The cost of self-righteousness: the public's tepid response to the Ferrier recall petition suggests the SNP's support for it may have been decisive, and Yousaf may have just pointlessly thrown away a seat to a unionist party

As expected, the recall petition against Margaret Ferrier has hit its target and triggered a by-election.  What I didn't expect, though, was how relatively close it came to failing. Only 14.7% of the registered electorate signed the petition, which means that the drive to persuade people to sign may have made the decisive difference in reaching the 10% threshold - and of course that was a drive the SNP were active participants in, even though they knew any by-election was highly likely to see the Rutherglen seat move from the pro-independence camp to the unionist camp.  As I pointed out recently, there were only two officially registered campaigning organisations in favour of the petition succeeding - one was Labour, and the other was the SNP.  It's the absolute epitome of self-defeating behaviour.  And make no mistake, this isn't necessarily just about one seat - landmark by-election results often produce snowball effects in the subsequent general election.  We could look back on what the SNP have done to Ferrier as a crucial milestone on the way to the loss of the pro-indy majority at Westminster.

I have no time whatever for the notion that the SNP's actions were made inevitable by the gravity of Ferrier's trangressions.  In February and March 2020, the Scottish Government, including Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, ignored the pleadings of the World Health Organisation and deliberately allowed Covid to move freely through the population.  They even sent Jason Leitch out on a Grand Complacency Tour of the TV and radio studios to hubristically imply that the WHO were wrong and that "what the science is telling us" is that people should keep going to large events, such as Stereophonics concerts, held in confined indoor spaces.  The only thing that put a stop to that unforgiveable folly was the realisation that the NHS would literally collapse if the "libertarianism for pathogens" approach was maintained.

And over the last year to eighteen months, of course, all mitigations against Covid have been completely dropped, even though the virus is still ubiquitous and is still causing considerable amounts of death and severe illness.  Literally the only thing that seems to matter to the government is that the numbers are no longer high enough to overwhelm the NHS - they simply don't care about the human toll along the way.

In a nutshell, then, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf must by definition be responsible for many, many times more Covid deaths than Margaret Ferrier was (and of course there's no way of knowing whether Ferrier was responsible for any deaths or infections at all).  To portray Ferrier as a monster, as the SNP leadership shamelessly did, and themselves as saints, is just rank hypocrisy.  And I would stress that I've been making similar points about the Scottish Government's catastrophic early handling of Covid since 2020, when I was still a member of the SNP myself.

There's also the question of what we can glean about the characters of SNP politicians who turned on Ferrier so instantly and savagely.  This is a woman they used to praise to the skies as the SNP's hardest-working campaigner, especially in local council by-elections. If they can decide literally overnight that she's irredeemably evil and untouchable, who is actually safe from being betrayed by them?

If the coming by-election is not going to be reported as a straightforward tale of Labour triumph and Yes disaster, it may well be that it can't be allowed to be a straightforward Labour v SNP battle.  As has been well-rehearsed, I think in normal circumstances Alba need to be incredibly cautious about splitting the Yes vote in first-past-the-post elections - but in this particular case, with the SNP seemingly almost guaranteed to lose, a good showing for a big name Alba candidate could be the only thing with any chance of preventing Labour from using the by-election to generate unalloyed momentum for themselves.  And a big name Alba candidate can only really mean Alex Salmond.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

A word of advice for Alba - there's a danger in being assumed, however wrongly, to be associated with the nutty Neil Oliver-style climate change denialism outlined by Stuart Campbell today

As regular readers will know, I've been a member of the Alba Party since its formation in spring 2021.  I was a member of the Alba NEC between 2021 and 2022, and to the best of my knowledge I'm still a member of the party's Appeals Committee.  One thing that has slightly concerned me over the last two years is the number of global warming denialists, anti-vaxxers and 'plandemic' conspiracy theorists who have become Alba members - however that has generally seemed only a minor concern, because such views are clearly not shared by people at the top of the party.  Before she was stripped of her column in The National, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was in fact one of the very few remaining voices of sanity on the subject of Covid to be found anywhere in the Scottish media, and Chris McEleny often spoke out about the issue too.  On the subject of climate change, it's fair to say Alex Salmond places a greater emphasis than many others on technological solutions such as carbon capture, which the Greens (and indeed Robin McAlpine, the author of the Wee Alba Book) regard as essentially a pseudoscience.  But there's no disagreement at all between the Alba leadership and the environmental movement on the urgency of the threat or on the responsibility of all countries to play their part in tackling it.

Today has seen something of a crossing of the Rubicon, though, because Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland has suddenly gone full global warming denialist nutjob, and published a Neil Oliver-style article in which he sneers at the idea that the extreme and life-threatening recent weather conditions in southern Europe are anything out of the ordinary for July, and essentially argues that Scotland and the wider UK should abandon all further efforts to tackle climate change.  Campbell is not, of course, a member of the Alba Party, and never has been - he's a Tory voter in Somerset who a few months ago revealed that he is "ashamed of Scotland" and would not support independence in any new referendum.  With near-comical irony, the only political party he has ever attempted to join is the Green Party of England and Wales.  Nevertheless, he is unofficially associated with Alba due to his role in editing the Wee Alba Book, and more particularly because of the significant overlap between his readership and Alba membership.  I know from personal experience the discomfort and stresses of being an Alba member who is opposed to Campbellism or Wingsism or whatever you want to call it - in my case that's literally the only type of Alba member I'll ever have any interest in being, so I just make a virtue of it, but I know of others who bite their tongue for a quiet life.  It's likely that if Campbell expresses a view on something, it'll be automatically assumed in many quarters to represent either official Alba policy, or at least the centre of gravity within the Alba membership.  And that's dangerous on a day like today.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - if Alba are going to make the transition from small party to major player, they need to position themselves in the sweet spot on the radical end of the pro-independence mainstream.  "Radical end" because that's the purpose of the party's existence, but "mainstream" because there will always be a severe limit on the support that can be won by a party too closely associated with wacky fringe views or preoccupations.  And I'm afraid the views that Campbell has expressed today do belong to that vote-repelling fringe, at least as far as the left-leaning, pro-independence pool of voters in Scotland is concerned.  The idea that the UK doesn't need to do anything on climate because we account for only 1% of global emissions, and the real polluters are the likes of China?  Well, any region of 50 million people in China could just as easily draw a circle around themselves and say "we're not the problem, it's the rest of the world that's the problem, so we can just get on with doing whatever we like".  Ultimately all countries have to make a serious effort, because China and Russia are hardly likely to make substantial enough cuts in emissions if they see that the western world can't be arsed to make any sacrifices at all.

If Campbell's thuggish behaviour in the past, and some of the extremist views he's previously expressed, have not been enough for the Alba leadership to consider putting up at least a touch of distance between themselves and him, I'd suggest today ought to give them pause for thought about whether the time has come to start quietly doing that.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

History suggests next year's general election may not be the triumphal procession for Starmer that so many are expecting

Someone claimed on Twitter a couple of days ago that there have only been four previous occasions when the main opposition party in the UK has had such a big lead in the opinion polls.  In practice that means since the 1940s, because polling wasn't around before that.  The four occasions mentioned were - 

* 1968-69, when Harold Wilson's Labour government was suffering a severe spell of mid-term unpopularity following the forced devaluation of the pound.

* 1990, when Mrs Thatcher was about to be dislodged due to the public's hatred of the poll tax.

* 1993-97, when John Major's government was in its prolonged death throes.

* 2008, at the lowest point for Gordon Brown.

It's not easy to double-check the claim that those are the only four periods on a par with the present day, but assuming it's right, the fascinating aspect of it is that only one of the four saw the opposition party sail through to an easy victory in the way that had been anticipated - 

* By 1970, Wilson had somehow turned it around for Labour.  He even called a snap general election a year earlier than he needed to, and was fully expected to win.  The Tories under Edward Heath did claim a surprise victory in the end, but they had to come from behind to do it, which certainly wasn't what they had been expecting a year or two earlier.

* Labour's big poll lead evaporated as soon as Mrs Thatcher was replaced as Tory leader in November 1990.  Thereafter, the polls still made the 1992 election look competitive - but the polls were wrong, and Labour suffered a crushing outright defeat. 

* 1997 was the one occasion when it was plain sailing for the opposition, with Labour under Tony Blair winning the landslide that the polls had been pointing towards for several years.

* The Tories did end up in power after the 2010 election, but only courtesy of a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats.  Gordon Brown clawed things back sufficiently that Labour could have stayed in power if the Lib Dems had backed them.

So all of that suggests next year's general election may not be the triumphal procession for Keir Starmer that both Labour and the media think.  The Uxbridge by-election result would tend to support the theory that what is happening now is not akin to the mid-1990s, because it's almost unthinkable that the Tories would have won any by-election at all during the latter John Major period, irrespective of local circumstances.  Otherwise intelligent people like Ian Dunt are spectacularly missing the point about the Uxbridge result, which they are dismissing as caused by a specific issue that only has resonance in a tiny number of constituencies.  In reality, what the result showed is that voters are still giving the Tories a hearing if a potent enough wedge issue can be identified - and Ulez is not the only such potential issue out there.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk