SCOT goes POP!
A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - one of Scotland's three most-read political blogs.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Reform UK double their GB-wide lead and hit a new all-time record high vote share in YouGov poll - but SNP retain double-digit lead in the Scottish subsample
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
This is, apparently, not a practical joke - Chris McEleny is genuinely standing for depute leader of the Alba Party while still under suspension for "gross misconduct". This is the sort of thing that happens to political parties when they are disintegrating.
If Alba are going back to begging for "tactical" votes, the basic arithmetic of the situation is going to make it very hard to convince people
The Alba Party's suspended General Secretary broke his radio silence on Twitter at the weekend.
SNP on course to win 3/4 of constituencies. This means touch & go for pro indy majority as SNP list votes won’t deliver seats. Meanwhile Alba remain within touching distance of a breakthrough - if SNP voters back Alba on the list it guarantees keeping unionists out of Bute House. https://t.co/eMJpgr2fcz
— Christopher McEleny (@ChrisMcEleny) February 15, 2025
"if SNP voters back Alba on the list"
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 16, 2025
Oh, if "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans. What matters is that at the moment almost every poll is projecting Alba on zero seats, so it's actually Alba list votes that are wasted. https://t.co/qYJhI7mHQy
First of all, of course, there's the little psychodrama here of why McEleny has suddenly started posting supportive tweets about Alba when he appears to be firmly on his way out of the party, unless his ally Ash Regan pulls off a major surprise in the leadership election. I suppose it's possible that the MacAskill leadership might shy away from expelling McEleny from the party altogether simply due to his apparent closeness to Alex Salmond (the "telepathic link" and all that) - it would look like they were questioning Mr Salmond's judgement. However, it does seem practically certain that McEleny's removal as General Secretary will be upheld on the grounds of "gross misconduct" - and if you find someone guilty of gross misconduct in 2025 you can hardly run them as a Holyrood list candidate in 2026. My guess is that if McEleny is left with no role in the party, and has no means of using the party as a vehicle for his ambitions to become an MSP, he'll leave voluntarily.
But let's take his tweet about the 2026 election at face value. It suggests that Alba are in a right old strategic muddle, because it implies that once again they will not be trying to win votes in the normal way by persuading voters that they are the best party, and will instead be begging for votes on a tactical basis. OK, it's perfectly understandable that they don't think pitching themselves as the best party is a viable option, given all of the very public in-fighting, and the McCarthyite purges, and the deeply unattractive personalities at the top, and the half-baked policy platform. (Even though I was an elected member of the Alba NEC for a year, I still don't have a scooby whether the party wants to rejoin the EU or not - all you ever hear is the holding position about joining EFTA for the time being.)
But if you're going to pitch for tactical votes on the list, you have to do that coherently. You can't say to voters that they need to vote for different parties on the constituency ballot and the list ballot, and then announce that in some areas you're standing on both the constituency and the list and want votes for both. As I've mentioned before, I heard McEleny suggest as recently as August that the plan was to stand in at least eight constituency seats, and I've since discovered that others have heard him say exactly the same thing on other occasions.
And even if it wasn't for that hopeless incoherence, the raw arithmetic just doesn't support Alba's pitch for tactical votes anyway. Here is the seats projection from the new Norstat poll broken down into constituency and list seats -
Constituency seats:
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Natty Norstat poll is yet another to show the SNP and Greens on course to retain the PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY at Holyrood - with Labour on the brink of being overtaken by Reform
I was just about to give you the full figures from tonight's new Norstat poll, but the archived page I was relying on has stopped working (probably temporarily). What I can tell you for now from memory is that the poll shows the SNP and Greens on course to retain a narrow pro-independence majority at Holyrood, with 65 seats between them, and unionist parties on 64. Labour and the Tories are both dangerously close to being overtaken by Reform - they are on 18 seats apiece and Reform are on 15.
Once again, Alba are not projected to win any seats, and their list vote share has dropped by one point.
The independence question shows an exact 50-50 tie.
I'll update this post once I find the full numbers.
UPDATE: Here are the figures...
Reform's Scottish votes are coming from unionist parties to a much greater extent than from the SNP
Friday, February 14, 2025
ALBA CLUEDO, THE SEQUEL: So who did it to Tasmina, with the mobile phone, in the Balkan country? Who could *possibly* have a strong enough motive to want to end her political career with a damaging leak? Investigators narrow it down to a list of 6572 prime suspects.
Strange happenings on Twechar Beach as Labour flatline but still make a by-election gain
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Nigel Farage on course for Downing Street as cataclysmic Find Out Now poll sees Reform move into record-breaking six point lead
Second YouGov poll in a row shows Reform ahead - with an enormous SNP lead in the Scottish subsample
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Alba members have finally been sent the report of the Constitution Review Group - this may be your one and only chance to seize democratic control over your own party, and please pay special attention to the vital need to democratise the Conference Committee in particular
I went to my first SNP branch meeting tonight since rejoining the party, and while no political party will ever be perfect, it was something of a relief to symbolically 'turn the page' on my horrific experience in Alba. Ironically, while I was sitting in the meeting, it looks like Alba members were at long last being sent the recommendations of the Constitution Review Group, which I was an elected member of until September - a fact that ultimately led to my ejection from Alba due to me pushing 'too hard' for internal democratisation. So although I no longer have any stake in what happens in Alba, I was obviously very curious tonight to see the document and to discover whether it bore any resemblance to what was agreed at the final meeting of the group before McEleny suspended me out of the blue. I'm grateful to the Alba member (for obvious reasons I won't name her but she knows who she is!) who sent the document to me.
First thoughts: bravo to Mike Baldry. He was the one remaining pro-reform member of the group after I was removed, and it looks like he's somehow held the line and kept what was agreed last spring more or less intact. I should also give some grudging credit to the group's anti-reform chair Hamish Vernal, who doesn't appear to have exploited my removal as an excuse to water the document down.
What that means essentially is that where the group was not unanimous or almost unanimous, both the majority and minority positions have been presented in the document for Alba members to consider and choose between. So that in theory opens up an opportunity for Alba members, if they wish, to decide that the elected members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), the Conference Committee, the Conduct Committee, the Appeals Committee, and the Finance & Audit Committee, should be directly elected by all party members on a one member, one vote basis - as opposed to the current set-up where only a tiny minority of members get to vote. There are also options presented (sort of) for the Party Chair to become a de facto elected position by being reserved for one of the two people who finish top of the male and female ballots for Ordinary NEC members, and for an expansion in the number of Ordinary NEC members from eight to twelve, thus allowing for a greater range of voices to be heard. The leadership will presumably lean extremely hard on the rank-and-file membership to reject those options, and of course one of the paradoxes of so many members having left in disgust is that the people who are still left in the party are disproportionately likely to be leadership cheerleaders. But go on, Alba members - prove me wrong, and reclaim democratic control of your own party. It may well be the only chance you'll ever get to do that, and if you don't take it, you may be dooming the party forever (whether the leadership realise that or not).
People who support one member, one vote for NEC elections sometimes used to say to me that they worried it might somehow be 'overkill' to extend that to the other national committees. If you're one of those people, I really do urge you to think again, because the Conference Committee is in practice far more powerful than the NEC. Alba members theoretically control the party's policy and strategy via the national conference - but that theory is utterly meaningless if they don't also control the national conference's agenda, and they can only do that if they directly elect the Conference Committee. Although the Conference Committee is the only national committee I was never a member of, I've heard reports from those who were members, and they all agree that in its current form it's a one-woman Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh dictatorship. She insists on "consensus decisions", which in practice means the committee is required to agree to whatever she wants without a vote.
Famously (and to Daniel Jack's displeasure I brought this incident up in the Constitution Review Group), Tasmina responded to a proposal that national conference should consider the introduction of a policy development committee by bellowing "THAT'S A BIG NO FROM ME!!!!", which apparently was supposed to be the end of the matter. Good luck, Alba members, in trying to democratically control your own party unless you transform the Conference Committee from a Tas dictatorship into a directly-elected body.
The case for the Conduct and Appeals Committees to be elected by one member, one vote is pretty straightforward - it's not fair for any party member to be expelled or suspended unless they've had an opportunity to elect the bodies making that decision. I suppose I would concede it may not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in principle I do think it should be.
I'm slightly disturbed by one of the documents that has been distributed along with the main report, which appears to set out proposed revisions of how the Disciplinary Committee should operate. I'm not totally sure whether that originates from the Constitution Review Group itself or from somewhere else, but amazingly it makes an already bad situation even worse in some respects. It limits the 'defendant' in any disciplinary case to just five minutes for an oral presentation, and it also limits each committee member to "approximately" just two questions. As you may remember, I was only permitted to be present at my own disciplinary hearing for twelve minutes, and a big part of the reason for that is the leadership loyalists on the committee had very obviously been instructed not to ask me any questions at all in case it gave me ammunition. So only one person was interested in asking me questions, and if that person had been restricted to only two questions, I'd have been there for an even shorter period than twelve minutes.
It hardly seemed possible that such an awful disciplinary procedure could be made even worse, but they seem to be managing it somehow.