An utterly unique political achievement: a month and a half after being expelled from the Alba Party, Chris McEleny appears to still be the Alba Party's Nominating Officer

It's been a little while since our last update on the McEleny saga, so I thought I'd take another quick look.  Correct me if I'm missing something, but I cannot find any publicly available reference to any appeal he made against expulsion from Alba or the outcome of it.  My guess is that it'll all be over by now, because we first learned about his expulsion in early May, he would have had a maximum of 21 days to decide on an appeal, and then I think the hearing would have had to be held within a month.  So in theory the process may still be dragging on, but I doubt it.  And the fact that we haven't heard anything at all probably indicates that his expulsion is now confirmed.

But it's not all bad news for "Mad Dog".  He may not be a member of Alba anymore, but according to the Electoral Commission website he's still the party's Nominating Officer.  You've got to give the guy his due: to still effectively be in control of a party he's been expelled from is a political achievement that is absolutely unique in British history.  He's never going to be First Minister, but they'll never be able to take this away from him.  OK, again it's theoretically possible that Alba may by now have found a way of coaxing him into resigning (they have no power to sack him) and the Electoral Commission website may just not have been updated yet.  But I somehow doubt that.

If things really are as they appear, it must be absolute mayhem behind the scenes at Alba, because it means that their ability to put up the candidates they want to at next year's election is subject to an absolute veto from a man they've just made an implacable enemy of by expelling.  Probably for the time being Corri Wilson is able to function as a de facto Nominating Officer due to written authorisation McEleny submitted well before his expulsion, but he could rescind that authorisation at any time he chooses.  I presume there must be Plan Bs in place to re-register the party with the Electoral Commission as a nominally new organisation - but to do that would require an entirely new name.  What would be left of the Alex Salmond Memorial Party by that point?

As for what McEleny's plan is, God knows, but everything we know about him and his ambition suggests that he'll be determined to stand as a Holyrood candidate next year, one way or another.  So if he hasn't moved on from Alba yet, that might indicate - bizarre though it may seem - that he still thinks he could be a candidate for Alba.  As Nominating Officer, he could of course just nominate himself as an Alba candidate and nobody would be able to stop him, but I'm wondering if perhaps he is holding out hope of doing it in a less provocative way.  

A number of people have pointed out that Kenny MacAskill seems to have lost all interest since becoming Alba leader - he spends more time these days tweeting cute photos of Highland cows and llamas than he does making political statements.  He's on a sort of Gerry Adams trajectory where it wouldn't be a total surprise if he releases a book of poetry.  So perhaps McEleny is banking on MacAskill giving in to his buyer's remorse and resigning quickly, thus leaving a vacancy that Ash Regan would be near-certain to fill.  If that happened, McEleny's expulsion would undoubtedly be reversed and he'd become the party's lead Holyrood candidate on the West list.  But Tyrannical Tasmina and the Corri Nostra (newly emboldened after the Wedding of the Century between Chris "the Crossmaglen Columbo" Cullen and straight-talking totally unfiltered independent woman Shannon Donoghue) will be determined to prevent that from happening at all costs.  If they need to hold MacAskill hostage, that's exactly what they'll do.

Meanwhile, it's dismaying but perhaps not surprising to see McEleny take a leaf out of his mate Stew's "Back Bibi With Whataboutery" book by retweeting a video mocking Greta Thunberg for being "selective in her activism" by sailing towards Gaza, rather than Ukraine "which is much closer to her".  Well, I suppose in the literal sense Ukraine is closer to Sweden, but in the overall scheme of things it's not that close, and by the same token Palestine isn't all that far away from Sweden either.  In fact Gaza is only a stone's throw away from Sweden's fellow EU member state Cyprus - hence all the intelligence-gathering flights Britain operates on Netanyahu's behalf from the 4% of Cypriot territory that is still colonised.

If I was in Thunberg's shoes I wouldn't have the slightest hesitation in prioritising Gaza.  Ukraine has control over 90% of its sovereign territory, whereas Palestine has proper control over none of its sovereign territory.  Ukraine has an army to fight back with, and it's backed to the hilt militarily and logistically by wealthy western countries.   Palestine has no army to defend itself with and it is receiving no external military support.  Its people are literally defenceless against genocide.

For as long as objective priorities exist, then yes, activism can be selective and it pretty much has to be, whether McEleny and Stew like it or not.

