ALBA - Unofficial Forum

I did Friday’s Common Weal daily briefing on the poll chaos. It seemed to me on Friday morning that we were getting results in elections and opinion polls which make the future very difficult to predict.

But generally when I get new information I tend to be surprised by it and then less so as time passes. With the current political picture in Scotland, I just keep getting more bemused. It… doesn’t make a lot of sense. It certainly doesn’t feel sustainable.

More than a year ago (can’t find the link) I argued that Scottish politics would be a race between who was becoming more unpopular faster – Starmer’s Labour UK Government (which was always going to disappoint massively) and Swinney’s SNP Scottish Government (which I never believed could reverse the downwards trend in SNP support).

It’s not that I was wrong, its that I couldn’t have predicted the scale of both of these phenomenon. It really hit me again this morning looking at the Survation poll. On Friday the National ran a headline saying that the SNP had opened up a lead for Holyrood in a YouGov poll. Given that I had just been through all the coverage of the Plaid Cymru by-election, it wasn’t that surprising.

In fact I immediately thought that John Swinney just needed not to set fire to some disabled kids by accident and he must surely be gaining from the Labour Party implosion. It was a simple process of elimination.

Then I looked; Swinney’s lead increased solely because of Labour’s decline. His constituency vote was unchanged and his list vote was actually falling. I tend to take care with polls which can individually be unreliable, so I approached the YouGov poll expecting to see what I didn’t see in the Survation poll (Swinney-SNP rising slightly by default).

I didn’t see that. In fact Swinney’s SNP has lost two points since the last Survation poll. What on earth is going on? None of this really makes sense. Given that polling is based only on likely voters, they have to vote for someone.

This rather condemns us to address the thesis that Reform are offering a ‘fuck you button’ and inviting the public to press it. I mean, politics is so bad right now that I’d press a decent fuck-you button in a second.

But I am very sceptical about the all-powerful Reform. For a kick-off, this clanjamfrey of hard-right odd balls have been here before in UKIP and Brexit Party form and it is not the first time they have over-performed in polls and under-performed at ballot boxes. There is reason for Reform to be worried in South Wales – Thursday’s vote suggests there may be a fairly brutal upper limit to Reform’s rise.

And I am more sceptical about Reform for more reasons than that. A lot of what you hear about Reform winning over voters from traditional parties is anecdotal, and it needs a big health warning. Reform switchers are very noisy; they make a lot of fuss about their shift. They want you to know they have shifted.

I keep looking at the overall numbers. By my very rough calculations, everyone who would vote either Reform or Tory if there was an election tomorrow is still about seven million votes shy of what Boris Johnstone got. Those voters didn’t shift back to Labour last year (Labour’s vote actually fell from Corbyn 2019).

What that means is that I can see zero evidence of anyone moving to Reform without first having gone Boris first. Or, let me put that another way; given how motivated Reform voters appear to be, is it not surprising they’ve not reached a greater proportion of the Tory voters from 2019? Whisper it, but is the Tory-Reform voting block perhaps not actually all that impressive just now?

Plaid is up, Greens are up and Lib Dems are up. Goodness knows what will happen with Your Party but there seems to me a real possibility that it could actually overtake Labour. Or more accurately, I think an English Green-Your Party coalition could most certainly overtake Labour. This looks like ‘punish incumbents’ again.

In that context, the SNP result makes more sense. What it suggests is that the political commentator approach to understanding voting is unhelpful. Political commentators assume rationally-motivated voting patterns based on what insiders think is the issue. They always think the public is looking for ‘the best manager’.

And in that context they would reach the conclusion I would that if Scottish Labour are declining as a possible governing party, the SNP as a governing party must rise. That obviously isn’t what is happening. So it has to be something else.

I suspect a more accurate framing is confidence – how much confidence does a voter have in any one party. What is important in this frame is that they aren’t comparing parties to pick a least worst option so much as simply assessing their confidence in each of the parties. In that way, confidence can fall in all of them without anyone picking up the lost votes other than on the list.

That seems to me to be the best description of what is happening. It suggests Swinney has turned nothing round in the SNP. It suggests that Sarwar is irrelevant because it is Starmer who is killing Labour. It suggests the Greens are the ones getting the default vote (I don’t personally believe that the public see Ross Greer and Gillian McKay as a step change over Harvie/Slater).

That in turn suggests they are susceptible to Your Party. Even Alba was looking rosier, and it is a long time since I thought Alba had much chance even of a token seat or two. I also don’t think confidence in Alba is rising.

So this looks like the mathematics of universal decline, and it is not what you usually see in politics. I don’t even think the Greens are really gaining out of this even though it looks like they are. I suspect that will not play out like that in the end.

The reason this is all particularly interesting for me is just the thought experiment – what does this actually tell us about the Scottish public’s mindset and what possibilities does it suggest? Because what it suggests is that there is something missing in Scottish politics, a party which instills confidence in voters.

My feeling is that, a year in (or 30 years in, depending on how you look at it), Swinney is not the saviour of the SNP. You might argue that he has stalled their decline, but even that is a reach. I can’t see what he’s going to do in the coming months that he’s not done before.

It seems pretty clear that Sarwar is just background noise to the howl of dissatisfaction there is for London Labour. It’s not his fault exactly (though his inability to generate any sense of identity for himself, apparently in the hope he could sail into government without making too much of a fuss, has really handicapped him). But I don’t see how he brings it back round.

The Lib Dems remain a local party for local people in Scotland and will do well in this election, but only on a regionalised basis. And my guess is that the Greens are getting a Polanski bounce which will decline. Fair or not, people look for leaders to exude confidence and sure-footedness and the Scottish Green team do not exude that at all.

And Reform is just resurgent Tory in a backdrop of disillusionment at the others, with some first time usually non-voters boosting the numbers a little. It is a motivated oasis in a desert of disillusion.

Politics is a zero-sum game. You only get one tick in one box on one ballot paper (even when you get two ballot papers). It takes a strange situation to put everyone in decline at once, but unless my eyes are deceiving me, that is what is happening.

I can’t see this continuing for a long time. Either something breaks or democracy does. That would be the most obvious assumption. Either one of the parties changes radically (can’t see which one), a new party appears, or we lose greater faith in democracy, right up until its demise.

The entire credibility of the political class is in question here. In ways I’ve never seen before, they are comprehensively failing to answer that question. That is bound to have consequences. It’s just not entirely clear what they’re going to be…