A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - voted one of Scotland's top 10 political websites.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Budget disaster for Labour in Scotland: bombshell Norstat poll shows SNP surging into big lead
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide
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):
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.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024: The Final Push
Click here to go straight to the fundraiser page.
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.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out HOLY COW!!! A majority of the Scottish public want independence in bombshell new poll
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
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.)
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Is Green party activist Allan Faulds right to claim Alba is now finished?
Saturday, October 19, 2024
All of the last six GB-wide polls have put Labour in the 20s - that's the sort of unpopularity associated with Michael Foot, John Major and William Hague
Friday, October 18, 2024
So, Tory voters of Falkirk South: what was it that first attracted you to Keir Starmer's hard-right Labour party?
Labour 30.5% (+8.1)
Conservatives 14.7% (-13.9)
Reform UK 9.9% (n/a)
Independent - McKean 5.5% (n/a)
Greens 4.5% (-1.1)
Liberal Democrats 3.6% (n/a)
Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out WOW!!! Sensational MRP projection suggests SNP would win a 2019-style landslide victory if another general election was held now
There was a brief moment of hope for Robert Jenrick in the Tory leadership contest a couple of days ago when a Find Out Now MRP projection suggested he would win more seats in a general election than Kemi Badenoch would (although the results for both of them were fairly dire). That hope has now been snuffed out by last night's head-to-head GB News debate, which like all normal people I didn't watch, but which seems to have been a clear win for Kemi Badenoch. Hilariously, ConservativeHome's verdict on the debate was "that's two hours of our lives we won't get back".
Nevertheless, the Find Out Now results are still of interest for other reasons, because the hypothetical questions about whether Jenrick or Badenoch is Tory leader shouldn't really affect the SNP v Labour battle in Scotland, and in both scenarios the SNP are projected to score a landslide victory (remember 29 seats is the target for a majority in Scotland).
Seats projection if Badenoch is Conservative leader:
Seats projection if Jenrick is Conservative leader:
Thursday, October 17, 2024
The Gaza genocide could be a watershed moment in the relationship between the BBC and its viewers - from now on, social media may start to become more trusted than the state broadcaster
With the recent 'generation anniversary' marking the passing of exactly one generation since the independence referendum was held in 2014, I was thinking back to the day after the referendum, when a conspiracy theory went viral on Facebook about the vote having been rigged. A friend of mine posted it, and we probably all know at least one person who did that - feelings were raw, and a touch of wishful thinking was inevitable. The story wasn't even mentioned on the BBC, and people probably - and with some justification - saw that as an example of why the mainstream media could be trusted far more than social media. If an allegation is essentially without foundation, the mainstream media will ignore it, while it'll still be plastered all over social media if enough people want to believe it.
But contrast that incident with what happened the other day, when once again a story was all over social media but ignored by the BBC. For about 24 hours, every third or fourth post I saw on Twitter was a photo of Palestinian civilians being burned to death in a hospital tent by the Israeli military. I didn't watch the BBC that day, but I'm reliably informed that news bulletins didn't mention the story, even in passing. That wasn't because the story was in any sense a conspiracy theory, or because there was a lack of evidence to confirm what had happened, or because there was any doubt that Israel was responsible for it. The BBC simply made an editorial decision to ignore the atrocity, and it's extremely hard to see that it could have had any other reasoning than that the image of the Israeli state must be protected. If any other state's military had burned civilians to death, and if it had been so well documented, it would plainly have been deemed newsworthy and might well even have been the lead headline. The conclusion people are likely to draw from having been far, far better informed by social media is that the BBC is now less trustworthy than sites like Twitter and Facebook, because it is serving the agenda of a foreign power and acting against the interests of viewers by deliberately withholding important information from them.
This is one reason why the small minority of independence supporters who say "we're sick of hearing about Gaza, let's focus on independence" are so misguided. Obviously the main reason for not ignoring Gaza is that we're all human beings and you don't turn your eyes away from an ongoing genocide. But it's also the case that faith in British institutions such as the government and the BBC is being undermined before our eyes by the response to the genocide. The penny is beginning to drop for many voters, particularly young voters, about how power is exercised in the United Kingdom and in the service of whom. That process could indirectly lead to Scotland becoming an independent country, or at least prove to be a significant contributory factor.
