SNP win the first preference vote in the Cromarty Firth by-election, but miss out after transfers

There were two by-elections in the Highlands yesterday, both of which were counted today.  And while there is nowhere in Scotland more fascinating in geographical terms than the Isle of Skye, I think politically the Cromarty Firth by-election was probably the more interesting of the two, so I'll start with that.  When I sat down to write this post, nobody had yet transcribed the result or calculated the percentages, so I've gone old school and calculated them myself manually from the video of the announcement.  Hopefully I haven't made any mistakes...

Cromarty Firth by-election result on first preferences (19th June 2025):

SNP 23.8% (-5.3)
Independent - Cross 20.1% (n/a)
Independent - Rattray 15.4% (n/a)
Reform UK 14.6% (n/a)
Liberal Democrats 12.2% (-15.7)
Greens 3.9% (+1.0)
Alba 3.8% (n/a)
Labour 3.2% (-1.0)
Conservatives 2.0% (-4.7)

The percentage changes above are measured from the 2022 local elections, rather than from the previous by-election in the same ward last year.  The SNP vote has held up pretty well, bearing in mind that in 2022 Nicola Sturgeon was still in her pomp and her party was still polling in the mid-to-high 40s in opinion polls.  Normally a 3.7 point lead on first preferences would be enough to be transfer-proof and to seal the victory, but probably a lot of unionist voters got through all the independent candidates before they 'boaked', allowing Mr Cross to sneak home from second place.  

Alba, as we know, clutch to absolutely any straws they can find in any and every situation (now that McEleny has been expelled it'll probably be HQ's resident wonderbairn Robert Reid doing the clutching, albeit from behind the curtain of anonymity), so they'll undoubtedly crow about finishing ahead of both Labour and the Tories.  But in context I don't think this is a great result for Alba.  They had a high-profile candidate in Steve Chisholm, who is well known for his championing of freeports, which obviously has a special relevance in the Cromarty Firth area.  Yet even with that USP he still didn't break the 5% barrier.  That said, of course, a lot of actual Alba members absolutely loathe and despise Chisholm's stance on freeports and believe it is contrary to the democratic wishes of the party rank-and-file, so maybe his candidacy was a double-edged sword.

The slump in Lib Dem support is surprising given that they did well in Skye, but perhaps it can be put down in part to the loss of any personal vote for Molly Nolan, who was on the ballot for them in 2022.

Obviously the Highlands aren't a Labour-SNP battleground area, so the swing between those two parties is less meaningful than it would be in the central belt or parts of the north-east.  But for what little it's worth, there was a nominal swing from SNP to Labour of just over 2%, which if extrapolated to the whole country is consistent with a Scotland-wide SNP lead of around eight percentage points over Labour.

More to follow...

The cause of Palestine is the cause of humanity - and it is therefore inseparable from the Scottish independence movement

I've been meaning for weeks to comment in more detail on former Alba man Neil Sinclair's claim that vocal opponents of the Gaza genocide are 'piggy-backing' their cause onto the independence movement, and that Yessers must 'protect' the movement at all costs by silencing all views about Gaza or at least putting them into a sort of sealed antechamber where they cannot contaminate the drive for independence.  There's a paradox here, of course, because Neil also demanded that Gordon Millar's "Sacred Comment" defending and 'contextualing' the genocidal views of the Israeli civilian population must be published in full on this pro-independence blog, and he denounced my earlier deletion of it as "censorship".

So why wasn't he logically consistent by applauding my refusal to allow Millar to contaminate this pro-independence space with a pro-Israel agenda and frankly repugnant apologism for genocide?  There was something really rather comical about the way that Neil initially broached the subject on his private chat group for former and disillusioned Alba members.  He grandly announced out of the blue that we were going to have to discuss the issue of "censorship" and that on this occasion it just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine.  As several people instantly pointed out in a state of some bewilderment, whenever anyone else had wanted to make comments that just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine, Neil had always been extremely quick to invite them to either shut up about it or to take it elsewhere.  But perhaps it's different when it's a mate of Neil who wants the freedom to express views on Israel/Palestine and to do it in the pro-independence space of his choice?  Perhaps it's different when Neil himself has strong private sympathy with the specific views on Israel/Palestine that are being piggybacked onto the independence cause?  Or perhaps it's because he saw Millar's 'contextualising' of genocide (essentially saying that Palestinians are undesirable troublemakers who 'nobody wants') as just 'regrettable statements of fact' that need to be introduced into the pro-independence space to 'help people to understand' why it is so terribly important to silence or banish all other expressions of views about the subject?

Openly expressed anti-genocide views might, for example, offend the many independence supporters who are supposedly pro-Israel and pro...well, pro-genocide, not to put too fine a point on it, or who at least, like Stuart "Stew" Campbell, think there are overwhelmingly strong arguments against taking any sort of principled stance about the mass extermination of an ethnic group.  Above all else, it might prevent us from immersing ourselves totally into the 24/7 crusade against women with beards, and we can't be having that, can we? It was interesting that after I called Neil out publicly on his hypocrisy, his main cheerleader kept saying to me "Neil and I don't like the genocide and we've criticised Israel's actions on occasion, but..."  The operative word is always 'but', isn't it?

I can see absolutely no evidence to support Neil's fantastical claims of entryism of anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian activists into the independence movement or into specific pro-independence parties.  There would scarcely need to be any entryism, because the anti-genocide cause is the cause of literally millions of people in this country, and those people can therefore entirely naturally be found in huge numbers in all walks of life and in all organisations.  And there's an especially strong affinity between independence supporters and the Palestinian cause, for the obvious reason that it touches on issues of self-determination and domination by a more powerful neighbour.  If Palestinian flags were ever to be banned from pro-independence marches, as Neil Sinclair and his ilk demand, many Yessers who have been devoted to the goal of independence for years or decades would feel hurt and confused.  They'd think the movement had lost its heart, its soul, its humanity, that it had been turned into a sterile, soulless environment by dictatorial headmaster types with no moral compass or even common sense.  They might start walking away from the movement in their droves, and for what?  To protect the sensibilities of the supposed hordes of 'silent' pro-indy folk who are disgusted by Palestinian flags, either because they think the genocide is cool, or because they think the arguments for and against the genocide are far too complex to grapple with?  Well, where exactly are these people?  Where are they hiding?  Frankly I think there are about twelve of them, and they're all helpfully closeted off in Neil Sinclair's chat group or the Wings Over Scotland comments section.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Israeli sympathisers on the Sinclair chat group informed me on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest that the twelve points awarded to Israel by the "UK public" was indicative that there was a silent pro-Israel majority out there, or a silent majority that doesn't care at all for the Palestinians.  I pointed out that there was massive evidence that the vote had been manipulated on an industrial scale by the State of Israel and by sympathetic actors, and that it hadn't been at all hard to do given that each phone number or payment card could vote up to twenty times for the same song.  With the overall vote split between 25 different countries, it didn't take all that many sets of twenty votes to push Israel into the 'douze points' position.  There were even some people boasting on social media that they had managed to vote EIGHTY times for Israel because they had payment cards registered in four different jurisdictions.  

But these points were met with sneering incredulity: "Don't you think, James (snigger) that it's just a tad more likely that these were just ordinary British people voting for their favourite song, as they do every year?"  No, I replied, it was far more likely that the State of Israel has engaged in massive manipulation of the vote, partly because of the evidence I had already identified, and also partly because the Israeli song was pretty bland and clearly wouldn't have topped a public vote on its own merits.  And with impeccable timing, a Find Out Now poll conducted among a demographically representative sample of UK viewers of the contest was published only a day or two later, setting out exactly what would have happened if British people had just voted for their favourite song and if there had been no Israeli manipulation of the vote - 

Find Out Now poll, 18th May 2025:

Of the following countries, whose performance did you particularly like?  Please select any that apply.  (UK excluded from below numbers, because British viewers couldn't vote for the UK in the contest itself.)

1) Sweden: 28%

2) Estonia: 19%

3) Austria: 18%

4) Malta: 15%

5) Iceland: 14%

6) Spain: 12%

=) Latvia: 12%

=) Finland: 12%

9) Italy: 11%

=) Israel: 11%

11) Luxembourg: 10%

=) Switzerland: 10%

=) Germany: 10%

14) Denmark: 9%

=) Netherlands: 9% 

16) France: 7%

=) Armenia: 7%

18) Norway: 6%

=) Greece: 6%

20) San Marino: 5%

=) Lithuania: 5%

22) Ukraine: 4%

23) Portugal: 3%

=) Poland: 3%

25) Albania: 2%

So, as I suspected, there would have been no humiliation for Israel if the vote hadn't been manipulated, but it would have been no better than the upper end of mid-table respectability for them.

The irony is that the whole reason that Israel went to such lengths to manipulate the vote was to mess with people's heads and to try to get them to say things like "uh-oh, maybe we'd better disassociate our political cause from the Palestinians, it looks like we've misread the public mood".  It is nothing short of astounding how easy it was for Israel to deceive some members of Neil's chat group into precisely the desired response - but, then, that was because the fictional version of the British and Scottish public that Israel was presenting them with was one that they desperately wanted to believe in.

I'm told that The National is getting good traffic from focusing so hard on Palestine, although "good traffic" for The National is of course a relative term. pic.twitter.com/wQJ2DSvjLm

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 10, 2025

"Relative" is an interesting choice of word, because here is a direct comparison from Stew's very favourite traffic comparison site SimilarWeb:

Estimated total visits in the 28 days up to 16th June 2025:

The National: 2,079,000

Wings Over Scotland: 242,808 

Looked at that way, The National's anti-genocide stance appears to be almost ten times more popular than Stew's "both sidesing" moral bankruptcy.  I know some will argue that it's unfair to directly compare traffic for a newspaper website to traffic for a mere blog, but who are we to argue with Stew's long-standing delusions of grandeur?  Perhaps of more significance is the comparison between The National and their own direct competitors such as The Herald and The Scotsman.  The Herald are not all that far ahead on around 2,700,000 visits, while The Scotsman are on around 4,300,000.  In both cases, the differential is less than I would have expected given the perception of The National as a relatively 'small' publication. 

It may well be that The National is gaining significant traction simply by being the only mainstream media outlet in the UK to actually provide a genuine news service on the Gaza issue.  Many people well beyond the borders of Scotland have pointed out that literally nobody else is doing what The National is doing.  That has vastly improved the paper's reputation - and by extension it has enhanced the reputation of the independence movement itself.

Once international organisations and academics are able to access Gaza, the full scale of one of the gravest crimes against humanity since 1945 will become apparent and will be documented in detail.  There will then be a reckoning about the complicity of western governments and western media.  The National, the only pro-independence newspaper in Scotland, will shine like a beacon for having been on the right side of history from day one.  Why anyone in the independence movement could possibly think that is a bad thing is beyond me.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2480, meaning it is 36% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

One subsample to rule them all, and in the brightness grind them

As you probably saw in the comments section of the previous post, yesterday was a red-letter day for the SNP in the latest GB-wide YouGov poll.  They hit 4% of the GB vote, which hardly ever happens, and were above 40% in the Scottish subsample.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 15th-16th June 2025):

Reform UK 27% (-2)

Labour 24% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-)

Greens 10% (-)

SNP 4% (+1)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 41%, Labour 23%, Reform UK 13%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 5%

Although YouGov are unusual in structuring and weighting their Scottish subsamples correctly, the margin of error in any subsample results is still enormous due to the small sample size.  So the SNP are unlikely to really be in the 40s, but this is the second post-Hamilton YouGov subsample in a row to have them with a big lead over Labour, which makes it more likely that they've effectively got away with their defeat in the by-election.  The only real danger of that setback was that it might produce a snowball effect threatening the SNP's national lead, and if that hasn't happened, we may end up looking back on the by-election as a noisy irrelevance.

The Britain-wide figures are consistent with the recent pattern of the gap between Reform and Labour narrowing.  I'd put that down to a combination of Reform's breakthrough in the local elections gradually fading from memory, and Labour winning back a small percentage of lost voters with the U-turn on winter fuel allowance.  Morgan McSweeney may even think this means his masterplan for winning the next general election for Labour is gradually coming together, but I am very sceptical that Labour will be able to win the election if they merely recover to the high 20s or low 30s.  There's always the potential for the right-wing vote to coalesce behind (probably) Reform to defeat Starmer.

*. *. *

It's trite to point out that Somerset's controversial "Stew" blogger often directly contradicts himself, but nevertheless it's startling to see him being brazen enough to do it in back-to-back blogposts.  In his last-but-one post, he blasted John Swinney and Kate Forbes for taking part in the "Scotland 2050" conference because this supposedly implied Scotland would still be part of the UK in 2050.  But when it became clear that Swinney would in fact be using his speech at the conference to say that he envisaged Scotland being independent well before 2050, Stew wrote another post expressing his outrage about that, because it's supposedly 'carrots'.

