The "Make Mine A Double" juggernaut keeps rolling on, as optimism grows that Stew, too, will back SNP 1 & 2

As I always point out, I don't actually use the phrase "SNP 1 & 2" because it wrongly implies that the Holyrood voting system is preferential and involves numbers, but the title of this blogpost doesn't break that rule because it's only there for wind-up-Stew-with-a-pleasing-little-rhyme purposes.

My video on Wednesday certainly seemed to hit an almighty nerve with Stew, probably because it called him out for failing to do his self-defined job as a "journalist".  I pointed out in the video that I know for certain that he was contacted multiple times in 2023-24 by people who wanted to write guest posts for Wings revealing the vote-rigging, rampant nepotism and culture of bullying that was destroying the Alba Party from within - in other words precisely the sort of guest posts that the late Iain Lawson *was* brave enough to run on the very popular blog Yours For Scotland.  Not only did Stew flatly refuse (or just completely ignore) all guest post submissions on the subject of the Alba meltdown, he also failed to cover the story himself - or, to put it more pointedly, he deliberately decided to hush the whole thing up.  Not exactly the actions of the "fearless investigative journalist" he preposterously portrays himself as.  We can only speculate as to his reasons for doing that - the least-worst interpretation is that he was driven by misplaced loyalty to Alex Salmond and to McEleny.  But whatever his motivation, the outcome of his "wheesht for the bullies" routine has been that Alba has, in his own words, "reduced itself with infighting to a shambolic irrelevance which there’s no credible hope of retrieving".  

The point I made in the video is that Stew was perhaps the one person who could have averted that outcome, because of the authority he held due to Salmond, Ahmed-Sheikh, McEleny and Hanvey constantly speaking of him in hushed reverential terms (however nutty this may seem) as the party's spiritual godfather.  If he had revealed to Wings readers what was going on before it was too late, the Alba leadership wouldn't have been able to ignore him in the way they ignored the revelations on the Iain Lawson blog  - they would have been forced to make some sort of move to put their house in order.  But Stew quite simply failed to do his "job" as a "journalist", and as a result he is one of the key authors of Alba's demise, a fate that was finally sealed a week or two ago when Ash Regan's resignation consigned them to fringe party status with no parliamentary representation.

You can tell how much Stew was smarting at hearing these uncomfortable home truths, because when he lashed out with yet another Wings blogpost about me, he failed to do certain things that he has always done in the past to at least maintain his own self-image as a "journalist".  Of the 719 words in the latest post, no fewer than 559 comprised quotes from my own blogposts on Scot Goes Pop, but he failed to attribute those words to their source, ie. he failed to identify me as their author.  OK, it's entirely standard for him to avoid referring to me by name - that's a long-standing stunt designed to maintain his tedious fiction that he "never even mentions me".  (The idea is that periodically he challenges his readers to use the search function on Wings to look for posts containing my name.  "You see?  There's hardly anything there!", etc, etc.)   But what he does usually do is link to an archived version of the Scot Goes Pop post he's quoting or referring to, so that anyone who clicks the link can see who he's talking about, which is a kind of indirect attribution of source.  He didn't do that on this occasion, and I suspect that wasn't an oversight.  It was literally impossible to tell from the post alone who he was quoting from, and indeed several of his readers ended up having to ask him.

Another sign of his rage was that he chopped up and spliced together quotes from several different blogposts of mine that were written days apart, but didn't indicate where the joins were with the use of, for example, marks of ellipsis.  That's a breach of basic standards that no professional journalist would ever make, but let's face it, when Stew's temper gets the better of him, all pretence that he has any standards at all pretty much evaporates.  Astoundingly, he claimed as bold as brass at the top of the post that none of my words were being taken out of context, in spite of the fact that in at least one case he had chopped up words from the same blogpost and rearranged them into a different order to give a misleading impression - you can hardly get a more clear-cut case of "taking words out of context" than that.  

To put beyond doubt that he succeeded in his attempt to deceive his readers, take a look at this bonkers tweet from John Smythe which expresses absolutely sincere bafflement that the "conclusion" of my "article" didn't seem to follow on logically from what had preceded it - 

I have seen a few others that do similar. Why ignore your own analysis when summing up? It makes a mockery of the whole article.

— John Smythe (@JohnSmytheInves) October 16, 2025

Yeah, you see, John, the reason for that is probably that no such "article" ever existed.  I can hardly take much responsibility for a conclusion that wasn't a conclusion or for an article that wasn't an article.  I know some people will argue that the fault here lies with John himself for being a bit slow on the uptake or for not reading Stew's disclaimer properly, but I'm not sure that's entirely fair on him, given that even if he did read the disclaimer, he'll have been wrongly led to believe that nothing was taken out of context and that everything "means what it sounds like it means".  And, of course, because Stew deliberately didn't identify me as the author of the jumbled-up quotes, it was much less likely that people would check for themselves and discover that he was feeding them porkies.

The little game Stew is playing here is what I would call "performative synthetic incredulity".  He wants to coax his readers, albeit by highly artificial and deceptive means, into bursting into laughter at the juxtaposition he offers between my misgivings about the SNP's new strategy on winning independence and my statement that people should vote "both votes SNP".  Because any reader who laughs will feel like their amusement is natural and spontaneous rather than carefully coaxed, Stew's hope is that they will come to feel on a gut level that it is 'obvious' that my position is ridiculous and somehow contradictory, and that Stew's position (that all independence supporters should seek to totally destroy the SNP by electing a unionist government) is somehow inescapable and logical.   But is it?  Let's look at my position and Stew's position side by side (something he desperately doesn't want you to do, for reasons that will become obvious) -

MY POSITION: "If the SNP go down a strategic blind alley, we should be honest and admit that it's a setback and makes it less likely that independence will be delivered within the next few years.  But abandoning the SNP in order to elect a unionist government would mean we have completely taken leave of our senses, and would turn a recoverable setback into an unmitigated catastrophe.  In any case, the SNP cannot actually be 'destroyed' by flicking a switch, as Stew fatuously claims - they attract very strong brand loyalty from a very substantial percentage of the Scottish electorate, and even if they are replaced by a unionist government, they will remain by far the leading pro-independence force in Scotland.  All we'd be doing is idiotically delaying - perhaps by one or two decades - any chance of independence, which can only realistically happen when an SNP-led government is in office.  The decision taken by delegates at the Aberdeen conference relates to the 2026 election only, and doesn't bind the party beyond that.  If we just show a little maturity and patience, and ensure the independence flame keeps burning bright by working for the strongest possible SNP result next May, we'll keep alive the very real possibility that a more viable strategy will emerge in future and can be successfully implemented.  Furthermore, although I estimate the chances of a single-party SNP majority in May as around 0.5%, that isn't zero, and it's just conceivable that if we all get stuck in we might hit the jackpot.  A true gambler, as Alex Salmond was, would always bet on success, even as a long shot, rather than making failure inevitable by lashing out destructively."

THE STEW POSITION: "If the SNP do not offer exactly what I want at this election, they must be completely destroyed forever so that they can't offer people anything at any future elections either.  We must destroy them by voting for unionist parties, even though I cannot explain how that will actually destroy them in practice because their core vote will remain intact and those voters do not listen to me and do not see the world in the angry way that I do.  If we succeed in destroying the SNP and installing a unionist government, that will somehow help in the long run because a new pro-independence party more to my liking will pop up to take the SNP's place.  However, I can confirm that this new party will not be Alba, who I described recently as a shambolic irrelevance, and I can also confirm the new party will not be Liberate Scotland, who I described recently as a micro-party that had never been anything BUT a shambolic irrelevance.  No, the new party will instead be one that has not yet been devised, and I cannot explain how it will come into being, what its nature or policy programme will be, or who will lead it.  I also cannot explain why there is any particular reason to think that the destruction of the SNP, even if it were possible, would lead to the creation of any sort of credible pro-independence alternative, rather than to the resumption of the permanent unionist rule we were used to prior to 2007.  But trust me, I'm Stew, I'm here to help, and my enthusiasm for voting for staunchly anti-independence, far-right parties is entirely coincidental."

I'm comfortable that this comparison shows beyond any doubt that the Stew position is the unnatural, convoluted, implausible one, and that mine is in many ways simply a statement of the obvious.  If you want independence, you get it by voting for it, not by voting against it.  If that sounds like any sort of strange statement, then you might want to consider the disturbing possibility that Stew's Pied Piper act has actually worked on you to some extent.

Incidentally, my point about not giving up on the outside chance of the target of a single-party majority being met is one that should really resonate with Stew, because unlike me, he rates it as considerably higher than a 0.5% chance.  In his now-legendary blogpost "The blindness of hatred" from five months ago, he claimed that the SNP were guaranteed to win at least 65 constituency seats next May, which of course would mean they'd automatically win a single-party overall majority without requiring any list seats at all.  It's official: Stew backs John Swinney to deliver!  A Wings endorsement of Make Mine A Double / Both Votes SNP must now surely follow.

Stew concluded his piece with a rather sinister euphemism about how his readers should follow a "different path" from the one I was suggesting.  I've since made strenuous efforts to produce a visual depiction for you of what the Stew Path would look like, but alas Grok wouldn't play ball, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

In response to Stew's latest post, I asked Grok if it could give me an image of "Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland following Nigel Farage down a path". This is what it's given me so far.

It's going to be a looooooong afternoon. pic.twitter.com/DdhZiW9YlN

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 16, 2025

This is Grok's latest rendering of "Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland following Nigel Farage down a path".

I suppose the one consolation here is that AI is clearly not yet on the verge of taking over the world. pic.twitter.com/x7zkAbS8y2

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 16, 2025

Donno, they’ve got the scowl and the eyes spot on. 😆

— Pedro (@celticchampionz) October 16, 2025

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