Will the issuing of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu force European countries into a reluctant parting of the ways with the US?

In retrospect there can't be much doubt that when Jeremy Corbyn was at the height of his powers as Labour leader, when he had recently achieved a miracle result at the 2017 general election and looked impossible to dislodge, a number of right-wing figures within Labour got together privately and tried to work out how on earth they could turn the tide and get the party back under their control, and what they settled on was the construction of a largely fake 'anti-semitism crisis'.  As Machiavellian strategies go, that one would have seemed particularly unpromising if it had been set out in advance, and it really is quite astonishing how comprehensively it worked.  Doubtless there was the occasional example of genuine antisemitism on the Corbynite left, as there is in all walks of life, but generally speaking what the supposed "crisis" was about was legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state being repackaged as "anti-semitism".  Too many people who might reasonably have been expected to be sensible enough to see through the stunt proved all too credulous, probably due to their own underlying disdain for the Corbyn project.  The momentum behind Corbyn, which briefly made him look like a Prime Minister in waiting, was put sharply into reverse, and once again he was back to being dismissed as an abnormal figure outside the bounds of political acceptability.   The tactic undoubtedly contributed to the scale of his defeat in 2019, paving the way for his replacement by Starmer, who was emboldened enough to remove his predecessor from the party on bogus grounds of anti-semitism - an act of unprecedented cynicism and arrogance.  And yet the political and commentator class continued acting as if nothing was amiss.

Having seemed for ages to get away with all of this Scot-free, it's hard to escape the supreme historical irony of the fact that Starmer and co were - unbeknown to them - concocting their "anti-semitism crisis" at a moment in time just before the State of Israel was about to commit the worst genocide of the 21st Century so far, thus unexpectedly putting Jeremy Corbyn very publicly on the right side of history as one of the minority of politicians who had consistently refused to accept Israel using accusations of anti-semitism as a shield to allow them to get on with oppressing a neighbouring people.  By contrast, Corbyn's tormentors like Margaret Hodge and David Lammy were left as the ones being seen to have cosy selfies taken with genocidal war criminals like Isaac Herzog and Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Labour leadership's initial reaction to this problem seemed to be double down and join with Israel in accusing anyone trying to impede the genocide, or even to identify its existence, of anti-semitism.  But can you really do that with the International Criminal Court, now that they have issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu?  

Israel itself is of course already trying to discredit the ICC as an anti-semitic institution, motivated by a wish to distract from sexual harassment accusations against their chief prosecutor.  The incoming Trump administration will doubtless join in with this smokescreen, and will probably take far more sinister actions against the ICC and its staff too.  But given that the UK is a party to the ICC and fully accepts its jurisdiction, how can Starmer go down that road himself?  Indeed, how can he do anything other than denounce those who try undermine the rule of international law?  In spite of the way the Labour party has mutated in recent years, there are still enough internationalists within the PLP that it's hard to imagine them indefinitely tolerating a leader who favours Trump and a wanted war criminal over the international courts.  

I said a couple of weeks ago that one of the silver linings of Trump's victory is that it might force European countries, however reluctantly, to move away from slavish loyalty to US leadership.  The ICC ruling may mark a parting of the ways whereby European countries will be forced to make a straight choice between loyalty to the US and adherence to an international rules-based system, because the two concepts will henceforth be opposites and fundamentally inconsistent with each other.

Bit of a problem for Keir Starmer that a big part of the ICC's rationale for issuing the arrest warrant against Netanyahu is "knowingly depriving the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival", ie. exactly what Starmer said Israel had the right to do.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 21, 2024

The Empire Flops Back: 61% of the Scottish public demand powers are transferred from London to the Scottish Parliament

This morning brings word of a new Survation poll for Angus Robertson's Progress Scotland organisation, which goes 1990s retro by asking a multi-option question on Scotland's constitutional future, rather than a straight Yes/No question on independence.  The results have been given as an exclusive to the Daily Record, which is fair enough - if you can get Pravda to report on a bad news story for Labour and their Precious Union, why not?  The only snag, though, is that the Record have - true to character - presented the results in a somewhat garbled manner. But as I understand it, these are the top preferences of voters:

Independence inside the EU: 34%

Independence outside the EU: 8%

More powerful Scottish Parliament inside the UK: 19%

The status quo inside the UK: 22%

Abolition of the Scottish Parliament, return to direct rule from London: 17%

There are two ways of looking at these numbers.  If the two pro-independence options are combined, they come to 42%, and if the three non-independence options are combined, they come to 58%, which is a bigger gap than in conventional Yes/No polls.  But that can perhaps be partly explained by the very fact that there are more non-independence options than pro-independence options - some people without strong views tend to gravitate towards the middle option, no matter what it might be.

On the other hand, the three options that involve a more powerful Scottish Parliament command the support of 61%, compared to only 39% for either the status quo or for fewer powers.  So clearly the "line in the sand" and "enough is enough" narrative from unionists has failed to chime with voters.

*  *  *

Something very peculiar has been going on in the comments section of this blog over the last five days or so.  What appears to be one person has been posing as an army of befuddled and indignant "casual readers", all posting anonymously and all with suspiciously identical writing styles, who purport to be downright *furious* that this blog used the easy-to-grasp concept of swing, introduced by David Butler as long ago as the 1950s, to extrapolate from last Thursday's local by-elections to a potential general election result.  He's tried to dismiss Butler's concept as "hocus pocus" or "not cutting the mustard" - well, good luck with that, mate.  The true reason for his anger is likely to be that the calculation shows that the SNP would have a national lead of around eight percentage points, putting them into landslide territory in Westminster terms.  But he doesn't actually dispute the calculation, and nor can he, because anyone can replicate it for themselves.  Instead, all he's left with is repeatedly spluttering "you can't extrapolate from local elections to Westminster".  

Of course you can.  In doing so, all you're saying is that if people vote in the same way in a general election as they do in local elections, and if last Thursday's results were typical, the SNP would win big across Scotland in a general election.  So is there any particular reason to think people vote differently in general elections from local elections?  Well, yes, recent history shows there is a modest amount of divergence.  But here's the thing - the SNP have actually tended to do less well in local elections than in other types of elections.  So if you make an adjustment to take account of that phenomenon, the SNP's big projected national lead would actually increase in a general election context, not decrease.

As the president of the Donald Trump Fan Club Of Somerset might put it: "what's your point, caller?"

A response to some 'feedback'

Even by normal standards there has been a truly industrial scale of trolling on the last three threads, and I've had a bit of it on Twitter as well.  Lesson: if you really want to upset the unionist contingent, all you have to do is point out to them that three Labour by-election wins are not actually as impressive as they would like to believe.  Their synthetic indignation at the idea that anything other than the winner of each by-election matters reminds me of someone watching the first few points of a match between Novak Djokovic and some minnow, and theatrically screaming "OH MY GOD, DJOKOVIC IS GETTING ABSOLUTELY SLAUGHTERED" when the minnow has a routine hold in his opening service game.

As I'm in a generous mood, I'll explain in a bit more detail why the results (with one exception) were not that great for Labour.

Whitburn and Blackburn: The SNP won the popular vote in this ward by just one percentage point in 2022, even though they were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  So on a uniform swing, they would have needed to be eleven points ahead of Labour nationally to win the ward on Thursday.  Although several polls have shown the SNP recovering since the general election and moving back into the lead, there has not yet been a lead of eleven points or more.  On no planet were the SNP favourites to win this by-election - although, as it happens, they very nearly did.

Doon Valley: Labour were more than two points ahead of the SNP in this ward in 2022, even though the SNP were twelve points ahead of Labour nationally.  By any standards, that makes it an unusually Labour-friendly ward.  To have won it on Thursday on a uniform swing, the SNP would have needed to be ahead of Labour by about fourteen-and-a-half points nationally.  No, it is not a major problem for the SNP that they are not fourteen-and-a-half points ahead nationally at this stage.

Colinton/Fairmilehead: The SNP weren't even starting from second place in this ward - in 2022 they were in third place with just 17% of the vote, in spite of being miles ahead nationally.  The idea that there is any shame in failing to win here on Thursday is completely ludicrous.  There was in fact a technical swing from Labour to the SNP, although admittedly in practice that was mainly caused by movement from Labour to the Lib Dems.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse: As I stated several times yesterday, this was the one and only result that was genuinely good for Labour and disappointing for the SNP.  In 2022, the SNP's lead in the ward was a little above ten points, very similar to the national picture, meaning on a uniform swing they would only have needed a tiny national lead to win on Thursday.  So yes, this particular one was a poor outcome, but it's one out of four, guys, one out of four.

SNP return to gold medal position: latest batch of by-elections suggest they have big national lead over Labour

First things first: I have an analysis piece at The National about yesterday's crop of four by-elections, and you can read it HERE.

The results were certainly a mixed bag. Labour's vote was well up in two and well down in the other two.  The SNP vote was up in one and down in three.  Of the two wards where Reform UK stood, they had a very good result in one and a poor result in the other.  The Liberal Democrats had a sensational victory in one, but didn't really trouble the scorer elsewhere.

All you can really do in these situations is look at the average, and the average swing from the SNP to Labour across the four wards was just 2%. Because that's measured from the 2022 local elections when the SNP were twelve points clear of Labour nationally, it points to a Scotland-wide lead for the SNP of eight points - putting them firmly in landslide territory in Westminster terms.

Really the one and only genuinely good result for Labour yesterday was in Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse, which is frustrating because that was also the only ward where the SNP appeared to have a realistic chance of winning.  However, even there the swing to Labour was only 8%, rather than the 9% falsely claimed by Anas Sarwar.

Anas Sarwar caught fibbing about the swing in Ayrshire by-election?

I've had to go old school on this one and calculate the percentages manually from the raw results published on the East Ayrshire Council website, but I'm fairly sure I haven't made any mistakes - and the swing to Labour appears to be a smidgeon above 8%, rather than the 9% claimed by Anas Sarwar on Twitter.

Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 39.4% (+11.2)

SNP 33.3% (-5.1)

Conservatives 20.2% (-1.8)

Liberal Democrats 4.7% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 2.4% (n/a)

Doon Valley by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 32.2% (+9.1)

Conservatives 25.6% (+8.9)

SNP 23.7% (+2.9)

Independent - Ireland 10.7% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 4.2% (n/a)

Greens 3.0% (n/a)

Independent - McNamara 0.6% (n/a)

Whitburn and Blackburn by-election result on first preference votes:

Labour 30.9% (-6.5)

SNP 28.9% (-9.7)

Reform UK 16.3% (n/a)

Independent - Lynch 11.9% (n/a)

Conservatives 6.7% (-11.8)

Liberal Democrats 2.7% (+0.3)

Greens 2.6% (-0.5)

Colinton / Fairmilehead by-election result on first preference votes:

Liberal Democrats 36.3% (+23.9)

Conservatives 19.6% (-0.7)

Labour 19.5% (-13.9)

SNP 10.8% (-6.5)

Greens 5.3% (-0.1)

Reform UK 3.6% (n/a)

Independent - Wilkinson 2.3% (n/a)

Independent - Henry 0.8% (n/a)

Scottish Family Party 0.7% (-0.9)

Independent - Brown 0.7% (n/a)

Independent - Bob 0.3% (n/a)

Scottish Libertarian Party 0.1% (n/a)

Whatever else happens, the SNP *must* avoid triggering an unnecessary by-election in Stephen Flynn's seat - that's priority number one

I agree with a lot of the comments that have been made about Stephen Flynn's attempt to get a seat at Holyrood.  There's an obvious double standard in forbidding dual mandates simply to put a spanner in the works for one SNP faction, and then suddenly deciding dual mandates are absolutely fine when it suits the interests of the ruling faction.  And while in principle there's nothing wrong with standing against an incumbent constituency MSP in a party selection (internal party democracy dictates that nobody should have a guaranteed seat for life), the optics are terrible because it's such an obvious case of punching downwards - the challenger is far more powerful and influential than the person he is challenging, and he's essentially trampling all over her in the service of raw ambition, much as Douglas Ross did to David Duguid.  I don't really agree that this has got anything to do with "men" and "women", though, because ultimately Flynn's factional advantages can be traced back to Nicola Sturgeon.

Flynn's justifications have been almost comically insincere at every step along the way.  In the immediate aftermath of the general election he said that the possibility of switching to Holyrood was not uppermost in his thoughts, when in reality he must have already been plotting in some detail how he was going to do it.  Then when he made the announcement, he insisted he was only doing it because there was so much interest from others in what he might do - nothing to do with the fact that there was a deadline to put himself forward and he could scarcely challenge a sitting MSP in conditions of total secrecy.  Most ludicrously of all, he claimed the reason for his decision was to avoid "sitting out" an important electoral contest for Aberdeen, as if the only conceivable alternative to muscling in and seeking a dual mandate was to let voters down by being a passive bystander.  Well, why end there, Stephen?  Why not seek a perpetual triple mandate by standing in every single local election, Scottish Parliament election and Westminster election?  If you don't, you're bound to let the people of Aberdeen down by being a bystander at least two-thirds of the time, and that would be a frightful, beastly, caddish thing to do.

I know we like our politicians to be confident and to have the gift of the gab, but when the self-serving insincerity is quite so transparent, I wonder if it does more harm than good.  My biggest concern now is that because the backlash against Flynn's antics has been so severe, there may be pressure on him to do a partial U-turn and accept the same rule that applied to Joanna Cherry.  That would be the worst of all worlds, because it would lead to a by-election that the SNP could easily lose.  The best solution to this problem would be for Flynn to accept that he already has an important job as leader of the fourth largest group at Westminster (bigger than Reform UK, bigger than the Greens, bigger than Jeremy Corbyn's group of independents) and to dedicate himself to it.  But if he insists on switching to Holyrood, the least worst outcome is for others to accept his dual mandate for a couple of years, albeit perhaps with a disapproving frown.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - after the Rutherglen debacle, the SNP have got to learn to stop chucking away parliamentary seats like confetti.  They've lost quite enough seats already, so whatever else happens they must avoid being reduced from nine to eight.

Keir Starmer, genocide denier

Although Keir Starmer going out to bat for the genocidal Netanyahu regime (and giving it feminine pronouns) is very much the established norm, on some level I'm puzzled by his decision today to double down on David Lammy's insistence that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Ultimately this will not remain a matter of interpretation for self-interested politicians - the question of whether genocide has occurred will be adjudicated in international courts and also by academics.  When a legal and academic consensus of genocide is established, and I do think that's now a question of 'when' rather than 'if', Starmer will clearly be seen to have been catastrophically on the wrong side of history, and that's bound to be detrimental to his legacy.  It really is odd that he's not leaving himself a bit of wiggle-room.

In one specific sense, of course, Lammy was just indisputably wrong and there should have been no great difficulty in publicly admitting that. He suggested that not enough Palestinians had been killed for it to be genocide, and using that word would trivialise 'real' genocides like the Holocaust in which millions died.  However, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Holocaust was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which "only" 8000 people died. That's less than a fifth of the minimum death toll in Gaza (likely to be a massive underestimate) and is a little over 0.1% of the number killed in the Holocaust.  Ultimately defining genocide isn't a numbers game, it's about the nature and characteristics of the act.

In the long run, the UK government's good relations with Netanyahu could end up looking as poorly judged as having good relations with Hitler - the only real difference between the two leaders' actions is one of scale.  It's interesting that one of the reasons given for scepticism over the claims that Donald Trump is a fascist is that true fascist governments of the past have tended to be violently expansionist.  Well, Trump may not tick that box (notwithstanding his fury when Denmark refused to sell him Greenland) but Netanyahu certainly does - he's made no secret of the fact that he's going all-out for annexation of what both he and Bill Clinton call "Judea and Samaria", ie. the sovereign Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  The Israeli government also meets a number of the other criteria for fascism, notably militarism, suppression of opposition and a belief in racial supremacy.

An authentic fascist leader is committing an authentic genocide in plain sight in the year 2024 - and yet he remains the West's number one buddy.  That's going to have long-term consequences for leaders like Starmer, probably well beyond what most people can imagine right now.

Do Brit Nats *really* think they can sell Prime Minister Badenoch as acceptable to Scotland? They may need to try, as new poll shows a Britain-wide Tory lead

During the Tory leadership contest, I suggested that a Robert Jenrick victory might open up a potential new path by which independence could happen, because he was using withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights as a wedge issue to try to get elected, which would be like a red rag to a bull for many liberal Remainers in Scotland.  Of course Jenrick did not win, and some Tories like George Osborne specifically voted for Kemi Badenoch because they don't want to leave the ECHR, and yet the paradox is that the new path to independence may still be there.  Badenoch has not ruled out leaving the ECHR and has said there may be some circumstances in which it will be necessary, but even beyond that issue she's just extraordinarily right-wing as an overall package.  Many commentators have described her as far-right, and although some might argue that's an exaggeration, I think it's fair to say that at the very least she occupies a grey area between the mainstream hard-right and the far-right.  So if she becomes Prime Minister, or even if a realistic expectation develops that she's going to become Prime Minister in 2028 or 2029, the familiar debate will start again about whether the UK has become too extreme a country for Scotland to feel comfortable within.

Looked at from that point of view, the early signs are ominous for the Brit Nats, because More In Common's first GB-wide poll since Badenoch became leader shows the Tories surging into the lead.

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 8th-11th November 2024):

Conservatives 29% (+3)

Labour 27% (-1)

Reform UK 19% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (-3)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 2% (-1)

James Cleverly's elimination from the leadership election was supposed to be Christmas come early for Labour because he was purportedly more voter-friendly than Badenoch, but that ignored the fact that the biggest obstacle the Tories have faced in recent times is the split in their natural support base between themselves and Reform UK.  Badenoch would seem to be far better placed than Cleverly to woo Reform voters back, and although there's no real sign that she's succeeded in doing that yet, both the polls conducted since she became leader have shown the Tory vote increasing rather than decreasing (with the caveat that the increase is minor and statistically insignificant in the case of the Techne poll).

*  *  *

You may well already have seen the video below, but if not I urge you to watch it, because it moves discussion about the genocide in Gaza into a radically new phase.  Apologists for Israel have until now tried to play a philosophical game by arguing that it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are mass-slaughtered, as long as Israel can nominally claim to have been targeting Hamas in each strike, regardless of how wildly implausible that claim often is, eg. "yeah we bombed the hospital and killed dozens of patients and doctors but that was only because the terrorists buried their GOLD there".  The idea is that it may not technically be genocide if you can muddy the waters about "intent" and "purpose" and make a case that civilians have only been mass-killed "incidentally".  But when you have a credible witness setting out how Israel have on a daily basis used drones to precisely target individual children to murder, you move beyond differing interpretations of possible 'indirect' acts of genocide, and are left with indisputable evidence of a genocide that is every bit as direct, calculated and industrial as the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre or the Rwanda genocide.  European politicians have thus far been let off the hook of facing up to that fact thanks to Israel doing its utmost to prevent any independent witnesses to the genocide, so that the pretence can be maintained that this is simply a conflict like previous ones Israel has been involved in, albeit with the customarily insane number of non-Israeli civilian casualties.

To answer the question asked by John Mason and others "if Israel wanted to commit genocide, why haven't they killed ten times as many people?", I'd have thought the answer was pretty obvious - they want to exterminate Palestinians at the maximum scale and speed consistent with retaining the support of the United States.  For any other country that would be an almost impossible balancing act, but not for Israel - and with the incoming Trump administration offering Netanyahu a blank cheque, we may now see the rate of the mass killings increase dramatically to something akin to the murder of Jews in the gas chambers.  The obvious question for us in this country is: what, if anything, will Keir Starmer and David Lammy say and do while this happens?  And if they do nothing other than moronically parrot the words "Israel has the right to defend herself", what will be the long-term consequences for themselves, the Labour party, and the continued viability of the United Kingdom?  

Where is the International Criminal Court?

British surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down in UK Parliament, describing Israel’s quadcopters DELIBERATELY TARGETING CHILDREN who had just been bombed.

pic.twitter.com/oGPYyDFBoz

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 12, 2024

Alba's internal democracy suffers another severe blow

Just over a year ago, I was one of four candidates who took part in the internal election for the Alba Party's Membership Support Convener. The other three were the incumbent Jacqueline Bijster, the former senior civil servant Daniel Jack, and the young activist Scott Fallon.  As with all of the other office bearer elections, it eventually descended into total chaos when the leadership suddenly decided to nullify the results just minutes before they were due to be announced.  But even before that, there had been an incident of controversy.

Prior to the vote opening, Jacqueline Bijster sent out an email to members in her capacity as incumbent which made reference to the election.  The party leadership reacted with absolute fury, arguing that this was a clear attempt on her part to abuse the advantages of office to skew the outcome.  They then took an extraordinary level of 'remedial action' - Chris McEleny sent an email to all party members listing the names of the other three candidates (ie. myself, Mr Jack and Mr Fallon), but omitting Ms Bijster's name. The three of us were also invited to write a short pitch in support of our candidacies, which was sent to all party members in a separate email, again without any pitch from Ms Bijster.

My initial reaction to all of this was one of bemusement. In fact I directly told Alex Salmond (on what I think was the last occasion I spoke to him before he died) that I had no great problem with what Ms Bijster did.  I agreed that her email gave her an advantage in the election, and I even agreed that may have been her motivation for sending it, but I pointed out that the incumbent was bound to have an in-built advantage due to their right to send out official emails under their name during their whole year in office.  One more email seemed to me to be neither here nor there, and the whole thing seemed like a total over-reaction.

As always in these situations, things were not quite as they seemed.  I discovered months later that the reason for the leadership's reaction was not a zealous commitment to free and fair elections, but instead that they had turned against Ms Bijster (for reasons that were not entirely clear), and wanted to use the election to get her replaced by Daniel Jack.  There were one or two steps taken to boost Mr Jack's profile at the right moment, and I gather Ms Bijster clocked what was going on and was savvy enough to realise that it wasn't just the leadership who had the in-built ability to push one particular candidate forward - she could do the same thing for herself. Essentially what the leadership objected to was that she had been streetwise enough to fight back against their own tactics extremely effectively.

But on the face of it, the leadership were saying that internal elections have to be scrupulously fair and that all candidates must have an absolutely equal opportunity to put their case.  Contrast that with the extraordinary email that was sent to Alba members yesterday.  For a second year in a row, the internal elections have been cancelled, but this time they've been replaced by a straight Yes/No plebiscite on allowing all current executive members to extend their term of office for around six months.  The email went on to expand at length on how uniquely suitable the current executive is and to exhort members to vote Yes for an extension.

So where is the scrupulous fairness in this plebiscite?  Where is the balancing email from those who don't support an extension and giving them an equal opportunity to set out the reasons why?  I've pointed out a number of times over the last year that the Alba leadership has become increasingly authoritarian, and I'm afraid this is another example of that.  The replacement of fully-fledged elections with plebiscites is, let's be honest, a classic tactic of authoritarian regimes down the ages (General Pinochet, for example) as they seek to give themselves a veneer of legitimacy.  I'd say a good rule of thumb is that if the purpose of a vote is not to give members a genuine choice, but instead an exercise in theatrics to give the appearance of legitimacy to a decision that has already been taken, then you have crossed a Rubicon and moved away from democracy.  It's quite clear that members are 'required' to vote Yes in this plebiscite, not least because there doesn't seem to be any meaningful alternative proposition - no explanation is given in the email of what would actually happen if there is a No vote.  The unspoken challenge to members is "you're not going to vote for a void, are you?"

I have no doubt whatsoever that the leadership will get their desired North Korean style 95%+ Yes vote.  However, if I had a vote myself (and I don't because I've been arbitrarily suspended from the party at Chris McEleny's personal whim for the last month and a half), I would vote No. I would do that as a matter of principle to object to yet another departure from democratic norms, but I would also do it because I frankly don't think the current executive have a collective record that warrants the confidence of members for a six-month extension.  The last year has seen numerous abuses of the party's disciplinary machinery to crack down on freedom of speech, and although that is not directly the fault of executive members, they are the only people with the power to rein in the General Secretary and the Party Chair when they act inappropriately, and they have signally failed to do so.  They have also presided over numerous blatant breaches of the party constitution - not just my own unconstitutional removal from a directly elected position on a committee, but also the appointments of Suzanne Blackley and Ash Regan to replace office bearers when under the terms of the constitution those positions should have automatically gone to the runners-up in the relevant elections (Abdul Majid and Heather McLean respectively). To be clear, I'm making these criticisms of the executive on a collective basis, because a collective extension is being sought.  It may well be that individual executive members have tried to do the right thing but were voted down.

I know some will argue that these are special circumstances and that the plebiscite is a one-off.  But it's only a year since there were other special circumstances that supposedly justified the one-off nullification of election results.  This is becoming a bit of a habit.  What will be the special circumstances next year?  What will be the deviation from democratic norms next year?  My own view is that Alex Salmond's tragic death does justify the postponement of the internal elections, but that postponement should have been no more than a few weeks and there should have been no question of a dodgy 'managed plebiscite' to justify anything longer than that.

A belated update on the recent Norstat poll: it showed the pro-independence vote slightly above 50%

First of all, I have an article at The National about the 'Super Thursday' local by-election results in Scotland, and in particular about Reform UK's good showing in them.  You can read the piece HERE.

On another subject, I realised earlier this afternoon that I had somehow overlooked the fact that the recent Norstat poll contained independence numbers, and I know KC would never forgive me if I didn't give them a mention.  They are pretty remarkable.  

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat, 30th October - 1st November 2024)

Yes 50% (+2)

No 50% (-2)

Better still, if rounded to one decimal place, the results are Yes 50.3%, No 49.7%, which means that on one measure, both of the two most recent polls on independence (from Find Out Now and Norstat respectively) have shown a Yes majority.

There are also Westminster voting intention numbers, which show Labour haven't been spared the same slump that they suffered on the Holyrood figures...

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 30% (+1)

Labour 23% (-9)

Conservatives 15% (+3)

Reform UK 14% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

Greens 6% (+1)

Alba 2% (-)

*  *  *

There was a flurry of comments a couple of threads back claiming that Alba's 9% vote share in the Inverclyde West by-election cost the SNP victory.  That's not the case, and I think people were forgetting that the election wasn't conducted under first-past-the-post.  Alba voters had the opportunity, if they wished, to have their votes transferred to the SNP after the Alba candidate was eliminated, and 43% of them took that opportunity, which in fact was more than enough to push the SNP into the lead at Stage 3, although Labour then jumped back into first place after the Tory votes were redistributed and broke overwhelmingly in the predictable direction.

Labour get almighty fright as SNP come within a whisker of shock victory in Inverclyde West by-election

America, eat your heart out, because it was Super Thursday in Scotland yesterday - well over 1% of the country's local government wards were going to the polls to elect a councillor in by-elections. First up we have Gourock, officially known as Inverclyde West...

Inverclyde West by-election result on first preference votes (7th November 2024):

Labour 34.0% (+7.9)

SNP 33.7% (+7.1)

Conservatives 15.2% (+5.7)

Alba 8.7% (+6.1)

Reform UK 8.4% (n/a)

The SNP have not won this election, but I don't think it can be overstated what a good result this is for them.  It's not so much the increase in their vote share, because that can be explained by the absence of the independent candidates from 2022.  It's more the lack of any swing of note from the SNP to Labour, even though the baseline is an election in which the SNP were 12.3 points ahead of Labour nationally.  This result, for what it's worth, is consistent with the SNP being around 11.5 points ahead across Scotland, putting them in landslide territory, at least in Westminster terms.

It's also fair to say the SNP would probably have topped the first preference vote in the ward if it hadn't been for Alba's intervention, although they perhaps still wouldn't have won after transfers.

From memory, I think Alba's 9% of the vote may be their best ever showing in a local government ward - my recollection is that the previous record was 8% for Kamran Butt in the Southside Central ward in 2022.  (Butt famously defected to the SNP only a few days later.)  In recent weeks, they seem to have finally got the hang of local by-elections and have had a string of relatively decent results, particularly where they were able to run a former councillor from the area, as they were in this case.  But there's a double-edged sword here, because the leadership will hype up this result to boost morale among members and to convince them that the party is marching towards list seats, which national polls suggest is simply not the case.  Alba is actually flatlining on the sort of vote share that left them well short of list seats in 2021, and that problem can't be overcome with the type of bubble campaigning that is proving effective in local by-elections.  The party needs to make some fundamental changes to broaden its national support base, and a false belief among members that all in the garden is rosy could prevent that process from even starting.

Fraserburgh & District by-election result on first preferences votes (7th November 2024):

Conservatives 36.3% (+3.9)

SNP 28.4% (+8.4)

Reform UK 25.9% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 7% (+2.2)

Scottish Family Party 2.3% (+1.3)

The SNP's 8.3% increase isn't as good as it looks, because a substantial chunk of the vote went to independent candidates last time around, which explains why all parties have had a boost.  But nevertheless, the SNP are the second biggest beneficiary out of five, so that's a pretty solid outcome, and they didn't fall all that far short of overhauling the Tories for what would have been a shock victory.

We've recently got used to strong Reform UK showings in by-elections, but 26% is extraordinarily high, and if this is a sign of what is happening in traditional Tory areas, there could be carnage at the Holyrood election.

More results to follow...

I have now been arbitrarily suspended from the Alba Party for *44 days* purely at the whim of Chris McEleny - and with no end to this Kafkaesque process in sight

Today is a big day for the Alba Party's General Secretary, Chris McEleny, because he's standing as his party's candidate in the Gourock by-election.  So this may be as good a day as any to post an update on my own personal situation, which was set in train at Mr McEleny's whim rather a long time ago now.  By my calculation, it is now 44 days since he unilaterally suspended my party membership, a decision which he justified with extremely vague objections about the contents of posts on this blog and also unspecified posts on social media (presumably Twitter, because that's the only social media presence I have at the moment).  

The suspension is supposedly "pending a disciplinary hearing", but that has still not taken place.  It was originally set for 17th October, but it was indefinitely postponed after Alex Salmond's sudden death, and I have heard nothing since.  Now, I have no problem with the fact that a postponement was inevitable - everybody needed space to grieve.  But what I absolutely *do* have a problem with is the fact that my arbitrary suspension remains in force at Mr McEleny's whim during this increasingly lengthy delay, even though I am still being charged on a monthly basis for a party membership I do not actually have (I'm blocked from even viewing the contents of the party website).  I'm not the first Alba member that Mr McEleny has casually left in purgatory in this way, and on those previous occasions there was no satisfactory explanation.

I would also note that the need for time and space to grieve has not precluded Mr McEleny and his supporters from running a full-throated by-election campaign in Gourock.  I would suggest that if it's got to the point where a by-election campaign is perfectly feasible, a disciplinary hearing should also be perfectly feasible.

Mr McEleny has totally ignored almost every email I've sent him during this Kafkaesque process.  However, I know he monitors this blog, so let me say this to him directly.  The situation you have created is totally unacceptable.  It was unacceptable right from the start, but it's even more so after *44 days*.  Please resolve it in one of the two following ways.  Either - 

a) Lift my arbitrary suspension

or

b) Immediately set a new date in the near future for the disciplinary hearing

And if you refuse to do either of those things, at the very least stop charging me for my "membership" and refund me for the last two months.  Many thanks.

The Reverend is in want of a wife...sorry, CLOCK

So make that 27,544.  Yes, thrillingly, the "Reverend" nipped away from his MAGA celebration party for a few seconds today to post a response on Twitter to my blogpost of last night.

"I wondered how he'd handle Trump's win, and I wasn't disappointed. I'd quite like to see the half-hour head-shaking, though."

Campbell seems as pleased as punch with that riposte, so it's almost a shame to have to spoil it by pointing out the obvious logical problem, but I fear I must.  You see, if he had bothered checking the time-stamp on my blogpost, he'd know that I published it at 11.14pm last night, meaning I wrote it before any exit poll had been released or any results at all had come in.  In other words, nobody had a clue at that point who was going to be elected President (apart from Rory Stewart who knew it was going to be Kamala Harris), and my blogpost therefore had nothing whatever to do with how I "handled Trump's win", which didn't happen until several hours later.

It's fascinating, though, that Campbell so clearly imagines himself to be "gloating" about Trump's victory, because that removes any remaining sliver of doubt about one of the points I made last night.  Yes, Campbell would have voted for Trump if he was an American citizen, and yes, he was sitting there last night willing Trump to win, which is certainly not something the vast majority of the people of Scotland were doing.  What's more, his excuse for supporting Trump is something to do with "women's rights", which is curious, given that Trump's hand-picked vice-president believes that the sole function of women is to have children, and that their lives are worthless if they do not.

Give Campbell his due, though, he's on a bit of a roll in 2024.  He wanted pro-independence parties in Scotland to lose at the general election, and he got what he wanted, albeit narrowly.  (And that includes the Alba Party, of course - he told his readers to reject Alba and to vote for unionist parties instead.)  He wanted Trump to have another four years as US President, and now he's got that too.  I'm quite open that I see very little comfort in the results of either the general election or the US presidential election, but there is one small entertaining aspect to it - and that will be watching Campbell over the coming years having to own the consequences of getting the election results he wanted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Adjusting to the Trump restoration

For the reasons I set out in my blogpost last night before the results came in, it's no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump's return to the White House is a setback for humanity.  However, in these situations you have to cling to the positives, and this is what I've come up with - 

* American moral leadership of the 'free world' will at the very least be on pause for the next four years, meaning it will no longer be so easy for European governments to reflexively support whatever nasty stuff the US wants.  Think about the repugnant coordinated withdrawal of funds from UNRWA a few months ago to distract from the ICJ's ruling against Israel.  If the UK were to participate in a stunt like that again, Starmer would pay a heavy political price for doing Trump's bidding.

* The Democrats are not going to be rewarded for facilitating genocide.  OK, there's going to be a pro-genocide president anyway, so in a sense it makes no difference, but there would have been something almost despair-inducing about progressives having been successfully browbeaten into producing an election-winning majority on the basis of "shut up and understand why the mass killing of Palestinians is necessary", as per Bill Clinton's disgraceful speech.

* Although one of my biggest concerns is about the American nuclear arsenal being under the control of an unstable narcissist, there is a counter-argument, which is that Trump's win will probably bring the Ukraine war to an end as a stalemate, and confrontation with Russia will actually become less likely as a result.

* For us non-fans of NATO, it's hard to see how this is anything other than a setback for that alliance.  NATO will probably not break up but it could well go into a sort of deep freeze.

* The left in other countries will not be able to use Kamala Harris as a template, which would have been a thoroughly dismal prospect.

* Rory Stewart is the shame of "the Middleland" this morning.

A brief reply to Stuart Campbell's latest bizarre attack on me *for voting against Donald Trump*

While we wait for the early exit polls, I just thought I'd briefly address the 27,543rd unprovoked attack on me from my crazed Somerset-based stalker, because this time he's angry with me for voting against Donald Trump.  Seriously.

"You know what's so wretched about this? There's *not one word* about what Harris would do to the rights of women, LGB people and vulnerable children. Women simply *never even figured in his thought process for a moment*."

So Campbell told people to vote unionist at the general election, he openly admits he would abstain in any new independence referendum, and now it turns out he would have voted for Donald Trump if he was American. Did anyone ever doubt it?

If I was even going to try to form a serious response to Campbell's rant, I would start by shaking my head in total disbelief for at least half an hour.  What do you even say to the guy?  There is an apocalypse going on in Gaza and it is only happening because of US government support.  I have been racked with guilt for the last three weeks because I have cast a vote for a vice-president who is literally facilitating genocide in real time.  But I did it because I was trying to be responsible due to the future of the world being at stake on two counts: a) a Trump win would put the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal in the hands of an unstable narcissist, which could in the worst case scenario lead to the sudden end of human civilisation, and b) a Trump win would stall any action on the climate emergency for four years, which is time we simply don't have.

So, frankly, I make no apology for the fact that the three rather important issues that have been at the forefront of my thoughts as I made my decision were genocide, nuclear annihilation and the climate emergency.  Campbell, of course, believes I should instead have been thinking about the trans issue, because that's the only issue in the entire f****** universe he actually cares about.  (Not "women", incidentally, who he doesn't give a toss about - if he did he'd realise that most people who care about women's rights voted for Harris due to the overturning of Roe v Wade.)

Stuart, sod off, you small-minded, obsessed little man.  My gender critical views are on the record and well-known, but if you think that's going to lead me to flirt with soft fascism, you can just take a hike.

Who will win today's US presidential election?

The answer is, of course, that I don't have a scooby. If the statistical experts who devote their lives to studying this question say the race is as hard to read as a coin toss (and they do), nobody else has got much of a prayer. And I say that with all due respect to the blessed Rory Stewart, who is claiming certain knowledge that Kamala Harris will win by miles, probably because he thinks it will help his punditry career if he's guessed correctly, and that everyone will swiftly forget he ever made a prediction otherwise.  We won't, Rory.  The people of "the Middleland" never forget.

I do have a few observations, though.  The betting exchanges currently say Donald Trump has a 62% chance of winning the election, but that Kamala Harris has a 76% chance of winning the national popular vote.  They also say there is a 60% chance that whoever wins the popular vote will carry the electoral college.  That sounds like a contradiction, but isn't - the 24% chance that Trump will win the popular vote is an important component of his percentage chance of winning overall.

The national polls in this campaign have been strikingly similar to 2016 in the sense that Donald Trump has been a bit behind in most of them.  And yet in 2016 that translated into Hillary Clinton being the strong favourite on the betting exchanges, whereas this time punters are assuming that a small Harris lead in the popular vote will translate into a Trump win in the electoral college.  Could that be a case of learning the wrong lesson from history? Having been burnt before by the incorrect assumption that a Democrat popular vote win would translate into overall victory, they're assuming the same thing is bound to happen again, whereas in fact the relationship between the popular vote and electoral college numbers is much more unpredictable than that?

Well, maybe, although there has been a key change in US politics in recent years, which is that Florida has transitioned from being a toss-up state to being an almost solid Republican state.  That means more than 5% of electoral college votes, which were firmly in play for the Democrats in previous tight elections, have now been practically taken out of the game completely.  So it might not be unreasonable to assume at this stage that the electoral college is genuinely and reliably skewed in Trump's favour.  I had guessed the change in Florida was probably due to anti-communist or anti-Maduro immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela, but apparently it's more to do with anti-lockdown Republicans moving to Florida over the course of the pandemic.

Punters also have state polls with which to judge the interplay between the national popular vote and electoral college outcome, although that brings us to the issue of poll 'herding', ie. poll companies deliberately tweaking their methodology to ensure their results are similar to their competitors, to reduce risk and ensure they all stand or fall together.  That leaves open the possibility that if the polls are wrong, they could all be wrong by quite some distance.  One theory is that the overturning of Roe v Wade is motivating liberal women to vote in record numbers, and that the polls aren't picking that up.  But so far that's no more than an untested theory.

During election night in 2016 (and something very similar happened in our own EU referendum six months earlier) there was an extraordinary window of opportunity of an hour or two to make a killing on the betting exchanges, because it was obvious from the actual results that Trump was the likely winner, but there was a lag on the exchanges with Clinton remaining favourite, probably due to an ingrained belief that a Trump win was unthinkable.  Could the same thing happen tonight if Harris wins?  I doubt it, actually.  Harris may be the underdog, but nobody thinks a win for her is unthinkable, so if the early results for her are favourable, I would expect the markets to adjust very quickly.  But you never know - it's always worth just checking.

Why I voted for Kamala Harris - and why that decision makes me feel dirty

A few weeks ago, I asked Scot Goes Pop readers for advice about my dilemma over whether to vote for Kamala Harris or Jill Stein.  I think you could see from the reactions that the 'right' and 'wrong' answers in this case are very much in the eye of the beholder, because some people thought it was incomprehensible that I could even consider voting for Harris while she is in the middle of facilitating a genocide, but there were other people who found it equally incomprehensible that I could even consider not voting for Harris given that she is the only person who can stop Donald Trump.

In the end I voted for Harris, and I did the deed weeks ago, so I've had plenty of time to mull it over, and it does make me feel dirty.  I'm pretty sure the me of fifteen years ago would have taken the opposite decision, and the me of fifteen years ago might well have been right.  If I'd heard Bill Clinton's astounding pro-genocide speech before rather than after I voted, that might possibly have changed my decision, I don't know.  But for what it's worth, my reasoning was as follows -

* I just couldn't see what a vote for Stein was actually going to achieve.  If she had a realistic chance of getting to 5% of the vote, that would have swayed me, because it would have unlocked federal funding for the Greens.  Even a realistic chance of getting to 3% would have interested me, because that might have started a serious conversation among Democrats about the policy changes required to win that substantial bloc of votes back.  But at 1% or less of the vote for Stein, even if that's enough to swing the election in Trump's favour, the Democrats will stay in their comfort zone and the only lesson they'll learn is that they need to lecture voters even more about not wasting their votes.

* It's quite true that the first-past-the-post voting system forces you to choose at times between a glorified abstention and casting what is effectively a fifth-preference vote to prevent your sixth preference from winning. In a sensible America with a preferential voting system, I wouldn't have felt remotely conflicted about giving Harris a fifth preference vote to make sure I ranked her above Trump, and arguably the principle of voting for her tactically under FPTP is much the same.

* Harris is only one of two people on the Democratic ticket, and I gather Tim Walz is regarded as having had a left-ish record as governor of Minnesota (although he's no better than Harris on the genocide issue).  So that at least sprinkles a little glitter on the Democratic option.

The bottom line is that I always knew I would regret my decision regardless of which way I jumped, because there was no good option available.  I'm certainly not going to be willing Harris to win tomorrow night, but at least it won't be on my conscience if she doesn't.

If it wasn't for the fact that Trump is certain to be irresponsible on climate change, and is not the sort of person you'd ever want to put in total control of the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal, there would be an argument that a Trump win might even be the least worst option, because it would undermine American leadership of the 'international community', which has been so utterly toxic for decades.  For example, why else are some European countries so slavishly loyal to the Netanyahu regime, no matter how many atrocities it commits?  It's because US politicians are bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, and many European governments think, say and do whatever the Americans tell them to think, say and do.  A Trump win could indirectly stop that destructive cycle, because European voters will no longer recognise the US government as representing moral leadership.

Budget disaster for Labour in Scotland: bombshell Norstat poll shows SNP surging into big lead

I said on Wednesday that the initial reaction of commentators to a Budget often bears little resemblance to the actual political impact of that Budget after a little time has elapsed.  We may be seeing that phenomenon here, because in the hours after Rachel Reeves' speech, Scottish Labour figures and Labour-supporting journalists in Scotland were pretty bullish in their belief that she had found an alchemy that would set them up for success against the SNP.  And yet the first post-Budget poll in Scotland shows Labour nosediving.  That doesn't appear to be a coincidence, because the supplementary questions of the poll show that, even though many of the individual Budget measures command public support, there are pluralities who feel that the overall package is bad for households and bad for Scotland as a whole.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 33% (-)

Labour 23% (-7)

Conservatives 15% (+3)

Reform UK 11% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

Greens 6% (+1)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 29% (+1)

Labour 22% (-6)

Conservatives 14% (-)

Reform UK 11% (+2)

Greens 9% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+2)

Alba 3% (-2)

Seats projection: SNP 51, Labour 29, Conservatives 16, Reform UK 12, Liberal Democrats 11, Greens 10

There's an important caveat here: four GB-wide polls have also been conducted since the Budget and three of those have shown Labour holding steady.  So if there is a Budget effect that is causing Labour to plummet in Scotland, it's odd that there isn't an equivalent Britain-wide effect.  Perhaps that's one reason to be sceptical, or at least cautious, about the trend that Norstat are showing.  But at the very least it looks like the Budget hasn't helped Labour's popularity.

In spite of the unexpectedly quick improvement of the SNP's polling position relative to Labour's since the general election, one thing we've had to keep reminding ourselves is that the SNP only looked well-placed to retain power in 2026, rather than to retain the overall pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament.  For the first time, this poll offers a scenario in which it starts to look just about plausible that the pro-independence majority could be rescued.  The SNP and Greens in combination are projected to have 61 seats - just 4 short of the 65 required for a majority.

There are different ways in which that shortfall could potentially be bridged, but it looks as if seats for Alba are unlikely to play any part.  As has been well-rehearsed, Norstat and their predecessor firm Panelbase have a history of significantly overstating Alba support, showing the party on 5% or 6% when the real figure was around 2%.  That was why there was a lot of wishful thinking involved when Alba claimed that the last Norstat poll, which showed them on 5%, was an indication that they were on course for list seats.  But now that even Norstat have them on only 3%, it's clear that Alba are not heading for list seats as things stand and that something will have to fundamentally change if a breakthrough is to be made.  I know that some people in Alba believed that the shock of Alex Salmond's death would in itself lead to a boost in support, but that certainly doesn't seem to have happened.

Once again, there's good news for the SNP in the leaders' ratings. Although John Swinney is in negative territory at -11, that still makes him slightly more popular than Anas Sarwar at -17, and far more popular than Keir Starmer at -36.  Russell Findlay has a poor opening score of -28, although admittedly that's a significant improvement on his predecessor Douglas Ross.

Interestingly, of the six individual Budget measures asked about in the poll, the only one respondents oppose (albeit narrowly) is providing £3 billion in funding to Ukraine "for as long as it takes".  That certainly wouldn't have been the case at the start of the war.  Perhaps voters have noticed that a First World War type stalemate has occurred and that resources are disappearing into a sort of 'death factory' rather than anything that will change the trajectory of the conflict. Or perhaps cynicism is creeping in, because it's so clear that the UK government will do whatever it takes to help Ukraine against Russian aggression, but will do absolutely nothing to aid the far more vulnerable population of Gaza against the Israeli-perpetrated genocide.

Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide

Jimmy Carter, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is widely regarded as the classic example of someone who performed exceptionally well as an ex-president.  No-one could accuse Bill Clinton of aiming for a similar accolade.  Indeed with a single deranged pro-genocide speech, he may have just destroyed his reputation as both a president and ex-president forever.  That might seem like an overstatement, but you have to remember that the only reason there is even any debate over whether what Clinton said was acceptable is that we're currently in a sort of antechamber where it's still possible to maintain the fiction that genocide is not occurring because Israel isn't allowing access to journalists to actually document the atrocities.  But that situation won't last forever - eventually journalists and academic researchers will get into Gaza and reliable estimates of the death toll will emerge.  It'll almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands, taking into account both those directly murdered by the Israeli military and those who died of starvation and disease due to Israel depriving them of the essentials of life.

Once that happens, the discussion will move on to how on earth the genocide was permitted to occur.  And as with previous genocides such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, there will be a lot of focus on the way in which genocidal language was normalised, for example Israeli officials suggesting that all residents of Gaza are legitimate targets because they are 'human animals' or because they supposedly all support Hamas.  Or an equally good example is Clinton stating that large numbers of innocent people "have" to be mass murdered by Israel because Hamas is hiding behind them.  That evades the obvious point that if one Hamas fighter is hiding behind 400 civilians, you actually have the option not to massacre the 400 civilians because you have the moral sense to know that in doing so you'd be committing a war crime every bit as grave as the one you claim to be avenging.  Always assuming, of course, you actually believe that the Hamas fighter is hiding behind the 400 in the first place, and that you aren't using that as a flimsy excuse because your real and sole aim to is to massacre the 400 as part of a step by step plan to drastically reduce the Arab population of Gaza.

And just as the Nazis prepared the ground for genocide by advancing pseudoscientific gibberish about racial superiority, it'll be considered highly significant that Clinton prayed in aid a mythology of racial entitlement to the land, with the Israelis' actions justified on the ahistorical basis that they were there in the time of King David, long before the Palestinians' own religion was created.  In truth, historians are sceptical as to whether King David actually existed, but even if he did, using the events of thousands of years ago as the basis for a racial hierarchy would undoubtedly give Native Amerìcans free license to do to Bill Clinton and millions of people like him exactly what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians.

Last but not least, Clinton tried to resurrect his own equivalent of Hitler's "stab in the back" myth by arguing that he has inside knowledge from the Camp David talks at the end of his own presidency that all the ills of the region, including the lack of a Palestinian state, had nothing to do with the Israelis, but were instead the fault of Yasser Arafat, who supposedly torpedoed the most generous offer in the history of the known universe because he was so hellbent on eradicating Israel and having a Palestinian state on 100% of the territory of historic Palestine.  The reality, of course, couldn't be more different.  Arafat conceded before the 2000 talks even began that the 1967 boundaries were the baseline, meaning that Israel would be keeping 78% of historic Palestine, a position far closer to Benjamin Netanyahu's lebensraum fantasy than to the total destruction of Israel. But that, of course, was not enough for the Israelis, who demanded -

* Just over one-tenth of the West Bank, recognised by the international community as indisputably Palestinan territory, would be confiscated by Israel.

* There would be no proper compensation for this land grab.  There would be a nominal "land swap", but the amount of Israeli territory transferred to the Palestinian state would be little over one-tenth the size of the confiscated Palestinian land.

* The land grab would split the Palestinian sovereign territory in the West Bank into three non-contiguous segments.  Adding in the fourth segment of the state in Gaza, this would make Palestine one of the most non-contiguous states in the world, evoking an obvious comparison with "Bantustans".

* The Palestinian state would be demilitarised and Israel would have a veto on any alliances it entered into.  Its airspace would also be controlled by Israel - an absolutely absurd demand that no self-respecting sovereign state would ever agree to.

* Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel, even though they were violently and illegally displaced by Israeli forces.

* The vast bulk of the conquered Arab-dominated East Jerusalem would be annexed by Israel.  At best, Palestine would be allowed to cobble together some of the newer outlying suburbs, artificially call it "the city of East Jerusalem" and make it the capital.

* Most crucially, Arafat was told that any agreement required him to permanently renounce any further "demands". More than anything else, this made agreement utterly impossible, because the Israeli proposals on issues like Jerusalem and airspace were so inherently unfair and so obviously justified only by blackmail due to Israel's present-day military strength that the only way Arafat could ever agree to them in good conscience was on a provisional basis subject to a review.

Really the only mistake Arafat made in 2000 was to wrongly take Clinton for an honest broker.  Clinton was playing an each-way bet - he was happy enough to pose as peacemaker if he bullied the Palestinians into accepting a deal that would permanently stitch them up.  But just as good for him was for the Palestinians to sensibly walk away, allowing him to self-righteously "stand with Israel" and to spend the next few decades lying through his teeth about what had just happened and who was to blame for it.

Tonight, Matthew, BMG stands for "Bong! Majority's Gone": Labour fall behind in a GB-wide poll for the first time since 2021

The general assumption is that Kemi Badenoch is just minutes away from becoming leader of the Conservative Party, and I expect that assumption to prove correct - although other types of election have proved highly unpredictable in recent years, ballots of Tory members have always played out exactly as billed. If so, Badenoch will surprisingly be inheriting an outright Tory lead, and the question now is whether Tory leads will become the norm over the next four or five years.  In spite of her own obvious shortcomings, that may well be the case.

BMG poll of GB-wide voting intentions (30th-31st October):

Conservatives 29%
Labour 28%
Reform UK 17%
Liberal Democrats 13%
Greens 8%

The fieldwork dates for the poll were the day of the Budget and the day after, although the impression given is that it's a post-Budget poll, ie. the Wednesday fieldwork started after Rachel Reeves had finished her speech.  If so, this is particularly disappointing for Labour, because it suggests that what they thought of as their trump card hasn't staved off crossover.

That said, there's also a Techne poll with similar fieldwork dates showing a slight increase in the Labour lead, albeit well within the margin of error and statistically insignificant.