More polling signs that the SNP may have steadied the ship

In the run-up to the Hamilton by-election, there was a troubling string of eight polls in a row that had the SNP on a relatively low 2% of the GB-wide vote.  Ironically, now that the SNP have lost that by-election, the ship seems to have been steadied - five of the last seven GB-wide polls have had the SNP on 3%, suggesting that normal service has been resumed.  Here is the latest from Find Out Now - 

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 11th June 2025):

Reform UK 30% (-1)

Labour 24% (+2)

Conservatives 16% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 13% (-2)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 32%, Reform UK 22%, Labour 22%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%

As far as I know Find Out Now don't structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly like YouGov do, but I've given you the numbers for information anyway.

It looks both from this poll and other polls that there may have been a minor GB-wide recovery for Labour, albeit from a very low base.  Possibly the U-turn on winter fuel allowance has helped them a bit.  However, the plight of the Tories remains unchanged - Find Out Now have them on only half the vote of Reform, and with the Lib Dems within striking distance of overtaking them.

It's hard to believe the Tories will continue to sleepwalk into oblivion in the way they have been - surely at some point they'll at least roll the dice by changing leader to see if that makes a difference.  The betting markets still have Robert Jenrick as the favourite to replace Kemi Badenoch, although he's not odds-on and is rated as roughly a one-in-three chance.

So just two years and four days after you predicted an SNP-Labour coalition, Andy Maciver predicted it too?  Wow, that's impressive, Stew!  Most of us think a prediction has only come true when the predicted thing actually happens, but hey, you do you!

A genuine question for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland: am I Scottish enough in your eyes to qualify as a citizen of an independent Scotland?

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that the new "Liberate Scotland" electoral alliance has three component parts, and one of those parts is the Sovereignty party, which boasts a large number of nativist and essentially far-right policies.  On the issue of citizenship in an independent Scotland, the 2024 Sovereignty manifesto makes clear that being legally resident in Scotland on independence day will only entitle a person to residency rights, with citizenship itself being reserved for "Scots".  That term is not clearly defined, but it seems pretty clear that it's intended to be defined much more narrowly than "British citizens living in Scotland", ie. it appears to have an ethnic basis.

One of our commenters wondered aloud whether he would count as Scottish enough for Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland, given that he is one-quarter Irish.  And that set me thinking about myself.  As regular readers of this blog know, I have dual nationality, so one-half of my family background isn't Scottish at all.  But on my dad's side of the family, I have a typical Scottish Catholic background - meaning that I'm mostly descended from people who emigrated from Ireland between the 1850s and the 1890s, due to the mass transfer of population that occurred as a result of the man-made (London-made) Great Famine and its aftermath.

In fact for a long time I assumed that I probably didn't have any pre-1850 Scottish ancestry at all, because until relatively recently the Catholic community tended to only marry amongst themselves.  But a few years ago I discovered that there was one (albeit only one) mixed marriage in the family, which occurred somewhere around 1870.  That means one of my great-great-grandmothers was a native Scottish Protestant woman from South Lanarkshire, and through her I have Scottish ancestry going back to time immemorial.

But the opposite way of putting it is that in strictly ancestral terms I am merely one-sixteenth Scottish.  So do I make the cut as far as Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland are concerned?  I certainly wouldn't if Nazi-style racial laws were applied, because one-sixteenth would be considered far too diluted to count.  I wouldn't even qualify as a 'Mischling' (half-breed) - I would just be deemed to be purely Irish, or perhaps Irish-French-English-Dutch if I get into the complexities of the more exotic half of the family.

Now, my guess is that Sovereignty would stretch a point as far as the Irish-descended Catholic community is concerned.  We sound Scottish, we look Scottish, and the only three things that really set us apart is that we tend to have Irish-sounding surnames, we generally went to Catholic schools, and we mostly support Celtic football club.  And of course Celtic football club is in itself an integral part of modern Scottish culture - so how on earth would you disentangle the descendants of an immigrant community that assimilated into Scotland so totally?

But if you assume that Sovereignty would indeed give us Irish-descended folk a free pass because of what we look like and sound like, that implies that we'd be given special dispensation that wouldn't be offered to Scottish residents who, say, sound English or look Pakistani.  And when you start thinking about which groups would and wouldn't make the cut, and about the reasons why, you start to realise just how arbitrary and nasty it is to award or withhold citizenship on the basis of ethnicity.

Barrhead Boy, who seems to be the de facto leader of Liberate Scotland, went completely off his nut when I drew attention to Sovereignty's far-right policies.  He accused me of being some sort of saboteur and said individual policies should wait until after independence.  But I don't think that attitude is ever going to work as far as citizenship rights are concerned, and there's a very good reason for that.  People need to know before they vote on independence whether they're being asked about independence for their own country or about independence for a country that will regard them as an alien.  Self-evidently the answer to that question will for many people be the prime determinant of how they vote.

Sovereignty and Liberate Scotland can't fudge this or kick it down the road.  Voters are entitled to be told who an independent Scotland will belong to - and who it won't belong to.

BREAKING: The Daily Express back down and publish an apology for falsely claiming there was a "by-election poll" showing a tie between the SNP and Reform

As you'll probably remember, two weeks ago I pointed out that there was a deliberately misleading headline in the Daily Express which read "Humiliation for SNP as Nigel Farage's Reform UK now level in shock new by-election poll".  That clearly implied there was a poll of by-election voting intentions in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency showing the SNP and Reform UK level with each other, when in fact what was being referred to was the tiny, unweighted Scottish subsample of a GB-wide voting intentions poll.  I asked if there was any Scot Goes Pop reader who felt able to make a complaint to the press regulator IPSO, and also said I would make a complaint if nobody else did.

I can confirm that a complaint went forward, and as a result the Express have completely backed down - not only have they amended the article, but they have published a correction and apology, both in the article itself and on a standalone basis linked to from the newspaper's homepage.  I'm a veteran of past complaints about Reach plc publications (the stable includes the Express, the Record and the Mirror among others), and I've even dealt with the same Complaints Officer before, and I therefore know their usual approach is to make only very minor concessions in the hope of getting the complainant to accept far less than he or she should and to drop the complaint.  For them to totally climb down in this way suggests they were worried about something.  Either there must be some sort of precedent that made them think IPSO would take a particularly dim view of their false headline, or they must have had too many complaints upheld against them recently and are trying to get the numbers down a bit.

By accepting this as an informal resolution of the complaint, it does mean it will not be officially recorded as an upheld complaint and it won't count against the Express in the statistics.  However, my guess is the wisest thing to do is to keep our powder dry in case an even more important complaint comes up later.  I'd just like to make two observations, though -

1) To an extent the Express have still got away with their stunt, because any harm caused to the SNP by the fraudulent headline would have been caused before the by-election took place.  The Express waited until almost a week after the by-election before issuing the correction.

2) Incredibly, IPSO's procedures have become even more weighted against complainants than they used to be.  IPSO used to inform you if they rejected your complaint out of hand at the preliminary stage, whereas now they say if you don't hear anything within 21 days, that is the only indication you'll get of a rejection.  You then have 14 days to lodge an appeal.  This change of approach can only be seen as a cynical attempt to vastly reduce the number of appeals by maximising the chances that the complainant will forget all about it during the short window of opportunity.  When I received the email telling me the complaint was going ahead, I realised that I had actually forgotten about the whole thing for two or three days, and therefore I would guess there's a 50%+ chance I might not have remembered to chase things up when the 14-day window opened up.

WARNING - *Danger* - Emergency - NEE-NAW NEE-NAW - It's Stew, he thinks he's doing "psephology" again - *Clear The Area* - THIS IS NOT A DRILL

It's only around six months since the controversial and increasingly far-right Somerset-based blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because voting for them would be pointless - there was "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year.  That was Version 1.  And it's only four weeks since Stew told us that we had to vote against the SNP on the list because there was a 100% chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood next year, due to the fact that the SNP were  guaranteed to win at least "65 constituency seats", meaning any SNP list votes would be "wasted".  That was Version 2.

As I pointed out a few days ago, the Hamilton by-election result completely eviscerated Stew's Version 2 claim that the SNP were certain to win 65 constituency seats and thus destroyed the whole basis of his Version 2 argument for "tactical voting on the list".  And as I also pointed out, this made it absolutely inevitable that sooner or later we'd be getting Version 3 from Stew of why we definitely mustn't vote for the SNP on the list, which would be completely different from Version 1 and Version 2, and would be thrillingly much more complex than either of its predecessors because it would have to be somewhere in the middle, ie. it would need to be predicated on the assumption of the SNP doing neither outstandingly well nor particularly badly.

He's got cracking early, and it must have taken him ages, because he's given a new prediction for each and every individual constituency.  Presumably having realised he was going to have to contradict himself yet again, and so soon after the last time, he decided he could only hope to maintain even a veneer of credibility if he went into much more detail than before.

So of course the first thing I looked at was his new prediction for East Lothian, which he had previously listed as one of his 65 guaranteed SNP wins, even though I pointed out to him repeatedly that the opinion polls clearly showed Labour were likely to gain it by some distance.  Has he at last given up the ghost on this one?  Well, yes he has, but in doing so he has put forward such a clueless and factually inaccurate reasoning that all but his most brainwashed cult followers will stop listening to him from this point on - 

"Ah, the East Lothian Question. A certain self-described “expert” analyst is very excited about this one, and it undoubtedly represents a strong possibility for Labour, in the sense that if they can’t take East Lothian, they probably can’t take anywhere.

Actual current national polling says the SNP will hold it (since the fall in their support since 2021 is almost precisely identical to Labour’s), but the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem vote combined here was almost 10,000 higher than the SNP’s, so let’s give the baby his bottle and chalk another one up for Anas Sarwar’s boys."

WHAT?  The fall in SNP support since 2021 is "identical" to the fall in Labour support?  Let's take this nice and slowly, Stew.  The SNP's national vote share in 2021 was 47.7%, an all-time record high, and Labour's was 21.6%, an all-time record low.  The last few opinion polls show the SNP's vote share at somewhere between 33% and 36%, which is a drop of between 12 and 15 percentage points since 2021.  And they show Labour's vote share at somewhere between 19% and 22%, which at the lower end is a drop of only three points since 2021, and at the higher end is a no change position.  That is why all projections based on opinion polls show the ultra-marginal seat of East Lothian as an overwhelmingly likely Labour gain from the SNP.  That's what the projections show now, and that's what they showed four weeks ago when Stew first made his bonkers claim that the polls were somehow pointing to an SNP hold in East Lothian.

Although it's always been obvious that Stew's "psephological analyses" are propaganda-driven and wildly divorced from reality, I must say I had always assumed that he at least understood the basics perfectly well, and that he was just bluffing his way through and hoping no-one checked the details of his deceitful claims too closely.  But in this case it really does look like he doesn't have a sodding clue what the 2021 baseline numbers are, and that all of the thousands of words he's written to try to support his case for tactical voting on the list have been based on the schoolboy howler false premise that Labour's vote is down by just as much as the SNP's since 2021.  In all seriousness, Stew fans: how did you manage to read that East Lothian prediction without bursting into hysterical laughter?  And having gained that insight into his utter cluelessness, how did you carry on reading the other predictions with a straight face?

Given that he seems to have armed himself with such a wonky abacus, you won't be surprised to hear that many of his other predictions and reasonings are similarly nutty.  Here are the most dodgy ones - 

* He has Aberdeenshire West, Eastwood and Galloway & West Dumfries as SNP gains from the Conservatives, when in fact current polling suggests a net swing from SNP to Tory, meaning all of these seats are likely to be retained by the Conservatives

* He has Aberdeenshire East, Aberdeen South & North Kincardine, Banffshire & Buchan Coast and Ayr as SNP holds, when in fact current polling suggests all of these seats are likely Conservative gains

And it's not just projections from opinion polls that point to likely Tory resilience in battleground areas - that pattern was clearly already visible in last year's general election when the Tories were holding seats they should really have lost on nationwide trends.  Where they were able to credibly portray themselves as the only hope of keeping the SNP out, they were successful - with the obvious exception of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East, but even there Douglas Ross came much closer to holding the seat than should ever have been possible in the circumstances.

Of course what Stew is engaged in here is an attempt to get his "projected" SNP constituency numbers as high as possible (while making a few grudging concessions such as East Lothian and Hamilton itself to try to avoid looking like a complete idiot), so he can claim that the SNP won't win any compensatory list seats and thus any SNP list votes will be wasted.  But nothing has changed since Version 2, Stew - your numbers still don't add up.  The only thing that has changed is that it now looks like you don't even know that your numbers don't add up.

UPDATE: The Sage of Bath has seen this blogpost and hurriedly deleted the key section of his East Lothian prediction.  Don't worry, Stew, I took the precaution of taking a screenshot of the incriminating evidence...

Is the new speculation about John Swinney's future as leader a hopeful sign for independence?

I'm not quite sure what to make of the story in The National suggesting that 25 senior SNP figures have met to discuss replacing John Swinney as leader.  I suppose the questions that form in my mind are "how senior?" and "how representative are they?", although it's been interesting to see open calls for a return to a serious strategy on independence from surprising sources such as Toni Giugliano a few weeks ago, and James Dornan yesterday.  

What I've found dispiriting about this situation all along is that it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because whenever John Swinney does depart, regardless of whether it's this year or in five years' time, his replacement is highly likely to be either Kate Forbes or Stephen Flynn, and to the best of my knowledge neither of them are likely to restore the policy of a de facto referendum.  Without that it's hard to see how you ever get to independence.  That said, during the 2023 leadership election, I was struck by how much more positive the mood music on independence was from Kate Forbes than from Humza Yousaf, and how she was talking about achieving it quickly, even if I couldn't quite fathom how she planned to do it.  Alex Salmond also told me on the phone that he thought Forbes was a supporter of independence, which may seem like quite a low bar to clear, but by that point he tended to dismiss many leading SNP figures as devolutionists.

But I presume that the main reason Swinney is leader right now is precisely to keep Forbes out because some people at the top of the party can't stomach her private religious views.  It's hard to see that roadblock to change being cleared before the 2026 election, because Stephen Flynn is still in Westminster.  As far as I can remember the rule hasn't been altered to prevent non-MSPs from standing for leader, so in theory if an early vacancy arose Flynn could put himself forward on the basis that he will nominate a stopgap First Minister to hold the fort until next May, but a) that would look like a very odd arrangement to the public, and b) if the stopgap was anyone other than Kate Forbes (and I bet it would be) it would look nakedly factional and open up a whole new can of worms.  I'm still inclined to think it would be better just to give Forbes a go as leader and see what she can do.  I'm not particularly bothered about her views on sex before marriage or whatever because to the best of my knowledge she's not actually planning to set up a Free Church of Scotland theocratic dictatorship.

Incidentally, on James Dornan's suggestion that the SNP should pledge to hold a referendum with or without a Section 30 order, although I thoroughly approve of the gung-ho attitude, I'm not sure how that could legally be done in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.  There are no legal issues with a de facto referendum and that is obviously the way forward.

It's just a straw in the wind, but a highly encouraging one: the first post-Hamilton Scottish subsample from YouGov suggests that the SNP still have a big national lead over Labour

As I've been pointing out repeatedly since Friday (and some people really, really haven't wanted to hear this message, but I'm afraid facts are chiels that winna ding), the swing in the Hamilton by-election was consistent with the recent polls showing the SNP with a double-digit national lead over Labour.  So the only way the Hamilton result is going to be any sort of problem for the SNP is if the media hype generated by it in itself changes public opinion in Labour's favour.  We'll have to wait for another full-scale Scottish poll to find out for sure whether or not that has happened (and that could be weeks away), but the first YouGov subsample conducted since Hamilton suggests that Labour have not made any progress or enjoyed any bounce.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 8th-9th June 2025):

Reform UK 29% (+1)

Labour 23% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 15% (-2)

Greens 10% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 28%, Labour 17%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Conservatives 7%, Greens 4%

YouGov structure and weight their Scottish subsamples correctly, unlike other firms, but the margin of error on a sample of 140 is still enormous.  So it's statistically possible there's still some sort of 'hidden' Labour bounce, but I think the SNP will be pretty reassured by these numbers.  The high Reform vote share is obviously concerning, but if we're back to thinking Labour are the SNP's main challengers next year, the first priority for John Swinney is to retain a substantial lead over Labour, and it looks like that might well be happening.

Here's how the SNP have a 15% to 25% chance of securing an independence referendum within the next few years - but only if SNP supporters are ready for the opportunity and put enormous pressure on their leadership to face down the Tom Bradbys of this world

Last week, I tried to look up what the leading betting exchange was showing about the Hamilton by-election - only to find that it wasn't showing anything at all, because of course it's far too Anglocentric to even bother with Holyrood by-elections.  So instead I browsed through some of the other political markets, and this is the one that caught my eye...

Who will win an overall majority at the next UK general election?

No overall majority: 1.93

Labour: 3.75

Reform UK: 5

Conservatives: 27

Liberal Democrats: 130

What that means is that punters are saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of a hung parliament after the next election - which is pretty startling, given that first-past-the-post is a majoritarian voting system that can and does produce overall single-party majorities on extremely low vote shares.  Since the Second World War, there have been twenty-two general elections, and only three have produced hung parliaments: February 1974, 2010 and 2017.  Additionally, seats projections from many recent polls have shown Reform winning an absolute majority despite only being in the high 20s or low 30s in terms of vote share.

As long-term readers will recall from my exchanges with Neil "Alligators" Lovatt, I don't believe the betting markets are any kind of predictive God.  But nevertheless, many punters on the markets are statistically minded, and they must at least have some sort of logic (even if that logic turns out to be wrong) for thinking there is a 50%+ chance of no party winning a majority.  Presumably the theory is that with the UK now in an era of seven-party politics, there are a lot of permutations in which the parties would be too bunched together to produce a clear winner.

Additionally, barring a dramatic improvement in Tory or Labour fortunes, there are a lot of seats which will go to (or stay with) the Lib Dems and the SNP by default, which effectively takes dozens of seats out of the game completely as far as Reform, Labour or the Tories reaching the target figure for a majority is concerned.

So let's just assume for the sake of argument that the market is right and there is a slightly better than even chance of a hung parliament.  Let's also assume (and this is another big assumption) that the SNP can return to their previous position of holding the majority of Scottish seats.  That might open up the possibility of the SNP holding the balance of power and being able to secure an independence referendum.

Now, to be clear, they would not have a 50% chance of being able to do that, because in spite of what the fantastical ravings of the controversial "Stew" blogger would have you believe, the existence of a hung parliament is not in itself enough to produce the necessary leverage for the SNP.  The arithmetic within the hung parliament still has to be favourable for them, by which I mean that they need to have the numbers to be able to offer a stable governing majority to a potential centre-left government.  That was categorically not the case in the 2017-19 hung parliament, when the SNP did not hold the balance of power.  So that consideration reduces the chances significantly, probably to somewhere between 15% and 25%.

I've been the first to say over the years that relying on a hung parliament at Westminster to get us to independence is in the realms of desperation, because the odds will always be against it and there's nothing we can do to influence whether it happens or not.  But in the context where we have an SNP leadership which has taken all the other credible options for delivering independence off the table, you have to look at what's left, and a 15% to 25% chance of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster within three or four years may actually be the most promising avenue remaining.

That being the case, SNP members and supporters need to be ready for that opportunity to come up - by which I mean they need to be ready to put overwhelming pressure on the SNP leadership to settle for nothing less than an independence referendum in return for what would presumably be some sort of confidence-and-supply deal with the Labour party.  That pressure will be desperately needed for two reasons.  Firstly, as a counterweight to John Swinney's innate caution and small 'c' conservatism (assuming Swinney is still leader by then).  And secondly, because an opposite type of pressure will be applied to the SNP from a different direction.

It always used to be assumed that proportional representation would be introduced in the UK once the Liberal Democrats held the balance of power at Westminster and were able to negotiate a coalition deal.  And yet in 2010, the Lib Dems did hold the balance of power and did negotiate a coalition - but settled for something that fell far short of proportional representation, namely a referendum on the non-proportional AV system.  Why did they do that?  Partly because they were psyched into it by establishment figures in the media, most notably the political editor of ITV News, Tom Bradby, who disgracefully abused his position to pretty much openly campaign for a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that did not feature proportional representation, or indeed that did not even discuss proportional representation in the coalition negotiations.  It was, he insisted, inappropriate to bring items like PR to the table when the country faced a crisis situation.  When the Lib Dems eventually did start negotiating on PR, Bradby blew his top, and put huge pressure on them to backtrack by angrily telling his viewers that it had been one of the grubbiest days in British politics he could remember.  ("Grubby" being code for a party trying to implement the policies it had been elected to implement.)

The thing is, no matter what the circumstances, the likes of Bradby will always be able to cynically frame coalition negotiations as a "national emergency" in which the participants have to set aside their normal preoccupations in the "national interest".  In fact the opposite is true - that's the very moment of opportunity at which preoccupations like PR or Scottish independence have to come to the fore and be argued for tenaciously and relentlessly.  The SNP membership will have to steel their own leadership to face down Bradby, or whoever the Bradby equivalent is in 2028 or 2029.  In that scenario, what Bradby says on News at Ten doesn't matter, what the next day's headlines say doesn't matter.  You have a one-off opportunity to win independence for your country, and that opportunity may never come your way again.  You damn well grab it, any way that you can.

Stew

My devoted stalker from Somerset famously claims to never even mention me on Twitter, or if he does mention me, it's only "twice a year" or so.  Mysterious, then, that he somehow managed to post three tweets about me within just three minutes on Saturday, with yet more thrilling bonus tweets yesterday.  But you've got to cut him some slack here - it was just a squeal of pain because I had pointed out what somebody was bound to point out before too long, ie. that the Hamilton by-election result had just demonstrated with almost embarrassing vividity that Stew's claim that the SNP are guaranteed to win 65 Holyrood constituency seats next year is completely, hopelessly, cretinously wrong, and has thus eviscerated his entire argument for so-called "tactical voting on the list".  

All he had left by that point was a Trumpian denial (albeit an extremely half-hearted Trumpian denial) that he had ever made the claim in the first place, followed by two extremely weak straw men.  Just for the sake of completeness, however, I'll briefly deal with the three tweets one by one.  "This won't take long", to adopt a beloved catchphrase of the Great One himself.

A new record, folks - a *72-word* title (premised entirely on something I've never even remotely come close to saying). pic.twitter.com/azpKlNeXg9

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 7, 2025

Yes, folks, apparently his 11th May blogpost "The blindness of hatred", in which he stated that the SNP were guaranteed to win 65 constituency seats, and even helpfully provided maps to put beyond doubt which 65 he was referring to (Hamilton was one of them!), was just a figment of our collective imagination.  You know, just like it was a figment of our imagination last autumn when he said that there was "zero chance" of a pro-independence majority at Holyrood next year - a claim that was not exactly consistent with the SNP winning 65 constituency seats.  Or just like it was a figment of our imagination when he said Humza Yousaf had definitely lost the 2023 SNP leadership election ("I'm calling it early" he boasted). 

Well, I don't know about you but I'm convinced.  In the immortal words of the Dugdale defamation judge, "case dismissed!"

Incidentally, Stew's tweet denying that he had ever said what we all saw him say a mere four weeks ago attracted this reply from one of his cult followers: "We have always been at war with Eastasia".  I mean, that's just too perfect to be real.  I don't think you meant that quite the way it came across, my friend, but great point.  Great point.

Poor mad James, 6 June: "HAMILTON SHOULD NOT BE MISTAKEN FOR A BELLWETHER CONSTITUENCY"

Poor mad James, 7 June: "HAMILTON IS TOTALLY A BELLWETHER CONSTITUENCY" pic.twitter.com/17HGaVA91o

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 7, 2025

For the uninitiated, the electoral meaning of "bellwether" is a locality or region that always or usually votes for the national winner.  Now, it's true that I said on 6th June that Hamilton is not a bellwether constituency, for the obvious reason that it isn't - it's instead a very favourable seat for Labour, one that on a uniform swing they would win even if they were ten, eleven or twelve percentage points behind the SNP nationwide.   Sadly for Stew, I didn't then contradict myself a day later by saying "Hamilton is totally a bellwether constituency", and indeed Stew has helpfully attached a screenshot of the completely different point I actually made.  I pointed out that because Stew had been proved so catastrophically wrong in his prediction that Hamilton was a nailed-on certain SNP hold, his predictions about other similar seats were almost certainly not well-founded either.  To point out that there are many other US states that tend to vote in a similar way to Alabama is a very different thing from saying that Alabama is a "bellwether state".

So silly, Stew.  What a weak effort, even by your standards.  

Poor mad James, 6 June: "The result shows that the polls indicating the SNP sweeping almost every constituency seat are basically accurate."

Poor mad James, 7 June: "The result shows that the SNP may win fewer constituency seats than Labour." pic.twitter.com/KD2R5WP98R

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 7, 2025

It's true that I pointed out on 7th June that Labour winning more constituency seats than the SNP is one of the wide range of possible outcomes next year.  It's also true that on 6th June I pointed out that the Hamilton result broadly demonstrated that the current polls are accurate.  Sadly for Stew, I did not contradict myself by saying that the polls are correct in showing the SNP "sweeping almost every constituency seat", because the polls show no such thing, and I've been consistently pointing out for weeks that Stew has been lying through his teeth when he tells his readers that the polls do show that.  You might remember that in our "Great Twitter Debate" (which he demanded and then ran away from within about ten minutes), I pressed him repeatedly on his utterly bonkers claim that East Lothian was a guaranteed SNP hold, when in fact the polls clearly show it to be a highly likely Labour gain.  Try as I might, I couldn't get him to admit that his East Lothian "projection" was just plain wrong, or at least to explain how on earth he had arrived at the "projection".  All he did was deflect by saying that it "didn't matter" what the result in East Lothian was, and when that didn't work he resorted to the comfort blanket of a Trumpian denial that he had ever claimed East Lothian would be held by the SNP.

I was right - that didn't take long.

Meanwhile, Stew retweeted a post yesterday which rehashed the endlessly debunked claim that gay people are thrown off rooves in Palestine.  This doesn't exactly assist his repeated protestations that his reason for trying to silence all criticism of Israel's genocide is because of his disdain for "both sides", rather than because he wholeheartedly agrees with all of Netanyahu's propaganda talking points about how Israel is justified in massacring Palestinians because it is a fight against "evil".

pic.twitter.com/Q1yrE7lzK1

— Devil's Advocate (@DevilEsq474) June 7, 2025

Of course the answer to the question "but what if you were gay in Gaza?" is "you would be shot or bombed by the IDF, just like straight and bi people".  Israel are extremely inclusive, even trans-inclusive, in their selections of Palestinians to slaughter.

You may also have heard, incidentally, that Israel have taken Greta Thunberg and her comrades hostage ("free the hostages", "bring them home", "Sweden has every right to defend herself", etc, etc) and intend to take them to Israel and show them a propaganda video of Hamas in action.  But I don't think you should stop there, Bibi, I think it would pack far more of a punch if you also fly out Neil Sinclair and Gordon Millar and get them to do a PowerPoint presentation about The Comment.  

"You see?  Criticising genocide is all very well, but there are reasons.  There is context.  All a bit more complicated than you thought, young lady, so I suggest you go back to your daily life, think only about the things that properly concern you, and let these fine gentlemen get on with doing whatever they see fit to the people of Gaza.  Oh no wait, apparently you're not going to be released because your left nostril is a suspected Hamas command centre.  You have no-one to blame but yourself for what must now be done."

Electoral illiteracy, part 2

There was another attempted comment an hour or two ago, which this time I'm not going to publish because it's grossly misleading, which among other things claimed that the Hamilton result showed that the opinion polls are divorced from reality.  Oh, really?

This is what last weekend's Norstat poll showed on the constituency ballot - 

* The SNP down 15 points since 2021

* Labour down 3 points since 2021

* Reform UK up 18 points since 2021

If you apply those changes to the Hamilton constituency, this would have been the projected by-election result -

Labour 31%

SNP 31%

Reform UK 18%

And the actual result was -

Labour 32%

SNP 29%

Reform UK 26%

It is pushing credibility beyond breaking-point to suggest that the Hamilton result showed the opinion polls are wrong, at least as far as the SNP v Labour battle is concerned.  The Norstat poll was actually shown to be correct within the usual margin of error, thus confirming that the SNP are likely to have a double-digit lead over Labour nationally.  It's true that the full extent of the Reform surge in Hamilton was not reflected in the polls, but some of that surge was probably a by-election-specific effect anyway, ie. a protest vote that might not be repeated in a Holyrood election or Westminster general election.

The reason Labour were written off in the by-election had nothing to do with the polls, which as I pointed out in my piece in The National on Tuesday clearly suggested that Hamilton should be a very tight contest between Labour and the SNP.  Labour were assumed to be in trouble in the constituency simply because of the feedback from campaigners on the ground.

On the subject of electoral illiteracy

There was a comment I saw in the moderation queue about 24 hours ago, which I had intended to respond to at some length when I had a spare moment, but for the life of me I can't find it now.  It started by saying something like "it's obvious that the SNP, Labour and Reform are all now roughly tied at 30% of the vote".  That's a perfect example of the 'electoral illiteracy' I was talking about on Friday, because people are clearly looking at the raw result in Hamilton and thinking they can apply it to Scotland as a whole, without taking any account at all of what makes the constituency of Hamilton different from Scotland as a whole.  It's as silly as looking at a by-election result in Buckinghamshire and assuming you'd get exactly the same percentages for each party in Coatbridge.

In the by-election, Labour's vote was actually down two points on the 2021 election.  Remember that nationally Labour were at a record low of just 21.6% on the constituency vote in 2021.  So the trend in Hamilton, far from suggesting that Labour are at "around 30%" nationally, actually suggests that they are at around *20%*.

The SNP's vote on Thursday was down seventeen points on 2021.  However, in 2021, the SNP's national vote share was at a record high of 48%, so a seventeen point drop would imply they are in the low 30s - still ten points or more ahead of Labour.

With Reform it's harder to say because there's no real 2021 baseline to measure from.  It may be that Hamilton is not particularly a favourable or unfavourable  seat for them, and that their 26% of the vote is a reasonable estimate of how they might have performed anywhere else in Scotland on Thursday - albeit in a by-election context where people are perhaps more likely to cast a protest vote against government parties.

But what that leaves you with is: SNP roughly in the low 30s, Reform roughly in the mid-20s, Labour at roughly 20%.  That may not be as good as we'd want, but it's self-evidently not an even-stevens position.

(And yes, I'm aware that Stew responded to my previous blogpost with a multi-tweet rant on Twitter - I'll give my thoughts on that in a fresh post later.)