You can get any result you want from a poll by massaging the questions
You can make people say anything you want them to say
But you can't make people do anything you want them to do
You can never be absolutely sure of people, can you?
(Sarah Harding, House Of Cards: To Play The King, 1993)
© Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, 1973
Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity
(Seneca and Mac Taylor, CSI NY: The Lady In The Lake, 2012)
A month ago we had another Scottish poll from Panelbase, who have now fielded three out of four Westminster polls, four out of five Holyrood polls and five out of eight IndyRef2 polls conducted since the December 2019 general election. I think it's definitely a good thing to have one single firm becoming the 'pollster of reference' for Scotland. That way we have the exact same methodology applied to each successive survey, so changes from one poll to the next are really happening and are not the result of some unquantifiable house effect. Which does not rule out random variations, but Panelbase gaining more experience on the Scottish electorate's thought patterns also means they can readily identify random variations from real changes, which is also a bonus. Then the way the poll was spun (or should that be spinned?) had a definitely hilarious side. So we had the Yes vote skyrocketing to 54% from.... uh... err... 54% in the previous poll. And we're not even there yet as this is the usual result with undecideds removed, and I have already made the case that undecideds matter and might be the key to the actual vote ending in victory. Or not. What the last poll actually says is 49.8% Yes, 43% No, 7.2% undecided. Which is actually quite an improvement over the previous one that said 49.7% Yes, 43% No, 7.3% undecided. No shit. Winning the undecideds 0.1 by 0.1 is the way to go, and now we can celebrate being just-a-wee-smitch-North-of-slightly-better-than-even-but-not-quite-there-yet odds, as the weighted average of the last four IndyRef2 polls shows:
All jokes about over-enthusiasm aside, this is really another encouraging result, especially at a time where feelings about the State Of The Precious Union are quite depressing for Unionists. A recent YouGov poll shows that 59% of respondents GB-wide think the relation between England and Scotland is weaker than five years ago while a measly 2% think it's stronger and 23% think it's the same, with 15% undecided. The feeling is shared across all nations and regions, including a massive 74% of Scots and even 53% of Conservative voters agreeing with the majority that the relation is weaker. Of course this new poll again triggered a healthy amount of bickering within the Yes camp because, ye ken, that's what we do best, don't we? I must say the best moment in the revival of the 'Path To Indy' debate was when Oor Precious Pete Wishart, after months spent blocking every tweep who disagreed with his opinion that anything but a Section 30 Order was a dead end, came up with an oven-ready dead end of his own. Because obviously nothing makes more sense than expecting the European Union to meddle with the United Kingdom's internal affairs, and we don't even need a policy expert or the Conservatives' fake outrage to figure that out. Guess Oor Pete needs to check where he is on the map just as much as Dominic Raab, and remember this is Scotland, not Kosovo. But of course the serious issue is how many Yes supporters are increasingly impatient with the SNP and want them to get out their sheet music and play the real waltz. If the SNP think that "we have a mandate and we're so sorry England will have none of it, but there's nothing we can do" is good enough, I'm afraid that dog won't hunt and next year's election might not be as good as they think, whatever current polling says.
If it's nearly impossible, then it's a little bit possible, so go for it and conquer
(Detective Danny Messer, CSI NY: Vigilante, 2011)
© Ellas McDaniel, 1955
So, Chaos destroying Evil? Sounds like gang ideology!
(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Seth And Apep, 2013)
But before we move on to the Holyrood part of the poll, let's have a word about one of the likely key issues. Aye, THAT one again. I guess you have noticed the conversations about gender self-identification on Twitter have already skipped to 'Episode II: Attack Of The Wokos' and usually end in MAB (Mutually Assured Block). But we don't actually know where Scottish public opinion stands on this, for lack of a recent comprehensive survey exploring all issues in the debate. The only poll I found was conducted by Panelbase for Stu Campbell in October 2019 and surveyed only SNP voters. But I guess SNP Central care more about what SNP voters think than public opinion generally, and the absence of a real debate probably means positions have not changed much in nine months. Then scroll down to Q20 on the sixth page of the report to get the full mouthful of a question that was unleashed on the unsuspecting respondents. Depending on where you sit, you might consider the question outrageously biased and leading as it is obviously phrased to elicit the highest number of negative answers, or you might praise it for being detailedly honest as respondents have to assess the practical consequences and not just the concept. Then I guess the crosstabbed results show the respondents' response was quite balanced as they actually don't show a convincingly massive opposition, and neither a convincingly massive support. 39% opposing and 36% supporting is as statistically tied as you can get when the poll's margin of error is some 3%. But the biggest support comes from where you probably least expect it: young women, who probably think women's rights are a given and can't be jeopardized in any way. But unfortunately also the kind of result that makes SNP Central feel safe in supporting school-age Wokos in £200 two-tone shirts who make as much sense on the real major issues as a squashed hedgehog on the route of the 7B to Kelty.
