A brief reply to Ballot Box Scotland about my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency

Allan Faulds, the former serial Scottish Green Party candidate who runs the psephological Ballot Box Scotland site, has taken a passive-aggressive swipe at me because of something I wrote in my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency for The National - 

"Personally if I'd been associated with the Alba Party and repeatedly exaggerated their prospects for success, I might consider not taking poorly informed swipes at three sources - myself,  @devolvedelections.bsky.social and  @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social - who have taken reasonable modelling positions!"

What he's referring to is my point that projections showing that the Greens are on course to win Edinburgh Central are based on a smoke-and-mirrors exercise, because they rely on using the high Green list vote from 2021 as a proxy for what might happen on the constituency ballot this time.  That makes no sense, because the Greens actually stood on the constituency ballot in Edinburgh Central in 2021, and indeed put forward a very high-profile candidate in Alison Johnstone, who was on the cusp of becoming Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.  They did not perform particularly well, and even making reasonable assumptions about how they might have performed better if the latest boundary changes are taken into account, they would almost certainly still have finished a distant fourth, probably almost thirty percentage points or so behind Angus Robertson of the SNP who won the seat.  So that has to be regarded as the realistic baseline for this year's race, although I did go on to say that the task was "not mission impossible" for the Greens, and that with a focused campaign they might have a chance - but I summed up by saying that if they won, they "would be defying the odds, not merely meeting expectations".

I absolutely stand by those comments, which constitute a balanced summary of the true position.  Frankly, I struggle to see how anyone can reasonably dispute them, and by coming out in such an absurdly shrill, precious, self-righteous way I believe Mr Faulds is allowing his protective bias towards his own political party to reveal itself clearly yet again.  He goes absolutely nuts, and has done for many years, whenever anyone suggests that his "project" (as he refers to his website) might not be as pristinely "non-partisan" as he insists, or that he in fact relatively frequently allows his own prejudices to shine through in his commentary.  But I suspect the only reason that's such a sore point for him is that he knows perfectly well it's sometimes a fair allegation.

By contrast, I've never pretended that this blog is non-partisan.  I am a member of the SNP, I will be voting SNP on both ballots in May, and on the blog I am strongly encouraging others to do the same.  But the constituency profiles are in a completely different category to the blog, and I do take the exercise very seriously and only say things that I believe to be 100% accurate and fair, and that can be justified and supported by hard facts.  I've gone out of my way to give proper attention to the Green challenge in the Edinburgh seats, where they are clearly a credible force, and I have most certainly not been talking them down in any way whatsoever.

Contrary to Mr Faulds' claims, I did not in fact identify him, or Mark McGeoghegan (whose strident political leanings are also well known from social media), or anyone else as being behind the bizarre projections for Edinburgh Central that I mentioned in the constituency profile, and the fact that he knew exactly what I was referring to anyway speaks volumes.  He openly admits on his site that the Greens' numbers in his constituency projections are based partly on their list performance - something that he does not do for any other party.  So in fact my commentary was not "ill-informed" - it was extremely well informed by Mr Faulds' own words and clarifications.

Incidentally, this is a very rare point of consensus between myself and Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland - he also commented a few weeks ago on how baffling it is that a projection would show the Greens on course to win a constituency in which they've never polled higher than 14%.  On this occasion Campbell's logic was actually sound, and it looks very much like Mr Faulds is simply indulging in special pleading for his own party as a form of "soft astroturfing".  To be clear, I would definitely not be astonished if Lorna Slater wins Edinburgh Central for the Greens, but if that happens it will be for the reasons I gave in the profile, not because of the heroic and frankly silly assumptions that are driving the dodgy projections.

As for Mr Faulds' dig about my former involvement with the Alba Party, he clearly knows very little about that subject, because I actually spent a fair bit of my time as an Alba NEC member begging Alex Salmond and others to adopt a greater sense of realism about Alba's electoral prospects.  I was almost in despair after the 2022 local elections, because Mr Salmond was waxing lyrical about how he had supposedly detected signs in the results, based mostly on second and third preference votes, that Alba were on course for the 6% needed to win list seats at Holyrood this year.  He seemed to be absolutely genuine about that - it was like he had succumbed to wishful thinking and had started to swallow his own propaganda.  In reality, Alba were firmly stuck on 2% and were making no progress towards winning list seats whatsoever.  I pointed that out more than once on the Alba NEC - it was a thoroughly unwelcome and unwanted message, but I pointed it out just the same.  

