BELLA WOMAN-PHOBIA? A response to Bella's bizarre hit-piece about Scot Goes Pop - which I was neither given advance notice of, nor offered a right of reply to

I have a long history with the Bella Caledonia website (or the Bella Caledonia group blog, to call a spade a spade).  Way back when Scot Goes Pop was in its infancy, probably around 2009, I received an email out of the blue from Bella editor Mike Small - who at the time I didn't know from Adam - asking me to place Bella on my link list.  I was a tad startled by this, because there was no hint at all of any offer of reciprocation.  The subtext seemed to be that Bella was so obviously important that it was only right and proper that it should be on every link list in the pro-indy blogosphere. I went along with the request, but I was a touch bemused.

Then in 2010 came the bizarre episode of Bella's "let's all spoil our ballot papers in the AV referendum" campaign.  I and other bloggers received an email, again totally out of the blue, informing us that an "independence referendum" had been called for May 2011. What this turned out to mean was that Bella Caledonia had issued an edict (self-described with typical humility as a "masterstroke") that all independence supporters should throw their votes away in the AV referendum by scrawling the word "INDEPENDENCE" on the ballot paper.  When I and most other bloggers refused to fall into line with this hare-brained scheme upon demand, Small angrily denounced us on Twitter (literally within hours) as ditherers and "fence-sitters".  As others pointed out at the time, if Small had conceived of the spoiled ballot campaign as a collective endeavour by the pro-indy New Media, he might have been better advised to check to see whether any other bloggers actually agreed with him before making the announcement, rather than 'assuming consent' and having a tantrum when consent wasn't forthcoming.  Certainly for my own part, if there's one political belief I've held for even longer than my belief in independence, it's my support for electoral reform, so there was never any way on God's earth that I was going to spoil my ballot in the AV referendum or recommend that anyone else should do so.  As was utterly predictable, the hubristic Bella stunt was a total flop, with a vanishingly small number of people spoiling their ballot in the way suggested.

A few years later, I think it was during the long independence referendum campaign, Small actually asked me to write an article about polling for Bella Caledonia in return for payment.  I wrote the article and it was published, but I was never paid.  I wasn't overly bothered, because I would have happily agreed to write the article for free - but once again, I just thought it was a very odd way for Bella to conduct itself.

In the run-up to the Holyrood election in 2016, it became painfully obvious that Bella had turned into a propaganda site for the concept of "tactical voting on the list", having published several articles in favour of the idea (including an unedited RISE press release), and none that opposed it or even expressed the remotest scepticism about it.  I and others challenged Small about this on Twitter, and he innocently insisted that Bella was open to submissions from all corners of the indy movement - he couldn't publish a counter-argument if it wasn't submitted.  So I asked the obvious question: if I submitted an article explaining why tactical voting on the list was a dreadful idea, would he consider it for publication?  He stated that he would.  I then stayed up half the night writing the article and sent it over to him.  In the morning he wrote back to me indicating that he had no intention of publishing the article unless I modified it to bring it into line with his own views on tactical voting - in other words to say the complete opposite of what it actually said. He had wasted my time in the most appallingly cynical way - and I told him so, and revealed on Scot Goes Pop what had just happened.

He started spitting fury that I had gone public, and made an abusive comment about me on Twitter.  (I blocked him as a result of that abuse, and have kept him blocked ever since.)  He then published his entire correspondence with me on Bella in a supposed attempt to "prove" that I had misrepresented it, but as several BTL commenters on Bella pointed out - often in a tone of some astonishment - what his messages to me actually proved was that every single claim I had made was entirely accurate.  Small had, indeed, refused to run my article as it stood, simply because he disagreed with the argument it advanced.  He watched on in a degree of helplessness and bitterness as the narrative about the exchange spiralled out of his control.

