Ca' canny...

As Massie says, the results of yesterday's Ipsos-MORI poll are remarkable, with Labour polling at a grisly 23% to the SNP's 52% going into the General Election. The Tories languish on 10%, and the Liberals, 6%. Grim tidings for the beleaguered Liberal Democrats, hoping to hold on to some of their eleven Scottish seats. Worse for Ed Miliband, who can ill afford to lose bastions on its northward front. 

The poll doubtless has some significance. The next General Election campaign certainly represents an opportunity for the Nationalists to make gains, particularly if we see a differential rise in activism and enthusiasm and turnout amongst the disappointed minority who voted Yes on the 18th of September. But if your attention is fixed on Holyrood, it is easy to forget just how badly the SNP has done in recent Westminster general elections. But here are a few sobering facts we shouldn't allow ourselves to forget in the current ferment. 

The SNP hit its high watermark in Westminster support in the October election of 1974, winning 11 seats. Since, it has never exceeded six MPs. In 2005 and 2010, the SNP were the third party in Scotland,  in terms of seats won, We pipped the Liberal Democrats in the popular vote in 1997, 2001 and 2010 but lagged behind in seats. God bless first past the post. But that was more than a decade ago. The two most recent UK polls put the Nationalists in the vice, squeezed between Labour, the Liberals and the Tories. 

Despite BBC documentaries, asking why Scotland didn't vote for the Tories, in 2010 the SNP polled just 78,500 more votes nationally than David Cameron's party. Labour members were returned to Westminster with thumping majorities, but so were many Liberal Democrats in their enclaves. Take a few big names. Michael Moore won Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk with 45.5% of the vote, some 5,675 ahead of his nearest, Conservative competitor. Wee Danny Alexander took Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey with over 19,000 votes.

But what should disturb the attentive Nationalist more is how we far down the pecking order we fall - even in areas in which we are in contention for, and even win, in Holyrood elections.  The Scottish and UK parliamentary orders do not nearly graft onto one another. The constituency boundaries have, in many cases, diverged. But a few examples from the Liberal Democratic periphery should hammer home the point. Take Danny Alexander, up in the Highlands. The Liberal Democrats may have won the day with 40% of the vote - but in 2010, his nearest competitor was not the SNP, but the Labour Party, who won 10,407 votes to the Nationalists' 8,803. The point is made even more brutally by considering the constituency in which I grew up: Argyll and Bute.

A Liberal seat throughout my childhood, represented by the late Ray Michie and now by the near-invisible Alan Reid, after a 1997 surge, the SNP actually came fourth in the constituency in 2001, 2005, and 2010, behind the Liberals, the Tories and Labour. Compare and contrast with the constituency's preferences in recent Holyrood elections. Lib Dem George Lyon was turfed out by the SNP's Jim Mather in 2007. Mike Russell held it in 2011 with over 50% of the vote. The divergence in voting behaviour is striking, and in general elections, not to our advantage. 

Are these challenges insuperable? Most certainly not. But they are formidable, and should be treated and understood as formidable. The Labour wipe-out promised by yesterday's poll is unlikely to appear. There are gains to be made, and constituencies to fight -- but matching or narrowly exceeding the party's all-time high of eleven seats in 1974 would be a great result. We shouldn't lose sight of that, and the low base - both in terms of votes and seats - from which we spring.

It is essential that the SNP begins to clamp down on the overrunning expectations of sweeping Labour from its Scottish constituencies and running the map after 2015. Take this morning's bad headlines for Ed Miliband, enjoy a partisan chortle, but don't believe the hype. There's a gathering risk here of mismanaging expectations to the extent that even a good result for the SNP in the general election looks like a failure, or worse, a public reckoning for Nationalist hubris.

That's not a story Nicola will want to foster at this early stage in her leadership. We should learn the lesson of the over-spun local election campaign in Glasgow in 2012. While the leadership was telling the press that Labour's grip on the city looked precarious, on the ground, Labour were working like mad - in the last ditch - and the Nationalist campaign never had the same level of resources, focus, or enthusiasm. The results speak for themselves. Labour retained its majority in the city chambers, and justly gloated about the over-inflated expectations which had been stoked up. "SNP juggernaut grinds to halt." Etcetera, etcetera. We saw similar missteps in managing expectations in the 2008 Glenrothes by-election. It is a temptation which must be resisted going into 2015 too. 

Keep the heid. Consider the data. Ca' canny.

An independent Scotland's representation in Europe

It seems to be Euro-election obsession season on the blog this week. Just a shorter thought for today, I promise. As we were discussing yesterday, on the 22nd of May, a small slice of the Scottish electorate will go to the polls to select the region's six members of the European Parliament.

Europhile Nationalists frequently make the point that for our size, Scotland is actually underrepresented in the European Union assembly. Our Danish friends, for example - estimated population, around 5,600,000 - send thirteen MEPs to the European Parliament: more than double our number. An independent Scotland in Europe could aspire to similar levels of representation.  

But who would we send? On twitter, Owen David Griffiths asked how the 2009 European election would have shaken out, if Scotland had sent its full compliment of parliamentarians to Brussels instead of the depleted band we enjoy under the Union.  That's an irresistible question for the committed bore like me. For simplicity, let's assume that an independent Scotland keeps a single, national constituency for European elections. By my reckoning, an independent Scotland would have despatched 5 SNP, 3 Labour, 2 Tories, 2 Liberal Democrats and a solitary Green across the channel in 2009 to attend to our interests.  (Applying d'Hondt is a lengthy business here. Click on the image below for a clearer snapshot).

Even having more than doubled the number of seats available, the United Kingdom Independence Party (no doubt by this time to be rechristened the "Little Scotlandlander Party") wouldn't get a look in. But that's counterfactual history.  How might the current European election pan out on current polling, if we were electing thirteen MEPs instead of six later this month? Running the numbers through the usual process, the SNP would make considerable gains - and the Liberal Democrat George Lyon would have attended the MEP leavers' party in vain.  (Again, click through for a clearer look at the allocation).

On these numbers, all six of the SNP's European candidates would be elected (+1 on 2009), joined by four Labour MEPs (also +1).  The Liberal Democrats and the Tories would hold onto one representative apiece (both -1), the Greens would also lose their solitary European seat, while UKIP's 10% would gain them one. Congratulations, David Coburn. Enjoy a refreshing biertje and a bucket of moules frites on us.

Here ends the wildly speculative Euro election nerdery. Given the drookit spring weather we're enjoying at the moment, you'll be glad of that anorak, I assure you.

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.