Memo to Stewart McDonald: you've had your "pause" on independence for the best part of the last decade. It didn't work and we can now see what the consequences were. The excuses have run out: it's time to press the "play" button and move ahead to a de facto referendum in 2026

Very, very long-term readers of this blog may recall that several years ago I used to be a columnist for a couple of UK-wide news websites, and without naming names or specifying which site it was, I've got this vivid recollection of sending in my column the day after one of Nicola Sturgeon's landslide election triumphs.  Whoever was on duty wrote back and said: "Thanks James - and congratulations.  I just wish we in England could have escaped from Conservative rule in the same way."  The point was that he just took it as read that because the SNP had such an overwhelming mandate, they would be pushing forward towards independence as promised.  The idea that what you do with mandates is collect them, and then twiddle your thumbs for a few years and let them expire, is a good deal more odd than some people on the 'delay' wing of the SNP would have us believe.

So I have no time whatever for the utterly predictable suggestion of Stewart McDonald, former MP for Glasgow South and the SNP's leading enthusiast for British militarism, that Thursday's defeat means the time is now ripe for yet another "pause" on independence.  How many would this make now?  Five?  Six?  He has reacted to just about every previous victory by calling for delay, so he's got very little credibility in now saying that the reaction to defeat should be exactly the same.  It was always obvious, and I can remember writing posts on this blog pointing this out years ago, that if you let mandate after mandate expire while waiting for the "perfect moment" that will never actually arise, eventually your luck is going to run out and voters will stop giving you a mandate, either because they can see you were never serious about delivering or because they get tired of you for another reason.  Anyone on the gradualist wing who didn't foresee that their own tactics would guarantee that a defeat like the one on Thursday would happen before independence did was guilty of astounding political naivety or self-deception.

In one sense, though, the SNP have been fortunate, because when the defeat eventually came it was at Westminster, where they were in opposition, rather than at Holyrood, where they are in power.  They are still a party of government today every bit as much as they were on Wednesday.  They still have the ball at their feet and there is absolutely nothing to stop them moving ahead with a de facto referendum in 2026.  They promised in 2016 that the changed circumstances of Brexit meant that Scotland would definitely be given a choice on independence.  Ian Blackford boomed every week that Scotland's voice MUST and WILL be heard.  Well, eight years on that still hasn't happened and it's about bloody time that it did.  Frankly, the excuses have run out.  Covid wasn't a valid excuse because by the time that happened in 2020 they had already let mandates from 2016 and 2017 run out.  The loss of twenty seats in 2017 wasn't a valid excuse because that still left them with a practically identical type of mandate to the one Labour won in Scotland on Thursday - one that the SNP themselves seem to be in awe of.  If they're so impressed by Labour's mandate, why on earth weren't they impressed by their own mandate in 2017 and why in God's name didn't they make use of it?

I'm not remotely swayed by the argument that you can no longer use a Holyrood election as a de facto referendum in circumstances where there is no longer a pro-independence majority among Scottish MPs at Westminster.  In fact, if you think about it for more than a few seconds that argument falls apart completely, because we've been told that the reason the 2021 Holyrood election no longer provides a mandate is because it has since been superseded by a more recent mandate for Labour.  It therefore inevitably follows that if you win a pro-independence majority at the 2026 election, that supersedes what happened on Thursday and then becomes the operative mandate.

And what happens, you might ask, if the UK Government then turns around and says they're not going to respect that mandate until and unless there is also a pro-independence majority among Scottish MPs once again?  In that case, you then fight the 2028 or 2029 general election on a simple message to independence supporters: "Are you going to stand for your democratic decision being ignored?"  You might actually win the general election that way, and what's more, it might be the only way in which it's even possible to win the general election.  I'm actually pretty optimistic about the SNP's chances in Holyrood 2026, but I'm not at all optimistic about their chances of winning Westminster 2028/9 if they try to do it against the odds on bread-and-butter issues when everyone knows they can't form a government in London.  The "stop the Tories" pitch from Labour would still work - unless it was a special sort of election in which the SNP were seeking to seal the deal after a de facto triumph in 2026.

As for any suggestion that Thursday's defeat means that 2026 is not a suitable time to be trying to win a majority for independence, frankly that's complete rubbish.  Electoral politics is a pendulum and often the best chance to prosper is on the rebound, because a new situation has been created and voters are looking at you afresh.  Think back to 2015 when the Scottish Tories suffered their lowest ever share of the vote.  Was that their worst possible moment to try to mount a major comeback?  No, it turned out to be their ideal opportunity, and they made huge unexpected gains in the elections of both 2016 and 2017.

As I said in my article in The National today, it's perfectly conceivable that the SNP could remain the largest party at Holyrood in 2026 with a dull managerial campaign that takes advantage of the fact that John Swinney and/or Kate Forbes are seen as more competent than Anas Sarwar.  But I think that would be a narrow result and there might well be a unionist majority in the parliament, possibly leading to Sarwar becoming First Minister from second place with Tory support.  So even from the point of view of the gradualist wing's bottom line (ie. staying in power), aiming higher and trying to win a majority for independence actually makes perfect strategic sense.  Otherwise it's just managed decline which has only one destination sooner or later: the opposition benches.

The words "de facto referendum" mean different things to different people, so let me be clear about what I mean by them - I'm talking about an election in which the SNP and other pro-indy parties state in their manifestos that a majority for them would constitute an outright mandate for independence (and not for a referendum, which is a concept that some people seem incapable of wrapping their heads around).  It wouldn't necessarily have to be a single-issue manifesto and nor would it be a one-off event you couldn't afford to risk - if you didn't get the mandate in one election you could then try again five years later.