Whatever anyone may think of John Swinney and his excessive caution, it's fair to say that, as far as his participation in the conference was concerned, he simply couldn't win with Oor Stew.  Anticipating that Scotland will be independent is bad, anticipating that Scotland will not be independent is bad.  Maybe Swinney was supposed to channel his inner Peter A Bell and declare UDI on the podium.  

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the third most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Scot Goes Fundraiser 2025: An Update

Well, I've given Scot Goes Pop readers a good long break from the constant irritating reminders of the fundraiser at the bottom of each blogpost, but I'm now going to have to get back to that grindstone.  The year is almost half over, the fundraiser is still only around one-third of the way towards its target figure, and I'm getting dangerously close to the 'running on empty' scenario once again.  

As I always say, writing Scot Goes Pop is not a full-time job, but it is the equivalent of a very time-consuming part-time job.  To be able to put in that kind of commitment of time requires either a) private means, or b) successful crowdfunders.  And alas, I don't have private means, so the only way the blog can continue is if I hit the annual fundraising target, or at least get pretty close to it.  

It's no secret that this blog has some rather severe detractors who would very much like it to disappear in a puff of smoke - and to that end they pursue the narrative that "nobody reads it" and "nobody funds it".  The irony is that those people are obsessed with traffic comparison sites and know as well as anyone that Scot Goes Pop is the third most read political blog in Scotland - ahead of, for example, Bella Caledonia, Robin McAlpine and John Robertson.  But it's true that SGP's fundraising has lagged behind other sites in recent times - I've raised enough to keep going, but only barely, and it's been a constant struggle from around 2021 onwards.  And it's also true that ultimately "the market" will decide whether SGP is valued enough to remain part of the alternative media eco-system.

I'm sure you know by now what you'll be getting if the fundraiser succeeds - detailed polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective, truly independent political commentary, hopefully the occasional podcast here and there, and if we really start cooking with gas maybe even another poll commission at some point.

If you'd like to donate, the crowdfunder page can be found HERE.

Direct donations can also be made via PayPal.  In some ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on the option you select from the menu.  My PayPal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

I know a small number of people prefer direct bank transfer, so if you'd like to do that, message me at my contact email address and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found in the sidebar of the blog (desktop version of the site only) or on my Twitter and BlueSky profiles.

Last but not least, there must be at least three or four people who have already donated multiple times to this fundraiser, because the same names have cropped up every few weeks.  If you're one of those people, please ignore this post, because I don't want to bankrupt anyone while trying to stay afloat myself!

FAQs on how the SNP might be able to win independence by using their leverage in a hung parliament

About a week ago, I published a blogpost setting out how there may be a 15-25% chance of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster after the next election and being able to use that to win an independence referendum.  As the 15-25% estimate implies, I do not think that's a particularly likely method by which independence can be won, but in circumstances where the SNP leadership have needlessly self-imposed almost impossible thresholds that have to be achieved before any other action towards winning independence can be taken, it may well be that a hung parliament is actually the most plausible remaining hope for progress in the relatively near future.

Even having clearly set out that major caveat, however, it was perhaps inevitable that some people were still going to be triggered by a post suggesting that independence could come about as a result of the SNP negotiating with Westminster parties, rather than by some madcap process involving Barrhead Boy stripping English people who live in Scotland of voting rights, "Liberate Scotland" sweeping to a landslide election victory, and then a grand march to the UN to beg them to decolonise us.  Consequently I received some rather colourful 'feedback', and I thought I'd respond to some of it here...

If using the balance of power at Westminster to win independence is such a wizard idea, why didn't the SNP do that in the 2015-17 parliament when they had 56 MPs?  Hmmm?  Hmmm????

Simple answer: because they didn't hold the balance of power in 2015-17.  There wasn't even a hung parliament during that period.  There was instead a Conservative government with a clear overall majority.  Doh!  Next...

Isn't the Section 30 route to an independence referendum dead?

This is an odd question because I didn't actually mention the Section 30 route at any point.  Because the UK parliament is sovereign, there are two ways in which an independence referendum could happen if the SNP hold the balance of power.  One is the Section 30 route, yes, in which Westminster would delegate powers to the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum.  But the other way is simply Westminster itself directly legislating for a referendum.  The beauty of the latter option is that it means in theory a referendum could happen even if pro-independence parties fall slightly short of a majority in next year's Holyrood election.

But as far as the Section 30 route is concerned, that's only dead just now because the SNP have no leverage to bring it about.  A hung parliament is one of the few situations in which they might regain the necessary leverage.

If independence happened as a result of a Labour-SNP deal to form a government, the SNP seats at Westminster would disappear on independence day and the government would no longer have a majority after that point, so what incentive would there be for Labour to agree to a deal involving an independence referendum?

There are two answers to that.  First of all, Labour might well still think a referendum is winnable for the "No" side.  Secondly, the independence process - not just the referendum but the negotiations that would follow any Yes vote - might well take three years or more, so the SNP seats would remain in place for the bulk of a five-year Westminster parliament.

If the SNP were part of the government at Westminster, wouldn't that mean they'd be negotiating an independence referendum, and a subsequent independence deal, with themselves?

I struggle to see why that would be any sort of problem - it would actually smooth the process considerably.  But no, any governing arrangement between the SNP and Labour would be unlikely to involve the SNP taking up ministerial office in Westminster - it's much more likely to be a confidence-and-supply agreement with the SNP remaining on the opposition benches.  When it seemed possible in the run-up to the 2015 election that the SNP would hold the balance of power, I personally argued that there was no good reason for them not to get involved in a full-blown coalition if it meant holding the position of Secretary of State for Scotland.  But they seemed allergic to the idea at the time and I doubt if anything has changed since then.

But any referendum won by negotiating with Westminster parties would be another non-binding referendum - that's no use!

This objection makes absolutely zero sense.  The only way a referendum can be binding is if Westminster approves that principle in advance, so if that's the kind of referendum you want, you can only get it via negotiations with Westminster. Any informal vote we organise ourselves, regardless of whether it's a referendum or a scheduled election doubling as a de facto referendum, would by definition be non-binding.  Its purpose would simply be to produce a Yes majority that would pile moral pressure on Westminster to come back to the negotiating table.

Didn't the Tories and DUP in combination have a Commons majority of only one seat in 2017?  (This excitingly left-field question comes from a controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset-based blogger, universally known as "Stew".)

No.  They had a nominal majority of six, but to all intents and purposes it was actually thirteen due to Sinn Féin declining to take up their seats.  No idea why you thought it was only one, Stew - you must have been using your wonky abacus again.

Wouldn't the Tories and SNP in combination have had a much more robust majority of 30 seats in 2017?  (This one also comes from "Stew".)

Wonky Abacus Klaxon yet again: the Tories and SNP in combination would have had a majority of 56 seats in 2017.  So what?  The SNP did not hold the balance of power at any point in the 2017-19 parliament, as can be seen from the fact that the Conservative government successfully sustained itself in office even though the SNP consistently voted against it in no confidence votes.  (Although there was an early election in 2019, that only came about because the Tories themselves voted in favour of it.)  But the idea of the SNP trying to win a Yes vote in an independence referendum in the context of them propping up a Tory government at Westminster is certainly an 'interesting' one, Stew.

And as for Stew's hoary old claim that there was a more limited one-off deal to be done, with the SNP agreeing to vote for Theresa May's soft Brexit plan in return for an independence referendum, I've debunked that umpteen times.  May wouldn't have been interested in such a deal because she was a conviction politician on the issue of "Our Precious Union", and she would have known it would be counter-productive anyway - her own backbenchers would have been so outraged by a deal putting the Union in peril that she would have lost far more votes for the soft Brexit plan than she'd have gained.

No, the only way a deal at Westminster will ever result in an independence referendum is if the SNP are able to offer a stable governing majority to a centre-left administration.

Another heavy blow for the Alba Party as popular senior member quits

I've got to be slightly cagey about what I say here, because I've been given permission to reveal some things, but not others, and there's a grey zone in the middle where I'd better tread carefully.  However, what I can tell you is that yet another very senior Alba member has left the party.  For privacy reasons she's asked to be identified as 'Bingo Wings' rather than by her actual name, but I'm sure many of you will know her well - she was a very popular figure within Alba and has had lots of success in the party's internal elections, including in the latest round of elections a few weeks ago.

