The controversial far-right blogger "Stew" has done yet another of his tweets about me without mentioning me by name - he does this regularly so that he can later do his schtick of "look! search for his name on my Twitter or blog! not there is it? I never even mention the guy!" This time it's a pair of 'before' and 'after' screenshots, which purports to show me contradicting myself, and is interspersed with a photo of a certain Ba'athist propagandist to imply that the alleged contradiction is in the service of pro-SNP propaganda. That's quite a heroic implication on Stew's part, because the first screenshot in fact shows me openly criticising the chosen strategy of the SNP leadership - scarcely something that a real propagandist would do. However, let's take a look at the two quotes and see if Stew's point is as weak as it first appears.
19th August 2025:
"So the SNP remain the only game in town, and we just have to work from within to try to improve the situation somehow. If the rebel motion doesn't make the conference floor, the next best outcome is to radically amend the Swinney motion so that it closely resembles the rebel motion. If that's not possible, the next best outcome is to defeat the Swinney motion altogether. And if it's not realistic to do that, the very least that needs to happen is for the motion to be amended to remove the most harmful stuff from it. As I've said before, no plan at all would almost be better than the Swinney plan, which would leave us in a worse place than ever before by setting a precedent of the SNP going into an election essentially agreeing with the UK government that no referendum should occur until some sort of ludicrously unattainable threshold is reached. That could make it impossible to achieve independence for literally decades to come. The voting system simply isn't designed to produce single-party majorities."
Today:
"The way the SNP have recovered from this event has been truly remarkable. Our old friend Stew is trying to make out it has left the independence movement a "broken shell", which he obviously wants to be true, but the events of the last few weeks tell a completely different story. The SNP leadership under John Swinney have restored the trust of party members sufficiently that the pre-election fundraiser succeeded beyond all expectations - and make no mistake, without that restored trust and without the funds that flowed from it, we wouldn't be sitting here now with the highest number of pro-independence MSPs in history. Once we get past the negative headlines of today, which unfortunately we've known were coming for a long time, both the SNP and the wider independence movement will actually be in pretty good shape."
Those two comments are clearly about different subjects - they're not totally unrelated to each other but they're not about the same thing. I don't see how anyone can possibly interpret today's comment as meaning that the single-party majority strategy worked or that it has put the independence movement in a better place - that's not something I believe, and I've unambiguously said in at least two of my videos since election day that the strategy was an "unforced error". What I was talking about today was instead the way in which John Swinney has rebuilt trust with SNP members to the point that they are willing to take a leap of faith and donate substantial money to the party in spite of what happened with Peter Murrell - and I pointed out that without that process of gaining trust, the SNP wouldn't have been so successful in the election because they simply wouldn't have had the funds to compete. What does Stew think that's got to do with the single-party majority strategy? Answers on a postcard, folks, and send them to Bath.
It's quite true, however, that I'm hopeful that the majority strategy may not prove to have been as harmful as I feared last summer and autumn, and that's mainly because of the remedial work that John Swinney and other senior SNP figures have done since polling day by stressing that the combined SNP-Green majority is more than enough to constitute a mandate. I didn't necessarily expect them to be quite as proactive if these circumstances arose, and it's made all the difference.
I do want to express my admiration for Stew, though, because not many people would be brave enough to voluntarily bring a Ba'athist propagandist into the conversation (especially if they actually live in Bath) when only a month ago they were telling anyone who would listen that "Angus Robertson to win Edinburgh Central is FREE MONEY", only to then begin their first blogpost after Mr Robertson's defeat with the line "well, we told you so". There was also that unfortunate incident of announcing there was no chance of a pro-independence Holyrood majority in this year's election ("barring nuclear war or alien invasion"), followed by an announcement that a single-party SNP majority was a nailed-on certainty, followed by the unintentional comic genius of "well, we told you so" when neither of those hopelessly contradictory predictions actually came true. Being as wrong as that takes considerable talent, and it's why Stew is a national treasure in his own quasi-fascist sort of way.
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