Here I am, Stew-ck in the middle with you

He's controversial.  He's increasingly far-right.  And he's in Somerset.  Yes, you've guessed it, it's our old friend "Stew".  

I was duly tickled yesterday when three of his most devoted groupies left comments on this blog (although I suspect at least one of them was the great man himself doing a spot of astroturfing - something he's openly confessed to in the past).  The narrative they were trying to weave was the familiar one  of "how can he be stalking you, he barely even mentions you, James! Two words on Twitter per decade at most!" I mean, come on, chaps, even you must have enough self-awareness to realise you couldn't have chosen a worse moment to trot out that schtick.  Last week Stew posted a single furious tweet about me that was full article length and contained several hundred words - something that's only even possible if you pay Elon Musk a whopping subscription every month.  Mere mortals are stuck with a tight character limit.  Within the last 24 hours, Stew has been so incensed by my reply to his abusive language yesterday morning that he's pumped out several more tweets and has even left multiple comments on this blog under his own name (see the previous thread).  Whatever else might be said about him, it's an objective fact that this guy is not Mr Olympian Disinterest.  He in fact devotes a considerable amount of time and energy to his relentless stalking operation, which is driven by raw anger, bitterness, and arguably hatred.

For the avoidance of doubt, that's not something I welcome, but his apparent continued optimism - even after all this time - that he can somehow gaslight me into responding with respectful silence to his endless torrent of lies and foul-mouthed abuse is, I'm afraid, catastrophically ill-founded.  Like the proverbial forgetful goldfish, that seems to be a lesson he'll just have to learn over and over and over again.  You'd think by now the penny would at least have dropped that the "I don't stalk you, you stalk me" gaslighting had failed forever as soon as he jumped the shark by installing the little shrine to me in the sidebar of Wings Over Scotland (see screenshot below), but I suppose he's willfully stuck in an echo chamber and he can't exactly rely on his devotees to give him honest feedback these days.  

Does he think people who are stalked tend to set up little online shrines to their stalkers, rather than the other way around?  Perhaps he genuinely does think that.  Perhaps it all makes sense in the Stew mind.

A creepy dude.

Anyway, let's get to the substance of his prolonged complaints about me on Twitter earlier today - which as per usual didn't mention me by name, but referenced me only by implication and by screenshot.  This is of course an ongoing and deliberate tactic so he can "prove" to his disciples at a later date that he's not stalking me by inviting them to search his Twitter account - but only for tweets actually containing my name.

Hilariously, that "pretty darn flat red line" does not actually appear in the What Scotland Thinks site.  Stew has superimposed it himself!  You couldn't make this stuff up...oh wait, he already has.

But none of this is actually the point.  He's frantically trying to evade the fact that the lies I identified from him about polling were specific and not generalised.  Those lies were: a) that Yes support was in the high 40s in May 2025, when an average of the two polls that month actually showed Yes on around 51% or 52%, and b) that Yes support was at around 25% in 2007, when in fact no binary-choice independence poll published at any time in the 21st century has shown Yes support anything like that low after the exclusion of Don't Knows.

As I've already said to him directly, if he would simply admit to those lies and to the sheer cynicism with which he so casually and repeatedly misleads his readers, it would then be possible to have a fact-based discussion about independence polling trends over the last two decades.  But that discussion would inevitably have to start with the elephant in the room, namely the massive methodological change that polling companies introduced immediately after the referendum in September 2014.  They recognised that polls during the campaign had systemically overestimated Yes support by around three or four percentage points, so they corrected for that by bringing in weighting by recalled referendum vote.

That means pre-referendum polls and post-referendum polls are simply not comparable.  A post-referendum Yes showing of 50% is roughly equivalent to a pre-referendum poll showing Yes on 53% or 54%.  In other words, the comparison Stew is drawing is a bogus one that disguises the extent of the real increase in Yes support that has occurred.

Furthermore, most of the polling companies have stubbornly persevered with weighting by recalled 2014 vote for longer than is really sensible, and that's increasing the risk of false recall and of artificially skewed results.  It's possible - and I only say possible - that a present-day poll weighted by 2014 vote and showing Yes on 50% is equivalent to a pre-referendum poll showing Yes on well *over* 54%.

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