David Maddox: Change of Lib Dem strategy?

Those of you who take an interest in party election leaflets - and I guess if you can be bothered to read this blog it will probably include you - then the utterances of Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat's Shadow Scottish Secretary, on Newsnight Scotland last night may have come as a surprise.
To put this in context I would ask you to remember the classic line used by all parties now, but developed by the Lib Dems, of only "only we can beat.... here." Usually it is accompanied by a spurious bar chart showing neck and neck support between their candidate and the sitting MP.
Often the claim bore little resemblance to reality. I remember as a 13-year-old in 1987 helping my mother deliver such leaflets for the then Lib/ SDP Alliance candidate in Norwich North only for the chap to come a very poor third.
Perhaps more famously Linda Gorn, the Lib Dem candidate in the Holyrood by-election for Moray in 2006 made a complete fool of herself by basing the campaign on that message. She disappeared shortly after coming third.
but last night Mr Carmichael said the idea of "binary political choices" was "condescending and arrogant".
He added: "The politicians have got to get real here, they've got to recognise that there's a major problem of political disengagement and instead of telling people what choice they have got why don't you just try and listen to them for a while and engage in proper, serious political debate about political issues, about the state of our economy about the state of our democracy and about the fact that most people don't see any solutions coming from a broken political system at all."
He meant this in a context of the election being one between Labour and the Tories or Labour and the SNP, but it certainly makes that old Lib Dem leaflet slogan look odd too.

David Maddox: The Numbers Game (8)

It always amazes me how seriously parties take the numbers games and how they crawl over every minute detail from the polls.
My earlier blog on desperation tactics sparked a fairly sharp retort from the Labour offices:

"Polls commissioned by parties do not tell you much - the parties control the questions and crucially the weightings attached to each class of voter (there were 308 people who said they'd vote Labour, but this was "weighted" to 266 in the results). Stick with newspaper polls - they're more reliable!!" It read.

And it was pointed out that while there was a healthy lead for the SNP in its own commissioned poll for Holyrood the Nationalists were behind for Westminster. And if it was compared with the last SNP commissioned poll of August 2008 the SNP were going down which ever way you look at it.

Here they all are along with Westminster seat calculations courtesy as ever of Electoral Calculus:

Westminster (seats won and change in number in brackets):
August 2008: SNP 36% (26 +20) Lab 29% (22 -19) Tories 18% (4 +3) LD 13% (7 -4)
April 2009: SNP 30% (10 +4) Lab 32% (35 -6) Tories 21% (5 +4) LD 13% (9 -2)

Holyrood constituencies:
August 2008: SNP 44% Lab 25% Tories 13% LD 14%
April 2009: SNP 37% Lab 30% Tories 15% LD 13%

What does this prove?
1. Voters are fickle.
2. They vote differently for Holyrood than Westminster.
3. Point 2 suggests that SNP votes are not necessarily for independence.
4. Minor fluctuations in support could lead to dramatic changes in results (see the Westminster seat calculations).

David Maddox: Who turned the lights out?

There was a members debate this evening to support the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour 2009, which aims to encourage millions of people worldwide and across Scotland to switch off their lights for an hour at 8.30 pm on Saturday 28 March 2009, as an act of awareness on climate change and the need to tackle it.

The debate this evening was led by one of the promising new Nationalist MSPs Shirley-Anne Somerville (pictured top right), who represents the Lothians, which has a certain irony to it. This is because, as contacts in both Labour and the Conservatives have pointed out, the SNP, in their view seem intent on turning the lights out permanently in Scotland.

The thrust of the (well worn) argument is that the SNP's obsession with renewable energy from wind, wave and sun and outright opposition to nuclear will leave Scotland without a stable base supply of power. Only time will tell who is right, but if the SNP are wrong then the results could literally send Scotland back to the dark ages.

But the fear of "the lights going out" is hardly a new one to throw at voters. Tony Blair and Labour suggested all sorts of cataclysmic outcomes if the SNP took power in Holyrood. However, after almost two years we are yet to see the four horsemen of the Apocalypse descend on the country.

No doubt Labour remembered well how the idea of turning the lights out managed to put off supporters in 1992 with the infamous front page of The Sun on election day (pictured bottom right), although in that case it was the last person to leave the country who was being asked to press the switch.