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Tuesday 22 May 2012

Eck The Comeback Kid?

Though this blog has tried to ignore the fact, there are elections to the Scottish Parliament this year. In just over ten weeks time in fact. I've ignored the subject because, frankly, the idea of Iain Gray - he's the leader of the Labour party in Scotland - becoming First Minister is too depressing to contemplate before the idea is thrust upon us by cruel reality and dastardly necessity. Mr Gray is the fifth person to lead Labour's Holyrood group since devolution and by some hefty distance the least impressive. This is a low bar to fail to clear but there you have it.

For months now it has looked as though Labour would "win" the right to govern with no new ideas at all. Happily, though perhaps too conveniently, a poll has been produced by Ipsos MORI suggesting that actually the election could be interesting after all. By interesting I mean of course that only a handful of seats will change hands. That's a feature of an electoral system that tends to compensate losses on the swings with gains on the roundabouts.

Today's poll for the Times puts the SNP on 37%, Labour on 36%, the Conservatives on 13% and the Liberal Democrats on 10%. The numbers for the regional list vote are: Snp 35%, Labour 33%, Conservatives 13%, Liberal Democrats 10%. According to number-boffin Heinz Wolff John Curtice all this could end up with the SNP winning 51 seats (+4), Labour (+2), Conservatives 14 (-3) Lib Dems 12 (-4) and Greens 4 (+2).

It's only one poll and while it's true that Alex Salmond's jib is more popular and better cut than Gray's this poll, like many before it, still seems too friendly to the Nationalist cause to be trusted entirely. Still, given the choice between a minority SNP executive and a minority Labour ministry I'll take the former any time. The SNP will probably disappoint; Labour are guaranteed to.

There are considerable dangers in reading too much into Holyrood polls at the best of times and it's doubly dangerous to treat them as reflecting Westminster-influenced politics. Nevertheless and while it is true that the election campaign will be a witless race to the bottom as the SNP and Labour squabble to persuade folk they and only they can protect the Plain People of Scotia from the ravages and rapery of the London coalition government, it is interesting to note how little the Tories and Lib Dems seem to be suffering from that association.

Not that they escape unscathed of course, but according to this poll at least their position is not as precarious as might have been, nay was, imagined. True, the Lib Dems have shed six points and the Tories three on the constituency vote since the 2007 election but their regional vote tallies are, on this poll anyway, much as they were four years ago. If, as seems possible, their constituency vote holds firmer in the FPTP seats they currently hold than it does in those in which they are functionally non-runners and that it remains firmish on the regional vote it could be that the losses Curtice forecasts on the back of this poll could be smaller still.

But it all also confirms the fact that Scottish politics at Holyrood is a two horse race with a couple of semi-parties also invited to tag along. The electoral system used to decide these matters has many flaws* but it does at least permit some level of representation for super-minority views. As readers know, most of the time I think political parties are best-advised to concentrate on where the voters are and this tends to be in the middle. The Scottish Tories, however, are in a different position since they can hardly be more hopeless than they are and so might as well stand for something even if, or perhaps even because, it will be unpopular. Alas, there's no sign of a Tartan Goldwater with an eye on the longer game...

Then again, the fact that the Lib Dems, according to this poll, still do OK (by their standards) on the regional vote is a reminder that their vote is often an anti-politics vote and one that, anyway, has long and deep roots in rural Scotland.

One poll does not an election make but this is still a better - that is, actually bloggable - poll than any other that's come out of Scotland this year. Which probably ensures it will gain rogue status...

*Among the flaws: it is annoying that were I minded to vote SNP on the regional vote because I approve of Joan McAlpine I could not do so without also helping cricket-hating Christine Grahame into parliament. The Dreadful Grahame will get in anyway (she tops the SNP South of Scotland list) so that's also a consideration and means, I suppose, that I will have to research the Tory and Lib Dem lists to discover whether their representatives are any better.

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