If Alba intervene in constituency races in 2026, they will harm independence and harm themselves on the list

It's being reported in the Press & Journal that Christina Hendry, the niece of the late Alex Salmond, is planning to stand as an Alba candidate in the Banffshire & Buchan Coast constituency in the 2026 Holyrood election.  Mr Salmond was previously planning to do so himself, and although I always thought it was extremely unwise to abandon Alba's status from 2021 as a list-only party, it was at least possible to construct a case that as the former MP and MSP for the area, and as a major national figure, he would have been competitive and might have had an outside chance of winning.  

By contrast, Ms Hendry is little-known and her chances of winning are zero.  So if she takes a non-trivial share of the vote, the only possible effect of that will be to increase the chances of a Tory win in what is an extremely tight SNP-Tory marginal.  The SNP won by a margin of just 2.3% in 2021, and in the equivalent Westminster seat the margin was identical in July's general election, in spite of Douglas Ross' very best efforts to hand the seat to the SNP on a plate.

If I can just gently say to Alba members (I was one myself until a few days ago), I know how angry you are with the SNP, and I totally understand that anger because it's very unlikely that independence will be seriously pursued for as long as John Swinney is SNP leader.  But there is no scenario in which replacing an SNP constituency MSP with a Tory constituency MSP can help the cause of independence.  It can only do harm.

The place to offer a radical pro-independence alternative to the SNP is on the list ballot, where seats can actually be won.  Playing silly buggers on the constituency ballot can only detract from that alternative. Remember that Alba was explicitly launched in 2021 as a list-only party, and by going down this new path, the party is simply underscoring how much the original concept has mutated since then.  Rather than a cooperative party that wants to work with others to bring about independence, Alba now looks like a harm-the-SNP-for-harm's-sake party, which if anything will put Yes supporters off from backing the party on the list.

For full disclosure, Christina Hendry is a member of Alba's Disciplinary Committee, and although I was only allowed into last week's hearing for a fleeting few minutes, I did see her there (I think she was one of about five or six in attendance), and based on views I've heard her express in the past, I do not have the slightest doubt that she will have been one of the people who voted for my expulsion from the party.  But regular readers will know that hasn't affected what I've said above, because I've been consistently saying exactly the same thing since I joined Alba in the spring of 2021 - except in very rare circumstances (such as by-elections where a high-profile candidate is available), the party should avoid first-past-the-post contests and focus entirely on proportional representation elections where there is actually a chance of getting elected.

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An unweighted Yes vote of 60.4% in the Norstat poll became 53.8% in the weighted results

Similar to that sensation of 'feeling your ears burning', I can sometimes sense when Professor John Robertson of Global Ferry News fame is about to write a snarky blogpost about Scot Goes Pop, because it's often presaged by him attempting to leave a comment here.  There was a comment yesterday or the day before with all the usual hallmarks, so I took a look at his blog, and this time there was no post about SGP, but what I did find was a post with the following headline: "Did the Sunday Times hide around 60% support for independence by dramatically reducing the number of 2014 Yes voters in their poll sample from 387 down to only 278?"

That's what John Rentoul would call a QTWTAIN (Question To Which The Answer Is No).  Of course the Sunday Times did no such thing - they have no role in determining the weightings used in any poll, they would never think of making such a request and Norstat would refuse such a request if it was made.  That said, I've looked at the data tables and it's true that the difference between the unweighted and the weighted numbers is pretty extreme.  The Yes vote in the unweighted numbers is 60.4%, whereas in the weighted numbers it's 53.8%.  OK, even normal demographic weightings can often bring down the Yes vote, because there might be too many young people in a sample, or too many SNP voters, or whatever.  But I very much doubt if that sort of thing would have had quite such a dramatic effect - the major explanation in this case is almost certainly direct weighting by each respondent's recollection of how they voted in the 2014 referendum, which of course took place more than a decade ago, thus opening up a risk of significant levels of false recall.  That's one of the reasons Ipsos have cited for not weighting by recalled 2014 vote, incidentally.

In the overall Norstat sample, before the likelihood to vote filter is applied, 43.9% of respondents claim to recall voting Yes in 2014, and only 30.0% claim to recall voting No.  A drastic adjustment has been made to bring those numbers into line with the actual 2014 result.  In fairness, there was initially a very good reason for introducing 2014 weighting, because polling companies had systemically overestimated the Yes vote by a small amount in the 2014 campaign.  But after more than a decade that adjustment is getting harder and harder to justify, and it's impossible to rule out the possibility that it may be artificially skewing poll results towards No and giving us a totally false impression of the state of play.  It must be very unusual to weight poll results by an electoral event that took place more than ten years ago - I'm struggling to think of any other examples of that happening, even internationally.  Somewhere in the deepest recesses of their minds, the heads of polling firms must be gearing up towards a review of this problem, sooner or later.  

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We should now think about calling a national holiday, because that rarest of rare things has just happened - Chris McEleny has actually responded to an email.  Apparently the clerk of the committee will be in touch in due course about the arrangements for my appeal against expulsion from the Alba Party.  I'll be interested to see what "in due course" actually means, because from my recollection of the party constitution (which I can no longer read because I'm barred from the party website), the appeal is supposed to be heard within an extremely tight timetable.

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I have now lodged my appeal against expulsion from the Alba Party

So some personal news - a few minutes ago I emailed Chris McEleny to inform him that I wish to appeal against the Disciplinary Committee's decision last Thursday night to expel me from the Alba Party, and to set out my reasons for appealing - which, as you can imagine, are extremely extensive.  I would have preferred to take a bit longer over the preparation of my appeal submission, but one of the frustrations of this process has been the way that Alba HQ has allowed it to endlessly drag on, and I don't want to give them any excuse for further delay.

As I've noted before, Mr McEleny has completely ignored all of the emails I have sent him throughout the "disciplinary" process (with the possible exception of one).  It must be hoped that he would not pull a stunt like that again, given that under the Alba constitution, my right to lodge an appeal is absolute and unconditional.  Unfortunately, though, I was told by one of the people who were expelled from the party earlier this year that he had tried to lodge an appeal but his email was completely ignored.  As far as I know that appeal never took place. So, as a precaution, I've copied my email to the Deputy General Secretary Corri Wilson, to the party chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and also to Suzanne Blackley, who as far as I know is still convener of the Appeals Committee.  I haven't copied it to the acting party leader Kenny MacAskill yet, but I will do if it becomes necessary.

I would hope that things will be done by the book this time, but I've learned to have extremely low expectations.

Questions for Pat McFadden

The Labour Cabinet minister Pat McFadden was asked on Sky News about Israel's illegal invasion of Syria, and he replied that Israel was "making sure its position in the Golan is secure".  That's a rather startling line of argument, because the Golan Heights is not part of Israel - it's only controlled by Israel because of a previous illegal invasion of Syria during the Six Day War of 1967.  Almost every country in the world continues to recognise the Golan as an integral part of Syria, and the UK is no exception.  So McFadden seems to genuinely believe that the desire to make one illegally occupied part of Syria "secure for Israel" is a perfectly logical and reasonable excuse for illegally invading yet another part of Syria.

McFadden was then asked by Kay Burley whether the UK supported Israel's actions, and he replied "We will always support Israel's right to defend itself and make itself secure".  That's a very clear answer - he had already characterised Israel's invasion as an exercise in "making itself secure", and given that the UK will "always" support any such action, he is therefore inescapably saying that the UK supports Israel's illegal invasion of land that the UK regards as Syrian sovereign territory.

This raises a number of obvious questions - 

1) Given that the Labour leadership characterised 7th October as a Hamas invasion of Israel, and said that Israel had a right to "defend herself" against the invasion, does Syria also have a right to "defend herself" against the Israeli invasion?

2) If not, why not?  Is it because "invasions to feel secure" are in a different category from other types of invasions?  If so, who makes the certification?  Indeed, is it a self-certification process?  Did the invasion become acceptable simply because Israel put out a press release saying they were invading for security?  Isn't that pretty much what Russia did when it invaded Ukraine?

3) Does the Labour blank cheque of "always" supporting invasions to help secure previously conquered territory only apply to Israel, or can other countries benefit from this exciting opportunity?  

4) If it's an Israel-only thing, what can other countries do to become more like Israel and gain similar special privileges?  Perhaps they could install a fugitive from justice, wanted by the world's highest court for war crimes, as their head of government?  Hang on, doesn't that describe Russia again?

5) Come to think of it, if you were trying to work out whether a country's claim to have illegally invaded a neighbouring sovereign state "for security" was a cock-and-bull story or not, wouldn't you normally be inclined to be more sceptical rather than less sceptical if that country happened to be led by a wanted war criminal?

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The US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller is without doubt one of the most preposterous, grotesque figures of the modern age, but even he exceeded himself on the hypocrisy stakes by declaring that it would be good if the International Criminal Court took action against Assad, because the US supports the work of the ICC and it only ever had a dispute with them over "jurisdiction" on the question of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu.  Hmmm.  What Biden actually said about the Netanyahu warrant was that it was "outrageous", and that it implied there was moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, and that America would always stand with its beloved Bibi.  Yeah, that sounds very much like a minor technical quibble over jurisdiction.

