It feels its like the referendum all over again. The STV debate had a very peculiar audience, where the Labour and Tory all join together warmly to applaud unionist points, and Jim Murphy got an enthusiastic round of applause before he even started speaking.
I wondered how on earth they got an audience so completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion, and the answer was not hard to find. The audience has been selected “based both on current opinion polls and the last general election result.”
Not the Holyrood election, not the referendum, but an election five years ago where about 75% of the electorate voted for the Unionist parties, and where the Labour Party was polling twice as well as it is now. On top of which, STV do not reveal what relative weighting they have given to the last general election and to recent opinion polls. It certainly looks like the greatest weight was placed on the last election result.
So we have a stitch-up where Nicola is responding to an audience completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion today, and where unionism, Labour and the Lib Dems are all vastly over-represented. Do not think this is accidental.