Monday, December 9, 2024

Norstat poll reveals John Swinney is settling into the role and showing sureness-of-touch - and he made a great speech at conference

Before anyone bites my head off, the headline is merely a running in-joke from the comments section.

The Sunday Times paywall was proving more of a barrier than usual to finding out the full Norstat poll results on Saturday night, but I've now caught up with the remaining results, which are basically leadership ratings and questions about the Scottish Budget.  The leadership figures in particular bolster the impression that the 2026 election is now very much the SNP's to lose.

Net ratings for party leaders:

John Swinney (SNP): -7
Anas Sarwar (Labour): -17
Russell Findlay (Conservatives): - 25
Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -29
Keir Starmer (Labour): -32

I think the public, both north and south of the border, have now made up their minds about Starmer, and his personal ratings are likely to remain thoroughly dismal for however long he stays on as Prime Minister - barring some kind of freakish event akin to the Falklands War or the pandemic.  So that means he's going to be a millstone around the neck of Labour in Scotland going into the election, and to offset that effect they would really want to have a very popular leader at Scottish level.  Instead Sarwar continues to trail Swinney and by a bigger margin than before.

It's been ages since we last saw a head-to-head Swinney v Sarwar "Who would be the best First Minister?" question from Redfield & Wilton, but if a poll like that was conducted now I would be amazed if it didn't show a big Swinney lead - remember that even Humza Yousaf usually led Sarwar on the head-to-head, despite being behind Sarwar on the net ratings.

So far at least, the Budget has proved to be very shrewd and effective in terms of its political impact, with overwhelming public support for four of the six specific measures that Norstat polled about.  The two more controversial items were ending the two-child cap, which is supported by the public but only by a margin of 38% to 27%, and free bus travel for asylum seekers, which depressingly is opposed by the public by a significant margin of 48% to 25%.  Interestingly, after the UK Budget, polls showed that voters were in favour of Rachel Reeves' individual measures but didn't like the package as a whole, whereas in the Norstat poll more respondents think the Scottish Budget will make themselves better off than think it will make them worse off, and a plurality think it will also make the country as a whole better off.  So that looks like a comprehensive success story for Shona Robison and John Swinney.

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Sunday, December 8, 2024

"Is that legal?"

I'm sorry, I know there are far more important things going in the world, today of all days, but I just cannot resist posting this, it's just too good to ignore.  Stuart Campbell is clearly smarting about me pointing out last night that his claim on Tuesday that there is "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament after 2026 has been left looking a bit silly by today's Norstat poll showing the SNP and Greens on course for a majority between them.  His response has been to post two catty tweets. The first was mocking me for mentioning the possibility of standing on the Central Scotland list as a pro-indy independent candidate (which yes, I meant seriously, but it's just one of several possibilities I'm mulling over now that Alba have left me as a free agent through no choice of my own, and it's not the most likely one).  

But the second tweet was a truly bonkers whinge about some obscure thing he's alleging I did to a blog comment (without, of course, providing a shred of evidence) on THE TWELFTH OF AUGUST, and which four months later he's suddenly decided is a scandal on a par with Watergate.  What makes this just sheer bloody exquisite perfection is Rab Dickson's "Is that legal?" reply, which you just know he meant absolutely seriously, and which forced Mr Campbell to patiently explain to him like a toddler that yes, Rab, of course it's legal.

A great pity.  For half a second I thought I was facing the sequel to the "Wings Of Justice" campaign, and that I might end up with a policeman at my door asking me "now then, what's this I 'ear about you nobbling blog comments?"

Maybe Campbell would have had more luck with me than he did with Dugdale.  But alas, we shall never know.

More analysis of the astonishing Norstat poll showing Yes at 54%

Just a quick note to let you know I have a new article at The National about the new Norstat poll showing that Yes would decisively win any new independence referendum, and that the SNP and Greens are on course to retain the overall pro-independence majority at Holyrood.  You can read the piece HERE.

Incidentally, it's been pointed out numerous times today that 54% is the highest Yes vote in any Norstat/Panelbase poll since four years ago.  It suddenly dawned on me that poll four years ago was actually commissioned by Scot Goes Pop.  It was a Panelbase/Scot Goes Pop poll conducted between the 5th and 11th of November 2020, and it showed Yes on 56% and No on 44%.  Maybe, just maybe, those days are back.

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Pandemonium in the bath as history-making Norstat poll shows massive Yes lead, with the SNP and the Greens on course to retain the PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY in the 2026 election

Sorry, that headline should probably read "Pandemonium in Bath".  Let's briefly recap on this week's dramatic events...

