Another week, another SUBSAMPLE SENSATION as SNP soar to twenty-point lead in YouGov crossbreak for the ages

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov / Sky News, 22nd-23rd June 2025):

Reform UK 27% (-)

Labour 23% (-)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Liberal Democrats 16% (+1)

Greens 10% (-1)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 39%, Reform UK 19%, Labour 17%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Greens 6%, Conservatives 6%

Oh, who will save the Scottish Tories now?  The number of respondents in these subsamples is tiny, but there does seem to be a weird consistency to the SNP doing markedly better after their setback in the Hamilton by-election than before.  That may seem counterintuitive but it's not impossible that it's a real trend.

The SNP have now been in power for longer than the Thatcher/Major government

Just a quick point that occurred to me the other day, and apologies if someone else has already pointed this out.  The longest-running UK government since the Second World War was the Thatcher/Major Conservative government that held office for exactly two days short of eighteen years.  It came to power on 4th May 1979 and was ousted on 2nd May 1997.  

The SNP government in Scotland has now exceeded that record.  It took office on 17th May 2007, which means it has been in power for eighteen years, one month and six days.  The only minor sense in which the comparison is not an exact one is that the Thatcher/Major government was always a single-party Tory administration, whereas the SNP had the ill-fated period of coalition with the Greens, and technically some or all of the law officers have been independents (ie. non-party).

But those are no more than points of pedantry, because the government has clearly been totally dominated by the SNP throughout.  From a purely party political point of view, ie. leaving aside for a moment the frustrations over the lack of progress on independence, that is quite some achievement.

I saw from a tweet that Stew Campbell had written a blogpost about me called "Anatomy of a L...", with the rest of the L word obscured. I knew without even checking that it would be "Lunatic". The poor chap's vocabulary range has shrunk to almost nothingness.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 23, 2025

And yes, I will be wearily responding to my Somerset stalker's 7562nd blogpost about me, but it'll probably have to wait until at least tomorrow at this stage.

The Stew-pot calling the Stew-kettle Snow White

You may have noticed that this has been a recurring theme from Stew for several weeks now - whenever I point out the obvious fact that voting against independence is not the ideal strategy for winning independence, he accuses me of "hate".  He even wrote a blogpost about me on Wings a few weeks ago called "Blinded By Hate" - although curiously it does not feature in his "compare and contrast" list of blogposts (or in his pie-chart of blogposts - genuinely a thing!) which seeks to establish that he has only ever written three blogposts about me and that I have written dozens about him.  Mysteriously, his landmark 2022 blogpost "For Karen and James", in which he made the downright bonkers claim that I and Karen Adam were literally the only reasons he had returned to "full-time blogging", also does not appear on the list or pie-chart of his supposed "three blogposts" about me.  Nor do the vast majority of the other blogposts about me that have featured on Wings over the years.

What is going on here?  Well, look at the screenshotted tweet above.  You'll notice that it's unambiguously about me but it doesn't directly mention me by name.  He does the same thing in many of his other tweets and blogposts about me.  A cynic might almost wonder if that's a deliberate tactic - allowing him to stalk me relentlessly while still being able to innocently invite people to "do a search of the words 'James Kelly' on the site - look, only three posts appear!  It's him that is Blinded By Hate, not me!"  But then a cynic would only wonder that because cynics are very, very cynical indeed.  

So what is this "hate" of which he speaks?  I can only assume that he thinks I hate both him and the Alba Party (or at least the Alba leadership) - that's what he seemed to be getting at in the past.  But, Stew, here's the thing - Fergus Ewing is not you, and he's not even a member of the Alba Party, so why would my supposed "hate" extend to him?  I find him perfectly likeable, and I've actually been extremely complimentary about him at times - I've said that I agreed with some (definitely not all, but some) of his critique of the SNP's strategic choices over the last few years, and I also made abundantly clear that I thought the SNP had made a terrible mistake by temporarily suspending him.  It's hard to make much sense of what Stew is getting at unless he's hinting that there's some kind of informal arrangement between Alba and Mr Ewing that he knows about and the rest of us don't.

But there's also the small matter of the pot calling the kettle black.  If Stew thinks that me calling for independence supporters to vote for the pro-independence Scottish National Party is a "strange place" for me to end up in, and that I can only have been led there by "hate", what would he say about a nominally pro-independence blogger who told his readers to vote for the anti-independence Labour party in the general election, simply as an act of revenge because he was so eaten up with resentment and bitterness after Nicola Sturgeon refused to back him in his idiotic vanity court case against Kezia Dugdale?  What would he say about the same blogger now moving towards an outright endorsement of the soft-fascist and most certainly anti-independence party Reform UK - something he'll only be able to justify with mind-bending contortions of logic along the lines of "to win independence, we must first kill independence"?  

I think that's a pretty strange place for you to end up in, Stew, and yes, I do think you've been led there by hate - or at the very least by deep-seated bitterness and grievance.  Others may disagree...but only because you've brainwashed them.

This is, in fact, not only untrue but a massive insult to both groups for different reasons. pic.twitter.com/oQ1cz10dQo

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 20, 2025

Here's yet another Stew tweet that is unambiguously about me but evades the search function by not mentioning me by name.  It's also just about the laziest retort I've ever seen from him - it amounts to no more than "Rubbish, because reasons!"  Who are the two "groups"?  What is the nature of the "massive insult"?  What are the "different reasons" for it being an insult in each case?  Nobody knows, and his lips are sealed.  Probably you're supposed to conclude that he'd tell you if only you were on his own plane of intellect, and capable of understanding.

One logical possibility is that the two groups he's referring to are "Palestinians" and "humanity", and that he regards a comparison between the two as an insult to humanity, because he sees the entire Palestinian ethnic group as 'terrorist trash'.  That's a point he made once before when he wrote a blogpost last year calling for the Green MSP Ross Greer to be prosecuted for hate crimes simply because he had used the words "Victory to Palestine!  Victory to humanity!"   According to Stew, "Palestine" and "Hamas" are indistinguishable concepts, and you are therefore illegally supporting a proscribed terrorist group if you simply wish the Palestinians success in their resistance to genocide.

Conflating the Palestinian ethnic group with Hamas most certainly constitutes a profound insult, but I somehow doubt Stew has had that particular epiphany quite yet.  So what he thinks the insult to Palestinians was remains a total mystery.

"You must now vote for the SNP on the list": controversial Somerset-based blogger reveals stunning change to his tactical voting advice in the Highlands

When Somerset's controversial "Stew" blogger started talking up Fergus Ewing's chances of holding his constituency seat as an independent, it struck me that he (ie. Stew) was setting himself up for a bit of a problem.  It's become extremely important to him to hold the line, patently absurd though it is, that the SNP are definitely not going to win any list seats at all at next year's Holyrood election.  I think he's banking on the simplicity of that (totally fraudulent) message to convince people to abandon the SNP on the list when they simply haven't done so in past elections - including in 2016, of course, which was before Stew's Damascene conversion on the subject and when he was still on the same page as me in pointing out that "tactical voting on the list" is a mug's game and essentially impossible to pull off successfully.

But by arguing that Ewing has a real chance of beating the SNP in Inverness & Nairn, Stew is by definition reducing his "projected number of guaranteed SNP constituency seats" in the Highlands & Islands and thus making it even more likely that the SNP will win at least one compensatory list seat in the region - which is one of the two regions where they already have a list seat, of course.  So if Stew concedes that inescapable point in an effort to maintain at least a semblance of logical coherence, it basically pulverises the simplicity of his "definitely no list seats at all for the SNP" messaging and means he'll have to revert to a more complex and probably less persuasive sales-pitch that factors in the real possibility that in some places SNP list votes will translate into SNP list seats.

I was curious to see how he would handle the dilemma, but I wasn't quite expecting this - 

Wow.  So in the blink of an eye he's gone from "every single SNP list vote in Scotland will definitely be wasted" to "SNP list votes in the Highlands & Islands will not be wasted and that's a good thing because it means you can vote for Fergus Ewing safely".  But the most important part of this new tactical voting advice is the bit he doesn't want to spell out, for very obvious reasons.  The logic only holds true if the SNP don't fall short of the percentage vote on the list that Stew is expecting - in other words he's tacitly saying you can only vote for Fergus Ewing safely on the constituency ballot if you also vote for the SNP on the list.  And by implication that has to be what he's advising you to do.

Stew telling people to vote tactically in favour of the SNP on the list - now that was a plot twist I didn't see coming.  

By the way, if I lived in Inverness & Nairn I would be voting for the official SNP candidate Emma Roddick and not for Fergus Ewing - and that would be the case even if I hadn't rejoined the SNP a few months ago.  It's no secret that I'm closer to Mr Ewing's views on identity politics issues than I am to Ms Roddick's, but Mr Ewing's call for the SNP to abandon independence for the next ten years makes it next to impossible, I would suggest, for independence supporters to vote for him.  He's now become a short-term and medium-term unionist.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2760, meaning it is 41% 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

Majesty. Grandeur. The Taj Mahal of polling crossbreaks. SNP hit 41% in simply sumptuous Ipsos subsample.

Marcia on the previous thread pointed out that the SNP are on an unusually high 4% in the latest GB-wide Ipsos poll.  So I had a look at the data tables to see if I could find the Scottish subsample figures, and they didn't disappoint...

GB-wide voting intentions (Ipsos, 30th May-4th June 2025):

Reform UK 34%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 15%

Liberal Democrats 11%

Greens 9%

SNP 4%

Plaid Cymru 1%

Scottish subsample: SNP 41%, Reform UK 30%, Labour 15%, Liberal Democrats 7%, Greens 3%, Conservatives 3%

Having talked the subsample up, I'm now going to have to talk it back down again, because Ipsos are not like YouGov, so the Scottish figures are probably not correctly weighted.  However, 4% for the SNP in the GB-wide numbers, which are properly weighted, is not at all shabby - and this is the latest in a string of decent GB-wide polls for the party since their setback in the Hamilton by-election, although curiously the fieldwork for this poll took place before that vote.

Why the long delay?  It may have something to do with Ipsos rolling out a new methodology - they seem to be changing their emphasis from telephone polling to an adjusted version of online panel polling (one of the adjustments being that panel members are recruited offline).  I don't know whether that will affect their long-running series of Scottish telephone polls commissioned by STV.  But certainly the headline numbers do look a bit different from polls conducted by other firms - as far as I can see, Reform's 34% is an all-time high across all pollsters, beating even the 33% previously recorded by Find Out Now a couple of times in May.  The gap between Labour in second place and the Tories in third is also bigger than other firms have been showing.

Incidentally, Ipsos have given Alba propagandists no hiding place in this poll, because it looks like Alba were offered as an option, but recorded a big fat zero in the Scottish subsample.

Net ratings for party leaders:

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): -15

Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats): -15

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -49

Keir Starmer (Labour): -54

Percentage of respondents who rate each party leader *positively*:

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): 34%

Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats): 23%

Keir Starmer (Labour): 19%

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): 11%

I think it's fair to conclude from the above numbers that Labour are unlikely to turn things around unless they either change leader or drastically improve Starmer's reputation with the public.  The latter is far harder to do than the former.  It's always said that Labour are not as ruthless as the Tories and don't dump their leaders in a crisis - but if they don't, they may already be toast, and Nigel Farage may be the next Prime Minister.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2760, meaning it is 41% 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

Bilingual people no longer need to feel left out: yes, Stew hates you too

As far as I can remember, I don't think we had definite proof until now that the controversial "Stew" blogger's hostility to Gaelic also extends to Scots, but it's not a huge surprise to learn that it does.  Of course it takes a different form in the case of Scots, because whereas he hates Gaelic and regards it as alien and useless and wants it to be totally eradicated, he's merely trying to reclassify Scots as just English in a funny accent.  That has the same ultimate effect, though, because if Scots is seen as merely a non-standard variant of English, it becomes acceptable for authority figures to "correct" people's Scots speech and push everyone towards standard English.  By contrast, accepting that Scots and English are closely-related but distinct languages means giving parity of esteem to Scots and English words and phrases and treating them as equally valid and legitimate.

It may totally blow Stew's mind that it's possible to understand the words of another language without being bilingual, but it's certainly not news to Portuguese people, who can watch Spanish TV and understand the bulk of what is being said without needing subtitles, simply because Spanish and Portuguese are very closely related languages.  That doesn't make Portuguese people bilingual, except for the minority who have taken the trouble to learn to speak Spanish themselves.  The same principle applies to Scottish Gaelic speakers, who can generally understand what is being said on the Irish language channel TV4 without much difficulty.  But for the most part they are not Irish speakers and are not bilingual in Gaelic and Irish.

So by the same token, most monolingual English speakers in Scotland can understand the fragments of Scots spoken in Still Game because the words are closely related to their English equivalents, and also because everyone in Scotland (except maybe in the Highlands) has been passively exposed to Scots throughout their lives.  But what about people who can actually speak Scots themselves, and not just understand it - are they bilingual?  Well, yes they are.  In most cases they don't recognise that fact about themselves, because speaking both Scots and English is just second nature to them and thus seems utterly unremarkable.  

Think about how Scots is used in the real world (and also in Still Game, for that matter).  There's probably nobody who truly speaks "pure Scots" (as I discussed in my podcast with Len Pennie four years ago), but by the same token, there's probably well over a million people in Scotland who never speak pure English either.  Scots speakers tend to constantly 'code-switch', often within the same sentence.  You might hear a sentence like "get aff that floor".  The word 'that' is common to both Scots and English, but 'off' and 'floor' are different in Scots.  In this case the speaker has used the Scots word for 'off' but not for 'floor'.  Does that mean he or she speaks a transitional dialect which incorporates 'aff' but not 'flair'?  Nope.  He or she knows both versions of both words, but has just semi-consciously chosen in the moment, probably for no particular reason, to use the Scots version of 'aff' but the English version of 'floor'.  They know which one is "Scottish" and which one is not, and if you asked them to translate from the Scottish version of each word to the English version, or vice versa, they would be able to do so.  But how can anyone "translate" unless Scots and English are different things?  How can they pull off the feat unless they're bilingual?

Answers on a postcard, folks (to be sent to Bath).

Incidentally, just as a general observation: why does someone like Stew, who still nominally claims to be an independence supporter (despite regularly urging his readers to vote against independence) want Scotland to be as similar as possible to England?  Why does he seemingly want to eradicate all points of difference, of which Gaelic and Scots are prime examples?

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2760, meaning it is 41% 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 Alba Party's shambolic infighting intensifies as the convener of Inverclyde branch sends an email to all local party members blasting the MacAskill leadership for "barely registering" - and then QUITS

An Alba member from Inverclyde has forwarded to me an extraordinary email that was sent out to all local party members two days ago by Jim McEleny - who I presume is Chris "Mad Dog" McEleny's father, unless there's also a brother with the same name.

""Stand up for what is right even if you stand alone. Stand up for truth, regardless of who steps on it."

Suzy Kassem

I believe that it is essential to stand up for our beliefs even when everyone around us disagrees with what is being said. Because silence implies agreement and speaking out could provide courage for others facing similar struggles.

Staying silent about the things that bother or scare us won't make them go away. In fact, it could make them worse by giving the people who are causing those problems a feeling of impunity.

I believe that the recent treatment of our former general secretary by the Alba Party has been shameful. In last year’s Gourock by-election we achieved Alba Party’s highest ever result at almost 10%. At that point we were on a trajectory to win seats at the Scottish Parliament election.

Since then, after the decision to unfairly expel the former General Secretary - one of the late Alex Salmond’s chief strategists and confidantes - the party has struggled in by-elections and we have went from polling numbers that would see success next year to barely registering at all.

To that end, I can no longer continue as the Convener of the Inverclyde Alba LACU that as a result of how the Party has treated someone who led the independence movement for a decade on Inverclyde Council and has stood in every single election on our behalf since Alba Party was formed by Alex Salmond.

I wish you all the very best for the future and thank you for your support of Alba Inverclyde LACU during my time as Convener and our Alba Party group leader on Inverclyde Council.

The dream shall never die.

Jim McEleny

Former Convener

Inverclyde Alba LACU"

It won't surprise you to hear that I don't have sympathy with either side in this dispute.  Chris McEleny is the classic example of living by the sword and dying by the sword - he regularly abused his powers as General Secretary to trample all over people, and was not shy about resorting to outright falsehoods in doing so.  The only excuse anyone has ever been able to offer for his behaviour is "he vos only following orders", ie. that the beneficiaries of his abuses of power were people like Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and never himself.  But even if that was true (and I don't believe it was) it means he knew he was doing the wrong thing and carried on doing it for years anyway.  Those of us who were on the receiving end are not going to be impressed by breathtaking hypocrisy about "standing up for what is right even if you stand alone".  That is scarcely one of McEleny's values - indeed, the polar opposite appears to be one of his values.  "Stand up for what is wrong because that's what you're paid for.  Stand up for lies because you think you'll get away with it" would just about sum it up.

As far as McEleny's performance in the Gourock by-election is concerned, the fact that it's still considered some sort of stellar result speaks volumes about just how catastrophic Alba's electoral record has been otherwise.  He achieved that "success" because Alba sat out multiple other by-elections in order to pour all their resources into Gourock - and yet despite supposedly being a big local name, he still took less than one-tenth of the vote.  And perhaps even more revealing is that he brought essentially no personal vote whatsoever to the table in the 2022 local elections, when Alba's resources were spread more evenly.

Presumably McEleny senior is acting on instructions from (or according to the wishes of) "Mad Dog" himself, and so this will be part of the five-dimensional chess the former General Secretary imagines himself to be playing as he bids to resurrect his political career.  Is he trying to trigger some sort of popular uprising against the leadership, so he can then use his leverage as Alba's Nominating Officer to regain control of the party?  Or is this is a sign that he's finally given up on a comeback within Alba, and is instead preparing the ground for a defection of his faction to a different party or grouping?  One way or another, we'll find out pretty soon.

Ironically, one of the key factors that led to McEleny's expulsion was his abuse of emailing privileges - he sent out a long email to all Alba members at the end of last year which sought to undermine the announcement that the acting party leader had only just made that the position of General Secretary was to be abolished.  Now that McEleny's father has also used his emailing privileges to attack the leadership, it wouldn't be surprising if those privileges are much more tightly controlled in future - perhaps by ensuring that all emails have to be vetted by Tyrannical Tasmina and her team.  

That would be in keeping with the response to whistleblowing last year about wrongdoing in the party's upper echelons - instead of accepting a need for greater openness and transparency, Tasmina introduced a new rule requiring all elected committee members (including NEC members) to sign a legally binding gagging agreement.  If some people have flatly refused to sign, on the basis that their loyalty is to the members who elected them and that they are not employees required to take orders, that might explain some of the ongoing strife we've seen in recent weeks.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2760, meaning it is 41% 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

SNP win the first preference vote in the Cromarty Firth by-election, but miss out after transfers

There were two by-elections in the Highlands yesterday, both of which were counted today.  And while there is nowhere in Scotland more fascinating in geographical terms than the Isle of Skye, I think politically the Cromarty Firth by-election was probably the more interesting of the two, so I'll start with that.  When I sat down to write this post, nobody had yet transcribed the result or calculated the percentages, so I've gone old school and calculated them myself manually from the video of the announcement.  Hopefully I haven't made any mistakes...

Cromarty Firth by-election result on first preferences (19th June 2025):

SNP 23.8% (-5.3)
Independent - Cross 20.1% (n/a)
Independent - Rattray 15.4% (n/a)
Reform UK 14.6% (n/a)
Liberal Democrats 12.2% (-15.7)
Greens 3.9% (+1.0)
Alba 3.8% (n/a)
Labour 3.2% (-1.0)
Conservatives 2.0% (-4.7)

The percentage changes above are measured from the 2022 local elections, rather than from the previous by-election in the same ward last year.  The SNP vote has held up pretty well, bearing in mind that in 2022 Nicola Sturgeon was still in her pomp and her party was still polling in the mid-to-high 40s in opinion polls.  Normally a 3.7 point lead on first preferences would be enough to be transfer-proof and to seal the victory, but probably a lot of unionist voters got through all the independent candidates before they 'boaked', allowing Mr Cross to sneak home from second place.  

Alba, as we know, clutch to absolutely any straws they can find in any and every situation (now that McEleny has been expelled it'll probably be HQ's resident wonderbairn Robert Reid doing the clutching, albeit from behind the curtain of anonymity), so they'll undoubtedly crow about finishing ahead of both Labour and the Tories.  But in context I don't think this is a great result for Alba.  They had a high-profile candidate in Steve Chisholm, who is well known for his championing of freeports, which obviously has a special relevance in the Cromarty Firth area.  Yet even with that USP he still didn't break the 5% barrier.  That said, of course, a lot of actual Alba members absolutely loathe and despise Chisholm's stance on freeports and believe it is contrary to the democratic wishes of the party rank-and-file, so maybe his candidacy was a double-edged sword.

The slump in Lib Dem support is surprising given that they did well in Skye, but perhaps it can be put down in part to the loss of any personal vote for Molly Nolan, who was on the ballot for them in 2022.

Obviously the Highlands aren't a Labour-SNP battleground area, so the swing between those two parties is less meaningful than it would be in the central belt or parts of the north-east.  But for what little it's worth, there was a nominal swing from SNP to Labour of just over 2%, which if extrapolated to the whole country is consistent with a Scotland-wide SNP lead of around eight percentage points over Labour.

More to follow...

The cause of Palestine is the cause of humanity - and it is therefore inseparable from the Scottish independence movement

I've been meaning for weeks to comment in more detail on former Alba man Neil Sinclair's claim that vocal opponents of the Gaza genocide are 'piggy-backing' their cause onto the independence movement, and that Yessers must 'protect' the movement at all costs by silencing all views about Gaza or at least putting them into a sort of sealed antechamber where they cannot contaminate the drive for independence.  There's a paradox here, of course, because Neil also demanded that Gordon Millar's "Sacred Comment" defending and 'contextualing' the genocidal views of the Israeli civilian population must be published in full on this pro-independence blog, and he denounced my earlier deletion of it as "censorship".

So why wasn't he logically consistent by applauding my refusal to allow Millar to contaminate this pro-independence space with a pro-Israel agenda and frankly repugnant apologism for genocide?  There was something really rather comical about the way that Neil initially broached the subject on his private chat group for former and disillusioned Alba members.  He grandly announced out of the blue that we were going to have to discuss the issue of "censorship" and that on this occasion it just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine.  As several people instantly pointed out in a state of some bewilderment, whenever anyone else had wanted to make comments that just so happened to touch on the issue of Israel/Palestine, Neil had always been extremely quick to invite them to either shut up about it or to take it elsewhere.  But perhaps it's different when it's a mate of Neil who wants the freedom to express views on Israel/Palestine and to do it in the pro-independence space of his choice?  Perhaps it's different when Neil himself has strong private sympathy with the specific views on Israel/Palestine that are being piggybacked onto the independence cause?  Or perhaps it's because he saw Millar's 'contextualising' of genocide (essentially saying that Palestinians are undesirable troublemakers who 'nobody wants') as just 'regrettable statements of fact' that need to be introduced into the pro-independence space to 'help people to understand' why it is so terribly important to silence or banish all other expressions of views about the subject?

Openly expressed anti-genocide views might, for example, offend the many independence supporters who are supposedly pro-Israel and pro...well, pro-genocide, not to put too fine a point on it, or who at least, like Stuart "Stew" Campbell, think there are overwhelmingly strong arguments against taking any sort of principled stance about the mass extermination of an ethnic group.  Above all else, it might prevent us from immersing ourselves totally into the 24/7 crusade against women with beards, and we can't be having that, can we? It was interesting that after I called Neil out publicly on his hypocrisy, his main cheerleader kept saying to me "Neil and I don't like the genocide and we've criticised Israel's actions on occasion, but..."  The operative word is always 'but', isn't it?

I can see absolutely no evidence to support Neil's fantastical claims of entryism of anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian activists into the independence movement or into specific pro-independence parties.  There would scarcely need to be any entryism, because the anti-genocide cause is the cause of literally millions of people in this country, and those people can therefore entirely naturally be found in huge numbers in all walks of life and in all organisations.  And there's an especially strong affinity between independence supporters and the Palestinian cause, for the obvious reason that it touches on issues of self-determination and domination by a more powerful neighbour.  If Palestinian flags were ever to be banned from pro-independence marches, as Neil Sinclair and his ilk demand, many Yessers who have been devoted to the goal of independence for years or decades would feel hurt and confused.  They'd think the movement had lost its heart, its soul, its humanity, that it had been turned into a sterile, soulless environment by dictatorial headmaster types with no moral compass or even common sense.  They might start walking away from the movement in their droves, and for what?  To protect the sensibilities of the supposed hordes of 'silent' pro-indy folk who are disgusted by Palestinian flags, either because they think the genocide is cool, or because they think the arguments for and against the genocide are far too complex to grapple with?  Well, where exactly are these people?  Where are they hiding?  Frankly I think there are about twelve of them, and they're all helpfully closeted off in Neil Sinclair's chat group or the Wings Over Scotland comments section.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Israeli sympathisers on the Sinclair chat group informed me on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest that the twelve points awarded to Israel by the "UK public" was indicative that there was a silent pro-Israel majority out there, or a silent majority that doesn't care at all for the Palestinians.  I pointed out that there was massive evidence that the vote had been manipulated on an industrial scale by the State of Israel and by sympathetic actors, and that it hadn't been at all hard to do given that each phone number or payment card could vote up to twenty times for the same song.  With the overall vote split between 25 different countries, it didn't take all that many sets of twenty votes to push Israel into the 'douze points' position.  There were even some people boasting on social media that they had managed to vote EIGHTY times for Israel because they had payment cards registered in four different jurisdictions.  

