Nationalist navel-gazing

This blogger tends not to salivate over the latest opinion poll results, thus the finer details of the figures are generally completely ignored.

However, it's a bit more difficult to avoid the nuances behind the headline figures this morning because Scotland on Sunday is prominently featuring an article about the SNP proudly proclaiming that they have a mandate for a second Holyrood term which "crosses parties", this based on polling results which indicate that a significant number of those who intend voting for other parties think that the Nationalists should be re-elected.

Come again? Some people who intend voting Tory (say) think the SNP deserve a second term? Intuitively that's bullocks; why doesn't the Tory voter just vote SNP? On the other hand, no doubt the whole thing can be rationalised. For example, the precise wording of the question asked isn't clear from the SoS article, so the summary above may be misrepresenting it all, if only slightly.

Moreover, at a very basic level voting for one party while supporting another (whatever that means, precisely; normally support might be an unproblematic concept in an opinion poll context, but clearly in this instance it's exact meaning becomes of greater relevance) could be done for a variety of reasons, for example tactical voting in a seat that your favoured party has no chance in, or perhaps in the sense that a Celtic supporter thinks that Rangers deserve to win - such is democracy!

But perhaps such analysis is better left to the experts. For this blogger the impression conveyed by the whole thing is that of a slightly desperate and contrived attempt to impress from the SNP and questionable news values from SoS: standard polling results are of little interest outside the political bubble without engineering self-serving figures like this.

Heaven help us if this is any indication of the kind of campaign we're to be subjected to over the coming weeks.