Tuesday: Stuart Campbell announces that polls show "there is no credible prospect" of retaining the pro-independence majority at the 2026 Scottish Parliament election.  He goes on to say: "we’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening."

Saturday: Norstat poll shows the SNP and the Greens on course to retain the pro-independence majority in 2026.

Life comes at you fast these days.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot (Norstat/Sunday Times):

SNP 37% (+4)
Labour 21% (-2)
Conservatives 14% (-1)
Reform UK 12% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 10% (-)
Greens 5% (-1)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 32% (+3)
Labour 18% (-4)
Conservatives 16% (+2)
Reform UK 12% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+1)
Greens 8% (-1)
Alba 5% (+2)

Scottish Parliament seats projection: 

SNP 59
Labour 20
Conservatives 19
Reform UK 13
Liberal Democrats 11
Greens 7

TOTAL PRO-INDEPENDENCE SEATS: 66
TOTAL ANTI-INDEPENDENCE SEATS : 63

PRO-INDEPENDENCE OVERALL MAJORITY OF 3 SEATS

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 54% (+4)
No 46% (-4)

The independence numbers are a major and very pleasant surprise as far as I'm concerned - if this was an Ipsos poll, 54% for Yes would be within the normal range but in a Norstat poll it's absolutely exceptional.  But in truth, regardless of Mr Campbell's ill-judged musings on Tuesday, the pro-indy majority in the seats projection shouldn't be such a huge shock.  Labour have been clearly continuing to drift downwards in recent weeks in Britain-wide polls, and there was no particular reason to think that phenomenon wouldn't extend to Scotland or that the SNP wouldn't be a beneficiary.

That's the case for the prosecution, but admittedly there's also a case for the defence, which is that Norstat have perhaps tended to be a little bit more favourable to the SNP than other firms have been since the general election, so there's certainly no guarantee that a poll from a different firm would show a pro-indy majority in the seats projection.  However, it's pretty likely (not certain) that any poll would show the same broad trend of a swing back from Labour to the SNP.

Although the pro-indy majority is the most striking feature of the poll, it's not the only remarkable possibility that has suddenly been brought into play.  Labour have probably been assuming that, at worst, they would be guaranteed to overtake the Tories and become at least the second-largest party.  That is now far from assured - although conversely, it can no longer be assured that the Tories will remain a larger force at Holyrood than Reform UK.  If the Reform momentum continues, who knows, we could end up with a pro-indy majority government and a Faragist opposition.

One possibility that this poll very much does not bring into play, though, is a breakthrough on the Holyrood list for Alba.  The Alba leadership are doing their normal thing of claiming that 5% in a Norstat poll is evidence of a stunning breakthrough, but don't be misled.  There's a house effect in Norstat polls which has been seen since 2021, and which regularly and significantly overstates Alba support.  When Alba are on 5% in a Norstat poll, the likelihood is that their true support is 2% or 3% at most, and that polls from other firms would show that sort of figure.  Don't shoot the messenger here - any other polling analyst would tell you exactly the same.  

Is the increase in Yes support genuine?  It may well be, but I don't think there's enough evidence to say that for sure yet.  The main supporting evidence is that the recent Survation poll for Progress Scotland also showed an uptick in the Yes vote, albeit with No remaining in a small lead.  However, the small Yes lead in the Find Out Now poll a few weeks ago was actually fairly typical for that firm.

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Being expelled from a political party due to a blatant vendetta on the part of the leadership is upsetting enough at the best of times, but the exact timing of Corri Wilson's email last night was also mildly inconvenient because I had been just about to sit down and write a blogpost about Nigel Farage's extraordinary surge in the "next Prime Minister" betting markets.  24 hours later than intended, here are the current numbers -

Nigel Farage 3.95
Kemi Badenoch 4.1
Yvette Cooper 15
Wes Streeting 15
Boris Johnson 15.5
Angela Rayner 18.5
Rachel Reeves 32

For the uninitiated, that means Farage, the leader of a party that currently has only five MPs (four fewer than the SNP), is the outright favourite to be Keir Starmer's successor as Prime Minister, and is estimated to have a roughly 25% chance of achieving that feat.  These numbers take into account the possibility of Starmer being replaced by one of his Labour colleagues before the next election, so in practice that means Farage's chances of becoming PM at the time of the next election are rated as a bit higher than 25%.

I've felt for a while that most commentators are underestimating the chances of a Reform government, but I'd have to say the betting markets are going to the other extreme and overstating those chances.  I'm wondering if some punters are still nursing the idea of a Reform-Tory merger with Farage emerging as leader, but I don't think that's at all likely.  For Farage to become PM, Reform would actually have to win the next general election, and I don't see that as anything like a 25% or 30% shot.  Maybe 10% would be a realistic estimate for now, which is plenty grim enough.

When I was growing up, people used to invoke Hitler as a rather improbable argument against proportional representation - ie. first-past-the-post would stop small extremist parties from ever gaining a foothold in parliament.  But now we're seeing the flipside of the coin - once an extremist party becomes a decent size, first-past-the-post makes unfettered power with an outright majority of seats a real possibility for them.  That would be very unlikely to happen under PR.

Friday, December 6, 2024

BREAKING: It's expulsion - the Alba Party leadership's hypocrisy laid bare as they do EXACTLY to me what they spent Wednesday lambasting the SNP for doing to Angus MacNeil - I have been nominally found guilty of 'secret' charges that I am not allowed to know about and that I frankly do not believe even exist - I will be appealing but I am clearly dealing with kangaroo courts

I was this evening informed by Corri Wilson that I have been expelled from the Alba Party.  This, of course, is fully consistent with the boast Yvonne Ridley made several months ago (well before any official action was taken against me) that she had inside knowledge that the Alba leadership had already made a secret decision to expel me.  That would imply that the so-called "disciplinary" process I've just been through was a complete sham from start to finish.  Of course there's still no proof that Ridley was telling the truth, and the way things have unfolded since her boast may have just been an eerie coincidence.  But I must say the process has felt very much like a sham, and I'll explain why.

I've said all along that if I was expelled, nobody in the Alba leadership or in the Disciplinary Committee would actually have a clue why they were expelling me, at least in the sense that they wouldn't be able to coherently explain what the 'official' explanation is.  And so it has proved.  The original 'disciplinary referral' that Chris McEleny wrote and then sent to both me and to the Disciplinary Committee was risible.  He was clearly struggling badly - he and others in the leadership were angry at the persistent and public stand I had taken in favour of radical reform of the party constitution and he wanted to expel me, but he couldn't come up with plausible-sounding reasons, so instead he resorted to extreme vagueness.

His case against me was effectively split into three little parcels.  The first parcel contained the closest thing there was to a specific allegation, which was that I had breached the confidentiality of meetings of the Constitution Review Group (of which I was a directly elected member), with a blogpost I had published on 21st April, entitled 'The case against a small political party treating its own members as the enemy'.  However, this was a very problematical allegation, because as you can see if you follow the link, I clearly stated at the outset of that blogpost that I was bound by confidentiality rules and that I therefore wouldn't be discussing the work of the group.  Nowhere in the blogpost did I make any statements whatsoever about what had been discussed at meetings of the group, or what decisions had been taken by the group.

So by definition Mr McEleny must have been alleging that I had revealed confidential information in some very indirect form.  Now, you might assume that in order to establish I had done something as nebulous as that, Mr McEleny would first have to specify what that secret information was, and then he'd have to set out what evidence he had that the information existed in the first place and that it was covered by confidentiality rules - for example he would have to identify the presence of that information in documents or equivalent material relating to the group (such as the minutes of meetings), and then marry it up to what I had written in the blogpost.

Extraordinarily, he didn't even get past first base.  I know this sounds unbelievable, but it's literally the case that throughout this process Mr McEleny has doggedly stuck to accusing me of disclosing confidential information while refusing to say what that confidential information was.  His message has effectively been "this guy has done this, I'm not going to tell you how he's done it, just take my word for it and expel him". Even more astonishingly, that has proved to be enough for the Disciplinary Committee - or perhaps it's not so astonishing when you remember that in its current composition the committee is leadership-controlled and throughout this year has been a 100% reliable rubberstamp for Mr McEleny's wishes.  I can attest to that fact personally - until my expulsion I was myself an elected member of the committee and I have sat through hearings that were utterly excruciating experiences because so much of what was said (and everything that was decided) had so obviously been scripted in advance.

A further logical problem, of course, is that if Mr McEleny is alleging that the blogpost breached confidentiality, by definition that must mean that the allegedly confidential information related in some way to the content of that blogpost, which narrows down the possibilities considerably.  It's murderously hard to interpret this in any other way than the following: Mr McEleny must be suggesting that members of the Constitution Review Group were saying in private that rank-and-file members of the Alba Party couldn't be trusted because they might be "infiltrators", and that therefore information should be withheld from party members and they shouldn't be allowed to vote on important matters affecting the party.  That was the main subject-matter of the blogpost, so what else can Mr McEleny possibly be getting at?  Surely it's unthinkable that senior Alba figures would be saying such disrespectful things in private about the members of a "member-led party", and trying to disempower those members as much as possible?  I believe there's a saying along the lines of "every accusation is a confession", and Mr McEleny might want to reflect on that at some length.  For the record, I certainly did not allege in the blogpost that any member of the Constitution Review Group had privately made any such statement about party members.  I was bound by confidentiality rules and I obeyed those rules.

