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Again, I'm with Scunnered here - twice in one day and it's not even lunchtime yet - I need to go and lie down in a darkened room . If she'd said that about Nicola Sturgeon then she should be roundly condemned but to me it's an attack on Salmond's in particular and men in general's lack of understanding of women's issues. You can agree or disagree with that but I think it's a stretch to read it as being directed at Moira Salmond.

It's not so much that Ireland isn't considered a foreign country, it's that under the 1948 Ireland Act - which formalised UK/Irish relations following the founding of the Irish Republic - that Irish citizens would have all the rights that any UK citizen had. A fact that was conviently overlooked by some of the madder BT types suggesting that Scots wouldn't be able to visit England.

I'm with Scunnered on this one I'm afraid. I started following her on Twitter a while ago and she does actually come across well and has quite a dry self-deprecating sense of humour. That went by the by a couple of months ago as the rhetoric stepped up in the election campaign to be fair, you also have to put up with the numerous other SLAB Numpties that she retweets. i think she'd be pretty good as PO - to be fair it's not exactly a stellar cast - as I think she'd dislike every party equally.

Now that Scotland is officially Tory, will it be safe for Michelle to come home now?

Have you actually read the article or are you just basing your response on your own predjudice? FWIW, I think he's spot on about the radical left - for as long as I can remember they have been completely up their own arses. A bunch of latter day Holy Willies. I've no issue with people standing wherever they want but I don't see how a more diverse "Yes" majority makes it any more or less likely that independence will be achieved.

Polls are just a snapshot view, they are not a prediction, especially where something with potentially complicated outcomes like an election is concerned. Over time though they do show trends. Winds me up a bit people going on about "when the polls say" as if the polls themselves that are important, they are not, they only reflect public opinion. The polls won't get to 60% - I'm not saying that's the magic number - by themselves, only by people changing their minds. I can completely understand why commentators ask the question about what level for how long and when but it's essentially meaningless. The truth is that when time comes you'll know it's the right time. What was the fundamental difference between the 1979 and 1997 referendums - putting aside the 40% clause - it's that in 1979 the result was far from certain, in 1997, the result wasn't really in any doubt, the only question was the size of the majority and also whether there would be a majority on the second question or not. Public opinion in favour shifted from 52% to 74% between the two referendums. I think it's a fair assumption that had there not been 18 years of Tory government in the interim, devolution would have been delivered a lot earlier.

Interesting point, why don't you think there will be another referendum?

Standing has nothing to do with whether or not the atmosphere is good or not. The atmosphere at Hampden is determined by three things, whether the ground is full or not, the importance of the game and how well the team is playing.

I think that's the most likely timescale - external factors like Brexit aside - before support will get to an acceptable level to call a second referendum. I don't think you'll see any major jumps in support for independence but a steady 1-2% increase year on year. That's not going to happen without a lot of work though the SNP will need to continue to provide competent government and more work needs to be done on the weaker 2014 arguments. My view is if support for Independence is in the high 50s by the end of the decade, then the 2021 election will be fought solely on the constitution and that following on from that a second referendum in late 2021.

Keep clutching at those straws. Remove the don't knows and that graph looks to me as if it's essentially 50/50 since November 2014. Some minor changes month on month but no discernible trend other than the country is essentially spilt down the middle.

It's a belter.

You're into the territory there of what the Westminster government could theoretically do under the constitution and ignoring the realpolitik.

It sounds like she's just talking about procedural changes to how the parliament operates rather than political issues per-se. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum it's probably something that the opposition parties could get behind. I can't see any concerted opposition agreement on the substance of any parliamentary business though.

I think you are right there - the SNP could win all 50 of the Scottish constituencies in 2020 and it would get reported in some places "SNP lose 6 seats"

I think the problem there is that there are too many representatives in Stormont rather than too few in Holyrood. That said, given the extra devolved powers that are coming to Holyrood there is probably an argument for increasing the number of MSPs, I think its less about having more government ministers than being able to effectively staff the committees.

There's only been one side going on about a second referendum and that's not been the SNP.

Probably not, a start in analysing it would be to look at the date of the tweet.

Got it in one, it would be illegal.

Well you asked for it - each party's list vote is divided by the number of seats they have +1, 7 rounds. Overall List Votes SNP 137086; LAB 38791; CON 85848; LIB 18444; GREEN 15123 Constituency seats: SNP 9, CON 1. Round 1 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/1= 38791; CON 85848/2 = 42924; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 CON WIN Round 2 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/1= 38791; CON 85848/3 = 28616; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 LAB WIN Round 3 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/2= 19396; CON 85848/3 = 28616; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 CON WIN Round 4 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/2= 19396; CON 85848/4 = 21462; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 CON WIN Round 5 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/2= 19396; CON 85848/5 = 17170; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 LAB WIN Round 6 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/2= 19396; CON 85848/5 = 17170; LIB 18444/1=18444; GREEN 15123/1=15123 LIB WIN Round 6 SNP 137086/10 = 13709; LAB 38791/2= 19396; CON 85848/5 = 17170; LIB 18444/2=9222; GREEN 15123/1=15123 CON WIN

Nicola has just said she'll be looking to lead a minority government, no formal arrangements with any other parties.

There could be an extreme amount of karma in play regarding the Edinburgh Central and Lothians List results. There's been a lot of handbags over the Edinburgh Central result, with the Greens being accused of splitting the Indy vote and letting the Tories get in. However if you look at what would have happened to the list had the SNP won that seat, there's two very interesting outcomes. Firstly the additional seat wouldn't have been enough to give the SNP an overall majority, they would still have been one short but that would put you into that interesting area where they didn't have a majority but when you took out the PO, couldn't be outvoted. As it stands, it makes it a lot more likely that the SNP will have to come to some form of loose arrangement with the Greens. One of the outcomes of this could be a program of more radical land reform - I think that the Greens could push the SNP on that - and of course the final list MSP elected in Lothian was Mr Land Reform himself, Andy Wightman. However, the SNP didn't win, Ruth Davidson got her big victory - which in the grand scheme of things didn't matter as she would still have come through on the list - but if you look at what the impact would have been if the SNP had won Edinburgh Central then the Tories would have picked up the last list seat in Lothian and so no Andy Wightman. So from the Green's point of view, standing Alison Johnstone in Edinburgh Central may well have meant that they got an extra MSP - I suspect that's more luck than judgement. From the Tories point of view, the likely outcome of Ruth's big moment may well be a more radical land reform program being led by the country's leading land reform advocate. That's something that I'm sure will go down well with the big Tory landowning grandees. Caveat - I hope my arithmetic is correct on this, but by my reckoning, in this situation it would mean the Tories would have 18743 votes compared to the Green's 17276.

On the other hand, in Lothian, the SNP list vote fell by 2.9% from 2011. If it had stayed at the same level then they would have picked up the final list seat rather than the Greens. Swings and roundabouts.

That's not actually true. Glasgow is pretty simple to work out since both the Greens and the Tories got no constituency seats and going into the last round they had both got one list seat. Therefore to take the last list seat instead of the Tories the Greens would have had to have gotten an additional 6136 list votes not a few more hundred.

I agree with you, Greens had every right to stand in any constituency they want to. By the same token, the SNP had every right to campaign for as many list votes as they could get. It cuts both ways.

Scunnered just dodged a bullet.