Drama as controversial blogger Stuart Campbell denounces his own regular pollster as a "fringe polling company" - has there been some behind-the-scenes falling-out, or is this just shameless hypocrisy to cover up his own embarrassment about a dodgy prediction? My guess is the latter...

Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell has a long and storied history of making bold political predictions which prove to be completely wrong, and then retrospectively coming up with excruciatingly convoluted explanations for why those don't actually count as incorrect predictions.  Often the explanations are along the lines of "obviously I would have been proved right if Completely Unforeseeable Factor X hadn't occurred" - that was why, for example, we're apparently obliged not to take any account of his announcement in spring 2023 that Humza Yousaf was definitely going to lose the SNP leadership election.  (Yousaf actually narrowly won by 52.1% to 47.9% in the second round.)

With almost exquisite timing, Campbell declared on 3rd December 2024 that - 

"We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

Within less than a week, a Norstat poll had appeared showing the SNP and Greens on course to retain the pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election.  And before the end of the month, there was another poll from Find Out Now showing not merely a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, but just as big a majority as the one that was secured at the 2021 election.  Of course none of this means that there will definitely be a pro-indy majority after May 2026, but what it does mean is that any claim that such a majority is "impossible" is left looking incredibly silly and obviously wrong.

It's been a long wait to find out how Campbell intended to talk himself out of this one, and when the moment came it didn't disappoint.  In fact, this excuse is an absolute belter, perhaps the all-time classic of the genre - 

"A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government."

Yeah, you're way ahead of me here - the problem is that one of the two pollsters Campbell is dismissing as "fringe polling companies" is Norstat, which just happens to be a rebranded continuation of Panelbase, Campbell's own preferred polling company.  Indeed, not just "preferred" - Panelbase / Norstat is to the best of my recollection the only polling company Campbell has ever used.  He's commissioned a very large number of polls from them, certainly well into double figures, going all the way back to before the independence referendum in 2014.

This raises a few obvious questions for Campbell - 

1) If Norstat / Panelbase are a "fringe" company, why did you keep using them?

2) Why did you never commission polls from "non-fringe" companies?

3) If polling results from so-called "fringe" companies are suspect, does this mean that the results of all your own polls down the years are essentially worthless?

4) Does the 'worthless polls' designation extend in particular to the results of your propaganda poll questions about, among other things, gender identity politics and Kezia Dugdale's role at the John Smith Centre?  

To be clear, the vast majority of Scot Goes Pop's polls over the years have also been Panelbase polls (the only exceptions were one Survation poll in 2021 and one Find Out Now poll in 2023) and I've always thought they are an absolutely excellent company.  Campbell has repeatedly expressed the same view, so I've no idea why he has had this sudden and total change of heart - unless of course he's got some intense personal embarrassment he needs to hurriedly cover up.  Yes, come to think of it, that would probably explain it quite neatly.

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