The Summer Of Independence will be taking place on the second day of autumn

Exactly three months ago, in the early hours of 1st June, I warned independence supporters that they'd better pace themselves during the "summer of independence" that Humza Yousaf had promised them, because the packed programme of seminars, festivities and cultural events threatened to leave them utterly exhausted.  I was being sarcastic, of course, because we were all fairly confident that the summer of independence was a total sham and that nothing of any substance had been planned. That's pretty much how it's panned out, but if we're sarcastic when big events are absent, I suppose we have to give the SNP leadership some credit when a big event does come along and they give it their wholehearted backing.  And, in fairness, the march planned for Saturday is the sort of thing our minds might conjure up if we were trying to imagine what a genuine 'summer of independence' would look like.  Just a couple of snags - it's a one day thing, not a three month thing, and it's taking place on what in the UK is traditionally regarded as the second day of autumn, not in summer.  But it's better than nothing.

And, come to think of it, there's more than one definition of when the seasons begin and end - in the US, summer is regarded as starting with the Solstice on 21st June and ending with the autumn Equinox on 23rd September. Even in Scotland, average temperatures in September are only marginally cooler than average temperatures in June, which leads me to suspect that if you drew a circle around the warmest three month period of the year and called it "summer", it would incorporate at least the first few days of September - maybe the first five, maybe even the first ten or twelve.  So if you stretch the point, you could perhaps regard Saturday's march as our promised summer of independence, condensed into one intense late summer's day.

The other sense in which it's fair to give the SNP leadership some credit is that we've always criticised them in the past for not turning up at independence marches, but being perfectly happy to endorse identity politics rallies with their presence.  OK, it's naturally vexing that they're only going to Saturday's march because it's a top-down, tightly-controlled, carefully-scripted affair, and that equivalent grass-roots marches are still routinely cold-shouldered.  But logically we have to acknowledge that the leadership organising their own sanitised indy marches to go to is a hell of a lot better than them not going to any indy marches at all.

Having doled out the credit where it's due, I now feel compelled to point out some of the oddities of Saturday's event.  The designated presenters of the rally, Alistair Heather and Kelly Given, presumably selected because they combine youthful trendiness with cast-iron political loyalty to the ruling faction, have made some downright peculiar statements in recent days.

"The stars are finally aligning...the independence fever is spreading again like it did in 2013/14...it feels like we're moving into a space now where we've cultivated this new movement that is kind of reminiscent of the campaign in 2014"

Does that describe the Scotland of 2023 that you recognise?  We're actually in a mixed situation at best.  It's true that support for independence is holding up admirably, and may even have increased a touch in recent weeks.  But the Yes vote is still lower than it was during the period between mid-2020 and early 2021, which is when the stars really aligned but when the opportunity was entirely squandered.  (That was the height of the Covid emergency, but it didn't stop planning going ahead for a major sporting event in Glasgow in the summer of 2021, or for a massive international climate summit in Glasgow in the autumn of 2021.)

The real problem we face now, though, is not that the Yes vote isn't high enough but that the SNP vote isn't high enough.  A huge Yes vote is devoid of all value if there aren't going to be enough pro-independence elected politicians to put the people's wishes into action. Strictly in terms of party political voting intentions we're in a weaker position than we've been at any time for around a decade.  Rather than everything suddenly going from wrong to right, as Given and Heather would have you believe, the events of 2023 have at dizzying speed taken the SNP from being in a commanding position to being on the ropes and trying to find a way of fighting back.

Worse still, the independence movement is not starting to resemble the healthy state it was in back in 2014, as Given and Heather claim, but in fact is more demoralised than it's been since 2014 due to Nicola Sturgeon suddenly nipping away without having kept her promises, the lies about SNP membership numbers, the poor leadership of Humza Yousaf, and the essentially rigged election process which installed him.

The positive interpretation of Given's and Heather's strange comments would be the same as the one I recently attributed to the Alba Party's actions, ie. that they're trying to "fake it until it's real".  If so, I don't disapprove of that, because sometimes grand optimistic gestures can prove to be a turning point.  But there's a fine line between faking it until it's real and slipping into a world of total delusion, and what troubles me is that I can't quite work out which side of that line Given and Heather are on.

Also, what do they mean when they say the rally "feels like a changing of the guard"?  Do they mean between unionists and Yessers?  If so, I don't really get what their point is, but the only alternative meaning would be a changing of the guard within the independence movement, which given how the rally is being organised would point to a transition from grass-roots control to establishment/SNP leadership control.  Few people would see that as a step forward, so it's an odd thing to be openly celebrating or boasting about.

Lastly, there's the strange specificity of the rally being about independence within the EU, thus excluding Yessers who are anti-EU or who prefer EFTA to full EU membership.  I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, but it hopelessly lacks congruity with the Yousaf strategy of "let's take our time, Rome wasn't built in a day".  Almost by definition, the 'delay' faction of the SNP have rejected Brexit as a central argument for independence, because if that card was going to be played, you really needed to have a referendum or equivalent democratic vote before Brexit or before leaving the single market and customs union.   You'd have had to say "Brexit is an emergency which independence can avert".  It's much harder to do that now, because the SNP have been sending the message that Brexit is perfectly tolerable and must (like Covid) be "lived with" for an indefinite period.  

But certainly if you ever want to use the unpopularity of Brexit to win independence, you can't delay any further.  If you wait as long as Yousaf apparently wants to, people will quite reasonably say "if Brexit was tolerable to the SNP for every single year between 2021 and 2034, why is it suddenly intolerable in 2035?"  It just won't wash.  Delaying means finding a case for independence which doesn't feature Europe particularly strongly - which, yes, renders nonsensical pretty much everything the SNP said and did in the years after the EU referendum.

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My blogpost last Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Why has McDougall served up a NoN-sense poll? Probably because Labour fear Kate Forbes becoming SNP leader

A few days ago, Blair McDougall (mastermind of the original and self-styled "Project Fear" in 2014, for younger readers who don't know who he is) announced that he was commissioning a poll to find out whether replacing Humza Yousaf with Kate Forbes would improve the SNP's electoral fortunes.  My immediate reaction was that Labour must have identified a Forbes leadership as the biggest threat to their chances in Scotland at the general election, and want to head that danger off by keeping Yousaf in harness at all costs.  McDougall's poll would therefore be calibrated to produce results intended to misleadingly give the SNP pause for thought about the electoral appeal of Forbes.  Let's face it, McDougall is a Machiavellian political actor - he's often pretty rubbish at it, most notably when he talked East Renfrewshire up as a two horse race between himself and the SNP and ended up finishing third, but nevertheless that's the scheming level on which his mind always operates.  If he goes to all the trouble and expense of commissioning a poll, it's hardly likely to be 'curiosity driven'.  It'll have a very specific practical purpose in the service of the Labour party.

Predictably, then, McDougall has come up with a poll that purports to show Forbes as leader would not increase the SNP's vote.  It may look like the question he asked was neutral enough, ie. whether people would be more likely or less likely to vote SNP if Forbes becomes leader, but the problem is that there are now enough people out there who hate the SNP that if you ask whether pretty much any hypothetical scenario would make them more likely or less likely to vote SNP, you'll get a negative response because a significant minority of respondents will want to use every question to bash the party if at all possible. Pretty much the only exception to that would be if the hypothetical scenario is every voter getting a free supply of beer for life.

McDougall knew that perfectly well from previous polls, of course, which is why he framed the question in the way that he did.  Don't fall for this ruse - if he really thought a Forbes leadership would work in Labour's favour, he'd be talking her up for all that he's worth, not talking her down.  There are various ways in which public opinion could have been more meaningfully tested, for example by asking people whether a Yousaf leadership or a Forbes leadership would make them more likely to vote SNP.  That way the question would have become genuinely about the individuals and not a proxy for SNP-bashing, and it probably would have come out firmly in Forbes' favour, bearing in mind how consistently she outpolls Yousaf on net approval ratings.

If money was no object (which certainly isn't the case) and I was able to commission another Scot Goes Pop poll in the near future, I'd try to explore this issue in some depth.  However, I don't actually think McDougall's stunt will reduce Forbes' chances of becoming leader, even if there are no alternative polls to challenge the narrative he's trying to weave.  If Yousaf is toppled before the general election, it'll be for negative reasons about his own leadership rather than positive reasons about his likely successor.  Some sort of major shock to the SNP's system would probably have to trigger it.  Remember that the 2004 European election result was enough to bring John Swinney down as leader even though, unlike now, there was absolutely no expectation that a more popular leader would step into the breach.  (We all wrongly assumed that a return for Alex Salmond wasn't a realistic option.)

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My blogpost last Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Why (and how) the Alba Party should be choosing its electoral battles

Craig Murray on Twitter earlier -

If Alba continue the policy of not standing for election, I shall be obliged to join an organisation that does stand for election.
I think they are called political parties.

— Craig Murray - (@CraigMurrayOrg) August 27, 2023

Whatever my misgivings about Alba's announcement yesterday in relation to the Rutherglen by-election, it's important to challenge the narrative contained in the above tweet, because it's entirely baseless.  Alba have in fact been standing in elections very extensively since they were founded two and a half years ago.  Every single voter in Scotland was given the opportunity to vote Alba at the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, because there were four Alba list candidates in every electoral region.  Roughly one-third of wards in the 2022 local elections had an Alba candidate, and there have since been a number of local by-elections in which Alba have stood.

But it's not unusual at all for small parties to sensibly pick their battles. Don't forget that Alba was the end product of years of agitation for the creation of a list-only party to attempt to "game the system" in Holyrood elections and dramatically increase the pro-indy representation on the list ballot while not harming the SNP at all on the constituency ballot.  The implicit logic of such a party is that it should only stand in proportional representation elections and in general should not risk splitting the Yes vote in first-past-the-post elections.  That principle is actually not especially limiting, because there are three tiers of electoral representation in Scotland - local council, Holyrood and Westminster - and only the latter is solely first-past-the-post.  History demonstrates how tough it is for a small party to gain more than a negligible number of votes in Westminster general elections, so much better to reserve your energies and resources for the other types of election in which both votes and seats can be more easily won.

Almost as soon as Alba came into being, matters were complicated by the defection of two MPs from the SNP who were always likely to want to defend their seats under Alba colours.  But again, squaring that circle is not rocket science.  You do it by pouring all your available resources for the general election into those two constituencies, and not standing elsewhere.  If a small party is going to defy gravity by winning seats in a first-past-the-post election, it'll do so with a geographically-concentrated campaign.  That gives you the best of both worlds - you maximise your chances of holding those two seats while avoiding the harm of pointlessly splitting the pro-indy vote anywhere else.

Unfortunately, for the last two years there have been senior individuals within Alba intentionally trying to crank up expectations of the party taking the reckless step of putting up candidates across the board at the general election, even though that was not agreed Alba policy, or even the publicly stated preference of the leadership.  What I found so dispiriting about yesterday's announcement is that it was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that the leadership have ever nailed their colours to that particular mast.  The language used was explicit - if the SNP don't agree to the Scotland United proposal, which they almost certainly won't in the absence of a pre-election change of leader, then Alba will make a "significant", "wide scale" intervention in the general election, "across Scotland".  Those words are plainly not consistent with the common sense option of only putting up two candidates: Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill.

Yesterday's statement was essentially a grenade wrapped in a love letter.  It was attempting to minimise the negative impact of revealing a plan to potentially act irresponsibly and recklessly at the general election by simultaneously revealing a plan to first of all act responsibly and put country before party in a one-off by-election.  It was like an ultimatum: "we'll act responsibly this one last time, but never again, unless you agree to our terms".  Now, it may be that this is still just tactical positioning intended to pile pressure on the SNP and that it shouldn't be taken too literally.  Perhaps just before the general election, Alba will once again say they'll be the grown-ups in the room and withdraw all their candidates (apart from Hanvey and MacAskill) at the very last minute.  But the problem is that if you have a lot of party members who are itching for an all-out fight with the SNP, no matter what the consequences, and if you allow expectations to build sky-high that those members will be getting what they want, it's very difficult to change course at a late stage even if you know that proceeding would be a dreadful mistake.  

My other concern about the announcement yesterday was the fairly unmistakeable subtext that Alba are giving the SNP a free run in Rutherglen in the hope that they will fail badly.  "The SNP say they want to fly solo, so let's give them the maximum opportunity to do that and see how they get on" - nobody is going to miss the sarcasm in those words.  Such cynicism isn't really the normal Salmond style.  I'd have expected him to say instead that the independence movement can't afford to collectively indulge itself with even one failed by-election, and that he'll fill the vacuum by standing himself, running a relentlessly positive campaign, and doing his utmost to ensure the media narrative about the final result is one of Alba on the way up rather than the SNP on the way down or Labour on the way to power.  If I'm honest, I'm extremely puzzled that he's decided against that course of action, because a parliamentary by-election (yes, even a first-past-the-post by-election) presents a rare and special "free hit" opportunity for a charismatic politician to seize the moment and change the political weather. Another such potential opening for Alba may not crop up for years.

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My blogpost on Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £600 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk