Bombshell GB-wide Ashcroft poll is the first not to show Reform in an outright lead for the first time in almost a year - Greens are in joint lead for the first time ever - Labour are in FOURTH - and the SNP have overtaken Labour UK-wide in the seats projection

So this is a genuine landmark for the reasons given in the title, and it's also worth making the point that the data tables (unless I'm misinterpreting them, but I don't see how I can be) show that the Greens are actually in a slight overall lead over Reform and the Tories - but that seems to have been disguised by the rounding to the nearest whole number.

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (Lord Ashcroft, 26th-30th March 2026)

Greens 21%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

SNP 3%

Plaid Cymru 1%

I know somebody listed Scottish subsample numbers on the previous thread, but I can't see any in the data tables with the "don't knows/will not votes" removed.  However, I've used what I presume was a rough recalculation to fine-tune a UK-wide seats projection, which shows: Reform UK 204, Conservatives 175, Greens 116, SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 47, Labour 33, Plaid Cymru 8, Others 19.

The target for an overall majority is 326, so it's not hard to see why a hung parliament is currently the strongly favoured outcome on the exchanges.  Nevertheless, under first-past-the-post not all that much movement is required to transform an absolute guddle into a clear majority, and by the same token not much movement would be required to turn a projection showing a right-wing parliament, as this one does, into one showing a centre-left parliament in which the SNP might just hold the balance of power.  Even if they don't hold the balance of power on their own, the huge strength of the Greens is a potential game-changer, because at the very least the English Greens are not opposed to independence.

On the exchanges, the Greens are currently estimated to have a 1 in 8 chance of winning most seats in the general election, but as the above numbers demonstrate, they might not actually need to win most seats to end up with influence.

An intriguing quirk is that the SNP are currently the fourth-largest party in the Commons (albeit only just, and they may soon be overtaken by Reform).  The projection from this poll shows they would still be in fourth place, but in a radically different way - they would have five times as many seats as now, they would re-overtake the Liberal Democrats, and they would overtake Labour for the first time.  Let's just reiterate that: the SNP would have more seats than Labour, UK-wide.

Ashcroft himself concedes that the reason his results might be different from other pollsters is that he has a completely different approach to the voting intention question - instead of directly asking people how they will vote, he asks them to rate their chances of voting for each party in turn.  As I understand it, any respondent who does not estimate a 50%+ probability of voting for at least one party is assumed to be an abstainer and excluded, and everyone else is assigned to the party they gave the highest probability to.  That method seems intuitively reasonable to me, but whether the results it produces will be more accurate, or less so, is anyone's guess at this stage.

For weeks after the Gorton & Denton by-election, YouGov were putting "footnotes" of sorts on their polls to give the impression that the Green advantage over Labour must just be a temporary effect caused by the by-election and would fade.  There is now some doubt over that, not just because of this Ashcroft poll, but also because last week's YouGov poll showed the Greens moving back ahead of Labour, after having slipped behind for one week.

In case you're wondering, the last GB-wide poll not to show an outright Reform lead was a Survation poll in late April/early May of last year.  That showed Labour and Reform tied on 26% apiece.

There is actually some relief for Starmer in the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll.  It's generally believed that head-to-head leadership polls are more predictive of election results several years in advance than headline voting intentions, and Starmer does have a clear 15-point lead over Farage.  However his lead over Badenoch is just three points, which amounts to a statistical tie - and Ashcroft doesn't even bother to ask whether respondents prefer Polanski to Starmer, which many will suspect is because he feared what the answer might be.  

There are a couple of results that I actually found quite surprising.  When asked whether nuclear power should be phased out, with wind power expanded and the net zero target brought forward a decade, respondents are almost split down the middle - 40% in favour, 45% against.  My guess is that Ashcroft asked it as a "shopping list" question in the hope that most respondents would find something on the list to object to, thus producing a result he'd be able to spin as clear and decisive support for nuclear power, but that didn't happen.

And on Europe, there are any number of people who will tell you that if you spell out in a poll question what returning to the EU would actually mean in practice, the pro-EU majority evaporates.  It looks to me like Ashcroft set out to prove that theory and spectacularly failed.  When asked whether they want to rejoin the customs union, restore freedom of movement and then rejoin the EU itself as soon as possible, 55% supported the idea and only 34% were opposed.  That's absolutely remarkable.

Ashcroft did manage to get a result which he can spin as showing massive opposition to scrapping the "nuclear deterrent", but as he lumped "and cut defence spending" into the question, the result is pretty meaningless.

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Loopy billionaire lord tries to convince us that funding the NHS with fair taxation is as impossible as enhancing the size of women's breasts with hypnotherapy

I cannot in all good conscience conclude my discussion of this poll without drawing your attention to the fact that Ashcroft has made a complete blithering idiot of himself with one particular part of his write-up - 

"Perhaps more controversially, nearly a third of voters said they felt less favourable towards Polanski when they heard that in his days as a hypnotherapist he once claimed he could increase the size of women’s breasts by hypnosis. Polanski claims to have apologised and put all this behind him, but in a different way he is arguably still at it. Just as there are those who want to change their body shape through the power of mind over matter, there will always be people eager to believe we can fund the NHS by taxing the rich"

Nice try, Mike, but you are believed to be worth £2 billion.  That alone would be enough to fund 1% of the entire annual budget of NHS England.  Quite plainly, taxing the rich could very easily fund the NHS - and the only use hypnotherapy would be on that front would be for those like you who don't want us to notice or believe a simple arithmetical fact.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"C'est trop bruyant!": The settled will klaxon is so piercing tonight that it can even be heard IN FRANCE, as Norstat show a pro-independence majority for a SEVENTH poll in a row

Tonight brings word of the latest in the regular series of Norstat polls for the Sunday Times, and although the newspaper has buried the results of the independence question at the bottom of the write-up as if it's of no great significance, it certainly looks pretty significant to me.  If I'm counting correctly, this is now the seventh Norstat poll in a row to show a Yes lead - and remember Norstat were one of the more No-friendly firms until a couple of years ago.  To this day (as far as we know, anyway), they continue to weight by 2014 recalled vote, which is a huge disadvantage for the Yes side, who are nevertheless repeatedly coming out on top.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat / Suday Times, 30th March - 1st April 2026)

Yes 52% (+1)

No 48% (-1)

The Sunday Times are far more interested in the Holyrood voting intention numbers, which are a bit of a curate's egg for the SNP.  Their own vote share has held up perfectly well, but a decline for Reform UK means that the unionist vote is no longer split as perfectly as it was, opening up the possibility that Labour and the Tories may take a few more constituency seats than previously expected and push the prospect of a single-party SNP overall majority further away.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34% (-1)

Labour 19% (+2)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Conservatives 11% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

Greens 8% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30% (-)

Labour 17% (-)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Greens 12% (+1)

Conservatives 10% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+3)

Seats projection: SNP 57, Labour 20, Reform UK 16, Greens 13, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 11

That would obviously be a very comfortable pro-independence majority (70 for the SNP and Greens in combination, 59 for the unionist parties), but it would leave the SNP well short of their self-imposed target of a single-party majority.  However, even if Reform's setback is indirectly bad news for the independence cause, I nevertheless find it strangely reassuring.  Every time Paul Hutcheon has written an over-the-top headline about "Reform's campaign in total meltdown", I've thought to myself "it won't make the slightest bit of difference you know, nothing sticks to them", so it's a bit of a relief to discover (or provisionally discover) that the laws of political gravity do actually apply to Offord and Reform after all, and that if they run a shockingly bad campaign it does have negative consequences for them, just as it would for any other party.

There's still a month for them to put their house in order, and all they'd really have to do is work their way back to where they were fairly recently in order to help the SNP back into the 60s in the seats projection.  Even if Reform don't recover, there's another very plausible get-out-of-jail-free card for the SNP, which is that the Greens plainly can't take 8% of the constituency vote when they're not standing in the vast majority of constituency seats.  What would happen if, say, the SNP were to take half of their votes and Labour were to take one-quarter?  The seats projection from this poll would then be: SNP 60, Labour 18, Reform UK 17, Greens 12, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 10.

