Greens stay ahead of Labour for THIRD week in a row - SNP lead by 5 in Scotland

Later in this video I also give some preliminary thoughts on the ever-absurd latest outing for the Survation / Scotland In Union propaganda poll - although there's a limit to what I can say about it, because almost a week on, Survation still haven't published the data tables.

Why the new ScotRail minimum fare is unfair for passengers

I only discovered a couple of days ago that ScotRail are introducing a minimum fare of £10 for tickets bought on the train, except when you've boarded at a station where there is no ticket office open and no ticket machine available.  I've been thinking about how that will actually work in practice at my nearest station of Cumbernauld.  

I don't use it very often because it's an hour's walk from where I live, but I've used it maybe half-a-dozen times over the last year, including when I went to the SNP conference on Saturday.  Every single time I've been there recently, the ticket office has been shut.  There is a ticket machine, but to the best of my knowledge there's only one, and it's on the opposite platform from the main entrance.  That means if you were getting the train to Falkirk or Edinburgh, you'd have to make an otherwise needless trek over the bridge and back - which I can tell you on Saturday morning was a pretty treacherous trek because of ice.

Now, it may be that common sense would apply and the minimum fare wouldn't be imposed on journeys from stations like Cumbernauld because of the special problems.  But passengers aren't mind readers, and on a technical reading of the rules they might well make the pointless crossing of the bridge, even if they have a disability.  To even put the thought in people's minds that they may have to do that is, I would suggest, pretty poor.

There's also the problem that if you feel forced to use ticket machines, they're not always very easy to navigate and you may, through no fault of your own, end up with a ticket that is not technically valid for your journey.  Last summer I had to take a train from London to Portsmouth, but for the ticket to be valid for the journey it had to specify that I was not going via a particular station (I can't remember which one).  The ticket machine simply refused to offer me the right sort of ticket, and I couldn't find a ticket office.  In desperation I bought the wrong ticket just to get through the barriers, and thankfully the conductor took pity on me and pretended not to read the ticket very carefully.

Of course the main inconvenience of the minimum fare is that it leaves you with a dilemma if there's only a minute or two before the train leaves - do you take the time to buy the ticket in advance if it means you might miss the train?  It's needless hassle like this that makes you feel like rail travel just isn't worth the bother and it might be better to stick to buses.

Stephen Daisley owes the Scottish Parliament an apology tonight

The vote on assisted dying went the way I hoped it would, although even three hours ago I was still very pessimistic.  I think one thing all of us can agree on is that the standard of debate was exceptionally high, and indeed today was perhaps the Scottish Parliament's finest hour in the twenty-seven years of its existence.  And for that reason, Stephen Daisley owes MSPs a grovelling apology after his crassest ever article (admittedly the competition is tough) in which he suggested that the vote could mark the final "failure" of devolution, summing it up as: "Sorry, we can’t teach your child to read, but we can hurry along her granny’s death.’ Nearly 30 years and this is what devolution looks like."

Where do you even begin with hypocrisy like that, when Daisley's beloved UK House of Commons passed an assisted dying bill that was significantly worse and more dangerous than Liam McArthur's?  Perhaps he would argue that Westminster is a two-chamber parliament and all that matters is that the Lords are there to correct the mistake that MPs made, but I would much rather an elected chamber reached the correct decision by a democratic process after a high-quality debate, as happened tonight, rather than depending on the utter randomness of whether appointed legislators-for-life who are only there because they used to be good at cricket or swimming (or whatever) feel motivated enough to lay down hundreds of wrecking amendments on any given issue.  Holyrood 1, Westminster 0, Stephen bloody Daisley -5984.

Incidentally, his article also contained an appallingly cynical rewriting of history - 

"Holyrood has not distinguished itself as a great legislative body. The Gender Recognition Bill had to be blocked by Westminster for straying into UK-wide equalities law. (When the SNP government challenged this decision in court, it got sent away with a flea in its ear.)"