Perhaps Mr Faulds is going back to way before that and is referring to what I said about Alba's prospects before the 2021 Holyrood election even took place.  But at that point there were numerous Panelbase polls suggesting Alba were on course to win list seats, and as I do not actually possess psychic abilities I had no way of knowing that the Panelbase panel contained far too many Alba supporters and that the numbers were therefore misleadingly inflated.  If Mr Faulds does possess psychic abilities, I salute him, but there's not much I can do about being inferior to him in that unusual respect.  In fact, I distinctly remember pointing out to someone just after the 2021 election that I had made three or four predictions about the result, and all of them had proved to be accurate apart from the one about Alba, "and I never actually claimed to be Nostradamus".  It would be interesting to go back over all of Mr Faulds' past election predictions and see if his own 'strike rate' is any better - and I do mean all of the predictions, not just the ones he cherrypicks with the benefit of hindsight.

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My latest two constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith and Edinburgh North Western.

"Alliance to Liberate Scotland" angrily defend their pact with the far-right - but their excuses simply don't make any sense

Later in this video, I also give my thoughts on the extraordinary but somehow totally unsurprising news that the self-styled 'independence ultra' Chris McEleny, who expelled and drove out so many genuine independence supporters from the Alba Party, tried to defect to the hardline anti-independence party Reform UK - but was rebuffed!

 

My latest constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Eastern, Musselburgh & Tranent.

Revealed: the far-right have almost totally taken over the "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" fringe party in the Highlands & Islands region

I said in my video about the far-right elements of Barrhead Boy's new fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "the Atlas") that I had spotted at least two of the party's candidates as being from the far-right Sovereignty.  But I knew that would be an underestimate, so I've now checked and it appears that a grand total of six of the party's thirty-nine candidates are from Sovereignty.  That's close to one-sixth of the total, and presumably it would have been an even higher proportion if it hadn't been for the last-minute influx of ex-Alba candidates.

The six far-right candidates are:

Alan McManus (Central Scotland & Lothians West)

Brian Nugent (Highlands & Islands)

Andrew MacDonald (Highlands & Islands)

Flora Badger (Highlands & Islands)

Kenneth MacKenzie (Highlands & Islands)

Laurie Moffat (Mid-Scotland & Fife)

As you can see, there's a particular concentration in the Highlands & Islands, where Barrhead Boy seems to have handed over the party organisation lock, stock and barrel to the far-right.  Four of the six Atlas candidates in the Highlands & Islands are from Sovereignty, including all of the top three on the list.  However, the two far-right candidates standing elsewhere in Scotland are also extremely prominent on their respective lists.  Laurie Moffat is number 2 candidate on the Mid-Scotland & Fife list, the region where Eva Comrie is number 1 (which makes me repeat my perpetual question: what on earth is Eva doing?).  And Alan McManus, who has been exposed in recent days as a regular speaker at the far-right rallies organised by arch-unionist and holocaust denier Alistair McConnachie, is number 2 in Central Scotland.

Again, all I can do is urge you to avoid Alliance to Liberate Scotland like the plague if you care about the cause of independence.  We simply cannot afford to allow our movement to become associated, even at the fringes, with these neo-fascists - it would undo the good work of decades.  Stick with the mainstream pro-indy options on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.

Incidentally, on a more nerdish point, it looks like five of the six far-right candidates will be standing under the Sovereignty banner on the constituency ballot, and the Alliance to Liberate Scotland banner on the list ballot.  That means, to state the obvious, that people will be standing for two different parties in the same election, which brings to life as never before the danger Michael Ancram identified during the passing of the Scotland Act 1998 of "alter ego" parties standing on the two different ballots to try to cheat the system.  However, as this is all happening completely openly, and as Atlas seem to have declared their intentions to the Electoral Commission, presumably a ruling must have been made on whether any hypothetical Sovereignty constituency wins would count against Atlas when the d'Hondt calculation is done to distribute list seats.  If anyone knows for sure what the position is, please let me know.

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My two latest constituency profiles for The National are Eastwood and Edinburgh Central.

Let's keep the independence movement clean: avoid the dodgy far-right links of the fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "The Atlas")

The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it

I received a Reform leaflet through the door this morning, emblazened with photos of Malcolm Offord.  And because I'm interested in polls, I immediately noticed the rather amusing error in the Lib Dem-style bar chart.  It's obvious that the idea was to use percentage changes from the 2021 Holyrood election, rather than from the most recent poll, to maximise the sense of Reform momentum and to make it look like the SNP are collapsing.  And in seven out of eight cases they've done that, but some unfortunate minion seems to have made an almighty blunder on the SNP's list vote - it should read SNP 29% (-11), but instead they've used the most recent poll as the baseline and given it as SNP 29% (+1).

Thanks, Malc, for that remarkably helpful piece of pro-SNP spin!

On the reverse side of the leaflet are four policy priorities which are obviously calibrated to appeal to socially conservative working-class voters.  The fourth is about improving the NHS, which I presume is intended as a key point of reassurance for the target electorate, who really do care about the health system.  And I think above all else this is where Reform are getting away with absolute murder, because if other parties, including the SNP, hammered them over their plans to semi-privatise the NHS, a lot of working-class voters would recoil in horror and not even the most hysterical immigrant-bashing messaging would be able to offset the impact.

Offord's personal message also makes a point of saying that he's a state-school Greenock lad who went to Edinburgh University on a full grant.  Er, are Reform planning to reintroduce maintenance grants?  Are they going to abolish tuition fees in England?  If not, what is the point of making that comment except as a form of brazen hypocrisy?

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I had a brief but telling exchange this morning with Craig Murray, who after his time in the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Norwich Independents, the SNP, Action for Independence, the Alba Party, the Workers Party of Great Britain and Your Party, is now standing for Barrhead Boy's "Greater Prism" party at the Holyrood election (they call themselves "Atlas", I believe).  I had been making the point to someone else that the reasons "both votes SNP" makes sense are: a) that the SNP will desperately need list votes and seats if they underperform in the constituency ballot, and b) that the SNP can win several list seats even if they don't underperform in the constituencies as long as their list vote is high enough.  Imagining himself to be making a killer point, Craig popped up and claimed that this meant I was saying SNP list votes could only be useful if the polls are wrong.

Golly, who could ever imagine such a thing as the polls turning out to be wrong?!  But here's the thing: Craig's entire case hinges on the polls being wrong, because Atlas are not registering in the polls at all.  They are on zero.  Their chances of winning any seats at all are non-existent.  To believe that Craig is making a valid point about list votes for Atlas being of more use than list votes for the SNP, you would first have to believe that the polls are light-years out on the question of Atlas support, but cannot possibly be even slightly wrong about the SNP.  That would, with respect, be a galactically stupid thing to believe.

Lord Ashcroft's dodgiest poll question is one the health inspectors should be all over

I've been having a more leisurely look through the results of the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll, and I think there are three worth drawing to your attention.  First of all, Ashcroft has really pulled a fast one in order to produce an unhelpful result for the independence movement on one of his questions.  In the write-up of the poll, he claimed that only one-quarter of respondents thought that a majority of seats for pro-independence parties would constitute a mandate for an independence referendum, or to put it another way, he was implying that three-quarters either don't understand or don't accept the most fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy.  I thought that was a surprising result, because other pollsters have asked that question and found that a slim majority think there would be a mandate.  

But the data tables demonstrate in embarrassingly vivid detail how Ashcroft pulled his stunt off.  One of the basic rules of polling balance and impartiality is that if you are trying to measure whether respondents agree or disagree with a proposition, the negative option should be worded so that it's as close as possible to the natural opposite of the positive option.  In other words, if the positive option is "a majority of seats should be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum", the negative option should be "a majority of seats should NOT be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum".  But Ashcroft doesn't do that, and instead takes a walk on the wild side by offering as the negative option "People vote at elections for lots of different reasons - we cannot assume someone supports Scottish independence just because they vote for a particular party".  Not only is that self-evidently not the natural opposite of the positive option, it's not even about the same subject.  The positive option is about a mandate for an independence referendum, the negative option is about a mandate for independence itself.  Moreover, the negative option is a statement of the obvious that nobody would actually dispute regardless of their views on independence or a referendum. 

What Ashcroft is doing is forcing people to reject the positive option because they know that if they don't, it would look like they were denying a statement that everyone knows to be true.  If he had wanted to achieve the opposite effect, he could have done it by making the negative option something like "Many voters are not intelligent enough to check what they are voting for or to understand the issues, so of course they are not giving a mandate for any particular policy", and then respondents would have flocked to the positive option in a state of indignation.

In a nutshell, the results of the mandate question have no credibility, and the polling health inspectors should be all over that question like a rash.

The poll also has approval ratings for the various political parties, including for Alba.  The Alba rating is so utterly diabolical that if anyone has any lingering regret about the party's demise, they should consider themselves liberated to no longer entertain that feeling for even a moment.  Only 5% of respondents approve of Alba, and 55% disapprove, giving a net approval rating of -50, which is marginally worse than Reform UK and only slightly better than the Tories.  Alba is almost equally hated on both sides of the constitutional divide, with SNP voters giving it a rating of -37, and Green voters going even lower at -54.  By the end, Alba simply had nothing to offer because independence supporters themselves didn't even want the party to exist, and there's not really much point arguing the toss when people have so definitively made their minds up.

Lastly, there's a question revealing that a grand total of 46% of respondents say that one of the top three things in their minds when they cast their vote will be either "keeping Scotland part of the UK" or "getting an independent Scotland".  That rather gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that the independence question is a low priority for the electorate these days.

If you haven't watched my video about the poll yet, you can see it below.

Ashcroft poll: pro-independence parties could take overall majority of VOTES as well as SEATS

Thank you, your lordship! Sensational Ashcroft poll shows SNP on highest vote share of John Swinney's leadership - SNP-Green coalition preferred to all Labour-led alternatives - independence support up 4

The contents have it!  I'll try to make a video about this poll when I have a spare moment, but for now the basic facts deserve mentioning, because they bode extremely well for the SNP.  Lord Ashcroft is showing, as far as I can see, the highest SNP vote on the constituency ballot in any poll from any polling firm since the autumn of 2023 - in other words this is the highest since John Swinney became First Minister.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 39%

Reform UK 14%

Labour 12%

Greens 11%

Liberal Democrats 10%

Conservatives 9%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 31%

Greens 17%

Reform UK 15%

Labour 12%

Conservatives 10%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Alba 1%

Of course it's nonsensical to even be including Alba, a party that will not be standing at the election and that has announced its intention to abolish itself.  Hopefully other pollsters will stop including them.  There's also a lot of uncertainty about the real destination of the supposed 11% Green vote on the constituency ballot, because the Greens will apparently not be standing in most constituency contests, with their focus instead on the list where they will win most or all of their seats.  If even around one-third of those Green votes end up in the SNP column, that would take the SNP well into the 40s, pushing them closer to the type of result they had on the constituency ballot in their landslide years of 2011, 2016 and 2021.

Notably (and this will horrify and bewilder Stew), when respondents were asked the direct question of whether they prefer an SNP-Green coalition government to the plausible alternatives, they came down in favour of the SNP-Green option.

Which of the following would you rather see in a coalition government?

SNP-Greens 38%

Labour-Liberal Democrats 34%

SNP-Greens 42%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Conservatives 30%

SNP-Greens 45%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Reform UK 27%

SNP-Greens 44%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Conservatives-Reform UK 28%

Last but not least, there's a narrow No lead on the independence question, but that still represents a big increase for Yes since the last Ashcroft poll on the subject (which was three years ago!).

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 48% (+4)

No 52% (-4)

My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dunfermline and East Kilbride.

A further thought on the defeat of the assisted dying bill

I just want to comment briefly on Andrew Tickell's column about the Scottish Parliament's rejection of the assisted dying bill.  He argues that the opponents of the bill, if they want to be logically consistent, would have to now argue for a new law to be brought in to criminalise and punish anyone who assists a suicide, by for example facilitating a journey to a clinic in Switzerland.  He suggests that all of the claims that were made about the risks of coercion would apply just as much to assisted suicides of Scots that occur in another jurisdiction, and thus to prove that the worries about coercion were genuine and not bogus, we are somehow obliged to want to send people to jail for helping others get to Switzerland.

I have to say that doesn't stack up at all.  The point that was actually made about coercion during the debate was that it can be very subtle and it's thus impossible to know for sure whether it has occurred in any particular case.  That's one key reason why it would be irresponsible to legalise assisted suicide in our own jurisdiction, but it's also the main reason why it would be wildly disproportionate in most instances to prosecute someone who has already, as an established fact that cannot be changed or reversed, helped a seriously ill loved one to die in another jurisdiction.  You could never be certain of exact motivations, so the standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt' would rarely even come close to being met.  The legal system is not there to wreck the lives of nine people who acted with the best of intentions just to be sure of punishing the tenth person who actually did behave coercively, and I'd be amazed if Andrew Tickell of all people does believe that's the way it's supposed to work.

His notion that the logic of the bill's opponents is exploded by the mere possibility of assisted suicide in another jurisdiction can just as easily be turned on its head.  Andrew could be asked why, if people always have the option of going to Switzerland, such a song and dance was made about the supposedly vital importance of legalising assisted dying here?  The reality, of course, is that the need to go to another country is a very, very substantial bar for the majority of people.  Parliamentarians thus had a very real and meaningful decision to make, and a decision in the negative was no more of a sham or a cop-out than a decision in the affirmative would have been.

Are the results of independence polls being deliberately manipulated by organised unionist infiltrators in polling panels?

As explained in the previous blogpost, my main concern about the data tables from the Survation / Scotland in Union propaganda poll is that they show beyond all reasonable doubt that some respondents misunderstood the question (as they were presumably intended to) and said that they want Scotland to "remain in the United Kingdom" when in fact they want Scotland to become an independent country.  The section which allowed respondents to give reasons in their own words for "switching from Yes to Remain" not only produced declarations of outright support for independence, but also a number of comments about wanting to be in the EU, which implies that some people didn't read the question carefully enough and assumed they were being asked the Remain/Leave question from the EU referendum.  Accordingly, the 60-40 split in favour of "remain in the UK" in the headline results of the poll does not have any credibility.

However, someone raised an additional issue in the comments section of the blogpost, and suggested that even some of the genuinely anti-independence comments from "switchers" in the poll looked a bit suspicious.  Having thought about that, I think there may be something in it.  The two potential reasons for suspicion are: a) some of the responses are very similar to each other, which might suggest a degree of coordination, and b) some of them are a bit too enthusiastic about the "we are better together, the UK is simply wonderful" message.  I know there's such a thing as the zeal of the convert, but I'm a bit sceptical about whether people who actually voted for independence in 2014 and have since changed their minds would be quite so gung-ho in favour of the exact messaging they once rejected.  I'd have expected them to have quite nuanced reasons and to sound a bit more conflicted.

Here are some more examples of what the purported "Yes to Remain switchers" gave as their reasons:

"Stronger together"

"Stronger altogether"

"We are better as a nation"

"because I believe that togetherness will make a country"

"we are great britain if we remain together"

"As I think we are better together"

We should just be grateful that none of them broke into the chorus of Lord Offord's God-awful 2014 anthem "Why build another wall?  Oh why build another wa-a-a-all?"

The point is of course that if a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong unionist lies through their teeth and tells a polling company that they voted Yes in 2014, the weightings may ensure that their anti-independence responses are magnified, thus potentially distorting the headline results.  This sort of problem has been documented before - around twenty years ago, the then editor of Political Betting / Stormfront Lite openly admitted that he was a member of the YouGov polling panel and that he had falsely claimed to be a past Labour voter.  To their credit, YouGov then unceremoniously banned him, but they would have no way of knowing whether that was an isolated case or whether distortions are occurring on a bigger scale as a result of organised infiltration of the panel.  These Survation responses suggest that the latter is a real possibility, at least in Scottish independence polling.

And remember the only reason the system is open to abuse in this way is because some polling firms still insist on weighting their results by recalled 2014 vote.  They shouldn't be doing that anyway after twelve long years because of the danger of false recall, and going forward I'd suggest we should regard any poll that applies these weightings as potentially suspect for more than one reason.

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I've received yet another pleasantry from the Liberate Scotland supreme leader Barrhead Boy - 

"Kelly is just a nasty wee man with a huge chip on his shoulder and a desire to be a ‘name’ in the movement."

Blimey.  I'm struggling to imagine a more clear-cut example of projection than that.  It's not exactly me who has set up his own vanity fringe party to pursue a destructive vendetta against the SNP, or who ludicrously imagines himself to be Alex Salmond's de facto successor as "The Boss", or who delusionally boasts about being on the cusp of "liberating the nation".  And doing all of that from luxury pads in Barcelona and the United Arab Emirates is just *chef's kiss*.

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My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dumbarton, Dumfriesshire, and Dundee City East.