Yet another stellar YouGov subsample for the SNP, as Labour brace for a return to the wilderness

I'm on the move again today, and I've just attempted to make a 'location' video giving you the latest YouGov results, but I've chickened out of using it, it was a bit ridiculous.  So here instead are the numbers in good old glorious texticolor...

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov):

Reform UK 28% (-)

Labour 21% (-)

Conservatives 18% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 15 (-1)

Greens 10% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 38%, Reform UK 19%, Labour 16%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Conservatives 10%, Greens 3%

That's yet another stellar result for the SNP, and although Labour are several points higher than last week, that's not a genuine recovery, it's just sampling variation caused by the huge margin of error.  The more subsamples that show Labour well below 20%, the more likely that's where they actually are, which is a catastrophic position for them to be in.

There's been a commenter on this blog who keeps reacting to these subsamples by saying things like "another disaster for the Greens, they're on course for wipeout next year", but that's not really the case.  The subsamples are specifically about Westminster voting intentions, and there's no reason to doubt that the Greens are still polling much higher on the Holyrood regional list, which is where their true strength lies.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER: I'm currently seeking an alternative funding model to keep Scot Goes Pop viable for the future.  Plan A is to turn it into a video blog (although there might be exceptions to that over the coming days because I may be on buses and trains quite a bit), and if that doesn't work Plan B is to move across to Substack or something similar.  However, it's probably going to take several months before I even begin to find out whether Plan A is workable as a funding model, and during that lengthy transitional period I desperately need to get the current fundraiser as close as possible to 100% funded just to keep the show on the road. It's currently 70% funded.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  For anyone who would like to donate (and remember small contributions are just as valuable as larger ones), card donations can be made HERE, or if you prefer, direct donations by PayPal are also an option.  My PayPal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk 

I know a small number of people prefer direct bank transfers, so if you'd like to do that, just drop me a line at my contact email address and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter or BlueSky profiles.

If the SNP conference is to be denied the chance to consider the "rebel" motion, then John Swinney's plan must either be defeated or amended to remove the harm from it

I was asked by a commenter on an earlier thread what I think of Robin McAlpine's new piece claiming that the "rebel" motion, proposed as an alternative to John Swinney's heavily-criticised strategy for winning independence, has been rejected behind closed doors and will not even reach the floor of the SNP conference.  If true, this is not a major surprise, because a source had briefed the press weeks ago that it would all play out this way.  I obviously agree with Robin that it's hopelessly inconsistent with the principle of internal party democracy - and incidentally it's also inconsistent with the logic of even bringing the Swinney plan to a conference vote in the first place, because if the leadership's attitude is that "John has chosen his strategy and he must be allowed to lead", then why not drop the pretence of a democratic process and just impose the strategy by diktat?

As I've rehearsed at length previously, I also take the same view as Robin that the Swinney plan is unworkable and seemingly designed to fail, because the outright SNP majority that is being proposed as the threshold for a mandate for an independence referendum is utterly unachievable.  But where I part company with Robin is in his assessment that all of this means that the SNP have become "an irrelevance".  That clearly makes no sense in relation to a party which forms the government of Scotland and looks set to be re-elected for another five years of power next May.  It's also a nonsense in a world where there is no credible alternative to the SNP as the vehicle for winning independence.  Alba squandered any chance of being a viable alternative by turning itself, grotesquely as a form of conscious choice, into a Stalinist freak-show.  And the only minor-party alternative to Alba is the "Liberate Scotland" alliance, which is roughly one-third composed of a far-right party which wants to do a Belarus by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to ban *all* economic migration, and to determine the citizenship of an independent Scotland on ethnic grounds.  Er, no thanks.

So the SNP remain the only game in town, and we just have to work from within to try to improve the situation somehow.  If the rebel motion doesn't make the conference floor, the next best outcome is to radically amend the Swinney motion so that it closely resembles the rebel motion.  If that's not possible, the next best outcome is to defeat the Swinney motion altogether.  And if it's not realistic to do that, the very least that needs to happen is for the motion to be amended to remove the most harmful stuff from it.  As I've said before, no plan at all would almost be better than the Swinney plan, which would leave us in a worse place than ever before by setting a precedent of the SNP going into an election essentially agreeing with the UK government that no referendum should occur until some sort of ludicrously unattainable threshold is reached.  That could make it impossible to achieve independence for literally decades to come.  The voting system simply isn't designed to produce single-party majorities.

In the words of Hippocrates, "first do no harm".  If the best that can be achieved at conference is to ditch the single-party majority target and replace it with a multi-party majority for securing a mandate for a referendum, I would consider that a win of sorts. It would still mean that the 2026 election is a dead end for winning independence (what we really need to do is use the election to seek an outright mandate for independence itself, not for a referendum), but at least we'd be avoiding the self-inflicted wound of setting a disastrous precedent.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER: I'm currently seeking an alternative funding model to keep Scot Goes Pop viable for the future.  Plan A is to turn it into a video blog (although there might be exceptions to that over the coming days because I may be on buses and trains quite a bit), and if that doesn't work Plan B is to move across to Substack or something similar.  However, it's probably going to take several months before I even begin to find out whether Plan A is workable as a funding model, and during that lengthy transitional period I desperately need to get the current fundraiser as close as possible to 100% funded just to keep the show on the road. It's currently 70% funded.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  For anyone who would like to donate (and remember small contributions are just as valuable as larger ones), card donations can be made HERE, or if you prefer, direct donations by PayPal are also an option.  My PayPal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk 

I know a small number of people prefer direct bank transfers, so if you'd like to do that, just drop me a line at my contact email address and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter or BlueSky profiles.

A review of the first three weeks of Scot Goes Pop as a video blog: how is it panning out so far?

As it looks like there aren't going to be any polls this weekend (meaning there have been no full-scale Scottish polls for two whole months - we're really not being well-served), I thought this might be a good moment to draw breath and look back at how the experiment of turning Scot Goes Pop into a video blog has gone over its first three weeks.  To recap briefly on why I've chosen to go down this road, I finally accepted a few weeks ago what in truth has been staring me in the face since 2021 - that traditional blogging just isn't sustainable anymore because the annual fundraisers have been consistently falling short of their target figures.  It's true that I've just about managed to stay afloat over the last four years, but I've been constantly lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis, and as a result I've had to post literally dozens of reminders about the fundraisers every year, which a) can't be expected to save the day indefinitely, and b) just becomes embarrassingly repetitive.  (And I'm afraid that the embarrassment will have to continue for a little while yet - because even in the best-case scenario it'll take several months for any alternative funding model to start bearing fruit, and to keep the show on the road during that transitional period I'll need to get the current fundraiser as close as possible to its target figure.  It's currently 68% funded, and I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has chipped in over the last few weeks.  But the grind goes on until and unless we get to 100%!)

People have been telling me for years that conventional blogging is yesterday's medium and that the action has moved elsewhere, so it seems to me there are two potential alternative funding models that are worth giving a serious try before giving up the ghost completely - 

1) A switch to video blogging.

or

2) A switch to Substack or something similar, ie. in which at least some content is put behind a paywall.

I much prefer the first option, because the videos can be very easily embedded on the blog and everything remains freely available.  So I'm going all in for video blogging for the time being - but to even get to the point of finding out whether it's viable as an alternative funding model, I'll have to hit the minimum threshold of 1000 subscribers on YouTube.

So how is it going so far?  I've posted 21 videos over the last three weeks, and if nothing else the viewing numbers have proved that there is still a substantial appetite out there for information about opinion polls from a pro-independence perspective.  All of the most popular videos have been about polls, with the most popular one of all being 'Triumphant SNP romp to 24-point lead over Labour in epic YouGov crossbreak', which has 2252 views so far - only around 500 short of my most-watched video from the past, which was my 2021 interview of Alex Salmond.  It's also significantly higher than the number of views for recent episodes of Slanszh Media's riveting weekly YouTube show Tas Is Still Talking, even though I'll obviously never be able to match the production values of the Great Zulfikar Sheikh.

I started out audio-only while I tried to work out the best approach to video content, because investing in a proper camera a few years ago had backfired horrendously - the lighting and the focus often seemed to be all wrong, but I'd always be oblivious to that until I'd finished the recording.  I've realised that simply using a webcam is the obvious solution, because you can see how the video looks as you're actually recording.  So far, though, I've just been using our normal webcam that we use for family Zoom calls, and the picture quality is therefore adequate at best.  If anyone can recommend a reasonably affordable webcam with genuinely crisper picture quality, please let me know.

My number of YouTube subscribers has roughly doubled since three weeks ago, from around 220 to 440.  I think that's pretty solid progress, but at that pace it'll be roughly November before I reach 1000 and can even begin to find out whether video blogging is viable as a funding model.  If you'd like to help speed things up, and if you have a Google account (even if you don't use it for YouTube very often), all you'd have to do is sign in, go to my channel and hit the 'subscribe' button. I think maybe the word 'subscribe' puts off people who don't use YouTube much because it sounds like subscribing to a pay TV channel, but it's nothing like that at all - it doesn't cost a penny.  Subscribing is basically just the equivalent of following someone on social media.

On the whole, then, I'm reasonably encouraged and I think it's possible that over time I might be able to build up a YouTube channel with a decent following.  But the jury is still very much out, and until I reach 1000 subscribers I remain in limbo and will need to keep pushing the fundraiser to keep the show on the road during this prolonged transitional period.  So if anyone who hasn't donated yet has £5 or £10 burning a hole in their pocket, it would be very gratefully received.  Card donations can be made HERE, or if you prefer, direct donations by PayPal are also an option.  My PayPal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk 

I know a small number of people prefer direct bank transfers, so if you'd like to do that, just drop me a line at my contact email address and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter or BlueSky profiles.

Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2025: Another update, and a crunch-point

Click here to go straight to the crowdfunder page.

Many thanks to everyone who has donated since the last update.  Progress has been made, although the fundraiser is still only 46% funded with less than half the year still to go.  Obviously I chose the target as the minimum I would realistically need to keep the blog viable for a year, and on the current trajectory it's likely to fall well short - which leaves me back in my now-familiar position of lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis and having to constantly post these updates just to try to stay afloat.

I know we've had the conversation a million times before about alternative funding models, and I have genuinely been thinking about trying something new in recent weeks.  We're forever hearing that conventional blogging is "yesterday's medium", so one thought I've been seriously toying with is moving across either in part or wholesale to video content.  If I could multiply my number of YouTube subscribers by about five and post original content extremely regularly, it might be possible to gradually start making an income that way.  In a sense it would also allow me to keep the blog going because I could very easily embed each video here.  However, one thing I've noticed is that when I do occasionally make videos (the most recent one was earlier this year), they tend to get significantly fewer views than the average number of page views for each blogpost.  That implies regular readers are highly geared towards text content rather than other media, and that to build up a YouTube channel I'd need to largely seek a new audience.  That would take time, and the problem is much more urgent than that - hence the need to make the current fundraiser work somehow, by hook or by crook.  (Well, not crook, obviously.)

The other problem is that for the moment I don't have the technical skills or equipment to make videos to a high standard.  You might remember that just for the fun of it, I switched to video content for some of my coverage of the 2019 general election, and as can be seen from this example, the content itself was fine but the technical quality was, to put it mildly, bargain-basement.  I later invested hundreds of pounds in a camera which was billed as "perfect for YouTube", but after a few videos I gave up on it in despair and went back to doing the videos on my phone, because I just couldn't seem to use it properly.  I always seemed to be slightly out of focus in the videos, or the lighting was wrong, or there were weird shadows across my face.  What can I say, I analyse polls and give my political opinions - I've never claimed to be François Truffaut.  

It's a great pity there doesn't seem to be as much call these days for genuinely audio-only content - popular podcasts usually seem to have a video version as well.  Audio content is far easier to make to a decent standard, and I do have a high-quality microphone, which I bought way back in 2016 for a livestreamed debate with Tommy Sheridan about tactical voting on the list (the more things change, the more they stay the same!).  What I might do is concentrate on audio on a transitional basis and post the files on YouTube with a still picture attached, so I can make a start on gradually building up the channel while I'm getting my head around how I can make videos of adequate quality.

In the meantime, though, I'm going to have to keep plugging away with the current fundraiser, just to keep the show on the road in any shape or form.  So if you find Scot Goes Pop useful and you have £5 or £10 to spare, please remember that small donations are just as useful as larger ones.  If 400 people all donated £10 (and there are far more than 400 people who read this blog every day), the problem would be solved overnight.

Card donations can be made at the crowdfunder page HERE.

As an alternative, direct donations by PayPal can eliminate fees altogether depending on the option you select from the menu.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Donations are also very welcome by direct bank transfer if that is your preference, although for obvious reasons I've always been advised not to post my bank details publicly.  So if you'd like to donate that way, please drop me a line and I'll send you the details directly.  My contact email address can be found on my Twitter or BlueSky profiles.

Many thanks in advance to everyone who helps Scot Goes Pop keep going in some form.

Alba's Christina Hendry has accused Nicola Sturgeon of "cowardice". Three words: pot, kettle, black.

Labour have the support of barely ONE TENTH of Scottish voters in landmark Find Out Now poll

The new GB-wide poll from Find Out Now is a genuine landmark, because it's the first poll from any firm since the general election to show Labour on less than 20% support across Britain.  But that's positively stellar compared to Labour's performance in the Scottish subsample, where they have barely one-tenth of the vote and are languishing in fifth place.  You can learn all the details in tonight's YouTube commentary, in which I've also randomly chucked in an Edinburgh Fringe recommendation for the play Devil's Point.

Watch either via the embedded player below, or at the direct YouTube link.

Anas and the Apocalypse: Labour face TOTAL WIPEOUT in Scotland as SNP run riot in history-making YouGov crossbreak

The Scottish subsample from the latest GB-wide YouGov poll is extraordinary, not just for the scale of the SNP lead, but also because it shows Labour on course to lose all of their Scottish seats at Westminster - not even Ian Murray would be left standing.  Find out all about it in today's YouTube commentary - you can watch via the embedded player below, or at the direct YouTube link.

I still believe what Alex Salmond told me in 2020 about the leaker to the Daily Record - but the independence movement desperately needs to move on

Nicola Sturgeon's new allegations about Alex Salmond are unwelcome, because as Gerry Hassan has pointed out, the Salmond-Sturgeon war is completely toxic and the independence movement desperately needs to just move on from it.  In today's YouTube commentary I recall the lengthy conversation I had with Mr Salmond in 2020 just after his acquittal, and explain why - in spite of everything that has happened since - I'm still inclined to believe what he told me about the leaker to the Daily Record, and how that is very hard to square with Ms Sturgeon's claims to honestly believe it's conceivable that Mr Salmond himself was the leaker.  I also give my reaction to Ms Sturgeon's suggestion that in 20 years' time there will be a new "British Isles confederation" involving an independent Scotland.

You can watch via the embedded player below, or at the direct YouTube link, or you can listen to an audio-only version on Soundcloud.

Eighty years on from the horrors of Nagasaki, Scotland must redouble its determination to join the international ban on nuclear weapons after independence

Today is exactly 80 years since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki - only the second use of a nuclear weapon in warfare, and also the last to date.  It self-evidently must remain the last if human civilisation is to have a realistic chance of surviving.  Today's YouTube commentary is partly prompted by TSE's wretched editorial in Stormfront Lite three days ago, which marked the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing by saying that actually the indiscrimate mass murder of tens of thousands of men, women and children, almost all from the Japanese ethnic group (let's face it - it was genocide) was totes cool because it supposedly saved more lives indirectly than it destroyed.  That's a classic example of history being written by the winning side, because there would have been none of these self-justifying logical gymnastics if the Nazis or Japan had nuked British or American cities - it would have been seen with absolute clarity as the obscene crime against humanity that it was.  If taken seriously, TSE's logic would also give present-day leaders a free pass to use nuclear weapons as a "vital life-saving tool" and to basically destroy the world in the process.

You can watch via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link.

Controversial Wings blogger boasts it will be "easy" for him to DESTROY the SNP - but he's WRONG

Here's why the independence plan of the "SNP rebels" is MORE workable than John Swinney's own plan

I suppose on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of John Swinney, winner of the coveted 100% rating in the 2025 Guide To The World's Worst Plans For Winning The Independence Of A Country, in criticising *someone's else's* independence plan for being "unworkable", but that's what he's just done.  In today's YouTube commentary I explain why the plan of the so-called "SNP rebels" is self-evidently far more workable than Mr Swinney's plan, and at the end I also point out the single worst feature of the Swinney plan - meaning that we'd practically be better off going into the election with no plan whatsoever than with the Swinney plan.

You can watch via the embedded player below, or at the direct YouTube link.

Triumphant SNP romp to 24-point lead over Labour in epic YouGov crossbreak

For today's YouTube commentary, I bring you the results of the weekly GB-wide poll from YouGov, which are unusually good for the SNP on the Scottish subsample.  I also discuss Andy Maciver's view that John Swinney's new independence strategy, insisting that only a single-party outright majority for the SNP will count as a mandate for independence referendum, "accepts the fact" that independence is off the agenda.  I explain why Mr Maciver is wrong about that, because John Swinney is not accepting a fact - he's needlessly creating a reality that forces independence off the agenda for at least five years.  The SNP faces a choice of two futures at its conference, because Mr Swinney's target of an SNP-only majority is totally unachievable, whereas the alternative proposal of seeking an outright mandate for independence on the list ballot, and with votes for all pro-indy parties contributing to that mandate, is perfectly achievable, and if successful would push independence right back onto the agenda again.  Why is John Swinney pushing for obviously the wrong one of those two strategies?

It may be that he wants to get back to his comfort zone, and intends to engineer a situation where he can say "we went all out for a cast-iron mandate that couldn't be ignored, but fell pitifully short - that shows how far away we are from building the trust of the people, and we now have to accept that's going to be a very long-term project".  I think that may be part of it, but it's not the whole explanation.  I think he also believes that the SNP will get a better election result by linking independence to votes for the SNP alone and setting the unattainable target, and he is therefore using independence as a tool to win elections for the SNP, which he regards as an end in itself.  He therefore isn't unduly concerned if the independence cause is harmed along the way. Most SNP members, I would suggest, think it should be the other way around - they understand that independence is the goal, and that the SNP should be used as a tool to win that goal.

You can watch the video on the embedded player below, or at this link. 

Kate Forbes' departure feels like a setback for the SNP and for independence - but can someone seize the moment and transform it into an opportunity?

Today's YouTube commentary is of course about the shock news that Kate Forbes, who would have been one of the two clear frontrunners to succeed John Swinney as First Minister, has taken herself out of contention by announcing she will be stepping down from parliament next year.  That leaves the way almost totally clear for Stephen Flynn, which is a problem for two reasons: a) opinion polls show he is less popular with the public than either Forbes or Swinney, possibly because he comes across as more belligerent, and b) while he seems very ambitious, it's ambition for himself and for his party, not ambition to make Scotland an independent country in the very near future.  Which is a paradox, because you'd think a man hungry for power would want to be Prime Minister of an independent country, not a First Minister hopelessly constrained by the limitations of the devolved settlement.  Could Forbes' departure make space for someone new to enter the mix and present themselves as the alternative to Flynn with a credible roadmap to independence?

This may be a good moment to remind you that in one of my other recent videos, I mentioned that Alex Salmond had apparently reached some kind of understanding with Kate Forbes that if she had won the March 2023 leadership election, Salmond would have returned to the SNP and effectively disbanded the Alba Party.  You can watch that video HERE.

But for today's commentary about Forbes' departure, you can listen via the embedded player below, or at this link.

Should the State of Palestine possess an independent nuclear deterrent?

Tonight's YouTube commentary is a sort of challenge to the minority of Scot Goes Pop readers who I discovered a few months ago actually believe that nuclear deterrence is a valid concept that works.  I ask them to consider the following: if a hypothetical and highly debatable "threat" from Russia is enough to mean that the UK must have an independent nuclear deterrent, surely the State of Palestine, which faces a much more imminent and proven threat from its nuclear-armed neighbour, must either have its own deterrent or be protected by another country's deterrent?  And if you think that this would not reduce the risk of a nuclear attack on Palestine or might even increase the risk, doesn't that mean deep down that you don't believe nuclear deterrence works, and that it therefore can't work for Britain either?

You can watch via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or you can listen to an audio-only version on Soundcloud.

"This doesn't make sense!" x 12: My reaction to the full text of John Swinney's independence strategy motion

For today's YouTube commentary (which as a thrilling experiment is in actual video form!), I look at the full text of John Swinney's proposed motion on independence strategy.  I point out the numerous logical contradictions in it, and the ways in which it seems to be designed to fail.  In my view the motion should be defeated, with a plan for using the 2026 election as a de facto independence referendum, with votes for all pro-indy parties counting towards the mandate, put in its place.

You can watch via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or you can listen to an audio-only version on Soundcloud.

Here's why Keir Starmer will be in BIG trouble if he ever goes to PARAGUAY

Today's YouTube commentary is about the dramatic revelation, breathlessly reported by The Times and other media outlets, that a group of "eminent lawyers" has identified damning evidence that Britain's planned recognition of Palestinian statehood will leave it in immaculate compliance with an international convention it hasn't actually signed anyway.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.

Campbell has now openly stated that the goal of his "tactical voting" advice is the total destruction of the SNP - a goal that is so obviously unachievable that it suggests a complete loss of rationality. The issue is therefore no longer arithmetical - it's psychological.

Stuart "Stew" Campbell has posted yet another article demanding that SNP supporters should vote tactically against their party on the list ballot next year - something that he claimed only a few weeks ago was almost impossible to do and insisted he would never advocate. Even if we leave aside the breathtaking nature of that contradiction, his arithmetical claims in support of tactical voting are yet again bogus, but it's almost redundant to go through the motions of debunking them again, because he finishes his piece by openly admitting his goal is the total destruction of the SNP - which suggests a complete loss of all rationality, given that it's plainly unachievable, even if he could somehow explain why it's desirable or would in any way help the situation. The issue is therefore now a psychological one rather than arithmetical. 

He repeatedly challenges people in his article to explain how it's possible to get SNP list MSPs elected - so isn't it reasonable to ask how precisely he proposes to destroy the SNP, an infinitely more difficult objective? How would he even define "destruction"? Why has he concluded that internal reform of the SNP, as difficult as it undoubtedly is, is somehow *more* impossible than the total destruction of Scotland's leading party, which by his own admission is heading for another major victory in the constituency ballot next year? On what does he base his seemingly absolute faith that the destruction of the SNP, even if that could be achieved, would lead to a ready-made party of Wonder and Wisdom popping up out of nowhere to take its place, complete with levels of popular support that most new parties would need decades to have any remote chance of building up? 

These are the questions I grapple with in today's YouTube commentary. You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.

 

Starmer was dragged kicking and screaming into doing it by Macron and by Labour MPs...but his recognition of the State of Palestine will change EVERYTHING

My latest YouTube commentary is about the concrete differences that will be made by the widespread international recognition of the State of Palestine - it's not just symobolism.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.

This was my second failed attempt to verify my age to continue using BlueSky - not exactly the most dangerous of sites. If the technology isn't up to scratch, then neither is the legislation. pic.twitter.com/a6QWYYwkuy

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) July 29, 2025

SNP jubilation as they remain dominant in latest cosmic crossbreak from YouGov

For today's YouTube commentary, I have all the details from the latest weekly YouGov poll of GB-wide voting intentions - which shows Reform UK with their biggest lead over Labour for two months, and the SNP remaining dominant in the Scottish subsample.  I also give my thoughts on the major problem the independence movement may face if Zack Polanski takes the Green Party of England & Wales into an electoral pact with the new Corbyn/Sultana party, thus leaving the independent Scottish Green Party with the dilemma of whether to run on a joint Holyrood list with a party that is unlikely to be explicitly pro-independence.  

You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.

By the way, I received an email yesterday from someone who says they usually read the blog when at work, and therefore can't listen to the audio commentaries because it would be too noisy.  The good news is that YouTube provide auto-generated transcripts of each video, so if you turn the sound down on your phone before clicking the video link, and then go into the description section, you'll find a "show transcript" option.  Obviously it's AI-generated so there are always a few little errors, but it's usually 95% correct.

I say this with tremendous regret...but John Swinney's new roadmap for independence is a false prospectus, it's a dead end, and it will need to be completely changed if independence is ever to be achieved

Today's YouTube commentary is my reaction to John Swinney's unexpected declaration that an independence referendum can only happen if the SNP win a single-party overall majority in the Scottish Parliament - something which is not only unachievable, but drives a coach and horses through the principle of democratic self-determination that we are all supposed to believe in.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.

Why the new Corbyn / Sultana party should back proportional representation

For today's YouTube commentary, I discuss why the new left-wing party being formed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana should embrace proportional representation - partly because it's the right thing to do in itself, but also because it would help neutralise the charge that they're splitting the vote and helping Reform into power.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud, or on Spotify.

What Mhairi Black's departure from the SNP reveals about the "broad church" paradox

A few people have been asking me for my thoughts on Mhairi Black's decision to leave the SNP, so that's the subject of today's YouTube commentary.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud, or on Spotify.

If you have a few seconds after listening, I'd be grateful if you'd subscribe to my YouTube channel, because I'm trying to build it up.

 

After I recorded the above, I spotted a monumentally stupid reader's letter in the Scotsman, accusing Mhairi Black of "inconsistency" because of her stance on Palestine and in favour of LGBTQ rights.  The guy then proceeded to basically do the whole "but what if you were gay in Gaza?" meme, although he presumably was blissfully unaware that he was doing a meme, and also blissfully unaware of what memes are.  The answer, of course, to the question "but what if you were gay in Gaza?" is "you would be murdered by Israel, just like heterosexual people in Gaza".  That's actually a form of equality, I suppose.  

Mhairi Black should know, the Scotsman reader prattled further, that Hamas opposes decriminalisation of homosexual acts.  OK, and?  Mhairi Black has never, to the best of my knowledge, expressed any support for Hamas, so where's the inconsistency?  Do you mean that she has to drop her opposition to genocide in order to look sufficiently condemnatory of anti-gay laws that by all accounts are rarely enforced anyway?  

Nothing ever changes.  The Scotsman readers' page remains whacko central.

They didn't tell us about THAT one! The "secret" YouGov poll showing a surge in support for independence

Thanks to Paul Kirkwood on Twitter for directing me towards YouGov polling data from June that I wasn't previously aware of.  That's the subject of tonight's audio commentary - you can listen via the embedded player below, or via the direct YouTube link, or on Soundcloud.  You can also find all of the audio files I've been uploading in podcast form on Spotify.

After listening, I'd be grateful if you'd subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven't already done so - that helps build its visibility.  

Bear in mind that I'm keeping the fundraising post pinned to the top of the blog for a while, so when you visit the site in the coming days, please scroll down to find the newest content.

The new Jeremy Corbyn / Zarah Sultana party: what will it be called, how popular will it be, and will it help to deliver Scottish independence?

For tonight's audio commentary, I turn my attention to the 'soft launch' of the new Jeremy Corbyn / Zarah Sultana radical left party.  You can listen via the embedded player below, or at the direct YouTube link, or at Soundcloud.  

After you've finished listening, I'd be very grateful if you hit the 'subscribe' button and the 'like' button on YouTube, because I'm trying to build my channel up.

Also, just a reminder that the fundraising post will be staying pinned to the top of the blog for a prolonged spell, so whenever you visit over the coming days please remember to scroll down for the newest content.

Astonishing poll shows big support in England for Scottish independence - plus Labour is totally at odds with its own voters on Gaza

I said in my fundraising post earlier that I was planning to start posting regular audio content, as a kind of transitional step to allow me to try to gradually build up my YouTube channel, with a view to moving on to posting regular video content if I can ever get to grips with the technical challenges.  So I thought I'd start as I mean to go on, and below you can find some audio commentary on no fewer than three new YouGov polls - one showing that Labour is at odds with its own voters on the Gaza issue, one showing surprisingly high levels of support for Scottish independence among English voters, and one showing how Scottish voters differ from English voters in their attitudes to votes at 16.  

If you can't use the embedded player for whatever reason, the direct link to the YouTube file is HERE, and it can also be found on Soundcloud HERE.  I'd be grateful if you subscribe to my YouTube channel after listening, because that's part of the point of the exercise!

Incidentally, I'm planning to keep the fundraising post pinned to the top of the blog for an extended period (or however long it takes), so remember to scroll down in future to look for the newest posts.

Make that a double: both SNP and Plaid Cymru lead the seismic subsamples in latest YouGov poll

Another week, another very solid result for the SNP in the Scottish subsample from YouGov.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov / Sky News, 20th-21st July 2025):

Reform UK 27% (-1)

Labour 23% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-1)

Greens 11% (-1)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 34%, Reform UK 21%, Labour 17%, Conservatives 11%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Greens 6%

Welsh subsample: Plaid Cymru 27%, Reform UK 26%, Labour 22%, Greens 14%, Conservatives 6%, Liberal Democrats 2%

YouGov's Scottish subsamples are of course unusual in that they are correctly structured and weighted, but I'm not totally sure whether the same is true of their Welsh subsamples.  When they first introduced Scotland-specific weighting a few years ago, they gave the impression that the same wasn't being done in any other geographic subsample, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've introduced Welsh weighting since then in the interests of greater consistency.  Either way, it's great to see both the SNP and Plaid Cymru in the lead with less than a year to go until the devolved elections.

