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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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