Wings Over Scotland

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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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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For lack of anything more interesting to write about, we thought we might do a monthly rundown of polling in the leadup to next year’s Holyrood election, with seat projections from a neutral source, in the shape of the newish Devolved Elections website.

And very quickly, things got a bit weird.

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We’ve written a number of extremely, painstakingly detailed articles in the last few months explaining why list votes for the SNP at next year’s election will be wasted, and will serve only to elect Unionist (and in particular Reform) MSPs.

Unfortunately, some people still don’t get it.

And that’s understandable, because super-detailed articles are long and people have terribly short attention spans nowadays, especially if there are large tranches of fiddly arithmetic involved. So let’s go the opposite way.

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There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.

“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.

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We’ve just taken delivery of some REALLY interesting polling results, readers, but it’s going to take a while to fully analyse and write them up, so in the meantime let’s look at some slightly less interesting ones which came from the same poll – the Norstat one commissioned by the Sunday Times and published today, which we hitched a lift on.

The headline figures show an eight-point Yes lead, which is nice, although it’s also entirely abstract since the SNP has no current policy for translating independence support into actual independence (or even another referendum about it).

All the same, it seemed a good time to assess the wider picture.

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Hi! I noticed, with very considerable amusement, your complaint last night that I hadn’t made a “substantive reply” to the [EDIT] EIGHT posts (totalling nearly 11,000 words) of semi-coherent ranting about me that you’ve made on your site in the last eight days.

(I’ll be absolutely honest, I’ve only skimmed the last few.)

We both know the reason that’s so tear-streamingly comical, of course.

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Because you certainly are a bit light-headed if you’re buying this horse-plop.

We don’t normally spend much time analysing opinion polls more than a year out from an election because it’s a complete chump’s game – too much can happen. But this one’s so absolutely batshit mad that we couldn’t resist a bit of a probe.

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The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.

It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.

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Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.

The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.

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In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.

It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)

April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.

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