If a Section 30 order is refused for the umpteenth time, there must be no further procrastination - the next UK general election must be used as a de facto referendum on Scottish independence

I keep wondering what effect the Labour leadership crisis, immensely entertaining though it is, is having on Scottish public opinion.  The general rule of thumb is that the public will not vote for divided parties, so this spectacle could have a positive effect by making Labour unelectable for a very long period to come, in much the same way that the Tory government was doomed from the moment of the Trussmageddon, with Rishi Sunak effectively just serving out time from that point on.

On the other hand, the crisis does distract from the SNP's election win and the renewed mandate for the two main pro-independence parties.  The one thing we mustn't allow to happen is for the independence issue to go back to sleep as a result of Labour's woes.  We have the mandate and we must maintain a sense of urgency and use it.  The vote on a Section 30 order must go ahead, and if Westminster then say no, it's reasonable to conclude after so many exhaustive attempts that the intransigence is permanent and an alternative means of exercising the mandate must be found.  The independence movement is not going to be tolerant of any further procrastination, and justifiably so.  As Believe in Scotland said last year, the obvious way forward is to use the next UK general election as a de facto referendum on independence.

I was criticised for making that point the other day by Angus Brendan MacNeil, the former MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar.  He wants a snap Holyrood election to be held within months instead.  I really don't think that's a helpful suggestion.  I have no problem with the principle of using a snap Holyrood election further down the road, but if you did it so soon after the election we've only just had, many voters would be furious at what they would see as self-indulgent game-playing, and pro-independence parties would be punished.  The beauty of using the Westminster election is that everyone would know it would be taking place anyway.  The other advantages are:

* If Reform UK appear to be on the brink of taking power UK-wide, the crisis would be imminent and voters might well be highly receptive to the message that voting for independence is the "last chance" to stop Farage.

* In a Westminster election, it's feasible to run on an independence-only or independence-dominant platform.  In any Holyrood election, a devolved government is being elected and the SNP would be seen as irresponsible or frivolous if they did not set out their stall for what they would do with devolved power.

* There are still plenty of sceptics about the principle of a de facto referendum, and if it's going to happen in the real world we need to build a consensus for it.  That consensus is much more likely to emerge if we focus on the Westminster 2029 option, given that the mainstream and SNP-allied organisation Believe in Scotland have already proposed it.  The more outlandish proposals like MacNeil's just make the whole idea seem unserious.  Stick to the credible plan and let's actually make it happen this time.

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The Scot Goes Pop fundraiser: time to aim for a rocket boost

So I just thought I'd put this post up to try to give another little boost to the ongoing Scot Goes Pop fundraiser, and I'll probably keep it pinned second from top on the blog over the coming few weeks.  As you may remember me mentioning early during the Holyrood campaign, I'm due to receive some substantial funds at some point during May or June, and after that I should be OK for a decent period, but I've absolutely no idea exactly when those funds will come in, and until then I'm just trying to keep the show on the road.  

Just to make you aware, I haven't been manually adjusting the target figure on the GoFundMe page - they've introduced a new system of dynamically changing the target as donations come in, because apparently that produces better results.  So there's no magic number on this occasion - I'm just trying to raise as much as possible, although I could certainly do with raising another few hundred pounds at least.

So if you'd like to donate and help Scot Goes Pop keep going with its political, polling and election analysis, there are three main options:

For card donations, the GoFundMe crowdfunder is HERE.  

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Post-election GB-wide poll shows Labour slumping to joint third place with the Greens - SNP surge to massive 22-point lead in Scottish subsample, with Labour on course for TOTAL WIPEOUT in Scotland

On some measures, Reform UK actually had a poor result last Thursday.  In the English local elections, their showing in the projected national vote share dipped quite sharply from 30% last year to 26% this year.  In the Scottish Parliament election, they significantly underperformed their polling average, while in the Welsh Senedd election, they had thought they were roughly level-pegging with Plaid Cymru but ended up quite a bit behind, both in terms of votes and seats.  However, that's not the impression you'd have got from looking at the media, and this may be an example that demonstrates the theory that what the media tells you about an election result is far more important than the election result itself, because the first GB-wide YouGov poll since Thursday shows Reform getting a post-election bounce, as if they're basking in the glory of having done really well.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 10th-11th May 2026):

Reform UK 28% (+3)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Greens 16% (+1)

Labour 16% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 13% (-1)

SNP 3% (-)

Restore Britain 3% (-1)

Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)

Scottish subsample: SNP 39%, Reform UK 17%, Greens 13%, Conservatives 10%, Labour 10%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Restore Britain 1%

Welsh subsample: Plaid Cymru 40%, Reform UK 33%, Conservatives 10%, Labour 6%, Greens 3%, Liberal Democrats 3%, Restore Britain 2%

On a more positive note, the straw in the wind that is the Scottish subsample may suggest there is momentum for the SNP and none (for example) for the Liberal Democrats, which would imply the public are interpreting the Holyrood result in a rather different way than they're 'supposed' to.  Individual Scottish subsamples are very small, of course, but YouGov do weight and structure theirs correctly, so if just for the hell of it we plug those numbers into a seats projection model, this is what we get for the Scottish component of the next UK general election: SNP 51, Liberal Democrats 5, Conservatives 1.  A total wipeout for Labour, and no breakthrough for Reform.

Your Party are literally polling at zero in England, Scotland and Wales, despite the fact that YouGov now include them.  Incredibly, despite Jeremy Corbyn's name recognition, they've failed as an experiment even quicker than Alba did, and I think Corbyn and Sultana should be thinking creatively about a way out of their predicament.  Their best bet might be to simply throw in their lot with Polanski and the Greens, but if they don't want to do that, the second-best option may be to negotiate a limited electoral pact in which the Greens agree to stand aside in a small number of seats like Islington North and Coventry South.  I can't see any other way that Your Party aren't going to fade into total irrelevance.

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If you enjoyed Scot Goes Pop's 2026 election coverage so much that you started to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
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As Keir Starmer nears his exit, who should the independence movement want to replace him?

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If you enjoyed Scot Goes Pop's 2026 election coverage so much that you started to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

My theory as to why Labour and the unionist media chose the wrong saviour in Anas Sarwar

As I pointed out after one of Anas Sarwar's catastrophic TV debate performances during the campaign ("HOW DARE YOU JOHN DON'T YOU DARE JOHN THAT MAN WANTS TO DEPORT MY FAMILY JOHN THIS IS A MORAL ISSUE JOHN DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT JOHN"), I have genuinely regarded him as an atrocious politician since long before he became Scottish Labour leader.  That opinion was largely formed by seeing him in action during the 2014 referendum campaign when he was Johann Lamont's deputy as leader.  I was completely bewildered by Labour's and the media's total faith in him as some sort of charismatic, inspiring leader who had great things ahead of him, and sure enough their faulty perceptions have finally faced the inevitable rendez-vous with reality.  

However, I have now developed a little theory as to why they went so badly astray.  It seems like a billion years ago now, but regular readers might recall that last June I attended the Holyrood Sources event at which both Sarwar and John Swinney were interviewed, and I was fortunate enough to be called to ask Sarwar a question about the Gaza genocide.  After I had finished reading my question out, Sarwar said "it sounds like you have a particular view on the Scottish constitutional question" and it suddenly became obvious that I was in the midst of a heavily Labour-supporting and unionist audience, because I heard lots of knowing chuckles around me as if my question had somehow just been deligitimised.  After the podcast recording was over (or possibly it was at the half-time break), Sarwar came up to close to where I was sitting and greeted a lot of the people near me, several of whom he seemed to already know.  I got the opportunity to see what he's like when he's not conscious of TV cameras on him, and he actually came across completely differently.  He was very likeable and had an easygoing charm about him.

I think the media and Labour genuinely believed they were onto a winner because of the man they actually knew in person, and were forgetting that he comes across as a half-automaton, half-clown on TV screens.  You sometimes hear the claim that it's better if parliamentarians rather than rank-and-file party members choose leaders, because they know all of the candidates' strengths and weaknesses, but Sarwar is actually a good advert for the opposite being true.  You might well be better off leaving the decision to people who only know the candidates via mass media, because exactly the same will be true for voters at election time.

I know a lot of people had a similar epiphany about Douglas Ross during his stint as a pundit on the BBC results programme, because as soon as he was no longer functioning as a politician, the real person started to shine through and you could see for the first time why people like Ruth Davidson rated him highly.  (But that of course doesn't even begin to excuse what he did to David Duguid.  What. A. Cad.)

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A crucial arithmetical point: the SNP on their own have more seats than all of the unionist parties combined

SNP: 58 seats

All unionist parties: 56 seats

Greens: 15 seats

This hadn't occurred to me until I saw someone mention it on Twitter this morning, but from a psychological point of view it's absolutely vital.  Now, to be clear, I never thought the target of a single-party overall majority should have been set, I spoke out against it vociferously at the time, and I voted against it as a delegate at the SNP conference in Aberdeen.  In a proportional representation system, it shouldn't matter a damn whether you achieve the near-impossible feat of a majority.  But if unionists try to take advantage of the fact that the target was set, it's a massive problem for them that their combined forces in parliament are clearly outnumbered by the SNP as a single party.  The only way they can arithmetically claim that the SNP have been denied a mandate for an independence referendum is by actually counting the Greens on the unionist side, which is the sort of logical gymnastics that even our biased media would be likely to find too much of a stretch.  The Green manifesto, even though Andrew Neil apparently didn't bother checking it, baldly stated that "Scotland should be an independent country" and called for an independence referendum.

I also have very little time for unionist commentators (or for those who are, let me politely put it, adjacent to unionist commentators) who are trying to retrospectively claim that vote shares are more important than seats.  I'm no great enthusiast for the Additional Member System - I've called for years for a switch to a pure list system as has just happened in Wales, and failing that STV would probably be my second choice (although STV is actually a lot, lot less proportional than people assume).  But given that Westminster introduced our current voting system in the first place, the cheerleaders for Westminster rule really don't have a leg to stand on in saying that the result the system produced should not be respected.  Let me remind them of the way they reacted with incredulity two years ago when I pointed out, entirely accurately, that the SNP's result in the UK general election was nowhere near as bad as was being portrayed, because for every 7 votes Labour had received, the SNP had received 6.  "The system is the system!" they spluttered with entitled rage.  "You're in denial about a total wipeout for the SNP across the central belt!"

If unionists now want to claim the electoral system is a problem, get back to us when you're ready to introduce a voting system at Westminster that would have given the SNP their rightful six-sevenths of Labour's seats at the 2024 general election.

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All I needed was the love you gave, all I needed for another day, and all I ever knew, only Stew

Tragically, the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger stopped updating his little shrine to me a few months ago, but I no longer need to feel neglected because he's been properly going off on one about me since the election.  He made a rather optimistic effort to accuse me of contradicting myself on the interminable subject of "tactical voting on the list", because on Thursday morning I urged people to vote Both Votes SNP, while on Saturday I pointed out that the reason the pro-indy majority at Holyrood had increased was because a significant proportion of SNP supporters had tactically switched to the Greens on the list.  But unfortunately for him, the screenshots he used demonstrated rather helpfully that there was no contradiction, because they clearly showed that I went on to say that the tactical voters had been taking a hell of a risk that could easily have backfired if their assumptions about how the constituency results would pan out had been proved wrong.  In other words, the tactical voting produced a good outcome simply because of luck - and one of the main reasons for my Both Votes SNP advice was because I didn't think (and still don't think) that people should be relying on luck.

However, all of this begs a question that I genuinely don't have an answer to.  One thing that is beyond dispute is that the tactical voting only worked because the recipients of the tactical votes were the Greens.  No other pro-independence party was remotely strong enough to win seats - by Stew's own admission Atlas were a "shambles", while all of the other pro-indy fringe parties were even less popular.  And yet we know he categorically did not want people to vote Green - he hates the Greens with every fibre of his being, and wanted everyone to vote against them on principle.  So when he says that people like me who voted SNP on the list were stupid because we were "helping to get unionists elected", who does he actually think we should have been voting for instead?  Who is actually left once you exclude the SNP, the Greens and the "shambolic" fringe parties like Atlas?  

OK, we kind of know the answer in the sense that he was obviously gagging for people to vote Reform.  But that wasn't his official advice, because he kept saying that SNP list voters were helping to elect Reform MSPs, as if that was a bad thing.  So who was he officially telling people to vote for on the list?  Can anyone fathom it?

Actually, if anyone is still on good terms with him, please do ask him, I'd be genuinely fascinated to find out the answer.  It'll be like cracking the code of an unsolvable equation.

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The full results of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election: and how the biggest pro-independence majority in history was won

For those of you who were asking, here is the final result of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, both in terms of vote shares and seats.

Seats:

SNP 58

Reform UK 17

Labour 17

Greens 15

Conservatives 12

Liberal Democrats 10

PRO-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 73 seats

ANTI-INDEPENDENCE PARTIES: 56 seats

PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY OF 17 SEATS

Constituency ballot:

SNP 38.2%

Labour 19.2%

Reform UK 15.8%
Conservatives 11.8%

Liberal Democrats 11.4%

Greens 2.3%

Regional list ballot:

SNP 27.2%

Reform UK 16.6%

Labour 16.0%

Greens 14.0%

Conservatives 11.8%

Liberal Democrats 9.4%

As we hoped would be the case, this is the biggest pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament's history, albeit only just.  The 73 seats for the SNP and Greens in combination exceeds the 72 for the SNP, Greens and Margo MacDonald in 2011, the 69 for the SNP and the Greens in 2016, and the 72 for the SNP and the Greens in 2021.  

I have to say I am completely and utterly baffled and bewildered by the people this morning who are continuing to moan about what they call "the SNP 1&2 strategy", because for the first time in history those people got what they claimed to want.  "Pro-indy tactical voting on the list" ceased to be simply a social media bubble obsession of activists, and was adopted wholesale by the general public in far bigger numbers than ever before.  The SNP vote slumped much more on the list ballot than it did on the constituency ballot, and the only plausible explanation is that tens of thousands of SNP-supporting voters tactically switched to the Greens on the list because they'd heard the argument that it would bolster the pro-independence majority.  That is precisely why we ended up slightly increasing the pro-independence majority compared to 2021 even though the combined vote share for pro-independence parties on the list ballot actually dropped by several percentage points.  As Ailsa Henderson pointed out on the BBC results programme, although the strategy worked a treat this time, the tactical voters were taking an enormous risk because they were making an assumption of how the constituency results would work out, and they could easily have been wrong.

Mark my words: this may come back to bite us in the future.  People have a nasty habit of learning the wrong lessons from history, and if there's a kind of 'folk memory' in five years' time that voting SNP constituency, Green list produces a good result for independence, many voters may try to replicate the strategy in an even more risky scenario where the SNP are being seriously challenged in the constituencies.  You could easily end up with a dreadful result for the SNP where they finish with ten or fifteen seats fewer than they should have received on a proportional basis, because one-third of their supporters have abandoned them on the list.

Incidentally, don't allow anyone to get away with offering the combined SNP-Green vote share on the list as the definitive vote for pro-indy parties.  Although the fringe pro-indy parties such as Atlas had dreadful results in isolation, they did in combination with each other manage to take around 2% of the list vote, and of course there were also pro-indy independent candidates on the list such as Sean Davis, Denise Somerville and Ash Regan.  The biggest vote for a pro-indy fringe party was the 0.8% for Atlas, in part due to Tommy Sheridan's name recognition in Glasgow, although Sheridan's own result on the Glasgow list was still relatively poor compared to his previous efforts with Solidarity.  The ISP and the SSP (the latter of which most people have probably forgotten even exists anymore) took 0.4% each.

The weirdest quirk of the result is that Labour, in spite of their disastrous reverses, still ended up moving from third place in 2021 to joint second this year.  However, they were pipped by a small margin in the popular vote on the list ballot by Reform UK.  The Greens are now a larger party than the Conservatives, which in historical terms is a mind-boggling thought.

Although the SNP had some wonderful constituency results (Shetland was the stuff that dreams are made of), the two results I found most painful were Na h-Eileanan an Iar and Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch.  That is why the SNP list seat on the Highlands & Islands is so soothing - it directly compensates for one of those two defeats and means that one of them doesn't actually matter (take your pick as to which one).

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Free Money with the Reverend Stuart Campbell: an update on how to collect your winnings

Seriously, folks, I've never steered you wrong on a bet recommendation about Scottish politics, and 5/4 on Angus Robertson is absolutely free money. pic.twitter.com/cGvR1ZzIBD

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) April 15, 2026

Now, for full disclosure, I did actually agree with Stew that Angus Robertson was the likely winner in Edinburgh Central, but unlike Stew I made clear that there was a plausible path to victory for both Labour and the Greens, and I certainly wasn't so idiotic as to go around telling people to bet the house on Mr Robertson winning.  Although the numbers are dwindling, Stew does still have a few sheep-like followers who adhere to his every utterance as if it's the Word of God, so it's actually highly likely that people took his advice and put money on Mr Robertson.  We can only hope that nobody is waking up this morning to the loss of their life savings.

So the Edinburgh Central prediction now joins the vast collection of Stew Predictions That Were Wrong, and given the way he made it, it's perhaps the crown jewel of the lot.  (My previous all-time favourite was "we're calling it now, Humza has lost" during the 2023 SNP leadership election.) But it doesn't end there, because he made other predictions about the Holyrood election that also proved to be hopelessly wrong.  I can maybe let him off the hook with his claim the other day that Iris Duane had no chance of being elected, because it was ambiguously worded and possibly referred to the constituency contest only.  But for the following he has no alibi:

* In an effort to convince people not to vote SNP on the list, he claimed a year ago that the SNP were nailed-on to win at least 65 constituency seats, he provided a map of the 65 he was referring to, and he challenged anyone to demonstrate which of those 65 the SNP might not win.

In the actual result, the SNP took 57 constituency seats.

* He said a year ago that the SNP were guaranteed to win zero list seats, and that anyone who voted SNP on the list could therefore know with absolute certainty that their vote would be wasted.

In the actual result, the SNP took one list seat - meaning the SNP have taken at least one list seat in all seven Holyrood elections since the start of devolution in 1999.

* He later modified that prediction to say there was a chance of the SNP winning one list seat, but only if they lost to Fergus Ewing in Inverness & Nairn.

In the actual result, the SNP defeated Fergus Ewing in Inverness & Nairn, but still took one seat on the Highlands & Islands list.

So what was Stew's sheepish reaction to his latest bonanza of hapless wrongness?  Yup, you've guessed it, folks, the opening words of his blogpost this morning were (and what else could they be): "Well, we told you so."

It's an art form in its own way.  Dear old Stewie.

Scottish Parliament election results 2026: How we've moved closer to a decision on independence

 

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