UK and Scotland

[Kirkhill]

The Scotland Issue is going to bother David Cameron for a bit so I thought I would start a thread to discuss it all on my ownsome rather than following my usual practice of forcing a tangent.

No thanks necessary.

So, anyway, after looking at the Scottish numbers last night I think Nicola and Wee Eck are still fighting an uphill battle.

The SNP took 56 of 59 seats
The Tories, Labour and the Whigs (Liberal Democrats) each held one seat.
Well done the SNP...if you like that kind of thing.

But

In an electorate of 4,094,784 and with a high turnout of 71.1%, the SNP managed to secure a total of 1,454,436 votes.  This means that while they secured 50% of the votes on the night. Their share of the total population is about 36%.

On the night the Unionist Parties (Tory, Whig, Labour, UKIP and Green) secured 1,447,202 votes, or the other 50% of those bothered to vote. 1,183,393 registered voters couldn't be bothered to get off their duffs.

In last year's referendum the SNP secured the support of 1,617,989 voters of a registration of 4,278,859.  The higher registration (4,278,859 vs 4,094,784) can be put down to the signing up of 16 year old voters that were ineligible to vote in the General Election.

If you remove that youth cadre (184,076 voters from both the general registration and the SNP votes) then you get last night's numbers.

Meanwhile, on the Unionist side, many folks felt safe to vote their tribal loyalties, or even sit idle and wait and see what happens. 

I doubt they will sit idle, or split the vote, during another referendum.

I don't see that Nicola and Eck have yet secured their "Winning Conditions".

Consequently, I think David Cameron (of the Scottish "Crooked Nose" Clan) can afford to proceed cautiously on the Scots front.  Boris Johnson is proposing a Federal Britain, and something of that may be useful.  Especially if diluted by bringing into the Westminster Federation Wales and Ulster and possibly the Independent Territories of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and the other Channel Islands. 

Could they go whole hog and bring their Overseas Territories into Westminster as well?  The Falklands and the Turks and Caicos represented in London? That would follow the French model.

Even more radically they could decide to regionalize England back to the ancient Heptarchy of Seven Kingdoms (Geordies, Scousers, Brummies, West Country, East Anglia, the Home Counties and London).

I don't think things will ever come to that - but it leaves a lot of food for thought.

I believe that most Scots will continue to stick with the Union, while constantly seeking more advantage.

On the same basis of tradition, affection and self interest I also believe most Scots will support giving David Cameron leverage to get a better deal from Europe. 

Referendum Data

Election Data

Edit: Edit on the Heptarchy.  London was never part of the Heptarchy - Occasional Battleground/Neutral Ground and always a trading post but never a Kingdom on its own.  The Seventh Kingdom, that I missed, was Yorkshire - the Heart of Danelaw.

 

[tomahawk6]

Ms Sturgeon is calling for new tax and welfare powers.Cameron is so far cool to the idea.

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-scotland-32680698

 

[Kirkhill]

"As First Minister, as leader of the SNP, I've got a responsibility to try to unite Scotland and I'm determined that I do that."

And Scotland isn't united behind the SNP

Take a look at the Second Place Map.

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/05/09/who-came-second-in-the-uk-election/

Many Scots voted their party rather than the Union.  And the Labourites, Conservatives and Lib-Dem supporters are all Unionists.

Tangent Alert:  If you take a look at the English second place map the strength of UKIP really becomes apparent - and it crosses all the old party region lines.  That will certainly play into both the EU referendum strategy and into the seat redistribution that the Lib-Dems previously blocked but will no be implemented shortly after the throne speech.

This is what the political map of England and Wales would look like after the redistribution. Link to Map and Agenda

And here is the Independent's view of Cameron's agenda

Link

Edited to provide links to maps as maps are protected.

 

[Kirkhill]

Two maps comparing the location of coalfields in the UK (left) against the seats the Labour party won in the 2015 General Election.

Link to the Independent

When you take a look at the Scottish coalfields you will also the Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out tendency.

 

[a_majoor]

Cann't seem to find a UK election thread, so mads can move this if required. However, the idea that pollsters are deliberately manipulating polls may have had something to do with the Scottish referendum, and has a certain resonance in other jurisdictions as well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12108096/The-election-polls-werent-wrong-because-of-mistakes-pollsters-deliberately-cheated.html

The election polls weren't wrong because of mistakes – pollsters deliberately cheated
If pollsters want to restore their reputation they need to come clean about deliberately misleading the public
Dan Hodges By Dan Hodges1:10PM GMT 19 Jan 2016

So now it’s official. We know what the pollsters did, and we know how they did it. The University of Southampton’s report into the great 2015 general election polling debacle stops short of telling us why they did it, but it doesn’t matter. We can fill that bit in for ourselves.

First, it’s been confirmed that the pollsters “herded”. Of course we knew the polls had mysteriously aligned in the final hours of the campaign – we could all see that for ourselves. But we know now – as some of us argued at the time – that this was not the basis of some ordinary statistical anomaly. As Professor Patrick Sturgiss, head of the inquiry, confirms: “A surprising feature of the 2015 election was the lack of variability across the polls in estimates of the difference in the Labour and Conservative vote shares. Having considered the available evidence, the Inquiry has been unable to rule out the possibility that ‘herding’ – whereby pollsters made design decisions that caused their polls to vary less than expected given their sample sizes – played a part in forming the statistical consensus.”

"The polls were wrong because the pollsters had – inaccurately – manipulated their own samples"

Professor Sturgiss also points out how this “statistical consensus” was arrived at. “The primary cause of the failure of the 2015 pre-election opinion polls was unrepresentativeness in the composition of the poll samples. The methods of sample recruitment used by the polling organisations resulted in systematic over-representation of Labour voters and under-representation of Conservative voters”. In other words, the pollsters inserted too many Labour voters into their polls, and not enough Conservatives.

On the surface this finding is an early contender for the “Statement Of The Blindingly Obvious, 2016” award. But it’s an important one. Remember what the polling industry’s own explanation was for its errors. “Lazy Labour” voters who couldn’t be bothered to turn up on polling day, was one theory. The old favourite “Shy Tories” was also trotted out. Then there was the idea there had been a “Late Swing” to the Tories. Some people even speculated efficient Tory “Micro-targeting” of key marginals may have in some way skewed the results.
It was all rubbish. The polls were wrong because the pollsters had – inaccurately – manipulated their own samples.

This finding is also significant for a number of other reasons. Firstly, it raises the question of what the pollsters were trying to hide. The error in sampling was an obvious one. The morning after the election the pollsters had their own sampling models in front of them. They also had the actual results in front of them, and the result of the exit poll, which had proved largely accurate. Why has it taken seven months for the “truth” to come out?

Another important factor is changes in sampling are a well documented device pollsters use to deliberately manipulate their surveys to produce a desired result. Last May the New York Times published an interesting article on this very phenomenon. It found, for example, that in the 2012 US presidential election polling, company PPP, which is described as a “Democratic firm”, altered its sampling, so that when Barack Obama lost support amongst white voters more black voters were added to the sample. Although the company attempted to justify the changes on methodological grounds, at the time these changes were not explained in the firm’s own methodology statements.
Another example the Times identified related to the pollster Pew Research. “Pew Research’s final poll in 2012 showed Mr. Obama ahead by 6 points among registered voters, but only after an ad hoc decision to weight respondents based on how they said they voted in the 2008 presidential election. If Pew had weighted the poll in its usual way, Mr. Obama would have led by 11 points among registered voters.”

Southampton University don’t themselves go so far as to claim evidence of deliberate manipulation of the 2015 result. Indeed, they go out of their way to state: “It is important to note that the possibility that herding took place need not imply malpractice on the part of polling organisations.”

But that’s precisely what the results imply. To believe deliberate herding did not take place, you have to believe the following:

Firstly, that every one of the polling companies independently and miraculously made the same methodological error. Secondly, that they not only made the same methodological error, but that it was made in such a way that it miraculously produced exactly the same margin between the Conservatives and Labour, despite the fact all the polls were of different samples, used different interview techniques, were conducted in different locations and over different time periods. Thirdly, you have to believe this alignment also just happened to miraculously occur around the very final poll of a five year election cycle. And fourthly, you also have to believe the – erroneous – result that was produced miraculously happened to be the most convenient for the pollsters themselves – namely, that the election outcome was “too close to call”.

"So we know the polls herded, we know how they herded and we know why they herded. The one thing we don’t know is precisely which firms were responsible for the herding"

In any case, we don’t need to speculate about whether pollsters manipulated their findings, because the pollsters have admitted it themselves. Survation announced the morning after the result that they had decided not to publish their own “final” poll of the campaign because – in the words of company CEO Damian Lyons Lowe – “the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures

So we know the polls herded, we know how they herded and we know why they herded. The one thing we don’t know is precisely which firms were responsible for the herding. It’s entirely likely – indeed it’s probable – that some firms actually got the result right. Similarly, it’s probable that some firms got the results wrong, but genuinely believed their results were accurate. The problem is Southampton University have chosen not to publish what their inquiry reveals about what happened to the methodology used by the individual polling companies in the final weeks and days of the campaign.

If the polling companies are serious about transparency, and they’re serious about restoring their battered reputations, they should ask Professor Sturgiss to ensure that when his final report is published, it highlights precisely that.