven't we?

Current projection leaves us in already well-charted waters although with a slight swing towards the Conservatives. Stablest and strongest outcome would be 2015ish while odds are the likeliest would be somewhere between 1974ish and 1910ish. Nothing surprising here as recent projections have kept oscillating between tiny majorities and unmanageable stalemates.

Besides the two major English parties have to deal with organized infighting which would seriously weaken their respective leaders' position. Mogglodytes and Soubrynistas on one side, post-Blairites on the other probably number up to 25% of their respective Parliamentary parties. And there's little chance a GE, snap or otherwise, would alter this unless both parties resort to selective deselection. Which would in turn lead to further dissension and make matters worse. 

Incidentally the Conservatives would hold Epping Forest (Winston Churchill's and Norman Tebbit's seat in a previous incarnation as Epping in some distant past) in all scenarios as it has been a Tory safe seat for the last 45 years. Same can't be said of neighbouring Chingford and Woodford Green. In the 'Labour Maximum' scenario Ian Duncan Smith would lose this seat he held by just 5% in 2017. Juist sayin…..

No Son of Mine

I have already described the impact of the Generation Divide on Scottish Parliament elections. Similar patterns also apply to House of Commons elections. As usual I ran separate simulations for Scotland and the rest of the UK. Scottish Westminster vote-by-age crosstabs are from Survation's most recent 'poll-till-you-boak' Scottish survey. And here are the voting intentions (different from the Holyrood ones) and seat projections by age.

The Scottish Westminster simulation shows a clear Generation Divide between Baby Boomers on one side and all other generations on the other, as did the Holyrood simulation. As usual the national seat projection is based on the one poll only for comparison's sake and not on any 'weighted rolling average' data.

For consistency, UK-wide data come from the most recent Survation poll, fielded early this month and which was slightly less Tory-leaning than the current rolling average. Here is what it predicts, voting intentions first and then seat projections. SNP voting intentions here are not reliable as they come from the tiniest of subsamples, which is why I substituted 'purely Scottish' data.

So if I sum it up here is what we have. The Generation Divide is further back in time than for Scottish Parliament. Only the oldest Baby Boomers would definitely return a strong Tory majority while the younger Baby Boomers and half of Generation X would sit on the fence and return a hung Parliament where a Lab-Lib coalition would be the only workable option. And the younger generations would deal Labour a victory of landslidish to tsunamish proportions.

Fun part of course is that both Generation Z and the older fringe of Baby Boomers would choose a true one-party state, although on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Or opposite corners of the upper-right quadrant of the Political Compass, depending on your perspective.

In both cases Scotland would be, quite fittingly, the last hub of resistance with 58 out of 81 Opposition MPs in the One-Labour-State and 35 out of 59 in the One-Tory-State. While DUP would owe its third-party status only to both Z'ers and Early Boomers choosing to blow up all opposition into subatomic particles all over England and Wales.

But enough fun for now, let's go back to the real world for a while.

Turn It On Again

It's always a good idea to keep all frequencies open, just in case. But not just right now. Keyword is: here comes nothing. Literally.

The LibDem Conference came and went and Storm Ali wiped it off the headlines before it even made any. Not that anything new or meaningful came out of it. Just Vince Cable and Willie Rennie making asses of themselves, which is neither meaningful nor new. 

No great expectations either from Labour, Conservative or SNP conferences. Umunnista Coup won't happen. Mogglodyte Coup won't happen. IndyRef2 kick-off won't happen. Just have to wait until after Brexitocalypse for the juicy bits. Juiciest of all being of course the long awaited Surprise Snap Election of 2018, now pushed back to the Snap Election Season of 2019. Or not.

Of course totally unexpected upsets might still happen like Ross Thomson saying anything sensible or Scottish Greens thinking something through before issuing a press release. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Anyway stay tuned for further broadcasts. Or not.

Saor Alba Gu Bràth

Holyrood projection - September 2018 update

What's new?

