Stat-pummelled readers will be glad to know that this is the last article we plan to write about the vagaries of the AMS electoral system, and how it might apply to next year’s Scottish Parliament election, for some time. This one also shouldn’t be full of tables and figures, so strap yourself in and let’s get this job finished.
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.
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.
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.
There’s been something of a resurgence recently in pundits bemoaning online abuse and saying “Yes, there are bad apples on both sides but the overwhelming majority of offenders are Yes supporters”.
The authors of such articles oddly choose to ignore the only statistical data so far in existence, which shows the opposite:
It also seems not to occur to them that their own experience of abuse may be a result of their particular – real or perceived – partisan position. (Ours, for example, is that 98% comes from No voters, but then that WOULD be our experience because on the whole you tend to get abused by people who disagree with you, not your own side.)
So we expect they’ll ignore this inconvenient statistical data from our latest Panelbase poll too, but we’ll put it out there anyway, alongside the Express poll, for reference. It’s pretty much all you can do.
From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:
It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?
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?
After last night’s debacle in the House Of Commons, various Labour activists and cheerleaders have been scrambled on social and print media to firefight the appalled reaction from voters on the left to the party’s abstention on the Tory welfare bill.
And as usual, they’re talking cobblers.
There’s a very strange feature in today’s Daily Record, and it’s not even one of their regular pieces of pioneering and hard-hitting investigative journalism about who’s the hottest guest ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.
The headline screams unequivocally that according to a new Survation poll, fear of the SNP influencing a Labour government was the reason that English voters swung back to the Conservatives, defying polls that said the Tories would be the largest party but be short of an overall majority.
(Weirdly it says that their goal in doing so was to “keep Salmond out of power”, even though (a) Alex Salmond is a humble backbench MP who doesn’t even lead the SNP group at Westminster, let alone the party, and (b) he won his seat anyway.)
The article then produces a flurry of graphs and figures showing that various numbers of supporters of the four UK parties switched their votes to various other parties after being polled (as always happens).
But then there’s something quite important missing.
Because the media in Britain is now basically just a giant gossip circle repeating each other’s stories, pretty much every newspaper today repeats Michelle Mone’s tiresome publicity-seeking whinge about “cybernats” from the Mail On Sunday.
One of them is the Herald, whose piece contains a quote suggesting that Mone – who appeared to think that flitting from Scotland to England somehow got you away from the internet – does have at least some basic understanding of how Twitter works:
“I blocked all the ones who used the C word. All from the same party, surprise, surprise.”
Now, we’re going to assume that by “the C word” she meant the four-letter insult, and by “the same party” we can deduce from context that she must mean the SNP.
So let’s just see if that claim stands up to scrutiny.
In its kneejerk “SNP BAD” reaction to the Alistair Carmichael affair, the Unionist establishment – politicians and media alike – has furiously tried to divert attention from Carmichael’s smear and attempted cover-up by harking back to an incident in 2012, when the press gave vast amounts of coverage to a claim that Alex Salmond had “lied” about legal advice regarding an independent Scotland’s EU membership.
Everyone and their dog has trotted out the allegation again in the past week, right across the Unionist political spectrum – “Steerpike” in the Spectator did it, Alex Johnstone of the Scottish Conservatives did it, Tavish Scott of the Scottish Lib Dems did it, Michael White in the Guardian did it, Toby Young in the Spectator (again) did it, thirsty Labour peer George Foulkes did it, Telegraph columnist Iain Martin did it, failed Lib Dem anti-Salmond candidate Christine Jardine did it, and countless numbers of shrill Scottish Labour activists and party officials did it.
And all of them are counting on the Scottish public not remembering the truth.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
