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.

Vote Green ... or UKIP gets it.

UKIP. Eurgh! Boo! Yuk. Icky. Want to stir soya milk into Nigel's decent, plain, old-fashioned British cornflakes? Vote GREEN.

That, in an organic spelt kernel, is the Scottish Greens' pitch for May's European election.  The sixth Scottish seat either goes to Maggie Chapman - diligent Edinburgh councillor, immigrant, and anti-nuke feminist - or some far-right goon who attributes rain-clouds to the cosmic machinations of a Romanian sodomite who recently deprived him of gainful employment. (In the interests of disclosure, I should say that I know Maggie of old and wish her well).  For those of us keen to keep Scotland a UKIP-free zone, this is an anxiety-provoking scenario. But is it a credible one? I'm not so sure.

Firstly, it's important to remind ourselves about how seats are allocated in European elections. One, there's a single national constituency and six seats going begging. Two, seats are allocated 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 + 1, with the party with the highest remaining 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.  I put together the following chart last March, showing how all of this shook out in 2009:

As you can see, last time out, the Greens trailed significantly behind not only Labour but also the SNP and the Tories. Short version? They'd only take a seat if Scotland elected nine MEPs rather than six. UKIP were nowhere. But much has changed since 2009. Specifically, the Liberal Democrats entering government has done little to boost their electoral fortunes in Scotland. The party's support fell by over 8% in the constituencies in 2011, losing just over 6% of their regional vote. Their suffering did not abate in the local government election of 2012, during which just under half of their first preferences deserted them, leaving the Liberals with around six-and-a-half per cent of votes cast nationally. 

So things don't look good for George Lyon, whose political career looks destined to end in a second failure, having already been hoofed out of Holyrood in 2007. But is it really just the Greens and UKIP, hovering over his carcase? Given the continuing strength of the SNP, I fancy not. The source of the Greens' claims is a recent pan-UK YouGov poll on the European election, and in particular, its regional breakdown. Yes you've guessed it: the Scottish sample is tiny, a weighted sample of just 165 folk. And intuitively, its findings don't look quite right, seriously overegging Labour (and potentially UKIP) support and underselling the SNP. 

This is significant, in that in 2009, the scrap for the sixth seat was actually between Labour (for a second seat) and the SNP (for a third), with the Tories trailing in third. For the battle for the sixth seat only to be a UKIP vs Green scrap would be a substantial departure; a fact nicely demonstrated by doing precisely what the Greenies want us to do: taking the YouGov sub-sample seriously.  Let's assume the same level of turnout as 2009, and that the election broke down precisely as YouGov's polling predicts. Who would win the seats? And who'd be in the scrap for the sixth?

The slightly embarrassing answer is: not just the Greens and UKIP.  The really embarrassing answer is: not the Greens or UKIP at all. Here's how, by my reckoning, it'd break if the YouGov polling was right.  The victor in each round of the allocation is bracketed underneath.

You'll notice a number of things. Firstly, it would be a battle between UKIP and the SNP for the final seat, with both Labour then the Greens coming up behind.  Lesson: if either Labour or the SNP do stonkingly well, a third seat for either of them can't be ruled out, nor can it be assumed that they'll take these seats early in the allocation, putting them out of contention for the final seat. Labour took its second MEP in 2009 in the last round of the allocation. In this model, the SNP would do so. The idea of a UKIP vs Green battle may be a congenial story for campaigners to tell, but it doesn't reflect the more substantial challenge represented by the big squeeze which Labour and the SNP have put on smaller parties since their recovery after 2003.

But what if the SNP does a bit better, and Labour does a bit worse? For the Greens, there's a sweet spot where both Labour and the SNP do well enough to net two seats apiece early on in the allocation, but insufficiently well to keep either party in contention for a third. Vote shares in the upper-middle twenties should do it: a bit better than Labour did in 2009, and a bit worse than the SNP. Alongside the sturdy Tory MEP spot, this would afford those parties hovering around the 10.5% mark to get a reliable look in, and to kick the sap out of each other for the sixth place.

Anything better than this and the Greens are in bother. The latest Ipsos-MORI poll of Holyrood voting intentions (not an unproblematic cypher for the European poll in which both the Greens and UKIP might expect to do better) has the SNP on 36% and Labour on 34% respectively.  The YouGov European polling gives the parties a total of 61% of the vote. Let's fiddle with it a bit and say that Labour and the SNP gain the same total percentage of support in the European poll, but allocate 31% to the SNP and 30% to Labour to reflect the closer contest suggested by the fuller Ipsos sample.  What happens then?

Again, neither the Greens or UKIP get a look it, with the SNP taking a third seat, trailed by UKIP, then Labour (behind by just 1 vote), then the Greens. The lesson? If UKIP looks to be doing well enough even to approach 10% of the Scottish vote in the Spring, voting for an electorally fragile and inconsistent Green party which itself has never attracted 10% of the vote may not do the trick. 

In simple mathematical terms, electing a third Labour or SNP MEP requires more votes that getting Maggie over the line, certainly (since by this stage in the allocation, every vote for the parties would be divided by three).  It is far from clear, however, that it would be politically more difficult to drum up 60,000 votes for either of the main parties, than it would be to add 20,000 new supporters to the Scottish Green tally in the party's current state.  If disappointing Nigel is your sole aim in casting your European ballot, a vote for either Labour or the SNP may be a more reliable weapon of choice.

Salmond on the slide?

It's part of the received political wisdom. The claim is that Maximum Eck isn't popular with Scottish women and goes down like a lead balloon with the distaff side.  Like many articles of received wisdom, there's little in the way of evidence supporting the truth of the proposition. As I argued here back in August, if anything, recent political statistics suggest that Alex Salmond is popular amongst Scottish women, but has historically been more popular among Scottish men. That trend may be on the turn.

This morning, the Times and Ipsos-MORI have published a new poll on independence, following on from their last research exercise in February of this year.  Plenty there to get our teeth into, but to aid digestion, I wanted to keep this post short and sweet. In addition to canvassing constitutional attitudes, the pollster posed its now familiar question, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the performance of various leading Scottish and UK politicians? Salmond amongst them. 

So what did today's polling find, and how do today's ratings relate to the historical esteem in which the First Minister has been held? I've knocked together the pollster's findings on Salmond's popularity, going back to the balmy days of November 2009.  Here's what the figures show, with today's findings on the far right of the chart.  As you can see, things have been on the slide for Salmond since the December of 2011, with his popularity among both men and women trending downwards again and again in every poll taken since.

Overall, this works out as a 47% satisfied, 45% dissatisfied and 8% "dunnos" for Alex, down slightly from 50% satisfied, 43% dissatisfied and 7% undecideds in February.  While he still enjoys a net +10 rating among men, for only the second time since February of 2010, Salmond now has a net negative rating amongst women, increasing from February's net -4% rating to today's -7%. 

That said, it is important to put these figures in perspective.  As the chart shows, the FM is polling about the same level as he was, two years into his first term of office during the SNP's spell as a minority government. Although on a downward trajectory, this trend is hardly unprecedented. His sky-high ratings in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Holyrood election were never likely to be sustainable. Mid-term, all governments find themselves in the pickle, and it'd be foolish to expect the SNP majority in Holyrood to be any different.

It is also worth bearing in mind that while 36% of the pollsters respondents said they were satisfied with Johann Lamont's stewardship of the Scottish Labour Party, with 31% dissatisfied, a mighty 33% of respondents still haven't the foggiest what to make of her one way or the other.  Interestingly, today's findings confirm that Nicola Sturgeon continues to be rated highly since she was first included in Ipsos-MORI's last effort. No blip, February. Outshining Lamont by a long way in both positive ratings and basic recognition, Sturgeon again also narrowly outperformed her boss in positive ratings, with significantly fewer hostile assessments of her performance in office from Ipsos' respondents.

I''ll be coming back to the pollster's (not terrifically encouraging) findings on independence later. Until then, you can amuse yourself with the full polling tables (including Holyrood election intentions) here.

TNS BMRB: Yes 30%, No 51%

Today, pollster TNS-BMRB publishes its most recent poll on Scottish independence. Often as not, today's results are quoted in isolation. I thought it might be helpful and of interest to stage a beneath-the-topline retrospective on the company's findings since the start of 2013. One wee note of caution. In January, TNS BMRB was still using the old formulation about negotiating independence, adopting the Scottish Government's new question first only in February. The impact of the change seems negligible, so I've simply included the January figures in the charts below.  

I don't have much time to commit to the exegesis of this material, so today I'll mostly be presenting the data, and leaving it at that, with a couple of marginal notions, to aid understanding. Today's data is labelled as March '13 throughout. First up, TNS-BMRB's findings on the changing overall picture since January. 

Gender

Historically, the gender gap has remained a stubborn feature of independence polling. Interestingly, TNS-BMRB has consistently generated smaller discrepancies between the voting intentions of men and women in the referendum than many of its competitors.

Age

Polling data on the breakdown of voting intentions by age has been marked by significant volatility at the bottom, most youthful end of the spectrum, and a good deal of solidity as we approach the eldest cohort of respondents.  Opposition to independence amongst those aged over 55 continues, undented. By contrast, the sometimes more-pro-independence younger voters continues to leap about like a frog in a frying-pan.

35 - 54

55 - 65+

Social Grading

Like a number of other pollsters, TNS BMRB break down their data using "social grading" codes.  Respondents are classified based on the occupation of the "head of household". This information on the chief earner's profession is broken down into AB (upper) and C1 (lower) middle classes, with C2 representing the "skilled working class", and DE denoting the working class and those living at the lowest levels of subsistence.  To add a bit of important context, according to Ipsos-MORI, something like 27% of Britons would be classified as of AB social grade, 29% as C1s, 21% as C2s, and 23% as DE. 

Previous polls have tended to show that opposition to independence is substantially higher amongst AB voters than their poorest fellows.  While TNS-BMRB found that opposition to independence is 8% down amongst AB voters than at the start of the year, today's poll shows a spike in the number of the poorest Scots who oppose the measure, and an independence droop. That said, the poorest cohort of Scots remains the most supportive, while the richest remain unconvinced, with less a quarter of AB voters currently favouring independence.

Independence: AB and C1s.

Independence: C2DEs.

 

Those full tables here.

Scottish Independence: those chancy Ipsos-MORI trends...

A somewhat uncomfortable juxtaposition this, given yesterday's jeremiad against commentary on Scottish independence which obsesses unduly over polling numbers, and which campaign is ahead by a nose, or as circumstances might have it, by a proboscis of Pinocchioesque scale.  What can I say? I'm going hazard the Americanisation, threaten complicity in the saturation of our politics with statistics, and take a closer took at Ipsos-MORI's latest independence poll, published this morning.  Commentary on these polls tends to be governed by how the relate to the study undertaken immediately previously, and if the analysis hitherto is anything to go by, then the good ship independence isn't exactly holed below the waterline, but this October poll shows it leaking support in a less than encouraging fashion. 

It strikes me, however, that it might be interesting, and certainly wiser, to cast our minds back a wee bit further than July this year, to see the ebbs and flows of these opinion polls in their proper aspect.  Accordingly, in slight amendment to my past approach to presenting polling data, this time I'll be contextualising the new findings, not with respect to the immediately prior poll, but to all five Ipsos-MORI independence surveys back to August 2011.  There is no particular reason of principle for my stopping at this point. That was merely when easily-accessible data stopped, and is I think far enough back, to offer perspective to today's findings, without exhausting us all with too much information.  

The lesson of this longer-term perspective? Firstly, you're really struck by the volatility of findings beneath the topline. While in poll after poll you find lower support for independence amongst women, and higher support for it amongst poorer than richer Scots, the rates of difference are all over the place, sliding hither and thon like a drunken centipede, giving rollerskates a try.  Opposition to independence amongst men, for instance, has ranged across fourteen percentage points, from a high of 58% opposition last August, to January 2012's low of 44%, increasing in July, and falling again by two pips this October. Women's support for independence has been consistently on the slide in Ipsos polls (down from 34% last August to 25% today).

Beyond the extremes, how support for independence might break down by age is mostly hunchwork.  We can consistently say that the oldest cohort of Scots is the most opposed to independence, but shy of that, all one can soberly say about those under fifty five is that they are consistently inconsistent in their constitutional preferences.  By way of an example, take the youngest group, 18 to 24 year olds.  Their support for independence in Ipsos polls has vacillated 12 percentage points from the highest to lowest level of support.  Indecision even more so, shifting 18% upwards today, compared to just 3% of the cohort questioned who said they were undecided about Scotland's constitutional future last December.  Over-confident analysis of these fluctuating findings looks decidedly chancy.  

One final observation or two on the latest poll, before the charts.  Across all but one of the categories we're looking at here - of gender, of social deprivation and of age, indecision is on the increase, and not solely at the expense of the pro-independence side of things. The percentage of respondents who are undecided in October's Ipsos-MORI is higher than any of the other four, whether they are men, women, old or young, and with only one exception, whether those questioned were wealthy or impoverished.  Divided up into the five percentiles of deprivation, only the second least deprived 20% felt less uncertain this October about how they might vote, than every other category of people.  This is at its starkest amongst the poorest 20% of Scots, usually independence polling's strongest supporters.  While independence remains the majority choice of the poorest 20%, levels of indecision have increased from a low of 9% in last autumn's poll, to a full quarter or respondents today. 

All in all, though, these aren't splendid-looking polls for those who support independence. Levels of support for independence today are at their lowest since August 2011 amongst men, amongst women, amongst the poorest, amongst 25 to 34 year olds, those aged 35 to 54, and amongst the inveterately opposed old codgers, counting more than fifty five years to their name. I suspect my own feelings mirror those of most nationalists surveying these results: they simply underline the challenge before us, rather than fostering despair. Salmond's buccaneer sensibility is the right one. Confound the bean-counters. Make the arguments. Strive to persuade your neighbours, your colleagues and friends. Keep the heid. It's not sewn up just yet.

And with that, to the pretty charts.  Let's start with gender, and their shifting Ipsos trends.

After which, to age.  For convenience, I've broken all of this down into Ipsos age bands.  I pondered a vast, mad, spider's web of a line graph, but it make for an impenetrable thatch of data to try and tease through.  If anyone has particular requests or preferences in terms of the presentation of the information, do please let me know. You'll notice, by the by, that Ipsos use slightly different, slightly fewer age brackets than, say, TNS-BMRB. Chronologically, the pollster's findings were as follows...

 

Unlike the social grading used by TNS-BMRB, which is based on the occupation of the "head of household", Ipsos favours distinguishing its respondents into one of five categories of affluence, running from the 20% who live in Scotland's most deprived areas, to the 20% who stay in the least deprived quarters of the land.  

One infelicity of this approach is that it is a bit tricky to entitle the data in a readily comprehensible way, save for the extremes of poverty, and extremes of wealth.  For accessibility, I've styled the arid categories 2, 3 and 4 as - second most deprived 20%, the middle 20%, and the second least deprive 20% respectively.  The charts run in order down the page, from poorest to richest to aid in their construction.  Already starkly hostile to independence, this month's poll records the lowest level for support for independence from the richest Scots yet, falling beneath 20%, while levels of indecision, as elsewhere, look to be on the rise.

 

Those full Ipsos-MORI October tables.