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Norstat poll reveals John Swinney is settling into the role and showing sureness-of-touch - and he made a great speech at conference

Before anyone bites my head off, the headline is merely a running in-joke from the comments section.

The Sunday Times paywall was proving more of a barrier than usual to finding out the full Norstat poll results on Saturday night, but I've now caught up with the remaining results, which are basically leadership ratings and questions about the Scottish Budget.  The leadership figures in particular bolster the impression that the 2026 election is now very much the SNP's to lose.

Net ratings for party leaders:

John Swinney (SNP): -7

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -17

Russell Findlay (Conservatives): - 25

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -29

Keir Starmer (Labour): -32

I think the public, both north and south of the border, have now made up their minds about Starmer, and his personal ratings are likely to remain thoroughly dismal for however long he stays on as Prime Minister - barring some kind of freakish event akin to the Falklands War or the pandemic.  So that means he's going to be a millstone around the neck of Labour in Scotland going into the election, and to offset that effect they would really want to have a very popular leader at Scottish level.  Instead Sarwar continues to trail Swinney and by a bigger margin than before.

It's been ages since we last saw a head-to-head Swinney v Sarwar "Who would be the best First Minister?" question from Redfield & Wilton, but if a poll like that was conducted now I would be amazed if it didn't show a big Swinney lead - remember that even Humza Yousaf usually led Sarwar on the head-to-head, despite being behind Sarwar on the net ratings.

So far at least, the Budget has proved to be very shrewd and effective in terms of its political impact, with overwhelming public support for four of the six specific measures that Norstat polled about.  The two more controversial items were ending the two-child cap, which is supported by the public but only by a margin of 38% to 27%, and free bus travel for asylum seekers, which depressingly is opposed by the public by a significant margin of 48% to 25%.  Interestingly, after the UK Budget, polls showed that voters were in favour of Rachel Reeves' individual measures but didn't like the package as a whole, whereas in the Norstat poll more respondents think the Scottish Budget will make themselves better off than think it will make them worse off, and a plurality think it will also make the country as a whole better off.  So that looks like a comprehensive success story for Shona Robison and John Swinney.

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"Is that legal?"

I'm sorry, I know there are far more important things going in the world, today of all days, but I just cannot resist posting this, it's just too good to ignore.  Stuart Campbell is clearly smarting about me pointing out last night that his claim on Tuesday that there is "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament after 2026 has been left looking a bit silly by today's Norstat poll showing the SNP and Greens on course for a majority between them.  His response has been to post two catty tweets. The first was mocking me for mentioning the possibility of standing on the Central Scotland list as a pro-indy independent candidate (which yes, I meant seriously, but it's just one of several possibilities I'm mulling over now that Alba have left me as a free agent through no choice of my own, and it's not the most likely one).  

But the second tweet was a truly bonkers whinge about some obscure thing he's alleging I did to a blog comment (without, of course, providing a shred of evidence) on THE TWELFTH OF AUGUST, and which four months later he's suddenly decided is a scandal on a par with Watergate.  What makes this just sheer bloody exquisite perfection is Rab Dickson's "Is that legal?" reply, which you just know he meant absolutely seriously, and which forced Mr Campbell to patiently explain to him like a toddler that yes, Rab, of course it's legal.

A great pity.  For half a second I thought I was facing the sequel to the "Wings Of Justice" campaign, and that I might end up with a policeman at my door asking me "now then, what's this I 'ear about you nobbling blog comments?"

Maybe Campbell would have had more luck with me than he did with Dugdale.  But alas, we shall never know.

I try not to pay too much attention to poor mad James Kelly, but this is actually beyond the pale - editing his reader comments to change them from criticism of him to criticism of me. I wonder how regularly he does it? I suspect a lot. pic.twitter.com/3urZ2viJSs

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) December 8, 2024

Is that legal?

— Rab (@Rab_Dickson1) December 8, 2024

More analysis of the astonishing Norstat poll showing Yes at 54%

Just a quick note to let you know I have a new article at The National about the new Norstat poll showing that Yes would decisively win any new independence referendum, and that the SNP and Greens are on course to retain the overall pro-independence majority at Holyrood.  You can read the piece HERE.

Incidentally, it's been pointed out numerous times today that 54% is the highest Yes vote in any Norstat/Panelbase poll since four years ago.  It suddenly dawned on me that poll four years ago was actually commissioned by Scot Goes Pop.  It was a Panelbase/Scot Goes Pop poll conducted between the 5th and 11th of November 2020, and it showed Yes on 56% and No on 44%.  Maybe, just maybe, those days are back.