SCOT goes POP!

Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Pro-independence parties on course to win an astonishing 62% of seats in the next Scottish Parliament, says sumptuous Ipsos poll

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot (Ipsos, 26th-31st March 2026):

SNP 39% (+3)

Reform UK 15% (-1)

Labour 15% (-5)

Conservatives 11% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (-)

Greens 7% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 29% (+3)

Greens 16% (-)

Reform UK 16% (+2)

Labour 15% (-4)

Conservatives 13% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-1)

Seats projection:

SNP 63

Greens 17

Reform UK 15

Labour 14

Conservatives 12

Liberal Democrats 8

I'll update this post with full commentary when I have more time later this afternoon or this evening, but while I'm thinking of it, just one point - does anyone know whether STV are still commissioning these Ipsos polls? At some point a few months ago they stopped using the words "exclusive poll commissioned by STV", so I'm starting to wonder if Ipsos are now self-funding them, but are continuing an informal relationship with STV as a convenient way of promoting the results.

UPDATE: OK, the commentary follows from here! This poll basically contradicts the Norstat poll, because it shows the SNP getting closer to an overall majority rather than further away. It not only has the SNP gaining three points on both ballots, but also shows the Reform vote holding up on the constituency ballot and Labour slumping horrifically. The main reason that Norstat were suggesting the SNP's chances of a majority were slipping was because there appeared to be a big swing from Reform back to Labour - but Ipsos are showing the opposite. Theoretically that might be explained by the fact that Norstat's fieldwork dates were a bit more recent - but not by much. The Ipsos poll opened four days earlier than Norstat's on 26th March, and the two polls even overlapped by a couple of days later on. I think this is more a straightforward case of two different polling companies showing opposite trends for reasons that have yet to be determined.

The Greens clearly aren't really going to take 7% of the vote on the constituency ballot, because they're only standing in a handful of constituency seats, and I doubt if that's been taken into account in the seats projection. If the SNP take, say, just over half of that 7%, it might inch them a bit closer to a majority.

The 39% for the SNP on the constituency ballot equals their highest in any poll from any polling company since September 2023, when an Opinium poll commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute (!) had them on 42%. By contrast, Labour's 15% share appears to be their lowest in any poll from Ipsos or the predecessor firm Ipsos-Mori since the 2021 Holyrood election.

One small bit of bad news is that this is a rare example in recent times of an Ipsos poll not showing a lead for Yes on the independence question - instead it's a 50/50 split. However, the last couple of polls from the firm have had Yes on 51% or 52%, so normal sampling variation made it almost inevitable there would eventually be a poll showing either a small No lead or a dead heat.

As usual, John Swinney's net personal rating (-8) is superior to that of his main rivals, with Anas Sarwar on -29 and Reform's Malcolm Offord on an embarrassing -41. That should exclude the main danger of any major turnaround in the parties' fortunes over the remaining month of the campaign.

Although Westminster elections are not forefront in our minds just now, it shouldn't go unmentioned that the Westminster figures set the SNP up for a stonkingly good result in a first-past-the-post election...

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 37%

Reform UK 16%

Labour 16%

Conservatives 11%

Greens 9%

Liberal Democrats 8%

In terms of a seats projection, I make it: SNP 49, Liberal Democrats 5, Conservatives 2, Labour 1.

The Find Out Now poll did not predict 8% for the Alliance to Liberate Scotland. Don't be silly. If you were simply honest about what that poll actually did show, you'd instantly have your answer as to why nobody else regards the result as being of much interest. https://t.co/tVu7ARVVg1
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Catastrophe for Starmer as Labour slump to joint all-time low in weekly YouGov poll, level with the Greens - the SNP have huge 18-point lead in Scottish subsample

YouGov have suddenly and belatedly started including Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain and Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party as options in their weekly GB-wide polls, which on the whole is a good thing because to some extent we've been flying blind about the impact of those two parties (especially Lowe's). The curious thing is, though, that you'd expect a non-trivial vote share for Restore Britain to reduce Reform's vote share significantly, but in this poll Reform's vote share has actually increased. A recent Find Out Now similarly found that including Restore made only a trivial difference to the Reform vote. The only logical explanation I can think of is that most Restore supporters were previously selecting 'other party' when answering polls - which would indicate that they're quite committed in their choice of party, it's not just a casual preference affected by what they see in front of them in a menu of options.