Between the Trussmageddon of September 2022 and the general election of July 2024, the Tories never even came close to claiming the lead in a single poll.  They seemed to have Everest to climb, and yet it's taken only four months of the public seeing what Starmer is actually like in power for that Everest to be climbed.  In Scotland the hope must be that this will translate into a sustained SNP lead.

Has the Reeves Budget produced anything that would stand in the way of an SNP win in 2026?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article at The National about whether Rachel Reeves' first Budget today will help to arrest Labour's tumble in popularity.  You can read it HERE.

The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed

Thanks to Paul Kirkwood on Twitter for pointing out to me that the data tables are now available for the recent Find Out Now poll showing a majority in favour of independence.  It's a single question poll (or if there were other questions they haven't been released yet), so there's not a huge amount to add, but there are a few points of interest.

Firstly, the poll excluded 16 and 17 year olds, not for any sinister reason but simply because the Find Out Now panel is comprised of over-18s only.  When I commissioned a Find Out Now poll eighteen months ago, they actually managed to source the necessary number of 16 and 17 year old respondents from another polling panel, but that may not have been possible this time, or it may have just been decided not to do that because of cost. Whatever the exact reason, it means there's a chance that the Yes vote is being slightly underestimated even at 52%.

The turnout adjustment was decisive in pushing Yes into the lead in this poll.  Before the adjustment, No was ahead by 52% to 48%, and after the adjustment there was an exact reversal, with Yes ahead by 52% to 48%.  That doesn't in any way invalidate the result, because almost all polling firms use a turnout filter, but it does demonstrate the greater enthusiasm levels among Yes voters.

It's specified that the poll result was weighted by gender, age, region, and recalled vote from the 2024 general election.  If that's an exhaustive list, it means there was no weighting by recalled referendum vote in 2014, which would be a very good thing, and other polling firms would be wise to learn from that example, because weighting by a vote from more than a decade ago (with all the dangers of false recall) is getting into the realms of the ridiculous now. However, this methodological difference isn't necessarily the reason for Find Out Now being one of the more Yes-friendly pollsters.  If memory serves me right, they did introduce 2014 weighting at one point but it didn't change their results much.

I always wince when people start treating the regional voting breakdowns as gospel, because the subsample for each region is far too small to produce meaningful results. However, for what it's worth Glasgow has the highest Yes vote in this poll and the Highlands & Islands has the lowest.

A significant minority of independence supporters may have drifted back to Labour at the general election, but that doesn't mean they were giving up on independence.  The poll shows that 25% of people who voted Labour in July would vote for independence, and that rises to 28% if Don't Knows are stripped out.

Depressingly, the old gender gap we'd hoped we'd seen the last of is evident in this poll - there's a bulky Yes majority among men but a slender No majority among women.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: THE FINAL PUSH

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Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024: The Final Push

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This is 'take two' for the 2024 fundraiser's final push, because as you might remember I attempted a post like this a couple of weeks ago, but literally just an hour after I published it, the tragic news came through that Alex Salmond had died.  However, I can't put off returning to the issue for any longer, because financial realities are what they are, and I think realistically I would need to raise a minimum of an additional £800 within the next two weeks or so to keep the blog afloat on the same basis that it's been operating for many years.  I can't delay the decision beyond that very tight timescale, because I'm in a situation that will be horribly familiar to many of you, ie. the numbers are just not quite adding up, and if I'm going to keep going, I'll need to keep the lights on and I'll need to eat.

To reiterate the points that I always make about fundraising: no, Scot Goes Pop is not my sole income, in spite of the constant "why not get a job" sneering from the trolls.  I'm sure that's self-evident to most sensible people, because the target figure for the annual fundraiser is always well below what is generally needed to live on.  I have multiple other income streams, but for a variety of reasons they aren't bringing in as much as they did prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately that sharp downward turn coincided with the problem of the post-2021 fundraisers repeatedly failing to meet their targets.  It's been a perfect storm, and consequently for the last three years I've been lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis.  What the fundraiser money always used to do was give me enough flexibility to just drop everything and blog at length whenever a poll came out or whenever a major story broke, regardless of whether that was at 11am on a weekday or midnight on a Saturday.  In other words, the non-blogging work that I do is mostly freelance and ad hoc, and I fit it around the blogging when required.  

Why are the fundraisers proving such a struggle these days, when they never were prior to 2021?  I'm sure it's partly due to the cost of living crisis, but it must also be partly down to my decision to join the Alba Party in the spring of 2021.  That seemed to displease almost everyone, because SNP supporters didn't like it but strangely many Alba supporters weren't much happier either.  I was a relative moderate within the party - I didn't think we should be waging total war against Nicola Sturgeon or attempting to totally destroy the SNP, and I was very troubled about the chatter over restricting the voting rights of English people living in Scotland.  Some of the harder line Alba members clearly didn't think there should be room for someone like me in the party, and regarded me with severe mistrust.

Hopefully, if there's one silver lining from Chris McEleny's apparent determination to expel me from Alba, it's that nobody can mistake me any longer for a partisan drone.  I literally have no idea what I will do after my likely expulsion.  There are three basic options - a) apply to rejoin the SNP, b) apply to join a smaller pro-indy party, or c) try to assist in setting up something new, and I am genuinely and totally undecided about which of those three would be best.  My mind has almost been like a war zone trying to work it out, and I wish to goodness the Alba powers-that-be would just do the decent thing and drop the malicious proceedings against me so that my dilemma would vanish in a puff of smoke, but I very much doubt that will happen.  So there's little point trying to pin labels on me just now when none really fit.

If I'm unable to raise enough over the next couple of weeks and I have to "stop" blogging, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete cessation, because I would always get a bee in my bonnet about something or other and have a burning desire to blog about it.  However, Scot Goes Pop would revert to being a hobby as it was when I started it way back in 2008, and I would imagine there might be two or three posts a month at the absolute most.

But let's accentuate the positive.  What can readers look forward to if the fundraiser does raise just about enough to keep things going into 2025?  Above all else, of course, there'll be extensive polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective.  We're potentially in quite an exciting phase of the electoral cycle, as the public seem to have decisively concluded that the Labour government is a dud, meaning that instead of the SNP being caught in the death spiral that so many unionist commentators predicted prior to the general election, they're actually showing signs of recovery.  That could set the scene for a much more favourable outcome in the 2026 Holyrood election than we dared to hope for even a few weeks ago.  I'd like Scot Goes Pop to be around to tell that story - because I'm not sure we can rely on the unionist mainstream media to tell it for us.

Secondly, although I'm not impartial about independence, you can rely on me to blog about my own honest views without fear or favour.  I've resisted the menacing demands (which you've probably seen repeatedly in the comments section) for me to turn Scot Goes Pop into an Alba propaganda blog in return for avoiding expulsion, and neither am I interested in being an SNP leadership drone.  I just call things exactly as I see them, and frankly that does set me apart from some (but not all, I hasten to add) of the most prominent pro-indy bloggers.

And no promises, but it would be nice to revive the Scot Goes Popcast - it was going really well for a year or so, with some cracking guests, but again, that was another victim of my decision to join Alba, because SNP and Green people started to blanket-refuse my invitations, not wanting to be associated with an "Alba blogger".  But if I'd been more persistent, I probably could have found some takers, so I might have another crack at it.  

And of course there's the possibility of another Scot Goes Pop poll at some point.  In fact I'll have to get that done eventually even if I do stop blogging, because my last attempt at fundraising specifically for a poll ended up in no-man's-land with some funds raised but not enough to go ahead.  One way or another I'll get it done somehow!

To put in perspective what would be needed to keep Scot Goes Pop going, as I write this the running total on the fundraiser page is £3764.  Another £800 would take it to £4564, so that's a rough guide to where the total would need to be two weeks from now if this final push is to be just about a success.  Obviously more would be better and would give me more of a cushion, but I've got to be realistic and we'll see if another £800 can be managed.

Thank you to everyone who has already donated.  If you haven't donated yet and would like to, there are three main options.

To donate by card, please follow this link to the fundraiser page on GoFundMe.

To donate via PayPal, simply make a direct payment to my PayPal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

To donate via direct bank transfer, please contact me by email and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter profile or in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version of the site only).

People sometimes ask about fees: GoFundMe now rely on tips to make a profit, but the payment processor they use does still directly deduct a small percentage from donations.  So if you want to avoid fees completely, please select either the PayPal or bank transfer option (and if you choose PayPal, select the non-fee option from the menu).  PayPal also has the advantage of (usually) transferring the funds instantly, whereas with GoFundMe there is a delay of at least several days.

Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out HOLY COW!!! A majority of the Scottish public want independence in bombshell new poll

It's actually only four months since the last time an opinion poll showed a clear pro-independence majority - that was a telephone poll conducted by the UK's gold standard firm Ipsos, no less, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since June, particularly the SNP's setback in the general election.  So it's incredibly heartening to discover that Find Out Now still have Yes in the lead.  I say "still" because for years Find Out Now polls have tended to show Yes majorities, as indeed have Ipsos polls - if those two companies are right, we've been in 'settled will' territory for quite some time.

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Find Out Now)

 

Yes 52% (-)

No 48% (-)

So far I haven't found the fieldwork dates, but they must be fairly recent because the poll is billed as being "the first since Alex Salmond's death".

As far as I can see this is the ninth poll Find Out Now have conducted on independence, and of those no fewer than eight have shown a pro-independence majority.  The sole exception was the poll commissioned by Independent Voices in September 2023, although oddly some sources list even that one as showing a Yes majority.  That'll be because of the way the data was presented by the client at the point of initial publication, which must be an almost unique example of a pro-independence client, as opposed to a unionist client, pulling a fast one and getting away with it.

Essentially the message of this poll is that the general election has had no effect - pollsters that have previously shown a small Yes lead can be expected to continue to show a small Yes lead, while the bulk of online pollsters that have tended to put Yes in the high 40s can be expected to continue doing that too.  So for all of KC's endless propaganda about "Statista polls" ("Statista" is not a BPC-affiliated polling firm, you won't be surprised to hear), it looks like the popularity of independence is untouched.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

The paradox for the most radical independence supporters is that they will act most effectively if they go against their own natural instincts, and instead of talking about "national liberation", start speaking the language of voters' real world concerns

A few weeks before the general election, I used my iScot column to bemoan the fact that there was no billboard ad campaign from the SNP (or any other pro-indy party or organisation) hammering Keir Starmer and Labour.  I felt Labour's narrow poll lead in Scotland was potentially highly vulnerable if voters became better acquainted with Starmer's well-documented history of lying, cheating and breaching trust, and indeed with how right-wing Labour's programme had become. However, I did concede that if the SNP simply didn't have the money to run such a campaign, there wasn't much that could be done.

However, now that we're on the other side of the general election, the independence movement has a golden second chance, because if Labour were vulnerable before July, they're even more vulnerable now - voters have spontaneously started to notice Starmer's true nature and his popularity has fallen off a cliff.  We'd now be pushing at an open door with billboard ads that make voters think about how Labour presented themselves as 'change without independence' and have utterly failed to deliver or have even been a change for the worse.  That effectively leaves voters with nowhere to go other than independence if they're looking for a radical change for the better.

So my heart started to sing this morning when Believe in Scotland sent out an email announcing that they intend to run another two billboard ads and are giving followers a chance to choose between three options, two of which are in line with what I think is the correct messaging.  One points out that Labour's own research shows that 4000 pensioners will die as a result of the winter fuel allowance being cut, adding that "Scotland didn't vote for this".  Another says "Starmer gets freebies while your granny freezes - Britain is broken".  I think "Scotland didn't vote for this" is the more effective of the two, because "Britain is broken" is open to interpretation and not everyone will realise that the nudge is towards independence.  They might think they're being urged to "fix" Britain with a new government.

Nevertheless both are good, and therefore I was dismayed when I submitted my vote and saw that the runaway leader in the poll was the only one that doesn't tackle Labour, and instead reverts to the independence movement's comfort zone by portraying the saltire as "dreaming big" and the Union Jack as "living small".  That doesn't really do anything at all - it's affirming and feel-good for the hardcore of already committed independence supporters, but doesn't hit any buttons for people who have yet to be convinced.

This is where I think potentially bad campaigning decisions are made when they're taken by radical independence supporters who assume that the rest of Scotland think like themselves.  I recently took a look at small pro-indy parties to see if any of them would be a suitable political home for me in the event that Yvonne Ridley's boast proves true and a decision has already been taken to expel me from the Alba Party.  But I found that almost all of them were making the same kind of mistakes as Alba, but on an even bigger scale - lots of talk about "national liberation" and "salvation", which in my view sounds like alien language to most voters.

Not long before Alex Salmond died, I was asked why I thought Alba had failed thus far, and I said that I thought perhaps the party's branding had been conceptually flawed from the start.  Although I'm passionate about the Gaelic language, from a hard-headed point of view the name Alba may have been a mistake, because for many voters it may have conjured up an image of a romantic, "Celticist" party, far removed from their own day to day concerns.  The smaller parties aren't learning from that error as far as I can see.  If a non-SNP, non-Alba party of independence is ever going to emerge as a serious contender, I suspect its messaging will have to go in a very different direction from the natural instincts of those who set it up.  It'll have to promote itself as a party primarily concerned with solving specific economic or social problems (or seeking to rejoin the EU, or whatever), but one that just happens to be utterly uncompromising in viewing independence as an essential part of the solution to those problems.  

As it turns out, there just isn't enough of a gap in the market for a party catering for voters who think the SNP isn't going far enough or fast enough on independence.  The SNP have well and truly monopolised the market as "the party of independence", and that isn't about to change. But where there may be a gap is by first speaking the language of voters' real world preoccupations, and then tying those preoccupations to the urgent necessity of independence.  That way you might even get soft No voters backing a Yes party, and help build a pro-indy majority in the Holyrood popular vote without directly harming the SNP much.  (From a more Machiavellian point of view, there's also a clear gap in the market for a pro-independence version of Reform UK, ie. one that blames everything on immigrants, but that's certainly not something most of us would ever touch with a bargepole.)

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Is Green party activist Allan Faulds right to claim Alba is now finished?

My eye was caught by an article in the Herald entitled 'Salmond's death signals end for Alba, pollster predicts', because if the pollster in question had turned out to be someone like Martin Boon or Anthony Wells, I might not necessarily have agreed with the assessment but it would certainly have been worth listening to.  Comically, though, it turns out that the individual is not actually a pollster at all, but is instead the Green party activist Allan Faulds, whose bitter dismissal of Alba is long-standing and clearly rooted to at least some extent in his own partisan politics.  He once claimed Alba needed to ditch Alex Salmond to have any chance, which self-evidently makes a nonsense of his new claim that Alba are finished specifically because they no longer have Mr Salmond.

Faulds does of course run a website which is purported to be politically neutral (but isn't - his own views and prejudices constantly leak through) and which sometimes analyses polls and has commissioned a couple of crowdfunded polls, but that's not what a 'pollster' is.  A pollster is either a person or organisation that actually conducts polls, which to the best of my knowledge Mr Faulds has never done.  Admittedly it's probably not his fault that he's been falsely billed in that way, because the same word has been used about me at times.

My own reading of the situation, for what it's worth, is that one of Alba's most long-standing problems has just been solved, although a counter-balancing problem has just been created, and it remains to be seen which of the two problems is/was more significant.  The problem that has been solved is the negativity associated with Alba's brand, which to a large extent derived from Alex Salmond's deep personal unpopularity, something that was consistently seen in polling from 2021 until this year.  The rapid reappraisal of Mr Salmond's legacy since he died means the party's association with him is suddenly no longer such a negative and may even have become a net positive.  But the new problem is of course that Alba will no longer attract media interest from being led by one of the true heavyweight politicians of the age, and once the coverage of Mr Salmond's death subsides, they may find it a lot harder to get noticed than they did before.

The one remaining big asset that they have, the sole factor that still sets them apart from a fringe party, is that they have a member of the Scottish Parliament.  I don't know whether Ash Regan will run for leader, but even if she doesn't, she'll need to be pushed firmly to the forefront if Alba are going to be recognised by the media as relevant.

Because Chris McEleny arbitrarily suspended my own party membership a few weeks ago after he took exception to my public calls for the party to be democratised, I am barred from viewing the party website and am thus somewhat in the dark about what is going on.  (My so-called "disciplinary" hearing was postponed after Mr Salmond's death to an unspecified date but my suspension was not lifted, so the longer this drags on, the more it feels like constructive expulsion from the party at Mr McEleny's whim.)  However, I've been told that there has been a boost in Alba's membership numbers in recent days.  If that's true, the party needs to think long and hard about how it is going to retain those new people.  The pattern so far has been that the only Alba members who have truly been happy are the ones who see their membership as a kind of 'fan club' status and just want to applaud whatever the leadership says or does.  Anyone with ideas of their own who wanted to play a part in (for example) policy formation has tended to become quickly disillusioned because they've been regarded by the party as 'problematical'.  Members have even sometimes been talked of with extreme suspicion as 'possible infiltrators' - although in their heart of hearts I don't think anyone in the leadership group truly believes that nonsense, it's just a handy excuse to treat members with 'undesirable' views as an 'enemy within'.

Alba desperately needs a cultural shift to make members feel both valued and empowered.  That can't wait a couple of years, it needs to happen right now - otherwise the current boost in member numbers may be the last one that ever happens.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk