A slightly more detailed reply to Ballot Box Scotland on his denunciation of Find Out Now polls

The other day I posted a brief response to Allan Faulds' announcement that his website Ballot Box Scotland is basically going to treat Find Out Now polls as if they don't exist from this point on. I think it might be worth going into more depth about this, because the issues are important, and there really isn't much doubt that he's based his decision in part on a false premise.  I've checked his website and I've checked his Bluesky account (he's abandoned Twitter), and he doesn't seem to have noticed that false premise yet.

It's fair to say that Mr Faulds and I are not on each other's Christmas card lists, so it's unlikely he'll read this blogpost, and even if he hears about it he's likely to discount the contents simply because they were written by me.  But if there's any stats-minded person reading this who is on good terms with him, it might be worth gently attempting an 'intervention' without mentioning my name, because I genuinely do think he's going to damage his own credibility by "blacklisting" a substantial minority of published Scottish polls on the basis of a completely false assumption.

The simplified version of his argument for "blacklisting" Find Out Now goes like this - 

* Their poll at the weekend had the SNP at 25% of the list vote, which is implausibly low.  It's a joint record post-2021 low, when the evidence from other pollsters is that the SNP's popularity has rebounded markedly since last summer.

* Their poll had the Greens and Lib Dems on 13% apiece for the Holyrood list vote, and had the Greens on 10% of the Holyrood constituency vote, which is implausibly high.

* Their poll had Alba on 7% of the list vote, which is massively out of step with every other polling company apart from Norstat. It's an all-time high for Alba at a time when Mr Faulds thinks the party is in a very weak state (and there's a very long discussion about why he thinks they're so weak - some of which is perfectly fair comment and some isn't).

But the problem is that most of the above isn't true.  The SNP are not on 25% of the list vote in the Find Out Now poll, and nor are Alba on 7%.  The Herald (who commissioned the poll) reported the wrong numbers - it's as simple as that. If Mr Faulds looked at the correct turnout-adjusted numbers, which are available on the Find Out Now website, his mind would be set at rest to at least some extent.  The SNP are actually on around 27% of the list vote and Alba are on around 5% - probably only enough to win Alba one list seat, rather than the eight that was suggested at the weekend.  OK, that probably still understates the SNP and overstates Alba, but it's within a more realistic range.

The Greens are actually on around 9% of the constituency vote and the Lib Dems are on around 12% of the list vote - not a huge difference from the wrong numbers reported by the Herald, but again, slightly more realistic.

There is a legitimate criticism that can and should be made of Find Out Now, but it's totally different from the one Mr Faulds has made.  Where they're seemingly going wrong is by not giving their clients sufficient guidance on how to interpret the data tables.  There's not much doubt that Find Out Now regard the turnout-adjusted voting intention numbers as the definitive, headline numbers, because they've used the turnout-adjusted numbers for Westminster in their own write-up of the poll.  But they don't seem to have explained that to the Herald.  I know from my own experience of commissioning a Find Out Now poll that I was basically just handed the data tables without much in the way of explanatory notes.  I manually worked out the independence percentages with Don't Knows excluded, and I then emailed them to say something like "before publishing, can I just check I have these percentages correct?", and they said "yes".  But if I hadn't checked, I'd never have known for sure what the correct percentages were.  It's not at all hard to see how wires could be getting crossed with a newspaper client.

I also think Mr Faulds is wrong in another respect, although this is more a matter of opinion than of fact.  I don't think it's good enough for him to say "this polling company is producing numbers that don't 'feel' right to me, therefore I'm going to pretend their polls don't exist". Remember the 2017 general election campaign, when most polling firms were pointing to a Tory landslide, but Survation were suggesting a hung parliament?  Survation were relentlessly mocked, not least by Andrew Neil, who just 'knew' it was ridiculous to suggest that a radical leftie like Jeremy Corbyn could be polling strongly with the British electorate.  But it turned out that Survation were right and the others were wrong.

