Campbell's claim, made only *four weeks ago*, that the SNP are guaranteed to win at least 65 constituency seats has just been eviscerated by the Hamilton by-election result. That claim was the *entire basis* for his insistence that independence supporters must vote tactically on the list. Will he now have the dignity to just admit that his whole argument for tactical voting was a load of old cobblers from start to finish?

The usual suspects will of course groan at this point, but it is really important to take a few moments to mark the occasion whenever the Stew Fan Club allow yet another of the Great One's incorrect claims or predictions to disappear into the memory hole, so that he can wipe the slate clean once again and continue mournfully wailing "WHY DO I ALWAYS HAVE TO BE RIGHT?" without any apparent sense of irony.  And this time, actually, it's even more important than usual to flag up that a Stew Fact has just been definitively proved to be wrong, because it destroys the whole basis for his instructions to his readership (nay, to the world!) that they must vote tactically on the Holyrood regional list ballot next year.  It literally is only four weeks since he claimed that the SNP were guaranteed to win at least 65 of the 73 Holyrood constituency seats, meaning they would be certain to win an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament without requiring a single list vote or list seat.  He added that this meant that it would be impossible for the SNP to win any list seats at all, so every single list vote for the SNP was now 100% certain to be wasted.  Barking mad though that claim was, he wasn't finished - with his trademark bombast, he noisily bellowed that *I* knew all of this to be true too and that like some sort of crazed Bond villain I was engaged in a wicked conspiracy to hide the facts from the world.

I mean, this was quite the 'evolution' in his views from only five months earlier when he announced that there was ZERO chance of a pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament, let alone of a single-party SNP majority, barring "a nuclear war or an alien invasion".  But, hey, that was just yet another of the Stew Facts that the fan club let slip down the memory hole without any undue fuss or comment.  They're so good to him in that way.  And without wanting to blow my own trumpet here, it has to be said that, like all good Bond villians, I've clearly been putting in a sterling effort to keep track of the ever-changing facts that I'm concealing as part of my evil masterplan.  The facts change so rapidly these days.

But here we are - the things that the Stew disciples Know To Be True are back in a state of flux yet again, because Hamilton was not supposed to go to Labour last night.  It was one of the 65 seats that were absolutely certain to be retained or gained by the SNP - Stew provided us with maps and everything.  And it was by no means the easiest of the Stew 65 for Labour to win, so it can be reasonably inferred that if he was hopelessly wrong about Hamilton, he was hopelessly wrong about many other similar seats too.  The reality is that there are a large number of constituency seats that the SNP may not win next year, which means they may well end up being compensated with a significant number of list seats, and therefore by definition SNP list votes are far from certain to be wasted.  On a poor night, the SNP may even trail Labour on constituency seats and require vast numbers of list votes just to end with more overall seats than Labour, exactly as they did in 2007.

When pressed a few weeks ago about his nutty 65-seat guarantee, Stew did eventually concede that the polls might change over the next year, in which case his claims about the wisdom of tactical voting might change too.  But that's no alibi for his blunder about Hamilton, because the claims he made about the polls were self-evidently not true at the moment he made them.  If there had been a full-scale Holyrood election yesterday, or four weeks ago when he made the claims, we now know that the SNP would probably have lost Hamilton and several of the rest of the 65 constituency seats that they were supposed to be guaranteed to win.  For Stew to have been as catastrophically wrong as that, there can only be two possible explanations: either a) what he grandiosely called his "constituency projections" were not actually supported by the polling data in the first place, or b) the assumptions he was making about polling accuracy were massively overblown.  In reality, it was a bit of both, albeit much more the former than the latter.

So just within the last six months, we've had Stew tell us two completely contradictory things: 1) that we mustn't vote SNP on the list because the SNP are going to do incredibly badly in the election and it would be pointless to vote for them, and 2) that we mustn't vote SNP on the list because the SNP are going to do insanely well in the election and it would be a 'waste' to vote for them.  Doubtless we're about to hear a third, and completely different, and probably thrillingly complex version of why we absolutely mustn't vote SNP on the list whatever we do.

And now that the whole basis for his previous demand for tactical voting has been totally eviscerated, we'll doubtless also hear a completely different version of why tactical voting is a must.  But it's worth bearing in mind that if the first version turned out to be wrong, there's quite a high likelihood that the second version will also turn out to be wrong, and for exactly the same reason - ie. that all Stew ever does is blag and bluff in pursuit of his agenda (which at the moment is to destroy the SNP and replace them with a far-right, pro-Netanyahu and anti-independence Reform UK government).

*  *  *

"Oh no, they're being beastly about Nigel again.  Stew, Stew, come here and defend Nigel!"

"Reform have imploded" pic.twitter.com/m5IPrfWo1M

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 6, 2025

A vague thought about something positive we could consider doing

It's been more than two years since Scot Goes Pop last commissioned an opinion poll (although there were two in quick succession in early 2023).  I've been reluctant to go down that road again since my last dedicated polling fundraiser in 2024 ended up in no-man's-land, raising a significant amount but not enough to go ahead with the poll.  Additionally, I've become painfully aware over the years that running the polling fundraisers makes it much harder for the general annual fundraisers to succeed, and ultimately it's the general fundraisers that are the bread-and-butter - without them the blog can't survive for very long, and this year's fundraiser so far remains well short of its target figure.

All of that said, there's a part of me, maybe only a small part but nevertheless a part, that thinks now might be a good time for another poll.  In the wake of their narrow defeat in the Hamilton by-election, the SNP stand at a strategic crossroads with eleven months to go until the Holyrood election - still enough time for key changes to be made and trajectories to be altered.  Some voices within the party are sensibly calling for "the independence button to be pushed", in order to reverse the recent decoupling between Yes support and SNP support, but as you may have seen on Angus MacNeil's Twitter account, there are also other voices barking up completely the wrong tree and trying to convince themselves and everyone else that the problem must somehow be Kate Forbes (!) and her social conservative views.  If any heed is paid to that, the SNP could make a dreadful mistake by distancing themselves even further from independence and reverting to being an identity politics party.

Here's how I see the situation - 

* On the previous two comments threads, it seemed to me there was a lot of 'electoral illiteracy' on display - many people seem to assume that if the SNP fall short in one particular constituency, that must be an unmitigated disaster that proves they are on course for a crushing national defeat next year.  Trying to explain to these people that, actually, Hamilton is a particularly favourable sort of seat for Labour, and that the swing last night was broadly consistent with national opinion polls showing the SNP in a double-digit Scotland lead over Labour, seems to only produce derision and mockery.  The paradox is that the SNP's problem after Hamilton is not the result itself, which objectively was not all that bad, but the danger that the media hype about the result could in itself change public opinion by producing fresh momentum against the SNP.

* Although the result was close to being in line with the opinion polls, the SNP fell just very slightly short of where they perhaps should have been.  This is John Swinney's second contact with the voters in a major electoral event, and on both occasions I haven't been able to escape the feeling that the SNP have left a little bit on the pitch.  Swinney's good personal ratings in the polls suggest he should theoretically be an asset, but in practice it might not be working out quite that way when real elections occur.

* The danger is, then, that polling which on average has suggested the pro-independence parties will narrowly retain their majority in Holyrood next year could translate into an actual election result in which they narrowly lose their majority.  After last night, that's my gut feeling of the most likely outcome.  The SNP would probably stay in power as a minority government, but that wouldn't be much use to us - the independence movement would still be cast into the wilderness for at least five years.

* But on a more positive note, the fact that we're talking about missing out by narrow margins means that even a small corrective in the near future could save the day and rescue the pro-indy majority.

* Regardless of who is SNP leader, it seems logical that the best chance of maximising the SNP vote is to try to win back the huge numbers of people who now vote for unionist parties in spite of remaining independence supporters.  The only way of doing that is by bringing independence back to the forefront of the SNP's campaigning, an idea which seems to run counter to every instinct in John Swinney's body.  I think, therefore, it could be helpful to have a poll that explores how voters would react to an SNP that changes course and starts speaking of independence as an urgent priority and actually tries to deliver it.  If the results were favourable, I can't guarantee the SNP leadership would pay the slightest heed to the poll, but they'd probably be a bit more likely to pay heed to it than to even a million irate emails.  I'd obviously want to ask serious and credible questions in the poll that produce meaningful answers, rather than fantastical pie-in-the-sky nonsense like "how would you vote in a referendum that forced you to choose between independence and abolishing the Scottish Parliament altogether". 

