The SNP did really well in Thursday’s local elections, gaining 61 extra councillors (compared to 46 extra for Labour), with these gains mainly coming from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

East Renfrewshire is actually quite typical in this regard: Labour 8 (+1), SNP 4 (+1), Tories 6 (-1), LibDems 0 (-1), Independents 2 (n/c).

However, if you’ve been watching the BBC, you’d think the SNP actually had a bad election. To achieve this negative image, they’ve had to doctor the figures, so instead of comparing the number of seats with the last election — as is the norm for reporting elections — they’ve decided to to compare the number of seats with the status quo ante bellum, which helps Labour immensely because they were hit by numerous defections of councillors to the SNP over the past few years.

According to the BBC, Labour therefore gained 58 seats compared to 57 seats to the SNP, and they then turn this into a story about Labour doing significantly better than the SNP. Of course they also conveniently focus more on these figures than on the absolute numbers, which are 424 SNP councillors compared to 394 Labour ones.

To reinforce their version of events, the BBC have been focusing strongly on Glasgow (where the SNP admittedly were too ambitious and thus didn’t gain quite as many seats as hoped, increasing their number of councillors “only” from 22 to 27), and been ignoring the parts of the country where the SNP had an excellent election, such as Dundee, which now has an absolute SNP majority.

The BBC’s biased reporting is not just affecting the SNP, but also the other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. They increased their number of councillors from 8 to 14, but this has been more or less ignored by the BBC.

This anti-independence bias has to stop now! The BBC are supposed to be impartial, and surely that should apply in Scotland as well as in England.

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For the second time, it will be held using the Single Transferable Vote, which basically means we’re being asked to rank the candidates.

In East Renfrewshire, last time the result was Labour 7, Tory 7, SNP 3, LD 1 and Independents 2, and the council is currently being controlled by a everybody-but-the-Tories coalition.

I live in Ward 1 (“Neilston, Uplawmoor and Newton Mearns North”), which last time voted Tory 2, Labour 1, SNP 1 — see the graph on the left, which to some extent is based on this posting by Lallands Peat Worrier. The coloured lines show the votes for each candidate; when they crash into the floor, it’s because the candidate was eliminated, and when they go up, it’s because of votes transferred from other candidates.

The SNP is much stronger nationally now than five years ago, so the decision has been made to put forward two candidates in this ward, Cllr Tony Buchanan and Frank Rankin, who I know well from SNP branch meetings and who I’m happy to endorse.

Because of the electoral system, it’s very important to use all your priorities if you want to maximise your influence — even if you’re first priority gets elected in the first round, parts of your vote can still get transferred to other candidates if the elected candidate got more votes than necessary (see also James’s advice on Better Nation).

I’ll definite give my first and second priorities to the two SNP candidates in my ward!

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It’s of course old news that the SNP are dominating Scotland politically, but England is also increasingly separating into areas that are very different politically — basically, Labour are big in the north of England and in London, the LibDems are big in the southwest, and the Tories are big elsewhere.

Although he doesn’t mention it, this is really creating problems for opinion polls. Their value depends on their usefulness, which again is derived from the assumption that if a party gains five points in the opinion polls, it’s likely to to get more seats in the next election. However, it’s entirely possible for a party to gain more votes in their heartland without gaining any more seats; indeed, if the votes gained “at home” are offset by lost votes in alien territories, the net effect could be a loss of seats.

I’ve long been arguing that opinion polls should treat England and Scotland separately, but I’m starting to wonder whether they also need to split up England.

PS: I’ve no idea why he’s calling it tricolour when the map clearly has four colours. Perhaps he’s already mentally accepted Scottish independence!

(You might also want to have a look at this old blog posting of mine.)

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It’s an interview with Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Liberal party of Canada.

It’s neither for nor against independence, but he’s making some apt comparisons with Canada and Quebec.

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I have just created a website for the branch.

It’s nothing special, just a nice little site based on WordPress.

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The SNP are often asked to provide detailed plans for what to do after independence — which currency would Scotland use, would there be passport controls, would Scotland be a member of NATO, etc.

To a certain extent that is right and proper – the SNP is the main proponent of independence, so it reasonable to expect that this party will also be able to suggest some answers to these questions.

However, there’s a limit to it.

The day after Scotland votes Yes to independence, the unionist parties will have to stop working to prevent independence and start working to fight Scotland’s corner in the independence talks with the rUK.

Furthermore, the next elections to the Scottish Parliament are due in May 2016, roughly 18 months after the independence referendum. It is entirely possible that the SNP won’t win these elections, and it could therefore quite feasibly be a Labour politician who would be the first prime minister of an independent Scotland, and in this case it would be Labour and not the SNP that would be making many of the crucial decisions about NATO, the currency and the other crucial questions.

In short, I’d like the Unionists to acknowledge that they too need to have a vision about what an independent Scotland should look like, because they might be the ones who’ll have to implement it.

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Tavish Scott and some of his unionist friends have been having fun recently suggesting that Shetland and Orkney might separate from Scotland in the case of Scottish independence.

As far as I can see, there are theoretically four options for Shetland and Orkney if Scotland becomes independent:

1. They can remain part of Scotland.
2. They can become part of Norway (or Denmark) instead.
3. They can become part of England.
4. They can become independent.

Option (1) is of course the most straightforward option. Although option (2) would perhaps tempt some of the islanders temporarily, I’m not sure they’d really want to learn Norwegian as their first foreign language, introduce Norwegian law, go to university in Norway, and so on. Option (3) would possibly appeal to some of the islanders, especially those of them who have moved there from England; however, would the majority of the population really want to be flown to England for complex hospital treatments, or by default go to university in England? Also, the islands have never in their history belonged to England, so it’d be a somewhat strange outcome. Option (4) is of course a possibility, but they have a very small population and don’t even have experience with devolution.

I think it’s a good idea for Shetland and Orkney to get some degree of autonomy within Scotland. Perhaps this would over time develop into full independence, although I’m doubtful. However, to leap from being a full and integrated part of Scotland to becoming an independent nation overnight would be a complete shock to the system, and I’d be very surprised if the islanders themselves would go for it, especially as there is no established independence movement on the islands as far as I know.

I can therefore only conclude that Tavish Scott is just trying to spread uncertainty and fear about the prospects of Scottish independence – he’s not really advocating separating the islands from mainland Scotland. I would have hoped the unionists had some positive arguments in favour of the Union, but that might have been too much to hope for.

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As far as I can gather, we are currently seeing a divide opening between London-based media (the big newspapers and many of the BBC’s flagship programmes, such as the Andrew Marr Show) and Scottish-based media (including Scottish blogs).

The London-based media are acting as if the independence referendum has already been won by the No side, and they’re almost blanking out the SNP. For instance, Andrew Marr seems to have completely ignored Scotland for the past few Sundays, and Fraser Nelson reported that the Unionists won easily at a debate in London.

In the Scottish-based media, on the other hand, there’s definitely no feeling that the independence referendum has been decided yet, and I think it’s fair to say that the Yes side are doing better than their opponents at the moment.

If this divide continues, the next two years are going to be very bizarre, with media in based in London and Scotland appearing to be based on different planets.

I wonder whether the divide will remain intact for the duration of the referendum campaign. If so, I think the London-based media are going to be very interesting to watch in the autumn of 2014, when they suddenly have to face up to the fact that the referendum electorate are all living in Scotland!

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The term Unionist historically meant a supporter of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and it was for instance in this sense that the Tories for many years called themselves the Unionist Party.

The word has gradually changed its meaning, however, and it now tends to mean a supporter of the Union between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so the independence battle in Scotland is now between Nationalists and Unionists.

For instance, the well-kent commentator Iain MacWhirter wrote this recently: “The danger now for the Unionists is that Mr Salmond – following the lead set by Mr Darling and Mr Cameron – may offer a version of independence that is so close to devolution max that Scots vote for it out of spite at not seeing their favoured option on the ballot paper.”

I’m not really aware of a better word – from a Scottish perspective, I guess one could talk about a Britainist or a Great-Britainist, but I think that might be a hindrance to understanding rather than a help.

The shift in meaning is also not really a problem from a current perspective, but it does occasionally lead to confusion when modern readers are confronted with older texts containing the word ‘unionist’.

I tried to do a plot using Google Ngram Viewer, but I have a feeling the figures are probably dominated by Irish Unionism. Does anybody have access to a Scottish corpus?

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Independence sceptics are often worrying endlessly about the jobs that might disappear as a result of Scottish Independence.

However, many jobs will be created as a result of independence. Here are a few areas that spring to mind, but I’m sure there will be many more.

• A lot of countries will open embassies in Edinburgh — we can’t be sure of the number, but there are about 60 embassies in Dublin, and about 75 in Copenhagen, so one would expect a similar number. Some of these will be small, but others will be huge, and there will be lots of local jobs needed to set them up and keep them running, on top of the money created by embassy employees finding places to live and spending money in local shops and restaurants. Of course Scotland will need to finance a similar number of embassies abroad, but we’re already paying about 10% of what the UK are spending on representations abroad, so I reckon there’ll be a net gain.
• There will be ministries created for the previously devolved areas. Using Denmark as a basis (it’s probably a better guide than using 10% of the UK), there might for instance be about 850 employees in the Scottish Foreign Office in Edinburgh and about 150 in the Scottish Ministry of Defence.
• Even if the SNP at the moment claim it won’t be needed, I think it’s likely there will be a Central Bank of Scotland, even if it’s just to administer a currency board. Using Denmark as a guide again, there might be more than 500 people working there.
• There are other government offices of various kinds. For instance, the DVLA in Swansea almost 7000 employees — a Scottish DVLA would therefore probably have at least 700 employees. On the other hand, there are UK government offices in Scotland — for instance, the HMRC accounts office in Cumbernauld AFAIK covers an area larger than Scotland — so it’s somewhat complicated to work out exactly the net number of jobs created in Scotland.
• Some companies would need to create separate Scottish subsidiaries. For instance, mobile phone companies would presumably need completely separate organisations in Scotland. I’ve no idea how many companies we’re talking about here, or how large their Scottish operations are, but we must be talking about thousands of jobs moving to Scotland. Of course there will also be companies based here that will need to create English subsidiaries in the same way, but I have a feeling the net effect will still be very positive for Scotland.

Of course there won’t be a perfect match between the jobs that will disappear and those that will be created — you can’t retrain a nuclear weapons worker to become a Foreign Office employee overnight — but I think on the whole it seems likely that independence will be very good for Scottish employment figures.

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