For lack of better evidence, let's say that it would be wise to seek updated data on this. But, with more than a third of SNP voters opposing the GRA reform nine months ago, the party should be cautious with this. Especially as provisions about gender identity in the Hate Crime Bill will certainly prove to be highly controversial as the debate unfolds, and might not go down that well with significant parts of both the general public and the SNP electorate, especially after the Scottish Police Federation publicly said they wouldn't enforce it in almost as many words. I suspect the Wokos' favourite breeding ground is somewhere in the posh liberal enclaves of post-Blairite Labourgravia in London, not in the Scottish Highlands. So it's quite bewildering to see how the contamination has spread to the highest rungs of SNP Central, when there is no PPE against this one except basic Scottish common sense, and how a fringe extremist faction like "Wokus Dei" is advancing their agenda to hijack the party's machine. But they succeeded by being one step ahead of their opposition, obfuscating the real issues and painting their opponents as the bigots and themselves as the victims. It's pretty much the pattern described in The Spectator last December, and coming from Boris Johnson's former employer does not make it less valid as it relies mostly on an outside source and not the columnist's own opinion. If you don't want to buy that one, you might want to listen to voices from within the LGBT community like Allison Bailey, who has first-hand evidence on how the Wokos wage their own brand of culture war to intimidate and silence dissenters. Let's just hope SNP Central will not dismiss every inconvenient truth as 'hate speech' and come back to their senses, or won't they?
What about principle? Is that even a thing anymore?
(Director Leon Vance, NCIS: One Step Forward, 2018)
© Stevie Winwood, Jimmy Miller, 1967
Politics is a blood sport, the prizes are big and you lose a lot when you don't win
And that's understood by all the grown-up players in the game
(Neil Kinnock live on BBC One, Election Night 1997)
Of course the pièce de résistance of the Panelbase poll was the Holyrood voting intentions part. Not that we actually learned anything new here. There is a strongly favourable trend in all Scottish polls conducted this year. The combined voting intentions for the pro-Independence parties haven risen from 51% to 58% on the constituencies, and from 47% to 58% on the regional lists since the first poll at the end of January. Which translates into the pro-Independence parties bagging an outright majority on both votes in six out of seven Holyrood polls fielded since the December general election. A lot has been said about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP enjoying some sort of 'Covid Honeymoon' but the trend started earlier, with the December general election also a very likely trigger for the shift towards the SNP. The massive and ever wider divide between England and Scotland proved again that Scotland has nothing to expect from the crumbling Union, and Covid-19 has only made this even more obvious. Massive internecine feuds within Labour and the Conservatives have also definitely hurt their credibility, which is why the SNP are so careful to avoid any such ferrets-in-a-bar brawls in their own ranks. Uh... wait... errr... naw... just pulling your leg here. Anyone who has watched the earlier episodes knows that the kerfuffle in Edinburgh Central and the failed coup in Glasgow Cathcart are just the appetizers before the hors d'oeuvre in what promises to be a juicy 2020-2021 season where own goals will be a-plenty. But the SNP haven't yet run out of feet to shoot, though the NEC have already expanded quite a few with their brainless shenanigans, so let's just rejoice for now at what this latest poll predicts. Which is the SNP bagging a 19-seat majority, the largest ever for any governing party or coalition since the Scottish Parliament reconvened twenty-one years ago. And also of course the Little Green Men losing any sort of leverage to blackmail the SNP into making dick moves they would have made anyway.
