Farquharson wants John Swinney to give Starmer political cover for cutting funds to Scotland to pay for British military adventurism abroad. That does not strike me as great advice.

Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson, aka "Jurassic Farq", has penned a column this week framing the choice for John Swinney on Ukraine as one consisting of three options - 

1) Concede the hardline unionist argument that the devolved Scottish Government should stay out of international affairs and get on with the day job.

2) Concede the isolationist argument allegedly put forward by some independence supporters that Scotland should "retreat from the world and just coorie doon in our bonny wee scrap of mountain and moor".

3) Take on an international role by becoming a cheerleader for Keir Starmer's plan to send British troops to Ukraine and vastly increase defence spending.

Farq naturally wants John Swinney to plump for option 3, and who knows, he may even get his way this time.  But there is of course a fourth option that Farq conveniently forgets to mention, which is that Scotland could use its voice on international affairs to take an independent line in the best interests of global peace, rather than to parrot Atlanticist dogma and give Starmer political cover for domestic spending cuts, which is presumably the real agenda here.

In the case of Ukraine, what could such an independent line look like?  Its starting point would surely be the principle that national self-determination for all peoples, including the Ukrainian people, is of tremendous importance and that the one thing of even greater importance is the avoidance of global nuclear annihilation.  There will be no self-determination for Ukraine or for Scotland in a nuclear wasteland, and therefore all decisions taken must be weighed up to ensure that the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange is not unacceptably high (and frankly even a 1 in 100 risk would be unacceptably high when human civilisation is at stake).  A second principle is that human life is precious, and while there may be rare circumstances in which it is justified to put professional soldiers and unwilling conscripts in harm's way, it should never be done when the chances of success are zero or so close to zero as makes no difference.  Lives shouldn't be thrown away on an industrial scale just to make a symbolic point.

Farq might argue that all of this is academic because Starmer's plan is about policing the peace in Ukraine rather than prolonging the war.  Many will be dubious about that, and in any case the sending of troops to Ukraine is only one-half of what Farq wants John Swinney to get behind - with the other half being cuts in Scottish public services to pay for lavish funding of the British military.  This in spite of the fact that we know from recent history that such funding is far more likely to facilitate the illegal invasion of other countries than the defence of our own.

Farq mentions almost as an afterthought that the SNP will also have to reverse their policy on rejecting weapons of mass destruction in Scottish waters due to the greater strategic importance of those waters with northern routes opening up as a result of global warming.  It's almost as if Farq thinks that everyone accepts the concept of nuclear deterrence as viable and valid, and that Scotland only ever flirted with opting out of it as a self-indulgent luxury that is no longer open to us.  In reality, those of us who believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament recognise that "deterrence" is not merely an imperfect defence against nuclear attack, it's no sort of defence at all.  The only way the risk of nuclear attack can be reduced is by promoting disarmament - and ultimately that is also the only answer for those who protest about Russian nuclear blackmail influencing strategic decisions in Ukraine.

But if Farq wants to surrender entirely to the Trump doctrine that Europe has to step up defence spending to plug the gap left by the US, why wouldn't that also apply to spending on nuclear weapons? If Trump can't be trusted to protect Europe with conventional forces, there's no way he can be trusted to retaliate against a nuclear attack on Europe's behalf, in which case deterrence is already dead anyway - unless Britain and France increase their nuclear arsenals a hundred-fold to match Russia's.  So what's it to be, Farq - a further descent into nuclear madness, or are we going to seek a new paradigm?

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1601, meaning that 24% 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

Reform UK double their GB-wide lead and hit a new all-time record high vote share in YouGov poll - but SNP retain double-digit lead in the Scottish subsample

I had wondered after the last batch of polls whether the Reform UK vote might finally have plateaued, but that theory seems to have gone out of the window.  As I've mentioned a few times before, YouGov are in a special category because they showed the Brexit Party in the lead in a few polls back in mid-2019, with a peak vote of 26% - and because Reform is a direct legal continuation of the Brexit Party, it's therefore been harder for Reform to hit a new record high with YouGov than with other firms.  But it's finally, unambiguously happened - and we consequently move into uncharted territory.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 16th-17th February 2025):

Reform UK 27% (+1)

Labour 25% (-)

Conservatives 21% (-)

Liberal Democrats 14% (-)

Greens 9% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 34%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 22%, Conservatives 8%, Liberal Democrats 7%, Greens 6%

Corroboration of the general trend is offered by a poll from More In Common, which also shows Reform rising one point to hit a new high watermark of 26% with that polling firm, and to move into a one-point lead over Labour.

