"Yeah, you oppose austerity, but don't forget, you blew people up!"
This is the biggest and most embarrassing failure the polling organisations have ever had, and it comes after they’ve had more than two decades to learn from their roughly equivalent failure in 1992. It’s all the odder because the same methods that didn’t work in England worked fine north of the border, where the polling organisations accurately forecast the SNP triumph. The pollsters did something or things very wrong. We’ll find out what soon enough, but it was probably a mix of ‘shy Tories’ and people deciding at the last moment to buy the line about having to vote Tory to keep out the SNP.
I thought his pitch was shot through with this weird sort of incongruence: we don't get enough funding from Westminster, so we're going to remove it completely as a source; we want to be independent, but we're going to establish closer ties with Europe; we're the party of ethnic minorities and gay rights, but not so long ago, our armed wing was murdering people for belonging to the wrong religious faction or talking to the police.
Weirdly enough at the moment there is an undercurrent of xenophobia among Unionist politicians which is blind to the fact that the tiny immigrant population will never impinge on the unionist way of life.