Some thoughts on how the voting system severely distorted the election outcome in Scotland

If the UK really is going to ludicrously persist with first-past-the-post in an increasingly multi-party system and with increasingly perverse outcomes, I would suggest there's a special responsibility on the media to explain to viewers, listeners and readers that there is a disconnect between how people actually vote and the election results that are produced, and also to explain the reason that is happening.  Robert McKenzie, who was one of the resident psephologists along with David Butler for the BBC's election results shows between the 1950s and 1979, was extremely good at doing that - he would just bluntly say "these results are nothing like how people voted, here is what the result would have been if we had a proportional system like every other country in western Europe".  Nobody is really filling that role now, except maybe for John Curtice, but he only appeared very sparingly on the results show.  

As you know, I wrote constituency profiles for The National over the course of the campaign, and almost on a daily basis I would sit down, look at another central belt constituency, and say to myself "ah, it's yet another one of those", in other words a constituency where the SNP were around twenty points ahead of Labour in 2019 and thus would lose the seat this time even if Labour were a few points behind the SNP nationally.  If Labour were a few points ahead of the SNP, which is what was actually happening, all of those seats would go, and by quite some distance, and it would look like a bloodbath even though that didn't reflect how people actually voted.  

If there have been a few half-hearted attempts in the media to explain this inbuilt advantage for Labour and to put the result in its proper perspective, they haven't been anything like sufficient.  So that's partly the topic for my piece in The National analysing the election outcome, and entitled "For every six Scottish Labour voters, there were five for SNP".  I'm not sure if it's on the main part of the website, but you can certainly find it in the print edition or in the digital edition (page 26) if you're a subscriber.

When I wrote it, I was trying to squeeze in a few introductory points about the wider UK result, but if I'd left those points in I wouldn't have had much room left for anything else, so once again, as a sort of "DVD extra", here is the part I cut out...

"The one-third of UK voters who actually voted Labour in this general election must be congratulated on getting the government they voted for.  The two-thirds of people who did not vote Labour were, however, not quite so fortunate.  This is a familiar objection to the legitimacy of first-past-the-post election results that has been heard since the 1970s when the share of the vote for the winning party typically started drifting well below 50%, so we know from past precedent that the problem will be shoved under the carpet by the new government, the official opposition and much of the media.  

But nevertheless 34% is yet another new all-time low for the winning vote share, and it must raise the question of where the cut-off point lies, beyond which it would not be possible to maintain the fiction that the will of the people is being enacted.  Commentators presumably wouldn't be able to claim with a straight face that Starmer had an overwhelming landslide mandate if he'd won it on 25% of the vote, so there must be a magic figure somewhere in the narrow band between 25% and 34% where the perverse effects of the electoral system become acceptable in polite society.

Another fiction that is skating on very thin ice is the notion that the changes Keir Starmer made to the Labour party, and his ruthless treatment of MPs and candidates who had ideological disagreements with him, were necessary to rebuild the trust and support of voters.  In fact, although Labour has undoubtedly changed out of all recognition since Jeremy Corbyn's period as leader, that hasn't happened in a way that has made the party any more popular.  Starmer's 34% vote share is six percentage points lower than the one achieved by Corbyn in his first general election in 2017, and is very similar to the 32% result in 2019 that was supposedly so intolerable that it was used to justify Corbyn's expulsion from the party.  As Professor John Curtice has been at pains to point out, Labour's support actually fell in Wales and remained more or less static in England, with the modest GB-wide boost being caused only by the recovery in Scotland.  Starmer's apologists have accordingly shifted their ground, arguing that Labour's shift to the right was never intended to increase vote share, but was instead aimed at playing the voting system and ensuring the most efficient geographical distribution of support.  But that just makes clear to voters that it was never actually about them, and that they were mere bystanders in the process of government selection."

So what happens from here?

One of the reasons why I suggested that independence supporters would be crazy to abstain or vote Labour on Thursday was that it would not just be business as usual afterwards - the media would try to turn any defeat into a 1979-style setback that would put independence off the agenda for a generation.  That is the process we're now seeing, and I'm troubled that the SNP are - just as in 2017 - not doing enough to resist the media narrative, in fact they may be fuelling it.  OK, in one sense it's a statement of the obvious to say that independence is off the imminent agenda because there is no practical way of achieving it between now and the Holyrood election - but there certainly is a practical way of achieving it at the Holyrood election itself, and if the SNP start denying that, that's when the alarm bells should start ringing. 

Most incoming governments enjoy a honeymoon, so when the next opinion polls are published (which may not be for quite some time), it's likely that Labour will have a large lead over the SNP, possibly even at Holyrood level.  Nobody should panic about that because the honeymoon effect wears off with time, possibly even within six months or so.  But the important question is whether the honeymoon will also affect the numbers on the independence question and produce a boost for No.  That's why it's so dangerous for the SNP to be bending the knee to the "defeat for independence" narrative - Yes supporters could take their cue from that and drift away, resulting in bad polls for Yes, which will just further embolden commentators to inform the public that independence is dead.  It could be a vicious circle.  However, even if Yes does take a knock, I would expect that to recover once the Labour government becomes unpopular.

For all that we used to say that a Tory government was the best recruiting sergeant for independence, it should never be forgotten that Tony Blair was still Prime Minister when the SNP first came to power in 2007, and that the Iraq War played a big role in that breakthrough.  If Starmer makes a mis-step on that scale, which can't be totally ruled out given his obscene comments on Gaza in October, it could be the decisive moment in moving Scotland towards independence.

*  *  *

Now that Stuart Campbell has got the unionist victory he campaigned for, you might be wondering what he thinks comes next.  Thrillingly he's given us an insight into his thinking, although it doesn't make a lot of sense.  Firstly he claims that the SNP is "stone-cold dead in the water". Er, really?  This is the result in the popular vote on Thursday (which will only change minimally once the Inverness result is announced) - 

Labour 36%

SNP 30%

Conservatives 13%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Reform UK 7%

Greens 4%

Alba 0.5%

Objectively, does that look "dead in the water" to you, or does it look like a party that is firmly in a duopoly with Labour, is not very far behind Labour, and is well placed to profit if Labour become unpopular?

Secondly, now that the election is over Campbell is suddenly making a show of being interested in Alba again and wanting them to overtake the supposedly "dead in the water" SNP.  Er, Stu, if that was what you had in mind, don't you think it might have been an idea to urge your readers to vote Alba on Thursday rather than Labour?  And given that you backed Labour instead, how in God's name do you now expect Alba to totally replace the SNP from 29.5 percentage points behind?

The SNP's result in historical context

I said last night that the SNP would have been hoping to outperform the exit poll just slightly, so that they would do better than in October 1974, when they won 11 seats and 30.4% of the vote.  That would have made it their fourth best general election result in history, and better than any result prior to 2015.  Obviously that didn't happen, and they only took nine seats (barring a turnaround in Inverness tomorrow), and it looks like they'll be just a smidgeon short of 30.4% too.  

But I've been doing some sums and found to my surprise than in one specific sense the SNP did actually outperform October 1974 and get their fourth best result.  Because there were 71 Scottish seats in 1974, winning 11 only gave the SNP 15.5% of the seats, whereas winning 9 out of 57 last night gives them 15.8% of the seats.

*  *  *

From an Alba point of view, I think it's worth drawing attention to the Alloa & Grangemouth result - 

Labour 43.8%

SNP 28.9%

Reform UK 9.2%

Conservatives 7.6%

Greens 3.4%

Liberal Democrats 2.8%

Independent - Comrie 2.1%

Alba 1.5%

Workers Party 0.5%

The big controversy for Alba in the run up to the general election was the departure from the party of Eva Comrie, who had been Equalities Convener and would have been an obvious possibility to stand in Alloa & Grangemouth, because it's her home constituency.  Not long after she left, she announced that she would be standing as an independent instead, and many Alba members felt that the party should have got behind her on a 'Scotland United' basis in the same way they had done with Angus MacNeil in the Western Isles.  Instead, the opposite happened, and Alba not only stood against her but put up just about the most prominent candidate possible in the former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.  That led to the sub-optimal scenario of no fewer than four pro-independence candidates standing against each other in a winnable seat for Labour.

To be perfectly honest, with Mr MacAskill's greater national profile and with more resources behind him, I had expected him to outpoll Eva Comrie, but as you can see he didn't.  He finished eighth, and ironically the only candidate he was ahead of came from Craig Murray's 'other' party, the anti-independence Workers Party.  You'd have to say that Ms Comrie has proved her point, and that if Alba were going to target Alloa and Grangemouth it looks like they'd have been better off doing it with the local advantages she would have brought to the table.

Even though a number of Alba's nineteen candidates were very well known for one reason or another, the only one who showed any real sign of receiving a personal vote was Neale Hanvey, and even in his case it was limited (he took 2.8% of the vote in Cowdenbeath & Kirkcaldy and finished seventh).

The real result mirrors the exit poll but feels worse somehow - and there are good reasons for that, although the scale of Labour's victory is still being wildly overstated

The exit poll showed the SNP on 10 seats, and the real result will be very similar to that - it'll be 9, or in theory it could still be 10, but the mood music suggests that the Lib Dems will very narrowly win the final seat after a recount tomorrow.  And yet somehow the reality of 9 seats feels much worse than the anticipation of 10.  Why is that?  

It's partly because living through the individual results drives the reality of them home, but I think it's more because the exit poll was actually wrong in a couple of key respects. It predicted that the SNP would do worse than they did against the Tories in rural and coastal seats, but better than they did against Labour in the central belt.  The battle against Labour in the central belt is always considered the meat in the sandwich, and suffering the losses there makes the situation seem a lot graver.  It would have been easier to dismiss the predicted Tory gains in Perth and Argyll (which didn't happen) as irrelevant results caused by unionist voters ganging up on the SNP.

The paradox is, though, that Labour haven't done any better in popular vote terms than the opinion polls predicted.  They have a lead of less than six points over the SNP, in line with several of the polls - the only thing that wasn't expected was the exact geographical distribution of their support which made their vote more efficient.  But in terms of number of seats, vote share, lead over the second-placed party, etc, etc, Labour's result is strikingly similar to the SNP's in 2017.  The media refused to accept 2017 as a good result for the SNP, let alone as a landslide or as a mandate for anything, and yet basically the same result for Labour in 2024 is being painted as an astonishing triumph. Once the dust has settled, it may be worth drawing attention to that blatant contradiction.

But the consequences of this result may hinge on whether the SNP themselves interpret it as "disappointing" or "disastrous", and in spite of all the caveats I've listed above, they seem to be veering more towards the "disastrous" interpretation.  That could yet lead to another change of leader, which I thought was unlikely last night. That would be no bad thing as long as the successor is Kate Forbes.  But what would be a very bad thing is if the SNP convince themselves, as Stephen Flynn seemed to be hinting at last night, that the solution to their problems is to backpedal on independence even more furiously.  Nicola Sturgeon herself seems to understand that if you run away from your unique selling point, you're not going to win elections, and hopefully her voice will carry more sway than Flynn's on that subject.

If it doesn't though, and if the SNP cease to be a genuine party of independence, the only hope for advancing the cause at the 2026 Holyrood election will lie with Alba and other similar parties. That makes Alba's strategic mis-steps in this election all the more frustrating.  A lot of what I've been saying about how Alba stood in too many seats and spread their resources too thin has been borne out by the results.  However in one sense they've got out of jail, because having quickly scrolled through the results I can't find any examples of Alba costing the SNP a seat.  It came very close to happening in both Aberdeen North and Dundee Central, but in both cases the SNP narrowly clung on.  So through sheer luck Alba may have avoided the worst of any recriminations about contributing to the scale of a unionist victory - and believe me, that will matter a lot.

How bad was Alba's result?  Gerry Hassan will of course post a million tweets pointing out that Alba took only 1 in 200 votes in Scotland, but that will be misleading - their real vote share in the seats they contested was around 1.5%.  That's in line with the 2021 Holyrood election and 2022 local elections, and might suggest their support has remained static.  However it's generally harder to win votes in first-past-the-post elections than on the Holyrood list, so pound-for-pound this might be a slightly better result than it appears - but I do think if a Holyrood election was held right now, Alba would probably fall short of winning list seats, so a hard-headed think about the way forward is required. In my opinion Alba needs to become a broader church, which means moving in pretty much the opposite direction of the last few months.  Being an exclusive sect and trying to impose suffocating discipline on rank and file members simply doesn't work, in my view, for a small party with the stated aim of getting up to 15% support.

Incidentally, the real result is better for the SNP than the exit poll in one respect - they're the fourth largest party in the UK in terms of seats, rather than fifth behind Reform UK.  That's cold comfort at the moment, but may make it marginally easier to win arguments for a fair share of broadcast coverage over the coming years.

And it's going to be slightly comical when the media eventually remember that the Scottish Parliament still exists, the SNP are still dominant there, and their hero Anas Sarwar is still but a mere opposition leader.

Exit Poll analysis

I've produced a lightning quick analysis piece about the exit poll for The National.  Basically the gist is that it's disappointing but not the absolute worst case scenario.  I've been saying all day that I wouldn't be at all surprised if "SNP 3 seats" flashed up on the screen, because with the exit poll all the pre-expectations tend to go completely out of the window.  At least it's not quite as bad as that.  You can read my full article HERE.

EXIT POLL: SNP projected to win 10 seats

Exit Poll results (number of seats for each party): 

Labour 410

Conservatives 131

Liberal Democrats 61

Reform UK 13

SNP 10

Plaid Cymru 4

Greens 2

Keir Starmer supported the illegal starvation of the innocent civilian population of Gaza. He is not fit to run a parish council, let alone the UK government. Don't vote Labour this evening, vote for a pro-independence party that cares about human life.

Keir Starmer said:

“Israel 🇮🇱 does have that right" to cut water and power from Gaza 🇵🇸

If you remember one interview on Thursday then remember this one.

Starmer & Labour have given Netanyahu cover for genocide.

Don’t forgive him. Don’t vote for him.pic.twitter.com/488zRLF3KN

— Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) July 2, 2024

Stuart Campbell has not only turned against independence, he's turned against the rights of women and girls. If anyone is crazy enough to follow his advice today, make sure you hold him accountable for the long-term consequences.

To save you having to directly experience the final descent of Wings Over Scotland into either hell or Narnia (delete as appropriate), I'll summarise his latest post for you.

* He's telling people that the way to get independence is to vote against independence.

* He wants his readers to help inflict the most crushing defeat possible on the cause of independence, and to deliver the most overwhelming supermajority possible for a unionist government in London.

* Despite claiming only ten days ago that "Wings has never told its readers how to vote and we’re not going to start now", he is now instructing his readers to vote Labour.  He says "there’s a job that needs doing...grit your teeth and gird your loins and get it done".

* In spite of having urged Alex Salmond to set up his own party in 2021, and in spite of having then demanded that Alba adopt the most radical and potentially reckless tactics at every turn, and in spite of having partly got his way with Alba putting up nineteen candidates against the SNP in a first-past-the-post election at a moment of maximum danger for the independence cause, and in spite of - to be blunt - the sycophancy that senior Alba figures have poured on this abusive bully over the last three years, he's telling his readers to vote for the anti-independence Labour party, and not for Alba.

* Despite having lectured SNP loyalists for years that they can't use independence as a form of blackmail to get feminists to vote for a party that wouldn't respect the rights of women and girls, he's now brazenly telling people to vote Labour, the party that JK Rowling says has abandoned women, because apparently trampling on the rights of women and girls is suddenly loads of fun as long as it's done to get revenge against the SNP.

* He's inviting his readers to believe that when they vote Labour, they'll be doing the opposite of what Keir Starmer wants, because apparently Starmer has only been pretending to support Labour candidates and he actually wants the SNP to win in Scotland, not Labour. (I'm not making this up - this is literally what Campbell is claiming.)

* Despite all of the above being self-evidently bats**t crazy, one of the priceless first reactions of his readers in the comments section is: "Perfectly put, Rev, not one thing in there that anyone could argue with."

We all know that the hardcore of Wings fans are so brainwashed by their bog-standard Pied Piper that - crazy though it may seem - some of them probably will go out today and vote Labour, and then have a little chuckle to themselves about how they've screwed up the masterplan of the pro-SNP Keir Starmer.  But sometimes people who are under the influence of a cult leader eventually have an epiphany, so what I would say to those people is just remember this moment.  If in five or ten years' time you realise that voting against independence killed independence rather than saved it, if you realise that voting for the British establishment helped the British establishment rather than harmed it, if you realise that you were not in fact playing 5D chess but were just having your strings pulled by a man with a petty and destructive agenda, then for pity's sake hold that man accountable for the damage he has caused to your country and the way he has exploited you.