Believe it or not, the Tories' showing in the Scottish subsample is actually unusually good for them - it's not all that often these days that they're in double figures or ahead of the Liberal Democrats.  But they're probably just being flattered by normal sampling variation.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3115, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Stop giving "release 23 Israeli hostages" parity of esteem with "the genocide must end"

The fabled international community, including even Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and David Lammy, seem to have finally reached the point of "twenty-one months of genocide were fine, but we draw the line at twenty-two", and yet they still can't bring themselves to just directly demand that Israel stop what they're doing without the "Hamas must release all hostages" qualification.  This was Lammy trotting out the standard formulation a couple of days ago - 

"We need an immediate ceasefire now, the release of all hostages and a surge in aid."

It would of course be a good thing if the remaining hostages were freed, but insisting on always giving that objective joint top billing is highly problematical in a number of ways - 

* It sounds very much like a condition or a prerequisite for a ceasefire, ie. Israel can say "you were only calling on us to stop mass-killing people if Hamas released the hostages, and they haven't, so we're good to continue".

* The subtext feeds into the narrative of "this all started on 7th October", thus giving some succour to the idea that Israel's genocide was semi-justified in response to the Hamas attacks.  Why not add in a further clause to make it "We need an immediate ceasefire now, the release of all hostages, an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and a surge in aid"?  Lammy would probably say that the end of the occupation is a completely separate issue - in other words he doesn't want to admit that the problem can be directly traced back to 1967 (and ultimately to 1948), rather than to October 2023. 

* It effectively accords far less proportionate worth to each Palestinian slaughtered than it does to each Israeli hostage.  There are thought to be around 23 remaining hostages, compared to at least tens of thousands of Palestinian dead (and it would be a brave person who doubts that the true death toll is way, way over 100,000).  To give parity of esteem to those two issues seems almost obscene.  It used to be said that one Israeli life was deemed to have the same worth as 1000 Palestinian lives, but now it's even worse than that - simply denying liberty to one Israeli citizen seems to be considered a graver crime than massacring 1000 Palestinian women and children.

* By implication, it denies the hostage status of the Palestinian "administrative detainees" held captive by Israel without charge, and it certainly accords less urgency to their freedom than it does to the far smaller number of Israelis still held by Hamas.  "Only Israelis can be hostages, Palestinians can only be prisoners or detainees."

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3115, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Here I am, Stew-ck in the middle with you

He's controversial.  He's increasingly far-right.  And he's in Somerset.  Yes, you've guessed it, it's our old friend "Stew".  

I was duly tickled yesterday when three of his most devoted groupies left comments on this blog (although I suspect at least one of them was the great man himself doing a spot of astroturfing - something he's openly confessed to in the past).  The narrative they were trying to weave was the familiar one  of "how can he be stalking you, he barely even mentions you, James! Two words on Twitter per decade at most!" I mean, come on, chaps, even you must have enough self-awareness to realise you couldn't have chosen a worse moment to trot out that schtick.  Last week Stew posted a single furious tweet about me that was full article length and contained several hundred words - something that's only even possible if you pay Elon Musk a whopping subscription every month.  Mere mortals are stuck with a tight character limit.  Within the last 24 hours, Stew has been so incensed by my reply to his abusive language yesterday morning that he's pumped out several more tweets and has even left multiple comments on this blog under his own name (see the previous thread).  Whatever else might be said about him, it's an objective fact that this guy is not Mr Olympian Disinterest.  He in fact devotes a considerable amount of time and energy to his relentless stalking operation, which is driven by raw anger, bitterness, and arguably hatred.

For the avoidance of doubt, that's not something I welcome, but his apparent continued optimism - even after all this time - that he can somehow gaslight me into responding with respectful silence to his endless torrent of lies and foul-mouthed abuse is, I'm afraid, catastrophically ill-founded.  Like the proverbial forgetful goldfish, that seems to be a lesson he'll just have to learn over and over and over again.  You'd think by now the penny would at least have dropped that the "I don't stalk you, you stalk me" gaslighting had failed forever as soon as he jumped the shark by installing the little shrine to me in the sidebar of Wings Over Scotland (see screenshot below), but I suppose he's willfully stuck in an echo chamber and he can't exactly rely on his devotees to give him honest feedback these days.  

Does he think people who are stalked tend to set up little online shrines to their stalkers, rather than the other way around?  Perhaps he genuinely does think that.  Perhaps it all makes sense in the Stew mind.

A creepy dude.

Anyway, let's get to the substance of his prolonged complaints about me on Twitter earlier today - which as per usual didn't mention me by name, but referenced me only by implication and by screenshot.  This is of course an ongoing and deliberate tactic so he can "prove" to his disciples at a later date that he's not stalking me by inviting them to search his Twitter account - but only for tweets actually containing my name.

Hilariously, that "pretty darn flat red line" does not actually appear in the What Scotland Thinks site.  Stew has superimposed it himself!  You couldn't make this stuff up...oh wait, he already has.

But none of this is actually the point.  He's frantically trying to evade the fact that the lies I identified from him about polling were specific and not generalised.  Those lies were: a) that Yes support was in the high 40s in May 2025, when an average of the two polls that month actually showed Yes on around 51% or 52%, and b) that Yes support was at around 25% in 2007, when in fact no binary-choice independence poll published at any time in the 21st century has shown Yes support anything like that low after the exclusion of Don't Knows.

As I've already said to him directly, if he would simply admit to those lies and to the sheer cynicism with which he so casually and repeatedly misleads his readers, it would then be possible to have a fact-based discussion about independence polling trends over the last two decades.  But that discussion would inevitably have to start with the elephant in the room, namely the massive methodological change that polling companies introduced immediately after the referendum in September 2014.  They recognised that polls during the campaign had systemically overestimated Yes support by around three or four percentage points, so they corrected for that by bringing in weighting by recalled referendum vote.

That means pre-referendum polls and post-referendum polls are simply not comparable.  A post-referendum Yes showing of 50% is roughly equivalent to a pre-referendum poll showing Yes on 53% or 54%.  In other words, the comparison Stew is drawing is a bogus one that disguises the extent of the real increase in Yes support that has occurred.

Furthermore, most of the polling companies have stubbornly persevered with weighting by recalled 2014 vote for longer than is really sensible, and that's increasing the risk of false recall and of artificially skewed results.  It's possible - and I only say possible - that a present-day poll weighted by 2014 vote and showing Yes on 50% is equivalent to a pre-referendum poll showing Yes on well *over* 54%.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3115, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

A response to Stew's latest abusive attack (yes, it's Monday AGAIN)

The controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset blogger "Stew" seems to have been more than a tad triggered by my blogpost of last night, in which I pointed out that the catastrophic failures and errors of judgement of the people behind Alba and Liberate Scotland have ended any chance of a non-SNP route to independence, and that therefore John Swinney has to at least be given a limited window of opportunity to make his own strategy (which I made clear that I do think is flawed) work.  I suspect the reason Stew is so touchy about this is that he knows perfectly well that he personally bears partial responsibility for the failure of Alba in particular, and therefore for ending any realistic hope that next year's Holyrood election will be used as a de facto referendum.  To some extent that's a feature not a bug - Stew doesn't even want the election to be about independence, and instead wants it to be about a breakthrough for the soft-fascist and ultra-unionist Reform UK, and by extension some sort of 'cleansing destruction' of the independence movement as we know it.  "To win independence we must first kill independence" is the preposterous, if thus far unspoken, Stew motto de jour.

It's all very well for anyone to say that Alba are right to propose that independence parties should use the Holyrood election to seek an outright mandate for independence, and that the SNP leadership are wrong to reject that idea.  But in circumstances where the self-appointed elite of Alba (and the true elite centred around Ahmed-Sheikh, Wilson, Donoghue, Cullen, etc, are very much appointed and not elected) have idiotically squandered any chance of taking a leadership role in the independence movement by behaving like a poundshop Mafia for the last four years, it's a bit redundant for them to complain about being on the losing side in the battle of ideas over strategy.  When you've left the pitch clear for the SNP to monopolise the leadership role, it's a statement of the obvious that the SNP leader will have the discretion and space to make his own strategic calls, however dubious the rest of us might be about them.  "It shouldn't be like this, it should be like that" is the plaintive wail of Stew, which a) constitutes a loss of contact with the real world, and b) evades his own partial responsibility for creating this situation in the first place.  

No, Stew, if you don't get your own way on strategy and policy, the answer is not to "destroy everything and start again", because there'll be nothing left to start again with.  Even if Swinney turns out to be wrong in his strategic choices, and he may well do, we have to conserve and protect the strengths we have as a movement if independence is ever to be won, and to a large extent that does mean preserving the SNP in the here and now.  "I have been spurned, so the movement must be purified in flames" is narcissistic twaddle that we should have no time for at all.

Stew is on particularly weak ground in his "Build Indy Support (FAILED)" point, because it was only yesterday that I set out in detail how his graph showing the evolution of indy support under different SNP leaders was totally fraudulent.  You're entitled to your own opinions, Stew, but not to your own facts.  The first step is to admit the graph was a lie, and then by all means a discussion can be had based on the actual facts.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3115, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Alba have blown it, "Liberate Scotland" are a bad joke, so however sceptical anyone may be about John Swinney's independence plan, he has to be given his chance to make it work - that's the only game left in town

For the last few weeks (probably months, actually), I've been receiving Mike Small's Substack email newsletter - which is basically Bella-style articles in email form.  I presume my details must have been imported from the old Bella mailing list, because I didn't specifically sign up for it.  However, I found today's article really helpful, because it quotes extensively from John Swinney's new independence plan, so I'm now much clearer in my mind what it actually is - and yes, there's a big plot hole in the middle of it, but the good news is the SNP are at least talking about independence and talking about putting it at the forefront of their election campaign.

One thing I actually agree with John Swinney about is that the SNP need a big statement win at next year's Holyrood election if independence is to be achieved.  I've found it quite curious that the SNP's critics have been making exactly the same demands of the party after last year's general election result as they did before it, thus taking no account of the fact that as far as many people were concerned, the SNP's defeat last year took independence off the agenda for an indefinite period - or "until further notice" might be a better way of putting it.  It should be a statement of the obvious that there has to be a clear demonstrative moment of "independence is back in business", achieved in a major election, before anything can actually be progressed.  That's not to say that you can't also seek a more specific mandate next year, because more than one objective can be pursued simultaneously, but the reality is that independence is currently tucked away in a box and can only break out of that box with a good election result - which means the SNP remaining the largest party and remaining the party of government, and the SNP and Greens between them retaining a pro-independence majority.  The latter bit is going to be tough, although polls suggest it's certainly not unachievable.

A complicating factor is that even if all of the above happens, the SNP are likely to lose seats simply because they had such a stonking landslide last time around.  That will obviously detract from any statement win, but perhaps the problem can be offset if the combined SNP/Green seat haul exceeds the 2021 result.  Again, that's a very tall order, but it's not totally impossible that Green gains could make up for any SNP losses.  (And no, the clusterbourachs that are the Alba Party and "Liberate Scotland" have no role to play in any of this, because they're not going to win any seats at all.)

So absolutely, John Swinney is correct that if you want independence, you need the SNP to do really well next year.  That will be an unalloyed Good Thing in its own right.  Where I part company from his independence plan is in its insistence that only an agreed referendum can win independence, on the grounds that there needs to be "international legitimacy" and "recognition".  That's a form of sophistry, because Scotland will automatically acquire legitimacy and recognition as soon as it concludes an independence agreement with the UK government.  It doesn't actually matter a damn how you get to that agreement.  Yes, one way of doing it would be to win a pre-agreed referendum, but there are several other possibilities.  You could use a scheduled election as a de facto referendum and then pressurise the UK to accept the legitimacy of the outcome retrospectively - that's exactly how Ireland achieved independence and international recognition.  (And who knows, if Ireland hadn't forced the issue in that way, and had instead waited forever and a day for an "agreed referendum", perhaps it would never have become independent and would have become trapped within a devolved framework.). A third possibility, which I think is the most likely, is that a majority vote in a de facto referendum could be used as leverage to bring the UK government kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, and to coax a compromise from them on holding a confirmatory referendum.

So given that a pre-agreed referendum is self-evidently not a prerequisite for legitimacy or international recognition, it can only be concluded that we're not being told the genuine reason for the SNP leadership insisting independence can only be done that way.  Cynics might suggest that the main attraction is that it's the only option that actually requires permission in advance from London, permission that everyone knows will not be granted, thus neatly getting the leadership off the hook of ever having to do anything about independence, and allowing them to get on with their alleged true love of running a devolved government in peace and quiet.  But it might not be that.  It might just be a form of strategic timidity, and a craving for the goal to just fall into our laps rather than us having to force the issue by doing anything too noisy.  Alas, the world doesn't work that way.  Not usually, anyway.

On the other hand, we do live in a world where the likes of Alba and Liberate Scotland have completely screwed up and thrown away any conceivable chance of bringing about independence from outside the SNP, which means that however sceptical we may be about John Swinney's plan, he has to be given his chance to make it work. That's realistically the only game in town, and at the end of the day nobody actually gives a monkey's whether a plan seems to work in theory, only in whether it works in practice.  

The big plot hole I was referring to is Mr Swinney's insistence that a great election result for the SNP will force the UK government to grant a referendum, when we all know that great election results for the SNP in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021 did not impress London in the slightest.  But if he defies the odds by converting an election win into a 'gold standard' referendum, no-one will be complaining.  He'll be judged on the results he's promised, and it's only if and when he fails to produce those results that SNP members will perhaps tap him on the shoulder and say: "John, you've done us a tremendous service by steadying the ship after the Yousaf era and winning a key election that has re-established the credibility of the independence cause.  But you've now taken us as far as you can, and the time has come for you to hand over the reins to someone with the skills and ideas to actually take us to independence itself."

By the way, I couldn't help but raise a smile when Mike Small interjected to say "I don't really know what that actually means?" about one of John Swinney's remarks.  Now you know, Mike, how the rest of us feel when we read Bella Caledonia articles about postmodern cacophonic spaces nurtured by surrealist hyper-ideological anarchic gender-capitalism, or whatever.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3100, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Exploding the myth that Alex Salmond "doubled independence support when he was First Minister"

One of the most obvious signs of the contempt that Stuart "Stew" Campbell has for his own readers was the way he kept using his fraudulent "independence support is flatlining" graph for years on end, even after it had been debunked umpteen times.  Basically he had cherry-picked a tiny number of polls from the hundreds of independence polls that had been conducted since 2014 to make it look as if support for Yes had remained absolutely static at 47%, thus completely misrepresenting the fact that an average of all polls showed a steady year-on-year increase for Yes until 2020, and that even in 2021 and 2022 support remained higher than in any year up to and including 2019.  

At some point, however, he finally got bored with that graph and replaced it with a new one, which has now had several outings.  I can't even call the new one misleading - it's a downright lie in most respects.  It claims the following -

* That support for independence stood at around 25% at roughly the time Alex Salmond became First Minister in May 2007.  (No exact number is given, but it appears to be halfway between 20% and 30%.)

* That support had doubled to 50% by the time Salmond was replaced by Nicola Sturgeon in November 2014.

* That the Yes vote had dipped slightly to the high 40s when Sturgeon was replaced by Humza Yousaf in May 2023.

* That the Yes vote remained unchanged in the high 40s when Yousaf was replaced by John Swinney in May 2024.

* That the Yes vote remained unchanged in the high 40s in May of this year.

The idea, of course, is supposed to be that Alex Salmond dramatically increased support for independence but that all of his successors have failed to build on that golden legacy.  And it's not hard to see why Wings readers find that narrative so seductive, but there's just one little snag - there's not actually a shred of truth in it.

The claim about May 2025 is the easiest to deal with because it's so recent.  There were exactly two independence polls in that month: one from Survation that had Yes on 49% and one from Norstat showing Yes on 54%.  So what has Stew done to produce his high 40s figure for the month?  He certainly hasn't used an average of the two polls, because that would have got him to around 51% or 52%.  So has he just used one and ignored the other?  If so, what possible justification does he have for doing that?  Before anyone suggests that maybe he's been sticking to Survation polls throughout the graph for the sake of consistency - nope, Survation didn't even exist in 2007.

And it's that 2007 figure which is by far the most problematical.  Unsurprisingly Stew doesn't give any source for it at all, but unlike the figures for the other years it clearly doesn't come from a straight Yes/No poll on independence with Don't Knows excluded, because that would imply the numbers were around Yes 25%, No 75%.  No poll even remotely like that has been published at any point in the 21st century.  By far the most likely explanation is that he is instead using the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey for that year, which had a complex multi-option format and did not exclude Don't Knows.  To say that he's made an apples-and-oranges comparison does not adequately convey the absurdity and fraudulence of what he's done - it's more like an apples-with-tractors comparison.

So what were the directly comparable Yes/No polls on independence showing in 2007?  There weren't very many independence polls being conducted back then, and most that did take place were conducted by TNS / System Three (last heard of under the branding Kantar).  It looks like there were two polls from the firm in 2007 - one showed Yes and No level on 50% apiece, and the other had No ahead by around 57% to 43% if Don't Knows were excluded.  So if we're ultra-generous and use the more favourable poll for No as the baseline, Alex Salmond increased support for independence by around seven percentage points during his tenure as First Minister - light-years short of the 25-point increase implied by Stew.  If we're not generous, and if we use the more favourable poll for Yes as the baseline, Salmond as FM did not increase support for independence at all.

Some people may be genuinely astonished to learn of this, because the mythology of Salmond doubling independence support has been so deeply ingrained into them.  But that's mainly because Salmond himself was such an effective propagandist, and it wasn't in his own interests to draw attention to the existence of several polls showing an outright Yes lead before he even became First Minister.  During the period of Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition rule from 1999 to 2007, it was in fact reasonably common for TNS / System Three to show a majority for independence.

What actually happened was that Yes support remained high until it became clear that the referendum was really going to happen, and then it was as if reality hit home for a lot of people and the Yes vote dropped like a stone, falling to as low as 33% at one point in 2012-13 (although never going close to Stew's fictional 25% mark).  Over the course of the referendum campaign there was an impressive recovery, but that essentially just got us back to where we started.  The best that can be said is that the 50% Yes vote in late 2014 had a lot more depth and substance to it than the 50% Yes vote of 2007, because people had properly thought about the issues by then.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3100, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

The gaslighting from the commentator class has reached its peak with the Diane Abbott incident

In 1996, a youthful Andrew Marr (at the time he was either the editor or political editor of The Independent) interviewed Noam Chomsky, who spoke about the narrow range of opinions that are permitted within the mainstream media.  Marr protested against any notion that he was self-censoring to please establishment paymasters, to which Chomsky famously replied:

"I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."

There could hardly be a more conclusive demonstration of the truth of those words than the behaviour of the mainstream media over recent days, which has failed to reflect the common sense view held by millions of people that what Diane Abbott said was just a statement of the obvious, and that of course people whose skin colour is not white will experience racism very differently from ethnic groups that are not visually distinguishable from the majority of the population.  Instead we've been gaslighted, in a way that looks highly organised but as Chomsky said probably isn't, by a tiny and wildly unrepresentative commentator class that wants us to swallow the contrived, convoluted and downright weird narrative that by refusing to agree that white ethnic groups experience racism just as severely as non-white groups, Abbott must have been saying that Jewish people do not experience racism at all, and that she is therefore anti-semitic and her suspension from the Labour parliamentary group is natural and unavoidable.

My blogpost the other day about the implications of all this for anti-Scottish racism was tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless the point is a genuine one.  Anyone who has ever raised the issue will know that the response is generally that Scots are not a race requiring protection, because we are a 'mongrel people' descended from Britons, Gaels, Picts, pre-Celtic populations, Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, Norman French, Flemings and others.  It's also usually pointed out that we look no different from anyone else in the UK and that it's ludicrous or offensive to suggest that we suffer from a racism problem that is in any way equivalent to the racism subjected to the Afro-Caribbean or South Asian populations.  And yet all of those objections are identical to Diane Abbott's comments, which we are being invited to regard as repugnant and unsayable and as having no place in our politics.  Unless our commentator class intend to be hypocrites, it is therefore totally unacceptable from this point on to sneer at or even question the idea that Scots require protection from racism in exactly the same way as any other ethnic group - including Jewish people, who just like Scots are usually white and have a mixed ancestry.  Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have mixed European and Middle Eastern ancestry, with the European component being predominant.

If anyone is tempted to say that any of this trivialises anti-semitism, well I'm sorry but you're not allowed to say that.  It means you believe in hierarchies of racism, that you are an anti-Scottish bigot, and that you have no place whatsoever in civilised society.

Which of course is ludicrous, but these are the problems that kick in when you properly jump the shark and try to mess with people's sense of reality.  To look at the issue of hierarchies of racism more seriously, let me return to the story I recounted on Twitter about when I was on a bus with a group of lads who were singing violent anti-Catholic songs.  I didn't feel under any sense of threat, for the obvious reason that they had no possible way of telling that I was a Catholic just by looking at me.  I looked exactly like them.  That is not a luxury open to black people on a bus full of racists.

Does that mean anti-Catholic or anti-Irish bigotry isn't or can't be a problem in Scotland?  Well, no it doesn't, and in fact my dad apparently reckoned he was denied a place in Glasgow School of Art because he was a Catholic.  I've no idea what led him to believe that, but he wasn't usually given to paranoia so I presume there must have been some substance to it.  But that kind of discrimination is only possible once you actually see someone's surname and the name of their former school on a piece of paper.  That creates a higher bar that protects white Catholics from the kind of instant racism that Diane Abbott might suffer from on the streets.  For someone like Robert Peston or Rachel Riley, the level of protection is probably higher still, because there might well be nothing in their CVs at all that would indicate a Jewish background.  (Incidentally, that also gives them higher protection against discrimination than Scots in England, who are usually instantly identifiable, not by their appearance but by their accents.)

🤔Peston thinks this is a tough one! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/rD6De9UImR

— The Daily Politik (@DailyPolitik) July 19, 2025

Of all the gaslighting commentators, the most preposterous of the lot has been James O'Brien, who used method acting to make himself look really angry, and said that Diane Abbott must either be a liar or an idiot - there was no "third path".  I presume what he meant was that her new comments indicated that her previous apology for causing offence to Jewish people the first time around must not have been genuine.  Well, here's a third path for you, James - she made that apology under intolerable pressure and in the midst of a hysterical McCarthyite atmosphere.  If you think politicians under that kind of pressure don't sometimes have to tack a little and say things they shouldn't really have to say or that they may not entirely believe, then you don't understand politics and you're not living in the real world.  It also means you're a hypocrite, because you were one of the people who helped cultivate that McCarthyite atmosphere in the first place, and thus practically compelled certain forms of speech from Diane Abbott.

Do you know what a commentator class plugged in to the real world would be saying right now?  They'd be hammering Starmer for totally losing the plot, and they'd regard his reasons for suspending Abbott as obviously risible.  They'd point out that he and his advisers have clearly learnt nothing from the catastrophic error of suspending her for such a long period before, and would question whether someone with such poor political judgement can survive as Prime Minister much longer.

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Now that Starmer is taking a zero tolerance approach to any suggestion that there can be hierarchies of racism, it seems clear that Labour must disband itself for its racist refusal to accept Scotland's right to exist and to defend herself

I remember in my days on Political Betting, aka 'Stormfront Lite', I used to sometimes get into heated discussions with the right-wing Tory hordes about whether it was possible for Scottish people to suffer racism from people elsewhere in the UK.  "Scotland is a region not a race" was the basic message I would often hear, although that was somewhat undermined by the precedent set by a court case at the time in which someone was found guilty of making racist comments that were specifically about Andy Murray's Scottishness.

I presume an inescapable logical extension of Keir Starmer's ludicrous decision to remove the whip from Diane Abbott yet again, and of his reasons for doing so, is that any Labour MP who ever questions whether it's possible for Scots to suffer racism that is of equal severity to the racism suffered by non-white populations will automatically be booted out of the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Indeed logically it must be racist to deny Scotland's right to exist as a sovereign state.  It must be racist to deny Scotland's right to defend herself.  There can be no hierarchy of racism here.  Starmer must take a zero tolerance approach to all Jockophobic denials of Scotland's right to exist and to defend herself, which inescapably means, I'm afraid, that the Labour party must now disband itself after decades of shockingly severe breaches.

I had actually been thinking about Diane Abbott in recent days, because if hypothetically she was to follow Jeremy Corbyn into the new left-wing party, that might boost its electoral chances quite considerably.  And yet I remember her saying a number of times over the years that "the left doesn't leave the Labour party, it's always the right that walks away", which I take to mean that she would never leave herself.  But could Starmer have just stupidly put her in a position where she has absolutely nothing left to lose?  She was thinking about retirement even before the last election, so presumably she intends this to be her final term in parliament anyway.  With no real incentive for her to spend potentially years grovelling to get the whip back, she might just conclude that a more constructive use of her time is to help get a viable alternative to Starmerism off the ground.

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Hammerblow for Starmer as YouGov poll shows he is less popular than Jeremy Corbyn, Reform UK's lead has trebled, and the SNP have yet another handsome lead in the Scottish subsample

Starmer's decision today to withdraw the whip from four Labour MPs is a sign of weakness, not of strength, because if it's a disciplinary matter to organise a partly successful rebellion that clearly attracted the sympathies of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, then the leadership is unambiguously at war with those who sustain them in office.  Without some humble pie being eaten to pave the way for a reconciliation, the chances of Starmer being deposed during this parliament have surely increased.  Which may be no bad thing for the Labour party as a whole, because yesterday's YouGov poll was an unmitigated horror show for them.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 13th-14th July 2025):

Reform UK 28% (+2)

Labour 22% (-2)

Conservatives 17% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 16% (+1)

Greens 12% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 18%, Liberal Democrats 12%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 6%

Recent YouGov polls had shown a narrowing of the gap between Reform and Labour, opening up the possibility of a 're-crossover' that might put Labour back into the lead for the first time since the spring.  But most other polling firms haven't really corroborated that trend, and now YouGov have returned to the pack and dashed Starmer's hopes by suddenly showing a trebling of the Reform lead from two points to six.

The Scottish subsample isn't quite as good for the SNP as last week's, but it's still plenty good enough to be getting on with, and continues their run of favourable results since the Hamilton by-election.  The Tories' dire fifth-place showing in Scotland may seem scarcely believable, but in fact it's been a pretty consistent pattern for months now.  We may at last be seeing The Strange Death of Tory Scotland.

Net ratings for party leaders and potential party leaders:

Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats): -6

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): -31

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -35

Jeremy Corbyn (Independent Alliance): -37

Keir Starmer (Labour): -44

So Starmer now has an inferior net rating to Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn is also ahead in terms of the percentage of respondents who view each individual positively (25% for Corbyn and 23% for Starmer).  Remember that when Starmer replaced Corbyn as Labour leader five years ago, it was supposed to be a no-brainer that Labour had just acquired a much more electable leader.  That theory may now be tested to destruction, with Corbyn looking set to lead or co-lead a party in direct competition with Labour.

Incidentally, one of the suspended Labour MPs is Brian Leishman, who represents Alloa & Grangemouth.  That means the number of Scottish Labour MPs has been for the time being reduced from 37 to 36, leaving the party with 63% of Scottish seats at Westminster.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3100, meaning it is 46% of the way towards the target figure of £6800.  If you'd like to help the blog keep going, donations by card are welcome HERE, or alternatively you can cut out fees altogether (depending on which option you select from the menu) by making a direct donation via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Stew told you about Rachel Reeves

Don't say we didn't tell you about Rachel Reeves, because we told you about Rachel Reeves. pic.twitter.com/7fc1VU3NId

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) July 15, 2025

It's quite true, you know - Stew did tell you about Rachel Reeves.  Alas, the main thing he told you was: "it's 4th July 2024, it's general election day, and you know what you have to do, alert readers - vote for the party of Rachel Reeves and make her Chancellor of the Exchequer for the next five years".

I'm sure Stew will be putting the flesh on the bones of his top-secret masterplan, and explaining exactly how helping to elect this wretched Labour government has brought us closer to independence, very soon.  Like, you know, any day now.

Oh, I know. It's for my own amusement, because I'm very bored atm and lord help me, I enjoy watching him squirm and fume. But from tomorrow there's the Peggie case to cover, so yay.

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) July 15, 2025

Yay!  Get in there!  SANDIE PEGGIE!  NHS FIFE!  

OK, so it turns out the explanation of the top-secret masterplan will have to wait a while, because Stew has nabbed himself actual TICKETS.

It's the HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN and Stew has GOT IN.   Do NOT mention the genocide to this man over the coming days, because he has a lifetime dream to fulfil and he intends to ENJOY it without distraction.

We're all so happy for you, Stew.  I mean, SANDIE PEGGIE and NHS FIFE.  It's like being able to say you were at Woodstock.

Oh, and I'm glad to hear that you've only been relentlessly stalking me to keep yourself amused, because I've heard it suggested in some quarters that stable individuals probably wouldn't write two thousand word articles, with borderline-psychopathic headlines like "Anatomy of a Lunatic", in which they tie themselves up in knots trying to frantically explain how demanding that people must vote tactically on the list is simply their way of expressing their opposition to tactical voting on the list.  Calm individuals in full control of themselves, I've heard it suggested, probably wouldn't shriek "you are IDIOTS if you don't vote tactically on the list, and you are IDIOTS if you somehow think what I've just said means I've reversed my opposition to tactical voting on the list".

So it's a relief to hear that appearances have been so deceptive on this occasion and that it's just been a purely recreational thing for you.  A bit of fun, rather than something you've felt compelled and driven to do because you're, y'know, a bit rattled.  Just goes to prove what I've always said - perceptions of who is "squirming" and "fuming" are very much in the eye of the beholder.

In any case, that's all behind you now, Stew, because from this day forth you are officially LIVIN' THE DREAM.

SANDIE PEGGIE.

NHS FIFE.

It's not just the top tier of entertainment, it's the top tier of human experience.

I know I speak for all Scot Goes Pop readers when I say I am green with envy.