At least Campbell's propaganda poll is helpfully revealing what his current prorities are: yesterday it was "let's reduce the pressure on Netanyahu to stop starving babies", and today it's "let's try to get the abolition of devolution onto the political agenda"

A few weeks ago, the senior Alba Party member Mike Dailly made the extraordinary declaration that he thought there should be a referendum on abolishing the Scottish Parliament and reverting to direct rule from London (with the clear implication that he'd be voting in favour of that) unless Maggie Chapman was removed as Deputy Convener of the Equalities Committee.  I know, I know, it doesn't sound any less bonkers with the passage of time.  And given that Alba is theoretically supposed to believe in Scottish self-government rather than London rule, it was even more remarkable that there was no apparent attempt on the part of the party leadership to distance itself from Mr Dailly's views.

The idea also seemed to instantly capture the imagination of the controversial and increasingly far-right "Stew" blogger, who has come to loathe our democratically elected national parliament because it keeps having the temerity to pass legislation he dislikes.  But in much the same way that he tactically decided to "both sides" the Gaza genocide rather than just baldly saying "it's all the fault of Hamas so please let Bibi get on with exterminating the Palestinians in respectful peace and quiet", he also realised that he couldn't be seen to be openly campaining for the abolition of devolution, because he's trying to keep up the increasingly fatuous pretence that he's still some sort of "pro-independence blogger".  

So he came up with what he thought was a brilliant wheeze.  He suggested modifying Mr Dailly's idea so that the referendum would be a binary choice between abolishing the Scottish Parliament altogether, and Scotland becoming an independent state.  In other words the devolved system, which was set up after attaining landslide majority support in a 1997 referendum, would be abolished by a new referendum in which nobody is allowed to vote to retain it.  It's self-evidently a batsh*t crazy idea, a total non-starter that any serious commentator would have been embarrassed to have even thought about, let alone to write it down and advocate it.  But the general rule of thumb with Stew is that the more preposterous the wheeze, the more his enthusiasm for it just seems to grow with time.  And from his own narrow point of view you can see the attraction, because it allows him to pursue his anti-devolution agenda while innocently posing as someone who is just trying to come up with fresh thinking for delivering independence.  Given the seemingly limitless credulity of his hardcore cult followers, it even allows him to attack the SNP for "not being serious about independence" simply because they very sensibly refuse to give the time of day to the latest Nutty Stew Idea De Jour.

Unsurprisingly, he's devoted a question in his latest propaganda mini-poll to his madcap plan.  But tellingly, he hasn't asked whether voters support the idea of holding his referendum, but instead the somewhat less important question of how they would vote if it was held.  Presumably this is because he has just about enough self-awareness to realise that if he asked voters whether his idea was a good one, they'd inevitably and resoundingly tell him that it is in fact a very, very stupid idea indeed.

If there were to be a second independence referendum tomorrow and the ONLY options on the ballot were full independence or the permanent closure of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and a return to direct Westminster rule, how do you think you would vote?  (Norstat / Stew, 27th-30th May 2025)

Full independence: 63%

Return to direct Westminster rule: 37%

To a limited extent this is good news, because what it tells us is that a significant minority of the hardest-to-reach No voters care strongly enough about having an autonomous parliament in Edinburgh that if the only remaining way of saving it was to switch to supporting full independence, they would do so.  That means, as I and many others have pointed out in recent months, that if a Reform UK government came into power and started trying to roll back devolution, it could be the game-changing moment that finally leads to an overwhelming and stable Yes majority.

But what the poll categorically does not tell us is that full independence would be the winning option in Stew's proposed referendum, for the very simple reason that no such referendum will ever take place.  And if you want to know why it will never take place, all you have to do is pay proper heed to the words of Stew himself.

"There is not, in our lifetimes, going to be another independence referendum on the terms of the first one. The UK government has no conceivable reason to agree to one, because it has nothing to gain. It conceded one in 2014 because it was confident it would win handsomely and wasn’t really risking anything"

Precisely.  The UK government will not hold a referendum when there is nothing forcing it to do so and when it would risk Scotland becoming an independent country.  There is nothing forcing the UK government to agree to the #StewRef, and they would be even less likely to agree to it than to a standard indyref, because as the poll demonstrates, it would carry an even greater risk of independence actually occurring.  So the whole plan falls apart on Stew's own logic.  The other reason London would not agree is that all UK governments feel obliged to superficially pose as supporters of devolution, so they wouldn't ever allow themselves to be framed as viewing the potential abolition of devolution as some kind of 'reward' or 'bait' for offering the vote.  That would just make it even harder for them to stop the momentum for independence.

The SNP would obviously never propose the idea in the first place for two very good reasons: a) they'd know the answer from London would be no, so they wouldn't make a fool of themselves by making such a silly request, and b) they wouldn't allow themselves to be seen to be willing to irresponsibly gamble away a parliament that millions of Scots care about and that took decades to win.  It would be a fundamentally unserious thing for any political party to do, and it might well destroy their credibility, and the credibillity of the wider independence movement, forever.

Stew may be highly unstable but he's not a fool - he knows full well that there's a hopeless logical contradiction in what he's proposing.  He's not banging the drum for the idea because he thinks it's remotely viable, but instead because he thinks it's a neat way of getting the option of abolishing devolution onto the political agenda and talked about.  And at least with his own disciples, he may get away with such a cynical stunt because they always reliably fail to apply the slightest scrutiny or logic to anything he says.

What this reminds me of most is the period somewhere around 2018 or 2019 when he announced that he'd come up with a cunning plan for how the SNP could get an independence referendum out of Theresa May.  All they had to do was offer to get her out of a fix by voting in favour of her soft Brexit deal in direct swap for an independence referendum, and she would have no option but to agree.  And of course because the SNP didn't go down that road, he's castigated them ever since for missing a supposedly golden opportunity to win independence.

Now, as regular readers know, I don't think the SNP did anything like enough to pursue independence during the key Brexit years of 2017-21.  But it was literally impossible for them to win independence in the specific way Stew claims they could have, because they simply didn't possess the arithmetical leverage that he alleges.  Theresa May would have said no to the Stew Deal for two reasons: a) she was a conviction politician on the question of 'Our Precious Union' and wouldn't have betrayed everything she believed in, even to save her own skin, and b) she'd have known it would have been pointless because she would never have been able to sell a deal involving an independence referendum to her own backbenchers, many of whom were hardline unionists.  She'd have gained 30-odd votes for her soft Brexit through one door and simultaneously lost 100-odd votes for it through another door.

Leading Alba figures understand this perfectly well, of course, but one of the disreputable things they've done over recent years is pretend not to understand it, because they know Stew has successfully convinced his followers that the fairy-tale deal with May was there to be done. For as long as people are daft enough to believe that, it's a useful stick for Alba to beat the SNP with.