Something very strange is happening in Scotland

[Rolfe]

Actually, it started happening within days or even hours of the independence referendum result. People started joining the SNP in droves, and the other two smaller independence-supporting parties in significant numbers. SNP membership, which had been steadily if unspectacularly growing for some time, sat at 25,000 on the day of the referendum. Latest figures, which actually date back to November or December, are about 94,000.

At the same time the opinion polls went crazy. Labour and the SNP switched places almost overnight. Insane Labour-to-SNP swings have been recorded in multiple opinion polls for the past four months, and seem to be hardening rather than evaporating. (And when the independence question is put, the polls are now showing a consistent, though small, lead for Yes.)

Now a set of detailed polls of Scottish constituencies has been accidentally released a few hours early. The figures available show even the seats Labour was expected to hold, going by the country-wide figures, falling to the SNP. These results are partial, and no doubt consist of the most dramatic, but they redefine sensational.

Here's a preliminary roundup.

http://scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/are-these-ashcroft-constituency-results.html

I've been sweating blood for over 20 years for the SNP, and seen only modest Westminster gains. I can't help feeling I've entered a parallel universe or something. But it seems to be real and while no doubt some of the lead will bleed away before 7th May, something seismic is brewing up.

On these figures the SNP will comfortably outnumber the LibDems and UKIP after May. Maybe put together. Interesting times.

ETA: Here's the official link now. http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2015/02/scottish-battleground/

 

[marplots]

So the loss was a win?

 

[Rolfe]

Don't know. I'm as bemused as anyone.

 

[Rolfe]

People are now saying that these figures are weighted by 2010 recalled vote. That's even more insane, as weighting by 2010 recalled vote is known to underestimate the SNP vote significantly. (Because people misremember and report their 2011 Holyrood vote instead. SNP was at 20% in 2010 and 45% in 2011.)

This isn't a swing, this is a paradigm shift. It's a move away from trusting Labour one last time at Westminster, while voting SNP for Holyrood, to going for SNP at Westminster too.

I'm too gobsmacked. I should go to bed.

 

[Puppycow]

Responding to the OP, I'm no expert in Scottish politics, but as a general matter I think electorates tend to be fickle. Is there any reason to think this is more than just the mood of this month?

They might win big in the next election, but then if they can't deliver on the promises, or even for reasons beyond their control, the mood may swing in the opposite direction the next time.

 

[Rolfe]

If it's the mood of the month, it was the mood of last month too, and the month before that, and the month before that. People are taking notice because the way-out polls have been consistent for that long, and we're now getting relatively close to the actual election.

It's a lot more complicated than "delivering on promises", trust me.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Very happy to see. I was hoping the 45/55 vote didn't discourage or fracture. There always seems to be a sort of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where measuring the public will changes it.

 

[LSSBB]

Yes. Makes a lot better sense than what she said earlier.

If I had a quid for everyone who's pointing out right now that there's still three months to go and anything can happen and the SNP always falls back in the short campaign because of the biassed BBC coverage and this just means we'll have to work all the harder and remember 2011 (when Labour were ahead at this stage but the actual vote was an SNP landslide), I'd be rich.

Bear with me because I'm a noob on the subject, and am buried deep within the North American continent...

Why does Scotland have to have the BBC? Would it be a better first step to campaign to be rid of the BBC?

 

[Craig B]

I don't know. I've been taking major stick among independence supporters for several months for pointing out that there is no evidence at all of ballot paper tampering, and lots of evidence that there wasn't.

I thought she might be suggesting that there would be vote-rigging to prevent an SNP victory in May. There won't be. The British establishment don't do that. (They do other things, which may not be working any more.) And there's no parallel anyway. The opinion polls were pretty close to accurate for the referendum.

These Ashcroft figures are utterly astounding.

In the Labour-held seats, only 60% of those who voted Labour in 2010 said they would do so again this year; more than one third (35%) said they would support the SNP. While the Conservative vote (such as it was) has held up in these seats well, the Lib Dems have collapsed: only 12% of the party’s 2010 supporters said they would vote Lib Dem again; nearly half (47%) said they would switch to the SNP.

Can this possibly be reflected in the polling places across the country come May? Does the majority Yes vote in Glasgow, and now this, mean that Labour will be wiped out here? Couldn't happen to a better man than Jim Murphy!

 

[Damien Evans]

Bear with me because I'm a noob on the subject, and am buried deep within the North American continent...

Why does Scotland have to have the BBC? Would it be a better first step to campaign to be rid of the BBC?

Well, see, there's this large island called Britain, with three constituent countries of the United Kingdom on it, these three countries being England, Scotland and Wales. There happens to be a publicly funded broadcaster which services this whole island of Britain, and hence it calls itself the British Broadcasting Corporation.

If this BBC stopped broadcasting in Scotland, the first B would become a lie.

 

[Caper]

And btw... Any subject titled "Something very strange is happening in Scotland" should always have the first line "And none of the sheep are talkin'"

 

[Damien Evans]

And btw... Any subject titled "Something very strange is happening in Scotland" should always have the first line "And none of the sheep are talkin'"

No, that's Wales.

Or New Zealand.

 

[Craig B]

And btw... Any subject titled "Something very strange is happening in Scotland" should always have the first line "And none of the sheep are talkin'"

In Scotland it would be regarded as strange if sheep did start talking! Unless by "sheep"you are referring to Labour voters in the past. Now it seems that the "sheep" may decide to change their voting practices. And a good thing too, if it happens.

Similar figures to these have been published before, in for example a Sky TV "poll of polls", and I thought it might be a fluke. So I was waiting impatiently for the next poll, and it gives the SNP an even greater lead. I still find it hard to believe that in reality this will happen on that scale in May, though I am sure that the SNP will make big gains.

The thing is, people in Scotland already give the SNP a big majority in Scottish Parliament elections, but a smaller percentage in UK parliament elections. It seems now that voters may intend to vote the same way in the next UK election as they already do in the Scottish election. Even more so in fact, in favour of the SNP. If that happens, Labour will be severely damaged here. Very severely damaged.

In former times the Democratic Party dominated the Southern states in the USA. But then there was a sort of electoral revolution and the pattern changed very radically, if I'm right about that. The polls in Scotland are indicating a revolution of that magnitude, if they are correctly predicting the May results.

 

[Francesca R]

On these figures the SNP will comfortably outnumber the LibDems and UKIP after May. Maybe put together. Interesting times.

I expressed surprise at this on this forum several months ago when you were absent. But I agree it is true.

My post-hoc interpretation is that the referendum "no" campaign required something of an unholy grand coalition to win. Grand coalitions (see Greece before 25/1, see Germany now) can be part of an eventually-doomed-to-failure attempt to push back the emergence of populism, and as such they can sometimes win a battle but hasten their loss of a war. If that makes sense.

I expect objection to the above implication SNP = populist. Probably there's a better term. It is not meant to demean this/them, but to label any group in the throes of popular surge in support at the expense of incumbent orthodoxy.

 

[Darat]

An explanation could be that although most people in Scotland wanted to stay as part of the UK they think that the SNP has the right approach on many other issues, folk just disagreed with their stance on independence.

 

[Francesca R]

But something happened around the referendum to boost their support significantly.

 

[Craig B]

I expect objection to the above implication SNP = populist. Probably there's a better term. It is not meant to demean this/them, but to label any group in the throes of popular surge in support at the expense of incumbent orthodoxy.

No, in the sense you intend, it's a reasonable term. As I said after the referendum, I was surprised at the degree to which Yes voting was correlated with Left wing ideological predisposition, so that all the yes-majority areas are traditional Labour strongholds.

This may indicate disaster for Labour, if its very heartlands become its most vulnerable assets. But I think that leftist social democratic sentiment remains strong in Scotland; only SNP rather than Blairite NuLab, especially in the latter's Murphyite incarnation, is now seen as the best parliamentary expression of such principles.

It is probably the case that the astounding political activism of the Referendum campaign gave the political kaleidoscope a bit of a shoogle, and the pattern is now settling into a new configuration.

 

[Rolfe]

I think there's an over-simple explanation which probably misses a lot of what's going on. The Yes vote in September was 45%. That's not enough to win a binary-choice referendum. It is enough to sweep all before you in a FPTP election. Since the Yes vote seems now to be somewhere around 52%, that goes double.

I don't remember 1979 terribly well. I was in the middle of my PhD project and not politically active. I just trotted along, voted Yes, and was resigned to failure because of the 40% rule. I do remember some of the depression that followed, though. The country really did seem to fall into a collective despond. We'd voted Yes, but that was counted as a No, and we were going to get nothing. Worse than nothing, we got Thatcher. The SNP's vote fell off a cliff.

I think most people expected a similar descent into depression after a No vote in 2014. I think it's also the case that after the event a significant number of people tend to move to support the winning side, rather than the other way round. Neither of these things happened in September.

I was very startled by my own response at the actual count. Yes, people were bursting into tears around me, but these were the youngsters and the Green/SSP activists. None of the SNP people seemed affected. I wasn't. I found myself comforting sobbing Generation Yes kids, saying, look, we're SNP, we know how to handle this. We've done it lots of times before and we can do it again. We get up, we dust ourselves down, and we carry on. All the while wondering how come I was actually saying these things, and meaning them.

It just felt like another election where we hadn't quite made the breakthrough.

Some people did have a bit of a melt-down on the 19th. Wings posted an absolutely desolate post and had a wee outburst on twitter. I slept through some of it, then got up, washed my face, and went out with the Plaid Cymru activists who were staying with me. They were battle-hardened and disinclined to hysterics, too. By that evening a bunch of us were sitting in a restaurant quite cheerfully discussing the way ahead and watching the appalling goings-on in Glasgow on my phone.

I've since spoken to people who got on the internet at six in the morning on the 19th and joined the SNP. About four days later a woman at work bounced cheerfully into my office and announced she and her son had both joined the SNP. The party membership numbers went ballistic, and the opinion polls started to look completely insane. Something like 2% of the adult voting population is now an SNP member.

At one level, yes, it's Yes voters voting for the Yes party. But at another level something quite unexpected is happening and I for one don't really know what to make of it.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Perhaps the fence-sitters saw how close the thing came and decided they would like to be more ready next time round.

 

[Francesca R]

I think most people expected a similar descent into depression after a No vote in 2014.

Maybe not so dramatic but I expected something like that yes.