In the spring of 2017, Small invited me and other New Media people to a sort of "summit" in Edinburgh.  It was a response to Nicola Sturgeon "calling a second independence referendum" - little did we know that all she had actually done was the first half of what was to become an all-too-familiar Grand Old Duke of York routine.  The idea was that we needed to "resolve our differences" before the "referendum campaign" got underway in earnest.  So I went along in good faith, but I ended up forming the distinct impression that my own invitation had been intended as a trap, because Angela Haggerty - at the time the editor of Common Space - had a pre-prepared attack on me ready for the moment I opened my mouth.  Apparently I had no credibility to make any suggestions at all given that I had published a satirical poem a few months earlier that failed to show sufficient deference towards her friends on the trendy radical left. It's a sign of how susceptible the radical left are to groupthink that Angela honestly seemed to believe I would crumple the moment she uttered the word "poem" with a knowing smile.  When I instead responded at some length to Angela's attack, Small started wincing and asked me to lower my voice because we were in a "shared space". (For the avoidance of doubt, I hadn't been shouting, although my friends have sometimes pointed out to me that my normal speaking voice is quite loud, possibly because I'm so used to being around hard-of-hearing family members.)

Later in the meeting, I challenged Small on the apparent contradiction between his belief that the pro-indy New Media had to work together, and his own constant attacks on Stuart Campbell. He responded that he would try his utmost to ignore Campbell for the duration of "the referendum", but that he just didn't think Campbell was a "serious person" in the New Media.  I thought that was an extraordinary statement.  Whatever anyone thinks of Campbell (and I'm no longer on good terms with him myself, of course), the very fact that his readership was several times bigger than Bella Caledonia and Scot Goes Pop combined meant self-evidently that he had to be taken seriously as a major player in the New Media.

The outcome of the meeting was, at least according to Small, that we should all co-ordinate more and inform each other in advance if we were going to mention or criticise each other in blogposts or articles. This principle was not put to the vote - it was just an edict from Small and consent was assumed.  Again, this suggests that Small imagines himself to be sitting at the apex of some sort of New Media hierarchy - although who the hell is supposed to have put him there is anyone's guess.

To be clear, I have no complaint about the fact that Bella Caledonia have today run a hit-piece about me and about Scot Goes Pop, without giving me any prior indication that they were planning to do so, or indeed offering me any right to reply.  That's a perfectly legitimate thing for them to have done - however, I do think in the light of the past history outlined above, I'm entitled to point out that it is utterly irreconcilable with what Small has expected and demanded from other bloggers over the years.  Double-standards abound on Planet Bella.

To turn to the actual contents of the hit-piece, the contention is essentially that Scot Goes Pop has "lost its sparkle" - but the author's only supporting evidence is that I have joined the pro-independence Alba Party (you know, just like Small once hitched his wagon to the pro-independence RISE party), and that the comprehensive GRA poll I commissioned last autumn was allegedly "flawed".  That appears to be code for "the questions weren't loaded with ideological assumptions that Bella would approve of".  Frankly, that was a feature, not a bug.  I've noted quite a few times that commissioning that poll was one of the most stressful things I've done in a long time, and most of the reason for that was simply that it was extremely difficult to find a pollster that was willing to ask the neutral and balanced questions that I had taken great care in devising.  If I hadn't stood my ground and eventually turned to the excellent Panelbase, I could very easily have ended up with a poll full of leading questions and incomprehensible Stonewall-approved buzz-language such as "cis-women" - which would have been an appalling betrayal of the people who had put their trust in me by helping to fund the poll and who fully expected the questionnaire to be a fair one.

The author of the Bella hit-piece (Paul Bassett) reads significance into the fact that some of the non-GRA questions in the poll were very short, while many of the GRA questions were long.  That's not a 'flaw' - it was quite simply unavoidable, because most of the public are unaware of the nature of the GRA reform that is being proposed by the Scottish Government, namely legally-recognised gender self-identification.  Unless poll respondents know and understand exactly what they're being asked about, the results of the poll will be meaningless.  (That's exactly what happened with a GB-wide YouGov poll commissioned by Pink News which asked a very short and vague question about self-ID, a concept which wasn't defined for respondents in any way.)

Bassett takes issue with the question that I asked about the right of a woman who has been sexually assaulted to request to be examined by a doctor who was born biologically female, rather than merely a doctor who is legally regarded as female.  Bassett asks: "How likely is that situation to actually play out in the way this question supposes? Does it reflect reality, or is it phrased to evoke an uneasy reaction in respondents’ minds as they try to answer?"  That's a bloody peculiar query, Paul.  If you're asking whether it is likely that some women might want the right to request to be examined by a doctor who is biologically and physically female in the incredibly stressful hours immediately after a sexual assault committed by a man, the answer is pretty obviously 'yes', and if you have any lingering doubts about that, the emphatic answer that respondents gave to that question should dispel them.  If the latter part of your query is asking me whether the poll question was an attempt to create "unease" or simply to find out the answer to the question I actually asked, then I'm happy to clarify it was the latter.  Doh, and all that.

Bassett goes on to complain that the GRA questions are "circuitous" because they start with the words "some people argue that".  I'm sorry to have to break the news to you, Paul, but that wording is entirely routine in the polling world, to the point of being almost humdrum.  Curiously, he then claims that the questions end up as open questions - "which point of view do you find more persuasive?".  But in fact that wording does not constitute an open question for the very reason that Bassett himself gives, ie. that respondents are being asked to choose between two specified points of view.  So I'm afraid that it's Bassett's own argument that is circular and "circuitous", rather than my poll questions.  If I had set out to ask "open questions", I would have failed to do so, but I didn't intend to ask open questions, so I didn't fail.  Again, doh.

Bassett is troubled that the two points of view respondents were invited to choose between were "strongly worded". Well, yes, this is a polarised debate, and the questions reflected that.  The problem with some past GRA-themed polls is that they only asked about the strongly-worded views of one side of the debate, and neglected to provide much-needed balance by also asking about the strongly-worded views of the other side.  I was determined to remedy that, and I make no apology for doing so.  Because respondents may well have found themselves somewhere between the two polarised extremes, they weren't invited to identify totally with one or the other - merely to say which they found "more" persuasive.  And if they were unable to do so, there was a "Don't Know/Prefer not to answer" option.  It was, in a nutshell, an entirely proper and scrupulously fair polling exercise.

Next comes the red herring that has already been given one or two outings by Professor John Robertson, who in recent months has reinvented himself as an increasingly preposterous propagandist on the GRA issue.  It's claimed that there couldn't have been much interest in the GRA poll because it wasn't fully funded at the point at which I felt I needed to go ahead and commission it.  The problem with that theory is that just before I launched the fundraising for the GRA poll, I had attempted to crowdfund for another full-scale independence poll, and that fell much further short of the target figure. About three times as much was raised for the GRA poll as for the independence poll, which implies that there is three times as much passion for the GRA issue as there is for independence.  That's something that should concern us all, and perhaps speaks volumes about how the Scottish Government's inaction is draining enthusiasm from the Yes movement.

Bassett adds that he "for one" is unconvinced that the poll did what I said it did - ie. "convincingly demonstrate" that the Scottish public are opposed to gender self-ID.  Quite honestly, Paul, if you can look at those almost painfully balanced questions and the overwhelming results they produced and still claim to be unconvinced, the one and only thing that reveals for us is your boneheaded determination to refuse to believe the evidence of your own eyes.

Finally, there's the usual bog-standard rant about Alba and about how Alex Salmond supposedly has too much "baggage" for the new party to ever succeed. Gentle hint, Paul: the fact that I disagree with you about that does not mean Scot Goes Pop has "lost its sparkle" - it means that two people have a difference of view.  Such a phenomenon is not totally unheard of, I believe.  All I can tell you is that I've served on the Alba Party's National Executive Committee since I was elected at the September conference.  Confidentiality rules prevent me from going into details about the meetings, but I can give you my general impression, which is that the way Alex Salmond has been caricatured recently is about a billion light-years away from the reality. Indeed, the entire Alba leadership team - Alex Salmond, Kenny MacAskill, Neale Hanvey and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh - have all struck me as impressively level-headed strategic thinkers with a laser-like focus on achieving independence at the earliest possible date (and, yes, on defending women's sex-based rights too).

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