A few years ago, I wrote an iScot column that was critical of Campbell's proposal for a Wings political party led by himself.  Because the editor of iScot generally allows his columnists to express their personal views freely (unless that causes legal problems or whatever), he published the column as normal without that constituting any sort of editorial endorsement of what I had said.  Campbell wasn't just angry. He effectively tried to put iScot - one of only two pro-independence print magazines in existence - out of business as an act of revenge.  He published a list of supposed "backstabbers" and included iScot on it, as a result of which some people cancelled their subscriptions and put the future of the publication in peril.  Thankfully it survived in spite of Campbell's best efforts, as it thoroughly deserved to, because it's a great magazine.  But if after today anyone is vindictive enough to draw up a list of backstabbers or betrayers of the independence movement, we all know there's only one man who can possibly have pride of place at the top of the list, and that'll be the man who backed Starmer and Sarwar at the 2024 general election.

I have very few political regrets, but I'd have to say that one of the exceptions is that until a few years ago I used to defend Campbell to the hilt against the radical left, who I thought were insufferable purists for trying to exclude the most popular and persuasive advocate for independence from our movement. In my defence I'd point out that Campbell was extremely consistent in his support of independence until a certain point and it would have been almost impossible to predict that he would eventually turn against us. I would also maintain that the radical left were right about Campbell for the wrong reasons.  But nevertheless they were right about him in the sense that we'd always have been better off without him, because all he's done is build up a following and used it to try to kill independence.

What exactly is his motivation?  Until yesterday I'd have said that he prioritises the trans issue over everything else, but an endorsement of Labour rules that out as an explanation.  It must boil down to a personal vendetta against the SNP.  A number of people have traced his loss of the plot to his defeat in his vanity legal action against Kezia Dugdale, during which the SNP did not support him, and perhaps he's just never going to forgive them for that.

But for people who care more about independence than about Campbell's bruised ego, here's some rather more sensible election advice - 

Please vote today

Please remember to take your photo ID with you

Please vote for a pro-independence party

Please vote SNP if you live in one of the thirty-seven constituencies where Alba or Angus MacNeil are not standing

*  *  *

My final batch of constituency profiles is in The National today - West Aberdeenshire & Kincardine, Stirling & Strathallan and West Dunbartonshire.

The Scot Goes Pop recommendation for Election 2024: please vote, and please vote for a pro-independence party (and yes, the SNP are a pro-independence party)

Apologies if the title sounds a bit self-important, but with so much irresponsible advice flying around at a moment of maximum danger for our movement, I want there to be no doubt at all about what I'm saying.  If you want independence, you have to vote for it.  And even just to keep hopes of independence alive, you have to vote for it. There is no five-dimensional chess available that allows you to get independence by voting against it or by abstaining.  If enough people vote against pro-independence parties tomorrow, no matter what their motivation for doing so, the cause could suffer a 1979-style setback that would take fifteen or twenty years to recover from.

I've spent the last few weeks looking closely at individual constituency races, but even if I hadn't done that, it would be a statement of the obvious that in 56 out of 57 constituencies, the SNP will have the pro-independence candidate with by far the largest number of votes.  Not all of those 56 seats are winnable for the SNP but a lot of them are, and a lot of them appear to be on a knife-edge right now.  Under the first-past-the-post voting system, that's inevitably something that has to be taken into account when deciding whether to vote for the SNP or for another pro-indy candidate who can't realistically win. The same logic applies in the Western Isles, but in reverse, because it appears that Angus MacNeil is in with a shout there and the SNP aren't.

There's also the issue of the national popular vote. If by any chance the SNP were to beat Labour in the popular vote, which may be odds against but after last night's Savanta poll can't be totally ruled out, it would be a tremendous boost for the independence cause and would be recognised as such by the media.  It would be frustrating to fall short of that by only a few votes.

Nevertheless, there are Alba candidates in nineteen constituencies. As a member of the Alba party I am required to support those candidates, and I of course do so, in spite of my misgivings about a party that billed itself when it was founded as a "list only party" now making a widescale intervention in a first-past-the-post Westminster election. That's something that no reasonable person could have anticipated when they joined the party in 2021 based on the statements the leadership was making at that time, and with the best will in the world it may risk splitting the Yes vote and help unionist parties to win a few seats they otherwise wouldn't. I stick to what I've been consistently saying since I was on the Alba NEC myself in 2021-22 - the strategy should have been to stand in only two or three seats, and commit all available resources into those seats to create a bubble-like by-election atmosphere.  There would still have been risks, but that would have been the closest thing to a win/win, because it would have kept Alba in the public eye in the build-up to 2026 but wouldn't have caused a widespread split Yes vote.  There also might just have been an outside chance of getting Neale Hanvey re-elected in Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy, but I suspect resources have been spread too thin for that to be realistically possible now.

Barring any mishaps with the photo ID, I will be voting SNP tomorrow, because I live in Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch which has no Alba candidate.  I have no hesitation in urging anyone who lives in one of the thirty-seven constituencies where Alba or Angus MacNeil are not standing to join me in voting SNP.  The future of our country depends on it.  

Incidentally, I'd draw your attention to a long letter in The National from a few days ago by Andy Anderson, who was a member of Alba but left in horror when he realised that the party was planning to put up candidates in a first-past-the-post election.  I don't agree with everything in the letter, in fact there are several points I strongly dispute.  But it does illustate that there are people out there who are basically in tune with Alba's thinking about how to use the 2026 election to win independence, but feel excluded from supporting that effort because they disagree with the party's Westminster election strategy. In fact the problem goes further than that, because Alba itself has told members who do not, for example, totally disavow the candidacy of Eva Comrie in Alloa and Grangemouth that they are no longer welcome in the party.  

If people who want to support Alba on the list in 2026 are told they can't because Alba has turned itself into an exclusive club with draconian rules about how you had to think and act during the 2024 Westminster election, where are those people going to go in 2026? The answer is I don't know, but they're going to go somewhere, and it's likely to duplicate whatever Alba are doing in 2026 in a way that will not be helpful.  I really do think Alba needs to mature as a party and become a broad church for anyone who wants to use the list vote in 2026 to bring independence closer.  There needs to be room for those people to agree to disagree on the wisdom of what was done in the current campaign, otherwise Alba will be cutting off its nose to spite its face.  2026 is the opportunity for Alba, not this election, and it needs as many people on board for 2026 as possible.

Please vote tomorrow

Please remember to take your photo ID with you

Please vote for a pro-independence party

Please vote SNP if you live in one of the thirty-seven constituencies where Alba or Angus MacNeil are not standing

The SNP won't be too unhappy with the final YouGov seats projection

After last night's poor seats projection for the SNP from Survation, I've been nervously waiting for the final projection from YouGov, who are the most experienced firm with MRP.  It's kind of middling - they have the SNP on eighteen seats, which if you think about it isn't that much fewer than the 24 projected from last night's Savanta poll that had an outright SNP lead in the popular vote.  The important thing is that it's in line with the previous two YouGov projections of 17 and 20 seats respectively, which means there is absolutely no corroboration for Survation's view that there has been a big swing against the SNP over the campaign.  Survation look increasingly like an outlier on that point.

The individual seat projections predictably show a sea of red in the central belt, but it's broken by SNP wins in Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock, Edinburgh East & Musselburgh, North Ayrshire & Arran and also in two symbolically important seats - Paisley & Renfrewshire South (formerly held by Mhairi Black) and Mid Dunbartonshire (held by Jo Swinson until 2019).  The SNP are also on course to defeat Douglas Ross in Aberdeenshire North & Moray East but are falling short in three notionally Tory-held seats: Gordon & Buchan, Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk and Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale.  All three of those are tight, though (the SNP are within five points).  The two Aberdeen seats and the two Dundee seats are all in the SNP column, although Aberdeen North is pretty close.

Fans of Joanna Cherry (which includes me) will be heartened to know that although she's nominally behind Labour, her seat is classed as a toss-up.  Deidre Brock is similarly very close to holding on in Edinburgh North & Leith, as is Alan Brown in Kilmarnock & Loudoun.  There are a handful of other central belt seats where the SNP still look to be in contention, including East Renfrewshire, which would be a very satisfying hold because the Labour candidate is Blair McDougall.

In the Western Isles, Labour are supposedly on course to defeat the SNP by 40% to 31%, with Angus MacNeil on a maximum of 7%, which demonstrates the severe limitations of MRP projections in atypical constituency races.  All of the indications from the ground are that MacNeil is likely to be in the top two alongside Labour. 

Jamie Stone is holding on for the Lib Dems in Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, but only just - Lucy Beattie is estimated to be only two points behind him for the SNP.  I know many people will be sceptical about that, but with the boundary changes being so radical you just never know.

The lower bound for SNP seats is 8, and the upper bound is 34, meaning that YouGov are saying an SNP overall majority is still just about possible.

Incidentally, YouGov have made a really odd factual error in their write-up.  They say their projection of 32 seats for Labour in Scotland would return the party to roughly their level of strength from the 2005 and 2010 elections, when they had "27".  In fact, Labour won 41 seats in Scotland in both of those elections, so they'd be falling a fair bit short of that.

Meanwhile, the new More In Common projection has the SNP on sixteen seats, which is also fairly stable since the last update.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Perth & Kinross-shire and Rutherglen for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.

The bombshell hits: the SNP *take the lead* in sensational eve-of-election Savanta poll

I've been wondering for weeks if there might be one poll, just one poll over the course of the campaign that would put the SNP in the outright lead.  It was beginning to look very unlikely, but it's happened on the very last day.  Obviously we have to be cautious about this, because we've already had poor polling data for the SNP from Survation earlier this evening, and who knows, perhaps there'll be one or two disappointing polls from other firms over the course of the next 24 hours.  But I'd much rather go into election day with uncertainty in the air rather than sure knowledge that it's going to be a bad result, and it looks like uncertainty is exactly what we're going to have.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (Savanta, 28th June - 2nd July 2024):

SNP 34% (-)

Labour 31% (-3)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+2)

Reform UK 6% (-)

Greens 3% (+1)

Seats projection: SNP 24, Labour 22, Conservatives 6, Liberal Democrats 5

The one disappointment here is that the Tory vote does seem to be solidifying just slightly as polling day approaches - there's been evidence of that in the GB-wide polls too.  That doesn't matter so much if the SNP really are ahead of Labour, but if other firms are correct and if Labour have a small-to-middling lead, the SNP are going to be fairly reliant for seats on the SNP-Tory battleground areas, mainly in the north-east and the south.  In the worst case scenario they might be totally reliant on those areas, as they often used to be prior to the 2015 breakthrough.  Even in this poll's seats projection, Professor Curtice once again has the Tories holding their six current seats, which is intuitively hard to accept given that 15% of the vote is less than they had when they were completely wiped out in 1997.  

Thoughts on the penultimate Survation seats projection

I'm not sure the latest Survation MRP update is as significant as people are assuming, because if the fieldwork dates are anything to go by, it's based on about 80% of the same interviews as the previous update.  The top-up of new data hasn't made the situation better for the SNP but it hasn't made it dramatically worse either.  And as an anonymous commenter pointed out on the previous thread, the credibility of the projection that the SNP will get only 10 seats hinges on whether you believe the popular vote figures, which show Labour 11 points ahead of the SNP.  That's possible, but it's significantly out of step with the conventional polling (so far).  If you think the SNP are a bit closer to Labour than that, it would mean they'd probably end up with more than 10 seats.  

The most recent batch of conventional polls show...

Savanta: SNP level with Labour

Ipsos: SNP level with Labour

Norstat: SNP 4 points behind

More In Common: SNP 5 points behind

Redfield & Wilton: SNP 6 points behind

YouGov: SNP 6 points behind

Survation: SNP 6 points behind

The Ipsos poll was less recent than the others but I've included it because it was conducted by telephone.

Aaaaaaargh! Is there ANY way of saving Our Precious Union in Aberdeen North?

But the Tories were second in Aberdeen North last time. And then there's Perth and Kinross-shire: Labour tell me to vote tactically for them, but then that lovely Stephen Daisley tells me only the Tories can win. I'm so confused, David. WHAT DO I DO WITH MY PRO-UK TACTICAL VOTE? https://t.co/RYXPD4a1b0

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) July 2, 2024

Hi James, I'm the #ScottishLabour candidate for #AberdeenNorth. I've posted a recent poll tracker from the Financial Times below - it's a two horse race between the SNP and Labour here. The Conservatives and LibDems are too far behind. pic.twitter.com/8HO6fwBXdo

— Councillor Lynn Thomson (@LTLabour) July 2, 2024

Thanks Lynn, but I've checked Wikipedia, and it says the Tories were 2500 votes ahead of Labour in 2019. Doesn't that mean Aberdeen North is a two-horse race between the SNP and the Tories? It's so confusing, people could accidentally HELP the SNP with their pro-UK tactical vote.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) July 2, 2024

Hi James, Aberdeen North was Labour from 1935 until 2015. We were not doing well in 2019 so our vote was lower than usual. We've spoken to thousands of people since the start of this year and what we're finding on the doorstep reflects the FT tracker.

— Councillor Lynn Thomson (@LTLabour) July 2, 2024

That's interesting but I've heard from the Tories that they're also getting a great response on the Aberdeen North doorstep and that they may be the choice for the discerning pro-UK tactical voter. So confusing.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) July 2, 2024

UPDATE: A few hours later, the Tory candidate for Aberdeen North turned up and joined in the chat too.  Lesson: if you want to grab the attention of our imperial masters, just mention the words "pro-UK tactical voting" to them.  Works every time.  The Lib Dem will be along shortly.

Yes, lend me your vote, & you get the added bonus of a local candidate focused on your priorities. Lived in North for 20 years & ready to serve! 🗳️🇬🇧

— Gillian Tebberen 🇬🇧 (@gilltebberen4N) July 2, 2024

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I've written three more constituency profiles for The National - Orkney & Shetland, Paisley & Renfrewshire North and Paisley & Renfrewshire South.

My day out in Dundee: the Alba manifesto launch, HMS Unicorn, and the Frenchman who was hellbent on giving me money

Before I forget completely, here are a few photos I took at the Alba manifesto launch in Dundee last week.  The party bigwigs were all immaculately turned out in sharp suits, so in a selfless effort to improve the party's diversity quotient I dressed down for the occasion, to such an extent that afterwards a French tourist approached me and demanded to give me £5 for something to eat.  I'm not making this up, he was really persistent.  "I'm not homeless" I explained.  "Oh!  I'm French!" he replied.  It did occur to me later, though, that it was a bit odd that he thought I needed fed given that I was sitting on a bench making my way through a meal deal consisting of a ham sandwich, a Wispa, barbecue pop chips and an Irn Bru.  Maybe it was an elaborate ruse to rob me.  Who knows.

It has to be said that the turnout was a lot poorer than for the campaign launch in Glasgow a few weeks ago, and most of the people who did turn up seemed to be relatives of candidates, which is strange because there was exactly the same open invite for all Alba members to attend as there was in Glasgow.  Perhaps Dundee isn't quite such a hotspot for Alba members, I'm not sure.  There was only a smattering of journalists, and the question from the Courier's chap grated on me because he was clearly cherry-picking one MRP projection out of several to try to write off the SNP in the two Dundee seats.  The agenda was obvious, but to his credit Alex Salmond refused to play along.

I didn't really have time to make a full day of it, but having gone all that way I was determined to squeeze in at least one touristy thing.  I was tempted by the V&A, but I was worried it would take too long, so instead I made my way to HMS Unicorn.

Labour in Scotland are running on two of the most fraudulent slogans since George Bush said "Read my lips, no new taxes"

Those two slogans are - 

"This is an opportunity Scotland can't afford to miss!"

If the opportunity here is "a Labour government", that's a rather rum opportunity Scotland couldn't miss even if it tried.  The voters of England decide general elections in the UK, and with three days to go there is no remaining doubt that they will elect a Labour government with a landslide.  There is, however, an opportunity that Scotland does have and can choose and therefore could miss, and that is the opportunity to have an independent bloc of Scottish MPs as a counterweight to an all-powerful Starmer government and that will speak up for Scotland rather than being sycophantic cheerleaders for every decision made in London.  "An opportunity you can't afford to miss" really means "please miss the only opportunity you have, because we want to be able to do whatever the hell we like without anyone even being there to question us".