Meanwhile, the tables from Saturday night's Scottish poll from Norstat have been published, which allows us to tie up some loose ends.  Although we already knew that the independence question was tied 50-50 after Don't Knows were excluded, it turns out that if Don't Knows are left in, Yes has a slender lead of 48% to 47%.  If nothing else that's psychologically important, because it means that across all polling firms, all of the last four published independence polls have shown a Yes lead of some description.  The numbers with Don't Knows removed but rounded to one decimal place are: Yes 50.4%, No 49.6%.

The Westminster voting intention percentages are:

SNP 32% (+1)

Labour 18% (-2)

Reform UK 17% (+2)

Conservatives 13% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (+2)

Greens 6% (-)

Labour have never been in so much danger of being overtaken by Reform in Scotland.  OK, they've been in third place behind the Tories many times over the last few years, but is this a wholly new category of threat due to Reform eating into their core working-class support?  Norstat already have Reform miles ahead of Labour among lower-income voters (by 26% to 14%).  That said, at the height of the Ruth Davidson surge in 2017, the Tories must have been taking a fair amount of working-class support that would once have been solidly Labour - not least in the constituency of Lanark and Hamilton East, which amazingly the Tories came within 266 votes of winning in 2017.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1491, meaning that 22% 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

This is, apparently, not a practical joke - Chris McEleny is genuinely standing for depute leader of the Alba Party while still under suspension for "gross misconduct". This is the sort of thing that happens to political parties when they are disintegrating.

Thrilling news for Alba members this afternoon: if you don't think Chris "Disgruntled Employee" McEleny, aka "Dzhugashvili", has done quite enough to destroy your party so far, you now have a golden opportunity to elect him as depute leader and help him to finish the job.  I honestly thought it was an elaborate practical joke when someone mentioned on the previous thread that he was standing - I thought at most that perhaps one or two Alba members might have nominated him as a bit of a lark.  But no, it's absolutely for real.  This at least explains why after a prolonged period of radio silence, he suddenly started pumping out pro-Alba tweets at the weekend as if his suspension had never happened.

And ah yes, the "suspension".  I'm already picking up a great deal of anger from Alba members, because the very fact that McEleny is able to seek nominations for depute leader reveals an important piece of information that was not previously known - his party membership has not been suspended.  How can that possibly be?  If he's been suspended from the most senior party staff role for "gross misconduct", how can he possibly still have the official status of a "party member in good standing"?  Ironically, his candidacy poses as many awkward questions for the current leadership as it does for himself and his own allies.  I gather some people are on the brink of leaving the party if McEleny's suspension isn't extended to cover his party membership.

I don't think McEleny has a cat in hell's chance of defeating Neale Hanvey for the depute leadership, but just imagine the implications if he actually did.  He would almost certainly be the deputy of the very leader who had sacked him for gross misconduct.  That is not a sustainable situation - one of the two would have to resign, or the party itself would fracture, or both.  He knows that as well as anyone, so exactly what game is he playing?  I can think of two main possibilities - 

1) He thinks if he polls a respectable minority vote in the depute leader election, it'll be his get-out-of-jail-free card and prevent MacAskill from getting rid of him.  I'm not sure that's right, though.  Remember that I had a decent record in Alba internal elections - I'm a former NEC member, I came within 0.5% of being elected Member Support Convener in December 2023, I was a serving member of three national committees, and I was the incumbent Organiser of North Lanarkshire LACU, but they still didn't think twice about expelling me at McEleny's own instigation.  Similarly, I believe Sean Davis was the Convener of a LACU in Ayrshire before McEleny maliciously took disciplinary action against him, but he still ended up effectively being indefinitely suspended from the party.

2) McEleny may be looking beyond his own defeat in the depute leader contest and his ally Ash Regan's defeat in the leader contest.  The idea may be to keep peddling the line that "Scotland needs a serious independence party, not a sideshow" so he and Regan can later claim that Alba have chosen to be a sideshow by electing the MacAskill/Hanvey ticket.  He and Regan would then claim to be acting in the national interest by providing a "serious independence party" in a different form.

I'm not sure if we're witnessing the death spiral of Alba as a whole or merely of McEleny's career within it, but it's likely to be one or the other.  In the meantime, we can look forward to one of the great comedy spectacles of our time as McEleny runs a depute leadership campaign almost entirely on the basis of his claimed "telepathic communion" with the late Alex Salmond, which apparently means that he and he alone is equipped to take forward Mr Salmond's secret-but-brilliant strategy for next year's Holyrood election.  Leanne Tervit set the scene rather well for what we're about to witness in this tweet from a few weeks ago.

If Alba are going back to begging for "tactical" votes, the basic arithmetic of the situation is going to make it very hard to convince people

The Alba Party's suspended General Secretary broke his radio silence on Twitter at the weekend. 

SNP on course to win 3/4 of constituencies. This means touch & go for pro indy majority as SNP list votes won’t deliver seats. Meanwhile Alba remain within touching distance of a breakthrough - if SNP voters back Alba on the list it guarantees keeping unionists out of Bute House. https://t.co/eMJpgr2fcz

— Christopher McEleny (@ChrisMcEleny) February 15, 2025

"if SNP voters back Alba on the list"

Oh, if "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans. What matters is that at the moment almost every poll is projecting Alba on zero seats, so it's actually Alba list votes that are wasted. https://t.co/qYJhI7mHQy

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 16, 2025

First of all, of course, there's the little psychodrama here of why McEleny has suddenly started posting supportive tweets about Alba when he appears to be firmly on his way out of the party, unless his ally Ash Regan pulls off a major surprise in the leadership election.  I suppose it's possible that the MacAskill leadership might shy away from expelling McEleny from the party altogether simply due to his apparent closeness to Alex Salmond (the "telepathic link" and all that) - it would look like they were questioning Mr Salmond's judgement.  However, it does seem practically certain that McEleny's removal as General Secretary will be upheld on the grounds of "gross misconduct" - and if you find someone guilty of gross misconduct in 2025 you can hardly run them as a Holyrood list candidate in 2026.  My guess is that if McEleny is left with no role in the party, and has no means of using the party as a vehicle for his ambitions to become an MSP, he'll leave voluntarily.

But let's take his tweet about the 2026 election at face value.  It suggests that Alba are in a right old strategic muddle, because it implies that once again they will not be trying to win votes in the normal way by persuading voters that they are the best party, and will instead be begging for votes on a tactical basis.  OK, it's perfectly understandable that they don't think pitching themselves as the best party is a viable option, given all of the very public in-fighting, and the McCarthyite purges, and the deeply unattractive personalities at the top, and the half-baked policy platform.  (Even though I was an elected member of the Alba NEC for a year, I still don't have a scooby whether the party wants to rejoin the EU or not - all you ever hear is the holding position about joining EFTA for the time being.)

But if you're going to pitch for tactical votes on the list, you have to do that coherently.  You can't say to voters that they need to vote for different parties on the constituency ballot and the list ballot, and then announce that in some areas you're standing on both the constituency and the list and want votes for both.  As I've mentioned before, I heard McEleny suggest as recently as August that the plan was to stand in at least eight constituency seats, and I've since discovered that others have heard him say exactly the same thing on other occasions.  

And even if it wasn't for that hopeless incoherence, the raw arithmetic just doesn't support Alba's pitch for tactical votes anyway.  Here is the seats projection from the new Norstat poll broken down into constituency and list seats - 

Constituency seats: 

SNP 54 

Conservatives 10

Liberal Democrats 5

Labour 3

Greens 1

List seats:

Reform UK 15

Labour 15

Greens 9

Liberal Democrats 8

Conservatives 8

SNP 1

So of the three largest pro-independence parties, the only one whose list votes are entirely 'wasted' is Alba.  The SNP's list votes do produce a small return, but the one pro-indy party that leaps out as getting proper bang for their buck on the list is the Greens.  So as a rational voter, there are only really two options to choose between.  Either:

1) You can take the same view as I always have, which is that the Holyrood list system can't be 'hacked' because there's too great a risk of tactical votes backfiring and producing the opposite effect from the one you expect.  That would lead to the conclusion that you should always vote for your first-choice party on the list regardless of circumstance.

OR 

2) If you insist on taking a big risk with a tactical vote, you would identify the pro-indy party with the best statistical chance of converting tactical list votes into list seats.  At the moment it's impossible to escape the conclusion that party is the Greens.  There are Alba list votes going completely to waste which could actually have a chance of producing extra pro-indy list seats if they transferred en masse to the Greens.  

There is no planet on which Alba is the best statistical prospect for a tactical vote.  I suppose their get-out clause would be "ah, but the Greens aren't really a proper pro-indy party, are they".  That's a tough sell, a) given the Greens' track record of full involvement in the 2014 Yes campaign, and b) given McEleny's own argument that the pro-indy majority is under threat and on a knife-edge.  In a crisis situation, are independence supporters really supposed to muck around on the basis of purity tests?