Still not a majority, but a bit closer to one, and it might be a slightly more realistic estimate of where the SNP stand right now.

John Curtice also makes the point in the Sunday Times piece that if the public become aware that Reform's support is falling away, that could encourage greater anti-SNP tactical voting for Labour and the Tories.  There may be some logic to that, although there may also be a side-benefit for the pro-indy camp, because Reform are currently taking a non-trivial percentage of independence voters and we need as many of those people as possible back on the side of light if we're going to end up with a decent vote share on the list - which in practice may be just as psychologically important as the seats tally.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Falkirk West.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"But what if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying 'we say no, and we are the state'?"

A former commenter on this blog from way back in the 2014 indyref period got in touch with a question a few days ago, and I've been so busy that I haven't responded to him yet - but it's an interesting and important question, so I thought I might as well turn my answer into a blogpost.

"Suppose Mr. Swinney really does win 65 or more seats (no longer a laughing matter). What if Mr. Starmer does not perform his usual U-turn? 

What if he does not feel he can win a referendum? I'm thinking of possible successors who could fight a referendum, but the only one I can even see fighting indyref2 with any confidence is Andy Burnham. 

What do you think is Mr. Swinney's plan?"

The first thing I should stress here is that I still regard a single-party SNP overall majority as a long-shot, simply because the AMS voting system is designed to produce hung parliaments, and it does that job very effectively.  Unless the SNP's list vote recovers massively to 2011-style levels, the route to a majority essentially consists of winning 65 out of 73 constituency seats, and even though those seats are elected by the first-past-the-post element of AMS, it's still very unusual for first-past-the-post to produce quite such an extreme result.  In the last hundred years, it's only happened once in a UK general election, when Ramsay MacDonald's Tory-dominated 'National Government' took 90.1% of the seats.  That's the feat the SNP will have to emulate to hit John Swinney's target.

Nevertheless, when I was at the SNP campaign conference a couple of weeks ago, a number of senior figures did sound genuinely confident of a majority, and of course they have access to canvassing data.  There are three possible explanations: a) it's a bluff, b) it's wishful thinking, or c) there might just be something in it.  So purely hypothetically, let's imagine it's c) and work through what would happen if the SNP win a majority.

Would Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum?  No, although of course his own days as Prime Minister might be numbered by then anyway.

Would any successor to Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum?  No, unless it's someone we haven't given serious consideration to yet.  Personally I would welcome Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham taking over, simply because they would probably represent a slight shift to the left, but I would expect all of them to be just as intransigent on the constitutional issue (especially Rayner, who seems almost robotic in her thinking).

Does that mean electing an SNP majority is pointless?  Definitely not, because John Swinney has made so many promises about the effect of a majority that he would have to try to deliver - and that is the real value of the exercise, because no First Minister is actually powerless in the face of Westminster intransigence, unless they make themselves powerless by being too passive, which has been the recurring problem since the summer of 2017.  Judging from the very few clues that were dropped last October, it sounds like a judicial review might be sought of any Westminster refusal to grant a Section 30 order - I can't see that going anywhere, but by the same token I can't see SNP members just accepting John Swinney saying "oh our application has been rejected, never mind, at least we tried".  There would have to be a follow-up with a Plan B, which is where the legendary 'secret plan' kicks in, although by definition we don't know what that is.

The simplest option is the one that Believe in Scotland have proposed, which is to finally bring this matter to a head by using the Westminster election of 2028 or 2029 as a de facto referendum on independence.  However, although Believe in Scotland are SNP allies and have close organisational links with the party, we know that John Swinney and other leading SNP figures like Stephen Flynn seem to be viscerally opposed to the whole concept of a de facto referendum.  Maybe they would reconsider if other options closed off and they needed to show SNP members they were taking their mandate seriously.  Or maybe they would be able to devise an imaginative alternative way of using the Westminster election to advance the cause.

One thing is for sure: if the SNP can win back their majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, they would have potential leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table as long as they are bold enough to use it.  They could engage in parliamentary disruption tactics (which remember even the moderate John Smith did as Labour leader in the mid-1990s), or they could boycott the Commons for a period of time.  The latter would create a genuine constitutional crisis: it wouldn't be considered sustainable for the bulk of one of the constituent nations of 'Our Pweshus Union' to go unrepresented in the national parliament for any prolonged period.

Again, Mr Swinney is so instinctively cautious that it's hard to imagine him going down that road, but the value of giving the SNP a mandate in May is that it opens these possibilities up and a conversation can at least be had about them.

On a semi-related point, I may actually have been proved wrong about something I said two years ago, although as with the French Revolution it's still too early to tell.  I repeatedly said back then that losing the SNP majority at Westminster would be an unmitigated calamity, because it would lose us the main legacy of the 2014 referendum and we'd never get it back. Once Labour were the dominant party once again, there would be a sense of normal service being resumed and the SNP would thereafter only be able to compete in Holyrood elections.  

That doesn't seem to be the case at all, and there's a real chance that Labour's 2024 victory will end up looking like a meaningless one-off.  The real normal service will be resumed in 2028 or 2029 when the SNP return to dominance, the 2014 legacy will turn out to be assured, and that will be a massive psychological shock to the Scottish Labour Party.  They thought they had established in 2024 that independence supporters would always sell themselves cheap by going back to Labour without any constitutional concessions whatsoever, but that was a mirage.  There might eventually be some long-overdue soul-searching about what it will actually take for Labour to build bridges with their Yes-supporting former voters - and the two obvious potential answers to that question would be either a) greater flexibility on a referendum, or b) a significantly enhanced devolution package.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh Southern, Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire and Falkirk East & Linlithgow.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

My plans for Scot Goes Pop's coverage of the Holyrood election campaign

This post will come as a relief to some of you, because I've decided to temporarily go back to conventional blogging for the remainder of the Holyrood campaign.  The emphasis is on the word "temporarily", because on the whole I think the YouTube experiment is working out well - the number of subscribers has built quicker than I was expecting, and the average number of views per video is pretty decent.  However, I think the situation changes in an election campaign, because it suddenly doesn't feel good enough to wait 24 or 48 hours to cover a particular poll result, and doing it by video just slows everything down massively.  You'll have noticed that I still haven't covered the Survation poll from the other day - that's because I was intending to make a video about it but still haven't found the time.  Of course I'm also writing daily constituency profiles for The National throughout the campaign, which takes a few hours per day and leaves me with even less time to make videos.

So for the remaining month-and-a-bit of the campaign I'm going to go retro and do pretty much what I've done in every election since the 2010 UK general election, which was the first major vote that Scot Goes Pop covered.  That should speed everything up and hopefully I can cover major polling developments much more effectively.

However, to make this work I'm going to have to ask for your patience and indulgence on a couple of points.  I'm going to add a sort of promotional link for my YouTube channel at the bottom of every post, so that it will hopefully still pick up a few subscribers even if there are fewer videos until 7th May (although I'll still try to make at least one or two).  And I'm afraid I'm also going to have to resume the fundraising promotions at the bottom of each post - I was hoping not to have to do that, but it's become unavoidable.  I'm due to receive some significant funds in a few weeks' time, probably in late May or early June, so from that point on there shouldn't be any problem for a few months, but until then there's practically nothing scheduled to come in at all, and I'm going to have plug the gap somehow to keep everything afloat over the next month or two.

As ever, there are three main ways to donate...

1) For card payments, the crowdfunder page is HERE.

2) Direct PayPal donations can be made to my PayPal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

3) Bank transfers are also fine.  I was advised not to post my bank details publicly, so if you'd like to donate that way, drop me a line by email and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

Many thanks for the support that readers have shown Scot Goes Pop over the years.

Joani of (Noah's nuclear-armed) Arc

The senior naval officer Reid was reported for 'inappropriate' behaviour with at Faslane is *separate* to the captain she is linked to tonight by the FT's @LOS_Fisher

The captain has reportedly stepped back from duties after text messages exchanged with Reid

— Anna Mikhailova (@AVMikhailova) March 31, 2026

We're going to need some sort of diagram here. https://t.co/pI9M6N3AJD

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

BBC Scotland will obviously just dismiss this story as Naval Gazing..

— David Nichol (@DavidNi09148795) April 1, 2026

How does one actually go about finding love with the captain of a nuclear-armed submarine? Is there some sort of niche dating app? https://t.co/b1T6Av5Zp0

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Ruddr

— calanbosch (@calanbosch) April 1, 2026

Would you like to see the plutonium rivet?

— JimMcDonald (@mcdonji1) April 1, 2026

Maybe the King should abdicate

Even the Pope isn't safe https://t.co/86GfE2t6Q1

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Just remembered about this pic.twitter.com/drJ3hISNm0

— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) April 1, 2026

If Joani Reid ends up being the cause of global nuclear destruction, I'm going to be very annoyed with her. https://t.co/S1lqYBj1M4

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

In all seriousness, what do we think are the chances of a by-election in East Kilbride & Strathaven? Must be at least 25%, surely?

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026 

Shock poll portends weather boffin coup threat for Atlas chief Lyon

You've probably seen the propaganda poll from yesterday that the hapless Alliance to Liberate Scotland, aka "the Atlas", commissioned from Find Out Now.  It used the infamous Archie Stirling question, ie. "would you consider voting for party X at the election?", which in the case of Stirling's party Scottish Voice overestimated their potential support in 2007 by a factor of 200.  It said that 20% of the population would "consider" voting for them on the Holyrood list, whereas in the event only 0.1% actually did so.

Atlas' own poll yesterday found that only 8% of people would consider voting for them, so if the "Stirling devisor" is applied, that would imply they are on course to take just 0.04% of the list vote.  I personally think that's a bit of an underestimate, simply because Tommy Sheridan does still have some residual support in Glasgow - you could imagine him getting around 1-2% of the vote there, while in the other regions Atlas may hover around 0.1% or 0.2%, producing a national figure of around 0.3% or 0.4%.  That would obviously still leave them light-years short of winning seats.

But it was interesting that they were concerned enough about not registering in the polls at all that they were willing to shell out for a propaganda poll, because it must have cost them around 10% of the relatively modest amount they've crowdfunded for their election fund.  (Although there again, as someone pointed out in the comments section of this blog the other day, they must also have "private means" simply to be able to pay for their election deposits, and perhaps that explains why they've been so willing to get into bed with a far-right party.)

Given what we know about the Mafia-like internal politics of these fringe parties, it perhaps isn't a surprise to find that not only has money been spent on a polling astroturfing exercise for Atlas as a whole, but that someone appears to have also paid for a poll to try to put one particular faction of Atlas into the ascendancy.  It's not hard to guess who may have commissioned this morning's new poll from OpinoSpa:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Hazel Lyon, the leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, has been a failure because she is unknown to the public and has been unable to boost the party's profile? (OpinoSpa, 25th-27th March 2026)

Agree strongly: 21%

Agree slightly: 37%

TOTAL AGREE: 58%

Disagree slightly: 11%

Disagree strongly 4%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 15%

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the former STV weather presenter Lloyd Quinan, who was a member of the Scottish Parliament for four years, would be a better leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland than Hazel Lyon because he would get the party more attention?

Agree strongly: 23%

Agree slightly: 45%

TOTAL AGREE: 68%

Disagree slightly: 7%

Disagree strongly 2%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 9%

Hold on to your hat, Hazel: strong gusts are forecast as a Quinan coup attempt comes in from the west.

The Alliance to Liberate Scotland and their "Big Lie": the Sovereignty Party are so spooked by being identified as far-right that they have started telling direct, flat-out lies about the contents of their 2024 manifesto

My latest Holyrood constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Northern.

A brief reply to Ballot Box Scotland about my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency

Allan Faulds, the former serial Scottish Green Party candidate who runs the psephological Ballot Box Scotland site, has taken a passive-aggressive swipe at me because of something I wrote in my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency for The National - 

"Personally if I'd been associated with the Alba Party and repeatedly exaggerated their prospects for success, I might consider not taking poorly informed swipes at three sources - myself,  @devolvedelections.bsky.social and  @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social - who have taken reasonable modelling positions!"

What he's referring to is my point that projections showing that the Greens are on course to win Edinburgh Central are based on a smoke-and-mirrors exercise, because they rely on using the high Green list vote from 2021 as a proxy for what might happen on the constituency ballot this time.  That makes no sense, because the Greens actually stood on the constituency ballot in Edinburgh Central in 2021, and indeed put forward a very high-profile candidate in Alison Johnstone, who was on the cusp of becoming Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.  They did not perform particularly well, and even making reasonable assumptions about how they might have performed better if the latest boundary changes are taken into account, they would almost certainly still have finished a distant fourth, probably almost thirty percentage points or so behind Angus Robertson of the SNP who won the seat.  So that has to be regarded as the realistic baseline for this year's race, although I did go on to say that the task was "not mission impossible" for the Greens, and that with a focused campaign they might have a chance - but I summed up by saying that if they won, they "would be defying the odds, not merely meeting expectations".

I absolutely stand by those comments, which constitute a balanced summary of the true position.  Frankly, I struggle to see how anyone can reasonably dispute them, and by coming out in such an absurdly shrill, precious, self-righteous way I believe Mr Faulds is allowing his protective bias towards his own political party to reveal itself clearly yet again.  He goes absolutely nuts, and has done for many years, whenever anyone suggests that his "project" (as he refers to his website) might not be as pristinely "non-partisan" as he insists, or that he in fact relatively frequently allows his own prejudices to shine through in his commentary.  But I suspect the only reason that's such a sore point for him is that he knows perfectly well it's sometimes a fair allegation.

By contrast, I've never pretended that this blog is non-partisan.  I am a member of the SNP, I will be voting SNP on both ballots in May, and on the blog I am strongly encouraging others to do the same.  But the constituency profiles are in a completely different category to the blog, and I do take the exercise very seriously and only say things that I believe to be 100% accurate and fair, and that can be justified and supported by hard facts.  I've gone out of my way to give proper attention to the Green challenge in the Edinburgh seats, where they are clearly a credible force, and I have most certainly not been talking them down in any way whatsoever.

Contrary to Mr Faulds' claims, I did not in fact identify him, or Mark McGeoghegan (whose strident political leanings are also well known from social media), or anyone else as being behind the bizarre projections for Edinburgh Central that I mentioned in the constituency profile, and the fact that he knew exactly what I was referring to anyway speaks volumes.  He openly admits on his site that the Greens' numbers in his constituency projections are based partly on their list performance - something that he does not do for any other party.  So in fact my commentary was not "ill-informed" - it was extremely well informed by Mr Faulds' own words and clarifications.

Incidentally, this is a very rare point of consensus between myself and Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland - he also commented a few weeks ago on how baffling it is that a projection would show the Greens on course to win a constituency in which they've never polled higher than 14%.  On this occasion Campbell's logic was actually sound, and it looks very much like Mr Faulds is simply indulging in special pleading for his own party as a form of "soft astroturfing".  To be clear, I would definitely not be astonished if Lorna Slater wins Edinburgh Central for the Greens, but if that happens it will be for the reasons I gave in the profile, not because of the heroic and frankly silly assumptions that are driving the dodgy projections.

As for Mr Faulds' dig about my former involvement with the Alba Party, he clearly knows very little about that subject, because I actually spent a fair bit of my time as an Alba NEC member begging Alex Salmond and others to adopt a greater sense of realism about Alba's electoral prospects.  I was almost in despair after the 2022 local elections, because Mr Salmond was waxing lyrical about how he had supposedly detected signs in the results, based mostly on second and third preference votes, that Alba were on course for the 6% needed to win list seats at Holyrood this year.  He seemed to be absolutely genuine about that - it was like he had succumbed to wishful thinking and had started to swallow his own propaganda.  In reality, Alba were firmly stuck on 2% and were making no progress towards winning list seats whatsoever.  I pointed that out more than once on the Alba NEC - it was a thoroughly unwelcome and unwanted message, but I pointed it out just the same.  

