here's a journalist for the Aberdeen Evening Express:

Link to tweet

This is one occasion when it's paid off to paste the text of the tweet in after the link.

The journalists' tweets are now "protected", meaning she's locked her account down, possibly because of harassment.

It's one thing for the party to be pro-Union in that(not sure if they could have survived in the rest of the UK if they'd been outright pro-independence; official neutrality might have been their best option), they should at least have run a distinctly Labour-only intervention there, but instead of thata, they totally discredited themselves by joining a unified "Nay" campaign).

It will be interesting to see if the Tory gains in the Scottish local elections in May hold up next year.

Scottish Labour did have an obligation to try and regain seats(any party that has had a major setback in the previous election has that obligation, to its own supporters if nothing else), but what read as an alliance with the Tories was far from the way to do it.

Without her and without al the relentless and cynical anti-Corbynism within the Scottish Labour party bureaucracy, Labour would have made a much stronger recovery in Scotland and the otherwise inexplicable Scottish Tory surge that saved Theresa May from immediate defeat in the Commons would never have occurred.

It's going to be very interesting to see how Ms. May keeps a coalition that includes both the anti-gay, anti-Catholic DUP and Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson(who is not only "out' but in a long-term partnership with an Irish Catholic) together for any length of time.

I'm glad Mhairi Black was returned. She is the conscience of the Commons in many, many respects.

They were a significant proportion of their gains in councillors in certain areas a few weeks ago. They're as abhorrent as the DUP, only with less power, but she hasn't said a peep about them.

Another irony is that a lot of the Corbyn manifesto could have been cribbed from the SNP, which has actually enacted those policies (like abandoning tuition fees) in Scotland.

While I agree with you that Dugdale should not have done anything that read as an alliance, it was never a realistic expectation that Corbyn would endorse Scottish independence. Can you imagine any UK party leader hanging on to her or his job after doing that?


The SNP manifesto did likely influence Corybn's policies at some level-and it's somewhere between pathetic and delusional that Dugdale still seems to feel she has to challenge the SNP from the right, when there are virtually no SNP-Labour "swing voters" who think the SNP is too far to the left on anything.

From what I've seen online, many Labour supporters seem quite satisfied that they gained seats off the SNP in Scotland. Although the need to bulk out their Scottish platform with stuff besides Unionism is being mentioned.

It will be interesting to see if the Westminster Tories turn on Ruth Davidson though. She appears to have said no to the "Theresa May uber alles" Tory campaign that backfired in England, and reaped the electoral benefits for this, and Tory brexshitters are sure to resent her making demands.

And there's a second election for which the Westminster Tories will be blamed.

For that lot, it's damned if they do, damned if they don't.

BTW, how do you think the internal power dynamics within Labour will change, given that Corbyn managed a 30 seat gain in which he was treated with greater disloyalty and disrespect within his own party than any previous party leader in UK history?

Would you agree that everyone within the party who was still trying to force Corbyn to stand down AFTER THE ELECTION WAS CALLED should now unreservedly apologize for doing so, and that any anti-Corbyn MP who won't do that,who still can't accept Corbyn as leader and who can't bring themselves to stop trying to force him out of the leadership should agree to stand down at the next election?

He had a lot of assistance from an abysmal Tory campaign yes, but to have won over young voters in such numbers has silenced the doubters.

The challenge for Labour is to get more unified and keep the heat on the Tories, who are in a horrendous mess of their own making.

It's all gang up with the Tories and Lib Dems to bash the SNP on devolved issues and hyped-up hysteria about a referendum issue (that had already been voted through at Holyrood) at a Westminster election at all costs, when their efforts in alliance with the Scottish Tories and Lib Dems sabotaged their own party's prospects of coming a lot closer to ousting the Tories at Westminster. They came away from it with 7 seats, the Tories won 13.

Not that I expect the rump of Labour that's left up here to join the dots. They weren't thinking UK-wide because they didn't support Corbyn, and thought Labour had barely a chance of surviving, let alone reducing the Tories' majority to a wafer.

Let's hope the new intake of MPs they're sending down south are better than the last lot ("the feeble fifty&quot , which by all accounts (from English Labour MPs no less) were useless and too obsessed with internal party jockeying to be effective.

ETA: Oh, and:

Link to tweet

- who's currently the darling of a number of English Tories who know very little about her apart from the media hype so far, but are desperate to find some way for her to join the Westminster cabinet or even, in their wildest dreams, become prime minister - being interviewed about the prospect of the DUP alliance. She fancies she's going to force May to go for a softer brexit and "champion Scotland's interests".

Once she can't bang on continually about her opposition to an independence referendum, she's utterly lost. Don't blink towards the end of this interview or you'll miss her exiting stage left at impressive speed mid-question:

Link to tweet

things like that stay with you.

How's the weather there today?

since the whole country went whackadoodle.

The weather's been crap for the last week or so. We've been making up for an unbelievable couple of months' drought in the late spring.

Taking "500 or less" as a "tiny majority" - basically less than 1% of the total voting in a constituency - there are 31 in the UK. Of those, 12 are in Scotland; of those, the SNP won 8, where Labour was 2nd in 5, Tories in 2, and Lib Dems in 1. The SNP came second in 4 of these seats - losing to Labour in 3, and the Tories in 1.

(It seems to me there were a lot of close results, so I've made a spreadsheet of them. Plaid Cymru was lucky too - of their 4 seats, 2 have tiny majorities).

Tactical voting's a lottery - you've no guarantee how voters are going to switch, no matter how much attempted co-ordination goes on behind the scenes. The SNP generally got unlucky on that particular roll of the dice.

A number of people have hashed together analyses showing that a few hundred/thousand votes the other way in certain constituencies would have put Corbyn in Downing Street, for example. I'm sure if you cherrypicked constituencies, you could show the Tories being returned with a resounding majority for the sake of similar numbers.

It's just a quirk of our FPTP system, but it will make the next election pretty excruciating for just about everybody. That alone is likely to affect voting patterns.

There's a reason why polls are expressed in confidence intervals (not that anybody in the media and general public pays them much attention).

If we could run the same polls multiple times in a hypothetical universe (which the best polling models actually do in simulations - the Monte Carlo method), sometimes the SNP would have gotten more votes and more seats, sometimes less. Same for all the parties. You could as easily claim the SNP got unlucky for it to be so close in those seats, and it would be as meaningless. If you look at vote share, you could argue they were unlucky or lucky depending whether you're a glass-half-full type or not, and that wouldn't mean much either.

They're now marginals, some extreme marginals (21-vote and 2-vote majorities in a couple of cases).

After the last utterly exceptional SNP landslide election and absurd swings, were they safe SNP seats? Nope. I don't think anybody sensible, especially the SNP, thought that. I actually don't think there's a safe seat in the whole of Scotland right now, for any party - we're in that much flux.

Will they be marginals in the next election? On paper, yes. But this was almost as much a wave election as the last one for the SNP and the dynamics are likely to be rather different, so I'd be wary of placing any bets.

Muriel, you'll know by now that I'm not daft enough to make election predictions (not to say that I don't make assumptions and results like the EU referendum and the scale of SNP losses in this last election didn't surprise me, of course). But I did do a bit of an analysis of my own Westminster seat on an earlier thread:

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{Brendan O'Hara, Argyll & Bute}

He came from nowhere (in historical party standing terms in this constituency) to win the seat with an 8,000-plus majority (44.3%) at the last election from three-term (and OK at a constituency level, but pretty useless in Parliament) Lib Dem Alan Reid (27.9%), who'd taken over the seat from another three-term Lib Dem in 2001.

O'Hara's been fine as far as I'm concerned. It's a tough call for any MP in this constituency, getting round a large, disparate and in parts rather remote area while maintaining a presence at Westminster.

The Tories were a distant third at the 2015 election, with 7,733 votes (14.9%) to Labour's fourth-placed 5,394 (10.4%).

The other parties have been slow to declare candidates, only Labour's Michael Kelly (who I've never seen or heard of before) standing against him so far.

His previous Lib Dem opponent Reid took the loss hard and has been fishing around for a political role at various levels since, and might have been in the running to contest his old seat, but he finally won an Argyll & Bute council seat in last week's election.

His previous Tory opponent, Alastair Redman (another who's been a regular contender for various roles in the area over the years), also won a seat in last week's election.

O'Hara's prospects depend on turnout, who decides to stand against him and who tactical voters decide has the best chance of defeating him.

In 2015, UKIP only got 1,311 votes (2.5%), so there's not much slack to gain from them for his future Tory opponent. The Lib Dems have historical strength in the constituency, but this seemed to evaporate at the last election, and there's been no sign of a resurgence at Scottish national level. They might be more likely Tory switchers, and possibly vice versa, but note that the Tories' total 2015 vote was less than O'Hara's majority over the Lib Dems with their sitting MP. It remains to be seen whether Labour voters would be willing to switch to Tory or Lib Dem in an effort to unseat him.

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And here's how it panned out, from that same thread:

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O'Hara was re-elected, but the Tories gained a lot of vote share to run second, at the expense of the Lib Dems who were a distant third. Labour came a slightly more distant but not disgraceful fourth - which is remarkable since their candidate didn't start campaigning at all till the last couple of weeks of the election due to prior commitments and had a habit of taking the huff in hustings and stomping out when challenged, on one occasion calling a would-be constituent a "fat bastard".

Ironically, the Corbyn effect might have helped the SNP in this constituency - Labour's vote held up, rather than defecting en masse to vote tactically (what sort of unreasoning hatred would make a Labour supporter envisage voting Tory, I can't imagine, but it looks like it happened elsewhere).
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Most of the time, an 8,000-plus majority in a seat like this would class it as "safe", but did I sound like I classed it as such?

Look at what happened to the Lib Dem, Tory and Labour votes, then tell me where those extra Tory 2017 votes came from (in this instance it looks like it wasn't from Labour, which probably saved O'Hara's seat - thanks, Mr Corbyn?):

2015:

SNP (Brendan O'Hara) 22,959 votes Vote Share: 44.3% Net change: +25.3%

Lib Dems (Alan Reid) 14,486 votes Vote Share: 27.9% Net change: −3.7%

Conservatives (Alastair Redman) 7,733 votes Vote Share: 14.9% Net change: −9.1%

Labour (Mary Galbraith) 5,394 votes Vote Share: 10.4% Net change: −12.3%

UKIP (Caroline Santos) 1,311 votes Vote Share: 2.5% Net change: (didn't stand before, UKIP didn't stand in 2017 either)

Majority: 8,473 votes (16.3%)
Turnout 51,883 (75.3%) +8.0%
SNP gain from Lib Dem
Swing +14.5%

2017:

SNP (Brendan O'Hara) 17,304 votes Vote Share: 36.0% Net change: -8.3%

Conservatives (Gary Mulvaney) 15,976 votes Vote Share: 33.2% Net change: +18.3%

Lib Dems (Alan Reid) 8,745 votes Vote Share: 18.2% Net change: -9.7%

Labour (Michael Kelly) 6,044 votes Vote Share: 12.6% Net change: +2.2%

Majority: 1,328 votes (2.8%)
Turnout: 48,069 (71.5%) -3.8%
SNP hold
Swing: -13.3%

There are obviously factors that make this seat unique, like any other (O'Hara's strongly anti-Trident in the constituency where it's based not being the least of them). In view of the Labour candidate's habit of storming out of hustings when accused of being a paper candidate, his vote held up pretty well.

from a blog I've mentioned before, Wings Over Scotland, which paints a picture of a Lib Dem death wish in favour of the Tories with no reciprocality.

This ignores any Labour-Tory tactical voting. One significant seat where there's evidence of Tory-Labour tactical voting is Labour MP (and rabid anti-Blairite, unless he's changed his tune suddenly) Ian Murray's seat, Edinburgh South, where the evidence is that Tories lent him their support in droves in 2015 to give Labour its only seat, and this was consolidated in 2017:

n/t.

here's a report from Scottish Labour's Campaign for Socialism:

Link to tweet

Chris Musson ✔ @camusson

MSP Neil Findlay is on holiday & pleading ignorance over press release sent out from the left-wing Scottish Labour faction he's convener of

Chris Musson ✔ @camusson


Hmm. Scottish Labour's Campaign for Socialism (convener @NeilFindlay_MSP) has put out statement saying Scottish party is holding Corbyn back