The second parcel of Mr McEleny's case against me was that I had discussed party business in five specific blogposts after the leadership had removed me from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - a decision that the leadership quite simply had no power to take under the current constitution.  However, there is nothing whatever in Alba's Code of Conduct or in its social media policy that actually forbids public discussion of matters of internal party controversy, so that part of the case was a complete red herring.  (That's where things get murky, though, because I was told at the hearing last night that Mr McEleny had replaced the original document with a much wider range of accusations covering nineteen blogposts - but I wasn't allowed to know what the new accusations were or which blogposts were being referred to!)

The third parcel was four little quotes from either the Code of Conduct or social media policy, with the implication that I was in breach of those specific parts, but without any explanation whatsoever of what I had done to breach them.  Most outrageously of all, one of the quotes related to behaviour on social media that was either "abusive" or that "targeted individuals", but Mr McEleny did not supply even a single example of any such behaviour on my part.  He did not come up with a single tweet, or a single Facebook post.  Zilch.  Nada.  Nothing.  Again, his message to the Disciplinary Committee was effectively "oooh, this guy has done awful things on social media, but I'm not going to tell you what I mean by that, just take my word for it and expel him".  And the committee's reply was effectively "OK, chief!"

As you can probably imagine, this bizarre non-accusation posed considerable challenges for me in preparing my defence.  How can you defend yourself against an accusation that only exists in Mr McEleny's head and that he refuses to tell anyone about?  The approach I took was to look at tweets posted recently by leading members of the Alba Party, including by Mr McEleny himself, to try to gauge how the social media policy is actually being interpreted by the party in practice.  These are some of the examples I came up with, the first of which I'm sure many people would argue is both misogynistic and lesbophobic:

Chris McEleny, 21st November 2024: "Define irony: Mhairi Black, who spent 10 years at Westminster with her snout in the Kit Kat trough"

Chris McEleny, 14th November 2024: "How creepy.  Some wee social media weirdo at the Scottish Parliament actually zooms in on women's footwear to brief the press."

Shannon Donoghue, 19th May 2024: "No it's not wrong, and if I'm really honest, I'm sick of the wee victim act.  I've seen Eva first hand at conferences with the wee gang.  She was privy to info being on NEC that Grangemouth was a key seat for them.  The only one lacking unity is her."

(Note: "Eva" is a reference to Eva Comrie, who was Alba's elected Equalities Convener just weeks before Ms Donoghue posted her tweet.)

Shannon Donoghue, 6th July 2024: "You, is the simple answer. You and the wee gangs attempt to tarnish the party. You do more damage to Indy than good. Disgraceful."

(Note: The above was a *direct reply* to Denise Findlay, Alba's former elected Organisation Convener.)

Shannon Donoghue, 6th July 2024: "James Kelly really tweeting about self-awareness.  The gift that keeps on giving."

I defy anyone to look at my own track record on social media and conclude that it is not significantly better and more respectful than any of the examples above.  That was exactly what I invited the Disciplinary Committee to do, and in the circumstances there wasn't much else I could do.  But needless to say the committee have decided to ignore all of that and have instead upheld the allegations that only exist inside Mr McEleny's head and that he's too shy to tell anyone about.  What a bashful lad he is, to be sure.

The case against me was effectively an optical illusion.  It was presented like a proper disciplinary case in a proper Alba-branded document, but the more you looked at it, the more it crumbled away and you realised there was nothing of substance there.  There were no specific allegations at all, just smoke and mirrors.  I have literally been expelled from the Alba Party for nothing.

Or nothing if you believe the official version.  There is of course a real reason, which is that I had strong views on the direction the party should take and I kept maddening the leadership by expressing those views in public.  And that takes me back to some of the conversations I had with Alex Salmond on the phone in years gone past, because I can recall three specific occasions when he spontaneously raised the issue of freedom of speech.  The first was when I mentioned concerns about Yvonne Ridley's notorious tweet suggesting that a vote for the SNP was a vote for Jimmy Savile.  (Ridley at the time was Alba's Women's Convener.)  He laughed it off and said something like "nobody can stop Yvonne saying whatever she wants to say" and added that she had a right to free speech anyway.  My reaction was basically "OK, fine, as long as the same rule applies to everyone else too".