I strongly disagreed with the Gender Recognition Bill, but it was legitimately passed by our national parliament and for democratic reasons it should have stood.  Westminster did not "have" to block it, it chose to block it for nakedly political reasons.  And the courts did not "send the SNP government away with a flea in its ear", they simply concluded they had to uphold a provision of the Scotland Act 1998 passed by Westminster granting itself essentially unlimited power to veto any Scottish law on a whim.  If you rig the rules of the game to ensure you can't lose and then extravagantly celebrate the sweetness of victory, as Daisley has done on Westminster's behalf, then you're making yourself look a bit bloody ridiculous - but as the man who called the Israeli conquest and annexation of the Arab-populated East Jerusalem in 1967 "the liberation of East Jerusalem", perhaps Daisley is simply past the point of embarrassment by now.

Reddit tries to explain Stew - but struggles

Today is going to be an unpleasant day, because the stakes are high and the outcome is unpredictable, so I thought you might appreciate some light relief.  A Reddit thread suddenly appeared yesterday in which users were challenged to explain how on earth the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger ever ended up with any influence.  The bafflement is palpable, and some of the replies are instant classics.  You can read it HERE.

Meanwhile, my alphabetical odyssey of the 73 Scottish Parliament constituencies for The National alighted in my own home constituency of Cumbernauld & Kilsyth on Sunday, and since then I've also done Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South.

You might be interested in some feedback I received by email about the Cunninghame North profile yesterday, and in particular my reference to the ballot papers from Arran getting wet in 2007 - 

"I was at the count which was being conducted via ballot counting machines.  Prior to the arrival of the Arran ballots Labour were very narrowly in the lead (the count was being displayed electronically as ballots were being fed into the machines).

We, in the SNP, were by now reasonably confident of victory because Arran, from our canvassing, had appeared to be behind Kenneth but we knew the end result would be very close.

I made sure I was next to the machine into which the ballots would be fed and what happened was that quite a few couldn't be input at first and one of the Labour activists joked that "maybe they fell overboard".  The technician inputting the ballots explained that the ballots weren't wet but just damp due to the night air.  In the end all the ballots were successfully input and the result was victory for Kenneth by 48 votes.

It was only in the days after the result that Labour resorted to smears including that the Arran votes had been tampered with using the "wet ballots" as evidence!"

Why I hope the Scottish Parliament rejects assisted dying this week

Not that I expect my opinion to make the remotest difference, but as the Scottish Parliament is about to make one of the most consequential decisions in its history, I thought I'd offer my opinion anyway.  I don't know about anyone else, but I find it deeply disturbing that not all that long a period of time before I was born, in the 1960s to be exact, Scotland was still a country in which the state took the lives of its own citizens in the form of capital punishment.  I once had a look at the death certificate of Henry Burnett, the last person to be executed in Scotland, and there's nothing all that remarkable about the contents of it - the cause of death is curtly given as "judicial hanging", his residence is given as the prison in Aberdeen, and the informant (who would normally be the next of kin) is the prison governor.  Everything about it just says "this is totally routine".

I can't imagine how much more disturbing I'd find it to live in a Scotland where a culture of death has been reintroduced in a completely different but much more widespread form.  Death certificates giving state-assisted suicide as the cause of death would become extremely routine, far more so than was the case with the death penalty - 5% of all deaths in Canada are now assisted suicide, and it's likely that we would follow suit. If you could guarantee me that the only people who would die under the new system would be single-minded, determined individuals who had freely chosen to avoid suffering, and who had not been coerced or malignly influenced, either directly or indirectly, then probably my attitude would be different.  But anyone who actually believes that is astoundingly naive.

If this legislation goes through, there will be people who die for economic reasons - either because they've been told they are a burden or because they assume that other people regard them as a burden.  There will be people who die because of treatable depression or low self-esteem or personality disorders.  There will be people who die because doctors actively put the idea into their heads.  For the first time since 1963, society and the state will be deciding that some people are better off dead and actually making them dead.

