Wings Over Scotland

We’ve only ourselves to blame, we’d be the first to admit. When we titled yesterday’s piece “AMS for lazy people” it was pretty much an invitation for people to get us to do their research for them, and so it proved.

Even as we slumped exhausted over a red-hot calculator, several readers wasted no time demanding a breakdown of how the mechanisms of the electoral system had affected last year’s European elections, in which UKIP defied some expectations (and delighted the Unionist parties and media) by taking a seat in Scotland.

So we suppose we might as well.

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The email we’ve had more than any other since the 8th of May is this one:

“Please can you explain how the Scottish election system works, and whether it’s a good idea for me as an SNP voter to give my list vote to someone else so as to ensure the maximum number of pro-Yes MSPs in Holyrood?”

We’d planned to leave that question until much nearer the relevant time, but to be honest we’re getting fed up of reading them, so let’s see if we can sort it out now.

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Social media is alive today with tales of people being refused a vote in the Labour leadership election on the grounds that they don’t support Labour values (if anyone even knows what those are any more). We suspect you’ll be hearing quite a bit about it in the press over the coming days.

The prevailing reaction seems to be slack-jawed astonishment at the planetary-scale car-crash the party has allowed to develop around the issue, with another “coup” story thrown in for good measure in the Telegraph.

We can only think of one way the farce could become even worse.

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Here’s former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris in today’s Sunday Times:

“The toughest job for an opposition leader is to get people’s attention and Kez will make a good job of that. She is different from what you’d normally expect.

But the only thing that would make people give Labour a second glance at the moment is offering something that I am absolutely opposed to, and that is independence. The only way we can attract voters back is by offering them what they want and that is independence.”

Wait, what now?

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There’s a comment piece by Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson in today’s Sunday Times, comprising 846 words which could be condensed into two: “SNP BAD”.

As such it could have been easily turned into a speech by any Scottish Labour leader of the last five years with nothing more than a quick search-and-replace of the words “Conservative” and “Labour”. It puts forward nothing remotely resembling a policy, just paragraphs of boilerplate waffle and a call for a debate.

Davidson professes to offer “a practical and pro-UK alternative to the SNP”, a programme which she boils down to two key components. It seems to have entirely escaped her notice that they contradict each other on the most fundamental level.

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There’s much noisy chat at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn being 20 points ahead of his Labour leadership rivals on first-preference votes. His rivals seem to agree; they’ve turned their main efforts to competing amongst themselves for second and third preference “stop Corbyn” votes.

But could any of them really close such a huge gap? And what if they don’t?

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Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.

Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.

The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.

Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.

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Having failed over the course of several years to label the SNP “Nazis” and “fascists” (or, depending on which sort of newspaper you were reading, “Tartan Stalinists”), the party’s political and media opponents have a new(ish) meme to punt: that the SNP is a religious cult made up of credulous, fanatical zealots impervious to logic or facts.

The leader of this new front is right-wing columnist Alex Massie, who by our count has managed to flog someone this diatribe at least four times already this year – the most recent being in yesterday’s Times:

“With its group-think, blame culture and wilful blindness, the Teflon party has turned into a faith-based organisation”

But he’s far from alone.

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With David Mundell and Ian Murray both having appeared on today’s “Good Morning Scotland” singing the praises of the wonderful Scotland Bill and how it would deliver all a nation could ever dream of, it seems a good time to publish the results of our recent Panelbase poll on the subject.

The nation, it seems, has rather more ambitious dreams.

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Alert readers may recall a few weeks ago, when this was a thing:

The SNP standing for seats in England, of course, is an idea that’s been put forward before by some of the nation’s sharper and more insightful political commentators, but the party has for obvious and understandable reasons shown no inclination thus far to undertake the experiment.

But as we realised after chatting to a left-wing English chum this week (a successful creative and businessman), such a party actually already exists, and has dozens of MPs. It’s just that it’s currently trapped inside a corpse.

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Alert readers may have noticed something of a glut of articles in the press recently by right-wing commentators angrily challenging the SNP to prove its left-wing credentials if and when the new Scotland Bill ever becomes law and grants Holyrood more powers over taxation, some minor aspects of welfare and – of course – road signs.

The zenith of the phenomenon must surely be today’s eye-rubbingly bizarre Scotsman story in which the Scottish Tories urge the SNP to increase tax in order to reverse, er, Tory cuts. But there’s method behind the seeming madness.

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The battle-cry of right-wing Labour apologists all this week has been “realism”. It’s all very well people like Jeremy Corbyn having crazy old principles about what Labour is supposed to stand for, runs the argument, but you can’t argue with public opinion and public opinion is desperate for Labour to become Tories with a slightly softer edge.

“Mental John” McTernan, for example, told the readers of the Telegraph yesterday that Labour’s disastrous, shambolic abstention on the welfare reform bill was the right thing to do because the party “had to show the public it got the message over welfare”.

But what actually IS the public’s message on welfare?

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