The second occasion was when he was reminiscing about Margo MacDonald (it was just a meandering conversation and he randomly ended up on the subject of Margo).  He said he was absolutely appalled when John Swinney engineered her removal from the SNP and added that he would never have done that in a million years.  He admitted he had angrily clashed with her but stressed that he held her in high personal regard and respected her right to hold alternative views.

The third occasion was in October 2022, when he phoned me up to offer commiserations after I was voted off Alba's National Executive Committee, which I had been an elected member of for the previous year.  I had just written a blogpost saying that I suspected I had paid the price for expressing dissenting views about the party's direction. He said to me "James, it's fine to express minority opinions, I have no problem with that at all". He actually chuckled as he said that, as if the idea that anyone in Alba would ever be penalised for expressing their own views was the most ridiculous thing he could think of.  The subtext seemed to be "that's the sort of thing that happens in the SNP, not here".

I believed those assurances when he gave them to me.  I absolutely believed them.  Let's be honest - I was completely wrong to believe those assurances.  I have just been expelled from the Alba Party for expressing my own views, which is the absolute polar opposite of what Alex told me Alba was all about.  I am not the first person this has happened to. All of those inspiring promises about Alba being a natural home for all independence supporters, where they could be themselves and express themselves freely, have proved to be utterly worthless.

Let me be clear that I do not believe that Alex Salmond himself was primarily responsible for Alba degrading into this weird, paranoid, sect-like, cult-like state in which free speech is ruthlessly cracked down upon and anyone who dissents is swiftly purged.  However, the fact remains that it did happen on his watch, and that is something that puzzles many of us.  It's been suggested to me that he was effectively a prisoner of certain other people in the leadership because they supply much of the party's funding, and that those people were insisting upon a much more authoritarian and disciplinarian approach than he ever took as SNP leader.  (Remember that it's believed that only one person was expelled from the SNP in his whole twenty years as leader - and that was Bill Walker, who was convicted of decades of domestic violence.  By contrast, I am at least the third person to have been expelled from Alba within the last few months, all for non-existent or downright daft reasons.)

In a way I consider myself fortunate that I know (or strongly suspect) that Alex Salmond must have signed off on my expulsion before he died, because at least that keeps me clear-sighted about the reality of the situation and prevents me from romanticising "Alba under Salmond" and kidding myself that the problems only kicked in after his death.  In truth, the rot set in long ago.

I'm not going to lie - I feel personally let down and in some cases betrayed by people I was foolish enough to put my trust in.  I won't name names but those people know who they are.  There's one guy in particular who keeps taking bad and cruel decisions, and I can see in his eyes when he takes those decisions that he knows deep down that he's doing something wrong, but he just goes ahead and keeps doing it anyway.  I suspect I know why he's chosen that path.

My first TV interview as a political blogger was on BBC Breakfast just two or three days before the independence referendum in 2014.  I made a premeditated decision that my first words in that interview were going to be "Scotland is a country", because I hadn't heard anyone say that during the campaign and I wanted it to be said on TV at least once before people voted.  It's just a total coincidence, of course, but Alex Salmond's final public words before his death were very similar: "Scotland is a country, not a county".  Alba have since embraced those words as an unofficial motto.  Well, let me propose another variation: "Alba members are people, not pawns".  That is something the Alba leadership have yet to learn or accept.  Effectively the party in its current state is a private club for a self-appointed elite consisting of a small number of closely-linked families and friends who decided to set up a miniature version of the SNP that they could run to suit themselves.  Nobody has let the rest of the membership in on the secret that everyone outside that elite is utterly expendable, and will be treated as little more than vermin if they are not deemed useful enough.  I have little doubt that a secondary reason for my expulsion is that I stood my ground on the Constitution Review Group against low-grade bullying attempts from two individuals in particular, who just happen to both be part of one of the families that form part of that elite group.  

The Kafkaesque "disciplinary" process I have just been through has been so obviously tainted by galactic-level procedural unfairness that I would be letting myself and other people down badly if I didn't at least lodge an appeal and challenge the Appeals Committee to do the right thing and overturn not only my expulsion, but also the upholding of such a blatantly bogus complaint.  I'm sure we can all guess what the outcome will be, but that appeal is damn well going to be lodged just the same.

In theory the appeals process is supposed to be very quick, so I also need to think about what I will do if the expulsion is left in place.  There are three basic options -

1) Apply to rejoin the SNP, and try to make the case from within for the SNP to return to a genuine pro-independence path.  (Note that I always use the word "apply" when I talk about this option - I'm not making any assumptions about whether my application would be accepted.)

2) Either stand myself as a "real independence but with actual integrity" candidate in the 2026 Scottish Parliament election (probably on the Central Scotland list, because that's where I live) or get behind other independent candidates standing on a similar platform.

3) Join an existing small pro-independence party (in all honesty I've searched and so far I can't find one that is really close enough to my own views, either in policy or strategic terms, but if there are any I might have missed please let me know).

I'm not going to do an Elon Musk and say I'll abide by whatever the majority tell me to do, but I'll certainly be interested in people's views, because in a rarity for me, I am genuinely unsure about what course of action to take if the expulsion stands.

A Sterling result for the SNP in a by-election in Stirling, near Tillicoultry

In recent weeks, the comments section of this blog has been plagued by an army of "Swing Truthers" (although I suspect a lot of them were one person agreeing with himself), who flatly refuse to accept the irrefutable truth that the swings to Labour we've seen in local by-elections have been small enough to mean that the SNP are ahead nationally.  "But how can that be when Labour have won the seats?" they incredulously ask, rather missing the entire point of swing, which is to extrapolate from results in localities that may be not be representative of the national population.  For example, the first result declared in the 1992 general election was a comfortable Labour hold in Sunderland with a pro-Labour swing, and yet it was immediately obvious that the swing was too small for Labour, and that the Tories would win nationally if that result was at all typical.

"OK" someone asked me, "if these by-elections are in Labour-friendly wards, where are all the wards that the SNP should be winning on this swing?"  Well, yesterday helpfully provided an answer to that question, because the Stirling East by-election produced a swing from SNP to Labour of around 4%, very much in line with what we've seen in recent weeks, and yet because it was a more favourable ward for the SNP, the victory went to the SNP.

Stirling East by-election result on first preference votes (5th December 2024):

SNP 34.6% (-4.1)
Labour 25.5% (+3.9)
Reform UK 14.1% (n/a)
Conservatives 12.2% (-11.1)
Independent - McGrow 5.6% (-2.3)
Greens 5.1% (+0.3)
Liberal Democrats 2.9% (+0.6)

In the other by-election yesterday, the swing to Labour was only marginally greater (5% rather than 4%), but because Labour were starting from first place in the ward, they eased to a very comfortable win.

Partick East & Kelvindale by-election result on first preference votes (5th December 2024):

Labour 37.5% (+5.3)
SNP 23.1% (-5.2)
Greens 18.2% (-2.7)
Conservatives 13.8% (+0.4)
Liberal Democrats 7.4% (+3.6)

The average swing to Labour in the two by-elections was 4.6%.  If extrapolated nationally, that suggests an SNP national lead over Labour of around three percentage points - once again, broadly consistent with what the opinion polls have been showing.

It's interesting that Alba didn't take part in any of the by-elections this week or last week.  That's a fairly strong clue as to how they managed to pull off their moderately respectable result in the Gourock by-election a couple of weeks ago - they poured all their resources, both human and financial, into that one contest and sacrificed participation in most of the others.  That was actually a very smart strategy, but it does underscore that Alba are in a significantly weaker position than, for example, Reform UK, who have managed to put up candidates in the majority of by-elections and ended up with decent results almost across the board.

Thursday, December 5, 2024

In the immortal words of Captain Blackadder, "I love a fair trial"

This was the scene at Scot Goes Pop HQ, around ten minutes before my so-called Alba "disciplinary" hearing was due to start on Zoom - 


 And this was the scene during the hearing - 


I can very much endorse the sentiment of Captain Blackadder - "I love a fair trial."

At this stage I'm thinking very carefully about what I can and can't say about what just happened, because under the Alba constitution (which is not always adhered to by the powers-that-be, of course) there's supposed to be an automatic right to appeal if the complaint is upheld - and I haven't yet been told whether it has been.  But what I will say for now is this -

* There were at least two shockingly blatant breaches of natural justice during the hearing, which were undoubtedly severe enough that if they had occurred in any criminal trial, the case would have instantly collapsed.  Essentially Mr McEleny has added to the list of accusations against me, but I am not allowed to know what those extra accusations are.  Literally.  I have literally no idea what I am accused of, even in the vaguest terms.  To a large extent this was a secret trial - secret even from me.  

* I didn't have a stopwatch handy, but my sense is that my involvement in the hearing lasted for no more than six or seven minutes, and then I was instructed to leave.  Even leaving aside the other massive irregularities, that does not strike me as a remotely serious process given that there's a very real chance it could lead to outright expulsion.

If the complaint is upheld, no matter how severe or light the penalty is, I will without a shadow of doubt be immediately lodging an appeal, if only as a matter of principle.  Regardless of whether or not Alba in the future is a party that has me in it, it will still be a party that needs to put its house in order.  And I suspect that will only happen if it is confronted with some very painful home truths about just how utterly broken the party's internal processes are right now.  

The Alba Party, which I once had such high hopes for, is in a very, very dark place, and needs a quiet revolution from the inside if it is to have even the remotest chance of prospering electorally in the years to come.

It's back to the 1920s as Labour revert to being the THIRD party of British politics, according to bombshell Find Out Now poll

I've basically got no time at all because I'm trying to get ready for my long-delayed tryst with a certain Alba Party committee this evening, so I'll just give you the basic numbers for now.  They're pretty astonishing.  It'll be hard for anyone ever again to charge Jeremy Corbyn with supposedly making Labour "unelectable" when Starmer has just taken his party to 23% and third place, opening up a non-trivial possibility of a soft-fascist party taking power in the UK before this decade is out.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 4th December 2024):

Conservatives 26% (-1)
Reform UK 24% (+2)
Labour 23% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-1)
Greens 9% (-)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

It's Disciplinary Eve here at Scot Goes Pop HQ - so I can't help but note the irony of the sudden emergence today of a new genre of Alba tweet, about how "expelling independence supporters from political parties is BAD"

Several months after the Alba leadership started targeting me, first by unconstitutionally removing me from my directly elected position on a working group that was (ironically) reviewing the party constitution, and then by arbitrarily suspending my party membership altogether, I will finally, at long last, face an actual "disciplinary" hearing tomorrow night.  Yvonne Ridley boasted that she had inside knowledge that it had been long since pre-decided that I will be expelled from the party outright - I've no idea if that's true, but I will very shortly find out, and I must say that based on what I've witnessed as an elected member of the Disciplinary Committee in recent months, I don't find the idea inherently implausible.

Given the irony of the timing, I couldn't help but be thoroughly bemused by the sudden emergence today of a new genre of tweet from leading Alba figures, which essentially amounts to "expelling independence supporters from political parties is BAD". An attitude I thoroughly approve of, if it's actually put into practice and means something.

Neale Hanvey: "Expelled for demanding *checks notes* action on independence. 

Independence is the @AlbaParty priority. 

@AngusBMacNeil will fit right in."

Suzanne Blackley: "Expelled for putting Independence front and centre.

No one should doubt his commitment to the cause and having people like Angus in Holyrood will actually see us make some progress!"

Robert Reid: "*Expelled for being too radical in pursuit of Scottish Independence.

Fixed it for you"

Crikey, this is inspiring stuff, isn't it?  "In our party, you can be bold, be radical, be yourself, speak your mind.  There's no need to self-censor. If you see something that's wrong, don't shut up, make demands.  Join us, and we won't take disciplinary action against you for doing these things like the SNP did.  You'll fit right in!"

I've gotta say, chaps, that is exactly the sort of party I thought I was joining when I joined Alba in 2021, but can you put your hands on your hearts and say it's actually worked out that way in the real world?  No, you can't.  Good independence supporters have been expelled from Alba this year, while others were subject to obscenely lengthy suspensions.  None of them were guilty of anything that anyone with an ounce of common sense would regard as genuine wrongdoing.  They weren't violent or threatening, they didn't defraud anyone, they didn't sexually harass anyone, they didn't use racist language.  All they were "guilty" of was trying to win independence in what the Alba leadership deemed to be the "wrong" way (ie. by continuing to work with indy supporters outside the party), or speaking out about what they genuinely - and in my view rightly - felt to be disturbing irregularities in the party's internal procedures.

In my case, I'm facing disciplinary action because I spoke out strongly and persistently about the need to democratise the party's system of internal elections. So whatever the outcome of tomorrow's hearing, I trust the committee won't make a total mockery of today's official narrative of "speak out, demand radicalism, and in Alba you'll fit right in!"  It would be rather odd if away from the public gaze that narrative suddenly morphed into a barrage of questions along the lines of "why didn't you shut up?  why did you speak publicly about your own personal views without authorisation? don't you realise Alba is a secret society and you can only say these things behind closed doors and even then THERE ARE LIMITS?", etc, etc, etc.

In 24 hours we shall see.

Yes, of course a pro-independence majority in 2026 is still perfectly possible

I'm indebted to my Somerset-based stalker for posting a seemingly exhaustive list of every political blog of note in Scotland, and which shows Scot Goes Pop with impressive figures as the fifth most-read blog, ahead of sites such as Bella Caledonia, Effie Deans, Talking Up Scotland (which I affectionately think of as Global Ferry News) and best of all Blair McDougall's Notes on Nationalism.  Indeed, if the figures are to be believed, Scot Goes Pop has a readership some sixty-two times bigger than Notes on Nationalism, a website that McDougall assumes is so well known to the public that he feels he only ever needs to refer to it by the admittedly amusing initials "NoN".  