I hope this bill is rejected. If it's not, I'm not sure I'll even recognise this country in the years to come.

Incidentally, when I spoke out a few weeks ago against Ash Regan's bid to introduce the Nordic Model on prostitution law, Stuart Campbell rather outrageously implied that I must have been motivated by self-interest, ie. that I must be someone who pays for sex myself.  I'll be interested to see what dark or cynical motivation he'll ascribe to me in this case.  It's true that I was brought up a Catholic, and that probably does influence me, because my default setting is that life is sacred unless there's an exceptionally good reason.  But I'm not sure that's such a bad principle to live by, and it's fair to say a great many atheists take exactly the same view, even if the terminology they use is different.

The "Liberate Scotland" alliance continues to both disintegrate and drift to the far-right - and Barrhead Boy's autocratic leadership looks to be the culprit

The Independence For Scotland party, which until today was one of the three component parts of the Liberate Scotland alliance along with the far-right Sovereignty and "Independents for Independence", has never been noted for being a particularly mainstream organisation or for being in touch with the concerns of the general public.  It's been utterly obsessed, for example, with the tedious and unimportant issue of oaths of allegiance to the monarchy.  So it would be tempting to characterise their decision to abandon Liberate in much the same way I characterised Allan Petrie's identical decision a couple of days ago, ie. "we can excuse fascism but we draw the line at sharing an alliance with people who do not agree with our views about gender recognition certificates".  

But that would perhaps be unfair, because they've actually given specific reasons which are maybe a bit more reasonable.  They've pointed out that until recently Liberate was an equal alliance of three parties/groupings, but was then forced to register as a party in its own right because of a ruling from the Electoral Commission.  It appears that the leadership of the new party then exploited that situation to bypass their partners when making important decisions, such as allowing Tommy Sheridan and Craig Murray to stand under the Liberate banner.  And judging from what Petrie said the other day, that leadership consists basically of the notoriously volatile and short-fused blogger Barrhead Boy, and the maverick former MP for Coatbridge, Phil Boswell (even though ironically neither are among the three officially registered party officers).  That ties in with everything I heard about Liberate in its early days - the message was overwhelmingly that Barrhead Boy was the de facto autocrat of the alliance in much the same way that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was the de facto autocrat of Alba.

So Liberate is now disintegrating for much the same reason that Alba began to disintegrate in late 2023.  However, the situation is even worse for Liberate, because however malevolent Tasmina was, she did at least have credibility as a seasoned politician and lawyer.  Barrhead Boy setting himself up as the dictator of a "national liberation movement" is faintly comical in comparison, and calls to mind the old saying about history repeating itself as farce.

The other significance of today's development, of course, is that it by definition moves the centre-of-gravity within Liberate even further to the nativist far-right - assuming Sovereignty are remaining inside the tent, that is.

SNP conference, and a housekeeping note

Never let it be said that I don't take my SNP membership seriously, because I've given up on watching the rugby today in order to attend the SNP campaign conference in Edinburgh.  (And there's precious little chance of doing a Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads by avoiding the result until I can watch it on catch-up, because ironically the rugby is one of the main topics of conversation at the conference.). While I've got a moment, I just wanted to apologise to some of the readers who have emailed me over the last few days, because I've been so rushed off my feet with the constituency profiles and whatnot that I haven't managed to reply to everyone.

One message I did reply to, though, was alerting me to the latest Scotland In Union propaganda poll, which I hope to cover later, because I'm afraid it sounds very much like Survation have moved up a gear in the assistance they're willing to give to Scotland In Union by subverting the polling process and knowingly producing misleading results.

My latest constituency profiles for The National are Clydesdale, Coatbridge & Chryston and Cowdenbeath.

This election is not a game. As yet another fringe pro-indy party starts brutally tearing itself apart, here's a constructive suggestion: why not try to win independence via the mainstream SNP route? At this stage, you really have nothing left to lose.

Until today, when he suddenly left the party after an angry tirade, Allan Petrie was the designated Nominating Officer of the "Alliance to Liberate Scotland".  (Indeed he technically still is, because any change takes time to go through.)  That is one of the three key party officer positions officially registered with the Electoral Commission, and is the same one that in Alba was held by Chris McEleny, including for several months after his expulsion.

And yet just two days ago, Petrie - who I have never met and have barely interacted with online - was bombarding me with tweets of the following ilk:

"Oh dear wee jeemie I see your research skills haven't improved much possibly because you don't get out of your bedroom much, tell us why you are in a party responsible for putting rapists in female prisons wee man"

Leaving aside the obvious immaturity and childishness of his tweets, does that look to you like someone in a leadership position within a party that should be taken seriously - not only one that can win seats but that in fact will lead Scotland to independence?  However preposterous that boast may sound, it's what Liberate Scotland claim to believe about themselves and certainly want other people to believe about them.  Even if in their heart of hearts they know it's not true, they'd presumably at least want to project an image of seriousness and credibility that would look congruous with their mission statement, and you really do have to wonder whether they have the self-awareness to understand just how far short of it they're falling.  Alba was a complete and utter shambles, and yet anyone who moves from Alba to Liberate will quickly realise they've just suffered a massive downgrade.

So what triggered Petrie so much that he forgot he was supposed to be a leading figure within a "national liberation movement", and then instantly reduced him to chucking puerile insults at me like a random drunk bloke in a pub?  It was simply because I had pointed out in a blogpost that his party is in an electoral pact with a far-right party called Sovereignty, and that as yet nobody has a credible answer as to why that's OK.  Liberate clearly have an agreed position that if anyone asks them about Sovereignty's extremist policies, they will refuse to answer substantively and will just trot out vacuous slogans like "independence nothing else nothing less".  The most you'll get out of them is an explanation that independence is the only thing that matters for now and that discussion of the merits and demerits of all other policies, including Sovereignty's extremist ones, will have to wait until after independence.  In other words, an independent Scotland established by Liberate might be a fascist ethnostate, but there again it might not be, we'll just have to wait and see, and what an exciting magical mystery tour that will be.  Yup, that sounds like a totally credible position, one that will be easily defensible in the heat of an election campaign.

But rather deliciously, Petrie's stated reason for flouncing out of Liberate today exposes the whole holding position of "independence nothing else, no other policies matter" as having always been a complete sham anyway.  He can't accept the fact that Craig Murray, who does not share his gender critical views, has been newly taken on as a Liberate parliamentary candidate.  It crosses a red line for him, apparently, even though the trans issue has got nothing to do with independence, the one and only thing that is supposed to matter.  Now I hold gender critical views too, and I don't doubt that it's an important issue, but I don't think it's any more important than opposing Sovereignty's policies on banning all economic migration, or on having an ethnically-based Scottish citizenship, or on withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.  If I and others are not allowed to regard fascist policies as a red line or to even ask about them, it's hard to see how Petrie can justify getting a special opt-out from the general "independence nothing else" principle that allows him to have a red line for his own personal hobby horse.

My suspicion is that Petrie and the others have been caught in their own bubble for so long that they can't even see the contradiction.  The independence issue and the gender issue have become weirdly fused inside their heads and they've literally forgotten that the two things are actually separate.

LOL. I did predict a civil war, but even I thought it might take a bit longer than two days. https://t.co/Whyp5Z1tst

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 12, 2026

It’s not a laughing matter James - it’s actually quite tragic! As long as self serving grifting charlatans put their interests first Scotland will never achieve independence - far too many livelihoods rely on the “independence industry” for it to ever be achieved.

