Was Alex Salmond’s resignation a surprise? And what should the SNP do now that it has lost the referendum that it fought for over so many years? In a View from 22 Spectator podcast special, James Forsyth and Hamish Macdonell analyse the First Minister’s decision, and who might replace him. listen to ‘Hamish Macdonell and James Forsyth discuss Alex Salmond’s resignation’ on Audioboo
Lord Ashcroft’s post-referendum Scotland poll gives politicians claiming they’ve ‘heard’ voters a number of clues if in reality they’re still a bit confused. It suggests that those last few days of panic from the ‘No’ camp didn’t really shift as many voters as some might have thought. The poll says 28 per cent of ‘No’ voters made up their mind within this year. 72 per cent had already decided before September 2013. Only nine per cent had settled on ‘No’ in the past week. And the reason more frequently cited for voting ‘Yes’ than any other was ‘disaffection with Westminster politics’, with 74% of those in favour of independence naming
Relief, actually. Not joy. A battle won is better than a battle lost but still an exhausting, bloody, business. There is no need to bayonet the wounded. It would, in any case, be grotesque to do so. Scotland voted and made, in my view, the right choice. The prudent choice. The bigger-hearted choice. But 45 per cent of my countrymen disagree. That’s something to be respected too. Moreover a good number of No voters did so reluctantly and not because they were necessarily persuaded by the case for Union but because they felt the Yes campaign had not proved its own argument beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s an important qualification. A reminder
This is an extract from a speech delivered by Tory MP Conor Burns at a Conservative association dinner in Chris Grayling’s constituency tonight: It would be extraordinary if I did not mention what is going on in Scotland this evening. I represent, as self-evidently, does the Lord Chancellor beside me a constituency in England. I have watched events in Scotland through that prism of course. But I have also watched as a staunch Unionist. I have always given equal weight to the full title of our great Party: Conservative AND Unionist. I was born and spent the early years of my life in Northern Ireland into a Catholic family with
Anyone listening to Alex Salmond’s final pro-independence rally tonight in Perth might have been forgiven for thinking the ‘Yes’ campaign was in the lead in the polls. He used most of it to congratulate his side for running such a successful campaign and for changing Scotland before the final result had even been declared. There was much less of a pitch for any undecided voters watching, unless the First Minister had concluded that anyone who was still wavering would be swayed by the idea that his guys had already won. listen to ‘Salmond: The referendum is ‘our opportunity of a lifetime’’ on Audioboo He told the audience that ‘what has emerged
The last YouGov poll of the campaign, which has a far larger than usual sample size, has No ahead 52-48. The last phone poll of the campaign, a Survation effort, has No up 53-47. So, the No campaign is ahead by a clear but small margin. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/3gFhn/index.html”] The Sun’s political editor Tom Newton Dunn reports that YouGov finds that men in Scotland favour independence 54 to 46 but women back the Union 57 to 43. Its numbers show that only 4 per cent of voters remain undecided. Interestingly, those from the rest of the UK who have moved to Scotland—those living the Union—are voting No by a 72 to 28 landslide.
And so our watch is all but over. Who knows what comes tomorrow but at least and at last the final reckoning is upon us. It is choosing time and there’s no escape. Few people would wish the campaign any longer. Many voters tired of it some time ago. Their minds were made-up and would not change and they just wanted to move on to the next story. Whatever it may be. But I can’t agree with the people who fret that this has been a nasty and divisive and awful experience. It hasn’t. I mean, of course it’s been divisive and of course passions have been running high but
I’ve just watched a passionate, informed debate about politics taking place on a street corner between three ordinary people. I’ve never seen that before. I should be thrilled, but instead I’m not. Why? That debate followed the first bad language and bad feeling I’ve personally witnessed while following campaigners from both sides of the Scottish independence debate around in Glasgow and Lanarkshire. I was with two ‘Yes’ activists, Jim Flynn and Neil Molloy, in Kelvin today, watching them delivering leaflets to residents of the gorgeous tenement blocks near the river. Most of those who opened the door were friendly: a Green ‘Yes’ voter, a cheery young mother backing independence, a
I’ve just spent a couple of hours on the Burnhill estate in Rutherglen watching a group of Labour ‘No’ campaigners knock on the doors of voters to find out how they’ll be voting on Thursday. Burnhill is a tidy estate of mostly social housing and a Labour council ward. The local Labour MP Tom Greatrex and his colleague Graham Jones, visiting from Hyndburn, were part of the group. I was surprised by the number of ‘No’ posters on display in the windows. I was expecting a plethora of ‘Yes’ placards, but fewer indications of the households whose inhabitants plan to reject independence, but on this estate at least, it’s not
We hold this truth to be self-evident: we are not an oppressed people. We have some liberty to chart our own course. We are, after all, choosing our path this week. We do not crave self-determination because we have always had that power. And many others besides that significant liberty. We are a free people. This is obvious yet also something worth recalling in these final hours. I have my own reasons for voting No on Thursday and, in truth, they have little to do with very much that has been said by the official Better Together campaign. But this kind of choice, this kind of referendum, inevitably prods one
The Lib Dems have just launched the final leg of their campaign against Scottish independence, which is a poster van with Charles Kennedy’s head emblazoned across it and three of the United Kingdom’s greatest achievements: the NHS, the pound and the BBC. It’s part of their ‘sunshine strategy’ to talk up the benefits of the Union in the final few days, and the four Lib Dems who launched this van – Danny Alexander, Charles Kennedy, Jo Swinson and Willie Rennie – argued that they had been saying all sorts of lovely sunshiny things about the United Kingdom all along, but they just weren’t as well-reported as all the warnings. It’s
The three Westminster leaders have made their promise. On the front page of the Daily Record, they all sign up to a vow that includes new powers for the Scottish Parliament, the continuation of the Barnett formula, and a promise that the Scottish Parliament will have the last word on health spending, and on keeping the NHS in public hands. Since Gordon Brown unveiled the timetable for this vow last Monday, the parties have needed to repeat their pledges as often as possible so that as many voters pick them up before polling day, and so that they really appear to mean it. But here are a number of problems
David Cameron has just delivered one of the best speeches of his career in Aberdeen. It was emotional, sincere, clear. The Prime Minister pleaded with Scots to stay in the United Kingdom. It ranged from warnings that this would be a permanent separation – ‘when people vote on Thursday they are not just voting for themselves, but for their children and grandchildren and the generations beyond’- to powerful images of something the peoples of the Union have built being torn apart: ‘For the people of Scotland to walk away now would be like painstakingly building a home – and then walking out the door and throwing away the keys. So
This week’s Spectator cover piece is written by our readers. Here are some more letters to Scottish voters, explaining why our United Kingdom should stay together. I come from the Isles of Scilly, which is as far away from Scotland as it’s possible to get whilst remaining in the UK. Flung out into the Atlantic ocean, 28 miles off Land’s End, I have always thought of my islands as part of the great Celtic fringe of this Kingdom. All I can do is plead with the people of Scotland to look beyond an opportunity to ‘shake off Tory rule’ and to consider instead how fortunate it is to be born
At times in the last few months, it has seemed that if no one was making the case for Britain in Scotland. Too often it seemed that Better Together knew the price of separation but not the value of Britishness. But that is changing. Yes closing the gap, and taking the lead in a couple of polls, has prompting an outpouring of emotion about the United Kingdom from those on the No side. At a pro-Union event in Edinburgh on Friday night, I was struck by how speakers from Gordon Brown to Danny Alexander to George Galloway all talked about Britishness in raw, emotional terms. This focus on Britishness is
Who will be relieved and reassured when they read this weekend’s polls on how Thursday’s independence referendum will go? Well, it looks like neither camp has much to celebrate as the polls are all over the place – which means that anything could happen in just a few days’ time. So here’s what we know so far. Opinium has ‘No’ with a six point lead at 53 per cent, with ‘Yes’ on 47 per cent. Meanwhile an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph puts ‘Yes’ eight points ahead. A Panelbase poll comes out later tonight. It’s also worth noting this post from John Curtice, which says the ICM finding ‘while
Unsurprisingly, Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservatives picked Boris Johnson last night as their parliamentary candidate for the 2015 election. Boris has a 11,216 majority to defend, but that’s only the start of the work he needs to do. His supporters are well aware that before the Mayor can ever throw his hat into that leadership ring that they’re all looking forward to, he needs to build better links in the Parliamentary Conservative party beyond those who already think he is wonderful. He needs to reach out, for instance, to those MPs who have been brought into the George Osborne camp by the Chancellor’s clever system of patronage and promotion. Boris
George Galloway announced his support for Gordon Brown as First Minister of Scotland last night. Galloway’s endorsement came as Brown turned up at an event at Usher Hall in Edinburgh that Galloway was compering. The endorsement was met with a broad grin by Brown. But behind the humour, there is a serious point, Scottish Labour knows that it has given Salmond and the SNP far too easy a ride at Holyrood. As the former Labour Minister Brian Wilson acknowledged at last night’s event, this referendum is happening because the SNP managed to win a majority in the Scottish Parliament and Labour must take some of the blame for that. That
Anyone who thinks that the latest YouGov poll on Scottish independence, which shows the ‘No’ camp with a six-point lead over ‘Yes’ at 52 per cent to 48 per cent (once don’t-knows are excluded) is getting a little ahead of themselves. It is significant that this is the same pollster who sent Westminster into panic on Sunday with its poll putting ‘Yes’ in the lead. But the only effect this poll should have on the ‘No’ campaign in the final days is to stop a blind, useless sort of panic where bad decisions are made and colleagues brief against one another before the final result. The last-minute panic that the
Even when it is at peace, the Conservative party deals in hypotheticals all of which involve David Cameron being ousted in one way or another. That’s why backbenchers have been wargaming what will happen to David Cameron if Scotland votes ‘Yes’ next week. It’s why 1922 Committee executive members have been calling fellow MPs, or pouncing on them in the corridors (one spent a good long time lurking in one particular corridor in Parliament yesterday, snaring backbenchers) to find out what they would do if the worst happens in the referendum. Everyone agrees that a ‘Yes’ vote would be seriously damaging to the Prime Minister and that it would lead
