Fancy becoming a contributor to Scot Goes Pop?

In recent months, the visitor numbers to this blog have reached unprecedented levels. Although that's a good thing, in a way it generates its own type of pressure - having sweated blood over the last five years (and it's now exactly five years) to build up a steady readership, there's a need to continue producing new content constantly, otherwise those readers would disappear soon enough and all the hard work would have been for nothing. Writing a solo blog sometimes feels like a self-imposed life sentence, and with the best will in the world it's murderously hard to keep the required pace up when you have a million-and-one other commitments.

A few weeks ago, Tris and Marcia both mentioned the possibility of a fund-raising campaign. Unfortunately, that's not a realistic option - in spite of the increase in traffic, Scot Goes Pop just isn't in the same league as a Wings Over Scotland or a Bella Caledonia, so there's no way on Earth that I'd be able to raise enough to allow me to blog on a full-time basis. And in all honesty I'm not sure that I'd want to do that anyway - I simply don't live and breathe politics in the way that many other bloggers do. I've never been active in the SNP, for example.

A potentially more plausible way of squaring the circle would be for Scot Goes Pop to cease to be a solo blog, and to open its doors to other contributors. I'm not just talking about the odd guest post here and there - I mean giving others full posting rights and allowing them to publish here on their own initiative whenever the spirit moves them. I haven't the faintest idea whether anyone would be interested in doing that, but I thought I'd at least pose the question and see what happens.

So if you were to become a contributor, what would be in it for you, I hear you ask? Well, basically you'd have a platform for your views, and a guaranteed audience - not a massive one, by any means, but a decent-sized one.

If you think you might be interested, feel free to drop me a line at the email address at the top of the sidebar, and we can talk it over. There'd be a few important ground rules, but hopefully nothing that would prove too onerous. Oh, and as this is a pro-independence blog, it would obviously help enormously for you to be in favour of Scottish independence!

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As far as I can see, there's still no sign of the full-scale YouGov poll on referendum voting intentions that we were expecting. However, there is a YouGov poll on whether the UK government should reverse its stubborn refusal to accept the Electoral Commission's recommendation that it should agree a joint position with the Scottish government prior to the referendum, allowing voters to know the exact meaning of a Yes or No vote. 67% of voters think the UK government should enter into such an agreement, and only 21% do not.

So let's recap...

1) David Cameron used to think that all Electoral Commission recommendations should be accepted without question - until the Electoral Commission made a recommendation he didn't like.

2) David Cameron thinks that the EU should enter into negotiations with him before his own in/out referendum, but doesn't see why exactly the same principle should apply in Scotland.

3) The electorate think that David Cameron should accept the Electoral Commission's recommendation, and enter into pre-referendum negotiations with the Scottish government.

The Prime Minister is fast running out of legs to stand on.