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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's only around six months since the controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset-based blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because voting for them would be pointless - there was "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year. That was Version 1. And it's only four weeks since Stew told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because there was a 100% chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year, due to the fact that the SNP were guaranteed to win at least "65 constituency seats", meaning any SNP list votes would be "wasted". That was Version 2.
As I pointed out a few days ago, the Hamilton by-election result completely eviscerated Stew's Version 2 claim that the SNP were certain to win 65 constituency seats and thus destroyed the whole basis of his Version 2 argument for "tactical voting on the list". And as I also pointed out, this made it absolutely inevitable that sooner or later we'd be getting Version 3 from Stew of why we definitely mustn't vote for the SNP on the list, which would be completely different from Version 1 and Version 2, and would be thrillingly much more complex than either of its predecessors because it would have to be somewhere in the middle, ie. it would need to be predicated on the assumption of the SNP doing neither outstandingly well nor particularly badly.
He's got cracking early, and it must have taken him ages, because he's given a new prediction for each and every individual constituency. Presumably having realised he was going to have to contradict himself yet again, and so soon after the last time, he decided he could only hope to maintain even a veneer of credibility if he went into much more detail than before.
So of course the first thing I looked at was his new prediction for East Lothian, which he had previously listed as one of his 65 guaranteed SNP wins, even though I pointed out to him repeatedly that the opinion polls clearly showed Labour were likely to gain it by some distance. Has he at last given up the ghost on this one? Well, yes he has, but in doing so he has put forward such a clueless and factually inaccurate reasoning that all but his most brainwashed cult followers will stop listening to him from this point on -
"Ah, the East Lothian Question. A certain self-described “expert” analyst is very excited about this one, and it undoubtedly represents a strong possibility for Labour, in the sense that if they can’t take East Lothian, they probably can’t take anywhere.
Actual current national polling says the SNP will hold it (since the fall in their support since 2021 is almost precisely identical to Labour’s), but the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem vote combined here was almost 10,000 higher than the SNP’s, so let’s give the baby his bottle and chalk another one up for Anas Sarwar’s boys."
WHAT? The fall in SNP support since 2021 is "identical" to the fall in Labour support? Let's take this nice and slowly, Stew. The SNP's national vote share in 2021 was 47.7%, an all-time record high, and Labour's was 21.6%, an all-time record low. The last few opinion polls show the SNP's vote share at somewhere between 33% and 36%, which is a drop of between 12 and 15 percentage points since 2021. And they show Labour's vote share at somewhere between 19% and 22%, which at the lower end is a drop of only three points since 2021, and at the higher end is a no change position. That is why all projections based on opinion polls show the ultra-marginal seat of East Lothian as an overwhelmingly likely Labour gain from the SNP. That's what the projections show now, and that's what they showed four weeks ago when Stew first made his bonkers claim that the polls were somehow pointing to an SNP hold in East Lothian.
Although it's always been obvious that Stew's "psephological analyses" are propaganda-driven and wildly divorced from reality, I must say I had always assumed that he at least understood the basics perfectly well, and that he was just bluffing his way through and hoping no-one checked the details of his deceitful claims too closely. But in this case it really does look like he doesn't have a sodding clue what the 2021 baseline numbers are, and that all of the thousands of words he's written to try to support his case for tactical voting on the list have been based on the schoolboy howler false premise that Labour's vote is down by just as much as the SNP's since 2021. In all seriousness, Stew fans: how did you manage to read that East Lothian prediction without bursting into hysterical laughter? And having gained that insight into his utter cluelessness, how did you carry on reading the other predictions with a straight face?
Given that he seems to have armed himself with such a wonky abacus, you won't be surprised to hear that many of his other predictions and reasonings are similarly nutty. Here are the most dodgy ones -
* He has Aberdeenshire West, Eastwood and Galloway & West Dumfries as SNP gains from the Conservatives, when in fact current polling suggests a net swing from SNP to Tory, meaning all of these seats are likely to be retained by the Conservatives
* He has Aberdeenshire East, Aberdeen South & North Kincardine, Banffshire & Buchan Coast and Ayr as SNP holds, when in fact current polling suggests all of these seats are likely Conservative gains
And it's not just projections from opinion polls that point to likely Tory resilience in battleground areas - that pattern was clearly already visible in last year's general election when the Tories were holding seats they should really have lost on nationwide trends. Where they were able to credibly portray themselves as the only hope of keeping the SNP out, they were successful - with the obvious exception of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East, but even there Douglas Ross came much closer to holding the seat than should ever have been possible in the circumstances.
Of course what Stew is engaged in here is an attempt to get his "projected" SNP constituency numbers as high as possible (while making a few grudging concessions such as East Lothian and Hamilton itself to try to avoid looking like a complete idiot), so he can claim that the SNP won't win any compensatory list seats and thus any SNP list votes will be wasted. But nothing has changed since Version 2, Stew - your numbers still don't add up. The only thing that has changed is that it now looks like you don't even know that your numbers don't add up.
UPDATE: The Sage of Bath has seen this blogpost and hurriedly deleted the key section of his East Lothian prediction. Don't worry, Stew, I took the precaution of taking a screenshot of the incriminating evidence...
I'm not quite sure what to make of the story in The National suggesting that 25 senior SNP figures have met to discuss replacing John Swinney as leader. I suppose the questions that form in my mind are "how senior?" and "how representative are they?", although it's been interesting to see open calls for a return to a serious strategy on independence from surprising sources such as Toni Giugliano a few weeks ago, and James Dornan yesterday.
What I've found dispiriting about this situation all along is that it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because whenever John Swinney does depart, regardless of whether it's this year or in five years' time, his replacement is highly likely to be either Kate Forbes or Stephen Flynn, and to the best of my knowledge neither of them are likely to restore the policy of a de facto referendum. Without that it's hard to see how you ever get to independence. That said, during the 2023 leadership election, I was struck by how much more positive the mood music on independence was from Kate Forbes than from Humza Yousaf, and how she was talking about achieving it quickly, even if I couldn't quite fathom how she planned to do it. Alex Salmond also told me on the phone that he thought Forbes was a supporter of independence, which may seem like quite a low bar to clear, but by that point he tended to dismiss many leading SNP figures as devolutionists.
But I presume that the main reason Swinney is leader right now is precisely to keep Forbes out because some people at the top of the party can't stomach her private religious views. It's hard to see that roadblock to change being cleared before the 2026 election, because Stephen Flynn is still in Westminster. As far as I can remember the rule hasn't been altered to prevent non-MSPs from standing for leader, so in theory if an early vacancy arose Flynn could put himself forward on the basis that he will nominate a stopgap First Minister to hold the fort until next May, but a) that would look like a very odd arrangement to the public, and b) if the stopgap was anyone other than Kate Forbes (and I bet it would be) it would look nakedly factional and open up a whole new can of worms. I'm still inclined to think it would be better just to give Forbes a go as leader and see what she can do. I'm not particularly bothered about her views on sex before marriage or whatever because to the best of my knowledge she's not actually planning to set up a Free Church of Scotland theocratic dictatorship.
Incidentally, on James Dornan's suggestion that the SNP should pledge to hold a referendum with or without a Section 30 order, although I thoroughly approve of the gung-ho attitude, I'm not sure how that could legally be done in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. There are no legal issues with a de facto referendum and that is obviously the way forward.
As I've been pointing out repeatedly since Friday (and some people really, really haven't wanted to hear this message, but I'm afraid facts are chiels that winna ding), the swing in the Hamilton by-election was consistent with the recent polls showing the SNP with a double-digit national lead over Labour. So the only way the Hamilton result is going to be any sort of problem for the SNP is if the media hype generated by it in itself changes public opinion in Labour's favour. We'll have to wait for another full-scale Scottish poll to find out for sure whether or not that has happened (and that could be weeks away), but the first YouGov subsample conducted since Hamilton suggests that Labour have not made any progress or enjoyed any bounce.
GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 8th-9th June 2025):
Reform UK 29% (+1)
Labour 23% (+1)
Conservatives 17% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 15% (-2)
Greens 10% (+1)
SNP 3% (-)
Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 28%, Labour 17%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%
YouGov structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly, unlike other firms, but the margin of error on a sample of 140 is still enormous. So it's statistically possible there's still some sort of 'hidden' Labour bounce, but I think the SNP will be pretty reassured by these numbers. The high Reform vote share is obviously concerning, but if we're back to thinking Labour are the SNP's main challengers next year, the first priority for John Swinney is to retain a substantial lead over Labour, and it looks like that might well be happening.
