Here is the *minimum* that Alba members should be demanding from the constitution review process, in my view

The weekly Alba email to members, this time written by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, has announced among other things that a National Assembly of the party will be held in Perth on 1st December to discuss the proposals of the Constitution Review Group.  This is the first news of any type I've heard about the constitution review process since I was suddenly informed by Chris McEleny around ten days ago that I had been removed from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - a decision which I am reliably informed by those with legal expertise that the leadership quite simply had no right under the existing constitution to take.  (The General Secretary can certainly temporarily suspend someone's party membership pending a disciplinary hearing, but there's no provision for someone to be removed or suspended on an 'a la carte' basis from their elected position on a specific committee or group.)  I've no idea whether today's announcement means that a meeting of the group has already been held in my absence.

I would urge all Alba members who believe in the type of thoroughgoing constitutional reform that would make the party fit for purpose to attend the National Assembly and to insist as best they can on real change.  I intend to be there and to make a pro-reform contribution, although obviously that will be contingent on the truth or otherwise of Yvonne Ridley's boast of having inside knowledge that a decision has been taken to expel me from the party on baseless, trumped-up charges about a breach of confidentiality rules.

December could well be the last chance for the rank-and-file membership to seize back control over the reform process.  It's a statement of the obvious that my own unconstitutional removal was part - perhaps a small part, but nevertheless a part - of a set of tactics intended to ensure that any reform package is as superficial and limited in scale as possible.  Unless members put up a real fight at National Assembly and then at conference, the opportunity to make the needed changes will be lost and may never come round again.

Regardless of what the Constitution Review Group proposes (and remember that group now has a majority of leadership-appointed members, with elected members firmly in a minority), I would suggest the minimum that the Alba membership should be insisting upon is the following:

1) All members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), with the exception of Ash Regan as leader of the parliamentary group, should be directly elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  During the Blair/Brown government, I saw a Labour minister on TV making an atrocious defence of an unelected House of Lords.  He argued that in a democracy, it's not necessary for every position to be elected - for example, in some American jurisdictions, judges are elected.  We don't do that here but we're still a democracy, he said.  Well, OK, it may not be necessary in a parliamentary democracy for judges to be elected, but it surely is necessary for parliament to be elected.  The same principle applies to Alba.  The NEC is the governing body of the party, and if the membership doesn't elect it, the party doesn't have a fully-fledged internal democracy.  At present around 95% of the members are in practice deprived of the right to elect ordinary members of the NEC due to the discredited 'pay-per-vote' system.  

I suspect the main reason that the leadership prefer a restricted franchise is that it ensures that a far greater percentage of those able to vote in NEC elections are the equivalent of a 'pay-roll vote', ie. not actually paid employees but people firmly under the leadership's influence. Anecdotally, I've been left in no doubt that people were told who to vote for last year. The system maximises the chances of the leadership getting a pliant NEC that will mostly do as it's told and not challenge anything or ask awkward questions.

But the even bigger danger is that the pay-per-vote system turns Alba into "the best democracy money can buy", ie. it potentially allows wealthy individuals to purchase a place on the NEC by buying voting rights for lots of people and then telling them to vote as a bloc.  Whether this has already happened in past years is something that can only be speculated about.

2) Other key committees, such as the Conference Committee and the Disciplinary Committee, should also be elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  The main pushback I've heard against this is that it would somehow be 'overkill'.  People have said things like "I support the NEC being fully elected, but can't you have too much of a good thing?"  Well, it might not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in many ways the other committees are more powerful than the NEC itself (in practice), and if they're not elected, the democratisation process will be hopelessly incomplete.  The Conference Committee is the gatekeeper of what can and cannot be debated at conference, so if the members don't control the Conference Committee, they have no ability to determine party policy.  At present the leadership appear to maintain control of the Conference Committee by swamping its meetings with people whose right to be there is highly dubious even under the existing constitution.  And if an increasingly authoritarian leadership is taking more and more disciplinary action against rank-and-file members, those members need protection against arbitrary treatment, and the most effective protection of all is for members to choose for themselves the composition of the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees.

3) Committees should select their own conveners, rather than have conveners imposed on them by the leadership.  The Alba constitution is closely modelled on the SNP constitution, so in the places where the Alba constitution is actually less democratic than the SNP, it raises a red flag for me and makes me wonder why.  As I understand it, the SNP's Conduct and Appeals Committees are independent from the NEC in their composition, but that is not the case in Alba, where the NEC (in reality the leadership using the NEC as a rubberstamp) appoints two members to the Disciplinary Committee and designates one of them as convener.  And even though nobody on the NEC is allowed to be a member of the Appeals Committee, the NEC still appoints the convener of the Appeals Committee, which is a ludicrous contradiction.  And in case you're wondering, no, the NEC did not appoint a convener from within the Appeals Committee's own ranks, they appointed a convener from outside who was not elected by anyone. That hopelessly compromises the committee's independence.  All committees should be trusted to choose their own chairs.

4) The "Enabling Act" should be removed. Like the SNP constitution, the Alba constitution permits rules to be drawn up that have the same force as if they were in the constitution itself.  But the SNP constitution adds the caveat that this is only the case insofar as the rules do not conflict with the text of the constitution. That caveat appears to be missing from Alba's constitution.  Why?  In theory, this is a weakness which could be exploited as a sort of 'Enabling Act' allowing the constitution to be overridden.  That's got to be sorted.

5) The General Secretary's veto powers over the disciplinary process should be abolished.  As Alan Harris' guest post set out, under the current system, the General Secretary can simply veto all complaints he doesn't approve of, and the Disciplinary Committee is not even made aware that those complaints ever existed.  But for complaints that the General Secretary allows through or sets in train himself, he is free to go all in, and demand certain outcomes and penalties.  That is not a fair, just or independent system, and unsurprisingly it is not producing fair, just or independent results. The Disciplinary Committee must be an independent, fully elected body that investigates all complaints without interference from the General Secretary or the party chair.

6) Something has to be done about the unelected nature of the party chair and General Secretary positions.  We have the weird paradox that most national office bearer roles are directly elected, but by far the two most powerful office bearers are not elected by anyone.  Presumably the leadership must be worried about those positions falling into the "wrong" hands, but given the huge power these two people wield over party members, I believe it is unsustainable for party members to have no say at all.  My suggestion is a compromise by which the leader would propose their preferred party chair and General Secretary, and the party membership would then either accept or reject those nominations via affirmative ballots.  However in an ideal world I do believe both positions should be directly elected.

Additionally, although it's not something I've personally prioritised, I know the biggest concern for many members is Alba's unsatisfactory approach to policy formation, which could potentially be addressed by the creation of a Policy Development Committee, or an elected Policy Development Convener.

Keith Brown's statement is not a long-overdue sign of realism - it's a sign of abject surrender to Westminster

Well, what a bind we're in as a movement.  Yesterday's Opinium poll was better than anyone could really have dreamed of at this stage and offered huge grounds for optimism that the SNP might well win a fifth consecutive term in government - which, if it happens, is going to be an almighty jolt to a political and journalistic establishment that had convinced itself that the tide has gone out decisively on the SNP and that a Sarwar-led government at Holyrood is a racing certainty.  And make no mistake, an SNP win would be a huge boost for independence, if only in the sense that if it didn't happen, the setback for independence would be enormous.  But there just doesn't seem to be any direct way forward from an SNP win to independence, because the SNP leadership are hoisting the flag of surrender, and they're doing it in plain sight.

A few people welcomed the depute leader Keith Brown's admission that Westminster will never grant another Section 30 order, as if it was a long-overdue sign of some realism creeping in.  But it's actually the total opposite, because he went on to clarify that independence can never be won without a referendum.  By "not playing by Westminster's rules", what Brown really appears to mean is that we have to totally surrender to Westminster's rigged rules, ie. we have to accept that something as prosaic as mere electoral mandates for a referendum or for independence are no longer sufficient and that we'll need ridiculously overwhelming levels of public support that simply aren't attainable in the real world.

In truth, if we really did stop playing by Westminster's rules, it would mean saying "sorry, but we don't need an unattainable supermajority, actually, in a democracy we just need a simple majority, and we're going to seek an outright mandate for independence via a scheduled election, which is something that you have no power to stop us doing".  That is so obviously the best and only way forward that it's surely inevitable that the SNP will have to embrace it sooner or later, but at the moment it looks very much like "later".   It's as if we're all left twiddling our thumbs until it happens.  Goodness only knows how many more years and leadership changes it will take for the penny to finally drop.

In the meantime, we do have a party in Alba that "gets it" and that will be offering voters a chance to vote for independence outright on the Holyrood list.  But the problem is that there seems to be quite a low ceiling on potential support for any radical independence party, and Alba will need to max that support out if they are to win any list seats at all and thus be in a position to do anything to move us forward.  In order to get that maximum support they'll need to be as broad a church as possible, they'll need to be welcoming, tolerant and inclusive.  They'll need to be a 'shining village on a hill' that everyone looks up to longingly and can't wait to visit.  

I don't think it should be controversial to point out that Alba are actually doing the opposite of that.  They're becoming an ever more narrow sect that lives inside a forbidding fortress.  Freedom of speech and dissenting views are being cracked down on, both by direct means and by fostering a climate of fear in which people feel they have to self-censor.  No attempts are being made to build bridges with the significant number of people who have already felt they had no choice but to leave the party, including Eva Comrie, who was probably the most popular figure in Alba other than Alex Salmond himself.  Other people who wanted to stay in Alba have been expelled, and that will presumably continue to happen.  (Indeed if Yvonne Ridley's boast has any truth to it, I could be next in line, although I'm no closer to finding out, because - as I predicted last week - Alba are deliberately "throwing a deefie" and totally ignoring my emails, even though I copied them to the General Secretary, the Deputy General Secretary, the party chair and the party leader.)  

On their current trajectory, Alba are likely to get between 1% and 3% of the list vote and to win no seats at all, which will simply be of no use to anyone.

If there was fundamental change in either the SNP or Alba, we might start to get somewhere, but how is that going to happen?  I've made no secret of the fact that I would welcome Kate Forbes as SNP leader, not least because I think she's the most electable person they've got, but I can't see any evidence at all that she would abandon the do nothing approach on independence.

And are there any signs of life outside the SNP and Alba?  Not that I can see.  The ISP have apparently gone down a very peculiar path by adopting abstentionism for Holyrood as well for Westminster, which rules them out of serious consideration as a vehicle for independence.  I was tickled to discover that Peter A Bell has set up his own political party, although perhaps I shouldn't be too dismissive, because if Alba do expel me, I could be needing a bolthole before too long.  (I know, I know, he'd never let me in!)  I suppose as a last resort some people might consider setting up yet another new party, but by God, that would be a long and hard road and might be wholly counter-productive.  It would be much better to get the existing parties into some kind of shape, but how to even begin achieving that is a massive conundrum.

SNP become clear favourites to win a fifth term in 2026 as stunning new Opinium survey gives them a significant lead over Labour

It's rather fitting that the day that marks the passing of a generation since the independence referendum has brought word of what could turn out to be a landmark polling moment that puts the SNP firmly back on track to win a fifth term in power at the Holyrood election of 2026.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Opinium, 5th-11th September 2024):

SNP 32%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 14%

Reform UK 11%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Greens 7%

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 32%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 12%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30%

Greens 25%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 12%

Liberal Democrats 8%

I know the Green figure on the list looks wildly implausible, and it probably is wrong, but at the moment the only place I can find the Holyrood numbers is on John Curtice's What Scotland Thinks site, and 25% for the Greens is what it says.  I can't see any sign of the numbers in the Opinium datasets or on social media, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do.  It may in reality be a combined figure of 25% for the Greens and the assorted 'others'.  But even if that is the case, there doesn't appear to be any reason to doubt that the SNP are several points ahead of Labour across the board, which is an extraordinary achievement at a stage of the electoral cycle when Labour should be still enjoying their honeymoon with the electorate.  I've said this before, but if this is as good as it gets for Labour, they've got a major problem on their hands.

So when, you might wonder, was there last a poll as good as this one for the SNP?  On paper the answer is as recently as January, when the Ipsos / STV poll gave the SNP a Westminster lead over Labour of 39% to 32%.  However, that's not really comparable, because Ipsos telephone polls have tended to be more favourable for both Yes and the SNP than most polls from online firms.  For the most recent online poll as good as today's, you'd have to go all the way back to September of last year when another Opinium poll had the SNP nine points clear.  And in case you're wondering, it's doubtful that there's an Opinium house effect at play here, because the Opinium poll during the general election campaign had Labour ahead, albeit admittedly not by quite as much as in the election result itself.

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UPDATE: If Wikipedia is to be believed, the What Scotland Thinks version of the numbers is indeed wrong, and the real figures on the list are: SNP 30%, Labour 25%, Reform UK 12%, Conservatives 12%, Greens 8%, Liberal Democrats 8%.  It appears that Reform UK also have a remarkable 12% of the constituency vote.  That means the seats projection works out as SNP 47, Labour 33, Reform UK 16, Conservatives 16, Greens 9, Liberal Democrats 8.  The pro-independence parties would be well short of a majority between them, but it's a struggle to imagine Labour forming a government from such a distant second place.  You'd imagine they'd want to limit any full coalition to just themselves and the Liberal Democrats, with the two right-wing unionist parties providing deniable support from outside.  But the problem is that a Labour - Lib Dem coalition would still have fewer MSPs than the SNP, so it would just look all wrong and I doubt it would happen in the real world.

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Ten years on, some personal recollections of the referendum

It's exactly a generation ago today that the independence referendum took place, and as everyone and their auntie seems to be publishing mini-memoirs of their own experiences during the campaign, I thought I might as well briefly join in the fun.

There were three main aspects to my own involvement.  One was Scot Goes Pop itself, which exploded in popularity as people searched for polling news and analysis.  I always thought it was really interesting that there was no big increase in Scot Goes Pop's traffic levels during the 2011 Holyrood election campaign, even though that was one of the most important and dramatic elections in Scottish history and I was constantly blogging about polls throughout it.  And yet even in autumn 2013, a whole year before the referendum, I was already seeing an exponential increase in reader numbers.  People were really hungry to know whether there was a chance Scotland might become an independent country.

Secondly, there was the syndication on Yahoo of some of my columns for the International Business Times, which as I always point out, probably means I was the most-read pro-independence blogger during the indyref campaign, albeit just through the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time.  I have a friend who is rarely impressed by anything I do, but she actually did look momentarily impressed when she glanced at the Yahoo homepage and saw one of my articles staring back at her!

And thirdly, there were my two appearances on BBC Breakfast during referendum week, one before the referendum, and one after.  For obvious reasons the one beforehand was much more nerve-wracking, because there was the slight danger that if I had said or done something really stupid, it might have had a detrimental effect.  But it went OK in the end.  When I was asked by Naga Munchetty why I thought Scotland should be independent, I made a point of starting by saying "well, Scotland is a country", which was something I thought hadn't been said enough on TV and radio during the campaign.

I did feel very slightly stitched up, though, because the item was supposed to be two bloggers, one Yes and one No, giving their own personal views about independence.  In practice, Dunc "don't call me Dunc" Hothersall was always inevitably going to be my opponent because he was the only unionist blogger in the known universe, and he was there as a de facto Better Together spokesman.  He had obviously been thoroughly briefed on exactly what to say, and indeed he was deep in conversation with Kezia Dugdale when I arrived.  Whereas I genuinely was there independently and hadn't been briefed by the Yes campaign at all. But I did my best. The irony is that I had made up my mind in advance that the one thing I definitely wasn't going to do was criticise the BBC live on air, but Duncan effectively forced me into it, because Better Together had clearly instructed him to make a song and dance about the "mob" protesting outside the BBC Scotland building in Glasgow.  I replied that it was a peaceful protest from people who had a legitimate complaint because "the BBC, not BBC Scotland but the BBC in London, haven't exactly covered themselves in glory over the last week". When I said the words "in London", Duncan started beaming and pointing at Naga Munchetty, as if to say "yeah, he's talking about you, hun".

It wasn't even remotely premeditated, but looking back I'm glad I said what I did, because it at least flagged up for viewers that the concerns were there. And arguably there's not much point complaining retrospectively about the BBC's bias during the campaign if you didn't raise the issue at the time when you had the golden chance.

When I made the return appearance two days after the referendum, Duncan was supposed to be there again, but for some reason he was replaced by the Tories' Mark Brown, who actually struck me as a decent bloke. I chatted to him before the filming started, and he seemed as genuinely keen as any Yes supporter that the promise made in The Vow of a more powerful Scottish Parliament was kept.  And after the interview, he gave me a bearhug and bellowed "WE ARE BETTER TOGETHER JAMES".

Incidentally, when I was first contacted by the BBC producer about the second appearance, probably at about 3pm on Friday 19th September, he asked me if I could help to put him in touch with anyone senior from the Yes campaign, because he had been baffled to discover that the entire Yes Scotland organisation seemed to have already disappeared in a puff of smoke.  The significance of what he said didn't really register with me at the time, but it's arguably something we've been suffering from ever since.

It was a "festival of democracy", not a trauma: ten years on, YouGov poll shows the Scottish public resoundingly believe holding the independence referendum was the right thing to do, and that they want another referendum to be held within the next ten years

Unsurprisingly, this week's tenth anniversary of the indyref has brought about a flurry of polls on independence, which is quite helpful because for the last two months we've had relatively limited information on the impact of the general election on Yes support.  Of the three new polls I'm aware of, two are positive for Yes and suggest that there is a higher level of support for independence now than there was on referendum day a generation ago.  The exception is YouGov, which is quite like old times, really, because during the long indyref campaign YouGov were consistently the least favourable online polling firm for Yes due to the notorious 'Kellner Correction' that was artificially imposed on the headline numbers because Peter Kellner refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes and insisted there had to be some sort of bug that meant No was further ahead than the raw results suggested.

I'm not aware of any similar 'correction' that YouGov are making now that would suppress the Yes vote in their polls, although it can't be completely ruled out that something is going on that we don't know about.  Their new poll has No ahead by 56% to 44%, which would be the first sign of what I feared at the time of the general election, ie. that there would be a temporary drop in Yes support due to a Labour honeymoon effect.  Frankly, though, I don't take that notion too seriously anymore, because the other two polls suggest that Yes support has held up admirably.  More in Common appear to have No ahead by around 52% to 48%, although that's my own rough recalculation from the figures with Don't Knows left in - I can't find the definitive numbers in the data tables.  With Opinium the No lead appears to be a wafer-thin 51% to 49%.

Although the YouGov poll is on the whole disappointing, there are a couple of really encouraging results within it.  You might remember that during the indyref campaign, most people were finding it such an exhilarating experience (it led, after all, to the highest voter turnout since the introduction of universal suffrage!) that unionist politicians and commentators felt compelled to embrace the holding of a referendum as an overwhelmingly positive thing, and the campaign itself as a "festival of democracy" (Tom Holland's words on the eve of polling day) that the rest of the UK needed to learn from.  But within a year or two, the exact same people were shamelessly gaslighting us by trying to implant false memories that the campaign had instead been a national trauma on the scale of a small war and that families and friendships had been torn apart by it.  The YouGov poll suggests the gaslighting has deservedly failed, and that by a resounding margin of 52% to 33%, respondents feel that holding the referendum was the right thing to do.  They also, by a narrower margin of 43% to 40%, want a second referendum to be held within the next ten years, although there's more hostility than in some previous polls to the idea of holding it within the next year or the next five years.

The poll also shows that voters would overwhelmingly back independence (the Yes advantage would be 56% to 32%, or roughly 64% to 36% without Don't Knows) if it meant Scotland would rejoin the EU - which, let's be honest, it probably would.  This suggests that, contrary to John Swinney's dismal claims in the Salmond/Sturgeon documentary, the SNP missed a trick by not bringing the independence question to a head after the EU referendum.  The mistake was not, as Swinney believes, to push too hard but to not push anything like hard enough, and to back off at the first sign of any resistance from 'Tyrannical Theresa'.  Even now, it appears the window of opportunity to use voters' horror at Brexit to win independence has not yet closed, but clearly there is no prospect whatever of taking advantage of that opportunity for as long as Swinney remains SNP leader.

Also of interest is that a greater proportion of people who support independence say they feel strongly about their views (90%) than those who oppose independence (78%).  That leaves open the possibility of a significant future net swing to Yes.

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