Astounding piffle

The Catalonian referendum result was astonishingly pro-indy: 91% pro-indy, on a turnoutof 42%. If all those who stayed away had voted, it would have needed 79% of them to vote anti-indy to produce a 50-50 result. Hands-down win for indy, no question.



It is of course true that we don't formally know the voting intentions of those who stayed away - that's what staying away means. But we can make some reasonable assumptions:

• Some of them were dead, or had moved house. All electoral rolls are out of date: in December 2015, 9% of the entries on the electoral rolls of the UK named people who were no longer there (Electoral Commission), and the Spanish registers will be comparable. So 9% of the alleged abstainers don't in fact exist, and to get a 50-50 result, we actually need not 79% of those who stayed away, but 87% of them, to vote anti.


• Some preferred not to be clubbed to bits by a cop dressed in a wall of plastic armour. Everything we know about human nature suggests that this fear would be evenly spread across pro- and anti- voters. But to get a 50-50 result, it would need to have deterred 87% of 'anti-' voters.

It's beyond implausible to say that 87% of those who stayed away would have voted against independence, and were only prevented from doing so by fear of violence. So our conclusion stands up: it was a hands-down win for indy.

However, there are still people who can't stomach this result, among them Stephen Bush, who gives us this astounding piece of piffle in the New Statesman:

With the opposition parties and voters boycotting the vote, independence nonetheless took a share of the vote roughly equal to the total share achieved by Leave in the United Kingdom's EU referendum.

So it's likely, but not certain, that a referendum held with Madrid's blessing would have been won anyway.

No, Stephen, they didn't take a share of the vote, they took a share of the potential vote, i.e. the names on the register. The abstainers didn't vote against, they didn't vote at all. It's not like the EU referendum, where those who voted against didn't just not vote, they voted against. I know educational standards are slipping, but you'd expect a lead journalist on a publication with the stature of the New Statesman to know the difference between share of the electoral roll and share of the actual votes. Or then again, perhaps you wouldn't.