* I would also, frankly, like to ask at least one credible question about Scottish attitudes towards the situation in Palestine, as a kind of remedial action after Campbell's outrageously leading poll question the other day that sought to portray the genocide in Gaza as a "war between Israel and Hamas", in which "both sides" are equally to blame.

* Bear in mind that there may be a downside to running a poll now because the voting intention question could potentially show a dip in SNP support in the wake of Hamilton.  That would probably be only temporary, but any such result could obviously be seized upon by our opponents.

Let me know what you think.  Because of the difficulties of fundraising that I outlined earlier, I'd probably only go ahead if there's overwhelming support for the idea.

Unpicking the Hamilton result

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at The National, about Labour's narrow win in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election.  You can read it HERE.

For the attention of the good people of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse: you have until 10pm to vote to stop the chancer Farage

No, Stew, you can't count the war in Ukraine FOUR times. You can't say "the occupation of Transnistria" is no different from the carnage in Gaza. Try again. What are your "fifty other countries" that are just like Gaza?

Yesterday, the controversial and increasingly far-right blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell claimed that we shouldn't be paying much attention to horrific war crimes in Gaza, because much the same sort of stuff is happening in "fifty other countries".  His subtext is "this goes on all the time, always has, always will, so if it didn't distract us from the vital importance of the women-with-beards issue in 2022, why should Gaza have the temerity to distract us from the women-with-beards issue now?"

Just one snag, of course: nothing comparable to the horrors of Gaza is occurring in anything like fifty other countries.  I looked carefully last night, and of the handful of other alleged ongoing genocides in the world at the moment, none have been established to have a higher death toll than Gaza.  Of the ongoing wars in the world, there are four that have a comparable death toll to Gaza, and those four wars affect seven countries - well short of Stew's claim of fifty.  So I challenged him to name his fifty.

After the obligatory rant about the fact that he can't reply directly because I have him blocked on Twitter (a bit rich given that it was he who blocked me and made a big song and dance about it, and I only blocked him afterwards on a "fair's fair" basis), he did his usual stunt of answering the question he wished I'd asked him instead.  Rather than finding fifty countries with wars or genocides *on an equivalent scale to Gaza*, he instead linked to a list purporting to show 114 ongoing wars without making any distinction between major conflicts and minor ones that have death tolls with a tiny fraction of Gaza's.  Before even looking at the list, I had little doubt that many of the entries would turn out to be low-intensity conflicts similar to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  I was correct about that, but in fact Stew's claim was even dodgier than I had anticipated, because the list also defines all military occupations as "conflicts" regardless of whether there is any actual fighting going on, and it also double-counts, or triple-counts, or even quadruple-counts certain wars.

To give an example, the list claims that there are seven wars going on in Europe.  But in fact FOUR of them are just different bits of the war in Ukraine (the occupation of Crimea, the invasion of the rest of Ukraine, the conflict in Donetsk and the conflict in Luhansk are all defined as four separate wars).  The other three so-called wars in Europe are: 1) the Russian occupation of Transnistria (legally part of Moldova), 2) the Russian occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (legally parts of Georgia), and 3) the Armenian occupation of Nagorno Karabakh (legally part of Azerbaijan).  These are all largely frozen conflicts with little or no fighting actually occurring at the moment.  To try to pretend that these non-wars are equivalent to the carnage in Gaza is fatuous in the extreme.

So no, Stew, you have not demonstrated that there are 114 wars of an intensity comparable to the Gaza genocide.  Not even close.  I cannot find more than seven countries that are currently affected by ultra-high-intensity conflicts or genocides.  If you can find another forty-three that would make up the shortfall from your original claim of fifty, tell us what they are and explain why you think they are on a par with Gaza.

OK, Stew, so what are these other fifty countries? Name them, please.

The controversial and increasingly far-right blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell literally published a blogpost today with the title "Why genocide is brilliant", but an even better insight into his warped mindset about the human catastrophe in Gaza can be seen in the Twitter exchange below, in which he's not even pretending to be satirical or ironic.

There is a video on here tonight of a man in Gaza holding up half a girl. "Half a girl". Not something I ever thought I would write. Or, god forbid, see.

— Barry Malone (@malonebarry) June 2, 2025

You know, I do actually find this sh*t as horrific as everyone else does. I'm just so f*cking over the fact that nobody gives a bollock about the 50 other countries the exact same thing is happening in, but which aren't fashionable. Go and f*ck away off. https://t.co/I1N5HGmOAR

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 4, 2025

From the extreme anger and defensiveness of Stew's response, you'd be forgiven for getting the impression here that Barry Malone had gone out of his way to annoy Stew.  But in fact the tweet wasn't even directed at Stew.  Mr Malone was just minding his own business, expressing his own views in his own online space.  Stew stumbled across the tweet and somehow still felt it to be such an outrageous violation against his own person that he was entitled to tell Mr Malone to "f*** off".

This is an established pattern of behaviour from Stew.  At least once every few days, he has an epic meltdown about social media accounts with large numbers of followers sharing photos, videos or factual text descriptions of individual atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza.  He tries to shame people into no longer sharing such content, by telling them they're only doing it because they want to virtue-signal or to look trendy or to build a media career.  And yet he knows that if those people do fall silent out of Stew-induced shame, public awareness of the genocide in this country will fall, pressure on the Labour government to take a stand against Israel will lessen, and Netanyahu will be able to press forward with the genocide with even greater impunity.  In a nutshell, Stew knows that if he gets the public opinion environment he's seeking to generate, many more people will needlessly die.  And yet still he seeks it.  Why?

We now have a bit of an insight from his reply above.  His reason is that he regards the genocide in Gaza as relatively normal, relatively unremarkable and relatively unimportant.  He thinks it is no worse than what is happening in 50 other countries right now - which, if true, would indeed make it extremely humdrum, because 50 countries would constitute no fewer than 26% of the member states of the United Nations.  He finds it deeply and personally offensive that Palestinians and their supporters are so jumped-up and loud, and that they don't understand their lowly place in the true hierarachy of victimhood.  He thinks they should quieten down for Stew, pipe down for Stew, wheesht for Stew.  If that means the pressure on Netanyahu is lifted, if it means more Palestinians have to die, he thinks they should understand that those extra deaths are no big deal in the global scheme of things, and that it's far more important that they should get on with suffering their fate quietly and without having the bad manners of invading the Stew gaze by appearing in a gruesome Twitter post at the moment of their deaths.  And they certainly shouldn't be permitted to distract us in any way from Stew's obsessive round-the-clock commentary on the all-important, all-consuming women-with-beards issue.

The snag is, of course, that Stew has also just revealed himself to be utterly clueless about where Gaza slots in to the hierarchy of current global events, because no matter which way you look at it, comparable horrors are not unfolding in anything like 26% of the world's countries.  We know from his leading poll question the other day that Stew thinks some sort of "conflict" or "war" is still going on in Gaza, as opposed to a one-way extermination event committed by Israel against a defenceless civilian population.  But even if we humour him on that point, I cannot find any more than four ongoing wars with a death toll comparable to Gaza's.  Those four are - 

* The Ukraine war

* The civil war in Sudan

* The civil war in Myanmar

* The war in the Sahel

Those four wars mainly involve a total of seven sovereign states: Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.  Between them, those countries make up less than 4% of UN member states - way below Stew's estimate of 26%.  

If we look at actual ongoing genocides, Gaza stands out as even more exceptional, because there are around five other alleged ongoing genocides at present and none of them can be clearly established to have a higher death toll than the genocide in Gaza (and of course the official death toll in Gaza will almost certainly be proved in the fullness of time to be a massive underestimate).

I suspect these irrationally extreme displays of angry defensiveness from Stew are a kind of stress response.  Tweets like the one from Barry Malone make Stew feel profoundly uncomfortable because they remind him of something he already suspects on an instinctive level - ie. that if he looked into it properly, he'd discover that he's quite wrong to say that events in Gaza are unexceptional by normal international standards, and that conversely, those he sneers at and tries to shame into silence are objectively right to say that Gaza is the most important moral cause of our time.  That's the case not only because the death toll is unusually high, but because our own UK government is facilitating the mass killings with generous weapons sales and intelligence-gathering reconnaissance flights - not something that can be said about the other wars and genocides of 2025.

It's just possible that those gruesome deaths you're so angry about being shown on Twitter are actually more important than the women-with-beards issue, Stew.  At least, you know, for the time being.

At least Campbell's propaganda poll is helpfully revealing what his current prorities are: yesterday it was "let's reduce the pressure on Netanyahu to stop starving babies", and today it's "let's try to get the abolition of devolution onto the political agenda"

A few weeks ago, the senior Alba Party member Mike Dailly made the extraordinary declaration that he thought there should be a referendum on abolishing the Scottish Parliament and reverting to direct rule from London (with the clear implication that he'd be voting in favour of that) unless Maggie Chapman was removed as Deputy Convener of the Equalities Committee.  I know, I know, it doesn't sound any less bonkers with the passage of time.  And given that Alba is theoretically supposed to believe in Scottish self-government rather than London rule, it was even more remarkable that there was no apparent attempt on the part of the party leadership to distance itself from Mr Dailly's views.

The idea also seemed to instantly capture the imagination of the controversial and increasingly far-right "Stew" blogger, who has come to loathe our democratically elected national parliament because it keeps having the temerity to pass legislation he dislikes.  But in much the same way that he tactically decided to "both sides" the Gaza genocide rather than just baldly saying "it's all the fault of Hamas so please let Bibi get on with exterminating the Palestinians in respectful peace and quiet", he also realised that he couldn't be seen to be openly campaining for the abolition of devolution, because he's trying to keep up the increasingly fatuous pretence that he's still some sort of "pro-independence blogger".  

So he came up with what he thought was a brilliant wheeze.  He suggested modifying Mr Dailly's idea so that the referendum would be a binary choice between abolishing the Scottish Parliament altogether, and Scotland becoming an independent state.  In other words the devolved system, which was set up after attaining landslide majority support in a 1997 referendum, would be abolished by a new referendum in which nobody is allowed to vote to retain it.  It's self-evidently a batsh*t crazy idea, a total non-starter that any serious commentator would have been embarrassed to have even thought about, let alone to write it down and advocate it.  But the general rule of thumb with Stew is that the more preposterous the wheeze, the more his enthusiasm for it just seems to grow with time.  And from his own narrow point of view you can see the attraction, because it allows him to pursue his anti-devolution agenda while innocently posing as someone who is just trying to come up with fresh thinking for delivering independence.  Given the seemingly limitless credulity of his hardcore cult followers, it even allows him to attack the SNP for "not being serious about independence" simply because they very sensibly refuse to give the time of day to the latest Nutty Stew Idea De Jour.

Unsurprisingly, he's devoted a question in his latest propaganda mini-poll to his madcap plan.  But tellingly, he hasn't asked whether voters support the idea of holding his referendum, but instead the somewhat less important question of how they would vote if it was held.  Presumably this is because he has just about enough self-awareness to realise that if he asked voters whether his idea was a good one, they'd inevitably and resoundingly tell him that it is in fact a very, very stupid idea indeed.

If there were to be a second independence referendum tomorrow and the ONLY options on the ballot were full independence or the permanent closure of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and a return to direct Westminster rule, how do you think you would vote?  (Norstat / Stew, 27th-30th May 2025)

Full independence: 63%

Return to direct Westminster rule: 37%

To a limited extent this is good news, because what it tells us is that a significant minority of the hardest-to-reach No voters care strongly enough about having an autonomous parliament in Edinburgh that if the only remaining way of saving it was to switch to supporting full independence, they would do so.  That means, as I and many others have pointed out in recent months, that if a Reform UK government came into power and started trying to roll back devolution, it could be the game-changing moment that finally leads to an overwhelming and stable Yes majority.

But what the poll categorically does not tell us is that full independence would be the winning option in Stew's proposed referendum, for the very simple reason that no such referendum will ever take place.  And if you want to know why it will never take place, all you have to do is pay proper heed to the words of Stew himself.

"There is not, in our lifetimes, going to be another independence referendum on the terms of the first one. The UK government has no conceivable reason to agree to one, because it has nothing to gain. It conceded one in 2014 because it was confident it would win handsomely and wasn’t really risking anything"

Precisely.  The UK government will not hold a referendum when there is nothing forcing it to do so and when it would risk Scotland becoming an independent country.  There is nothing forcing the UK government to agree to the #StewRef, and they would be even less likely to agree to it than to a standard indyref, because as the poll demonstrates, it would carry an even greater risk of independence actually occurring.  So the whole plan falls apart on Stew's own logic.  The other reason London would not agree is that all UK governments feel obliged to superficially pose as supporters of devolution, so they wouldn't ever allow themselves to be framed as viewing the potential abolition of devolution as some kind of 'reward' or 'bait' for offering the vote.  That would just make it even harder for them to stop the momentum for independence.

The SNP would obviously never propose the idea in the first place for two very good reasons: a) they'd know the answer from London would be no, so they wouldn't make a fool of themselves by making such a silly request, and b) they wouldn't allow themselves to be seen to be willing to irresponsibly gamble away a parliament that millions of Scots care about and that took decades to win.  It would be a fundamentally unserious thing for any political party to do, and it might well destroy their credibility, and the credibillity of the wider independence movement, forever.

Stew may be highly unstable but he's not a fool - he knows full well that there's a hopeless logical contradiction in what he's proposing.  He's not banging the drum for the idea because he thinks it's remotely viable, but instead because he thinks it's a neat way of getting the option of abolishing devolution onto the political agenda and talked about.  And at least with his own disciples, he may get away with such a cynical stunt because they always reliably fail to apply the slightest scrutiny or logic to anything he says.

What this reminds me of most is the period somewhere around 2018 or 2019 when he announced that he'd come up with a cunning plan for how the SNP could get an independence referendum out of Theresa May.  All they had to do was offer to get her out of a fix by voting in favour of her soft Brexit deal in direct swap for an independence referendum, and she would have no option but to agree.  And of course because the SNP didn't go down that road, he's castigated them ever since for missing a supposedly golden opportunity to win independence.

Now, as regular readers know, I don't think the SNP did anything like enough to pursue independence during the key Brexit years of 2017-21.  But it was literally impossible for them to win independence in the specific way Stew claims they could have, because they simply didn't possess the arithmetical leverage that he alleges.  Theresa May would have said no to the Stew Deal for two reasons: a) she was a conviction politician on the question of 'Our Precious Union' and wouldn't have betrayed everything she believed in, even to save her own skin, and b) she'd have known it would have been pointless because she would never have been able to sell a deal involving an independence referendum to her own backbenchers, many of whom were hardline unionists.  She'd have gained 30-odd votes for her soft Brexit through one door and simultaneously lost 100-odd votes for it through another door.

Leading Alba figures understand this perfectly well, of course, but one of the disreputable things they've done over recent years is pretend not to understand it, because they know Stew has successfully convinced his followers that the fairy-tale deal with May was there to be done. For as long as people are daft enough to believe that, it's a useful stick for Alba to beat the SNP with.

Normal service is resumed as SNP bounce back to hold a commanding lead in latest YouGov subsample

The full-scale Scottish poll from Norstat showing a decent SNP lead was already enough to say with a reasonable level of confidence that the recent weird string of Scottish subsample results from GB-wide polls had been leading us astray, but it's nevertheless reassuring to see normal service being resumed in the latest YouGov subsample.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 1st-2nd June 2025):

Reform UK 28% (-1)
Labour 22% (+1)
Conservatives 18% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 17% (+2)
Greens 9% (-2)
SNP 3% (+1)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 38%, Reform UK 26%, Labour 17%, Liberal Democrats 7%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 3%

It's passing by without much comment, but the Scottish Tories seem to be sleepwalking towards...well, maybe not quite an extinction event, because they'll probably still have Holyrood seats after next year, but they look set to be downgraded from the leading opposition party to fourth, fifth or sixth place.

Meanwhile at GB-wide level, the Tories once again find themselves more or less level-pegging with the Liberal Democrats.

*. *. *. 

I have a new article at The National, looking ahead to the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election - you can read it HERE.

The only consolation is that he's Somerset's shame, not Scotland's: Campbell intensifies his "let's reduce the pressure on Netanyahu to stop starving children" campaign by spending hundreds of pounds of his readers' money on an Israel-friendly propaganda polling question

A couple of weeks ago, the controversial and increasingly far-right "Stew" blogger ran an utterly meaningless self-selecting Twitter poll of his readers that was carefully framed to produce a "both sides are to blame for the situation in Gaza" response, and to reinforce his propaganda narrative that what is happening is an incomprehensible far-off quarrel that we should all just forget about so we can concentrate totally and without reservation or distraction on the all-important women-with-beards issue.  Rather than, you know, actually ratcheting up the pressure on our pro-Israel government in London to do something to stop the ongoing genocide and to prevent tens of thousands of children from literally starving to death in the near future.  

Others may be determined to give the Pied Piper of Bath a free pass on this, but I have no intention of doing so.  Campbell is pro-passivity on Gaza and he is therefore pro-starvation.  He and other pro-passivity "both sides" commentators know exactly what they're doing, and they are fully aware that the public opinion environment they are trying to engineer is one in which far more children (and of course adults) are likely to die needlessly.  What his underlying motivation might be for doing this is more open to debate, although plenty of us have our suspicions. He presumably knew from early on in the genocide that he would harm his own case and whatever is left of his reputation if he backed Israel without qualification, and then realised he didn't even need to bother doing that, because "both sidesing" the issue has exactly the same practical effect - impunity for Israel and ongoing slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

When the remarkable Norstat/Sunday Times poll on independence was published at the weekend, Campbell announced that he had "hitched a lift" by paying to have at least one of his own questions added to the poll, and insisted that his own results were of far more interest than the independence numbers.  Readers naturally assumed that this meant his question would be yet another vitally important passive-aggressive effort about Kezia Dugdale's time as Director of the John Smith Centre, and would of course in no way be motivated by the Longest Sulk in History after Campbell was predictably defeated in his loopy defamation court action against Dugdale.  Alas, though, it turns out there is no Dugdale involvement at all in the question, which is instead simply a repeat of Stew's Twitter question about Israel, albeit this time asked of a representative sample of the Scottish population.

Paradoxically, the main thing he's achieved by doing this (whether he realises it or not) is to demonstrate that those who pointed out his Twitter poll was worthless were absolutely correct.  Although there's a narrow plurality in the poll for "both sides" being to blame, the percentage choosing that option is much lower than it was in the Twitter poll, thus underscoring once again that self-selecting polls of one guy's followers on social media have no statistical validity.

The question Campbell had Norstat ask was "Who do you think is responsible for the current conflict in Gaza?"  Which begs the obvious question: what is this "conflict" of which you speak, Stew?  A "conflict" or "war" normally implies that there are two or more sides slugging it out, which may have been the case eighteen long months ago but is certainly not the case now.  All we have at the moment is a single actor, the State of Israel, systematically exterminating the utterly defenceless population of a neighbouring country.  To the extent that there's a second belligerent, it consists of a civilian population simply trying to evade the bombs and the bullets, and its "war aims" can be summed up in just one word: survival.

Who do you think is responsible for the current conflict in Gaza?  (Norstat / Stew, 27th-30th May 2025):

Both Sides™: 35%

Mostly Israel: 28%

Mostly Hamas: 23%

Bearing in mind the leading nature of both the question wording and the options provided (if the third option had been "mostly Palestine" or "mostly the Palestinians", the result would have been radically different), it's pretty impressive that more people selected Israel as the culprit than Hamas.  Remember that almost the entire mainstream media in this country were pumping out relentless and largely unchallenged pro-Israel propaganda from October 2023 until very recently, and even now Israel is still being protected from much of the condemnation that is warranted.  For a very long time the public were being brainwashed with the brick wall message that "Hamas started this on October 7th" and "Israel has the right to defend itself" and "Israel strenuously denies that it is committing genocide or war crimes and you will kindly not use those words when being interviewed by me ever again".  After so long being practically instructed to think Hamas are the only baddies, it's extremely difficult for people not to cop out of saying "mostly Israel" by seeking sanctuary in the "both sides" option.  But it says something really quite powerful about the way in which social media is successfully breaking through the narratives of the establishment media that almost as many people chose "mostly Israel" as chose "both sides".  

Nevertheless, it has to be said that it's an objective fact that the combined total of 58% who believe the main culprit is either Hamas or "both sides" are simply wrong.  There are a number of reasons for that - 

1) The starting point for the violence was not 7th October 2023, but the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 in which the Israelis used extreme force (including mass killings) to establish a Jewish state comprising 80% of the territory of Palestine, of which they made up only around a third of the population.

2) It makes no difference that the Israelis had previously accepted the UN partition plan and that the Palestinians had rejected it, because the Palestinians were entirely within their rights to argue that the whole of Palestine was a single coherent territory with the right to self-determination and the clear majority of its population was opposed to partition.

3) Having driven massive numbers of Palestinians away from their homes in 1948, Israel have since and to this very day illegally refused to allow them the right to return, which has left many of them crammed into the tiny space of the Gaza Strip, effectively a glorified refugee camp.  That created the perfect breeding ground for radicalised groups such as Hamas to come into being and to thrive.

4) Those conditions were exacerbated by the Israeli conquest of the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, meaning that refugees were still crammed into appalling conditions but without even being masters of the 20% that remained of their house after 1948.

5) Having by the 1990s reluctantly reconciled themselves to the injustice of being permanently pushed back to the West Bank and Gaza, the moderate Palestinian leadership have for the most part not had any partner for peace on the Israeli side.  Almost all Israeli governments of the 21st century have consciously pursued a policy of trashing any peace process and throwing every conceivable practical obstacle in the way of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

6) Benjamin Netanyahu is far more responsible than the Palestinian people for the fact that Gaza is currently ruled by Hamas.  Although Hamas were democratically elected to a parliamentary majority in 2006, they have outstayed their term of office by around a decade and a half, and in any case they were never elected to the role of the presidency, which they effectively usurped in Gaza.  Netanyahu has funnelled millions of dollars to Hamas as a strategy to keep the leadership of the Palestinian territories divided and to make the formation of a state less likely.  Even right now, Netanyahu and the US are refusing to allow Hamas to add a clause to any ceasefire deal that would see political control of Gaza pass from Hamas to a technocratic Palestinian leadership.  Israel needs the Hamas bogey-man to survive, not only to thwart a Palestinian state but also to justify the continuation of the genocide.

For all of these reasons and more, and notwithstanding the horrors of 7th October, Israel unquestionably bears the overwhelming responsibility and blame for the last few decades of violence, and self-evidently for the one-way mass extermination event that is occurring at the moment.

I gather that Neil Sinclair, who made an extraordinary attempt to dictate the content of this blog a couple of days ago, and specifically to force me to allow his friend Gordon Millar to openly post justifications of genocidal beliefs here, was largely motivated by very similar views to the ones that drive Campbell.  Sinclair's attitude to those in Scotland campaigning loudly to stop the starvation of babies is, like Campbell's, one of irritation and vexation.  He regards them as "piggy-backing" onto the independence cause in the same way that trans activists have allegedly done in recent years.  He believes they should either be silenced or that their views should be placed into a sort of sealed antechamber where they cannot sully the independence cause.  Quite apart from the fact that his interpretation is simply wrong (I cannot see any evidence of piggy-backing or entryism going on), the worldview it betrays is grotesque and morally bankrupt.   Essentially we're supposed to sacrifice the people of Gaza on the altar of our own homegrown political preoccupations - which yes, are very important, but right at this moment cannot possibly outweigh the absolute imperative of stopping a genocide that is occurring *now*.  I'll have more to say about this in a future post.

More analysis of the extraordinary poll showing independence support at 54%

Just a quick note to let you know I have a new analysis piece at The National about the Norstat poll from the weekend, which showed a big lead for Yes on the independence question, and also had the SNP well ahead on party political voting intentions. You can read the article HERE.