We've seen a similar effect before - I have no doubt that the SNP wouldn't have crept over the line for their narrow win in 2007 if trust in the Labour party hadn't been severely eroded by the illegal invasion of Iraq four years earlier.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
The Famous Hypocrisy of the Grouse
So it's a curious thing - as you may have seen on Twitter, I've been receiving some totally unprovoked abusive DMs from Grouse Beater of all people. I did have problems with him many years ago, but someone interceded to end the rift, I had a long phone conversation with him and we made our peace with each other. Since then, I've gone out of my way to tread gingerly with him, and when I've seen him have blazing arguments with other people (including in the comments section of this blog), I've just stood right back and let him get on with it, even when I thought he was in the wrong. But even those precautions weren't enough, it seems.
So what's his foul-mouthed harrumphing about this time? To be blunt, it's just sheer hypocrisy on his part. As you may remember, he was expelled from the SNP several years ago for alleged anti-semitism. Countless numbers of us defended him at the time, because his words were actually extremely ambiguous and were open to plenty of alternative innocent explanations. But no good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes, and he seems to now have a visceral loathing of many of those who defended him most strongly, because some of them have since fallen foul of strikingly similar abuses of the Alba disciplinary process and have dared to speak up about it, just as he spoke up about the SNP's ill-treatment of himself. Suddenly he's become a born again Stalinist, saying that anyone who has been trampled on should just shut up and slink away where he doesn't have to think about them or remember their existence, because it's just so darn inconvenient to the party that large numbers of people should actually know that abuses of power have taken place. As long as he isn't the one on the receiving end, and as long as the people being silenced are ones he dislikes and would prefer to shut up, it's all totally fine.
In fact, let's be honest: he would be an enthusiastic cheerleader for someone being expelled for exactly the same reason he was expelled from the SNP, just so long as you first stick a blue Alba rosette on the Conduct Committee.
Bizarrely, what seemed to trigger him tonight was that the people he calls "the Famous Five", which seems to be an alternative name for Shannon Donoghue's "wee gang of malcontents", have been paying generous tribute to Alex Salmond and saying very complimentary things about him.
I asked Grouse Beater if he would prefer them to be making disrespectful comments about Mr Salmond at a time like this. Unsurprisingly, he didn't have much of an answer.
Could I just say to @Grouse_Beater, who has been sending me totally unprovoked abusive DMs and blocking me before I could reply: you, sir, are a hypocrite. You, sir, are a coward. I'm not going to tolerate this behaviour from anyone, no matter what my previous respect for them.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 15, 2024
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
So where does the independence movement go from here?
Robin McAlpine's latest piece presents the independence movement as having been "orphaned" by Alex Salmond's death, with a sudden realisation that "we're going to have to do it on our own", and with no sign of a new generation of Salmond-like charismatic leaders to guide us to the promised land. Others have expressed similar sentiments, but I must say I don't see it that way. If the orphaning occurred, it was several years ago. When Mr Salmond appeared on mainstream media in recent years, it was generally only to commentate on the fortunes of his former colleagues, in much the same way that Roy Hattersley used to pop up now and again to give his thoughts on New Labour. Mr Salmond was no longer really seen as an active participant in the political process, even though on paper that's exactly what he was.
It's possible that he could yet have become an active participant once again on more than just paper, and that was what all of us in Alba hoped for, but my own view was that was becoming less and less likely due to Alba's direction of travel - in other words its drift towards authoritarianism (with accompanying mini-purges), which made it more and more of a narrow sect centred around a few closely-knit families and friends, rather than the open, welcoming space for everyone on the radical end of the independence movement that it really needed to be to have any hope of creeping up to the level of support that might win it Holyrood list seats. Now is not the moment to be commenting in detail on the extent to which Mr Salmond's own decisions contributed to Alba going down that wrong path, although in fairness he may sometimes have been faced with impossible dilemmas given his heavy reliance on those who were keeping the party afloat financially.
So even without the tragic loss of Mr Salmond, it's highly likely that independence would have had to be won by a new generation of talent within the SNP's own ranks. (Unless of course John Swinney actually *does something* in his remaining time as leader, but we all know he won't.) Realistically, that probably means Kate Forbes and Stephen Flynn. The current ruling faction clearly want Flynn to be the next leader with Forbes in a lesser role, whereas I firmly believe it should be the other way around - Forbes as leader, Flynn as second-in-command. But either way they look like being the two key figures. Charisma-wise, how do they compare with Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon at a similar stage in their careers? I would actually say extremely well.
In my blogpost in the minutes after Mr Salmond's death was announced, I mentioned that he single-handedly converted me to the cause of independence with his persuasiveness in a 1992 episode of Election Call hosted by Nick Ross. That's absolutely true, but I have other memories of his TV performances from around that time which are much more mixed. When he stood for SNP leader in 1990, I was very, very young, but I was just about old enough to be taking a tentative interest in politics, and I remember him taking part in an informal debate with his opponent Margaret Ewing on Left, Right and Centre - Kirsty Wark's show, although Brian Taylor was the moderator for the debate. Taylor asked the two candidates how they differentiated themselves from each other, and Ms Ewing was extremely clear - she felt she had a stronger focus on social justice. But Mr Salmond kept speaking on her behalf, saying that Taylor was going to fail to identify any divisions because Ms Ewing actually agreed with him about absolutely everything. I found that tactic slightly irritating, and I bet I wasn't the only viewer who reacted like that.
Mr Salmond himself used to recount an incident from the late 80s, when he got annoyed with Robin Day for shutting him down on an episode of Question Time. Day asked him to watch the programme back and see if he felt the same way afterwards. He took that advice and phoned Day later to apologise, because he realised that he had gone too far and had been in danger of losing the audience, and that if anything Day had done him a massive favour by stopping him. So in a nutshell Mr Salmond was not the finished article in the late 80s and early 90s, and we tend to forget that. He was a good debater but he still had plenty left to learn, and plenty of rough edges to smooth off. Even by around 1995, when he was 40 years old and had started to rack up a few electoral breakthroughs, he wasn't yet being talked about as one of the finest politicians of his generation. He grew in stature over the late 90s, and even during the four years in the early noughties when he was no longer leader.
The pattern was similar for Nicola Sturgeon. Before Mr Salmond's dramatic comeback, she had been intending to stand in the 2004 leadership election, but no-one was in any doubt that she would have lost to Roseanna Cunningham. That seems incredible in retrospect, but the 34-year-old Sturgeon simply wasn't seen as the political titan she later became. I've said myself that I never rated the younger Ms Sturgeon - I thought she mimicked Mr Salmond's style of delivery but lacked his charisma. I felt she came across as an automaton.
Which is as much as to say that politics isn't tennis - ie. it's not necessarily a young person's sport, and there's no reason to assume thirtysomethings like Forbes and Flynn have yet reached their peak. They're already highly regarded and as they become older they could easily emerge as statesmen/stateswomen on a par with Salmond and Sturgeon. My question is not whether they're charismatic enough, but whether they're sufficiently committed to do what it takes to bring about independence, or whether other priorities will get in the way.
I had a long conversation with Alex Salmond during the 2023 SNP leadership election. Although that was eighteen months ago, I think that was the second-last time I spoke to him before he died - relations subsequently cooled after I started taking a stand against the Alba leadership's increasing authoritarianism. I don't think I'm revealing any state secrets in saying that he regarded Humza Yousaf as having no interest at all in delivering independence, and that he broadly sympathised with the strategy Ash Regan had set out (although he was at pains to point out that Ms Regan was genuinely not 'his' candidate and she was not doing his bidding - it was just a natural convergence of views). However, I knew Ms Regan had next to no chance of winning, so I asked Mr Salmond the only question that seemed to matter: "what about Kate Forbes?"
He paused for a moment, chuckled, and said "well, I think she does support independence". OK, that's a start, I said.
As far as Alba's own potential role is concerned, I and others have tried over the last year to democratise the party but hit a brick wall, which leaves power heavily concentrated in the leader. That means absolutely everything depends on who is elected to replace Mr Salmond. It shouldn't need to be as 'all or nothing' as that but unfortunately it is. If an authoritarian machine politician becomes leader, the party will be essentially finished. A reforming leader might just give it a fighting chance.
Monday, October 14, 2024
Alex Salmond's appearance on the Scot Goes Popcast, 6th April 2021
A couple of you have asked for the link to Alex Salmond's appearance on the Scot Goes Popcast at the time of Alba's founding. You can watch the video version below. I was one of umpteen alternative media people (and indeed mainstream media people) who were given a slot with him that day, so he'd already been going for hours by the time it was my turn - his mental stamina was incredible.
Although I was an enthusiast for the Alba project and I may already have joined the party by the time the interview took place, I didn't allow my journalistic pride (or my blogger's pride if you prefer) to desert me - I made sure I asked him a few awkward questions. One in particular had longer term significance than I could possibly have realised at the time.
It's only 25 minutes long, so sit back and allow yourself to be transported back in time three and a half years to what already seems like a very different political era.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
John Mason's ridiculous expulsion suggests the SNP have learned absolutely nothing from the Rutherglen debacle - you can't throw seats away like confetti and expect there to be no consequences
Simply astounding: just three months after their "loveless landslide", Labour have *lost their poll lead* and have a vote share similar to John Major in the mid-90s
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Alex Salmond, 1954-2024
While I take a few days off to prepare properly for my Alba "disciplinary" hearing, it may be a good time to give the 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser one last big push
Friday, October 11, 2024
"We were supposed to have momentum!" laments Anas Sarwar, as Labour flatline in one by-election and go backwards in another - results that are consistent with a nationwide lead for the SNP
Last week brought two SNP by-election wins in Dundee, this week has brought two Labour by-election wins in North Lanarkshire, including one in a ward where the SNP topped the poll last time around. But in actual fact the underlying message of both weeks is identical. The net swings to Labour are small enough to point to a small SNP lead nationally, which is a far cry from the typical pattern in by-elections prior to 4th July.
Mossend and Holytown by-election result, first preferences (10th November 2024):
Thursday, October 10, 2024
My US election dilemma (advice is welcome)
Those of you of a certain vintage may remember that the Guardian newspaper was widely regarded as having made a complete fool of itself twenty years ago when it tried to influence the US presidential election by getting its readers to send personalised letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio, urging a vote for John Kerry rather than George W Bush. If it had any effect at all, the perception was that it slightly increased Bush's margin of victory in Ohio, because people disapproved of outside interference in American affairs.
Anyone who was involved in that miscalculation may draw some satisfaction from learning that the boot is apparently on the other foot this year, and people from the US are sending handwritten notes to registered voters overseas urging them to vote. I received the above note from a lady in California a couple of weeks ago, and although it doesn't say "please vote against Trump", I do detect a bit of a subtext there!
But here is my dilemma. I have a history of voting for left-wing third-party candidates in presidential elections, but in 2016 and 2020 I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden respectively, on the basis that any election in which Donald Trump is on the ballot is an emergency and you don't muck around.
The same logic applies this year, but I just could not have imagined the scale of the Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the Biden/Harris administration's seemingly unconditional backing for the genocidal Netanyahu regime. Any vote for Harris thus feels like an endorsement of the genocide. Additionally, I felt happier about voting for Clinton and Biden because they seemed to have abandoned their previous support for the death penalty, which is a key issue for me, but I gather opposition to the death penalty has been removed from the Democratic platform this year, and Harris is being evasive about her own position.
I'll have to make a decision very soon, so I'd be interested in your thoughts. What would you do? Vote against the genocide by voting for the Green candidate Jill Stein, or vote against Trump by voting for Kamala Harris?
James Cleverly's elimination is the perfect illustration of what can go catastrophically wrong if you try to "game the voting system"
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
The Tories opt for a hard right turn - as they almost always do
Well, if you needed any evidence that the betting markets are not some sort of predictive God, or that sudden movements on them are not proof that punters have inside knowledge, here it is (yet again). Robert Jenrick dropped like a stone on the markets earlier, probably on the logic that James Cleverly had enormous momentum behind him after his performance at the party conference (and in yesterday's ballot), and that Jenrick supporters would defect to Badenoch to stop Cleverly. That actually was a reasonable enough assumption, but it hasn't happened.
Robert Jenrick 41
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Crossover nears: Labour's GB-wide lead over the Tories cut to just one point
The batch of three GB-wide polls that I mentioned the other day were ominous for Starmer, because they showed Labour had lower percentage support than under Jeremy Corbyn in the crushing 2019 defeat. But at least they still showed Labour in the 30s, and with a cushion of sorts over the Tories. Neither of those things are true in the new More In Common poll, which has the worst results for Labour in years and years.
More In Common GB-wide poll: