Our "One Party State"...

"One party state" Definition: relating to or denoting a system of government where only one political party is permitted.

"One party state" (Scot only) Definition: relating or denoting a system of government in which many different parties are permitted to stand and enjoy representation at every level of democratic government. 

Composition of the Scottish Parliament at time of writing:

Total number of SNP MSPs: 64. 

Total number of opposition MSPs: 63.

Percentage of governing party MSPs in parliament of "Nicola Sturgeon's one party state": 50%.

Percentage of opposition MSPs in parliament of "Nicola Sturgeon's one party state": 49%

Local government (2012)

Total number of SNP councillors elected in 2012? 425. 

Number of councillors not in the SNP elected? 798.

Total number of local authorities subject to SNP majority control? 2 of 32 (6%)

European Election (2014)

Total number of SNP MEPs elected? 2 

Number of non-SNP Members of the European Parliament, despatched to Brussels and Strasbourg? 4. 

Westminster parliament (2015)

Number of SNP MPs elected? 56 

Number of non-SNP MPs elected? 3. 

Number of Scottish MPs contributing to the UK government's absolute majority? 1. 

Unchecked single-party tyranny index (2015)

Total number of elected representatives in "Nicola Sturgeon's one party state": 1,416.

Total number of SNP politicians elected in "Nicola Sturgeon's one party state": 547.

Total number of non-SNP politicians elected in "Nicola Sturgeon's one party state": 869.

Totting up these figures, it looks like the First Minister's incipient tyranny needs serious work. SNP candidates control a mere 38.6% of seats in Holyrood, in Scotland's Westminster delegation, and in town halls and local authority offices across the country. If this is authoritarianism, it is singularly inept authoritarianism. Yet another area in which the Scottish Government has over-promised and under-delivered, no doubt. It is almost as if this is a deranged fantasy, or tabloid hyperbole, and Scotland isn't a one party state at all...

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.

Are the SNP due a Dunfermline drubbing?

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. Bill Walker is clearly no devotee of Shakespeare, and in resigning his Dunfermline seat a few days ago, he didn't heed Macbeth's advice about the charms of celerity.  But resign the villain finally has, and under the Scotland Act, we'll have a by-election in his Fife constituency within the next three months.  

So what are the chances? Who's in with a shout? And from the SNP perspective, critically, are we going to get stuffed? Let's take a look at the data.

Riding on the coattails of the national party, in 2011, Bill Walker won the seat with 37.6% of the vote, beating the Labour candidate Alex Rowley by 590 votes. Reflecting the mood in much of the rest of the country, the notional incumbent's support went through the floor, Liberal Democrat Jim Tolson polling just 5,776 votes to the winning 11,010 secured by the SNP.  So much we know, but it is also instructive to look forward and backwards from 2011. The party is still polling rather well nationally against Lamont's Labour. But, but...

In the Council elections of 2012, after the accusations against Walker first surfaced but before his trial and conviction, SNP candidates won 5,814 first preferences votes compared Labour's 9,524 in the four Dunfermline wards which the constituency completely covers. The Liberal Democrats trundled in next, with just 3,341 first preferences.  The constituency also takes in parts of The Lochs ward on Fife Council - but Labour won that too, comfortably, snaring 1,729 first preferences to the Nats' 708.  Obviously, the dynamics of the local elections are different from national elections, and different again from a by-election.  For all that, however, these can only be promising figures for the Labour Party in the area. 

Putting the 2011 result in broader context, between 1999 and before 2011, Dunfermline was bifurcated into two distinct constituencies, East and West.  The new seat takes in the the old West constituency, and part of the East, the result of which is now represented by Helen Eadie, as Cowdenbeath.  Going into the 2011 Holyrood election, the Liberal Democrat, Jim Tolson, sat for the western constituency.  As we all now know, in 2011 the SNP came from a notion third place in the seat, behind the Labour party, to take it. To add another layer of complexity to proceedings, the Liberal actually snatched the seat from Labour in 2007, who had held it since 1999. 

Now, I'm no Fifer, and don't know this territory well, but figures lead me to conclude that - at the best of times, in a favourable national election with a tolerably popular SNP government and a suitably incompetent Labour opposition - defending and retaining Dunfermline might prove a tall order for the Nationalists.  Liberal Democrat fortunes have not, and may never, fully revive in the area. The Labour Party may not have the springy vitality of an excitable Cocker spaniel, but if I was a Scottish strategist in John Smith House, Dunfermline would already be circled on the electoral map, as low-hanging fruit.  Even without the scandal of a Nationalist parliamentarian being revealed as a domestic tyrant and unlawfully handy with his fists.

Arguably, the party's poor showing in the area in 2012 is as nothing to the reception we can hope to receive in this by-election.  At that time, Bill Walker was suspected, but innocent until proven guilty. Today, the luckless and brave SNP candidate will have to contend with press hostility, and most likely, an electorate none-too-enamoured with the party which nominated such a goon for election in their constituency.  You needn't subscribe to the idea that there was any jiggery-pokery in the way the party dealt with the Walker case to see that he will hang around the neck of the Nationalist candidate like the Old Man of the Sea, however vigorously or acidly they denounce him in public.  This is one for Nationalists to take on the chin.  Anything short of a drubbing would be a relief. 

As the erstwhile Labour blogger Stuart MacLellan noted a few years back, Labour has never actually won a seat back from the SNP, having lost it. If they can't heave themselves over the finish line first in this Dunfermline by-election, a disgraced Nationalist incumbent having been forcibly pitchforked from party and office after twenty-four criminal convictions and an outrageous display of contempt for his constituents, Scottish Labour really are jiggered.

Thanks, Bill. 

Another triumph for the Procurator Fiscal Service...

65 Tampering with nomination papers, ballot papers, etc.

(2) In Scotland, a person shall be guilty of an offence if—

(a) at a parliamentary or local government election, he forges any nomination paper, delivers to the returning officer any nomination paper knowing it to be forged, or forges or counterfeits any ballot paper or the official mark on any ballot paper; or

(b) at a local government election, he signs any nomination paper as candidate or in any other capacity certifies the truth of any statement contained in it, knowing such statement to be false; or

(c) he fraudulently or without due authority, as the case may be, attempts to do any of the foregoing acts.

Langside, recounted...

Tuesday's recount of the local election result in Glasgow's Langside ward produced no drama.  As predicted, when the contents of ballot box 139 was added to the rest of the votes cast in the ward, the Green's Liam Hainey kept the Glasgow Council seat he was first elected to on the 4th of May.  After a few days footering, the Council have now released the full recount data for the ward, including the previously neglected Battlefield votes.  For completeness, I've totted these figures up into a new, revised Langside chart.  To make drawing comparisons more straightforward, I've also attached the original calculation in the ward, to be followed by a breath or two of commentary from me.

And the original Langside result:

 

Commentary:

For the SNP to snatch the seat back the third seat in the recount was always going to be tricky, but as you can see, the Greens actually won more comfortably when the Battlefield ballots were included. Wild speculations about what might have happened if Battlefield proved an unexpected Liberal Democrat haven proved wildly far of the mark.  Paul Coleshill for the Liberals polled only 7% of first preferences in the additional box of papers, effectively ending any chance they might have had to eliminate the Greens in the sixth round of the allocation. Like many SNP candidates across the city, Hewetson suffered for his alphabetical placing on the ballot paper, disadvantaging him against Hainey in subsequent rounds...

 

The other first preferences added to the recount calculation were spread as follows:

One factor which might have weighed against the Nationalists was the increase quota. If Susan Aitken's first preferences didn't keep pace with the increases in the quota, her running mate Hewetson would find fewer surplus votes tacking his way.  In the event, this didn't materialise, and Aitken's first preference support increased more than the quota for election increased, as did Labour's Archie Graham's.  The Greens were greater beneficiaries of Labour surplus transfers (taking 149 votes to the SNP's 81), however, putting them just ahead of the Nationalists on the second round of the recount.  With Aitken's transfers reallocated, Hewetson soon clawed back that lead, albeit with a narrower advantage than he'd enjoyed on the first calculation of the results.  By round six, the Greens had entirely closed the gap, and were eeksie-peeksie with the SNP. In the seventh round of the original allocation, which saw the Nationalist eliminated, he trailed the Green candidate by 121 votes.  In this recount, by round seven, Hewetson was 174 behind.  Not a palatial margin of victory for Hainey, but certainly a more comfortable one than he enjoyed in the initial declaration.

Sighs of Green relief all round.