Sadly, the numbers and the rankings aren't remotely reliable, because they almost certainly come from SimilarWeb.  As I've mentioned many times before, I used to doublecheck Mr Campbell's claims before SimilarWeb introduced a registration-wall, and the figures for Wings Over Scotland revealed that the site supposedly has around fifteen "employees", a "turnover" of several million pounds, and is based in Glasgow, as opposed to, say, Bath.  If the traffic estimates are as reliable as those claims, there's something of a credibility problem.  In truth, the likelihood is that Wings' traffic is wildly overestimated by SimilarWeb due to many of his regulars treating the site as a de facto discussion forum, meaning they constantly refresh the page to see if there are new comments, with each refresh counting as a fresh "visit".  It was for exactly that reason that fifteen years ago Political Betting was able to honestly claim to be the UK's "most-read" political blog, even though Iain Dale's blog had a far higher number of unique readers, which is what really matters.

Nevertheless, because I now have such a high-profile source for the claim that Scot Goes Pop is the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland, I might as well take advantage of that, so I've updated the site's masthead accordingly.  I was tempted to say "one of the four most-read political blogs in Scotland", because I'm not sure we should really be counting Somerset-based gender politics blogs as "Scottish", but I'll be ultra-generous and stretch the point. 

Mr Campbell goes on to make my ears burn with this assertion - 

"What’s left of the much-reduced Scottish political blogosphere has mostly reacted to these developments with either catatonic indifference or wild outbreaks of denial, clutching at all manner of straws to pretend that there’s any credible prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election...18 months is a long time in politics, but we’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening."

With all due respect (which admittedly is not much respect), that's an absolutely clueless claim that reveals a truly astonishing level of ignorance about the current state of polling, and also about recent political history in both Scotland and the wider democratic world and what it tells us about the volatility of the electorate.  Mr Campbell is a good bit older than me, so he really ought to be able to remember the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, when a Labour-led government looked a racing certainty as late as February or early March, but a single-party majority SNP government was elected in early May.  If predictions were that far out just two months before an election, it is just absolutely nuts for Mr Campbell to claim that a pro-independence majority can be completely ruled out some eighteen months before the 2026 election.  Especially given that it's just one month since the seats projection from a Norstat poll showed the SNP and Greens in combination on 61 seats - just four short of a majority.

Nobody is suggesting that a pro-independence majority is the most likely outcome, but with so much time to go there are multiple ways in which it could still happen - most obviously by the UK Labour government's unpopularity continuing to deepen and voters drifting back to the SNP as a result.  A major Green surge could also do the trick, as long as the SNP vote holds up reasonably well.

Mr Campbell also approvingly quotes Robin McAlpine, who all of us are completely in awe of for his wonderfully incisive policy and strategy analysis, but I'm not sure his analysis of our electoral system is quite up to the same standard here - 

"If Reform ended up one point ahead of the Greens in every list, it is conceivable the Greens could be wiped out."

Well, I suppose that's theoretically possible, in the same sense that it's possible Shergar may yet turn up alive and well in a Chelsea penthouse, but with recent polls putting the Greens between 8% and 10% of the list vote, they look pretty well-placed to return a sizeable contingent irrespective of the Reform surge.  The chances of them being wiped out completely are very low.

That said, it's worth noting that Robin McAlpine himself confidently stated at times during the 2016-21 parliament that the polling evidence showed there was no real chance of the pro-indy majority being sustained in 2021, so that's another example of how it pays to be cautious with predictions and how dramatically and unpredictably the state of play can change.

I know Mr Campbell was sort-of-quoting an Irish website with the following statement, but pedantry means I can't resist - 

"Our dear cousins across the Irish Sea, incidentally, are in a similar boat. Last week’s election to the Dáil left the nation so split, with no party able to achieve even 22% of the vote, that a coalition of FOUR parties might be required to get anything done."

Hmmm.  In fact, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in combination ended up just two seats short of an overall majority, so adding a third party (either Labour or the Social Democrats, who have eleven seats apiece) will put them well past the winning post with an extremely comfortable working majority.  It's possible there may yet be a four-party coalition, but if that happens it won't be because it's arithmetically necessary, but simply because Labour and the Social Democrats are both looking for safety in numbers, ie. nobody wants to be the fall guy as the only junior coalition partner.  

And needless to say Mr Campbell hasn't missed an opportunity to spew yet more random hatred about the Gaelic language.  We knew you wouldn't let us down, Stu.