But these points were met with sneering incredulity: "Don't you think, James (snigger) that it's just a tad more likely that these were just ordinary British people voting for their favourite song, as they do every year?"  No, I replied, it was far more likely that the State of Israel has engaged in massive manipulation of the vote, partly because of the evidence I had already identified, and also partly because the Israeli song was pretty bland and clearly wouldn't have topped a public vote on its own merits.  And with impeccable timing, a Find Out Now poll conducted among a demographically representative sample of UK viewers of the contest was published only a day or two later, setting out exactly what would have happened if British people had just voted for their favourite song and if there had been no Israeli manipulation of the vote - 

Find Out Now poll, 18th May 2025:

Of the following countries, whose performance did you particularly like?  Please select any that apply.  (UK excluded from below numbers, because British viewers couldn't vote for the UK in the contest itself.)

1) Sweden: 28%

2) Estonia: 19%

3) Austria: 18%

4) Malta: 15%

5) Iceland: 14%

6) Spain: 12%

=) Latvia: 12%

=) Finland: 12%

9) Italy: 11%

=) Israel: 11%

11) Luxembourg: 10%

=) Switzerland: 10%

=) Germany: 10%

14) Denmark: 9%

=) Netherlands: 9% 

16) France: 7%

=) Armenia: 7%

18) Norway: 6%

=) Greece: 6%

20) San Marino: 5%

=) Lithuania: 5%

22) Ukraine: 4%

23) Portugal: 3%

=) Poland: 3%

25) Albania: 2%

So, as I suspected, there would have been no humiliation for Israel if the vote hadn't been manipulated, but it would have been no better than the upper end of mid-table respectability for them.

The irony is that the whole reason that Israel went to such lengths to manipulate the vote was to mess with people's heads and to try to get them to say things like "uh-oh, maybe we'd better disassociate our political cause from the Palestinians, it looks like we've misread the public mood".  It is nothing short of astounding how easy it was for Israel to deceive some members of Neil's chat group into precisely the desired response - but, then, that was because the fictional version of the British and Scottish public that Israel was presenting them with was one that they desperately wanted to believe in.

I'm told that The National is getting good traffic from focusing so hard on Palestine, although "good traffic" for The National is of course a relative term. pic.twitter.com/wQJ2DSvjLm

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 10, 2025

"Relative" is an interesting choice of word, because here is a direct comparison from Stew's very favourite traffic comparison site SimilarWeb:

Estimated total visits in the 28 days up to 16th June 2025:

The National: 2,079,000

Wings Over Scotland: 242,808 

Looked at that way, The National's anti-genocide stance appears to be almost ten times more popular than Stew's "both sidesing" moral bankruptcy.  I know some will argue that it's unfair to directly compare traffic for a newspaper website to traffic for a mere blog, but who are we to argue with Stew's long-standing delusions of grandeur?  Perhaps of more significance is the comparison between The National and their own direct competitors such as The Herald and The Scotsman.  The Herald are not all that far ahead on around 2,700,000 visits, while The Scotsman are on around 4,300,000.  In both cases, the differential is less than I would have expected given the perception of The National as a relatively 'small' publication. 

It may well be that The National is gaining significant traction simply by being the only mainstream media outlet in the UK to actually provide a genuine news service on the Gaza issue.  Many people well beyond the borders of Scotland have pointed out that literally nobody else is doing what The National is doing.  That has vastly improved the paper's reputation - and by extension it has enhanced the reputation of the independence movement itself.

Once international organisations and academics are able to access Gaza, the full scale of one of the gravest crimes against humanity since 1945 will become apparent and will be documented in detail.  There will then be a reckoning about the complicity of western governments and western media.  The National, the only pro-independence newspaper in Scotland, will shine like a beacon for having been on the right side of history from day one.  Why anyone in the independence movement could possibly think that is a bad thing is beyond me.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £2480, meaning it is 36% 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

One subsample to rule them all, and in the brightness grind them

As you probably saw in the comments section of the previous post, yesterday was a red-letter day for the SNP in the latest GB-wide YouGov poll.  They hit 4% of the GB vote, which hardly ever happens, and were above 40% in the Scottish subsample.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 15th-16th June 2025):

Reform UK 27% (-2)

Labour 24% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-)

Greens 10% (-)

SNP 4% (+1)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 41%, Labour 23%, Reform UK 13%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 5%

Although YouGov are unusual in structuring and weighting their Scottish subsamples correctly, the margin of error in any subsample results is still enormous due to the small sample size.  So the SNP are unlikely to really be in the 40s, but this is the second post-Hamilton YouGov subsample in a row to have them with a big lead over Labour, which makes it more likely that they've effectively got away with their defeat in the by-election.  The only real danger of that setback was that it might produce a snowball effect threatening the SNP's national lead, and if that hasn't happened, we may end up looking back on the by-election as a noisy irrelevance.

The Britain-wide figures are consistent with the recent pattern of the gap between Reform and Labour narrowing.  I'd put that down to a combination of Reform's breakthrough in the local elections gradually fading from memory, and Labour winning back a small percentage of lost voters with the U-turn on winter fuel allowance.  Morgan McSweeney may even think this means his masterplan for winning the next general election for Labour is gradually coming together, but I am very sceptical that Labour will be able to win the election if they merely recover to the high 20s or low 30s.  There's always the potential for the right-wing vote to coalesce behind (probably) Reform to defeat Starmer.

*. *. *

It's trite to point out that Somerset's controversial "Stew" blogger often directly contradicts himself, but nevertheless it's startling to see him being brazen enough to do it in back-to-back blogposts.  In his last-but-one post, he blasted John Swinney and Kate Forbes for taking part in the "Scotland 2050" conference because this supposedly implied Scotland would still be part of the UK in 2050.  But when it became clear that Swinney would in fact be using his speech at the conference to say that he envisaged Scotland being independent well before 2050, Stew wrote another post expressing his outrage about that, because it's supposedly 'carrots'.

Whatever anyone may think of John Swinney and his excessive caution, it's fair to say that, as far as his participation in the conference was concerned, he simply couldn't win with Oor Stew.  Anticipating that Scotland will be independent is bad, anticipating that Scotland will not be independent is bad.  Maybe Swinney was supposed to channel his inner Peter A Bell and declare UDI on the podium.  

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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 third most-read political blog in Scotland.  It's only been possible due to your 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

Scot Goes Fundraiser 2025: An Update

Well, I've given Scot Goes Pop readers a good long break from the constant irritating reminders of the fundraiser at the bottom of each blogpost, but I'm now going to have to get back to that grindstone.  The year is almost half over, the fundraiser is still only around one-third of the way towards its target figure, and I'm getting dangerously close to the 'running on empty' scenario once again.  

As I always say, writing Scot Goes Pop is not a full-time job, but it is the equivalent of a very time-consuming part-time job.  To be able to put in that kind of commitment of time requires either a) private means, or b) successful crowdfunders.  And alas, I don't have private means, so the only way the blog can continue is if I hit the annual fundraising target, or at least get pretty close to it.  

It's no secret that this blog has some rather severe detractors who would very much like it to disappear in a puff of smoke - and to that end they pursue the narrative that "nobody reads it" and "nobody funds it".  The irony is that those people are obsessed with traffic comparison sites and know as well as anyone that Scot Goes Pop is the third most read political blog in Scotland - ahead of, for example, Bella Caledonia, Robin McAlpine and John Robertson.  But it's true that SGP's fundraising has lagged behind other sites in recent times - I've raised enough to keep going, but only barely, and it's been a constant struggle from around 2021 onwards.  And it's also true that ultimately "the market" will decide whether SGP is valued enough to remain part of the alternative media eco-system.

I'm sure you know by now what you'll be getting if the fundraiser succeeds - detailed polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective, truly independent political commentary, hopefully the occasional podcast here and there, and if we really start cooking with gas maybe even another poll commission at some point.

If you'd like to donate, the crowdfunder page can be found HERE.

Direct donations can also be made via PayPal.  In some ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on the option you select from the menu.  My PayPal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

I know a small number of people prefer direct bank transfer, so if you'd like to do that, message me at my contact email address and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found in the sidebar of the blog (desktop version of the site only) or on my Twitter and BlueSky profiles.

Last but not least, there must be at least three or four people who have already donated multiple times to this fundraiser, because the same names have cropped up every few weeks.  If you're one of those people, please ignore this post, because I don't want to bankrupt anyone while trying to stay afloat myself!

FAQs on how the SNP might be able to win independence by using their leverage in a hung parliament

About a week ago, I published a blogpost setting out how there may be a 15-25% chance of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster after the next election and being able to use that to win an independence referendum.  As the 15-25% estimate implies, I do not think that's a particularly likely method by which independence can be won, but in circumstances where the SNP leadership have needlessly self-imposed almost impossible thresholds that have to be achieved before any other action towards winning independence can be taken, it may well be that a hung parliament is actually the most plausible remaining hope for progress in the relatively near future.

Even having clearly set out that major caveat, however, it was perhaps inevitable that some people were still going to be triggered by a post suggesting that independence could come about as a result of the SNP negotiating with Westminster parties, rather than by some madcap process involving Barrhead Boy stripping English people who live in Scotland of voting rights, "Liberate Scotland" sweeping to a landslide election victory, and then a grand march to the UN to beg them to decolonise us.  Consequently I received some rather colourful 'feedback', and I thought I'd respond to some of it here...

If using the balance of power at Westminster to win independence is such a wizard idea, why didn't the SNP do that in the 2015-17 parliament when they had 56 MPs?  Hmmm?  Hmmm????

Simple answer: because they didn't hold the balance of power in 2015-17.  There wasn't even a hung parliament during that period.  There was instead a Conservative government with a clear overall majority.  Doh!  Next...

Isn't the Section 30 route to an independence referendum dead?

This is an odd question because I didn't actually mention the Section 30 route at any point.  Because the UK parliament is sovereign, there are two ways in which an independence referendum could happen if the SNP hold the balance of power.  One is the Section 30 route, yes, in which Westminster would delegate powers to the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum.  But the other way is simply Westminster itself directly legislating for a referendum.  The beauty of the latter option is that it means in theory a referendum could happen even if pro-independence parties fall slightly short of a majority in next year's Holyrood election.

But as far as the Section 30 route is concerned, that's only dead just now because the SNP have no leverage to bring it about.  A hung parliament is one of the few situations in which they might regain the necessary leverage.

If independence happened as a result of a Labour-SNP deal to form a government, the SNP seats at Westminster would disappear on independence day and the government would no longer have a majority after that point, so what incentive would there be for Labour to agree to a deal involving an independence referendum?

There are two answers to that.  First of all, Labour might well still think a referendum is winnable for the "No" side.  Secondly, the independence process - not just the referendum but the negotiations that would follow any Yes vote - might well take three years or more, so the SNP seats would remain in place for the bulk of a five-year Westminster parliament.

If the SNP were part of the government at Westminster, wouldn't that mean they'd be negotiating an independence referendum, and a subsequent independence deal, with themselves?

I struggle to see why that would be any sort of problem - it would actually smooth the process considerably.  But no, any governing arrangement between the SNP and Labour would be unlikely to involve the SNP taking up ministerial office in Westminster - it's much more likely to be a confidence-and-supply agreement with the SNP remaining on the opposition benches.  When it seemed possible in the run-up to the 2015 election that the SNP would hold the balance of power, I personally argued that there was no good reason for them not to get involved in a full-blown coalition if it meant holding the position of Secretary of State for Scotland.  But they seemed allergic to the idea at the time and I doubt if anything has changed since then.

But any referendum won by negotiating with Westminster parties would be another non-binding referendum - that's no use!

This objection makes absolutely zero sense.  The only way a referendum can be binding is if Westminster approves that principle in advance, so if that's the kind of referendum you want, you can only get it via negotiations with Westminster. Any informal vote we organise ourselves, regardless of whether it's a referendum or a scheduled election doubling as a de facto referendum, would by definition be non-binding.  Its purpose would simply be to produce a Yes majority that would pile moral pressure on Westminster to come back to the negotiating table.

Didn't the Tories and DUP in combination have a Commons majority of only one seat in 2017?  (This excitingly left-field question comes from a controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset-based blogger, universally known as "Stew".)

No.  They had a nominal majority of six, but to all intents and purposes it was actually thirteen due to Sinn Féin declining to take up their seats.  No idea why you thought it was only one, Stew - you must have been using your wonky abacus again.

Wouldn't the Tories and SNP in combination have had a much more robust majority of 30 seats in 2017?  (This one also comes from "Stew".)

Wonky Abacus Klaxon yet again: the Tories and SNP in combination would have had a majority of 56 seats in 2017.  So what?  The SNP did not hold the balance of power at any point in the 2017-19 parliament, as can be seen from the fact that the Conservative government successfully sustained itself in office even though the SNP consistently voted against it in no confidence votes.  (Although there was an early election in 2019, that only came about because the Tories themselves voted in favour of it.)  But the idea of the SNP trying to win a Yes vote in an independence referendum in the context of them propping up a Tory government at Westminster is certainly an 'interesting' one, Stew.

And as for Stew's hoary old claim that there was a more limited one-off deal to be done, with the SNP agreeing to vote for Theresa May's soft Brexit plan in return for an independence referendum, I've debunked that umpteen times.  May wouldn't have been interested in such a deal because she was a conviction politician on the issue of "Our Precious Union", and she would have known it would be counter-productive anyway - her own backbenchers would have been so outraged by a deal putting the Union in peril that she would have lost far more votes for the soft Brexit plan than she'd have gained.

No, the only way a deal at Westminster will ever result in an independence referendum is if the SNP are able to offer a stable governing majority to a centre-left administration.

Another heavy blow for the Alba Party as popular senior member quits

I've got to be slightly cagey about what I say here, because I've been given permission to reveal some things, but not others, and there's a grey zone in the middle where I'd better tread carefully.  However, what I can tell you is that yet another very senior Alba member has left the party.  For privacy reasons she's asked to be identified as 'Bingo Wings' rather than by her actual name, but I'm sure many of you will know her well - she was a very popular figure within Alba and has had lots of success in the party's internal elections, including in the latest round of elections a few weeks ago.

I asked her why she left, and she gave me a one word answer: "mince".  That's not very specific but it's heartfelt, and many of us will have a fair idea of what she's getting at.  I gather she's been treated extremely badly in recent weeks.

Among those of us who have left Alba or been forced out, there are wildly varying opinions on the way forward - I and a few others have gone back to the SNP, some have joined "Liberate Scotland" (which I think is yet another dead end but they clearly take a different view), and others are just steering clear of party politics altogether for the time being.  But I think the one thing we'd all agree on is that being part of Alba was just a thoroughly unpleasant experience in a way that we could just never have anticipated when it all started in 2021.  What the Alba leadership (which essentially means Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and the people around her) have always wanted from the rank-and-file members is basically just an adoring fan club.  If you're willing to play that role, then you may have a positive experience, but if you have any independent ideas of your own, you'll quickly find yourself in a toxic environment.  There's lots of out-and-out bullying and plenty of passive-aggressive nastiness too.

I know some people will say "that's just politics for you, all parties are the same", but I think that's only true up to a point.  There's an Alba-specific problem here - Alba just seems to be a particularly nasty party, as Theresa May once said about the Tories.

An utterly unique political achievement: a month and a half after being expelled from the Alba Party, Chris McEleny appears to still be the Alba Party's Nominating Officer

It's been a little while since our last update on the McEleny saga, so I thought I'd take another quick look.  Correct me if I'm missing something, but I cannot find any publicly available reference to any appeal he made against expulsion from Alba or the outcome of it.  My guess is that it'll all be over by now, because we first learned about his expulsion in early May, he would have had a maximum of 21 days to decide on an appeal, and then I think the hearing would have had to be held within a month.  So in theory the process may still be dragging on, but I doubt it.  And the fact that we haven't heard anything at all probably indicates that his expulsion is now confirmed.

But it's not all bad news for "Mad Dog".  He may not be a member of Alba anymore, but according to the Electoral Commission website he's still the party's Nominating Officer.  You've got to give the guy his due: to still effectively be in control of a party he's been expelled from is a political achievement that is absolutely unique in British history.  He's never going to be First Minister, but they'll never be able to take this away from him.  OK, again it's theoretically possible that Alba may by now have found a way of coaxing him into resigning (they have no power to sack him) and the Electoral Commission website may just not have been updated yet.  But I somehow doubt that.

If things really are as they appear, it must be absolute mayhem behind the scenes at Alba, because it means that their ability to put up the candidates they want to at next year's election is subject to an absolute veto from a man they've just made an implacable enemy of by expelling.  Probably for the time being Corri Wilson is able to function as a de facto Nominating Officer due to written authorisation McEleny submitted well before his expulsion, but he could rescind that authorisation at any time he chooses.  I presume there must be Plan Bs in place to re-register the party with the Electoral Commission as a nominally new organisation - but to do that would require an entirely new name.  What would be left of the Alex Salmond Memorial Party by that point?

As for what McEleny's plan is, God knows, but everything we know about him and his ambition suggests that he'll be determined to stand as a Holyrood candidate next year, one way or another.  So if he hasn't moved on from Alba yet, that might indicate - bizarre though it may seem - that he still thinks he could be a candidate for Alba.  As Nominating Officer, he could of course just nominate himself as an Alba candidate and nobody would be able to stop him, but I'm wondering if perhaps he is holding out hope of doing it in a less provocative way.  

A number of people have pointed out that Kenny MacAskill seems to have lost all interest since becoming Alba leader - he spends more time these days tweeting cute photos of Highland cows and llamas than he does making political statements.  He's on a sort of Gerry Adams trajectory where it wouldn't be a total surprise if he releases a book of poetry.  So perhaps McEleny is banking on MacAskill giving in to his buyer's remorse and resigning quickly, thus leaving a vacancy that Ash Regan would be near-certain to fill.  If that happened, McEleny's expulsion would undoubtedly be reversed and he'd become the party's lead Holyrood candidate on the West list.  But Tyrannical Tasmina and the Corri Nostra (newly emboldened after the Wedding of the Century between Chris "the Crossmaglen Columbo" Cullen and straight-talking totally unfiltered independent woman Shannon Donoghue) will be determined to prevent that from happening at all costs.  If they need to hold MacAskill hostage, that's exactly what they'll do.

Meanwhile, it's dismaying but perhaps not surprising to see McEleny take a leaf out of his mate Stew's "Back Bibi With Whataboutery" book by retweeting a video mocking Greta Thunberg for being "selective in her activism" by sailing towards Gaza, rather than Ukraine "which is much closer to her".  Well, I suppose in the literal sense Ukraine is closer to Sweden, but in the overall scheme of things it's not that close, and by the same token Palestine isn't all that far away from Sweden either.  In fact Gaza is only a stone's throw away from Sweden's fellow EU member state Cyprus - hence all the intelligence-gathering flights Britain operates on Netanyahu's behalf from the 4% of Cypriot territory that is still colonised.

If I was in Thunberg's shoes I wouldn't have the slightest hesitation in prioritising Gaza.  Ukraine has control over 90% of its sovereign territory, whereas Palestine has proper control over none of its sovereign territory.  Ukraine has an army to fight back with, and it's backed to the hilt militarily and logistically by wealthy western countries.   Palestine has no army to defend itself with and it is receiving no external military support.  Its people are literally defenceless against genocide.

For as long as objective priorities exist, then yes, activism can be selective and it pretty much has to be, whether McEleny and Stew like it or not.

More polling signs that the SNP may have steadied the ship

In the run-up to the Hamilton by-election, there was a troubling string of eight polls in a row that had the SNP on a relatively low 2% of the GB-wide vote.  Ironically, now that the SNP have lost that by-election, the ship seems to have been steadied - five of the last seven GB-wide polls have had the SNP on 3%, suggesting that normal service has been resumed.  Here is the latest from Find Out Now - 

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 11th June 2025):

Reform UK 30% (-1)

Labour 24% (+2)

Conservatives 16% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 13% (-2)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 32%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 22%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%

As far as I know Find Out Now don't structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly like YouGov do, but I've given you the numbers for information anyway.

It looks both from this poll and other polls that there may have been a minor GB-wide recovery for Labour, albeit from a very low base.  Possibly the U-turn on winter fuel allowance has helped them a bit.  However, the plight of the Tories remains unchanged - Find Out Now have them on only half the vote of Reform, and with the Lib Dems within striking distance of overtaking them.

It's hard to believe the Tories will continue to sleepwalk into oblivion in the way they have been - surely at some point they'll at least roll the dice by changing leader to see if that makes a difference.  The betting markets still have Robert Jenrick as the favourite to replace Kemi Badenoch, although he's not odds-on and is rated as roughly a one-in-three chance.

So just two years and four days after you predicted an SNP-Labour coalition, Andy Maciver predicted it too?  Wow, that's impressive, Stew!  Most of us think a prediction has only come true when the predicted thing actually happens, but hey, you do you!

A genuine question for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland: am I Scottish enough in your eyes to qualify as a citizen of an independent Scotland?

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the new "Liberate Scotland" electoral alliance has three component parts, and one of those parts is the Sovereignty party, which boasts a large number of nativist and essentially far-right policies.  On the issue of citizenship in an independent Scotland, the 2024 Sovereignty manifesto makes clear that being legally resident in Scotland on independence day will only entitle a person to residency rights, with citizenship itself being reserved for "Scots".  That term is not clearly defined, but it seems pretty clear that it's intended to be defined much more narrowly than "British citizens living in Scotland", ie. it appears to have an ethnic basis.

One of our commenters wondered aloud whether he would count as Scottish enough for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland, given that he is one-quarter Irish.  And that set me thinking about myself.  As regular readers of this blog know, I have dual nationality, so one-half of my family background isn't Scottish at all.  But on my dad's side of the family, I have a typical Scottish Catholic background - meaning that I'm mostly descended from people who emigrated from Ireland between the 1850s and the 1890s, due to the mass transfer of population that occurred as a result of the man-made (London-made) Great Famine and its aftermath.

In fact for a long time I assumed that I probably didn't have any pre-1850 Scottish ancestry at all, because until relatively recently the Catholic community tended to only marry amongst themselves.  But a few years ago I discovered that there was one (albeit only one) mixed marriage in the family, which occurred somewhere around 1870.  That means one of my great-great-grandmothers was a native Scottish Protestant woman from South Lanarkshire, and through her I have Scottish ancestry going back to time immemorial.

But the opposite way of putting it is that in strictly ancestral terms I am merely one-sixteenth Scottish.  So do I make the cut as far as Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland are concerned?  I certainly wouldn't if Nazi-style racial laws were applied, because one-sixteenth would be considered far too diluted to count.  I wouldn't even qualify as a 'Mischling' (half-breed) - I would just be deemed to be purely Irish, or perhaps Irish-French-English-Dutch if I get into the complexities of the more exotic half of the family.

Now, my guess is that Sovereignty would stretch a point as far as the Irish-descended Catholic community is concerned.  We sound Scottish, we look Scottish, and the only three things that really set us apart is that we tend to have Irish-sounding surnames, we generally went to Catholic schools, and we mostly support Celtic football club.  And of course Celtic football club is in itself an integral part of modern Scottish culture - so how on earth would you disentangle the descendants of an immigrant community that assimilated into Scotland so totally?

But if you assume that Sovereignty would indeed give us Irish-descended folk a free pass because of what we look like and sound like, that implies that we'd be given special dispensation that wouldn't be offered to Scottish residents who, say, sound English or look Pakistani.  And when you start thinking about which groups would and wouldn't make the cut, and about the reasons why, you start to realise just how arbitrary and nasty it is to award or withhold citizenship on the basis of ethnicity.

Barrhead Boy, who seems to be the de facto leader of Liberate Scotland, went completely off his nut when I drew attention to Sovereignty's far-right policies.  He accused me of being some sort of saboteur and said individual policies should wait until after independence.  But I don't think that attitude is ever going to work as far as citizenship rights are concerned, and there's a very good reason for that.  People need to know before they vote on independence whether they're being asked about independence for their own country or about independence for a country that will regard them as an alien.  Self-evidently the answer to that question will for many people be the prime determinant of how they vote.

Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland can't fudge this or kick it down the road.  Voters are entitled to be told who an independent Scotland will belong to - and who it won't belong to.

BREAKING: The Daily Express back down and publish an apology for falsely claiming there was a "by-election poll" showing a tie between the SNP and Reform

As you'll probably remember, two weeks ago I pointed out that there was a deliberately misleading headline in the Daily Express which read "Humiliation for SNP as Nigel Farage's Reform UK now level in shock new by-election poll".  That clearly implied there was a poll of by-election voting intentions in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency showing the SNP and Reform UK level with each other, when in fact what was being referred to was the tiny, unweighted Scottish subsample of a GB-wide voting intentions poll.  I asked if there was any Scot Goes Pop reader who felt able to make a complaint to the press regulator IPSO, and also said I would make a complaint if nobody else did.

I can confirm that a complaint went forward, and as a result the Express have completely backed down - not only have they amended the article, but they have published a correction and apology, both in the article itself and on a standalone basis linked to from the newspaper's homepage.  I'm a veteran of past complaints about Reach plc publications (the stable includes the Express, the Record and the Mirror among others), and I've even dealt with the same Complaints Officer before, and I therefore know their usual approach is to make only very minor concessions in the hope of getting the complainant to accept far less than he or she should and to drop the complaint.  For them to totally climb down in this way suggests they were worried about something.  Either there must be some sort of precedent that made them think IPSO would take a particularly dim view of their false headline, or they must have had too many complaints upheld against them recently and are trying to get the numbers down a bit.

By accepting this as an informal resolution of the complaint, it does mean it will not be officially recorded as an upheld complaint and it won't count against the Express in the statistics.  However, my guess is the wisest thing to do is to keep our powder dry in case an even more important complaint comes up later.  I'd just like to make two observations, though -

1) To an extent the Express have still got away with their stunt, because any harm caused to the SNP by the fraudulent headline would have been caused before the by-election took place.  The Express waited until almost a week after the by-election before issuing the correction.

2) Incredibly, IPSO's procedures have become even more weighted against complainants than they used to be.  IPSO used to inform you if they rejected your complaint out of hand at the preliminary stage, whereas now they say if you don't hear anything within 21 days, that is the only indication you'll get of a rejection.  You then have 14 days to lodge an appeal.  This change of approach can only be seen as a cynical attempt to vastly reduce the number of appeals by maximising the chances that the complainant will forget all about it during the short window of opportunity.  When I received the email telling me the complaint was going ahead, I realised that I had actually forgotten about the whole thing for two or three days, and therefore I would guess there's a 50%+ chance I might not have remembered to chase things up when the 14-day window opened up.

WARNING - *Danger* - Emergency - NEE-NAW NEE-NAW - It's Stew, he thinks he's doing "psephology" again - *Clear The Area* - THIS IS NOT A DRILL

It's only around six months since the controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset-based blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because voting for them would be pointless - there was "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year.  That was Version 1.  And it's only four weeks since Stew told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because there was a 100% chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year, due to the fact that the SNP were  guaranteed to win at least "65 constituency seats", meaning any SNP list votes would be "wasted".  That was Version 2.

As I pointed out a few days ago, the Hamilton by-election result completely eviscerated Stew's Version 2 claim that the SNP were certain to win 65 constituency seats and thus destroyed the whole basis of his Version 2 argument for "tactical voting on the list".  And as I also pointed out, this made it absolutely inevitable that sooner or later we'd be getting Version 3 from Stew of why we definitely mustn't vote for the SNP on the list, which would be completely different from Version 1 and Version 2, and would be thrillingly much more complex than either of its predecessors because it would have to be somewhere in the middle, ie. it would need to be predicated on the assumption of the SNP doing neither outstandingly well nor particularly badly.

He's got cracking early, and it must have taken him ages, because he's given a new prediction for each and every individual constituency.  Presumably having realised he was going to have to contradict himself yet again, and so soon after the last time, he decided he could only hope to maintain even a veneer of credibility if he went into much more detail than before.

So of course the first thing I looked at was his new prediction for East Lothian, which he had previously listed as one of his 65 guaranteed SNP wins, even though I pointed out to him repeatedly that the opinion polls clearly showed Labour were likely to gain it by some distance.  Has he at last given up the ghost on this one?  Well, yes he has, but in doing so he has put forward such a clueless and factually inaccurate reasoning that all but his most brainwashed cult followers will stop listening to him from this point on - 

"Ah, the East Lothian Question. A certain self-described “expert” analyst is very excited about this one, and it undoubtedly represents a strong possibility for Labour, in the sense that if they can’t take East Lothian, they probably can’t take anywhere.

Actual current national polling says the SNP will hold it (since the fall in their support since 2021 is almost precisely identical to Labour’s), but the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem vote combined here was almost 10,000 higher than the SNP’s, so let’s give the baby his bottle and chalk another one up for Anas Sarwar’s boys."

WHAT?  The fall in SNP support since 2021 is "identical" to the fall in Labour support?  Let's take this nice and slowly, Stew.  The SNP's national vote share in 2021 was 47.7%, an all-time record high, and Labour's was 21.6%, an all-time record low.  The last few opinion polls show the SNP's vote share at somewhere between 33% and 36%, which is a drop of between 12 and 15 percentage points since 2021.  And they show Labour's vote share at somewhere between 19% and 22%, which at the lower end is a drop of only three points since 2021, and at the higher end is a no change position.  That is why all projections based on opinion polls show the ultra-marginal seat of East Lothian as an overwhelmingly likely Labour gain from the SNP.  That's what the projections show now, and that's what they showed four weeks ago when Stew first made his bonkers claim that the polls were somehow pointing to an SNP hold in East Lothian.

Although it's always been obvious that Stew's "psephological analyses" are propaganda-driven and wildly divorced from reality, I must say I had always assumed that he at least understood the basics perfectly well, and that he was just bluffing his way through and hoping no-one checked the details of his deceitful claims too closely.  But in this case it really does look like he doesn't have a sodding clue what the 2021 baseline numbers are, and that all of the thousands of words he's written to try to support his case for tactical voting on the list have been based on the schoolboy howler false premise that Labour's vote is down by just as much as the SNP's since 2021.  In all seriousness, Stew fans: how did you manage to read that East Lothian prediction without bursting into hysterical laughter?  And having gained that insight into his utter cluelessness, how did you carry on reading the other predictions with a straight face?

Given that he seems to have armed himself with such a wonky abacus, you won't be surprised to hear that many of his other predictions and reasonings are similarly nutty.  Here are the most dodgy ones - 

* He has Aberdeenshire West, Eastwood and Galloway & West Dumfries as SNP gains from the Conservatives, when in fact current polling suggests a net swing from SNP to Tory, meaning all of these seats are likely to be retained by the Conservatives

* He has Aberdeenshire East, Aberdeen South & North Kincardine, Banffshire & Buchan Coast and Ayr as SNP holds, when in fact current polling suggests all of these seats are likely Conservative gains

And it's not just projections from opinion polls that point to likely Tory resilience in battleground areas - that pattern was clearly already visible in last year's general election when the Tories were holding seats they should really have lost on nationwide trends.  Where they were able to credibly portray themselves as the only hope of keeping the SNP out, they were successful - with the obvious exception of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East, but even there Douglas Ross came much closer to holding the seat than should ever have been possible in the circumstances.

Of course what Stew is engaged in here is an attempt to get his "projected" SNP constituency numbers as high as possible (while making a few grudging concessions such as East Lothian and Hamilton itself to try to avoid looking like a complete idiot), so he can claim that the SNP won't win any compensatory list seats and thus any SNP list votes will be wasted.  But nothing has changed since Version 2, Stew - your numbers still don't add up.  The only thing that has changed is that it now looks like you don't even know that your numbers don't add up.

UPDATE: The Sage of Bath has seen this blogpost and hurriedly deleted the key section of his East Lothian prediction.  Don't worry, Stew, I took the precaution of taking a screenshot of the incriminating evidence...

Is the new speculation about John Swinney's future as leader a hopeful sign for independence?

I'm not quite sure what to make of the story in The National suggesting that 25 senior SNP figures have met to discuss replacing John Swinney as leader.  I suppose the questions that form in my mind are "how senior?" and "how representative are they?", although it's been interesting to see open calls for a return to a serious strategy on independence from surprising sources such as Toni Giugliano a few weeks ago, and James Dornan yesterday.  

What I've found dispiriting about this situation all along is that it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because whenever John Swinney does depart, regardless of whether it's this year or in five years' time, his replacement is highly likely to be either Kate Forbes or Stephen Flynn, and to the best of my knowledge neither of them are likely to restore the policy of a de facto referendum.  Without that it's hard to see how you ever get to independence.  That said, during the 2023 leadership election, I was struck by how much more positive the mood music on independence was from Kate Forbes than from Humza Yousaf, and how she was talking about achieving it quickly, even if I couldn't quite fathom how she planned to do it.  Alex Salmond also told me on the phone that he thought Forbes was a supporter of independence, which may seem like quite a low bar to clear, but by that point he tended to dismiss many leading SNP figures as devolutionists.

But I presume that the main reason Swinney is leader right now is precisely to keep Forbes out because some people at the top of the party can't stomach her private religious views.  It's hard to see that roadblock to change being cleared before the 2026 election, because Stephen Flynn is still in Westminster.  As far as I can remember the rule hasn't been altered to prevent non-MSPs from standing for leader, so in theory if an early vacancy arose Flynn could put himself forward on the basis that he will nominate a stopgap First Minister to hold the fort until next May, but a) that would look like a very odd arrangement to the public, and b) if the stopgap was anyone other than Kate Forbes (and I bet it would be) it would look nakedly factional and open up a whole new can of worms.  I'm still inclined to think it would be better just to give Forbes a go as leader and see what she can do.  I'm not particularly bothered about her views on sex before marriage or whatever because to the best of my knowledge she's not actually planning to set up a Free Church of Scotland theocratic dictatorship.

Incidentally, on James Dornan's suggestion that the SNP should pledge to hold a referendum with or without a Section 30 order, although I thoroughly approve of the gung-ho attitude, I'm not sure how that could legally be done in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.  There are no legal issues with a de facto referendum and that is obviously the way forward.

It's just a straw in the wind, but a highly encouraging one: the first post-Hamilton Scottish subsample from YouGov suggests that the SNP still have a big national lead over Labour

As I've been pointing out repeatedly since Friday (and some people really, really haven't wanted to hear this message, but I'm afraid facts are chiels that winna ding), the swing in the Hamilton by-election was consistent with the recent polls showing the SNP with a double-digit national lead over Labour.  So the only way the Hamilton result is going to be any sort of problem for the SNP is if the media hype generated by it in itself changes public opinion in Labour's favour.  We'll have to wait for another full-scale Scottish poll to find out for sure whether or not that has happened (and that could be weeks away), but the first YouGov subsample conducted since Hamilton suggests that Labour have not made any progress or enjoyed any bounce.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 8th-9th June 2025):

Reform UK 29% (+1)

Labour 23% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-2)

Greens 10% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 28%, Labour 17%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%

YouGov structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly, unlike other firms, but the margin of error on a sample of 140 is still enormous.  So it's statistically possible there's still some sort of 'hidden' Labour bounce, but I think the SNP will be pretty reassured by these numbers.  The high Reform vote share is obviously concerning, but if we're back to thinking Labour are the SNP's main challengers next year, the first priority for John Swinney is to retain a substantial lead over Labour, and it looks like that might well be happening.

Here's how the SNP have a 15% to 25% chance of securing an independence referendum within the next few years - but only if SNP supporters are ready for the opportunity and put enormous pressure on their leadership to face down the Tom Bradbys of this world

Last week, I tried to look up what the leading betting exchange was showing about the Hamilton by-election - only to find that it wasn't showing anything at all, because of course it's far too Anglocentric to even bother with Holyrood by-elections.  So instead I browsed through some of the other political markets, and this is the one that caught my eye...

Who will win an overall majority at the next UK general election?

No overall majority: 1.93

Labour: 3.75

Reform UK: 5

Conservatives: 27

Liberal Democrats: 130

What that means is that punters are saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of a hung parliament after the next election - which is pretty startling, given that first-past-the-post is a majoritarian voting system that can and does produce overall single-party majorities on extremely low vote shares.  Since the Second World War, there have been twenty-two general elections, and only three have produced hung parliaments: February 1974, 2010 and 2017.  Additionally, seats projections from many recent polls have shown Reform winning an absolute majority despite only being in the high 20s or low 30s in terms of vote share.

As long-term readers will recall from my exchanges with Neil "Alligators" Lovatt, I don't believe the betting markets are any kind of predictive God.  But nevertheless, many punters on the markets are statistically minded, and they must at least have some sort of logic (even if that logic turns out to be wrong) for thinking there is a 50%+ chance of no party winning a majority.  Presumably the theory is that with the UK now in an era of seven-party politics, there are a lot of permutations in which the parties would be too bunched together to produce a clear winner.

Additionally, barring a dramatic improvement in Tory or Labour fortunes, there are a lot of seats which will go to (or stay with) the Lib Dems and the SNP by default, which effectively takes dozens of seats out of the game completely as far as Reform, Labour or the Tories reaching the target figure for a majority is concerned.

So let's just assume for the sake of argument that the market is right and there is a slightly better than even chance of a hung parliament.  Let's also assume (and this is another big assumption) that the SNP can return to their previous position of holding the majority of Scottish seats.  That might open up the possibility of the SNP holding the balance of power and being able to secure an independence referendum.

Now, to be clear, they would not have a 50% chance of being able to do that, because in spite of what the fantastical ravings of the controversial "Stew" blogger would have you believe, the existence of a hung parliament is not in itself enough to produce the necessary leverage for the SNP.  The arithmetic within the hung parliament still has to be favourable for them, by which I mean that they need to have the numbers to be able to offer a stable governing majority to a potential centre-left government.  That was categorically not the case in the 2017-19 hung parliament, when the SNP did not hold the balance of power.  So that consideration reduces the chances significantly, probably to somewhere between 15% and 25%.

I've been the first to say over the years that relying on a hung parliament at Westminster to get us to independence is in the realms of desperation, because the odds will always be against it and there's nothing we can do to influence whether it happens or not.  But in the context where we have an SNP leadership which has taken all the other credible options for delivering independence off the table, you have to look at what's left, and a 15% to 25% chance of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster within three or four years may actually be the most promising avenue remaining.

That being the case, SNP members and supporters need to be ready for that opportunity to come up - by which I mean they need to be ready to put overwhelming pressure on the SNP leadership to settle for nothing less than an independence referendum in return for what would presumably be some sort of confidence-and-supply deal with the Labour party.  That pressure will be desperately needed for two reasons.  Firstly, as a counterweight to John Swinney's innate caution and small 'c' conservatism (assuming Swinney is still leader by then).  And secondly, because an opposite type of pressure will be applied to the SNP from a different direction.

It always used to be assumed that proportional representation would be introduced in the UK once the Liberal Democrats held the balance of power at Westminster and were able to negotiate a coalition deal.  And yet in 2010, the Lib Dems did hold the balance of power and did negotiate a coalition - but settled for something that fell far short of proportional representation, namely a referendum on the non-proportional AV system.  Why did they do that?  Partly because they were psyched into it by establishment figures in the media, most notably the political editor of ITV News, Tom Bradby, who disgracefully abused his position to pretty much openly campaign for a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that did not feature proportional representation, or indeed that did not even discuss proportional representation in the coalition negotiations.  It was, he insisted, inappropriate to bring items like PR to the table when the country faced a crisis situation.  When the Lib Dems eventually did start negotiating on PR, Bradby blew his top, and put huge pressure on them to backtrack by angrily telling his viewers that it had been one of the grubbiest days in British politics he could remember.  ("Grubby" being code for a party trying to implement the policies it had been elected to implement.)

The thing is, no matter what the circumstances, the likes of Bradby will always be able to cynically frame coalition negotiations as a "national emergency" in which the participants have to set aside their normal preoccupations in the "national interest".  In fact the opposite is true - that's the very moment of opportunity at which preoccupations like PR or Scottish independence have to come to the fore and be argued for tenaciously and relentlessly.  The SNP membership will have to steel their own leadership to face down Bradby, or whoever the Bradby equivalent is in 2028 or 2029.  In that scenario, what Bradby says on News at Ten doesn't matter, what the next day's headlines say doesn't matter.  You have a one-off opportunity to win independence for your country, and that opportunity may never come your way again.  You damn well grab it, any way that you can.