Europe in the Magic Lantern

Giddy with constitutional politics, we seem to have forgotten that there is a real darn-tootin' election in these parts in just a few months time. 

I've blogged a couple of times before about about May's elections to the European Parliament. Scotland sends six MEPs to Strasbourg and Brussels - depending on whatever day of the week it is.  To keep the public suitably bamboozled by the wealth of electoral systems we employ in this country, Europe offers yet another variation on the theme.  Like Holyrood's regional seats, parties rank their candidates in order and we use the d'Hondt mechanism to allocate the European jobs.  Unlike elections to the Scottish Parliament, however, for Europe, we're treated as one big, single constituency, and the votes are added up from Aberdeen to Auchinleck and from the isle of Skye to the eastmost edge of the Orkney islands.

So what do the portents tell us? For scallcrows, who enjoy cackling over the spent cadavers of Liberal Democrats, the European poll looks likely to throw up another victim in George Lyon, who has been buggered by the general collapse in Scottish support for his party.  So who looks likely to benefit from his electoral evisceration? 

Not the Tories, who look well placed to retain their European seat, but are still in no danger of threatening another.  Nor Labour.  Given the level at which the SNP is polling, the election of a third Labour politician looks damn near impossible.  Holding their two MEPs is a more modest, but eminently more achievable aspiration. By contrast, both the Greens and UKIP are hopping about enthusiastically, as are the SNP who fought an uncharacteristically lively fight for third place on the European last, after the current incumbents, Alyn Smith and European old-timer Ian Hudghton.  So what are Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh's chances?

If Monday's ICM poll is anything to go by, Tasmina can begin anticipating the Belgian moules frites. While my pals in the Greens continue to argue - not without credibility - for strategic Green voting in the May's poll, this week's poll confirms the earlier assessment that an SNP gain at the expense of the Liberals may be more likely than Scotland despatching its first Green or UKIP parliamentarian to sit in the European parliament. 

ICM's full tables break down voting intentions in a range of different ways, collating the opinions of all those who say they will vote, and providing a second table, weighted by ICM for turnout. As it happens, this weighting doesn't make a substantial difference to the overall numbers, nicking a percentage point from the Greens and Labour, and bumping SNP support by a point. Overall, using the unweighted numbers to give the smaller parties the greatest look in, ICM found the following levels of support for each party:

So how does that shake out in terms of outcomes, it we run those figures through the d'Hondt allocation system?

The lesson? The Greens and UKIP will have to significant outperform the current polls if either party is to stand the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of prying the sixth European seat from George Lyon's cold dead hands. That's not an impossibility. Turnout in European elections in Scotland is notoriously poor. It may be also that Nationalist support is rather over-egged here, and the party's actual performance on polling day will throw Ahmed-Shiekh's hopes and ambitions of taking a third European seat in doubt. As Gary Dunion notes in a recent piece in the Scottish Left Review, every vote for the SNP will have just a third of its value come the fifth and sixth stage of the allocation, having already been significantly reduced by the d'Hondt divider (seats already won + 1).  A window of opportunity then for Maggie Chapman and the ghastly David Coburn -- however narrow.

2014 Euro Elections: The power of three?

At this weekend's Spring Conference, the SNP picked its slate of six European candidates from fifteen who have been husting across the country, making the case for their candidacy, over the last few weeks.  The remaining six will be ranked by the party membership on a one-member-one-vote basis over the summer. The two incumbent MEPs, Alyn Smith and Ian Hudghton, survived the Conference's verdict, along with Toni Giugliano, Chris Stephens, former Salmond special advisor Stephen Gethins and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who counts the SNP as her third party in as many years, formerly having held memberships of both the Tory and Labour Parties.  

From the conference scuttlebutt, it seems that the leadership were quite keen to see Tasmina prosper this weekend.  Just an unlikely coincidence I'm sure, just serendipity, that Ahmed-Sheikh's daughter was hailed as the SNP's 25,000th member on the eve of the conference. Subtle it ain't, but I suppose such machinations are to be expected in all political outfits, where happy accidents can be found to puff the objects of official favour. It remains to be seen where the party membership will bestow their benevolence.  Those candidates nominated in first and second place, all things being equal, are assured a seat in the European Parliament.  Interestingly, if the current polls are anything to go by, the SNP has a sniff of a third.

How European Elections Work

I find that many folk are a bit mystified by how European elections work. Here's a brief summary. Firstly, Scotland is a single constituency, and from 2009 onwards, elects six MEPs.  These are selected on the basis of a simple quota system.  Like the regional vote in Holyrood, each party nominates and ranks a list of candidates. On election night, returning officers tot up all of the votes cast into national totals.

These are then divided by the number of seats the party has already won in the region + 1, with the party with the highest tally winning a candidate in that round.  In practice, that means that the party winning the highest level of support takes the first MEP, and their vote is divided first by two, and then by three if they take a second seat.  Clear as mud?  Consider this worked example. Consider the allocation in 2009.

As you can see, the Greens never really had a look in here, the scrap for the sixth and last Scottish MEP being duked out between Labour and the SNP, with only 7,925 votes between them, and the Tories due a second MEP too before any Scottish Green got to set foot in Brussels.

With the fundament falling through the Liberal vote after 2010, both the SNP and the Greens - and the Tories too - smell an opportunity for gains, and they're right to do so.  Projecting ahead here is a little tricky. The constituency which turns out for European elections isn't the same as materialises for Holyrood and Westminster polls, and accordingly, neither are good guides to what levels of support parties might expect in 2014, save in general terms about who is up, and who is down.

The drift of the Liberal vote also poses its predictive challenges. The Scottish election survey has convincingly shown that the SNP's win in the Holyrood election of 2011 wasn't attributable to the direct transfer of drifting Liberal Democrats, but an ensemble piece, pulled together from the electorate which had previously supported all of the SNP's rivals. No Scottish poll has yet asked about voting intentions for Europe.

For mischief, however, let's be crude about it, and candid about our crude assumptions. Say, for the sake of argument, that the number of votes cast in 2014 are the same as 2009. Let's assume too that the SNP, still doing well in the polls in Holyrood, add another 5% to their 2009 showing of 29.1% of the European vote, taking them up to 34.1% of all ballots cast.  For the model, say too that Labour, the Tories and the Greens are steady at 20.8%, 16.8% and 7.8% of the vote respectively.  Now let's snaffle 5% off the Liberal Democrats, leaving them with just 6.5% of Euro ballots cast.  

Given what we know about recent local and Holyrood elections, these assumptions don't seem entirely unreasonable. If the 2014 European elections were to pan out along these lines, who might benefit from George Lyon's evaporating vote? The tantalising answer is: it's all up for grabs.

SNP gains and Liberal losses reorders rounds one to five, with the Conservatives gaining their first MEP in the fourth rather than the third round, while the SNP snares its second in round three instead of four, per 2009. Instead of being narrowly trumped handily by the Labour Party in the sixth round, a 5% bump in support combined with a -5% Liberal slump would put the third-ranked SNP candidate very much in contention much earlier on, due an office in Strasbourg and Brussels as early as round five. An opportunity here which clearly focussed minds in the party conference in Inverness this weekend, and promises to make the ranking contest between Smith, Hudghton, Giugliano, Stephens, Gethins and Ahmed-Sheikh quite the scrap. 

On these simple assumptions, round six of the allocation doesn't have the appearance of a closely-fought mêlée, though reality has the habit of upending one's most cogent assumptions.  On this model, Labour would retain its second MEP in the sixth round, 18,796 votes ahead of the nearest contender - now the fourth-ranked SNP candidate - and 34,485 in front of the Greens. 

While in Holyrood in 2011, the Scottish Greens proved unable to capitalise on the Liberal purge, perhaps Europe will give Maggie Chapman an opportunity to corral more wayward Liberals, shorn of the presidential Salmond vs Gray logic which dominated in 2011.  If she's to have a snowball's chance in hell to be in contention, she'll have to push the Green vote (higher in European elections in recent years than in Holyrood polls) to the sorts of levels which the Liberals were able to command in the pre-coalition era.

A rather modest opportunity here too for the Scottish Conservatives to achieve that most elusive of outcomes - a Scottish political gain - if only they can keep up their vote. And, for that matter, for the Liberal Democrats to save a little face, if their losses aren't as attenuating as I've projected. Lyon might survive yet.  

UPDATE

In an earlier edition of the blog, I magisterially cocked up the all important last-stage calculation (unaccountably, I mixed up my dividers) hence any changes you might detect in the charts or their interpretation.