Poll update

One or two people have been asking when we can expect the results from the Scot Goes Pop poll. It'll be a while yet - if I was going to hazard a guess I would say around ten days or so. As I mentioned on Twitter, I actually ran into an unexpected hitch, so the process is going to be slightly different this time. I'll explain a little more when the results are ready. 

Someone also sent an email asking me to change the wording of the main independence question to "Should we in Scotland control our own affairs?". Believe me, it would have been a really big mistake to muck around in that way, because even if the results had been positive, nobody would have regarded that as a bona fide independence question, and quite rightly so. It's always best to use the standard independence question, and we're always the first to criticise unionist propaganda polls that don't do that. 

On the subject of the 1990s edition of Question Time in which Nicola Sturgeon was in the audience and demanded that Donald Dewar uphold the principle that Scotland could become independent simply by electing SNP MPs in a majority of Scottish constituencies, I've been directed to Wikipedia's list of QT episodes, and it looks like the most likely candidate is 23rd March 1995, when the recording was in Glasgow and the panel consisted of Dewar, Margaret Ewing, Ray Michie and Ian Lang. Dewar also appeared in episodes in 1996 and 1997, but those were recorded in London, so it's unlikely that Ms Sturgeon would have been in the audience for those. Realistically, it must have happened before she stood as the SNP candidate in Govan in May 1997, and indeed by 1998 she had made her own first appearance on the actual panel. 

I received a downright odd email overnight accusing me of "cleverism" for drawing people's attention to the fact that Ms Sturgeon previously held a very different view on how Scotland can and should exercise its right to self-determination. I was also accused of "holding her hostage" to views she held a very long time ago. That really is a complete nonsense. The whole point here is that the SNP leadership have been suggesting that there is some kind of timeless process that has always been recognised as the only legitimate or effective way by which a country can become independent. The fact that the SNP and Ms Sturgeon herself were wedded to essentially the opposite position 25 years ago drives a coach and horses through that claim. Of course the leadership is entitled to change its view on the best means to achieve an independence mandate, but to claim that the new policy is suddenly the only possible means of achieving a mandate is much more problematical.