So on the whole you'd have to say this is good news for Farage, because it looks as if his support hasn't been exaggerated by recent polls in the way that had seemed a logical possibility.

(UPDATE: Having looked at the data tables more carefully, it appears that YouGov are only including Restore Britain and Your Party on a secondary menu which only appears if respondents choose "some other party", so that would explain why Reform's vote is unaffected.)

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 6th-7th April 2026):

Reform UK 24% (+1)

Conservatives 19% (-)

Greens 16% (-3)

Labour 16% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)

Restore Britain 4% (n/a)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Your Party 1% (n/a)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 15%, Labour 14%, Greens 11%, Conservatives 11%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Restore Britain 2%, Your Party 1%

In one sense a three-point drop makes this a very disappointing result for the Greens, but on the other hand what they probably care most about is where they stand in relation to Labour, and at the moment they're tied, which is good enough to be getting on with. I constantly have to remind myself what Labour's record low vote share is (because it keeps changing), but I'm pretty certain 16% is the lowest they've ever been with YouGov, so this is a return to an all-time low. No poll from any polling company during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership ever had Labour lower than 18%, so Starmer is unambiguously performing worse than his predecessor ever did.

The Iran war has (undeservedly) seen a partial recovery in Starmer's personal ratings, and some supplementary questions in polls have delivered a not too dreadful verdict on his response to the crisis. Some have suggested that meant he and Labour were "having a good war", but it would be hard to argue that case now.

To reiterate the point that people always miss about YouGov's Scottish subsamples, they can be taken more seriously than subsamples from other firms because they're correctly structured and weighted. However, they do still have a big margin of error due to the small sample size, so you will still sometimes get wildly misleading results, as happened a few weeks ago when there were two subsamples in a row showing the SNP below 30%. This week's result is more routine, and is pretty encouraging on the whole - the unionist vote is split in an ideal way, and there's a substantial Green vote that the SNP will hope to squeeze on the constituency ballot next month, where in most cases the Greens are not standing candidates.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Baillieston & Shettleston - a seat I can claim a tenuous connection to, because my dad was once an assistant headmaster of the long since demolished St Gregory's secondary school in Cranhill.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

If Trump was Chamberlain: "This morning I handed the Iranian Government a final TruthSocial stating that unless we heard from them by 8pm Eastern that they were prepared at once to open the f****n' Strait you crazy b******s I would wipe our their civilisation. I have to...
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

...tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, but that Iran have sent me a neat 10-point counter-proposal, and that consequently, I might not bother committing genocide after all. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

More on the MRP poll: the 67-seat projection for the SNP may even be an underestimate due to the Greens being included in too many seats

Some more details of the Find Out Now MRP poll for The National have been published on the Electoral Calculus website. Whoever wrote the article (presumably Martin Baxter) doesn't seem to be fully versed in devolved Scottish politics, because references are repeatedly made to the "official opposition" party in the Scottish Parliament, which is a concept that does not actually exist. The leader of the largest opposition party is called first at FMQs, but apart from that there's no special status.

However, what matters is whether the numbers in the poll are accurate, and I've been looking through the individual seats projections with interest. The first thing that leaps out is that there is a Green vote share given for every constituency, when in fact the Greens are only standing in a handful of constituency seats. That might conceivably make a difference in two cases: in Caithness, Sutherland & Ross, the Lib Dems are projected to have a four-point lead over the SNP, and the Greens are on 4%, while in Edinburgh Southern, Labour are projected to be three points ahead of the SNP, with the Greens on 4%. So if you take the numbers in the poll absolutely literally, the 67-seat projection for the SNP could even be a slight underestimate.

On the other hand, the SNP are projected to be just two points ahead of the Lib Dems in Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch, which in 2021 returned the largest SNP majority in the country, with the Lib Dems in third. Now, of course that's not totally implausible, because the SNP will be losing any personal vote for Kate Forbes, and the Lib Dems surprised us all by winning the overlapping constituency of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire in the 2024 UK general election. But it does make me wonder about the assumptions baked into the poll's methodology. It's almost as if the Westminster numbers are being used as a baseline. I note, for example, that there's no sign of a Lib Dem breakthrough in the projection for Argyll & Bute, which is a similar constituency in many respects but not in one: there was no major Lib Dem recovery there in 2024.

The SNP are projected to hold on to the seats where the Greens are actually standing and are purported to have a decent chance. However, the Greens are in either second place or joint second in Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill, and are a relatively modest 5-9 points behind the SNP in each. Intuitively, that strikes me as a much more plausible estimate of the state of play than we've been seeing in certain quarters.

Reform UK's best showing is projected to be 24% in Banffshire & Buchan Coast, which is presumably based partly on that being the most pro-Brexit constituency. More startling, however, is the 23% for Reform in both of the North Ayrshire seats (Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South).

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Anniesland.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Even if he doesn't follow through on this clear threat of genocide, it strikes me that the threat itself constitutes the gravest of crimes. What does "terrorism" mean if not acts designed to instill terror in a civilian population? https://t.co/n04RyXnXYB
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 7, 2026

Monday, April 6, 2026

Find Out Now - ZAP WHAM POW - that a new MRP poll shows the SNP on course for an overall majority

As you may have seen, a new Find Out Now MRP poll commissioned by The National is suggesting that the SNP are on course for an overall majority at the Holyrood election. They would take 67 seats, all on the constituency ballot. I've been trying to work out what those 67 are, or to put it more simply which six constituencies they wouldn't win, but so far I'm struggling with navigation in the table of results - if anyone can let me know in the comments section, that would be great. It's probably safe to assume that Orkney and Shetland will both be staying Liberal Democrat, but I wouldn't want to guess which other four constituencies are projected to be in the unionist column. The basic figures are -

SNP 67

Labour 17

Greens 14

Reform UK 14

Conservatives 10

Liberal Democrats 7

I have a new article at The National discussing the track record of past MRP projections, which you can read HERE.

UPDATE: OK, thanks to Michael and Keith in the comments section, we now know which six constituencies are projected to elude the SNP. They are:

Caithness, Sutherland and Ross (LibDems)

Edinburgh North Western (LibDems)

Edinburgh Southern (Lab)

Fife North East (LibDems)

Orkney Islands (LibDems)

Shetland Islands (LibDems)

That means the SNP are projected to enjoy a whole string of eyebrow-raising wins elsewhere:

Dumbarton: I'm struggling with this one. It should be a Labour hold on the basis of the swing in national polls, and bearing in mind the track record of tactical voting in the constituency, it's hard to see how the SNP take it.

Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire: An SNP gain is possible here, but it's like trying to thread a needle - the unionist vote would have to be divided almost perfectly. Unlikely in my view.

Dumfriesshire: A bit more plausible, but still a very tough one - the SNP are starting from ten points behind the Tories.

Galloway & West Dumfries: The most winnable of the three Blue Wall seats in the south, and the SNP have a past track record of success here, although on the basis of national trends they would still be expected to fall just short. But I can accept this one as a plausible SNP gain.

Banffshire & Buchan Coast: The SNP look vulnerable here to both the Tories and Reform, but it's by no means outlandish to think they'll hold on.

Aberdeenshire West: On paper this doesn't look promising for the SNP, but we keep hearing the Tory canvass results in the northeast are dreadful, so yes, this is a possible gain.

Inverness & Nairn: I don't think anybody really knows yet what the impact of Fergus Ewing's independent candidacy will be, so there's a big question mark on this one.

East Lothian Coast & Lammermuirs: Looked like a lost cause not that long ago, but could now be very close.

Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill and Glasgow Southside have all been touted as Green gains. As previously explained, those predictions are based on a smoke-and-mirrors statistical exercise and shouldn't be taken seriously, but with an effective Green campaign the SNP are not necessarily safe in any of the three, and they're also vulnerable to Labour in Edinburgh Central. Each of the three in isolation looks like a probable SNP hold, but is it really likely their luck will hold out in all three? Even if just one of the three were to go to Labour or the Greens, it would make winning an overall majority very tough.

So as you can see I'm still very sceptical about the prospects of a single-party overall majority, but believe me about one thing: I do want to believe.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Fife North East and Galloway & West Dumfries.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Bombshell GB-wide Ashcroft poll is the first not to show Reform in an outright lead for the first time in almost a year - Greens are in joint lead for the first time ever - Labour are in FOURTH - and the SNP have overtaken Labour UK-wide in the seats projection

So this is a genuine landmark for the reasons given in the title, and it's also worth making the point that the data tables (unless I'm misinterpreting them, but I don't see how I can be) show that the Greens are actually in a slight overall lead over Reform and the Tories - but that seems to have been disguised by the rounding to the nearest whole number.

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (Lord Ashcroft, 26th-30th March 2026)

Greens 21%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

SNP 3%

Plaid Cymru 1%

I know somebody listed Scottish subsample numbers on the previous thread, but I can't see any in the data tables with the "don't knows/will not votes" removed. However, I've used what I presume was a rough recalculation to fine-tune a UK-wide seats projection, which shows: Reform UK 204, Conservatives 175, Greens 116, SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 47, Labour 33, Plaid Cymru 8, Others 19.

The target for an overall majority is 326, so it's not hard to see why a hung parliament is currently the strongly favoured outcome on the exchanges. Nevertheless, under first-past-the-post not all that much movement is required to transform an absolute guddle into a clear majority, and by the same token not much movement would be required to turn a projection showing a right-wing parliament, as this one does, into one showing a centre-left parliament in which the SNP might just hold the balance of power. Even if they don't hold the balance of power on their own, the huge strength of the Greens is a potential game-changer, because at the very least the English Greens are not opposed to independence.

On the exchanges, the Greens are currently estimated to have a 1 in 8 chance of winning most seats in the general election, but as the above numbers demonstrate, they might not actually need to win most seats to end up with influence.

An intriguing quirk is that the SNP are currently the fourth-largest party in the Commons (albeit only just, and they may soon be overtaken by Reform). The projection from this poll shows they would still be in fourth place, but in a radically different way - they would have five times as many seats as now, they would re-overtake the Liberal Democrats, and they would overtake Labour for the first time. Let's just reiterate that: the SNP would have more seats than Labour, UK-wide.

Ashcroft himself concedes that the reason his results might be different from other pollsters is that he has a completely different approach to the voting intention question - instead of directly asking people how they will vote, he asks them to rate their chances of voting for each party in turn. As I understand it, any respondent who does not estimate a 50%+ probability of voting for at least one party is assumed to be an abstainer and excluded, and everyone else is assigned to the party they gave the highest probability to. That method seems intuitively reasonable to me, but whether the results it produces will be more accurate, or less so, is anyone's guess at this stage.

For weeks after the Gorton & Denton by-election, YouGov were putting "footnotes" of sorts on their polls to give the impression that the Green advantage over Labour must just be a temporary effect caused by the by-election and would fade. There is now some doubt over that, not just because of this Ashcroft poll, but also because last week's YouGov poll showed the Greens moving back ahead of Labour, after having slipped behind for one week.

In case you're wondering, the last GB-wide poll not to show an outright Reform lead was a Survation poll in late April/early May of last year. That showed Labour and Reform tied on 26% apiece.

There is actually some relief for Starmer in the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll. It's generally believed that head-to-head leadership polls are more predictive of election results several years in advance than headline voting intentions, and Starmer does have a clear 15-point lead over Farage. However his lead over Badenoch is just three points, which amounts to a statistical tie - and Ashcroft doesn't even bother to ask whether respondents prefer Polanski to Starmer, which many will suspect is because he feared what the answer might be.

There are a couple of results that I actually found quite surprising. When asked whether nuclear power should be phased out, with wind power expanded and the net zero target brought forward a decade, respondents are almost split down the middle - 40% in favour, 45% against. My guess is that Ashcroft asked it as a "shopping list" question in the hope that most respondents would find something on the list to object to, thus producing a result he'd be able to spin as clear and decisive support for nuclear power, but that didn't happen.

And on Europe, there are any number of people who will tell you that if you spell out in a poll question what returning to the EU would actually mean in practice, the pro-EU majority evaporates. It looks to me like Ashcroft set out to prove that theory and spectacularly failed. When asked whether they want to rejoin the customs union, restore freedom of movement and then rejoin the EU itself as soon as possible, 55% supported the idea and only 34% were opposed. That's absolutely remarkable.

Ashcroft did manage to get a result which he can spin as showing massive opposition to scrapping the "nuclear deterrent", but as he lumped "and cut defence spending" into the question, the result is pretty meaningless.

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Loopy billionaire lord tries to convince us that funding the NHS with fair taxation is as impossible as enhancing the size of women's breasts with hypnotherapy

I cannot in all good conscience conclude my discussion of this poll without drawing your attention to the fact that Ashcroft has made a complete blithering idiot of himself with one particular part of his write-up -

"Perhaps more controversially, nearly a third of voters said they felt less favourable towards Polanski when they heard that in his days as a hypnotherapist he once claimed he could increase the size of women’s breasts by hypnosis. Polanski claims to have apologised and put all this behind him, but in a different way he is arguably still at it. Just as there are those who want to change their body shape through the power of mind over matter, there will always be people eager to believe we can fund the NHS by taxing the rich"

Nice try, Mike, but you are believed to be worth £2 billion. That alone would be enough to fund 1% of the entire annual budget of NHS England. Quite plainly, taxing the rich could very easily fund the NHS - and the only use hypnotherapy would be on that front would be for those like you who don't want us to notice or believe a simple arithmetical fact.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Saturday, April 4, 2026

"C'est trop bruyant!": The settled will klaxon is so piercing tonight that it can even be heard IN FRANCE, as Norstat show a pro-independence majority for a SEVENTH poll in a row

Tonight brings word of the latest in the regular series of Norstat polls for the Sunday Times, and although the newspaper has buried the results of the independence question at the bottom of the write-up as if it's of no great significance, it certainly looks pretty significant to me. If I'm counting correctly, this is now the seventh Norstat poll in a row to show a Yes lead - and remember Norstat were one of the more No-friendly firms until a couple of years ago. To this day (as far as we know, anyway), they continue to weight by 2014 recalled vote, which is a huge disadvantage for the Yes side, who are nevertheless repeatedly coming out on top.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat / Suday Times, 30th March - 1st April 2026)

Yes 52% (+1)

No 48% (-1)

The Sunday Times are far more interested in the Holyrood voting intention numbers, which are a bit of a curate's egg for the SNP. Their own vote share has held up perfectly well, but a decline for Reform UK means that the unionist vote is no longer split as perfectly as it was, opening up the possibility that Labour and the Tories may take a few more constituency seats than previously expected and push the prospect of a single-party SNP overall majority further away.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34% (-1)
Labour 19% (+2)
Reform UK 15% (-4)
Conservatives 11% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)
Greens 8% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30% (-)

Labour 17% (-)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Greens 12% (+1)

Conservatives 10% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+3)

Seats projection: SNP 57, Labour 20, Reform UK 16, Greens 13, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 11

That would obviously be a very comfortable pro-independence majority (70 for the SNP and Greens in combination, 59 for the unionist parties), but it would leave the SNP well short of their self-imposed target of a single-party majority. However, even if Reform's setback is indirectly bad news for the independence cause, I nevertheless find it strangely reassuring. Every time Paul Hutcheon has written an over-the-top headline about "Reform's campaign in total meltdown", I've thought to myself "it won't make the slightest bit of difference you know, nothing sticks to them", so it's a bit of a relief to discover (or provisionally discover) that the laws of political gravity do actually apply to Offord and Reform after all, and that if they run a shockingly bad campaign it does have negative consequences for them, just as it would for any other party.