There hasn't been any new Holyrood poll recently. So this is a technical update as I phased older polls out of my super-sample and am now using only the two most recent ones. Super-sample size is 2,020 with a 2.1% MOE on both the constituency and list votes. Here is what the updated weighted average of voting intentions says:

These results are pretty good for the SNP. Of course not when compared to the 2016 results as the SNP is down on both votes. But they show a significant improvement on earlier Holyrood polling and also pretty much the same trend as House of Commons polls. The breakdown of list voting intentions by region also shows some interesting shifts from 2016.

Some polls include a regional crosstab of the list voting intentions and sometimes these stray far off what uniform national swing (UNS) would predict. Interesting case is North East Scotland where the SNP would enjoy the same lead over Conservatives as in 2016, while UNS on the list vote is roughly 3.5% from SNP to Conservatives. In South Scotland the SNP and the Conservatives would now be neck to neck with Conservatives slightly in the lead (which fits with UNS) while Conservatives won the list vote there only once in 2003.

How did we get here?

Not all polls since the last Holyrood election have been milk and honey to the SNP's ears (jings, another mixed-up metaphor 😬). Anyway here are the trends for both Holyrood votes based on the 17 polls fielded since June 2016. 

Not surprisingly the patterns we see here are fairly close to those seen in Westminster voting intentions for the same period. Some hints at buyer's remorse in the months immediately following the 2016 Holyrood election with SNP 4-5 points up from the election results. Then a noticeable slump roughly during the 2017 GE campaign when the SNP's performance was far from stellar. Finally a gradual recovery from the end of 2017 until today.

Interestingly the trendlines also show that SNP going down/up is generally mirrored by Labour going up/down. Throughout the period the combined SNP + Labour voting intentions are roughly 65% ± MOE on the constituency vote and 56% ± MOE on the list vote, the balance being people intending to vote Green on the lists. I read this as evidence a number of voters are willing to switch back and forth between the two center-left parties, depending on which one appears the most convincing at the moment, but not (yet?) ready to throw the baby under the bus (crivens, another mixed metaphor 😁) and switch to the Conservatives.

What kind of Scottish Parliament would a snap election have delivered?

This is a rhetorical question as a Holyrood snap election is the unlikeliest of all possible political upsets these days. Per Part I, Section 3 of Scotland Act 1998 dissolution would require a 2/3 super-majority which is as likely as Ruth Davidson agreeing to an interview with a journalist from The National. Now let's say that for a moment we live in an alternate timeline where a snap election actually happened, and here's what the average of 2016 and pre-GE 2017 polls would have delivered:

67 seats for the SNP and 78 overall for the pro-Independence parties would have been quite a feat after a disappointing 2016 election but afterwards polling went south (quite literally as it swung towards Unionists) and the post-GE 2017 polls painted quite a different picture.

The SNP down to 54 seats and pro-Independence parties down to 62 seats overall would have strengthened the Unionists' narrative about 'too wee, too poor, too daft' Scotland. But this one too was never bound to happen and current polling is back to much more satisfactory results for the Yes movement.

So what do we get on current polling?

If election results duplicated the weighted average of the two most recent polls, there wouldn't be any major upset though ten seats are projected to change hands. Here are the projected constituency results by SLLM rating:

The SNP would lose two constituencies to the Conservatives: Edinburgh Pentlands (Gordon MacDonald) by less than 1% and more significantly Perthshire South and Kinross-shire (Roseanna Cunningham) by about 4%. Another four SNP seats would be in the danger zone (margin lower than MOE) in regions where the Conservatives did well at Council and House of Commons elections in 2017: Moray (Richard Lochhead), Perthshire North (John Swinney), Aberdeen South and North Kincardine (Maureen Watt), Angus North and Mearns (Mairi Gougeon). But the SNP would also have a fair shot at unseating Labour MSP Jackie Baillie in Dumbarton which was the most marginal Holyrood seat in 2016.

Projected list results are kind of a mixed bag with Conservatives bound to lose the most and LibDems to gain the most. The odd workings of AMS would make that some kind of musical chairs with eight seats projected to change hands.

Assuming all incumbent list MSPs would stand again and 2021 lists would have the candidates in the same order as 2016 lists, the following would notionally lose their seats: Andy Wightman (Greens), Maree Todd, Paul Wheelhouse (SNP), Elaine Smith (Labour), Jeremy Balfour, Dean Lockhart, Tom Mason, Maurice Corry (Conservatives). The one noticeable oddity would be the SNP unseating Andy Wightman in Lothian as the bizarre workings of AMS would automatically 'compensate' the loss of Edinburgh Pentlands with an unexpected SNP list seat.

Finally the full projected Scottish Parliament. Which would still have the SNP as the first party by a large margin and the only ones able to form a government. And the pro-Independence parties holding a two-seat majority which would extend the mandate for a second Independence referendum into the next term, if it hadn't happened already in the fallout of the Brexitocalypse.

Factoring in MOE and the way AMS often compensates changes in the constituency results with opposite changes in the list results, possible ranges of seats would be: SNP 57-61, Conservatives 29-30, Labour 24-27, LibDems 8, Greens 7. Meaning there still is a 30% chance that pro-Independence parties would be one seat short of a majority, though prevailing odds are they would hold a two-seat or three-seat majority.

Seat breakdowns by region

No comment needed on these I think. Just the detail of the projected results we have seen earlier.

Incidentally these results again show how AMS doesn't work as a genuine 'additional members' system but rather as 'compensatory seats for constituency losers', all parties included. Which could be the basis for some kind of electoral reform. More on this in a later blog entry.

The generation gap

Back now to Survation's most recent comprehensive Scottish poll. Here is the picture based on their vote-by-age crosstabs. National data are the poll's results and how they project into seats in Scottish Parliament, not the actual 2016 results or my 'current average polling' projection above. As Comrade Kevin would say the charts speak by themselves, or for themselves, or what-the-fuck-selves. Anyway let them speak and what we hear is quite astounding.

And here is how you can sum it up, showing a clear divide between Generation X and younger on one side and Baby Boomers on the other.

The 55-64s would actually deliver a hung Parliament with the SNP as the first party. But I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be 2007 all over again. In the current climate Unionists would never allow another SNP minority government on only two more seats than in 2007, so some some sort of wobbly anti-Indy coalition would be the likeliest outcome.

The Generation Divide is even more obvious and striking when grouping parties by their stance on Independence. Millennials and Generation X would vote for a strong pro-Independence majority, close to the 81-seat super-majority mentioned in the Scotland Act 1998. Generation Z would go even further with an amazing 93-seat super-super-majority for pro-Indy parties. Only the Baby-boomers would stick to a pro-Union majority.

Based on current ONS statistics on Scottish population, this means that 43% of the voting-age population would squarely defeat AMS' built-in purpose and offer the SNP a majority; 18% would choose an SNP minority administration within a pro-Indy majority; and only 39% would stick to the plan and deliver some sort of coalition government. Demographics are squarely on the SNP's and Independence's side. Which doesn't mean the Yes movement should just sit on their hands and wait. Boldness should be the order of the day unless you want to whine about that ship having already left the station (help ma boab, yet another mixed-bag metaphor 🙈).

Strikingly too, no generation would pick Labour as their first choice, not even (or probably especially not) those who grew up under Labour's dominance of Scottish politics. This too should ring an alarm in Labour ranks. Even those who likely voted for them in their 20s or 30s have now mostly switched to the SNP, or the Conservatives for those whose foremost concern is to stay in the Union at all costs. Among younger generations the 'Corbyn factor' doesn't work too well either as all massively pick the SNP as their first choice. Scottish Labour is dead, they just haven't realized yet how funny they smell.

What to expect next?

I don't think 'Salmondgate' or any of the made-up 'SNP Bad' controversies will have any significant effect on voting intentions. Recent polls already show that a no-deal Brexit boosts support for Scottish Independence beyond 50%. This should in turn boost support for the SNP as the only party both willing and able to deliver Independence, even if the path to Indy goes through some convoluted twists and turns, and to a lesser extent for the Scottish Greens as the only other party with parliamentary representation openly supporting Indy.

Hopefully we will soon know for sure as further Scottish polls are published, so stay tuned for further briefings.

Cha togar m' fhearg gun dìoladh