Mapping Scotland's Dramatic Shift in Political Geography | Hacker News Reader

Mapping Scotland's Dramatic Shift in Political Geography

bbc.co.uk

32 pointsjjar73 comments

As an English person residing in England, This is very much the most interesting story from this election.

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens at Holyrood next year, and what the result of the promised 2017 EU referendum is. Although I am sceptical that we'd see independence before 2020 for Scotland, a big constitutional shakeup does seem to be on the cards.

what is "holyrood next year"?

Elections for the devolved Scottish Parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament_general_el...

"Holyrood" is the part of Edinburgh in which the Scottish parliament is located. In this context it's being used to refer to the Scottish government collectively, in the same way that "Washington" is often used to refer to the American government.

> Although I am skeptical that we'd see independence before 2020

Wait, didn't we just have a democratic vote on that in 2014 and the result was no? Are we going to have another one because the yes people aren't happy about the result?

No, we'd probably see a second vote only if the SNP took a majority in the Scottish parliament again and the UK voted to exit the EU. Leaving the EU is really bad for Scotland (arguably all parts of the UK, but Scotland especially for many economic reasons), and might spur a bunch of people that voted "no" last time to vote "yes" if it were held again.

Like I said, I consider that unlikely, but it's a risk.

The total collapse of Lib in south west was also pretty clear. It surprised me.

As a German I feel strange seeing a nationalist party win. Is it reasonable to worry here? Don't know much about Scotland.

*edit: deleted a sub comment after being shown that I misunderstood something.

Worry about what?

"Nationalist Party German History" peek what google has to say about that topic if your memory from school and grand parents isn't sufficient already. ;)

Pffft. Same argument can be used against socialism.

All the other parties are nationalist too, and sometimes fiercely so, just for the current status quo.

There was no argument but a question. I interpret your answer as "no there's nothing to answer". Thanks for your reply.

> Pffft. Same argument can be used against socialism.

Sure, but it's understandable that a german would be slightly worried no? Though nationalism in general is benign in most of the world, it remains a worrying sight in Germany (IIRC a few years ago there were comments that Germans only allowed themselves waving the flag for football matches) for perfectly good historical reasons.

The SNP are nothing to worry about, really. They're centre-left and moderate. They might campaign for another referendum but it would be silly to class them as xenophobic.

However, from a technology perspective the new Tory majority really worries me. They have no understanding of tech. They want to reintroduce sweeping surveillance legislation that was blocked by the Lib Dems in the previous government.

They also want to ban encryption (!) and will continue to attempt to censor the internet.

They will also likely fail to reform the current system that sees people being arrested for making jokes on Twitter (or, more widely, our terrible libel laws). They also have no real interest in ensuring widespread rollout of high-speed fibre broadband. They'll pay lip service to it, but that's easy to do.

They are also unconcerned about data protection and will likely continue to allow more care.data-style schemes with little effective oversight.

The only upsides: GDS and open data initiatives will probably survive.

No reason to worry, they're left-wing nationalists who want an independent scottish nation.

They're civic nationalists and social democrats, in German politics they're around the Greens, maybe mixed with a bit of SDP, in the European Parliament they're currently part of the Green/EFA alliance (same as the german Greens and Pirate Party)

There is definitely a pretty strong element of 'us vs. them' with the SNP, but I wouldn't say it's any different to the same sort of thing which happens in almost any nation state. i.e. they're nationalist in the same way that a French person believes that France should be a nation. There is, I would say, unpleasantness and irrationality in it, but no more so than in the usual way that people rally round to defend against foreign criticism, or judge practices or ideas in terms of whether they are 'truly British', 'anti-American', or whatever.

Nationalist in this context has nothing in common with how the word is generally used in politics. The SNP are in favor of ethnic diversity, this is about control of resources, both natural and political, for the people who live in Scotland (wherever they came from originally). IT's about wresting control from the south of England who Scots feel have marginalized their country (yes, 'country', although technically no longer a country in the proper sense, I should like to point out to other HNers that Scotland has retained judicial, taxation and education systems separate from England and Wales).

What I want to know is how all those polls were wrong. The closest I can get is there's a systematic "shy conservative" bias.

It's certainly not a sample size problem. I trust the pollsters understand statistics, and this seems to be the most polled election ever.

Note that the same polls were all pretty accurate in regards to the result in Scotland, which makes the errors even odder (and gives a bit of support to the "shy conservative" theory).

Possibly the highly promoted guides to tactical voting provided by the right-wing press had a disproportionate impact on the marginal seats?

But wouldn't tactical voting be captured in the polls as well?

There's another theory about bias inherent in sampling from the internet. But I can't imagine pollsters don't know about that.

There was discussion about the variance between phone and internet polls before the result, but the differences between the two types of polls were minute compared with the change in the actual results.

Tactical voting in an opinion poll doesn't make any difference, so I'd guess there's a danger of misleading answers. I'm sure the pollsters are at least aware of the issue, though what they can do about it I'm not sure.

How does the "shy conservative" come into play in telephone polls, for example? I guess it may well, but it seems a little strange.

Is there something where on the day people swing more towards the safety of the incumbent? This study seems to suggest the opposite should true [0], at least when it comes to undecided voters.

It's definitely an interesting question. How were the polls so wrong? Maybe in the closely contested seats the minor parties split labour? But why didn't the polls show that?

I'd love to paw through the data. Really need to look at it on an electorate by electorate basis to see the variation between the parties (opinion vs actual).

[0] http://www.pollingreport.com/incumbent.htm

The basic theory is that people are embarrassed to vote in their own selfish self-interest. There are some who claim you get more conservative voters with online polls, because there's no human being there to judge them.

I'd always heard that the undecided break towards the incumbent. I believe all the polls took that into account already though, and still got it wrong.

Oddly enough I would rather not have someone patronizingly voting for what they believe is in my best interests. How do they know what that might be? I would hope that people would always vote in their own 'selfish' self-interest.

I might vote for something that's not directly in my self-interest, believing it's more in the collective interest. I'm part of the collective and I feel a more even society is in my interests, even if that means I personally might not be as well off as I could be. That's really not patronizing.

Though you could argue that I've done it for my own self-interests in the long term (who knows when you or your kids might rely on essential services) :)

EDIT Also, it's pretty obvious that there are choices that are better for some groups of people (that aren't me). I don't know who "you" are, but there are voting choices that I can make that will help those classes of people, you may or may not be among them. I resent the idea that I'm being patronizing by making that choice (though in the strictest sense of the word "patron" maybe you're right).

'Collective' suggests to me we're not going to agree. Patronizing in this context only means making assumptions (likely to be unwarranted I’d argue) about what someone else wants. But who is the 'someone' affected by a vote in a general election? How many people? To what extent? What about unknown/known effects on other people who you do not have in mind? You cannot know and the assumptions pile up. So much easier to vote on what you really do know to the extent that you can know or rationalize. As you say, we can surely agree that it isn’t always our immediate concerns that best serve our interests as in the simple example of imagining ourselves out of work or needing medical attention. As you say, this benefits everyone – point being that we also are ‘everyone’.

Interestingly, Survation actually got it (mostly) right the day before, but didn't publish it because it looked like such an odd outlier: http://survation.com/snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victo...

The last time time the opinion polls were so wrong was in 1992, when similarly they overestimated support for a somewhat awkward Labour leader who had been the subject of a massive negative campaign by the popular press. I suspect that this kind of personal campaign had an effect when people came to the morning of the election and thought 'actually, do I really want this guy to be Prime Minister?'.

For example:

The headline of the UK's largest newspaper on the morning of the election: https://mobile.twitter.com/hendopolis/status/595703178294878...

The top columnist for the Daily Mail, a day or two before (for reference, Jimmy Saville was a well known entertainer who turned out to be a paedophile): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3068131/Trust-Labo...

Why were the Liberal Democrats so strong in rural/highland areas up until now?

The Liberal Democrats have always (well, till now) been at their strongest in progressive rural areas that have little to no urban blight (so, much of Scotland, much of the South West, parts of East Anglia, Northumberland, mid Wales).

Now for my personal opinion.. I would credit this to them being the most "centre" of the parties - they're progressive without being overtly socialist, and that appeals to the "hey, I'm still cool" element of the rural middle class that still likes their cars, village fetes, and horsey stuff, but is also pro gay marriage, pro equality and pro welfare.

>> "I would credit this to them being the most "centre" of the parties"

I thought the liberal democrats (at least before the coalition) were the most left leaning of the major parties.

Long-term, no, but due to New Labour (1997-2010) being slightly right of centre, the Lib Dems were "left" in relation to that, yes, but not in relation to Labour's traditional position.

I am not particularly savvy when it comes to Scottish politics, but I was under the impression that Scottish Labour was considered somewhat more left than Labour proper even during the New Labour years.

Labour are the most left leaning, but still kinda centrist. Liberal Democrats are relatively centrist for the major parties but still quite right:

This sums it up best... the UK is mostly a right leaning authoritarian country, we vote on the relative differences between parties rather than the overall thing.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2015

Is it just me or does politicalcompass.org seem to skew everything towards right wing authoritarianism?

I think it's just the world we live in. The left and more liberal options exist but none of them are mainstream and we mentally re-draw the extents of the political compass to cover the politics we experience (the major parties).

Having had a look through political compass's past predictions (primarily Australian, since I'm Australian) their analysis is very odd. I mean, there is no way that you can seriously put three quarters of the parties on the top right 16th of the chart.

That should be how the political compass is drawn since it is based on human experience, no?

I think that chart is crazy though. The Conservatives are far from a far right party. Christ, if you dropped the Conservatives in America, they'd be considered a right bunch of commies - even the Democrats would be off the scale to the right by that chart.

> That should be how the political compass is drawn since it is based on human experience, no?

AFAIK, the political compass attempts to assess an absolute scale across world politics, not local choices.

Still a bit odd the concentration of western political parties in the right-wing authoritarian section of the graph - unless there's a whole lot of countries with extreme left-wing governments which are very pro-choice, which I highly doubt.

> Still a bit odd the concentration of western political parties in the right-wing authoritarian section of the graph

Dunno, if you consider that much of the anglosphere is patterning itself more and more after US politics which lives solely in the top-right corner of the top-right quadrant it makes sense that they would coalesce there. And "labour" parties have definitely been shifting their stances towards US dem inspiration.

I'd still say the UK and Australia are a fair way away from the American parties (particularly the republicans).

Seem about right to me. The NZ[0] or German[1] compasses cover much more of the spectrum, especially towards left-libertarianism. It's not politicalcompass's fault that US politics live entirely in the right-authoritarian corner and English politics have significantly shifted towards it with New Labour's realignment on US democrats.

[0] http://www.politicalcompass.org/nz2014

[1] http://www.politicalcompass.org/germany2013

Yes those NZ and German charts look a bit more balanced - but being from Australia, their 2013 Aussie election chart is just a bit silly to be honest - two of the parties listed had no chance of even getting any seats, and despite most parties being fairly centrist in their economic policy they all seem to be bunched up in the top right corner. My only guess is that the analysis was done using a small sample of international media.

They were the centrist party, labour was the binary left (centre-left). The Dem part of LibDems had split from labour in the 80s because labour was getting too left-wing. With New Labour moving to centre-right, LDs moved to right-right (explaining the coalition being "basically tory"). The left-leaning parties remaining are the SNP (center-left) and the Greens (left) (Sinn Féin can be ignored as they refuse to sit in Westminster)

http://politicalcompass.org/uk2015

They are all right wing.

Scotland votes far left of the rest of the UK typically, Lib Dems have historically been more left than Labour however they formed a coalition with Tories to form the last government (and as a part government instituted policies the opposite of why anyone would ever vote for them, ie university tuition fees). So they are no longer considered actually a liberal party.

They where the centre party before Blair brought Labour to the center/center-right from its original leftist position.

Then the Coalition got you tories if you'd voted lib dems, what is the point of voting LD then?

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