— Heather McLean (@HeatherMc1960) March 12, 2026

I'm afraid after Allan's childish antics two days ago (openly cheerleaded by you it has to be said) I'll have to strongly disagree with you here, Heather: it's absolutely bloody hilarious. Petrie's position is literally "I can excuse fascism but I draw the line at sharing a...

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 12, 2026

...party with someone who disagrees with my views on gender recognition certificates". He's literally done the meme. pic.twitter.com/arIyP6Wtmq

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 12, 2026

Meanwhile, as expected, Tommy Sheridan and his wife Gail were today also unveiled as defectors to (and candidates for) Liberate.  As I pointed out in my blogpost the other day, that will trigger a civil war within the party, because even those who don't immediately follow Petrie out of the door will soon find themselves in a battle for control with Sheridan, who always seeks to be the dominant force in any party or political project he is part of.  And although I don't believe in the 'horseshoe' theory of politics (that the further you go to the left, the closer you get to the far-right), Sheridan the Trotskyist is not exactly doing much to dispel it by going into alliance with Sovereignty without a second thought.

A week or two ago, our old friend Stew said as a 'joke' that he was almost tempted to endorse the SNP for the Holyrood election after all, because if they won an overall majority that would put John Swinney on the spot and require him to try to deliver the independence referendum that he has promised would follow in those circumstances.  Like a lot of Stew's intended jokes, that's a lot more significant and revealing than he realised when he said it, because the logic is actually watertight.  Even if you genuinely believe that there is only a 10% chance of Swinney doing what he's promised, the rational thing to do is vote SNP and at least give that 10% chance an opportunity to play out.  

After all, what brilliant alternative independence strategy would you be giving up by doing that?  None.  If you vote Liberate, you'll be voting for a party that has not only become an embarrassing circus, but that will probably get only 0.1% or 0.2% of the list vote.  That's a complete and utter waste of time that cannot possibly achieve anything.  Alex Salmond only got 1.5% of the vote with Alba, and he had the sort of charisma and strategic nous that Barrhead Boy can only dream of.  The only charismatic potential leader Liberate have got in its ranks is Sheridan himself, but if he takes over it will become the Tommy Sheridan Party, ie. Solidarity Mark II, and we all remember how Solidarity Mark I fared in repeated Holyrood elections.

Give independence a chance.  Vote for an independence party that the general public will actually vote for.  And yes, that means the SNP, or if there's some particular reason why you can't bring yourself to vote for them, the Greens are also a pro-indy party that will win seats.  No other pro-indy party will even get close.

Far right? Farage is far right. Maga is far right. Are you seriously smearing fellow independence activists with British tropes? I doubt anyone inside the Swinney version of the SNP is in any way "to the left" in politics.

— Inde-Car Gordon Ross (@PartickDriver) March 10, 2026

Apologies, Gordon, I didn't see your tweet until now. Yes, I absolutely am describing Sovereignty, one of the key components of the "Liberate Scotland" alliance as far-right, because that is what they are. Read their 2024 manifesto - it speaks for itself. Farage is to their left.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 12, 2026

*  *  *

My latest Holyrood constituency profile for The National is Clydebank & Milngavie, which you can read HERE.

GB-wide YouGov poll: Greens STAY AHEAD of Labour, and SNP lead by 8 in Scotland

Later in this video, I also provide some more information / offer some thoughts on why YouGov may be systemically underestimating independence support in their full-scale Scottish polls.

Questions mount over Stew's "I'm a fearsome journalist, can make mincemeat of anyone" self-image, as the controversial Somerset blogger concedes: "I can't risk moderating the James Kelly v Allan Petrie debate, because I'd just end up assisting James"

 

But yeah, Allan, it *was* actually pretty rude of you to make Stew's involvement a condition of you taking part if you hadn't even bothered to check with him whether he was willing to do it.  Hopefully you can think of a suitable replacement, but for heaven's sake: this time, ASK FIRST!

Or to put it another way: hey Stoo, Stoo...who's the REAL moderator?