So I discovered one thing last night - at least one person is keen enough on Ash Regan becoming Alba leader that they are willing to manipulate internet polls to astroturf momentum for her

Although self-selecting online polls are hopelessly unscientific, there's a case to be made for paying some slight heed to them in situations such as the Alba leadership election, because one thing we know for almost certain is that no polling companies will be conducting polls of Alba members.  I suppose straw polls could be taken at branch meetings to get a sense of who is winning, but the results would still not be reliable, because people who attend branch meetings are not necessarily representative of the wider membership.  (Indeed, that was one of the very points I repeatedly made at the Constitution Review Group before Mr McEleny got me removed from my elected position - ie. that all members should be democratically empowered, not just the minority who are able to turn up for meetings.  It predictably went down like a lead balloon, but I stand by that point absolutely.)

Curiously, the first Twitter poll that I saw of the leadership election was run by, of all people, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia.  It showed Ash Regan with a decent lead over Kenny MacAskill. However, I wondered if that might have been partly due to the four-way format, with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and Angus MacNeil included as candidates, even though they are unlikely to stand.  So I decided to see what would happen if I ran a head-to-head poll between Mr MacAskill and Ms Regan, and initially, as I suspected would happen, Mr MacAskill did better and built up a slight lead.  

But then I checked back half an hour later and suddenly 500 votes had appeared out of nowhere, and almost all of them were for Ms Regan, who had raced away into an almost 9-1 lead.  It was obvious one or more Regan supporters had manipulated the poll.  Someone suggested there may have been an innocent explanation, perhaps due to Regan supporters enthusiastically sharing the poll among their fellow travellers, but having thought about it, that just doesn't make any sense.  500 people is getting on for 10% of the entire Alba membership, and the idea that they're all reachable within 30 minutes is stretching credibility somewhat.  More likely, perhaps, is that somebody was able to use a large number of fake accounts to give the appearance of widespread support for Ms Regan.

So in a sense this is good news for those like me who are horrified by the thought of a Regan leadership installing Chris McEleny as Alba's éminence grise, because if my poll was manipulated by a Regan supporter, there's a fair chance the same thing happened to the Bella Caledonia poll, which would call into question Ms Regan's lead in that one.  My gut feeling remains that Kenny MacAskill is likely to be elected leader if he stands - with that 'if' being the key variable.

There's something slightly odd about this, to put it mildly. I checked half an hour ago and there were around 50 votes, with Kenny MacAskill slightly ahead. There are now over 500 votes with Ash Regan ahead by a 9-1 margin. It's supposed to be one vote per account, but... https://t.co/TEEKd7kqFD

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 6, 2025

From your own blog and analysis…

We are commenting in the shadow of a poll you’re conducting, which agrees with the point I’ve made.

While you question the validity of your own poll and anyone who dares suggest ‘not Kenny’

What else do you want? pic.twitter.com/9zFBoENNaW

— Graeme Spence (@trekkie101) January 7, 2025

Graeme, you can see for yourself the poll has been manipulated - a wildly unrealistic number of votes were cast within just half an hour, almost all of them for Regan. Some have even suggested you were the one who manipulated it, although I would never dream of being so cynical.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 7, 2025

I'd have to say that reading some of the replies to the poll were like stepping into Narnia.  Graeme Spence, Number One Super-Fan of the Regan / McEleny combo, is still pushing the line that Mr MacAskill's 1.5% of the vote in Alloa & Grangemouth is a sign that he is unpopular and out of touch with the electorate.  News-flash, Graeme: Kenny MacAskill took 1.5% of the vote because he was the Alba candidate, not because he was Kenny MacAskill.  His result was bang in line with all Alba candidates in Scotland, including Chris McEleny himself, who took just 1.8% of the vote in Inverclyde. It's likely that part of the reason Eva Comrie outpolled Mr MacAskill in Alloa & Grangemouth is precisely that she ran as an independent and wasn't weighed down by the baggage of the Alba brand.

Someone else claimed Ash Regan should be leader because she's an MSP and "polls show" she will hold her seat.  It's as if Chris McEleny saying something in an email is enough to make it real.  To reiterate, the true position is as follows: all polling companies with the sole exception of Find Out Now currently show Alba on course for zero seats, which would mean Ash Regan would lose her seat.  And even if Find Out Now are right and every other polling firm is wrong, there's still no guarantee she would hold on, because Alba would only be taking a list seat in three out of eight regions.

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your incredibly generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Drama as controversial blogger Stuart Campbell denounces his own regular pollster as a "fringe polling company" - has there been some behind-the-scenes falling-out, or is this just shameless hypocrisy to cover up his own embarrassment about a dodgy prediction? My guess is the latter...

Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell has a long and storied history of making bold political predictions which prove to be completely wrong, and then retrospectively coming up with excruciatingly convoluted explanations for why those don't actually count as incorrect predictions.  Often the explanations are along the lines of "obviously I would have been proved right if Completely Unforeseeable Factor X hadn't occurred" - that was why, for example, we're apparently obliged not to take any account of his announcement in spring 2023 that Humza Yousaf was definitely going to lose the SNP leadership election.  (Yousaf actually narrowly won by 52.1% to 47.9% in the second round.)

With almost exquisite timing, Campbell declared on 3rd December 2024 that - 

"We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

Within less than a week, a Norstat poll had appeared showing the SNP and Greens on course to retain the pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election.  And before the end of the month, there was another poll from Find Out Now showing not merely a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, but just as big a majority as the one that was secured at the 2021 election.  Of course none of this means that there will definitely be a pro-indy majority after May 2026, but what it does mean is that any claim that such a majority is "impossible" is left looking incredibly silly and obviously wrong.

It's been a long wait to find out how Campbell intended to talk himself out of this one, and when the moment came it didn't disappoint.  In fact, this excuse is an absolute belter, perhaps the all-time classic of the genre - 

"A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government."

Yeah, you're way ahead of me here - the problem is that one of the two pollsters Campbell is dismissing as "fringe polling companies" is Norstat, which just happens to be a rebranded continuation of Panelbase, Campbell's own preferred polling company.  Indeed, not just "preferred" - Panelbase / Norstat is to the best of my recollection the only polling company Campbell has ever used.  He's commissioned a very large number of polls from them, certainly well into double figures, going all the way back to before the independence referendum in 2014.

This raises a few obvious questions for Campbell - 

1) If Norstat / Panelbase are a "fringe" company, why did you keep using them?

2) Why did you never commission polls from "non-fringe" companies?

3) If polling results from so-called "fringe" companies are suspect, does this mean that the results of all your own polls down the years are essentially worthless?

4) Does the 'worthless polls' designation extend in particular to the results of your propaganda poll questions about, among other things, gender identity politics and Kezia Dugdale's role at the John Smith Centre?  

To be clear, the vast majority of Scot Goes Pop's polls over the years have also been Panelbase polls (the only exceptions were one Survation poll in 2021 and one Find Out Now poll in 2023) and I've always thought they are an absolutely excellent company.  Campbell has repeatedly expressed the same view, so I've no idea why he has had this sudden and total change of heart - unless of course he's got some intense personal embarrassment he needs to hurriedly cover up.  Yes, come to think of it, that would probably explain it quite neatly.

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your incredibly generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Farage's Bloody Sunday - has Musk just saved the Tories with a single tweet?

I was going to post about the first GB-wide poll of 2025 being yet another to show Reform UK hitting a new high watermark with a specific firm (this time Deltapoll), but that news has been well and truly overtaken by Elon Musk dramatically dumping his former darling Nigel Farage and announcing that Reform UK needs a new leader.

It's easy to snigger at Musk's extreme fickleness and naivety about British politics - after all, whatever his reason for ditching Farage (most likely Farage's refusal to embrace Tommy Robinson), it's likely to have been something he could easily have found out months ago if he'd asked the right questions or entered the right Google search terms.  And in any case there really is nobody other than Farage capable of leading Reform to electoral success.  But this latest change of heart may matter a great deal, because a lot of the momentum behind Reform was based on the assumption that Musk was about to make it the best-funded party in the UK and would be indefinitely churning out propaganda on its behalf on Twitter.  OK, Musk is unlikely to start backing the Tories, but if Reform is replaced in his affections by a much less voter-friendly far-right option such as the BNP or UKIP, in practice that can only work in the Tories' favour.

Incidentally, there's surely a lesson here for the leading figures in the Alba Party who have been paying homage to Musk and practically begging for his attention and even his funding.  If Farage isn't far-right enough for Musk, it's highly unlikely that Neale Hanvey, Ash Regan or even Chris McEleny will ever be deemed up to scratch.  Isn't it slightly degrading to so publicly thirst after affections that will never be granted?

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your incredibly generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

That unusual sound you can hear is jaws dropping to the floor across Scotland as Chris McEleny - that's CHRIS MCELENY - chooses this moment of all moments to pen a newspaper article about the vital importance of *due process*

For confidentiality reasons I won't reveal who this was or what the circumstances were, but during the Alba Party's McEleny Purges last year, one of my fellow members of the Disciplinary Committee had clearly been briefed by the leadership in advance of one of the show-trials (possibly by Mr McEleny himself) on a supposed flaw in the defence put forward by one of the Alba members facing punitive disciplinary action.  When he was building up to asking what he imagined to be his killer question, he unintentionally did a Lieutenant Columbo impersonation: "you see, I'm a little confused here, because..."

That very much sums up my own sentiment today as I ponder Mr McEleny's extraordinary decision (and extraordinarily timed decision) to write a newspaper column in The National about what he apparently learnt about the vital importance of due process during his legal battle with the Ministry of Defence a few years ago.  I'm a little confused here, Chris, because if you're just so darn passionate about due process...

1) Why did you abuse your position as General Secretary last year to push (successfully) for someone's expulsion from the Alba Party because he made an irreverent joke about you on Twitter?

2) Why did you ignore that individual's emails saying that he wished to take up his right under the rules to attend his disciplinary hearing?

3) Why did you instruct your deputy to falsely tell the Disciplinary Committee that the individual had expressed no desire to attend the hearing?

4) Why did you not immediately resign as General Secretary after your lie was brought to light, and why did the party chair instead threaten myself and two other members of the committee with disciplinary action for raising strong objections to your lie and to several other procedural irregularities?  (In true Orwellian fashion, the points of order we raised were reframed by Tasmina as "misogynistic bullying of the committee convener", and I'm genuinely not making that up.)

5) Why did you apparently ignore the expelled member's emails stating that he wished to take up his right to appeal against expulsion - a right which is absolute and unconditional under the Alba constitution?

6) Why did you (successfully) demand that the Disciplinary Committee take punitive action against a courageous whistleblower who brought to light potential evidence that the December 2023 NEC elections were partly rigged, rather than doing what you're supposed to do by ensuring that whistleblowers are fully protected?

7) Why were you not suspended from the Alba Party when you were facing a criminal trial for threatening behaviour, bearing in mind that you have shown no compunction whatsoever in arbitrarily suspending other Alba members for weeks or months on end because of trivial and unproven allegations?  Shouldn't due process preclude such blatant double standards in the treatment of different categories of members?

8) Why did you ask the NEC to remove me from my directly elected position on the Constitution Review Group, when there is no provision in the Alba constititution allowing the NEC to remove someone from a directly elected position on an a la carte basis?

9) Why have you just got me expelled from the Alba Party on secret charges that were sent to my fellow members of the Disciplinary Committee but not to me?  (To this day, all I know is that, at a minimum, the secret charges related to fourteen blogposts on Scot Goes Pop, but I have no idea which fourteen posts were being referred to or what the hell was supposed to be so wrong with them.)

10) Why was it possible for a secret witness to be called at the hearing which decided on my expulsion, without me having any knowledge of a) the fact that a witness was called at all, b) the identity of that witness, and c) what that witness said?  Why was I given no possible opportunity to challenge or dispute what that witness said?  (In case you're wondering, I found out the identity of the witness, but only by complete accident because a committee member happened to mention it in one of his questions to me.  The committee convener, the leadership loyalist Josh Robertson, clearly had absolutely no intention of even informing me that a witness had been called.)

11) Why did your charge sheet against me reference the section of the social media policy relating to "abusive behaviour" on social media, but without giving a single example of me behaving abusively on social media?

12) Why did you ignore my emails asking you to either specify examples (if any existed) of me being abusive on social media, or to delete that section of the charge sheet?

13) How was it even possible that the "abusive behaviour" section of the social media policy was one of the three grounds for expulsion the Disciplinary Committee cited in reaching their decision, when you had failed to find a single example of abusive behaviour on social media?  Is "look, take my word for it, guys, he's said some awful stuff" really sufficient for expulsion in the Alba Party?

I mean, I could go on and on here, but if you could answer those questions for starters, that would be grand.

In line with the clear Jacqueline Bijster precedent, Chris McEleny should now be stripped of his emailing privileges after exploiting them by sending out a lengthy auto-hagiography in an attempt to change the trajectory of the leadership election

I think it may be worth reminding ourselves that in the autumn of 2023, Jacqueline Bijster, the incumbent Membership Support Convener of the Alba Party, sent out an extremely short and relatively innocuous email giving generalised information about the party's upcoming internal elections, and stressing that she would play no part herself in running them.  The Alba leadership, including Chris McEleny, flew into a blind rage, accusing Ms Bijster of "trying it on" in the hope of giving herself an unfair advantage in her bid for re-election - even though the email did not contain any sort of election pitch.  The only way it could possibly have given her an advantage was by reminding Alba members of her existence and her name - but that, apparently, was exactly what the Alba leadership (who were hellbent on replacing her with Daniel Jack) were so furious about.  Mr McEleny wrote to Alba members to say that Ms Bijster had been stripped of her right to send out emails, and to provide supposedly 'remedial' action by listing the names of the three candidates standing against her (of whom I was one) but without listing her own name.  It didn't end there - the three of us were also invited to submit a short election pitch which would be emailed to Alba members, but without Ms Bijster being given the same opportunity.

Chris McEleny's extraordinary self-indulgence today in sending out an email to Alba members which is several times the length of the one Ms Bijster sent, which shamelessly extols his own virtues and stresses how wonderful Alex Salmond thought he was (thank heavens Mr Salmond still has someone to speak on his behalf, if only to say how marvellous Chris McEleny is!) and which repeatedly references the forthcoming leadership election and his own role in running it, must be seen in the light of the Bijster precedent.  We know that Mr McEleny will not be neutral in the forthcoming leadership election and will be Ash Regan's unofficial running mate, so it can be reasonably assumed that today's auto-hagiography is an attempt to exploit his right to email members in order to alter the trajectory of the contest.  It probably betrays a concern that his own deep personal unpopularity will be a drag on Ms Regan's support and is an attempt to neutralise that problem at an early stage.

Ostensibly the purpose of the email is to announce that Mr McEleny will be "resigning as General Secretary" once the election is over, but that's a complete and utter nonsense because it was announced only a week or two ago that the position of General Secretary is being abolished completely anyway.  Indeed, arguably the best evidence that Mr McEleny is "trying it on" is that he doesn't even mention the fact that the post he is "resigning from" is being abolished - no doubt because that would raise question marks in members' minds about whether this "resignation announcement" is rather superfluous and redundant and whether something else is going on.

The implications of the Bijster precedent are, I would suggest, crystal-clear - having misused his privileges as General Secretary in a shameless exercise of self-promotion during an internal election process, Mr McEleny should now be stripped of his rights to email members until the elections are over, and must also be stripped of his role as Returning Officer for those elections.  

The acting leader Kenny MacAskill has the power to take that remedial action, just as Mr Salmond did after the Bijster email.  Will he now do so?

I must just note an unintentionally funny part of the "let me speak on behalf of the late Alex Salmond to explain why he thought I was the greatest guy in the world" section of the email.  Mr McEleny claims he was "telepathically linked" to Mr Salmond "in terms of carrying out his instructions".  It's very difficult to read those words in any other way than that Mr McEleny was carrying out "instructions" that he had not actually been given, and was then getting Mr Salmond to okay his actions retrospectively.

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, this wasn't simply Mr McEleny's "turn" to write the weekly Alba email.  The weekly email is always sent out on Friday afternoons, and this is Thursday morning.  Mr McEleny was very much acting on his own initiative here.

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your incredibly generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Could this year mark the biggest realigment in the UK party system since the 1920s?

First of all, a very happy New Year to all Scot Goes Pop readers, including even KC, who forced me to delete his first "Nessie" post of 2025 before it was 1am.  Although this year is slated to be politically quieter than 2024 with no major elections scheduled in the UK (just the usual batch of English local elections in May), it could still be a landmark political year if Reform UK complete the process they seem to have already started, by decisively overtaking the Conservatives in the opinion polls as the leading right-wing party.  It occurred to me the other day that, if that happens, it would mean that the original UK two-party system consisting of Tory (and later Conservative) versus Whig (and later Liberal) has finally been completely replaced.  Labour supplanted the Liberals as the main party of the left in the 1920s - and it's important to stress there was nothing inevitable about that, because there had earlier been a Lib-Lab electoral pact that could have led to the Liberals co-opting the Labour movement as the new radical wing of a unified centre-left party, but that opportunity was missed.  Could history be repeating itself on the right exactly a century later?

One thing that will be causing the Conservatives some alarm is that a couple of days ago Ipsos published head-to-head polling numbers on who would make the best Prime Minister - a question that is often thought to be more predictive of election results than standard voting intention numbers.  To reflect the new three-way battle for power, the question was asked in three parts...

Starmer v Badenoch:

Keir Starmer 32%

Kemi Badenoch 18%

Starmer v Farage:

Keir Starmer 37%

Nigel Farage 25%

Badenoch v Farage:

Nigel Farage 23%

Kemi Badenoch 16%

Although those numbers do not suggest Farage is on the brink of power, they're absolutely consistent with him being on the brink of overtaking the Tories.  And if that happens, I do wonder if there may be a tipping-point where a large chunk of Tory support crosses over to Reform almost all at once, allowing Reform to build up a sizeable lead over Labour as Starmer moves deeper into mid-term unpopularity.

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Poll commissions, poll analysis, election analysis, podcasts, videos, truly independent political commentary - that's Scot Goes Pop, running since 2008 and currently the fifth most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your incredibly generous support.  If you find the site useful and would like to help it to continue, donations by card payment are welcome HERE, or alternatively donations can be made direct by PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk