Friday, June 19, 2026

SNP settle for one by-election win out of two - but Keir Starmer will only be settling for a taxi

By-election analysis

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at The National analysing last night's three by-election results, which you can read HERE.  I'll try to make a video later on as well, although having stayed up most of the night, I'm a bit groggy-eyed at the moment.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Burnham still in the danger zone in Makerfield by-election, say two out of the three most recent polls


Monday, June 8, 2026

The Scot Goes Popcast is now available on Apple Podcasts

I hope this will be of some use to someone, because it's taken me days of torture to get to this point.  Apple may be one of the largest companies in the world, but its website is a baffling, bug-ridden mess.  Five long years after my first failed attempt, I finally seem to have navigated all of the exotic obstacles and got the Scot Goes Popcast onto Apple Podcasts, and you can find it HERE.  And before anyone asks, it's already on Spotify and has been since 2021.  It suddenly seems to be on quite a few other podcast platforms as well, although in most cases I'm not entirely sure that was my own doing.

Just to be clear about what the Popcast actually is, it's basically audio versions of some of my YouTube videos from the last year or so (not all of them), plus the back catalogue from 2021-22 when I was making a conventional podcast intended primarily for audio, although I later stuck the majority of the episodes on YouTube anyway.  In most of those, I was interviewing guests, including the likes of Tim Rideout, Alex Salmond and Len Pennie.  

Bear in mind that in contrast to the YouTube videos, I will not be receiving any passive advertising revenues from the audio-only uploads, so putting the Popcast on Apple could in a sense end up being harmful if it diverts any traffic away from my YouTube channel.  So if you'd like to help keep the content I produce sustainable, just a reminder that I now have a Ko-Fi page, where you can either set up a small recurring monthly subscription, or make a one-off donation.  

Thank you to the several people who urged me to keep trying with Apple - it would have been annoying to be defeated by the glitches.

Saturday, June 6, 2026

An examination of the latest Hullaba-Stew

Never one to resist an exercise in utter futility, the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger has attempted to resuscitate a correspondence with the Chief Constable and the Crown Office that has clearly already been closed.  What is perhaps more disturbing is that he has issued a fairly clear threat to get his readers and their money directly involved in the futility by crowdfunding a judicial review bid - which would likely be a repeat of the "Wings Of Justice" calamity when Stew's readers were coaxed into chucking eye-watering amounts of cash down a bottomless pit in pursuit of a hopeless vanity-driven defamation case against Kezia Dugdale.  That said, it was for the most part good independence supporters who had their money wasted on the Dugdale case, whereas the dwindling ranks of Stew Devotees that remain now are far more likely to be neo-unionists and soft fascists, so perhaps it won't be quite so harmful this time if tens of thousands of pounds are sucked into the black hole of Loyalty To The Great One.

You don't actually need to be any sort of legal expert to understand why Stew is completely wasting his time here - just elementary logic and basic common sense is enough to tell you that he's arguing on an obviously false premise.  He claims that it is "chronologically impossible" for the police to have already investigated the implications of John Swinney's recent statement about how the ringfenced indyref funds were spent, because Operation Branchform concluded before that statement was made.  But here's the thing - it's absolutely *not* "chronologically impossible", indeed it's overwhelmingly likely, that either Mr Swinney or others of seniority within the SNP will have earlier made an identical statement in private to the police.  Of course the police will have asked where the money went, and of course that question will have been answered.  If that answer was investigated to the police's satisfaction, there plainly doesn't need to be a repeat of the investigation simply because Mr Swinney has repeated the answer in public.

Why would the police have been satisfied with the answer?  Probably because it touches on such a grey area.  If you fundraise for an independence referendum, is it reasonable to spend some of that money by doing preliminary/preparatory campaigning for independence years in advance of any referendum being called?  It might well be, but that's in the eye of the beholder.  It's not clear-cut.  The question the police may have been asking themselves is whether a court could be sure that any reasonable person would definitely take the opposite view, and of course that certainty was never going to be there.

For what it's worth, my own personal view is that Mr Swinney would have been better advised to answer the question about the funds by saying that all of the relevant decisions were made by the previous leadership and that it wasn't for him to second-guess them - all he could answer to was the current financial situation and how funds would be spent from now on.  He didn't need to assume responsibility for decisions he didn't actually take - but even having done that, I don't think it's going to do much long-term harm to either himself or the SNP, because it looks increasingly unlikely that any legal complications will occur.

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