Oh, and by the way, Ian Murray as Secretary of State of Scotland is an opportunity that any sensible person can easily afford to miss, thank you very much.

"The change that Scotland needs"

If the election in Scotland is defined mainly as a contest between the SNP and Labour, then the SNP represent the radical change of independence and Labour represent the no change position - both constitutionally and in every other sense, because they are committed to largely continuing Tory policies when in power.  Labour have spent the last seventeen years running in terror from the radical change the SNP represents and doing everything they can to prevent and frustrate it.  They see this election as a golden opportunity to finally put an end to all hopes of change in Scotland once and for all.  To run on a "change" pitch in that context is the height of cynicism - in fact it's Orwellianism on stilts.

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I have two more constituency profiles in The National - North Ayrshire & Arran and North East Fife

Motherwell and Western Isles constituency previews

I've written previews of the constituency races in Motherwell, Wishaw & Carluke and Na h-Eileanan an Iar for The National - you can read them HERE and HERE.

One point I was half-toying with making in the Na h-Eileanan an Iar piece, but it would have been too much of a digression, was that we've heard a great deal of talk in this election about "change", mostly from politicians who love the status quo, but the Western Isles really are undergoing a profound and negative change.  I saw a YouTube video two or three years ago in which an American travels to Lewis to try to track down some genuine Gaelic speakers, but is disappointed to discover that young people who know the language don't actually use it in their day-to-day lives. "But my granny does!" one of them explains.

However, he then spends the evening in a pub, where the youngsters eventually start singing traditional songs in fluent Gaelic.  At that point he concludes the language is safe for the future - apparently oblivious to the fact that he's just observed precisely the way in which a language dies, ie. when only the elderly use it as a fully-fledged social language and the young relegate it to a few peripheral spheres.

As far I know Gaelic is still a majority language in places like Uist and Barra, so it still has a toehold and therefore a chance, but it really is in the last chance saloon now and urgent protective action needs to be taken.

On the subject of Motherwell, you might be interested to read this Glasgow Herald article about the Motherwell by-election of April 1945, which was won by the SNP.  Even though war was still raging, the two main campaign issues seem to have been Prestwick Airport and the Forth Road Bridge!  Jarringly modern...

Independence BOMBSHELL hits Westminster just days before general election as Yes support rockets to *50%* in new Norstat poll - SNP support increases by 1% as Swinney emerges again as most popular leader in Scotland

It's a great pity that we're four days away from a general election rather than an independence referendum, because we'd be on the brink of victory in the latter if tonight's new Norstat poll is to be believed.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat)

Yes 50% (+1)

No 50% (-1)

That's still significant, though, because in some past general election campaigns independence support has tended to tumble in the polls, often largely unnoticed.  My assumption has generally been that this happened because a UK campaign would progressively suck Scottish voters into a "Britished" mindset, albeit temporarily.  It may be that the Labour comeback is disguising the fact that voters are actually becoming more resistant to that process and are viewing this campaign through a Scottish lens as never before.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election:

Labour 35% (+1)

SNP 31% (+1)

Conservatives 13% (-1)

Reform UK 8% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 8% (-1)

Greens 3% (-1)

Alba 1% (-1)

Seats projection: Labour 28, SNP 18, Conservatives 6, Liberal Democrats 5

I'm actually reassured by that, because it's a picture of stability that totally contradicts the message of yesterday's Survation MRP poll which suggested there had been a hefty swing to Labour over the course of the campaign.  The SNP remain close enough to Labour to have a good chance of winning a substantial haul of seats, and if they recover just slightly, or if they're being underestimated just slightly, an outright national victory remains possible.  On the other hand, they're also in a perilous position because the voting system would punish them heavily if there's even a small slippage in support, or if the polls are overestimating them.

For all the hype about Labour, note that they are projected to be one seat short of an overall majority in Scotland, so they're not expected to be back to the total dominance they enjoyed pre-2015.  I'm not totally convinced the projection of six seats for the Conservatives, even though it was calculated by John Curtice himself, really passes the smell test given that their national vote share would be their lowest in history.  If that projection is an overestimate (and if it is an overestimate, it could just as easily be a severe overestimate as a small one), it would probably work in the SNP's favour.  So twenty seats may not be totally out of reach for the SNP even if they remain slightly behind Labour on the popular vote.

Leaders' net ratings:

John Swinney (SNP): -7

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -9

Keir Starmer (Labour): -13

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): - 39

Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -44

Rishi Sunak (Conservatives): -60

And the above is the reason why I remain of the view that the SNP are probably in a better position right now than they would have been if Humza Yousaf had still been leader.  Swinney isn't Mr Charisma, he isn't doing anything exceptional, but he's not actively repelling or enraging voters, which may be half the battle at the moment.

In The Sun's write-up of this poll, which is penned by the notorious Conor Matchett of the #Matchettgate fake poll scandal from 2021, there's an extraordinary claim from an anonymous Liberal Democrat source that the Lib Dems are "nailed on" to oust Drew Hendry in the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat.  Well...I'm not on the ground, so I can't say whether it's right or wrong, but intuitively it sounds like a stretch.  The Lib Dems are starting from a fairly distant third place in the notional 2019 results for that seat, and even if they reckon their fake bar charts are paying dividends and giving them momentum, it's hard to believe their canvass returns are comprehensive enough in such a geographically vast constituency to tell them for certain that they're going to win.  I'm not ruling out that the prediction will prove true, but it also wouldn't be the first time in recent general elections that the Lib Dems have been light-years out in a claim about a result in the Highlands.  We'll see.