Wings Over Scotland

Another month has passed, so we suppose it must be time for the third of our polling-analysis pieces for the Scottish Parliament election in May.

(Last time round we assessed the grotesque rank idiocy of voting SNP on the list if you want a pro-indy majority, and the time before that we considered the possible impact of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party on seat numbers, which now looks rather less potentially semi-interesting than it did last summer.)

So what can we look at this time?

Well, what if Unionists were slightly less stupid and tribal than SNP voters?

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We’re really not sure this makes things any better with regard to the incredible tale that’s unfolded around the judgment in Sandie Peggie vs NHS Fife.

In fact, on any interpretation we can think of, quite the reverse.

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This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.

It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.

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My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.

Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.

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This week The National published a poll it commissioned from Find Out Now for this May’s Scottish Parliament election, alongside a seat projection from Sir John Curtice. Here are the list-vote figures from the poll.

The seat projection calculated that the election would result in 59 SNP MSPs (six short of the number John Swinney says is the minimum needed to force a second indyref), 25 for Reform, 13 for the Greens, 12 each for Labour and the Tories and eight for the Lib Dems.

It didn’t specify how many of the seats were constituency ones and how many were list ones, so we dropped Sir John a line and asked him.

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Yesterday we noted in passing that independence support now outstrips that of the SNP by more than 20 points, making the party into a gigantic liability as the vehicle for enabling Scots to leave the UK. Put simply, even when voters want independence (as most now do), they’re not willing to vote SNP to get it.

(Not, of course, that they WOULD get it if they voted SNP – the party still having no coherent or credible strategy to achieve it – but more than 40% of would-be Yes voters are no longer prepared to even try giving them the benefit of yet another mandate.)

And since what everyone loves most of all on New Year’s Day is a good old wade in some political stats, we thought we’d take a little more detail on that.

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With Reform now pretty consistently miles in front in polling for the next UK election, logically this is brilliant news for the Scottish independence movement, isn’t it?

So can anyone explain why the SNP is so desperate to stop them?

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There’s a post on the superwoke poll-analysis account Ballot Box Scotland today bemoaning the lack of interest in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election from polling companies, and presenting it as some sort of anti-Scottish conspiracy.

The real reason nobody’s very interested, of course, is that as things stand the election is an obvious foregone conclusion in which the party that’s been in power for the previous 19 years will stay in power for another five, and nothing will change.

The only minor intrigue around the election is to be found at the edges and is only of real interest to politics nerds, but since we ARE politics nerds we may as well take a look at it.

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This is actually pretty serious.

Because, y’know, you can call us old-fashioned purists or sticklers or whatever if you like, but government ministers probably shouldn’t openly lie in prepared statements to the High Court in order to pervert the course of justice.

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As recently as this weekend, the Scottish Government claimed that it has “made clear it accepts the Supreme Court ruling [in For Women Scotland] and is taking forward the detailed work necessary”.

But as with so much the Scottish Government says, it’s a barefaced lie.

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We thought we should keep track of all the issues with the Peggie tribunal judgment, now that Sandie Peggie has officially announced her intention to appeal it.

Because this story has some distance left to run.

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According to a new poll, fewer than a third of SNP voters even think independence is in the top three priorities facing Scotland.

It’s only five points ahead of immigration in fourth place, and seven ahead of housing. So it’s hardly surprising that the SNP aren’t bothering themselves about it. Their own support, like the party, is very comfortable with the way things are.

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