Could Labour end up in third place in the polls due to the new Corbyn / Sultana party?

In 2007, Archie Stirling (the husband and father of the actresses Diana Rigg and Rachael Stirling respectively) set up a fringe party called Scottish Voice for that year's Holyrood election, and used his wealth to commission a YouGov opinion poll which purported to show that around 20% of the Scottish population would consider voting for the party.  That was around a hundred times higher than the 0.2% of the public that actually voted for Scottish Voice at the election itself.  The point being, of course, that it's very easy for people to try to look reasonable by saying they'll "consider" doing something, but actually doing it is another matter.

Ever since then, I've used the term "Archie Stirling poll question" when someone about to set up a political party cynically uses that type of question to give the false impression that the party will be wildly popular.  The classic example, of course, was the controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset blogger "Stew", who asked an almost identical question to Stirling's (and got similar results) when he was toying with the idea of setting up a Wings Party.  And he knew exactly what he was doing, because several people had warned him in advance that he needed to ask a more credible question, and explained why that was so important.

YouGov may have found an elegant way of squaring the circle with the prospective new Jeremy Corbyn / Zarah Sultana left-wing party, though.  They've asked respondents whether they would consider voting for the party, but they've also asked the same question about all the other established GB-wide parties, thus allowing what might be a more meaningful comparison to be made.

Percentage who will consider voting for each party (YouGov, 6th-7th July 2025):

Labour 30%

Liberal Democrats 28%

Greens 28%

Reform UK 28%

Conservatives 24%

Corbyn 18%

If you apply that sort of differential to the current polls, it's at least imaginable that a Corbyn party could start off with 8-10% of the vote.

Assuming people answered the question honestly, Labour's absolute maximum vote at the moment is 30%, which I've tended to assume would not be enough to win an election for them, because the right-wing vote will consolidate behind Reform or the Tories.  But as you can see, the supposed maximum vote for either Reform or the Tories is actually slightly below 30%, implying there are a lot of Reform voters who hate the Tories and vice versa.

However, even if the right-wing vote does give an assist to Starmer by remaining helpfully split, Labour still stand to suffer far more from a Corbyn party than their main opponents.  As many as 31% of Labour voters from last year's general election say they will consider voting for Corbyn's outfit, compared with only 2% of Tory voters.  If Labour do slip any further in the polls, they could end up in third or fourth place with less than 20% of the vote.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3065, meaning it is 45% 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

Your cut-out-and-keep guide to how Stuart Campbell is literally treating his readers as idiots with his ever-changing, crazy-paving set of "reasons" for voting against the SNP on the Holyrood list ballot

As promised, here is my detailed response to the controversial "Stew" blogger's latest 'radical reimagining' of his arguments for tactically voting against the SNP on the Holyrood list ballot - and by goodness was a hurried reimagining required, because the result of the Hamilton by-election drove a coach and horses through his previous argument, which he presented to us only a few weeks ago and which hinged on the SNP being supposedly 'guaranteed' to win at least 65 constituency seats, of which Hamilton was one.  In a similar way, his previous argument of last autumn that you should vote against the SNP on the list because there was supposedly "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood was blown apart within a matter of days by opinion polls showing that we were on course for, you've guessed it, a pro-independence majority at Holyrood.  Whenever Stew makes a confident prediction and predicates his arguments on it, there's often good money to be made by betting on precisely the opposite outcome.

It won't surprise you to learn that there are yet again massive logical errors in the latest iteration of the Stew Tactical Voting Instruction Manual.  But although I'm going to cover some of those errors in detail, I first of all want to make a couple of broader-brush points.  It should be a statement of the obvious that Stew has been intellectually dishonest for months in claiming to be answering the question "how should independence supporters attempt to maximise the number of pro-independence MSPs?", because by his own admission his goal is not to maximise the number of pro-independence MSPs.  In fact it's pretty much the reverse of that.  He wants to destroy the SNP, and first went on record in the Wings comments section a few weeks ago by saying that his advice to his readers is going to be to vote for whichever party is best placed to defeat the SNP in any given constituency.  That means by definition that he will be telling his readers to vote for unionist parties almost across the board, because there are only two constituencies in which it can even be plausibly argued that the main challenger to the SNP is a pro-independence party or candidate.  And one of those two is Glasgow Kelvin, where the Greens are the potential challenger, so it seems phenomenally improbable that he will be urging a pro-indy vote there either.

So by banging the 'pro-indy tactical voting' drum so loudly for months, all he's actually been doing is presenting his back-up argument for those among his readers who understandably don't want to hear his primary message that the time has come for a Scottish Parliament that opposes Scottish independence ("to win independence we must first kill independence", etc, etc).  He's effectively been asking those people to trust him to give an honest and dispassionate assessment of how to achieve the opposite outcome from the one he wants.  And while I suppose it's technically possible that a man who has been demonstrably consumed by unreasoning hatred of the SNP for the best part of a decade might be capable of setting his agenda aside to give that type of honest advice, I'd gently suggest that it's also possible, and arguably far more likely, that he is in fact not doing so, and that he understands perfectly well that persuading his readers to throw their list votes away on no-hoper fringe parties can only increase the chances of a unionist majority at Holyrood - ie. precisely the outcome he craves.

The second broad-brush point is that if anyone is trying to 'hack' the Holyrood voting system, there are two sides to that equation - both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.  Essentially the goal is to take the current state of public opinion, in which pro-independence parties have only a minority of the popular vote between them, and use the voting system to distort that and to produce a pro-independence majority in terms of Holyrood seats.  To achieve that aim, by far the most important part of the equation is that the SNP must have a large enough lead in the popular vote on the constituency ballot to produce a massive 'winner's bonus' in terms of constituency seats. John Curtice made that very point at the Holyrood Sources event a couple of weeks ago.

So to the extent that tactical voting can play a role, it would have to primarily consist of iron discipline among independence supporters in voting tactically for the SNP on the constituency ballot.  What happens on the list ballot is of much less importance, and by inviting you to fixate on the list, Stew is trying to get you to not see the wood for the trees.  That's not to say the list doesn't matter at all - a pro-indy seats majority without a popular vote majority will probably also hinge on the Greens doing well enough on the list to retain their current handful of seats.  But at the moment it seems highly likely that they will do at least that well, which means that if independence supporters get behind the SNP in big numbers on the constituency ballot, that should be enough to do the trick.  List votes for Alba and Liberate Scotland, who have almost no chance of winning any seats, have literally zero role to play here.  But no prizes for guessing why Stew doesn't want the penny to drop with people that SNP constituency votes are actually the really important bit.

All of that said, though, let's go through some of the detailed points in his latest 'psephologist cosplay' post.  I do love it when he uses words like 'divisor' as if he knows what he's talking about.

"Because it’s #1 of very many straightforward, barefaced lies in The Lunatic’s piece. Wings has offered no “tactical voting advice” to anybody, in Highlands or elsewhere. Tactical voting on the list is, as we noted many years ago, almost impossible to do."

Well, this is brazen.  I've pasted the above in plain text, which means that you can't see that he's linked to one of his posts from the run-up to the 2016 election, in which his position on tactical voting on the list was the polar opposite of what it is today.  Back then, he was on exactly the same page as me in saying that it was a mug's game, whereas now he's arguing that it's somehow possible to know in advance, before a single vote is cast, that the SNP will perform so well on the constituency ballot and so poorly on the list ballot that they will win no list seats at all, and therefore that any SNP list votes will be wasted, and you must vote for another party.  That, Stew, is advocacy for tactical voting on the list.  It is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether you admit to that or whether you call it by some Orwellian name to attempt to obscure its nature.  I'm interested in what the thing is, and not in what you claim it to be.

I suspect that Stew's contortions and contradictions on this issue have now been pointed out often enough that he feels the only option he has left is to try to hide his hypocrisy in plain sight, ie. to indignantly insist that there is a seamless join between his commendable anti-tactical voting stance in 2016, and his pro-tactical voting stance of today.

