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.

Survation cross a Rubicon by actively and knowingly pushing a fraudulent propaganda message on behalf of their client Scotland In Union - they must now be deemed partisan actors working willingly and enthusiastically on behalf of the cause of British unionism

As I pointed out in my video last night, the polling company Survation have seemingly prided themselves over the years on maintaining a particularly high standard of political neutrality and balance, even if that means not always going along with what their clients ask for.  And yet whenever Scotland In Union come calling and ask for another of their regular series of propaganda polls, all of Survation's principles just seem to fly straight out of the window.  Pretty much the cardinal rule of polling neutrality, which ironically virtually all polling companies OTHER than Survation religiously adhere to at all times, is that clients cannot interfere with the wording of voting intention questions - the wording of those questions must remain absolutely consistent regardless of the client, and that way the public can have confidence that the result would have been exactly the same no matter who the client was.

But it seems there is an exception to that rule which states that absolutely anything bloody goes when Survation are the pollsters and Scotland In Union are the client.  Suddenly in that context it becomes absolutely fine to replace the standard independence voting intention question "Should Scotland be an independent country?" with the propaganda question "Should Scotland remain part of the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?", even though Survation know perfectly well that this is not an independence question, it doesn't work as a proxy for an independence question, and it would not have a cat in hell's chance of being approved by the Electoral Commission for use in a referendum because of its ambiguity.  The key point is that it's perfectly possible to "leave the United Kingdom" without becoming an independent country - you could become part of another state, or become a dependency like Jersey, or become a freely associated state like the Cook Islands.

Survation also know that in practical terms the respondents in their panel are not replying to the question as if it's a proxy for an independence question, because the "Leave" vote produced by the question is consistently several points lower than the Yes vote in the 2014 referendum, whereas conventional independence polling using the standard question, including Survation's own conventional polls using that standard question, consistently show that the Yes vote is several points higher than in 2014, and may well be in an outright lead.  So the propaganda polls are literally producing worthless results which tell a story that is the opposite of the truth, and yet Survation have passively sat back and allowed their client to deliberately deceive both the media and the public by portraying those results as if they genuinely show that independence support has sharply declined since the referendum.

As I noted in the video, though, in the latest poll Survation have gone a step further, and have become active participants and collaborators in pushing this fraudulent and farcical propaganda fiction.  They have agreed to run a supplementary question that asks "switchers" from Yes to "Remain" to give reasons in their own words for "why they've changed their minds since 2014".  The clear subtext here is that a large drift from Yes to No is a real phenomenon that needs to be investigated, whereas Survation know - know for literally certain - that the polar opposite is true.  Survation have thus crossed a Rubicon and can now reasonably be considered partisan actors working willingly and enthusiastically on behalf of the cause of British unionism.  The only remaining question is why they are doing that - and I find it murderously difficult to come up with a plausible explanation that doesn't involve Scotland in Union paying an extra premium to buy themselves an exemption from the normal rules on impartiality and balance.

Genuine independence polls show that, since 2014, many voters have switched both from Yes to No and from No to Yes.  So it's unsurprising that some of the answers to Survation's question come from people who have genuinely turned against independence.  But it's equally unsurprising that other answers pick up a degree of bewilderment and confusion from people who have no idea why they're being asked to explain why they've changed their minds when they in fact still support independence.  Here is a little selection from the belatedly-published Survation data tables - 

"Scotland never wanted to leave the EU"

"Because I believe Scotland should be independent from England"

"No one has"

"I like the way they lead and organise"

"Needs to be independent"

"It would allow better autonomy"

"Better future and stronger if we stay in the European Union"

"Too much confusion in with the UK"

Remember these are all people who selected the "Remain" option on the headline propaganda question, and are all supposedly explaining in their own words why they "no longer support independence".

Take a bow, Survation, you've just made yourselves look utterly ridiculous.  But you've also just unwittingly demonstrated to the whole world why the headline results from Scotland In Union's propaganda polls are entirely false, and for that you do deserve our grudging thanks.

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My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dumbarton and Dumfriesshire.

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.