Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday’s poll results attracted quite a surprising amount of anger from people who apparently don’t consider it at all important to the cause of independence to find out what people intending to vote SNP at the next Holyrood election think.

They’re probably not going to like these ones much either.

A third of SNP voters are unconvinced by the First Minister’s constant assurances that a second indyref will be delivered in the next 18 months. But the related question posed by several readers yesterday was “If you don’t think the SNP has a coherent strategy for securing a new vote, what would YOU do, Mister Smartypants?”

Which is annoying, because it’s a question we’ve answered in various contexts half a dozen times in the past year and a bit. So we thought we’d see if voters had been paying any more attention.

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This site has repeatedly – much to the displeasure of some readers – expressed the view in 2019 that the SNP doesn’t know what it’s doing with regard to Brexit. But it turns out we’re not the only people who feel that way.

Last week we commissioned a Panelbase poll of SNP voters only (specifically those currently planning to use their Holyrood constituency vote for the party in 2021), and these were the results.

In other words, nobody has a clue what the goal is, let alone the strategy.

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So we’ve done a new poll, and this one’s a little different than usual. The sample was 1007 Scottish voters who said they would vote SNP with their constituency vote at the next Holyrood election.

Which makes these findings pretty interesting.

The fact that 10% of SNP voters would either vote No in a new indyref or aren’t sure isn’t the surprising part – in fact those numbers are unusually low for that question. Historically around 15-20% of SNP voters have been opposed to independence. While that seems mad, they simply feel that the party are the best option for running the Scottish Government and are willing to gamble that independence won’t happen.

The curious part is the significant proportion of the sample – 15% – that voted No in 2014 but supports the SNP now, but of which only two-thirds has also come over to Yes. At a time when Scottish politics is supposedly completely polarised around the constitution, and when cracks are beginning to show in the party’s domestic record (under, it should be said, very difficult circumstances) and the First Minister’s personal approval ratings struggle to register a net positive, significant numbers of people still appear to be switching to them, yet are unconvinced about independence, yet the party’s voters as a whole are becoming MORE strongly pro-indy rather than less.

And if you think THAT’S confusing, folks, wait till you see the rest of the poll.

Yeah, we know we haven’t had a post up in days. What is there to say? The news is nothing but repeats. Anyone got any questions? Know any good jokes?

He’s got no right to shoot from there.

There’s less than half an hour to go and we’re holding the previous year’s World Cup finalists on their own patch. A point would be a great result, but we’ve got men up. Try to thread it through on the left. Turn, hold it up for a second and knock it out wide to the overlap on the right and get forward for a cross or a cutback. If we just wait, if we take it slow, the situation can only get better for us.

But definitely don’t waste it on a wild, optimistic punt.

Right?

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Remember this guy? Go on, give it a minute, it’ll come to you.

He popped up today to chuck in his tuppence-worth about inflammatory language in politics, and how – like everything else bad – it all started with vile cybernats in 2014 (because as you’ll of course remember, it was Yes supporters who never shut up about “surrendering”) and has now sullied even the dignified halls of Westminster.

We wonder how that can have happened.

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You now have less than 24 hours left to secure your copy of our intermittent cartoonist Mr Cairns’ latest beautifully-crafted volume of biting political satire featuring a cute lion. (No, not the one pictured below.)

For the love of God please don’t upset him or we’ll get more like this.

So the Supreme Court has delivered its brutal verdict. The prorogation of Parliament was completely unlawful and now, in effect, never happened. Parliament is officially still in session. The same Parliament that has stupendously failed to solve Brexit for three years can reconvene and continue to fail to solve it. What now?

Jeremy Corbyn stood up a few minutes ago at the Labour conference and demanded that Boris Johnson stand down immediately and hold a general election, as did several other opposition leaders. Which, alert readers may recall, is what Johnson tried to do, twice, barely a fortnight ago, and was blocked by the opposition.

Presumably if he tries again, they all now have to cooperate and vote for it, even though the dissolution of Parliament would render the Benn bill requiring him to ask the EU for an extension first null and void. So there’ll be a general election held on the subject of “Who rules the country – the people or the courts?”, which is what Johnson wanted all along. Um, victory?

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PS Fun trivia fact: UK electoral law requires 25 working days between the dissolution of Parliament and the date of a general election. There are exactly 27 working days (inclusive) between now and 31 October.

Labour just had a vote at their party conference to decide on their Brexit policy. On a close show of hands, the party voted not to have a policy on Brexit until after the next general election, and – we promise you we’re not making any of this up – delegates immediately demanded to have another vote to overturn that vote.

A few minutes later, Momentum activist Cathleen Clarke and former Tony Blair adviser John McTernan appeared on Sky News to sort it all out for confused viewers.

Good luck in the next few months, everyone.

“Flounders” might have been a more appropriate animal.

It’s painfully entertaining viewing, but Gordon Brewer’s persistence pays off right at the end as we finally discover that Scottish Labour’s answer is “No – even if a clear majority of Scottish people vote for parties explicitly calling for a second independence referendum, and return a majority of pro-indy MSPs to Parliament, we will not consider that sufficient support.”

Which would mean there was no democratic route left open to Scotland to achieve independence. So what is it that he suggests we do?

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(Editor’s note: as a result of this cartoon, Mr Cairns has been sent on mandatory administrative leave of absence to let’s call it a “health spa” for the next two weeks. While he’s receiving let’s call it “therapy”, fill the gap by purchasing the latest volume of his works, which is guaranteed not to contain this one, we can only hope and pray.)
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As the mandate for a second independence referendum currently sits gathering dust in the SNP vaults, discussion has started on ways to generate some movement. One of these has been the possibility of a Wings political party being set up to campaign for Holyrood list seats, which has generated rather a lot of attention.

Various pundits have been loudly vocal about the perceived pros and cons, but I’ve been extremely dissatisfied – in particular with those dismissing the value of a Wings party – with the quality of evidence and analysis that they’ve produced to justify their negative opinion. So I thought I’d use my day-job skills in commercial data science to analyse and understand the benefits, or otherwise, of the idea.

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