Of course such a spectacular result has an obvious downside: it could prove just too good to be true. There has often been a point in the time-space continuum of post-2015 elections when SNP Central are too far into their comfort zone and start being complacent. It did not happen in 2019, but then the very short campaign and the tsunami of rejection of both Conservatives and Labour were probably enough to overcome ant weakness in the SNP's campaign. But 2016 and 2017 tell different stories. In 2016, the SNP vote fell by 10% on both the constituencies and the regional lists between the end of January and Election Day. And the pattern was repeated almost to the decimal place in the run-up to the 2017 general election: 10% down between the last poll conducted in January and Election Day. And of course the SNP need to remember and be reminded that the mandate they get from their voters is to Get Indy Done, not to Get GRA Done. But, as always, the SNP are not different from you and me: their fate is in their own hands. But for now we have Scottish Labour and Conservatives looking like the maizefield after the elephants walked through it on their way to the watering hole. I will certainly miss Jackson Carlaw struggling with his 'we won because we lost' prepared remarks on Election Night, but Douglas Ross might prove good comical value for money too. Dougie will certainly have some fitba-inspired Cummings-approved jokes up his sleeve. Though I would advise him to not even try anything remotely close to 'SNP-yellow card' when they end up with more seats than any party ever bagged at any Holyrood election. But of course any 'Labour-red card' joke will work, provided of course nobody in Team Blue has leaked it to the SNP first, just to piss off Dougie. Then he still would have the Johnsonian oven-ready narrative that worked so well with Covid-19: it's not that bad because it could have been worse, and I lost only a quarter of our seats, not half as Jackson did in 2019. Definitely no honour among gits.
Somehow, 'ouch' doesn't even start to cover it
(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Sangre Por Sangre, 2010)
© Alec Dalglish, 2012
If you can't ignore facts, you have no business being a politician
(Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes, Prime Minister: The Tangled Web, 1988)
Of course this new poll has once again revived the debate about an hypothetical list-only pro-Indy party, let's call it an alt-Yes party, bagging some of the SNP's 'wasted' list votes. But it has now taken quite an unexpected turn, though in hindsight you might say the new scenario was bound to surface at any time before the election. It started with failed MSP and perennial mythomaniac Marc Whittet publishing fake news about a non-existent Survation poll involving Alex Salmond in Whittet's fantasies. Then, as predicted by Newton's Third Law Of Motion, this triggered an equal reaction to the action with Stu Campbell commissioning his own poll to test the 'Alex Salmond Party' scenario. I guess some will be happy to find out that Obnoxious Bathman, despite losing in court to Kezia Dugdale and suspending his crowdfunding, still has enough dosh in the bank to buy himself a £10k Panelbase poll. To his credit the wording of the question was not outrageously leading to trigger the maximum 'SNP Bad' response. For once. So I'll take it for valid until further investigation. The core element here is how many votes the hypothetical Alex Salmond Party (ASP) would take from the other parties and the results are quite interesting. So here's how other parties' voters, based on the December 2019 Westminster vote and not current Holyrood voting intentions, rate their own likelihood to vote for the ASP from 'definitely possible' to 'definitely never happening':
Interestingly Green voters are not included in these crosstabs and you can only wonder why. Notwithstanding the ASP, if it ever existed, would snatch a very sizeable part of the potential SNP electorate and also quite many Labour voters. The numbers here are quite close to the share of Labour voters who also support Independence. Obviously this part of the Labour electorate can't quite bring themselves to vote for the SNP but would welcome an alt-Yes list, possibly no matter who would lead it. The share of Conservative and LibDem voters who would switch to the ASP is quite surprising, but I guess they would do that only to fuck the SNP by creating another opposition bloc, as their own parties are not predicted to do very well. This means the hypothetical ASP would bag a much larger vote share than the Scottish Greens ever did, and could even end up the second party. Then I don't think this is the most likely scenario as I don't see Big Eck leading a rebellion against the SNP, even after this week's shameless denial of democracy by the party's NEC. But I can definitely picture him, and/or some of his supporters, helping SNP dissenters if some deselected MSPs choose the Margo MacDonald way and stand as independents on the list in a few regions. Which of course would be massively ironic when you remember how and why Margo herself made the decision to stand as an early version of alt-Yes. But let's just fancy for a moment that the ASP is actually a thing, and here are their potential vote shares based on the voters' own ratings applied to the Holyrood list voting intentions as predicted by Panelbase. 'Low' factors in only those who would definitely vote for the ASP, and 'High' adds the likely voters.
Below is the summary of the list votes, as the constituency votes are supposed to be unchanged, and the seat projections for both ASP scenarios. So the math says again that the alt-Yes list seats would not be on top of the already projected pro-Indy seats, but partly instead of them. Five to ten seats in the ASP scenarios above, or one third of their total seats, and this is a limited-damage situation as the ASP would also hypothetically snatch votes from the Unionist parties and not just the SNP. Of course this kind of scenario is just wild speculation as long as nobody knows what Alex Salmond intends to do, other than publishing his Book Of Revelations close enough to the election to make sure the SNP can't do any effective damage control. Then of course SNP HQ are already entangled in some tricky damage control and can only blame themselves for the backlash after this week's NEC's votes. That they have already been forced to backpedal on one of the controversial rulings shows how amateurish the Woko faction within the NEC were. And I have a hunch it's only a matter of time before the anti-Cherry ruling is overturned too as even Angus Robertson now openly opposes it. You may remember I expressed concern earlier that the fight for Independence might become hostage to the fight over gender self-identification, and become something of an afterthought. We probably have reached that point and sped past it already, and the fallout might prove disastrous. Then what the SNP should fear most now is probably not an all-out rebellion across the whole nation, but smaller uncoordinated bush fires in a number of regions, like the one who kept Margo MacDonald in Holyrood after Alex Salmond had her relegated to an unelectable position on the Lothian list. Snatching the seventh list seat requires between 5.5% and 7% on current polling, depending on the local configuration of the list votes. I would definitely not rule out something like that happening next year, instead of some People's Front of Alba that is already riddled with squabbles even before it's born.
Some will also argue that the the political argument for an alt-Yes list party is far more convincing than the flawed math used by some of its supporters. There is no doubt 13 years in power have brought out both the best and the worst in the SNP. Right now voters obviously think the best far outweighs the worst, but the SNP should be considering the real risk that the exact opposite could happen some day. According to the Panelbase poll, up to 21% of the electorate could abstain and 12% of the likely voters are undecided, which makes about 30% of the electorate who will need to be convinced to get the fuck out of the couch on Election Day first, and then to cast their votes for the SNP. The downside for the SNP is that these voters are an unknown quantity who might very well turn a deaf ear to the 'managerial competence' talking points and be swayed by opposition campaigning targeting gender self-identification and probably the flawed and unenforceable Hate Crime Bill too. Finally and for your complete information, Gordon McIntyre-Kemp at Business For Scotland has published a thought-provoking and well-researched article on tactical voting and the possible prospects of an alt-Yes strategy going after the SNP's list votes. What we need now is a fair assessment of the electoral potential of the alt-Yes, and also the alt-No list-only parties. All that Panelbase have to do is to add the ISP, the newborn AFI and whatever alt-Yes pops up next week to their list of prompts, and UKIP and George Galloway too as both have indicated willingness to stand and we wouldn't want to miss seeing how alt-Noes can split the Yoon vote.
Be seeing you.... after the next poll when we see the combined impact of Boris Johnson's Tour Of Scotland and the SNP's NEC's massive clusterfucks.
We're not always right, but it's not always because we're wrong
(Doctor Sheldon Hawkes, CSI NY: Rest In Peace, Marina Garito, 2010)
If the future’s all worked out, horoscopes, all that stuff
It means we’re not responsible for anything we do
It means we’re just actors saying lines in a script that’s been written by somebody else
I don’t wanna believe that, I wanna believe I’m in charge of me own life, me own destiny
Tomorrow’s a new day, a fresh page in a book that’s not been written yet
What happens in the future is up to me, not some predetermined destiny smeg
(Dave Lister, Red Dwarf: Cassandra, 1999)
© Alec Dalglish, 2012
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