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A mountain to climb – Labour’s challenge ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections – political
A mountain to climb – Labour’s challenge ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections – politicalbetting.com
And a majority looks well within the SNP’s grasp at this early point – @theSNP are riding high in both votes, with the Conservatives in 2nd place and Labour in 3rd (3/6) pic.twitter.com/4QQhQVuYW0
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It just ain't right. I don't read the site for several days then I get in here.
And at the moment I have nothing to say.
Scotland will be better off taking responsibility for itself and being our friendly neighbours. Good luck to them.
Very pleased to have this analysis - many thanks.
I also see that the Green vote seems to have collapsed, but on checking, that's just cos people don't vote Green in the constituency but in the list. When one checks, a very different perspective opens - the Greens have overtaken the LDs.
https://twitter.com/Emily_IpsosMORI/status/1316334283863269378
https://twitter.com/CillizzaCNN/status/1316735823816151043?s=09
Instead given 47% of No voters back the Scottish Conservatives and only 25% back Scottish Labour to make any progress at constituency level in the Central belt next year Scottish Labour has to target Scottish Tory voters and ask them to lend them a tactical vote to support a Unionist candidate to beat the SNP in seats the Tories have no chance while still voting Tory on the list.
So forget SNP voters, Starmer and Leonard need to start lovebombing Scottish Tories!
https://twitter.com/felix_bohr/status/1316331170049789952?s=20
"Lies are often more pausible and appealing to the mind than the truth, because the liar has the crucial advantage of knowing in advance what the audience like to hear."
Edit: and SLAB history of late (1997 on, IIRC) has been that at least two key figures tell their voters to vote Tory to keep the SNP out.
Independence - 58% support, if it holds up, is getting into consensus territory. It isn't close, unlike the Brexit referendum, nor is it particularly "divisive" - the soundbite of Tory reaction. The discussion moves from the Whether to the How.
I have issues with the wording of the other polling where 75% would vote Yes, leaving aside economic concerns. Nevertheless this does suggest Project Fear is baked into the 58% overall support figure. People may be over sanguine about the consequences of independence, but they are taking consequences as they perceive them into account.
Scottish Labour - desperately need independence to go away as an issue. Based on polling that suggests independence actually happens.
When, as with SLAB, you have been the party of the Scottish establishment it is even more difficult because you tend not to have those quirky but potentially popular policies that the Lib Dems put up to get noticed. Scottish Labour has incredibly little to say about the future of the nation.
On the odd occasion they do get coverage Mr Leonard does not inspire. Indeed, its not often clear what he is even talking about. It really doesn't help.
I say this as someone who usually supports the Tories with no satisfaction whatsoever. Scottish Labour was the bulwark of the Union and it is sad to see it in this diminished state. The falling away of their power bases, not just in Holyrood but in local government, has left the field wide and open in large parts of Scotland where Tories don't have a ready audience or much chance of a hearing. Something needs to break in Scottish politics if the SNP hegemony is ever to end. It seems unlikely that Labour will be a major part of that restructuring.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/poll-most-scots-would-reject-independence-after-considering-issues-2976093
I would house Biden in a hermetically sealed safe room between now and November 3rd!
He's does jealous he only has fake ones ;-)
Until someone plays the role of Androcles, there is no moving forwards with Scottish politics.
You're right about indy and Slab. Just consider how it was the Scottish TORIES who are most desperate for Slab to extradigitate and get rid of Mr Leonard.
In 2014 they got Slab ot be their penal battalion [edit] to rush over the electoral minefield and clear the electoral field for the Scottish, sorry British, Tories to climb to partial success over their corpses. The Tories want that to happen again.
Yet Slab is not independent of London - being head of it is an illusion (and the very name is only permitted by a fiddle of electoral legislation exempting the word 'Scottish' from the need to be truthful on the ballot). And yet the Labour MPs in Scotland will never allow Slab to go independent - peerages call too strongly.
But the party only has 1 MP and precious little hope of getting many more on the evidence here. So ...
https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1316741474235699200
Quite frankly as long as the SNP can keep the Yes vote united behind them there isn't any possibility of the Tories and any other party ending their hegemony.
It is exactly the same as Brexit and the General Election in 2019.
Since the Tories can't unite the No vote the only way the No vote can be united is if the Scottish Tories collapse.
There's no evidence that any alternative MSP leader such as Daniel Johnson, Sarah Boyack, Anas Sarwar
etcwould do much better than him per se so I don't think a replacement is worth bothering with.
An SNP-Green majority is not an inevitability by an any means even though Sturgeon is popular with the 16-45 vote as Ross Greer's seat is on a shoogly peg and the SNP are likely pile up wasted votes in some urban constituencies in places like Dundee, Aberdeen, Stirling, Glasgow where they already strong.
The Tories are certain to go backwards in places like Edinburgh but will likely hold their ground well in places like Aberdeenshire, Moray, Ayrshire, Perthshire, Borders etc and could quite plausibly pick up a few more FPTP seats.
I am not quite as depressed today as I was yesterday.
Similarly Unionist parties can get a majority at Holyrood even if the SNP win most seats
https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1316715349220483072?s=20
Which suggests if voters perceive independence as settled, one way or the other, they will prioritise social justice again. That's Scottish Labour's opportunity.
I am guessing so long as Johnson is around, not much, but Nippy has a big personal following, so it might have a small effect.
At the last election the SNP "only" got 41.7% of the List vote, much less than the Tories got at the General Election. They got 48.9% of the seats in Holyrood though.
Yet I don't agree re social democracy. When Mr Corbyn came to Scotland to give his infamous lecture with its demands on key elements of social democracy, most of the demands had either been met, were in process, or had been blocked by the revisions of the Scotland Act labour wanted. Okay, his demand to renationalise the water industry was rejected but then it had never been privatised here - in part due to a previous Labour administration of IIRC Strathclyde which organised a referendum (which is, BTW, an interesting model in the current circs.)
But back to your analkysis, and my reactiomn is that the Tories, in Scotland and London, are doing their very best to make sure that the question of indy is not settled, in the most arrogant and undemicratic manner possible. .
Some people are in for a shock.
Rebekah Brooks has taken Piers Morgan to lunch today after his appearances on all three News UK radio stations to plug his new book – what are old friends for after all. Rebekah personally escorted Piers around the building. Speculation is that she is trying to get him for the new TV channel.
https://order-order.com/2020/10/15/rebekah-want-piers-on-her-new-tv-station/
The question is whether the damage (from a Unionist perspective) is permanent. And if it is reversible, how is it actually reversed?
Then we have people spinning Tier 2 is a lockdown.
We have Sturgeon who won't even accept Hands, Face, Space, instead insists on FACTS, which then has to be spelt out in detail what it actually means. And use a different app that can't track English using going to Scotland and vice versa.
We have the Welsh saying the English mustn't come to Wales.
The very worst of all possible worlds.
Certainly a changing of the guard and a chance for all parties to bring in some fresh talent
With the list system for UK general elections some Tories would have voted LD or Brexit Party on the list even if they gave the Tories their first vote at constituency level to keep out Corbyn Labour's candidate or deliver Brexit respectively.
So the LDs would likely have got more seats and the Tories less percentage wise combining constituency and list seats and the Brexit Party would also have gained seats at the Tories expense so no net change for hard Brexit with them but a shift against hard Brexit due to the extra LD MPs elected on the list.
In 2016 the SNP had a big majority of 45 at Holyrood on the constituency seats but no majority at all combining the constituency and list seats, leaving them reliant on the Greens to keep a nationalist majority overall
At Trump's insistence it will be scheduled head to head with the Biden townhall.
NBC are cretins.
My suggestion is that a solution needs to be found that allows a strong Scottish identity to be expressed within the United Kingdom.
It’s for this reason that I’d have no issue with saltires being plastered all over Scottish exports rather than UJs, for instance. It’s important for the same reason that blue passports for the UK within the EU would have been.
Symbols matter.
Only the Conservatives retain swathes of guaranteed safe mainland seats outside Scotland. North of the border the SNP are unassailable.
He also wants holiday meals and activities to be expanded to an extra 1.1 million, and the value of healthy food vouchers for pregnant women to be increased to increased to £4.25 per week (up from £3.10)
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-54545772
This is the problem with these types of government schemes, there are always more deserving cases to be found and it gets expanded and expanded, before you know it millions are getting it and it won't just be during an emergency.
That was happened with Gordon Brown approach to lots of things. Start of with very deserving, then made aware of another sub-group that were deserving, but you couldn't precisely target them, so went for a wider group, rinse and repeat, and before you know it people on £50k a year on tax credits.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/10/14/erin-burnett-monologue-trump-rally-covid-19-herd-immunity-ebof-vpx.cnn
1. The Covid crisis needs to be over. At the moment the crisis means Sturgeon is on TV every day and she gets the credit for every step forward and deftly blames Johnson for every step back.
2. A critique of the SNP government that moved the debate onto non-Constitutional issues such as housing, education, health, economic development, etc.
3. A credible set of policies for improving these which showed that progress could be made with current devolved powers - so the SNP couldn't blame Westminster for preventing them from doing stuff.
4. A credible leader in Scotland to present the arguments for 2 and 3.
Perhaps 1 is possible. I see no sign for the others. Labour will be buried. The Tories will use constitutional issues to win second place, but that's winning short term benefit at the expense of long term oblivion.
I guess schadenfreude at Labour's expense will provide them with some cheer. I expect I'll continue with my reverse-Midas record and vote Labour, who will probably fall to third in a constituency they won in 2011.
Although, I might vote Green if I decide that the Climate issue is more important to me than the Constitutional. It doesn't help that the Labour candidate is an unimaginative Corbynite.
A few thoughts: how reliable is any polling during the current global pandemic? Is it likely to be skewed by people’s natural tendency to ‘cling to nurse’, in this case Sturgeon, and be distracted from ‘usual’ day to day voter issues? The shift in Scottish polls seems to tie as much to COVID as to Brexit (with No still ahead in most polls until this year).
Ipsos had a 9% Yes lead in 2015 and another, smaller 4% lead the next year around the time most other companies were reporting solid No leads.This latest poll is out of line with the Survation non-standard q poll and Savanta Comres from around the same period. Who knows who’s right, but what’s the likely reason for this?
We're behaving irrationally ... and ill-informed voters are lapping it up.
Only learned people with job security or safe pensions, like Profs. Ioainnides, Levitt, Spiegelhalter, Stadler, etc are saying anything radically different.
The alternative to that was that the UK (as a whole) could never take a fundamental foreign policy decision that Scotland might disagree with because it would break the Union. If that was the case - that attachment to the EU was stronger than the UK - then the Union was already doomed in the medium-long term as it was too fragile to survive any serious disagreement.
There’s the antithesis of this. Gibraltar, for instance, voted overwhelmingly to Remain but it’s sense of Britishness is so strong that it immediately accepted it and prepared for a full break. There is not the remotest of a hint that it might opt for, say, joint sovereignty with Spain as a solution to largely stay in.
Whether it is a good idea for Trump presumably depends on whether Trump displaces more potential Biden viewers than the other way round,
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Some PBers need to learn to spell. And the liquid lunch isn't even an excuse today Casino.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/orderedseats.html#:~:text=This page shows all the seats in England,,Holland and The Deepings, is at the bottom.
She owned up to a mistake and profoundly apologised (yes, she was stupid and irresponsible etc) and got hauled over the coals and absolutely vilified for it anyway. To the max.
Others in future will simply keep their mouths shut and take the risk of being found out. Because what else do they have to gain?