A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - voted one of Scotland's top 10 political websites.
Saturday, November 9, 2024
Alba's internal democracy suffers another severe blow
Friday, November 8, 2024
A belated update on the recent Norstat poll: it showed the pro-independence vote slightly above 50%
First of all, I have an article at The National about the 'Super Thursday' local by-election results in Scotland, and in particular about Reform UK's good showing in them. You can read the piece HERE.
On another subject, I realised earlier this afternoon that I had somehow overlooked the fact that the recent Norstat poll contained independence numbers, and I know KC would never forgive me if I didn't give them a mention. They are pretty remarkable.
Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat, 30th October - 1st November 2024)
Labour get almighty fright as SNP come within a whisker of shock victory in Inverclyde West by-election
Thursday, November 7, 2024
I have now been arbitrarily suspended from the Alba Party for *44 days* purely at the whim of Chris McEleny - and with no end to this Kafkaesque process in sight
Today is a big day for the Alba Party's General Secretary, Chris McEleny, because he's standing as his party's candidate in the Gourock by-election. So this may be as good a day as any to post an update on my own personal situation, which was set in train at Mr McEleny's whim rather a long time ago now. By my calculation, it is now 44 days since he unilaterally suspended my party membership, a decision which he justified with extremely vague objections about the contents of posts on this blog and also unspecified posts on social media (presumably Twitter, because that's the only social media presence I have at the moment).
The suspension is supposedly "pending a disciplinary hearing", but that has still not taken place. It was originally set for 17th October, but it was indefinitely postponed after Alex Salmond's sudden death, and I have heard nothing since. Now, I have no problem with the fact that a postponement was inevitable - everybody needed space to grieve. But what I absolutely *do* have a problem with is the fact that my arbitrary suspension remains in force at Mr McEleny's whim during this increasingly lengthy delay, even though I am still being charged on a monthly basis for a party membership I do not actually have (I'm blocked from even viewing the contents of the party website). I'm not the first Alba member that Mr McEleny has casually left in purgatory in this way, and on those previous occasions there was no satisfactory explanation.
I would also note that the need for time and space to grieve has not precluded Mr McEleny and his supporters from running a full-throated by-election campaign in Gourock. I would suggest that if it's got to the point where a by-election campaign is perfectly feasible, a disciplinary hearing should also be perfectly feasible.
Mr McEleny has totally ignored almost every email I've sent him during this Kafkaesque process. However, I know he monitors this blog, so let me say this to him directly. The situation you have created is totally unacceptable. It was unacceptable right from the start, but it's even more so after *44 days*. Please resolve it in one of the two following ways. Either -
a) Lift my arbitrary suspension
or
b) Immediately set a new date in the near future for the disciplinary hearing
And if you refuse to do either of those things, at the very least stop charging me for my "membership" and refund me for the last two months. Many thanks.
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
The Reverend is in want of a wife...sorry, CLOCK
So make that 27,544. Yes, thrillingly, the "Reverend" nipped away from his MAGA celebration party for a few seconds today to post a response on Twitter to my blogpost of last night.
"I wondered how he'd handle Trump's win, and I wasn't disappointed. I'd quite like to see the half-hour head-shaking, though."
Campbell seems as pleased as punch with that riposte, so it's almost a shame to have to spoil it by pointing out the obvious logical problem, but I fear I must. You see, if he had bothered checking the time-stamp on my blogpost, he'd know that I published it at 11.14pm last night, meaning I wrote it before any exit poll had been released or any results at all had come in. In other words, nobody had a clue at that point who was going to be elected President (apart from Rory Stewart who knew it was going to be Kamala Harris), and my blogpost therefore had nothing whatever to do with how I "handled Trump's win", which didn't happen until several hours later.
It's fascinating, though, that Campbell so clearly imagines himself to be "gloating" about Trump's victory, because that removes any remaining sliver of doubt about one of the points I made last night. Yes, Campbell would have voted for Trump if he was an American citizen, and yes, he was sitting there last night willing Trump to win, which is certainly not something the vast majority of the people of Scotland were doing. What's more, his excuse for supporting Trump is something to do with "women's rights", which is curious, given that Trump's hand-picked vice-president believes that the sole function of women is to have children, and that their lives are worthless if they do not.
Give Campbell his due, though, he's on a bit of a roll in 2024. He wanted pro-independence parties in Scotland to lose at the general election, and he got what he wanted, albeit narrowly. (And that includes the Alba Party, of course - he told his readers to reject Alba and to vote for unionist parties instead.) He wanted Trump to have another four years as US President, and now he's got that too. I'm quite open that I see very little comfort in the results of either the general election or the US presidential election, but there is one small entertaining aspect to it - and that will be watching Campbell over the coming years having to own the consequences of getting the election results he wanted on both sides of the Atlantic.
Adjusting to the Trump restoration
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
A brief reply to Stuart Campbell's latest bizarre attack on me *for voting against Donald Trump*
Who will win today's US presidential election?
The answer is, of course, that I don't have a scooby. If the statistical experts who devote their lives to studying this question say the race is as hard to read as a coin toss (and they do), nobody else has got much of a prayer. And I say that with all due respect to the blessed Rory Stewart, who is claiming certain knowledge that Kamala Harris will win by miles, probably because he thinks it will help his punditry career if he's guessed correctly, and that everyone will swiftly forget he ever made a prediction otherwise. We won't, Rory. The people of "the Middleland" never forget.
I do have a few observations, though. The betting exchanges currently say Donald Trump has a 62% chance of winning the election, but that Kamala Harris has a 76% chance of winning the national popular vote. They also say there is a 60% chance that whoever wins the popular vote will carry the electoral college. That sounds like a contradiction, but isn't - the 24% chance that Trump will win the popular vote is an important component of his percentage chance of winning overall.
The national polls in this campaign have been strikingly similar to 2016 in the sense that Donald Trump has been a bit behind in most of them. And yet in 2016 that translated into Hillary Clinton being the strong favourite on the betting exchanges, whereas this time punters are assuming that a small Harris lead in the popular vote will translate into a Trump win in the electoral college. Could that be a case of learning the wrong lesson from history? Having been burnt before by the incorrect assumption that a Democrat popular vote win would translate into overall victory, they're assuming the same thing is bound to happen again, whereas in fact the relationship between the popular vote and electoral college numbers is much more unpredictable than that?
Well, maybe, although there has been a key change in US politics in recent years, which is that Florida has transitioned from being a toss-up state to being an almost solid Republican state. That means more than 5% of electoral college votes, which were firmly in play for the Democrats in previous tight elections, have now been practically taken out of the game completely. So it might not be unreasonable to assume at this stage that the electoral college is genuinely and reliably skewed in Trump's favour. I had guessed the change in Florida was probably due to anti-communist or anti-Maduro immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela, but apparently it's more to do with anti-lockdown Republicans moving to Florida over the course of the pandemic.
Punters also have state polls with which to judge the interplay between the national popular vote and electoral college outcome, although that brings us to the issue of poll 'herding', ie. poll companies deliberately tweaking their methodology to ensure their results are similar to their competitors, to reduce risk and ensure they all stand or fall together. That leaves open the possibility that if the polls are wrong, they could all be wrong by quite some distance. One theory is that the overturning of Roe v Wade is motivating liberal women to vote in record numbers, and that the polls aren't picking that up. But so far that's no more than an untested theory.
During election night in 2016 (and something very similar happened in our own EU referendum six months earlier) there was an extraordinary window of opportunity of an hour or two to make a killing on the betting exchanges, because it was obvious from the actual results that Trump was the likely winner, but there was a lag on the exchanges with Clinton remaining favourite, probably due to an ingrained belief that a Trump win was unthinkable. Could the same thing happen tonight if Harris wins? I doubt it, actually. Harris may be the underdog, but nobody thinks a win for her is unthinkable, so if the early results for her are favourable, I would expect the markets to adjust very quickly. But you never know - it's always worth just checking.