SCOT goes POP!: 2025-01-05

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

So I discovered one thing last night - at least one person is keen enough on Ash Regan becoming Alba leader that they are willing to manipulate internet polls to astroturf momentum for her

Although self-selecting online polls are hopelessly unscientific, there's a case to be made for paying some slight heed to them in situations such as the Alba leadership election, because one thing we know for almost certain is that no polling companies will be conducting polls of Alba members. I suppose straw polls could be taken at branch meetings to get a sense of who is winning, but the results would still not be reliable, because people who attend branch meetings are not necessarily representative of the wider membership. (Indeed, that was one of the very points I repeatedly made at the Constitution Review Group before Mr McEleny got me removed from my elected position - ie. that all members should be democratically empowered, not just the minority who are able to turn up for meetings. It predictably went down like a lead balloon, but I stand by that point absolutely.)

Curiously, the first Twitter poll that I saw of the leadership election was run by, of all people, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia. It showed Ash Regan with a decent lead over Kenny MacAskill. However, I wondered if that might have been partly due to the four-way format, with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and Angus MacNeil included as candidates, even though they are unlikely to stand. So I decided to see what would happen if I ran a head-to-head poll between Mr MacAskill and Ms Regan, and initially, as I suspected would happen, Mr MacAskill did better and built up a slight lead.

But then I checked back half an hour later and suddenly 500 votes had appeared out of nowhere, and almost all of them were for Ms Regan, who had raced away into an almost 9-1 lead. It was obvious one or more Regan supporters had manipulated the poll. Someone suggested there may have been an innocent explanation, perhaps due to Regan supporters enthusiastically sharing the poll among their fellow travellers, but having thought about it, that just doesn't make any sense. 500 people is getting on for 10% of the entire Alba membership, and the idea that they're all reachable within 30 minutes is stretching credibility somewhat. More likely, perhaps, is that somebody was able to use a large number of fake accounts to give the appearance of widespread support for Ms Regan.

So in a sense this is good news for those like me who are horrified by the thought of a Regan leadership installing Chris McEleny as Alba's éminence grise, because if my poll was manipulated by a Regan supporter, there's a fair chance the same thing happened to the Bella Caledonia poll, which would call into question Ms Regan's lead in that one. My gut feeling remains that Kenny MacAskill is likely to be elected leader if he stands - with that 'if' being the key variable.

There's something slightly odd about this, to put it mildly. I checked half an hour ago and there were around 50 votes, with Kenny MacAskill slightly ahead. There are now over 500 votes with Ash Regan ahead by a 9-1 margin. It's supposed to be one vote per account, but... https://t.co/TEEKd7kqFD
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 6, 2025

From your own blog and analysis…

We are commenting in the shadow of a poll you’re conducting, which agrees with the point I’ve made.

While you question the validity of your own poll and anyone who dares suggest ‘not Kenny’

What else do you want? pic.twitter.com/9zFBoENNaW
— Graeme Spence (@trekkie101) January 7, 2025

Graeme, you can see for yourself the poll has been manipulated - a wildly unrealistic number of votes were cast within just half an hour, almost all of them for Regan. Some have even suggested you were the one who manipulated it, although I would never dream of being so cynical.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 7, 2025

I'd have to say that reading some of the replies to the poll were like stepping into Narnia. Graeme Spence, Number One Super-Fan of the Regan / McEleny combo, is still pushing the line that Mr MacAskill's 1.5% of the vote in Alloa & Grangemouth is a sign that he is unpopular and out of touch with the electorate. News-flash, Graeme: Kenny MacAskill took 1.5% of the vote because he was the Alba candidate, not because he was Kenny MacAskill. His result was bang in line with all Alba candidates in Scotland, including Chris McEleny himself, who took just 1.8% of the vote in Inverclyde. It's likely that part of the reason Eva Comrie outpolled Mr MacAskill in Alloa & Grangemouth is precisely that she ran as an independent and wasn't weighed down by the baggage of the Alba brand.

Someone else claimed Ash Regan should be leader because she's an MSP and "polls show" she will hold her seat. It's as if Chris McEleny saying something in an email is enough to make it real. To reiterate, the true position is as follows: all polling companies with the sole exception of Find Out Now currently show Alba on course for zero seats, which would mean Ash Regan would lose her seat. And even if Find Out Now are right and every other polling firm is wrong, there's still no guarantee she would hold on, because Alba would only be taking a list seat in three out of eight regions.

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Monday, January 6, 2025

Drama as controversial blogger Stuart Campbell denounces his own regular pollster as a "fringe polling company" - has there been some behind-the-scenes falling-out, or is this just shameless hypocrisy to cover up his own embarrassment about a dodgy prediction? My guess is the latter...

Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell has a long and storied history of making bold political predictions which prove to be completely wrong, and then retrospectively coming up with excruciatingly convoluted explanations for why those don't actually count as incorrect predictions. Often the explanations are along the lines of "obviously I would have been proved right if Completely Unforeseeable Factor X hadn't occurred" - that was why, for example, we're apparently obliged not to take any account of his announcement in spring 2023 that Humza Yousaf was definitely going to lose the SNP leadership election. (Yousaf actually narrowly won by 52.1% to 47.9% in the second round.)

With almost exquisite timing, Campbell declared on 3rd December 2024 that -

"We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

Within less than a week, a Norstat poll had appeared showing the SNP and Greens on course to retain the pro-independence majority after the next Holyrood election. And before the end of the month, there was another poll from Find Out Now showing not merely a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, but just as big a majority as the one that was secured at the 2021 election. Of course none of this means that there will definitely be a pro-indy majority after May 2026, but what it does mean is that any claim that such a majority is "impossible" is left looking incredibly silly and obviously wrong.

It's been a long wait to find out how Campbell intended to talk himself out of this one, and when the moment came it didn't disappoint. In fact, this excuse is an absolute belter, perhaps the all-time classic of the genre -

"A few of the dimmer bulbs in the indy movement have been getting over-excited at what are still currently a couple of outlier polls from fringe polling companies, which suggest that the 2026 election could unexpectedly return a pro-indy majority due to the Unionist vote being split four ways in the wake of UK Labour’s implosion in government."

Yeah, you're way ahead of me here - the problem is that one of the two pollsters Campbell is dismissing as "fringe polling companies" is Norstat, which just happens to be a rebranded continuation of Panelbase, Campbell's own preferred polling company. Indeed, not just "preferred" - Panelbase / Norstat is to the best of my recollection the only polling company Campbell has ever used. He's commissioned a very large number of polls from them, certainly well into double figures, going all the way back to before the independence referendum in 2014.

This raises a few obvious questions for Campbell -

1) If Norstat / Panelbase are a "fringe" company, why did you keep using them?

2) Why did you never commission polls from "non-fringe" companies?

3) If polling results from so-called "fringe" companies are suspect, does this mean that the results of all your own polls down the years are essentially worthless?

4) Does the 'worthless polls' designation extend in particular to the results of your propaganda poll questions about, among other things, gender identity politics and Kezia Dugdale's role at the John Smith Centre?

To be clear, the vast majority of Scot Goes Pop's polls over the years have also been Panelbase polls (the only exceptions were one Survation poll in 2021 and one Find Out Now poll in 2023) and I've always thought they are an absolutely excellent company. Campbell has repeatedly expressed the same view, so I've no idea why he has had this sudden and total change of heart - unless of course he's got some intense personal embarrassment he needs to hurriedly cover up. Yes, come to think of it, that would probably explain it quite neatly.

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Sunday, January 5, 2025

Farage's Bloody Sunday - has Musk just saved the Tories with a single tweet?

I was going to post about the first GB-wide poll of 2025 being yet another to show Reform UK hitting a new high watermark with a specific firm (this time Deltapoll), but that news has been well and truly overtaken by Elon Musk dramatically dumping his former darling Nigel Farage and announcing that Reform UK needs a new leader.

It's easy to snigger at Musk's extreme fickleness and naivety about British politics - after all, whatever his reason for ditching Farage (most likely Farage's refusal to embrace Tommy Robinson), it's likely to have been something he could easily have found out months ago if he'd asked the right questions or entered the right Google search terms. And in any case there really is nobody other than Farage capable of leading Reform to electoral success. But this latest change of heart may matter a great deal, because a lot of the momentum behind Reform was based on the assumption that Musk was about to make it the best-funded party in the UK and would be indefinitely churning out propaganda on its behalf on Twitter. OK, Musk is unlikely to start backing the Tories, but if Reform is replaced in his affections by a much less voter-friendly far-right option such as the BNP or UKIP, in practice that can only work in the Tories' favour.

Incidentally, there's surely a lesson here for the leading figures in the Alba Party who have been paying homage to Musk and practically begging for his attention and even his funding. If Farage isn't far-right enough for Musk, it's highly unlikely that Neale Hanvey, Ash Regan or even Chris McEleny will ever be deemed up to scratch. Isn't it slightly degrading to so publicly thirst after affections that will never be granted?

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