Perhaps Mr Faulds is going back to way before that and is referring to what I said about Alba's prospects before the 2021 Holyrood election even took place.  But at that point there were numerous Panelbase polls suggesting Alba were on course to win list seats, and as I do not actually possess psychic abilities I had no way of knowing that the Panelbase panel contained far too many Alba supporters and that the numbers were therefore misleadingly inflated.  If Mr Faulds does possess psychic abilities, I salute him, but there's not much I can do about being inferior to him in that unusual respect.  In fact, I distinctly remember pointing out to someone just after the 2021 election that I had made three or four predictions about the result, and all of them had proved to be accurate apart from the one about Alba, "and I never actually claimed to be Nostradamus".  It would be interesting to go back over all of Mr Faulds' past election predictions and see if his own 'strike rate' is any better - and I do mean all of the predictions, not just the ones he cherrypicks with the benefit of hindsight.

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My latest two constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith and Edinburgh North Western.

"Alliance to Liberate Scotland" angrily defend their pact with the far-right - but their excuses simply don't make any sense

Later in this video, I also give my thoughts on the extraordinary but somehow totally unsurprising news that the self-styled 'independence ultra' Chris McEleny, who expelled and drove out so many genuine independence supporters from the Alba Party, tried to defect to the hardline anti-independence party Reform UK - but was rebuffed!

 

My latest constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Eastern, Musselburgh & Tranent.

Revealed: the far-right have almost totally taken over the "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" fringe party in the Highlands & Islands region

I said in my video about the far-right elements of Barrhead Boy's new fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "the Atlas") that I had spotted at least two of the party's candidates as being from the far-right Sovereignty.  But I knew that would be an underestimate, so I've now checked and it appears that a grand total of six of the party's thirty-nine candidates are from Sovereignty.  That's close to one-sixth of the total, and presumably it would have been an even higher proportion if it hadn't been for the last-minute influx of ex-Alba candidates.

The six far-right candidates are:

Alan McManus (Central Scotland & Lothians West)

Brian Nugent (Highlands & Islands)

Andrew MacDonald (Highlands & Islands)

Flora Badger (Highlands & Islands)

Kenneth MacKenzie (Highlands & Islands)

Laurie Moffat (Mid-Scotland & Fife)

As you can see, there's a particular concentration in the Highlands & Islands, where Barrhead Boy seems to have handed over the party organisation lock, stock and barrel to the far-right.  Four of the six Atlas candidates in the Highlands & Islands are from Sovereignty, including all of the top three on the list.  However, the two far-right candidates standing elsewhere in Scotland are also extremely prominent on their respective lists.  Laurie Moffat is number 2 candidate on the Mid-Scotland & Fife list, the region where Eva Comrie is number 1 (which makes me repeat my perpetual question: what on earth is Eva doing?).  And Alan McManus, who has been exposed in recent days as a regular speaker at the far-right rallies organised by arch-unionist and holocaust denier Alistair McConnachie, is number 2 in Central Scotland.

Again, all I can do is urge you to avoid Alliance to Liberate Scotland like the plague if you care about the cause of independence.  We simply cannot afford to allow our movement to become associated, even at the fringes, with these neo-fascists - it would undo the good work of decades.  Stick with the mainstream pro-indy options on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.

Incidentally, on a more nerdish point, it looks like five of the six far-right candidates will be standing under the Sovereignty banner on the constituency ballot, and the Alliance to Liberate Scotland banner on the list ballot.  That means, to state the obvious, that people will be standing for two different parties in the same election, which brings to life as never before the danger Michael Ancram identified during the passing of the Scotland Act 1998 of "alter ego" parties standing on the two different ballots to try to cheat the system.  However, as this is all happening completely openly, and as Atlas seem to have declared their intentions to the Electoral Commission, presumably a ruling must have been made on whether any hypothetical Sovereignty constituency wins would count against Atlas when the d'Hondt calculation is done to distribute list seats.  If anyone knows for sure what the position is, please let me know.

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My two latest constituency profiles for The National are Eastwood and Edinburgh Central.