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)
A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - one of Scotland's three most-read political blogs.
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:
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.
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):
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.