I asked her why she left, and she gave me a one word answer: "mince".  That's not very specific but it's heartfelt, and many of us will have a fair idea of what she's getting at.  I gather she's been treated extremely badly in recent weeks.

Among those of us who have left Alba or been forced out, there are wildly varying opinions on the way forward - I and a few others have gone back to the SNP, some have joined "Liberate Scotland" (which I think is yet another dead end but they clearly take a different view), and others are just steering clear of party politics altogether for the time being.  But I think the one thing we'd all agree on is that being part of Alba was just a thoroughly unpleasant experience in a way that we could just never have anticipated when it all started in 2021.  What the Alba leadership (which essentially means Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and the people around her) have always wanted from the rank-and-file members is basically just an adoring fan club.  If you're willing to play that role, then you may have a positive experience, but if you have any independent ideas of your own, you'll quickly find yourself in a toxic environment.  There's lots of out-and-out bullying and plenty of passive-aggressive nastiness too.

I know some people will say "that's just politics for you, all parties are the same", but I think that's only true up to a point.  There's an Alba-specific problem here - Alba just seems to be a particularly nasty party, as Theresa May once said about the Tories.

An utterly unique political achievement: a month and a half after being expelled from the Alba Party, Chris McEleny appears to still be the Alba Party's Nominating Officer

It's been a little while since our last update on the McEleny saga, so I thought I'd take another quick look.  Correct me if I'm missing something, but I cannot find any publicly available reference to any appeal he made against expulsion from Alba or the outcome of it.  My guess is that it'll all be over by now, because we first learned about his expulsion in early May, he would have had a maximum of 21 days to decide on an appeal, and then I think the hearing would have had to be held within a month.  So in theory the process may still be dragging on, but I doubt it.  And the fact that we haven't heard anything at all probably indicates that his expulsion is now confirmed.

But it's not all bad news for "Mad Dog".  He may not be a member of Alba anymore, but according to the Electoral Commission website he's still the party's Nominating Officer.  You've got to give the guy his due: to still effectively be in control of a party he's been expelled from is a political achievement that is absolutely unique in British history.  He's never going to be First Minister, but they'll never be able to take this away from him.  OK, again it's theoretically possible that Alba may by now have found a way of coaxing him into resigning (they have no power to sack him) and the Electoral Commission website may just not have been updated yet.  But I somehow doubt that.

If things really are as they appear, it must be absolute mayhem behind the scenes at Alba, because it means that their ability to put up the candidates they want to at next year's election is subject to an absolute veto from a man they've just made an implacable enemy of by expelling.  Probably for the time being Corri Wilson is able to function as a de facto Nominating Officer due to written authorisation McEleny submitted well before his expulsion, but he could rescind that authorisation at any time he chooses.  I presume there must be Plan Bs in place to re-register the party with the Electoral Commission as a nominally new organisation - but to do that would require an entirely new name.  What would be left of the Alex Salmond Memorial Party by that point?

As for what McEleny's plan is, God knows, but everything we know about him and his ambition suggests that he'll be determined to stand as a Holyrood candidate next year, one way or another.  So if he hasn't moved on from Alba yet, that might indicate - bizarre though it may seem - that he still thinks he could be a candidate for Alba.  As Nominating Officer, he could of course just nominate himself as an Alba candidate and nobody would be able to stop him, but I'm wondering if perhaps he is holding out hope of doing it in a less provocative way.  

A number of people have pointed out that Kenny MacAskill seems to have lost all interest since becoming Alba leader - he spends more time these days tweeting cute photos of Highland cows and llamas than he does making political statements.  He's on a sort of Gerry Adams trajectory where it wouldn't be a total surprise if he releases a book of poetry.  So perhaps McEleny is banking on MacAskill giving in to his buyer's remorse and resigning quickly, thus leaving a vacancy that Ash Regan would be near-certain to fill.  If that happened, McEleny's expulsion would undoubtedly be reversed and he'd become the party's lead Holyrood candidate on the West list.  But Tyrannical Tasmina and the Corri Nostra (newly emboldened after the Wedding of the Century between Chris "the Crossmaglen Columbo" Cullen and straight-talking totally unfiltered independent woman Shannon Donoghue) will be determined to prevent that from happening at all costs.  If they need to hold MacAskill hostage, that's exactly what they'll do.

Meanwhile, it's dismaying but perhaps not surprising to see McEleny take a leaf out of his mate Stew's "Back Bibi With Whataboutery" book by retweeting a video mocking Greta Thunberg for being "selective in her activism" by sailing towards Gaza, rather than Ukraine "which is much closer to her".  Well, I suppose in the literal sense Ukraine is closer to Sweden, but in the overall scheme of things it's not that close, and by the same token Palestine isn't all that far away from Sweden either.  In fact Gaza is only a stone's throw away from Sweden's fellow EU member state Cyprus - hence all the intelligence-gathering flights Britain operates on Netanyahu's behalf from the 4% of Cypriot territory that is still colonised.

If I was in Thunberg's shoes I wouldn't have the slightest hesitation in prioritising Gaza.  Ukraine has control over 90% of its sovereign territory, whereas Palestine has proper control over none of its sovereign territory.  Ukraine has an army to fight back with, and it's backed to the hilt militarily and logistically by wealthy western countries.   Palestine has no army to defend itself with and it is receiving no external military support.  Its people are literally defenceless against genocide.

For as long as objective priorities exist, then yes, activism can be selective and it pretty much has to be, whether McEleny and Stew like it or not.

More polling signs that the SNP may have steadied the ship

In the run-up to the Hamilton by-election, there was a troubling string of eight polls in a row that had the SNP on a relatively low 2% of the GB-wide vote.  Ironically, now that the SNP have lost that by-election, the ship seems to have been steadied - five of the last seven GB-wide polls have had the SNP on 3%, suggesting that normal service has been resumed.  Here is the latest from Find Out Now - 

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 11th June 2025):

Reform UK 30% (-1)

Labour 24% (+2)

Conservatives 16% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 13% (-2)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 32%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 22%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%

As far as I know Find Out Now don't structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly like YouGov do, but I've given you the numbers for information anyway.

It looks both from this poll and other polls that there may have been a minor GB-wide recovery for Labour, albeit from a very low base.  Possibly the U-turn on winter fuel allowance has helped them a bit.  However, the plight of the Tories remains unchanged - Find Out Now have them on only half the vote of Reform, and with the Lib Dems within striking distance of overtaking them.

It's hard to believe the Tories will continue to sleepwalk into oblivion in the way they have been - surely at some point they'll at least roll the dice by changing leader to see if that makes a difference.  The betting markets still have Robert Jenrick as the favourite to replace Kemi Badenoch, although he's not odds-on and is rated as roughly a one-in-three chance.

So just two years and four days after you predicted an SNP-Labour coalition, Andy Maciver predicted it too?  Wow, that's impressive, Stew!  Most of us think a prediction has only come true when the predicted thing actually happens, but hey, you do you!

A genuine question for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland: am I Scottish enough in your eyes to qualify as a citizen of an independent Scotland?

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the new "Liberate Scotland" electoral alliance has three component parts, and one of those parts is the Sovereignty party, which boasts a large number of nativist and essentially far-right policies.  On the issue of citizenship in an independent Scotland, the 2024 Sovereignty manifesto makes clear that being legally resident in Scotland on independence day will only entitle a person to residency rights, with citizenship itself being reserved for "Scots".  That term is not clearly defined, but it seems pretty clear that it's intended to be defined much more narrowly than "British citizens living in Scotland", ie. it appears to have an ethnic basis.

One of our commenters wondered aloud whether he would count as Scottish enough for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland, given that he is one-quarter Irish.  And that set me thinking about myself.  As regular readers of this blog know, I have dual nationality, so one-half of my family background isn't Scottish at all.  But on my dad's side of the family, I have a typical Scottish Catholic background - meaning that I'm mostly descended from people who emigrated from Ireland between the 1850s and the 1890s, due to the mass transfer of population that occurred as a result of the man-made (London-made) Great Famine and its aftermath.

In fact for a long time I assumed that I probably didn't have any pre-1850 Scottish ancestry at all, because until relatively recently the Catholic community tended to only marry amongst themselves.  But a few years ago I discovered that there was one (albeit only one) mixed marriage in the family, which occurred somewhere around 1870.  That means one of my great-great-grandmothers was a native Scottish Protestant woman from South Lanarkshire, and through her I have Scottish ancestry going back to time immemorial.