There's still a month for them to put their house in order, and all they'd really have to do is work their way back to where they were fairly recently in order to help the SNP back into the 60s in the seats projection. Even if Reform don't recover, there's another very plausible get-out-of-jail-free card for the SNP, which is that the Greens plainly can't take 8% of the constituency vote when they're not standing in the vast majority of constituency seats. What would happen if, say, the SNP were to take half of their votes and Labour were to take one-quarter? The seats projection from this poll would then be: SNP 60, Labour 18, Reform UK 17, Greens 12, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 10.

Still not a majority, but a bit closer to one, and it might be a slightly more realistic estimate of where the SNP stand right now.

John Curtice also makes the point in the Sunday Times piece that if the public become aware that Reform's support is falling away, that could encourage greater anti-SNP tactical voting for Labour and the Tories. There may be some logic to that, although there may also be a side-benefit for the pro-indy camp, because Reform are currently taking a non-trivial percentage of independence voters and we need as many of those people as possible back on the side of light if we're going to end up with a decent vote share on the list - which in practice may be just as psychologically important as the seats tally.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Falkirk West.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Friday, April 3, 2026

"But what if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying 'we say no, and we are the state'?"

A former commenter on this blog from way back in the 2014 indyref period got in touch with a question a few days ago, and I've been so busy that I haven't responded to him yet - but it's an interesting and important question, so I thought I might as well turn my answer into a blogpost.

"Suppose Mr. Swinney really does win 65 or more seats (no longer a laughing matter). What if Mr. Starmer does not perform his usual U-turn?

What if he does not feel he can win a referendum? I'm thinking of possible successors who could fight a referendum, but the only one I can even see fighting indyref2 with any confidence is Andy Burnham.

What do you think is Mr. Swinney's plan?"

The first thing I should stress here is that I still regard a single-party SNP overall majority as a long-shot, simply because the AMS voting system is designed to produce hung parliaments, and it does that job very effectively. Unless the SNP's list vote recovers massively to 2011-style levels, the route to a majority essentially consists of winning 65 out of 73 constituency seats, and even though those seats are elected by the first-past-the-post element of AMS, it's still very unusual for first-past-the-post to produce quite such an extreme result. In the last hundred years, it's only happened once in a UK general election, when Ramsay MacDonald's Tory-dominated 'National Government' took 90.1% of the seats. That's the feat the SNP will have to emulate to hit John Swinney's target.

Nevertheless, when I was at the SNP campaign conference a couple of weeks ago, a number of senior figures did sound genuinely confident of a majority, and of course they have access to canvassing data. There are three possible explanations: a) it's a bluff, b) it's wishful thinking, or c) there might just be something in it. So purely hypothetically, let's imagine it's c) and work through what would happen if the SNP win a majority.

Would Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, although of course his own days as Prime Minister might be numbered by then anyway.

Would any successor to Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, unless it's someone we haven't given serious consideration to yet. Personally I would welcome Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham taking over, simply because they would probably represent a slight shift to the left, but I would expect all of them to be just as intransigent on the constitutional issue (especially Rayner, who seems almost robotic in her thinking).

Does that mean electing an SNP majority is pointless? Definitely not, because John Swinney has made so many promises about the effect of a majority that he would have to try to deliver - and that is the real value of the exercise, because no First Minister is actually powerless in the face of Westminster intransigence, unless they make themselves powerless by being too passive, which has been the recurring problem since the summer of 2017. Judging from the very few clues that were dropped last October, it sounds like a judicial review might be sought of any Westminster refusal to grant a Section 30 order - I can't see that going anywhere, but by the same token I can't see SNP members just accepting John Swinney saying "oh our application has been rejected, never mind, at least we tried". There would have to be a follow-up with a Plan B, which is where the legendary 'secret plan' kicks in, although by definition we don't know what that is.

The simplest option is the one that Believe in Scotland have proposed, which is to finally bring this matter to a head by using the Westminster election of 2028 or 2029 as a de facto referendum on independence. However, although Believe in Scotland are SNP allies and have close organisational links with the party, we know that John Swinney and other leading SNP figures like Stephen Flynn seem to be viscerally opposed to the whole concept of a de facto referendum. Maybe they would reconsider if other options closed off and they needed to show SNP members they were taking their mandate seriously. Or maybe they would be able to devise an imaginative alternative way of using the Westminster election to advance the cause.

One thing is for sure: if the SNP can win back their majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, they would have potential leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table as long as they are bold enough to use it. They could engage in parliamentary disruption tactics (which remember even the moderate John Smith did as Labour leader in the mid-1990s), or they could boycott the Commons for a period of time. The latter would create a genuine constitutional crisis: it wouldn't be considered sustainable for the bulk of one of the constituent nations of 'Our Pweshus Union' to go unrepresented in the national parliament for any prolonged period.

Again, Mr Swinney is so instinctively cautious that it's hard to imagine him going down that road, but the value of giving the SNP a mandate in May is that it opens these possibilities up and a conversation can at least be had about them.

On a semi-related point, I may actually have been proved wrong about something I said two years ago, although as with the French Revolution it's still too early to tell. I repeatedly said back then that losing the SNP majority at Westminster would be an unmitigated calamity, because it would lose us the main legacy of the 2014 referendum and we'd never get it back. Once Labour were the dominant party once again, there would be a sense of normal service being resumed and the SNP would thereafter only be able to compete in Holyrood elections.

That doesn't seem to be the case at all, and there's a real chance that Labour's 2024 victory will end up looking like a meaningless one-off. The real normal service will be resumed in 2028 or 2029 when the SNP return to dominance, the 2014 legacy will turn out to be assured, and that will be a massive psychological shock to the Scottish Labour Party. They thought they had established in 2024 that independence supporters would always sell themselves cheap by going back to Labour without any constitutional concessions whatsoever, but that was a mirage. There might eventually be some long-overdue soul-searching about what it will actually take for Labour to build bridges with their Yes-supporting former voters - and the two obvious potential answers to that question would be either a) greater flexibility on a referendum, or b) a significantly enhanced devolution package.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh Southern, Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire and Falkirk East & Linlithgow.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Thursday, April 2, 2026

My plans for Scot Goes Pop's coverage of the Holyrood election campaign

This post will come as a relief to some of you, because I've decided to temporarily go back to conventional blogging for the remainder of the Holyrood campaign. The emphasis is on the word "temporarily", because on the whole I think the YouTube experiment is working out well - the number of subscribers has built quicker than I was expecting, and the average number of views per video is pretty decent. However, I think the situation changes in an election campaign, because it suddenly doesn't feel good enough to wait 24 or 48 hours to cover a particular poll result, and doing it by video just slows everything down massively. You'll have noticed that I still haven't covered the Survation poll from the other day - that's because I was intending to make a video about it but still haven't found the time. Of course I'm also writing daily constituency profiles for The National throughout the campaign, which takes a few hours per day and leaves me with even less time to make videos.

So for the remaining month-and-a-bit of the campaign I'm going to go retro and do pretty much what I've done in every election since the 2010 UK general election, which was the first major vote that Scot Goes Pop covered. That should speed everything up and hopefully I can cover major polling developments much more effectively.

However, to make this work I'm going to have to ask for your patience and indulgence on a couple of points. I'm going to add a sort of promotional link for my YouTube channel at the bottom of every post, so that it will hopefully still pick up a few subscribers even if there are fewer videos until 7th May (although I'll still try to make at least one or two). And I'm afraid I'm also going to have to resume the fundraising promotions at the bottom of each post - I was hoping not to have to do that, but it's become unavoidable. I'm due to receive some significant funds in a few weeks' time, probably in late May or early June, so from that point on there shouldn't be any problem for a few months, but until then there's practically nothing scheduled to come in at all, and I'm going to have plug the gap somehow to keep everything afloat over the next month or two.

As ever, there are three main ways to donate...

1) For card payments, the crowdfunder page is HERE.

2) Direct PayPal donations can be made to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

3) Bank transfers are also fine. I was advised not to post my bank details publicly, so if you'd like to donate that way, drop me a line by email and I'll send you the necessary details. My contact email address is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

Many thanks for the support that readers have shown Scot Goes Pop over the years.

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Joani of (Noah's nuclear-armed) Arc

The senior naval officer Reid was reported for 'inappropriate' behaviour with at Faslane is *separate* to the captain she is linked to tonight by the FT's @LOS_Fisher

The captain has reportedly stepped back from duties after text messages exchanged with Reid
— Anna Mikhailova (@AVMikhailova) March 31, 2026

We're going to need some sort of diagram here. https://t.co/pI9M6N3AJD
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

BBC Scotland will obviously just dismiss this story as Naval Gazing..
— David Nichol (@DavidNi09148795) April 1, 2026

How does one actually go about finding love with the captain of a nuclear-armed submarine? Is there some sort of niche dating app? https://t.co/b1T6Av5Zp0
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Ruddr
— calanbosch (@calanbosch) April 1, 2026

Would you like to see the plutonium rivet?
— JimMcDonald (@mcdonji1) April 1, 2026

Maybe the King should abdicate

Even the Pope isn't safe https://t.co/86GfE2t6Q1
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Just remembered about this pic.twitter.com/drJ3hISNm0
— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) April 1, 2026

If Joani Reid ends up being the cause of global nuclear destruction, I'm going to be very annoyed with her. https://t.co/S1lqYBj1M4
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

In all seriousness, what do we think are the chances of a by-election in East Kilbride & Strathaven? Must be at least 25%, surely?
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Shock poll portends weather boffin coup threat for Atlas chief Lyon

You've probably seen the propaganda poll from yesterday that the hapless Alliance to Liberate Scotland, aka "the Atlas", commissioned from Find Out Now. It used the infamous Archie Stirling question, ie. "would you consider voting for party X at the election?", which in the case of Stirling's party Scottish Voice overestimated their potential support in 2007 by a factor of 200. It said that 20% of the population would "consider" voting for them on the Holyrood list, whereas in the event only 0.1% actually did so.

Atlas' own poll yesterday found that only 8% of people would consider voting for them, so if the "Stirling devisor" is applied, that would imply they are on course to take just 0.04% of the list vote. I personally think that's a bit of an underestimate, simply because Tommy Sheridan does still have some residual support in Glasgow - you could imagine him getting around 1-2% of the vote there, while in the other regions Atlas may hover around 0.1% or 0.2%, producing a national figure of around 0.3% or 0.4%. That would obviously still leave them light-years short of winning seats.

But it was interesting that they were concerned enough about not registering in the polls at all that they were willing to shell out for a propaganda poll, because it must have cost them around 10% of the relatively modest amount they've crowdfunded for their election fund. (Although there again, as someone pointed out in the comments section of this blog the other day, they must also have "private means" simply to be able to pay for their election deposits, and perhaps that explains why they've been so willing to get into bed with a far-right party.)

Given what we know about the Mafia-like internal politics of these fringe parties, it perhaps isn't a surprise to find that not only has money been spent on a polling astroturfing exercise for Atlas as a whole, but that someone appears to have also paid for a poll to try to put one particular faction of Atlas into the ascendancy. It's not hard to guess who may have commissioned this morning's new poll from OpinoSpa:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Hazel Lyon, the leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, has been a failure because she is unknown to the public and has been unable to boost the party's profile? (OpinoSpa, 25th-27th March 2026)

Agree strongly: 21%

Agree slightly: 37%

TOTAL AGREE: 58%

Disagree slightly: 11%

Disagree strongly 4%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 15%

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the former STV weather presenter Lloyd Quinan, who was a member of the Scottish Parliament for four years, would be a better leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland than Hazel Lyon because he would get the party more attention?

Agree strongly: 23%

Agree slightly: 45%

TOTAL AGREE: 68%

Disagree slightly: 7%

Disagree strongly 2%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 9%

Hold on to your hat, Hazel: strong gusts are forecast as a Quinan coup attempt comes in from the west.