A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - one of Scotland's three most-read political blogs.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Another week, another SUBSAMPLE SENSATION as SNP soar to twenty-point lead in YouGov crossbreak for the ages
Monday, June 23, 2025
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.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
"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.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Majesty. Grandeur. The Taj Mahal of polling crossbreaks. SNP hit 41% in simply sumptuous Ipsos subsample.
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:
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.
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
Friday, June 20, 2025
SNP win the first preference vote in the Cromarty Firth by-election, but miss out after transfers
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)
Thursday, June 19, 2025
The cause of Palestine is the cause of humanity - and it is therefore inseparable from the Scottish independence movement
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:
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
One subsample to rule them all, and in the brightness grind them
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Scot Goes Fundraiser 2025: An Update
Monday, June 16, 2025
FAQs on how the SNP might be able to win independence by using their leverage in a hung parliament
Sunday, June 15, 2025
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.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
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
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):
Thursday, June 12, 2025
A genuine question for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland: am I Scottish enough in your eyes to qualify as a citizen of an independent Scotland?
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.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
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?
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
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
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?