Demanding that polling companies must only produce results that "feel intuitively right" to commentators effectively encourages those companies to artificially "herd" their results - which in some cases will make polling averages much less accurate, not more so.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 around ten days ago, and so far the running total stands at £1251, meaning that 18% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Power-crazed McEleny pushes Alba to the brink of destruction by launching yet another bogus "disciplinary" action - this time against the party's ACTING LEADER

As you've probably seen, The National have published a dynamite exclusive from which only one conclusion can be drawn.  Chris McEleny has recognised that he made a potentially career-ending blunder by betting the house on Ash Regan winning the Alba leadership contest, because the Salmond family's backing of Kenny MacAskill makes it almost a nailed-on certainty that MacAskill will win.  As the pound-shop Machiavelli that he is, McEleny now knows that only a major disruptive incident can rescue Regan's campaign and therefore his own career, and has decided to engineer one by yet again abusing his own powers as General Secretary.  He has launched another bogus "disciplinary" action - this time against the acting party leader himself.

As can be easily discerned from the National piece, the charges of "bullying and harassment" McEleny has lodged against Mr MacAskill are totally bogus.  They amount to nothing more than special pleading on behalf of the Regan campaign because they didn't like the implications on social media that they were flirting with fascism by aping Reform UK rhetoric.  It looks like Mr MacAskill has seen off the bogus action for the time being, with him commenting - 

"An unauthorised and unconstitutional attempt was made to allegedly suspend me, Kenny MacAskill, by an individual acting outwith the limits of their powers."

However, those words create a massive problem for MacAskill too, because the words "unconstitutional" and "acting outwith the limits of their powers" have a specific meaning here.  McEleny did not suspend Mr MacAskill's party membership pending a disciplinary hearing (which he would have had the power to do under the Alba constitution) but instead sought to suspend Mr MacAskill from attending Alba committee meetings (which he has no constitutional power to do).  He specifically said he was empowered to do this due to the precedent of the action he took against me in September, when he initially did not suspend my party membership but instead suspended me from attending meetings of the Constitution Review Group, of which I was an elected member.

By definition, then, if MacAskill is saying that the action taken against himself is unconstitutional and exceeds McEleny's powers, he is confirming that the action taken against me in September was also unconstitutional and exceeded McEleny's powers.

I would suggest it is now incumbent upon Mr MacAskill to clarify whether he voted for or against the unconstitutional action against me when McEleny took it to the NEC.  If he voted in favour of it, I would suggest that in all good conscience he should now be considering his own position - not only for knowingly breaching the party constitution, but also for sheer hypocrisy.  At the very least, he should be pondering the old verse - 

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

McEleny, for his own utterly selfish ends, has now driven Alba to the brink of either civil war or total destruction, and those who have sat back and allowed him to abuse his powers for the last four years, simply because they were not personally affected at the time, must accept a large share of the blame for that.  Morgwn Davies, Alan Harris and myself all did our level best as members of the Disciplinary Committee last year to stand up to McEleny as he maliciously sought the expulsion and suspension of numerous Alba members who had done absolutely nothing wrong - and what support did we receive from senior people in the party who should have been both protecting us and speaking out against McEleny's abuses?  None.  Absolutely none.  We were hung out to dry.

YouGov put Nigel Farage in pole position to be the next Prime Minister as Reform jump into the lead in apocalyptic new poll

This is not, of course, the first time in recent weeks that a polling company has put Reform in the lead, but it's the fact that YouGov have done it that is really making people sit up and take notice.  It perhaps shouldn't be a surprise, though, because as I've noted in the past, Reform in their previous guise as the Brexit Party had a purple patch in mid-2019 when they had an outright lead in a number of GB polls - and the vast majority of those polls were conducted by YouGov.  A couple of them had the Brexit Party as high as 26% - so technically this new poll isn't even an all-time high for Reform.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 2nd-3rd February 2025):

Reform UK 25% (+2)
Labour 24% (-3)
Conservatives 21% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 14% (-)
Greens 9% (-)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 34%, Reform UK 17%, Labour 15%, Liberal Democrats 13%, Conservatives 13%, Greens 5%

As I always point out (and it seems I have to do it every single time because people go off on one otherwise), YouGov's Scottish subsamples can be taken more seriously than those from other firms because they seem to be correctly structured and weighted - although of course the margin of error is still huge because of the limited sample size.

James Johnson of JL Partners, who according to his Twitter bio used to do internal polling for the UK Government, argued a few days ago that recent polls have been OK for Labour, and that they are on course for re-election.  Obviously the new poll calls that into question, but I think it would have been an extraordinary statement anyway.  You can only say Labour at 24-28% of the vote are on course for re-election if you truly believe that the right-wing vote will not coalesce around one party or another at any point over the next four and a half years, and that rather than being a transitional state of affairs, the current relatively even split between Reform and the Tories will just persist indefinitely.  That seems to me to be phenomenally unlikely.  Labour are pretty plainly on course for a historic drubbing unless their own vote share recovers, although I suppose the caveat is that some of the left-wing vote might fall into line behind Labour out of fright if Reform start to move into the 30s.

Our own pro-Reform commenter was gloating last night that Farage would get into Downing Street, repeal the Scotland Act, and that would be the end of indy for a very long time.  As you know, I believe the opposite is true.  I think Farage abolishing devolution would be Christmas for the independence movement and would sent Yes support soaring through the roof.  In fact it's harder to think of a faster track to indy than that.  The odds are still probably against such a scenario, but with Reform's stance on devolution being so unclear, it certainly can't be ruled out.

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I've been asked what I think about Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland 'blacklisting' Find Out Now and saying he's just going to basically pretend Find Out Now polls don't exist anymore.  I personally think he's destroying his own credibility - I don't think any serious analyst or collator of polls can just use personal taste or whim as an excuse for excluding a very large proportion of polls that are published.  And that's what he's doing, because Find Out Now have joined Redfield & Wilton on Faulds' blacklist, and his reasons seem even more nebulous and insubstantial this time - as far as I can see he just doesn't trust the look of the numbers.  In the case of the most recent Find Out Now poll, he might have been better advised to do what I did last night and check the data tables to see whether the numbers have actually been accurately reported by the client (the Herald) because they clearly haven't been.

Of course there are junk polls out there, but those have to be identified by some sort of objective test rather than by personal distaste.  I'd have thought the most obvious objective test is whether a polling company is affiliated to the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.  Both Find Out Now and Redfield & Wilton are full BPC members.  Having commissioned a Find Out Now poll myself two years ago, I know how seriously they take their responsibilities as BPC rule-followers.  They're perhaps a little ill-advised in the way they go about it, because they use Martin Baxter of Electoral Calculus to approve their question wordings (or at least they did as of early 2023) and he brings to bear his own very strong London-centric biases in carrying out the task.  But the point I'm making is that they're not some sort of slapdash cowboy outfit, and they shouldn't be treated as if they are one.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 around ten days ago, and so far the running total stands at £1201, meaning that 18% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

BREAKING: It appears the Find Out Now poll has been misreported, with support for independence actually on 52%, not 51% - but in a huge blow for Alba, they appear to be on 5% of the list vote, not 7%

There's been a lot of discussion over the last couple of days about whether the 7% list vote for Alba in the new Find Out Now poll is really plausible, but as far as I know there's been no discussion over whether that figure has actually been correctly reported.  I've been having a look at the Find Out Now tables, and I'm far from convinced that it has been.

Let me say at this point that I've commissioned a Find Out Now poll myself in the past - just once, and it was almost two years ago now, but assuming that they still have the same basic approach that they did back then, what is likely to have happened is that the Herald will have been handed the data tables and left to work out the meaning of the numbers for themselves, unless they specifically asked for guidance.  So for starters, it looks like the Herald have used the non-turnout-adjusted numbers on independence (Yes 51%, No 49%), whereas to maintain consistency with previous polls they should really have used the turnout-adjusted figures, which are...

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Find Out Now/Herald, 15th-20th January 2025)

Yes 52% (-)

No 48% (-)

The same issue has led to a discrepancy between the Westminster numbers on the Herald and Find Out Now websites.  The Herald say that second-placed Labour are only one point ahead of Reform UK in third place, whereas Find Out Now themselves say the gap is three points.  That strongly implies Find Out Now regard the turnout-adjusted numbers as the headline results, which means Alba are NOT on 7% of the Holyrood list vote.  They are on about 5.4%, which is borderline between being rounded down to 5% or rounded up to 6%, but in all probability the correct number is 5%.

The slight mystery here, though, is that Professor John Curtice apparently did the seats projection and I'd have thought he'd have checked the data tables first before approving the numbers.  However, the more I've looked at the tables, the more convinced I've become that a major error has been made.

I've done a manual calculation, and the following appear to be the correct numbers, although in one or two cases they may be 1% out due to rounding issues - 

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34% (-1)

Labour 20% (+1)

Conservatives 13% (-2)

Reform UK 13% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-)

Greens 9% (+2)

Alba 2% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 27% (+1)

Labour 16% (-1)

Conservatives 15% (+1)

Greens 13% (-)

Liberal Democrats 12% (+2)

Reform UK 11% (-)

Alba 5% (-1)

Those numbers make far, far more intuitive sense than the ones that were published on Saturday night - there's no mysterious slump in the SNP vote, and Alba's support is at a slightly more realistic level (albeit still probably significantly exaggerated).

As far as a seats projection is concerned, I'm not aware of John Curtice's model being publicly available online anywhere, so it's impossible to be sure of what the real numbers would be if the vote shares had been entered correctly.  But on the most popular tool available online, the seats projection works out as:  SNP 54, Labour 18, Conservatives 17, Greens 16, Liberal Democrats 14, Reform UK 9, Alba 1.  Again, that looks like a far more realistic estimate of where we actually are than the rather wild-looking projection that was published on Saturday night (which had Alba on *eight* seats!).

It's still a very substantial pro-independence majority - pro-indy parties are on 71 seats in combination, with unionist parties on just 58 seats.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last weekend, and so far the running total stands at £1201, meaning that 18% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

THE ALBA FILES, Part 7: What Robert Reid and Chris McEleny have previously said about the Alba leadership's plans to split the pro-independence vote in constituency seats

Just a short one this, but it's prompted by Alba HQ's resident stripling Robert Reid having one of his periodical rants about me on Twitter last night.  He obviously drops by to this blog now and again, and his rage at seeing any sort of alternative to HQ propaganda always seems to get the better of him.

However, he's more than a tad hapless in the way he lashes out.  Last time around he was feigning incredulity that anyone could possibly doubt the integrity of the process that led to my expulsion from Alba given that "ordinary Alba members" had supposedly made the decision - but all I had to do was point out that only four Alba members had voted to expel me, and exactly 50% of them were either his own girlfriend or his own mum.  He couldn't dispute that because he knows it's true and he knows it's in the minutes.

This time he was harrumphing about me supposedly "lying" when I criticised Alba for their irresponsible plans to split the pro-independence vote on the constituency ballot next year, abandoning the sensible list-only strategy from 2021. Reid insisted that no decision has been taken yet and that Alba members will ultimately decide.  But yet again, it's his own girlfriend that's the problem for him, because Christina Hendry has already announced that she intends to be the Alba candidate in the constituency seat of Banffshire and Buchan Coast.  And it has to be said she doesn't seem to be terribly interested in Alba members' thoughts on the matter - she reckons she's inheriting the candidacy from her Uncle Alex by right of "Salmond blood", to use her own bizarre Game of Thrones-style language.

When I put that point to Reid, he defensively tried to make out that what Ms Hendry had said to the press was only provisional and "pending membership approval".  To put it mildly, that does not ring true, because when Alex Salmond himself first announced his plans to stand in Banffshire and Buchan Coast, there was no deference to the ultimate sovereignty of Alba members - it was just something he had decided to do and that was an end to the matter.  His party, his decision, full stop.

Anyway, Reid's ongoing obsession with me has made me think back to my previous interactions with him.  They're extremely limited, because his election to the NEC in autumn 2022 coincided with me being voted off the body.  However, he did phone me up out of the blue once - it was a year ago, in February 2024.  Apparently Alex Salmond had got extremely upset about a newspaper article written by Conor Matchett, which suggested that polling showed Salmond was less popular in Scotland than Nigel Farage.  He wanted a sharp reply to be sent to Matchett, but neither he nor anyone else in HQ could actually find the relevant numbers in the data tables of the poll, so in desperation Reid turned to me.  (I suspect the poor lad may have been getting the hairdryer treatment all morning.)  I had to be the bearer of bad news, because the poll did basically show what Matchett had claimed it showed.

Nevertheless, Reid did his best to follow his leader's instructions, and sent an email to Matchett with a suitably indignant tone, even though the facts were stacked against him.  He forwarded the email to me, and one section stands out as particularly significant - 

"Firstly ALBA are at 3 per cent on the regional list polling question of the latest Redfield Wilton poll as shown below. This is the ONLY section of voting for which ALBA have been traditionally prompted by pollsters (ie shown on their list of parties on polling questions). That is understandable since previously ALBA only intended to stand on the regional list for Holyrood."

Never again let it be pretended that Alba hasn't mutated from its original billing as a responsible list-only party.  OK, political parties are allowed to change, but by the same token members and supporters of a party are allowed to be upset about having been sold a false prospectus.

Another intriguing titbit is that Reid once spontaneously contacted me with a "keep up the good work" message after I wrote a blogpost urging Alba to only stand in the two seats where they had incumbent MPs at the Westminster general election.  He told me that wasn't all that far away from HQ's own thinking - which surprised me, because my impression from having previously been on the NEC was that Alex Salmond wanted Alba to make a big intervention in the general election, which of course is exactly what happened in the end.

I can only speculate, but I wonder if "HQ's thinking" was code for "McEleny's thinking".  If so, that might indicate there was a difference of view between McEleny and Mr Salmond on election strategy.  In spite of the much-vaunted "telepathic link" between the two men, McEleny was sometimes surprisingly blunt in his criticisms of Mr Salmond.  When I last saw McEleny in August (only a few weeks before he arbitrarily suspended me from the party), he very directly stated that Mr Salmond was living well beyond Alba's means in terms of the hotel, travel and food expenses he was racking up, and that someone was going to need to have a word with him.  "It's fine if Alex gets a big gig like Question Time in London", but other than that, major cutbacks were going to have to be made.  

That of course is one of the issues that has caused so much hurt and upset - other Alba NEC members, and indeed Alba rank-and-file members, have been working tirelessly for the party out of their own pocket, and they haven't known what to make of a select few at the top living the high life thanks to party funds which should really have been used for campaigning purposes.

McEleny also gave a possible clue in August to the leadership's plans about standing in Holyrood constituency seats next year.  He talked of the possibility of standing in one constituency per electoral region, which would mean splitting the pro-indy vote in eight constituency seats across Scotland.  He then caught himself and said with some alarm "I'm just speaking hypothetically here, James", which led me to think he wasn't speaking hypothetically at all - although I suspect eight constituency seats may be more of a floor than a ceiling.

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Coming up in future installments of "THE ALBA FILES"...

* Straight-Talking And Totally Unfiltered: How Shannon Donoghue and Chris Cullen explained their refusal to give rank-and-file Alba members decision-making powers, or even any basic information about decisions taken at the monthly NEC meetings 

* McEleny's campaign of "disciplinary" revenge after evidence of the 2023 election-rigging started to leak

* Tasmina Writes It All Down And Then Hits "Send"

...plus much, much more.  Stay tuned.

*SETTLED WILL KLAXON* - Yet another Find Out Now poll shows a pro-independence majority

Many thanks to Paul Kirkwood for pointing out to me that the independence numbers from the Find Out Now poll have been published in the print edition of the Herald on Sunday, where they're presented almost as an afterthought.  I don't know whether they've been published online - I certainly didn't see them on the Herald website last night.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Find Out Now / Herald, 15th-20th January 2025)

Yes 51% (-1)

No 49% (+1)

So it remains the case that all but one of the Find Out Now polls on independence that have ever been published have shown a Yes majority.  In other words, if Find Out Now's methodology is accurate, Scotland has a settled will that it wishes to become an independent country.  The same can more or less be said of the UK's 'gold standard' pollster Ipsos.

It's also technically the case that the last three polls to have been published across all polling firms have shown a Yes lead.  However, that's a slightly artificial point, because as far as I know the independence numbers from the recent Survation poll were never published, but from the data tables it looked to me like there was a No lead in that one.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last weekend, and so far the running total stands at £831, meaning that 12% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk