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

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

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

 

Yes 52% (-)

No 48% (-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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