But the opposite way of putting it is that in strictly ancestral terms I am merely one-sixteenth Scottish.  So do I make the cut as far as Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland are concerned?  I certainly wouldn't if Nazi-style racial laws were applied, because one-sixteenth would be considered far too diluted to count.  I wouldn't even qualify as a 'Mischling' (half-breed) - I would just be deemed to be purely Irish, or perhaps Irish-French-English-Dutch if I get into the complexities of the more exotic half of the family.

Now, my guess is that Sovereignty would stretch a point as far as the Irish-descended Catholic community is concerned.  We sound Scottish, we look Scottish, and the only three things that really set us apart is that we tend to have Irish-sounding surnames, we generally went to Catholic schools, and we mostly support Celtic football club.  And of course Celtic football club is in itself an integral part of modern Scottish culture - so how on earth would you disentangle the descendants of an immigrant community that assimilated into Scotland so totally?

But if you assume that Sovereignty would indeed give us Irish-descended folk a free pass because of what we look like and sound like, that implies that we'd be given special dispensation that wouldn't be offered to Scottish residents who, say, sound English or look Pakistani.  And when you start thinking about which groups would and wouldn't make the cut, and about the reasons why, you start to realise just how arbitrary and nasty it is to award or withhold citizenship on the basis of ethnicity.

Barrhead Boy, who seems to be the de facto leader of Liberate Scotland, went completely off his nut when I drew attention to Sovereignty's far-right policies.  He accused me of being some sort of saboteur and said individual policies should wait until after independence.  But I don't think that attitude is ever going to work as far as citizenship rights are concerned, and there's a very good reason for that.  People need to know before they vote on independence whether they're being asked about independence for their own country or about independence for a country that will regard them as an alien.  Self-evidently the answer to that question will for many people be the prime determinant of how they vote.

Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland can't fudge this or kick it down the road.  Voters are entitled to be told who an independent Scotland will belong to - and who it won't belong to.

BREAKING: The Daily Express back down and publish an apology for falsely claiming there was a "by-election poll" showing a tie between the SNP and Reform

As you'll probably remember, two weeks ago I pointed out that there was a deliberately misleading headline in the Daily Express which read "Humiliation for SNP as Nigel Farage's Reform UK now level in shock new by-election poll".  That clearly implied there was a poll of by-election voting intentions in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency showing the SNP and Reform UK level with each other, when in fact what was being referred to was the tiny, unweighted Scottish subsample of a GB-wide voting intentions poll.  I asked if there was any Scot Goes Pop reader who felt able to make a complaint to the press regulator IPSO, and also said I would make a complaint if nobody else did.

I can confirm that a complaint went forward, and as a result the Express have completely backed down - not only have they amended the article, but they have published a correction and apology, both in the article itself and on a standalone basis linked to from the newspaper's homepage.  I'm a veteran of past complaints about Reach plc publications (the stable includes the Express, the Record and the Mirror among others), and I've even dealt with the same Complaints Officer before, and I therefore know their usual approach is to make only very minor concessions in the hope of getting the complainant to accept far less than he or she should and to drop the complaint.  For them to totally climb down in this way suggests they were worried about something.  Either there must be some sort of precedent that made them think IPSO would take a particularly dim view of their false headline, or they must have had too many complaints upheld against them recently and are trying to get the numbers down a bit.

By accepting this as an informal resolution of the complaint, it does mean it will not be officially recorded as an upheld complaint and it won't count against the Express in the statistics.  However, my guess is the wisest thing to do is to keep our powder dry in case an even more important complaint comes up later.  I'd just like to make two observations, though -

1) To an extent the Express have still got away with their stunt, because any harm caused to the SNP by the fraudulent headline would have been caused before the by-election took place.  The Express waited until almost a week after the by-election before issuing the correction.

2) Incredibly, IPSO's procedures have become even more weighted against complainants than they used to be.  IPSO used to inform you if they rejected your complaint out of hand at the preliminary stage, whereas now they say if you don't hear anything within 21 days, that is the only indication you'll get of a rejection.  You then have 14 days to lodge an appeal.  This change of approach can only be seen as a cynical attempt to vastly reduce the number of appeals by maximising the chances that the complainant will forget all about it during the short window of opportunity.  When I received the email telling me the complaint was going ahead, I realised that I had actually forgotten about the whole thing for two or three days, and therefore I would guess there's a 50%+ chance I might not have remembered to chase things up when the 14-day window opened up.