"so votes for either Unionist parties OR the SNP will have the same result: lots of Unionist MSPs."

If this is intended to disprove the notion of a Plan A / Plan B approach, ie. Plan A being "vote against the SNP on the list because a unionist majority is desirable", and Plan B being "but if you're stupid enough to want a pro-indy majority, you should vote tactically against the SNP anyway", then it's not doing a very good job, is it?  If you thought Plan A was sufficient, Stew, you would dispense with the lie that voting SNP on the list produces unionist seats.  Why are you psychologically incapable of dropping the crutch of that lie, Stew?  Because you are an advocate of tactical voting on the list, while farcically claiming not to be.

"FALSEHOOD #2. Wings has at no juncture “talked up” the likelihood of Fergus Ewing holding Inverness & Nairn. A few days ago we said it was unlikely."

The operative words there are "a few days ago", which was before Ewing announced he was standing as an independent.  After that announcement, Stew could barely contain his excitement and repeatedly tweeted about the supposedly good chances of Ewing defeating the SNP.  For the purposes of Stew's rant, it seems, those tweets must be condemned to disappear down the ever-trusty Wings memory hole.

"FALSEHOOD #3. Wings has never said any such thing."

He's claiming here that he never said that the SNP were definitely not going to win any list seats at all - something he has in fact said on multiple occasions, most notably in his blogpost "The Blindness of Hatred" (surely the most un-self-aware title in history).  That blogpost was published on 11th May 2025 - exactly two months ago.  So not so much a "falsehood", Stew, as well, y'know, the other thing.

It was also in the same blogpost that you claimed the SNP were assured of winning at least 65 constituency seats - ie. that they would have a single-party overall majority in the parliament without requiring even one list seat.  You also supplied maps showing Hamilton and East Lothian as being among those 65 nailed-on certain constituency wins for the SNP.  Embarrassing, I know, but the internet never forgets.

"More to the point, though, the actual argument we’ve made is that they’ll win fewer list seats than would be won if their list vote was redirected to other indy parties – something The Lunatic has never actually attempted to refute."

I've not only "attempted" to refute it, I have refuted it on umpteen occasions.  The most succinct way of putting it is that the SNP have an established track record of winning list seats in every single Holyrood election they've ever fought, and with their constituency vote seemingly having dropped sharply since the 2021 election, it's unlikely that track record will change - because of course the fewer constituency seats a party wins, the more scope it has to pick up compensatory list seats.  By contrast, Alba would need to at least double their current list vote share to have an outside chance of winning even a single list seat, and Liberate Scotland would probably need to multiply their current support, which at the moment is so microscopic that it cannot even be measured, by several hundred times.  Neither of those possibilities are credible, meaning that even if it was somehow possible to "redirect" some SNP list votes to "other indy parties" (he's talking about those votes as if they were pieces on a chessboard), it would most likely have the effect of reducing the overall number of pro-indy seats and increasing the number of unionist seats - the polar opposite of his claim.  

The only exception to that would be if he is referring to a 'redirection' of SNP votes to the Greens - because unlike Alba and Liberate Scotland, the Greens will almost certainly have enough list votes to win seats.  But if the Greens are what Stew means (and let's face it, they're not - he hates them), he should spell that out and make clear that 'redirecting' SNP list votes to any indy party other than the Greens would have a counterproductive effect.  The reason he doesn't spell that out is that he's deceiving you.  Intentionally.

By the way, Stew, claiming that 'redirecting' SNP list votes would produce a greater number of pro-indy seats is not really consistent, is it, with your claim not to have changed your view that tactical voting on the list is "almost impossible to do".  In fact, let's be blunt: it drives a coach and horses through that claim.  It means, yet again, that you are saying the complete opposite of what you were saying ten years ago.  You were right ten years ago, and you are wrong now.

"FALSEHOOD #4. As noted above, Wings remains of the view that TACTICAL voting on the list is all but impossible. What we want is not voting SNP on the list, which is something very different. And the point about that is that it doesn’t change whether or not you care about how many pro-indy MSPs are elected on the list."

What does he mean by "it doesn't change"?  He means that if you share his view that there should be a unionist majority ("to win independence we must first kill independence", etc, etc) you should vote against the SNP on the list because the SNP are baaaaaaad, but if you want a pro-indy majority you should still vote against the SNP on the list because doing so will supposedly produce a greater number of pro-indy seats (spoiler alert: it won't).  In other words he's saying that tactical voting on the list is possible, despite only a couple of sentences earlier insisting it was impossible, and he's advocating that you should do it, in spite of angrily denying that he's a tactical voting advocate.

Make. It. Make. Sense. Stew.

"Any and every SNP list vote will therefore, as a simple measurable empirical fact, be worth less – at least 50% less and up to 91% less, in fact – than a list vote for a party with no constituency seats."

Oooh, "up to 91%" sounds impressive, Stew.  I can't remember being so impressed by a number since Tony Blair claimed Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction "within 45 minutes".  I take it that, just like Blair, you've got a "dossier" to back up this claim?  Answer: yes you do, you've got a little table, and it's full of numbers that you've thrillingly rounded to two decimal places to make them look as if they must be important.

But I must admit I'm far more interested in the fundamental principles than in the decimal fractions.  Why does Stew insist that the supposed low value of an SNP list vote, and the precision of his claims about how low that value is, constitute "a simple measurable empirical fact"?  Why, that'll be for one of two reasons:

Option A: Opinion polls are pinpoint accurate.  There is no history in this country of significant opinion poll error, and late swings of public opinion never occur after the final polls of an election campaign are conducted.

Option B: Time does not progress in a linear fashion, and it's possible to have foreknowledge on polling day of the election results that will be announced the following day.  In other words, when you cast your vote, you already know how everyone else will vote on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.

Now, you may think both of these options are self-evidently nonsensical.  But think again, because Stew says this stuff is EMPIRICAL FACT, so it looks like the known laws of science are about to be revised radically.

Back in the real world, of course, opinion polls do have a history of significant inaccuracy, late swings do frequently happen, and foreknowledge of election results on polling day is not possible.  At the moment you cast your vote, you won't have a sodding clue how many constituency seats the SNP are going to win, you won't have a sodding clue how many people are voting SNP on the list, and you therefore won't have a sodding clue what the likelihood is of an SNP list vote translating into SNP list seats.  Your chances of not having a sodding clue on any of these points is not "up to 91%" but are in fact an extremely round 100%.

The whole point of giving you two votes is, of course, this very lack of foreknowledge.  Two votes provides you with a crucial back-up.  If your first-choice party wins your constituency seat, then great, but if it doesn't, you still have a chance of winning representation for that party as long as you voted for it on the list.  If you instead voted "tactically" on the list for your second-choice party, the d'Hondt formula will ignore your constituency vote and will regard your second-choice party as your first-choice party - it's as simple as that.  The seats distribution will be calculated on exactly that basis.  That's why tactical voting on the list is a mug's game, that's why it has such a high risk of backfiring catastrophically, and that's why it can produce such perverse outcomes.  The much more sensible Stew of 2015/16 (the man who had not yet become twisted with bitterness because Nicola Sturgeon refused to back him in his vanity court case against Dugdale) told you exactly that.

"If you want the maximum number of “pro-indy” MSPs elected on the list, and if you consider the SNP “pro-indy”...then you’d be an idiot to give the SNP your list vote, because you’ll definitely get fewer pro-indy MSPs that way, whether it’s actually 0 or just close to 0."

I'll tell you who the only "idiots" are here, and that's the people who can read the above without recognising it as crystal-clear, unambiguous advice to vote tactically on the list - something which Stew has only just said is impossible to do and which he has only just angrily insisted he would never advocate.

Stew thinks his readers are idiots, doesn't he?  He literally thinks they are idiots.

Reform lead in latest poll for the Welsh Senedd - but could that translate to the Plaid Cymru leader becoming First Minister?

So I'm just catching up with the latest Welsh voting intention poll, which comes from More In Common, who don't seem to have done any full-scale Welsh polls before.

Senedd voting intentions (More In Common, 18th June-3rd July 2025):

Reform UK 28%

Plaid Cymru 26%

Labour 23%

Conservatives 10%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Greens 4%

It's obviously disappointing that More In Common haven't corroborated the two YouGov polls showing Plaid in the outright lead, but in one sense that may not matter.  Progressive parties have a majority of the vote between them, which ought to mean that the Plaid leader would become First Minister on these numbers, at the head of a 'keep Reform out' coalition.  Admittedly it would be in Labour's power to scupper that, and to allow a minority Reform government to take office - but how would they do it without being seen to do it?  How would they do it without suffering massive reputational damage as a result?  I think they would have to swallow their pride and let Plaid take the reins.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3065, meaning it is 45% 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

What's in an accent?

 

I thought I'd take the above screenshot as a souvenir, because when I was growing up in Kilsyth, although I used a decent sprinkling of Scots words like 'doon' and 'hoose' and 'didnae' and 'how?' and 'gallus', I nevertheless had a Frankenstein mid-Atlantic accent that made everyone at school think I was either Australian or Irish.  It became much more Scottish from the age of about twelve onwards, but if you listen very carefully you can still hear the occasional very faint trace of American here or there. 

So when I took the accent test, it was with a due sense of trepidation, and I was half-expecting to be told I was from New Zealand or somewhere.  But nope, it came back as 82% Scottish.  If you're in a quiet room and have a microphone enabled, have a go yourself and let me know your results.

SNP hit fabulous forty per cent in YouGov's colossus of crossbreaks

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 6th-7th July 2025):

Reform UK 26% (-)

Labour 24% (-)

Conservatives 16% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-1)

Greens 11% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 40%, Labour 20%, Reform UK 17%, Liberal Democrats 12%, Conservatives 5%, Greens 4%

This is the second consecutive YouGov poll to have Reform's GB lead over Labour at 'only' two points, and although there can't be any direct link, it somehow seems in keeping with the latest evidence of the age-old truth that every party led by Nigel Farage always starts disintegrating after a period of time.  If you ever feel bored, a fun game to play is "guess how many Reform MPs there are today", because the number is never what you think it is.  At the moment, as far as I can see the answer is four, even though they started off with five last July and have since won an extra seat at the Runcorn & Helsby by-election.  At one point I thought it was pretty likely that Reform would overtake the SNP as the fourth-largest Commons party during this parliament due to defections, but that seems a lot less probable now.   If anything, the SNP may be at greater risk of being overtaken by the Corbyn/Sultana party-that-is-not-yet-a-party.

The SNP's excellent run of subsamples continues with a rare instance of them breaking the 40% barrier, and with double the support of their nearest challenger.  Although YouGov structure and weight their subsamples correctly, the small sample size means any individual subsample must be treated with a dose of salt.  But an average of several correctly-weighted subsamples over a period of time will give you a better idea of the state of play, and that average is looking pretty healthy just now.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3065, meaning it is 45% 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

Corbyn is not a "diminished figure" - his reputation has grown and grown as the Gaza genocide has shown him to be on the right side of history

I had a look at Political Betting (aka Stormfront Lite) for the first time in ages today, and there's a post from the site's editor TSE, who I believe self-identifies as a "moderate" or "centrist" Tory, and which makes me wonder if the political Right even inhabit the same planet as the rest of us.  

He feels the need from the outset to defend himself from the ridicule he expects from his peers, because he has placed a bet on Jeremy Corbyn or Zarah Sultana to become Prime Minister at odds of 100/1.  He stresses this is merely a "trading bet" (with the unspoken implication that it might make a profit simply because other people will in future be stupid enough to start thinking Corbyn or Sultana could win an election), and states as a fact, as if it's something that everyone just "knows", that Corbyn is a "much diminished figure since 2017" because of his reaction to the Salisbury poisonings.

I mean, what?!  When I think of Jeremy Corbyn, there are probably about 500 things that would pop into my head about him long before I'd even remember anything to do with his reaction to the Salisbury poisonings.  He's quite clearly not a diminished figure, his reputation has in fact grown and grown as he's been shown to be on the right side of history in respect of Israel and Palestine, and as his detractors during the confected "anti-semitism crisis" have been shown to be on the wrong side of history.  His spectacular success in defeating the Labour machine in Islington last year has also greatly enhanced his track record as an electoral winner.

But if you said to someone like TSE that Corbyn's principled stance on the gravest crime against humanity of the 21st century might possibly have some relevance to his current public standing, you'd just get a blank look.  The notion has probably never even occurred to TSE, who it appears shut down all thought after the Salisbury incident, which is as fresh in his mind as if it happened yesterday.

TSE even tries to pour cold water on Corbyn's electoral achievement in 2017, when he became the only Labour leader to top 40% of the popular vote in a general election since 2001.  Apparently that doesn't really count for anything because the Tories "ran the worst campaign in living memory" in 2017.  Well, that's a subjective call, but I very much doubt that any alternative Labour leader would have reached anything like 40% of the vote that year, because Corbyn was gobbling up Green and other radical leftist votes that a centrist leader would never have been able to reach.

I don't think it's particularly likely that Corbyn or Sultana will become Prime Minister, but for a 100/1 bet to be considered value, the real probability only needs to exceed 1%.  Given that Zack Polanski seems to be open to an electoral pact with Corbyn/Sultana, and that it's reasonable to suppose that such an alliance might attract 15% of the vote at a time when the leading party is usually only in the 20s, it seems entirely logical that one of the leaders of that alliance could well have a better than 1% chance of forming a government.  It's a perfectly sensible bet - not even as a trading bet, but just on its own terms.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3065, meaning it is 45% 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

Munificent MRP poll shows the SNP on course to win almost THREE-QUARTERS of Scottish seats at Westminster

I thought I'd take a belated look at the new MRP seats projection from More In Common, which I believe was published yesterday or possibly the day before.

Seats projection (More In Common MRP poll, 13th-30th June 2025):

Reform UK 290

Labour 126

Conservatives 81

Liberal Democrats 73

SNP 42

Greens 7

Plaid Cymru 4

Unlike the recent YouGov MRP poll, the fieldwork for this one took place entirely after (and indeed well after) the Hamilton by-election on 5th June.  So the evidence is becoming ever stronger that the Hamilton setback did the SNP no lasting harm at all, except for the obvious point that it reduced their number of seats in the current Scottish Parliament by one.

This is another MRP poll pointing to a hung parliament, but not one in which the SNP would hold the balance of power, because Reform and the Tories between them would have a very comfortable blocking majority preventing any centre-left government from being formed.  (Although doubtless Stew would say that all the SNP have to do is offer Reform a deal on withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and Farage will instantly cave in and give them an independence referendum.)

There are some strikingly sharp differences in the details of the More In Common and YouGov MRPs.  YouGov had Reform winning three Scottish seats, all in the south and south-west of the country, but More In Common still have Reform on a big fat zero in Scotland.  They're not even close in the southern seats - in Dumfries & Galloway, for example, they're on just 8% of the vote, and in Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock they're on just 14%.  There's also the odd phenomenon of Labour being projected to gain a couple of seats even as they suffer crushing losses to the SNP elsewhere in Scotland.  One of them is Dumfries & Galloway, and yes, that's not totally impossible - the southernmost seats have not been particularly fertile territory for the SNP in recent decades (with the obvious exception of 2015), so if the Tories collapse it might be Labour that's left to pick up the pieces.  But the other projected Labour gain is Dundee Central, and that makes no sense whatsoever - something freakish must have happened in the sampling.  I rarely make hard predictions, but I can say with confidence that if the SNP win 40+ seats at the next election, Dundee Central will be one of them.

On the other hand, More In Common show Na h-Eileanan an Iar as an SNP gain, even though many other MRP polls have had it as a Labour hold.  In fact, Labour aren't even projected to be in second place in the seat - they're a distant third behind the SNP and Reform.  

The Lib Dems are projected to hold all five of their Scottish seats, but the SNP are breathing down their necks in three of them - Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross (Lib Dem 30%, SNP 30%), Mid-Dunbartonshire (Lib Dem 35%, SNP 28%) and North-East Fife (Lib Dem 36%, SNP 29%).  

The Tories would be reduced to just two Scottish seats, both in the Borders/south.  The SNP are the main challengers in both, and are around 8 or 9 points behind.  

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The allegedly fake cleric in Somerset, who claims not to be stalking me, tweeted about me for the 7489th time this year earlier today, and it was a weird delayed reaction to something I said last week.  All I had done was point out the indisputable fact that the SNP's relatively low Holyrood list vote in the polls is not a major problem for them if their lead in the constituencies holds up, but that if the SNP's lead on the constituency ballot is reduced to low single figures, the voting system will then start working in Labour's favour and the SNP may be reliant on list votes to remain the largest single party in the Scottish Parliament.  I'm sorry, Stew, but that's just a statement of the bleedin' obvious, and facts are chiels that winna ding and all that.  Look at the 2007 election result as a good example - the SNP were one point ahead on the constituency ballot, but took a hammering in constituency seats.  In fact Labour took 37 of the 73 constituency seats, meaning they would have had a slim overall majority if the election had been conducted solely by first-past-the-post.  But once the list seats were added, the SNP just barely came out on top, with 47 seats to Labour's 46.  That was only possible because the SNP took 31% of the list vote.  If they had fallen short of that, perhaps because a small percentage of voters had abandoned them on the list for so-called "tactical" reasons or for any other reasons, they would have ended up as only the second-largest party despite winning the popular vote on the constituency ballot, and it's entirely possible that Jack McConnell would have remained First Minister.

That's correct, isn't it, Stew?  So what's your point?

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3000, meaning it is 44% 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 last days in the bunker: Alba's leader channels Comical Ali as he insists "Relationships in the party are COLLEGIATE and HARMONIOUS! We will win SIXTEEN list seats next year!"

Kenny MacAskill is one of the few people in the upper echelons of the Alba Party who I still have respect for.  Even he has far too authoritarian a mindset (he once told someone that new people were welcome to join the Alba Party, but only if they "accept direction from the party"!), but he is at least a genuine conviction politician on policy matters, ie. he's not a cynical opportunist like Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh.  All the same, it's hard to keep a straight face when he says in his interview with the Herald today that relationships within the party are "remarkably collegiate and harmonious".

If he truly believes that, he's descending into a world of fantasy.  He's talking about a party, let's not forget, which over the last couple of years has had one of the highest per capita rates of Mafia-style backstabbing and bloodletting of any political party in western Europe.  And there are two very recent events that are more than a tad difficult to square with the "collegiate and harmonious" line -

* As I mentioned the other day, there are strong indications that a very senior member of Alba, possibly even one "of Salmond blood", tried to get the police involved in her bitter vendetta against an NEC colleague who resigned from the party after being relentlessly bullied.  This incident apparently happened only around a month ago.

* The Electoral Commission website still shows that Alba's Nominating Officer, ie. the only individual who is ultimately responsible for approving Alba election candidates, is none other than Chris McEleny - the man expelled from Alba two months ago.  It's hard to think of a less "collegiate and harmonious" state of affairs than to have an expellee in such a pivotal position.  And under the rules, it's almost impossible to get rid of him unless he voluntarily resigns, which apparently he has refused to do.  This is an almost unprecedented situation in British political history - I say "almost" because something similar happened to George Galloway's former party Respect.  (By a strange coincidence, Alba's delightful Yvonne Ridley was heavily embroiled in that Respect clusterbourach - if you do a Google search, you'll even find a newspaper article from the time which tries to determine whether or not she was technically the Respect leader.)

I also get the impression that these two episodes are not entirely unrelated.  Although the story about the police came to me in garbled form, the implication seemed to be that it had something to do with the Alba leadership's panic over the McEleny situation, which made me think I may have been on the right track in wondering whether they're concerned that they may have to nominally re-register the party under a new name, as the only viable way of getting round the roadblock of McEleny insisting on remaining as Nominating Officer.

MacAskill's comments were made in response to a Herald interview with McEleny a week ago, which I hadn't previously seen.  It contains this extraordinary statement - 

"You can't stay a big tent and a broad church but kick out people when they disagree with you."

Are we to take this as some sort of Damascene conversion, Chris?  Or as some sort of long-overdue apology to myself, Denise Somerville, Geoff Bush, Sean Davis and Colin Alexander, all of whom you expelled from Alba (or de facto expelled) for fatuous non-reasons last year?  There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repenteth, etc, etc.  

McEleny also blasts MacAskill for turning Alba into a "1970s tribute act", which seems at least in part to be code for "he's taking too principled a stance on Gaza".  I don't know if it's Stew's influence, but McEleny does seem to be increasingly flirting with the dark side on Gaza - see for example his ghastly retweet from a few weeks ago which mocked Greta Thunberg for caring too much about the issue, and did so from a firmly right-wing American, genocide-apologist perspective.

McEleny justifies all of this by saying Alba should be concentrating on bread-and-butter issues that matter to voters, but then bizarrely in the next breath he starts banging on like a true ideologue about the vital importance of Ash Regan's "Unbuyable" bill on prostitution law, which is not relevant to the lives of the vast majority of voters and which polling shows is an extremely low priority for them (and indeed polling also shows that voters oppose the principles of the bill in any case).

All of this reminds me that I received another press release from the National Ugly Mugs campaign a few days ago that identified a comment from the Scottish Government's Siobhian Brown which expressed scepticism about the wisdom of Regan's bill.  If the SNP leadership aren't going to lend support to the bill, it's obviously far less likely to pass.  The SNP are in principle sympathetic to the Nordic Model, but it makes perfect sense that if there's ever going to be legislation, they'd want to draw it up themselves, rather than allow Alba's only MSP to railroad it through in a half-baked form.

The Herald have once again drawn attention to Regan's now-notorious literalistic misunderstanding of the term "prostitution being driven underground".  I hadn't seen the full quote before, and it truly is a thing of beauty - 

"If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?"

Hopefully somebody will ask Regan if she wants to put clear blue water between herself and the SNP, just to see if she starts looking into the cost of a dinghy.

Reading between the lines of the McEleny interview, it's obvious that his expulsion from Alba has been upheld by the Appeals Committee (assuming he even put in an appeal at all). Given the time limits imposed by Alba's rules, the process must be over by now.

Last but not least, we have MacAskill's delusional claim that Alba could win between eight and sixteen list seats next year.  Eight seats would mean they'd have to treble their 2% list vote share in last week's Ipsos poll.  They'd have to multiply it by six to get to sixteen seats.  Let's get real, Kenny - it's not going to happen.  Alba remain firmly on course for zero seats.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3000, meaning it is 44% 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

What exactly is "real Yes" when it's at home?

I still intend to take pre-moderation back off at some point, because it's a right pain in the neck for all of us, but at the moment it's not possible because the levels of abuse in some of the submitted comments is just too high - probably because the Stew Fan Club haven't had time to de-frenzy themselves quite yet.  But at least it means that I don't have to constantly deal with the regular allegations that I am an "enemy of independence" because I do not support "real Yes alternatives".

What in God's name is a "real Yes alternative" when it's at home?  It seems to be code for "any pro-independence party that is not the SNP", ie. the idea is that the SNP is no longer 'really' a Yes party, thus giving Liberate Scotland a valid excuse for splitting the Yes vote on the constituency ballot next year, etc, etc.  Well, I can tell you this: I've been to all but one of the local SNP branch meetings since rejoining the party in mid-January.  At first I wasn't quite sure what to expect, because if you listen to some people you'd think the SNP have been completely taken over at every level by identity politics entryists, but that hasn't been my experience at all.  Pretty much everyone at the meetings seems to have joined the party because of independence.  They also care about social justice issues, and some talk about subjects they have particular professional expertise about, but independence is the number one priority for one and all.  

So a question: how can a party composed of literally tens of thousands of genuine independence supporters not be a "real Yes" party?  I suppose the argument might be that there's a disconnect between the "real Yes" members and a "fake Yes" leadership, but even if that was the case, it's surely a statement of the obvious that the party containing the overwhelming majority of the independence movement has the potential to transform itself into a vehicle for independence.  If all else fails, one way that could happen is via the next SNP leadership election, whenever it comes up.

As for the much smaller parties that have been designated as "real Yes", it's a matter of record that I was not only supportive of Alba, I was in fact a card-carrying member of the party for well over three years.  Towards the end I was not at all happy with Alba's direction of travel and I thought the scale of the party's intervention in a first-past-the-post general election was a dreadful error.  But I took the view that this in not America, and in this country you don't (to misquote Katy Perry) "change parties like a girl changes clothes".  If you join a party, you've made a commitment, and if that party goes astray, you don't walk away unless there's a very good reason - you instead roll up your sleeves and try to fix the problems, or at the very least try to push for change.  That's exactly what I did - I got stuck in, stood in the Alba internal elections, got elected to several committees, and did my absolute level best to insist on due process in the Disciplinary Committee and to give the party a real internal democracy via the Constitution Review Group.  All I got for my efforts was to be unceremoniously thrown out of the party on gibberish trumped-up charges that no speaker of any known version of the English language has been able to make head nor tail of.  So it's redundant and bordering on offensive to say with a sense of entitlement that I am not living up to some kind of 'duty' to support the Alba Party.  The Alba Party made abundantly clear that it did not want my support, and it sent exactly the same message to countless other good independence supporters.  

There are two things that Alba is definitely not and never has been.  It is not a participative "member-led" party, and it is not a vehicle for delivering independence.  It is simply a fan club set up to give status, funding and a platform to a small and exceedingly nasty clique centred around Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh.  If you're an independence supporter, do not waste a further second of your time on Alba.  It's never going to deliver what you want.  It's never going to deliver anything worth having.

As for Liberate Scotland, they've disqualified themselves from the off by bringing the nativist party Sovereignty into the fold, complete with far-right policies on withholding citizenship rights from "non-Scots" on some sort of ill-defined ethnicity criteria, a total ban on "economic migration", and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.  I don't buy the argument that you shouldn't judge people by the company they keep, because it seems highly unlikely that Barrhead Boy would ever have been so comfortable with an electoral pact with Sovereignty unless he agreed with a fair number of their dodgier policies.  Even during his Alba days, one of his hobby-horses was withdrawing voting rights from English people living in Scotland. When I disagreed with him publicly about that, Alex Salmond phoned me up to say he couldn't have two members of "his NEC" in open conflict with each other (funny that - I thought the NEC was an elected body representing Alba members, but apparently not), but he stressed that he vehemently disagreed with Barrhead Boy about narrowing the franchise and asked me to trust him to "sort it out quietly" in some sort of unspecified way.  Perhaps in a roundabout sense he actually kept his word on that, judging by the fact that the hard core of blood and soil nutters now seem to be in Liberate Scotland rather than Alba.

So if you want to lecture people on the need to support a credible pro-independence alternative to the SNP, first of all you'd have to actually create such an entity, because at the moment it simply doesn't exist.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3000, meaning it is 44% 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

Will Corbyn and Sultana be spoilers for the SNP, or will they pave the way to the Promised Land?

My attitude to the prospect of a new Corbyn-led or Corbyn-founded or Corbyn-backed party of the left has been "I'll believe it when I see it", and in a strange way that hasn't changed as a result of the announcements of the last couple of days, which seem to have been more about individuals jostling for position before the launch of a party rather than getting on with the actual business of setting a party up.  However, presumably the talk has gone sufficiently far by this stage that some sort of new party, and one that will have a parliamentary presence, is highly likely to emerge in some form.  The only thing that might stop it would be if Keir Starmer is forced out of office in the near future and replaced by someone from the soft left, who then seeks reconciliation with the Corbynites.

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of events like this potential breakaway as taking place in another country and as being only of indirect interest to Scotland.  But in fact there was an opinion poll a couple of weeks ago that suggested the SNP was one of three parties that would suffer if a Corbyn-led party is set up, with the others being Labour and the Greens.

Hypothetical voting intentions if a Corbyn-led "populist" left party is formed (More In Common):

Reform UK 27% (-)

Labour 20% (-3)

Conservatives 20% (-)

Liberal Democrats 14% (-)

Corbyn Party 10% (n/a)

Greens 5% (-4)

SNP 2% (-1)

In this case the percentage changes are calculated from the standard voting intentions numbers in the same poll.  Now, to put it in perspective, the SNP vote in the Scottish subsample only drops from 28% to 24%, and that's based on a sample of only a couple of hundred respondents.  So the apparent appeal of Corbyn to SNP voters may just be statistical noise.  On the other hand, the Corbyn party is on 18% in the Scottish subsample, and it's hard to believe that a party of the left could perform anything like that well in Scotland without harming the SNP to at least some extent.

I'm reminded of walking around Glasgow in the days leading up to the 2017 general election and overhearing people spontaneously talking about how excited they were about Corbyn and how he was persuading them to turn back to Labour.  Those were almost certainly people who had voted SNP in 2015 and Yes in 2014.  So we'd be naive not to think that the new party could have broad appeal in Scotland, although the flipside of the coin is that Labour performed extremely poorly in Scotland under Corbyn in the 2016 Holyrood election and the 2019 general election.  Perhaps it was only when he had momentum in England that Scots thought he was worth taking a look at.

There was a write-up of the poll in the New Statesman with a very odd headline dismissing Corbyn as a "phantom" menace.  That didn't tally up with the contents of the article, and it certainly didn't tally up with the actual results of the poll, which suggest Corbyn would take one-third of the combined Labour/new party vote.  That makes him a figure of considerable significance, not the fringe irrelevance that London establishment folk like to portray him as.  And taking three percentage points off Labour could easily be enough to change the outcome of the next general election.

But to actually win or prosper in that general election, rather than to be just a disruptor, Corbyn will need more than 10% of the vote.  And there's one obvious way he might get it, which is by going into an electoral pact with the Greens.  Such an alliance could be greater than the sum of its parts, and might just be strong enough to overtake Labour in some polls during this parliament.  That would be a huge psychological moment, and would be difficult for centrists within the Labour party to wrap their heads around.  There's some speculation that Zack Polanski might be open to a pact if he becomes Green leader, although whether he'd be able to sell it to his party is another matter.  If he can't, the Greens and the new party might cancel each other out and leave the left in an even worse position than they currently find themselves, although it's interesting that the poll implies Corbyn could take votes away from Labour that the Greens currently can't seem to reach.

As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, here are some of the other 'known unknowns' about the new party, ie. 'things that we know that we do not know' - 

* Will other Labour MPs, with or without the whip, cross the floor and throw in their lot with Corbyn and Sultana?  It's hard to imagine Corbyn and his former Shadow Chancellor being in different parties from each other, but it might well work out that way due to John McDonnell's cultural loyalty to Labour.  But I speculated a few weeks ago that if there was even the slimmest of slim chances of an early general election before 2028, it would probably depend upon the partial disintegration of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and even a modest number of MP defections to the Corbyn party could conceivably end up looking like the first step in that process of disintegration (although it would almost certainly have to eventually involve right-wing Labour MPs searching for a very different sort of alternative political home, maybe even in Reform UK).

* Will George Galloway and the Workers Party want to join the new Corbyn project?  And perhaps more to the point, will the people around Corbyn want Galloway now that he seems to have lost the plot completely and started chasing the openly racist vote?  He always claimed he was talking about the Iraqi people, and not Saddam Hussein, when he "saluted your indefatigability", but he didn't mention at the time that he wanted the UK borders closed to all indefatigable people without pale skin.

* If Zarah Sultana foresees the new party having a conventional leadership structure with herself (or herself and Corbyn) at the top of that structure, will all the Independence Alliance MPs still be happy to join up?  They've got very used to having full parity of esteem with Corbyn in their current set-up.

* Is it possible that the new party could take a slightly more enlightened stance on Scottish independence than most London parties do?  Outright support for independence is far too much to hope for, clearly, but is there a chance of a neutral position, and perhaps no closing of the door on a referendum?  Corbyn would be personally sympathetic to at least being neutral, I suspect.  As Labour leader he indulged in plenty of Nat-bashing, and even trotted out the hoary old "you can't eat flags" line, but I suspect that was one of the compromises he felt he had to make (along with campaigning for Remain) to shore up his position.  My guess is that a London party will always revert to type and go Brit Nat.  But who knows - a Corbyn/Polanski alliance open to an indyref and polling at 15-20% might just be the sort of black swan event that unexpectedly opens the door for independence.

Incidentally, I was on Facebook last night and I saw that a friend of the family had changed his profile picture to a photo of Zarah Sultana, overlaid with a quote from her Twitter announcement yesterday.  She really has become a folk hero for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and the new party will be blessed to have her as an alternative figurehead if Corbyn, who has always seemed to be in two minds about whether he wants to be a party leader again, opts for a lesser role.  I've got to be honest, I'm a big fan of hers too, and if I was a voter in England I'm pretty sure I'd be thinking this is the most exciting thing to happen in politics for years.  Give me a Sultana over a Swinson any day of the week.

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The running total in the Scot Goes Pop 2025 fundraiser currently stands at £3000, meaning it is 44% 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

Was Rachel Reeves weeping for the failure of her political project, or for the shame of knowing it was never worth fighting for in the first place?

It now appears (although we'll have to wait for people's memoirs to know for sure) that Rachel Reeves' tears at PMQs yesterday may have been triggered by something that loveable ol' Lindsay Hoyle said to her.  But when it seemed more likely that she was weeping for the political failure of both herself and the Labour government, and in particular for the gutting of the welfare reform legislation, I couldn't help but think it perfectly summed up the tragedy of the modern Labour party.  To try to transform society for the better, and to fail, as many progressive politicians have done in the past, would be something to take immense pride in.  But to be so bereft because you betrayed everything your party once was by trying to make life worse for the most vulnerable people, and were thwarted, speaks to a kind of hollowing out of the British left's soul, which will leave Reeves' generation of Labour ministers with a sense of total emptiness when they reach the end of their careers.  What they fought for wasn't worth having and they didn't get it anyway.  I suppose the flipside is that the flame of Labour values does continue to burn, albeit as no more than a dull flicker, among the wider PLP - but unfortunately the only positive practical effect of electing a Labour majority to parliament is that it might sometimes be able to resist the right-wing excesses of the very Labour government that it pointlessly sustains in office.

There was an extraordinary quote on Tuesday from an anonymous Labour loyalist, attacking the welfare rebels: "What did they think the job was? They all think they're JFK because they delivered some leaflets while Morgan McSweeney won them the election."  If the job description of Labour MPs has been revised from creating a fairer society to total unthinking loyalty to the unelected Morgan McSweeney, then I think it's high time this modern day JFK was subjected to some proper public accountability, because I'm not sure I've ever even heard the sound of his voice.  I presume he still has a southern Irish accent, which would be rather jarring given what he's come to represent.  On the face of it, he strikes me as a total political dud, for three reasons -

* He forced Labour to abandon all of its values on the premise that doing so would increase the party's popularity, but ended up with roughly the same share of the vote that Jeremy Corbyn took in 2019, and a significantly lower share of the vote than Corbyn took in 2017.

* His strategic advice has led to the Starmer government's popularity plummetting further and faster than any other newly elected government in British history.

* He purged the PLP as best he could of all free thinkers and replaced them with drones to ensure that his right-wing programme would face no substantive resistance, and yet the Starmer administration with its landslide majority has still ended up functioning like a minority government that cannot carry its business without negotiations and massive concessions.

Now that really is political failure.  To misquote Senator Lloyd Bentson: "Morgan, you're no Jack Kennedy...although let's hear what your voice sounds like just to be sure."

Ipsos poll confirms that the end is nigh for Alba

I didn't get around to giving you the party political voting intentions numbers from the Ipsos poll yesterday, so here they are...

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34%

Labour 23%

Reform UK 14%

Conservatives 10%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Greens 9%

Alba 1%

Scottish Parliament list ballot:

SNP 26%

Labour 22%

Reform UK 16%

Greens 15%

Conservatives 10%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Alba 2%

Scottish voting intentions for next UK general election:

SNP 31%

Labour 22%

Reform UK 16%

Conservatives 10%

Greens 10%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Alba 1%

If the Alba vote shares are accurate, and I don't particularly doubt that they are likely to be reasonably accurate, Alba have made no progress at all since 2021 when they were light-years short of winning any seats.  One of the several dishonest points in Jim McEleny's email to party members after resigning as convener of Alba's Inverclyde branch was that he tried to make out that things had fallen apart since the good old days when his son/brother (I think it's son but I'd better cover all the options) was General Secretary - ie. that opinion polls showed the party on course for seats back then but no longer do.  In fact there has been no change in the polls at all - Alba have always been on course for zero seats and they remain on course for zero seats.  To be blunt, Alba members were cynically deceived by Chris McEleny with his ridiculous "poll after poll" catchphrase - it was a downright lie that Alba were ever on course for seats, and yet it was obvious from social media that many Alba members were successfully duped.

This is why independence supporters must ignore the siren voices, such as the controversial "Stew" blogger, which are trying to convince them to throw their list votes away on fringe parties that cannot in the real world win any list seats.  Given how evenly spread their vote is, Alba would need to at least double their support to even have an outside chance of nicking a seat somewhere.  If anyone were to say "oh of course the SNP can achieve objective X or Y, all they need to do is double their vote", Stew would be the first to mock the naivety and the dishonesty of that position - so why it should supposedly be any different with Alba or with the wilder fringe elements represented by Liberate Scotland is a complete mystery.  There are only two pro-independence parties capable of winning list seats, namely the SNP and the Greens, and frankly the task facing anyone who is serious about electing a pro-indy majority at Holyrood next year is to choose between those two parties.  Voting for anyone else increases the chances of a unionist majority without a shadow of doubt.

Incidentally, I heard an extraordinary story last week about a senior figure within Alba, possibly even one 'of Salmond blood', trying to get the police involved in her vendetta against a female NEC colleague who recently left the party.  The story was so garbled that it was hard to fully make sense of, but there's a real whiff of 'the last days in the bunker' about Alba at the moment.  NEC or other committee members who are the subject of the leadership's paranoid suspicions about "treachery" should probably just count themselves lucky if they escape the firing squad.

Stew was gloating yesterday about John Swinney's net approval rating of -17.  It's true that's unusually low by the standards of other recent polls, but nevertheless it still leaves Mr Swinney with slightly better ratings than Mr Sarwar.  There was speculation at the Holyrood Sources event last week that Labour's position might improve once voters turn their attention away from Westminster and towards Holyrood, just as there was a big swing towards the SNP in 2011 once voters actually remembered it was a Holyrood election.  But that swing in 2011 was driven by two factors - a) the fact that Alex Salmond was regarded as a far more credible leader than Iain Gray, and b) the fact that the SNP were more trusted than Labour to stand up for Scotland.  Well, in the new Ipsos poll, John Swinney is slightly more popular than Anas Sarwar, and the SNP are more trusted than Labour to stand up for Scottish interests, by a margin of 37% to 12%.  If the hypothetical Labour fightback is going to happen, what exactly will it be built on?

More analysis of the Ipsos poll showing a pro-independence majority

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an analysis piece at The National about the new Ipsos poll, which shows Yes in the lead by 52% to 48%, and a substantial SNP lead in both Westminster and Holyrood voting intentions.  You can read the article HERE.

Ipsos abandon a decades-long tradition of phone polling in Scotland - but continue to show a Yes lead on the independence question

As you'll remember from a few days ago, there was a GB-wide poll from Ipsos which used a new methodology.  Ipsos announced they were moving away from telephone polling in favour of using an online panel which had been recruited offline (making it significantly different from most online polling panels).  I wondered at the time whether there would be a similar methodological change in the next poll in the long-running Ipsos series for STV, which has always previously been conducted by phone, and which in recent years has produced much better results for Yes on the independence question than most online firms.  It didn't take long to find out - a new Ipsos / STV poll was released today, and it has indeed switched to online fieldwork, but crucially it still shows a Yes lead.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Ipsos / STV News, 12th-18th June 2025)

Yes 52% (+1)

No 48% (-1)

More details and analysis to follow...

A question for Mandy Rhodes: who has killed the most women over the last year, Iran or Israel?

I saw a furious response on Twitter to a Mandy Rhodes article about the Israeli assault on Iran, and having taken a look I can understand where her detractor is coming from.  Ms Rhodes seems to have heartily embraced the prevailing London media narrative of "when Israel is committing a genocide, the priority is clear - we must denounce left-wing activism at Glastonbury".  Specifically she thinks activists have no right to champion Iran over Israel-Trump, given Iran's appalling human rights record.  She cites the high number of executions in Iran, and in particular the number of executions of women - although oddly the main thing she succeeds in doing is demonstrating that the number of women executed is only a very small percentage of the overall number of executions in Iran.  As in most countries with the death penalty, the people most affected, to a vastly disproportionate degree, are men - and to be clear, that does not make it any the more excusable.

One thing that can be said to Israel's credit is that it is 'abolitionist in practice' on the death penalty - it has only executed two people in its history, and the last one was Adolf Eichmann well over half a century ago.  But how much of a virtue is that in the real world, when Israel's allies allow it to commit extra-judicial killings on an industrial scale with absolute impunity?  Who has killed the most people over the last year - Iran or Israel?  Who has killed the most women over the last year - Iran or Israel?  Who has killed the most children over the last year - Iran or Israel?  It's not even a contest.

The US, by contrast, is very much on the same page as Iran in its enthusiastic application of the death penalty against both men and women.  In fact, the three countries with the highest number of verified executions in 2023 were Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US.  The list would undoubtedly be topped by China if the number of executions there wasn't kept secret, but nevertheless the US is almost certain to be in the top seven or so.  Donald Trump has of course lifted the moratorium on the use of the federal death penalty.  If Mandy Rhodes thinks a country's retention of capital punishment means it can never be actively supported in military conflicts regardless of any other circumstances, I trust we'll find that she's been morally consistent over the years by refraining from showing any support for military action taken by the US in the aftermath of 9/11, for example.

A key point that left-wing activists who have expressed sympathy for Iran in recent weeks would make is that Iran was the victim of unprovoked aggression from Israel, and indeed aggression motivated by a desperate wish to distract the world's attention from the genocide in Gaza - a tactic of breathtaking cynicism that Ms Rhodes seems only too keen to reward Netanyahu for.  If a country's poor human rights record means that the normal sympathies can't be extended to it when it is the victim of unprovoked aggression, I trust we'll find Ms Rhodes consistently applied the same principle immediately after the Hamas attacks of 7th October 2023, and refused to express any sympathy for Israel due to its brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967.

As for any suggestion that the Israeli and US bombing of Iran can be justified as a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear programme, don't make me laugh.  Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  It does not possess nuclear weapons and according to America's own intelligence assessment of only a few weeks ago, it was not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.  By contrast, Israel is one of a tiny number of countries to have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it has possessed nuclear weapons for decades.  If belligerent Middle Eastern countries possessing nuclear weapons is deemed to be a problem, the first step towards a solution is pretty obvious - Israel must be disarmed at all costs.

A gentle hint to the non-Sovereignty contingent within Liberate Scotland: the tactic of "slinging a deefie" at any questions about the electoral pact with a far-right nativist party is not going to work for a whole year, and especially not when the mainstream media start asking the questions

As I understand it, Liberate Scotland view the SNP as an anti-independence party, hence the decision to split the vote on the constituency ballot. Until they break out of that mindset (and I doubt if they will) it can only be a destructive exercise.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

Who is going to provide the credible plan?

— eva comrie (@mickbrick54) June 29, 2025

Certainly not Liberate Scotland. I'm astonished that you're standing for an alliance that includes a nativist party like Sovereignty. You were Alba's Equalities Convener - surely the most fundamental equality of all is equal citizenship rights?

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

Diversion James. It doesn’t work with me. Who’s providing the credible plan? #IndependenceNothingLess. BTW you don’t need to remind me of the content of my own CV.

— eva comrie (@mickbrick54) June 29, 2025

Great, you remember. So what the hell are you doing in alliance with Sovereignty? Do you have any red line? Would you go into alliance with the BNP if they were pro-indy? This is not diversion - this is fundamental. I have no interest in ushering in fascism in the name of indy.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

As I said your attempts at diversion don’t work. Who’s producing the credible plan?

— eva comrie (@mickbrick54) June 29, 2025

Barrhead Boy, presumably. #sarcasm

You *seriously* have no answer to what you're doing in alliance with the far right? You really think that just refusing point blank to answer is going to work for the next *year*? Good luck with that.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

I asked you who’s providing the credible plan because I genuinely want to see one. I cannot help if you cannot answer.

— eva comrie (@mickbrick54) June 29, 2025

But not only do you not have an answer to my question about what you're doing in an electoral pact with fascists, neither do you have an answer to *your own* question either. If you demand a "credible plan", who in Liberate Scotland is providing it? Barrhead Boy?

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

I understand that you desire independence and that’s why you rejoined the SNP. I’d really like to know how you think they can achieve independence. However I respect Gil’s view and wonder if you think there’s a credible plan up John Swinney’s sleeve ?

— eva comrie (@mickbrick54) June 29, 2025

If you're asking me whether I think John Swinney has a more credible plan than Barrhead Boy or the far right nativists of Sovereignty, which is the only relevant question given who you've thrown in your lot with, the answer is yes. An extremely low bar, admittedly, but yes.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 29, 2025

As you know, I'm far from content with the SNP leadership's current approach to independence, but the point is that pretty much any plan is superior to the Barrhead / Barcelona brew of a) uniting 0.2% of the independence movement under a "big tent", b) demonising the other 99.8% of the independence movement as "saboteurs", c) fiddling the franchise so English people living in Scotland can't vote, d) strolling effortlessly to a landslide election triumph, and e) marching on the UN to beg them to decolonise us.

This is the first time I've had any contact with Eva since she made what I can only describe as the dreadful error of joining Liberate Scotland.  If she had stayed as a genuine independent candidate and stood on the list only, I think she would have had a small outside chance of becoming an MSP, but she's blown it by associating with a brand that is likely to become as toxic as Alba (if not more so).  But as I hadn't previously spoken to her about her decision, I expected she'd have some kind of thoughtful answer to the question of what on earth had possessed her to enter into an electoral pact with Sovereignty.  Her refusal to even acknowledge the question, let alone answer it, stunned me.

I was on the Alba NEC with Eva for a year in 2021-22, and two things stood out for me about her.  One was her absolute commitment to the equalities role - she was extremely passionate about aspects of it that have been neglected by others, most notably justice for Scotland's Travellers community, which is an issue that has been in the news very recently.  It's hard to believe that someone who feels so strongly about equality for one of the most marginalised segments of our society would have much truck with the idea that some residents of Scotland should be denied citizenship after independence on arbitrary ethnic grounds, but that appears to be the Sovereignty position.

The second thing that stood out was Eva's hardheaded realism about electoral strategy.  When she was concerned about the deficiencies in Alba's preparations for the 2022 local elections, she spoke up volubly and identified exactly what she thought the shortcomings were.  She was nobody's yes-woman - she cared about independence and about the party above all else, and if she thought that Alex Salmond and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh needed a forceful dose of reality, she was more than willing to provide it.  I find it very hard to believe that she's naive enough to think that the questions about Sovereignty and its nativist policies will go away if they're just studiously ignored.  It's one thing fobbing off fellow independence supporters on social media, but when the mainstream media start asking the same questions, Liberate Scotland are going to be absolutely crucified if they can't find a more convincing and respectful way of answering.  (That's assuming the mainstream media pay them any attention at all - and if not, all of this becomes totally academic because Liberate will be lucky to get 0.1% of the vote.)

To me, the obstinacy of just repeatedly ignoring the questions has more of a "made in Barrhead" or "made in Barcelona" feel to it than "made in Clackmannanshire".  Barrhead Boy is by all accounts the de facto leader of Liberate, and Eva may be reluctantly going along with the dubious wisdom of a "just sling a deefie" directive imposed by HQ in sunny Catalonia.

Now we've established that Stew doesn't want Holyrood to have any say on foreign affairs (meaning by definition that he opposes independence), can he clarify whether he agrees with his own retweet that Israel's 1967 invasion and conquest of the Arab town of Bethlehem was "the liberation of Bethlehem"?

As mentioned in the previous post, my devoted Somerset stalker "Stew" has been continuing to fire off tweets about me over recent days, faster than I can really keep up with, even though in some cases he has been directly demanding responses from me.  And this is the guy who just a few months ago innocently claimed to mention me on Twitter only a couple of times a year at most.  One might almost be tempted to say that he's finally dropped the pretence, although actually that's not true, because in most cases he's still doing his usual thing of making clear by indirect means that he's referring to me but without mentioning me by name.  He repeatedly does the same thing on his blog - the idea being that in a few months' time he can successfully shove what he's been doing down the memory hole by inviting his readers to search Wings or his Twitter account for my name, and say "You see?  I've barely even mentioned the guy!"

While I have a few spare moments, I may as well work my way through a few 'highlights' of his tweets about me from the last week or so, although frankly there aren't enough hours in the day to deal with all of them.  First up, there's a multi-tweet thread in which he critiques the question I asked of Anas Sarwar the other night.  You'll be dumbfounded to hear that he's not a fan of it.

Look, Stew, I'm truly sorry if I dismayed you by asking a question that departed from the women-with-beards issue.  Like all of us, I do know the lyrics of the reworked Elton John cover I Guess That's Why They Call It The Stew off by heart: "time wasted asking non-women-with-beards-related questions could be time spent asking women-with-beards-related questions".  Very true.

Leaving aside my blasphemy in neglecting the Sacred Topic, however, I'm rather surprised that Stew was so unhappy with my question, because I saw him earlier in the week imploring anyone who attended the Swinney/Sarwar event in Edinburgh to ask the two leaders whether there were any policy areas that divided them apart from independence.  I had already submitted my question by then, but I was confident that what I had put forward fulfilled a very similar function, because Gaza has been one of the points of difference between the SNP and Labour.  "Give us points of difference, but not THAT one" seems to be Stew's message.  "Don't even mention that one, because Bibi must be allowed to get on with the genocide in civilised peace and quiet."

So here's the remarkable thing. I asked Anas Sarwar whether he thought the Scottish Government should think small, "get back to the day job", and stop talking about foreign affairs.  His answer on all three of those points was essentially "no", and he promised to speak out about foreign affairs if he becomes First Minister, because he said his social justice values do not end at the Scottish border.  So having set out to find a dividing line between Mr Swinney and Mr Sarwar, the irony is that I ended up finding a dividing line between Mr Sarwar and Stew instead.  Despite opposing independence, Mr Sarwar believes, or at least claims to, that the Scottish Government should not be restricted to concerning themselves with the limited number of devolved powers imposed on them by Westminster.  Whereas Stew absolutely thinks they should be restricted in that way, and that they should stop getting ideas above their station, which is an extraordinary worldview for any self-styled 'independence supporter' to hold.  But there again, it's a statement of the obvious that if you don't think foreign affairs should be the province of the Scottish Government, you don't actually support independence at all.  

Let's stop pretending black is white, shall we?  Stew probably was a genuine independence supporter eleven years ago, but he no longer is.  He's a unionist now, and a devo-sceptic unionist at that, albeit one who ties himself up in knots trying to convince people that he still supports independence in some sort of convoluted, upside-down manner - because he knows he would lose readers otherwise.

Aw, bless.  You gotta love Stew, he's apparently convinced himself that his latest cosplay "psephologist" blogpost was some sort of killer effort that has left everyone totally stunned and that no-one can think of a response to.  Stew, I don't know how to break the news to you, dear heart, but apart from the first few sentences I haven't even read your precious blogpost yet.  I deliberately didn't read it, because I knew I might not have time to respond for a few days and I didn't want my mind cluttered up with gibberish while I was getting on with other things.  But rest assured I will find the time to read it and respond at length.  A little patience, if you please.  Although I do love the fact that you've clearly been frantically hitting the refresh button over the last week in the hope of seeing my reply.  A proper stalker badge is on its way to YOU, my friend.

This one isn't a Stew tweet about me, but instead a Stew retweet of a Stephen Daisley tweet about an anonymous comment on this blog.  What's deeply disturbing about it is that Daisley presents screenshots of a Spectator article he wrote about Winnie Ewing's supposed ties to Israel, and in which he describes Israel's 1967 invasion and conquest of Bethlehem as "the liberation of Bethlehem".  

Long-term readers of Scot Goes Pop will know I've made numerous references to an extraordinary article that Daisley wrote many years ago, long before he was even employed by STV, in which he similarly said the 1967 invasion and conquest of East Jerusalem was "the liberation".  But to talk of the liberation of Bethlehem is even more offensive, because throughout modern history Bethlehem hasn't been a Jewish town at all.  The censuses in the 1920s and 1930s found literally just two Jewish people in the whole town.  Traditionally the population was overwhelmingly Arab Christian, and more recently has been overwhelmingly Arab Muslim, ie. Palestinian.  The vast majority of countries in the world regard Bethlehem as part of the sovereign (but illegally occupied) territory of the State of Palestine, and the minority that don't recognise the State of Palestine instead regard Bethlehem as part of the 'Occupied Palestinian Territories'.

The only way of making sense of Daisley's barmy claim that Bethlehem was liberated in 1967 is that he means it was promised to Israel in the Bible thousands of years ago, and therefore it needed to be annexed and its population expelled or exterminated, so that the rightful ethnoreligious owners could take over.  Now, we all know the standard disclaimer that "retweets are not necessarily endorsements", but if I was retweeting content that contained such an outrageous claim, I would go out of my way to make clear I disagreed with it.  Stew very noticeably did not do so, and I think we could do with some clarity from him about whether he agrees with Daisley about Bethlehem or not.  Even if he read Daisley's words and didn't think they were controversial, that speaks volumes too.

Elsewhere, Stew's newest obsession seems to be retweeting derogatory comment about Zohran Mamdani, the progressive and rather wonderful Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York...

Presumably Stew was cheering on the disgraced and God-awful "centrist" Andrew Cuomo in the primary, and in November will be keeping his fingers crossed for the Republican incumbent Eric Adams.

There's also this immigrant-bashing dog-whistle of a retweet, presumably preparing the ground for Stew's inevitable endorsement of Reform UK next year...

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