I've been elected to the SNP's Policy Development Committee

As I posted three times last week to plug my candidacy in the SNP's internal elections, here's a quick video update on how I fared in the results.

SNP lead in Scotland as Labour slump to catastrophic all-time low of 15% across Britain

*. *. *

With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Could the UK general election of 2028 or 2029 end up being the real crunch-point on independence?

As has been well-rehearsed, a strategic misstep was made at the weekend - a single-party SNP majority is unlikely to be won simply because the electoral system is designed to prevent it, and then we'll be stuck with a precedent that we needn't and shouldn't ever have set.  Undoubtedly at some point after next year's election, we'll try to walk back from that precedent by arguing that a single-party majority isn't actually necessary after all, and our opponents will try to hold us to it, just as they've tried to hold us to "once in a generation".  It will be hard to get over that hurdle.

However, that mistake is now pretty much baked in, so there's not much point worrying about a misstep that has already been made.  As we look for signs of hope, I think one thing we should bear in mind is that if a pro-independence majority is won next year, but without the SNP reaching the self-imposed target of a single-party majority, it's not actually the case that Scottish politics will then go to sleep until 2031.  The next big election after May will in fact be the UK general election of 2028 or 2029.  If Reform are still in anything like the position in the polls they're in now, there will be considerable pressure on the SNP to devise a strategy for using that general election to win independence outright and to protect Scotland from far-right rule, rather than revert to the usual fare of just offering "strong Scottish voices at Westminster".

The logical step would be to say that "we have the pro-indy majority at Holyrood, that part of the equation is already there, so if pro-indy parties win a majority of votes at this Westminster election, we will regard that as an outright mandate for independence".  In practice, of course, we know that John Swinney is for some reason totally allergic to the concept of a de facto referendum in a way that Nicola Sturgeon was not, and even if he's been replaced by Stephen Flynn by then, the same will almost certainly prove to be true of Flynn.  But there will be immense pressure on the SNP leadership to devise some sort of method, regardless of what label they put on it, by which a pro-indy majority of seats and/or votes can be used to win independence.  Given the way the SNP itself has been clear about the apocalyptic threat of Reform rule, it's unlikely that "steady as she goes, let's build towards another crack at the 0.5% chance of a single-party majority in 2031" will be considered good enough.

Unless of course the Farage bubble has burst by then and Reform are no longer leading in the GB-wide polls.  But we'll just have to wait and see about that.

*. *. *

With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Make mine a double: why it has to be BOTH votes SNP next May

And yes, I do of course intend to vote "Both Votes SNP" next May, and would urge all SNP members and supporters to do the same, for the reasons I've given umpteen times over the last fifteen years (basically that the list vote is your "banker vote", it's what the overall composition of parliament is determined by, and is therefore not conducive to so-called "tactical voting").  But I must admit my main reason for the headline of this post is just to trigger our old friend Stew, and my goodness he is so easily triggered these days.  

Given that Stew famously "never even mentions me", it's amazing how often I get to be the star of Wings Over Scotland. It's my time in the sun, yet again, today.

I'm deeply honoured, Stew.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 14, 2025

You'll notice that even though his latest epic rant about me extensively quotes from my previous blogpost, he doesn't refer to me directly by name.  This is his standard tactic, both on his main site and on Twitter, in the hope that in six months' time he can tell his fans to do a search for my name to 'prove that he never even mentions me'.   Hmmm.  I'm afraid that bird has flown now, Stew.  Even the hardcore of the brainwashed will have noticed by now that you do tend to blog about me rather a lot.

In the video below you can see my response to Stew's article, in which I address his main point head-on, and explain exactly why pushing for the best possible result for the SNP at next year's election remains the right thing to do and makes perfect sense, in spite of my misgivings about the strategy that was agreed on Saturday.

*. *. *

With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

More analysis of the fateful strategic decision the SNP made on Saturday - and my thoughts on how we can best move forward from here

From a psephological point of view, the most interesting question about next year's Scottish Parliament election is whether or not the pro-independence parties in combination will win a majority of seats.  That is a very real and finely-balanced question - as things stand at the moment, I would say that there is perhaps a 60-65% chance that the SNP and Greens in combination will win a majority of seats, and a 35-40% chance that they will fail to do so.  In the latter circumstance it will probably only be a narrow failure, but a miss is as good as a mile.  Until the SNP's fateful decision at the weekend, the difference between winning a pro-indy majority and not doing so would have looked like the difference between victory and defeat for the SNP leadership and for independence itself.  But now, it looks like the only difference would be between one type of defeat and another type of defeat - a self-imposed defeat, because the SNP itself has declared that a pro-indy majority is nowhere near enough for victory.  Essentially all the suspense has just been drained from the election, because we now know with a very high level of confidence that defeat, in the absolutist all-or-nothing terms that the SNP have defined defeat, is firmly on the cards.  This is something that we as SNP conference delegates have done to ourselves (well, not all of us, but by a majority vote), and it's a really odd thing to have done.  It's pointless to pretend that it's anything other than a very odd thing to have done.

Because what is definitely not a psephological point of interest about next year's election is whether or not the SNP on their own will win a single-party overall majority.  In percentage terms, I would say that there is maybe a 0.5% chance of it happening and a 99.5% chance of it not happening.  That is simply because we have a proportional representation voting system which is designed to prevent any single party from winning a majority on its own, and in general it does that job very effectively.  If a weather forecaster told me that there is a 0.5% chance it will rain, I don't think I would even bother packing an umbrella.  When people say that lotteries are a "tax on stupidity", they don't mean that it is literally impossible for anyone to win the lottery jackpot - clearly people do win.  It's just that it's so close to impossible for any given individual to win as makes no difference, and it's therefore rational to say that they are simply throwing their money away for no purpose.  

So by the same token, it's rational to say that it's not a question of what John Swinney will do *if* the SNP do not win a single-party majority, but what he will do *when* the SNP do not win a single-party majority.  The laws of arithmetic do not yield to sheer force of will.  They do not change just because the SNP has inexplicably chosen to set itself a near-impossible target.

Now it may yet be that the pro-independence parties will fail to win a majority of seats between them, in which case it's all an academic point.  That would have constituted a defeat anyway, regardless of what happened at the weekend.  But if the pro-indy parties do win a majority between them, and the SNP fall short of a single-party majority, which at this stage looks like the most probable election outcome, that will be - as Toni Giugliano pointed out in his speech - a victory that we have chosen to turn into a defeat.  I really don't understand what the plan is in that eventuality or where John Swinney proposes to go from there.

One theory is that Mr Swinney doesn't think Scotland is ready to pursue independence (his comments in the Salmond/Sturgeon BBC documentary were consistent with that), and therefore he's consciously set up this strategy as a sort of "painful but necessary demonstration" to the independence movement, ie. when the single-party majority isn't won, he will say: "You see?  We fought this election flat-out on the independence issue, we threw the kitchen sink at it, but the public simply weren't listening to us.  Now we must heed that painful lesson and take the slow road to build the public's trust gradually, and I'm the man for that job." However, if that is what he has in mind, there are two obvious problems.  Firstly, in order to win support for his resolution at conference, he built expectations sky-high that not only would the single-party majority be won, but that he would personally ensure that it happened.  Several of the supportive speakers, notably Kate Forbes and Stephen Gethins, urged delegates to vote for the motion on a "back John Swinney to deliver the goods" basis, with the subtext being that even if you doubted the logical coherence of the plan, trust in the leader and loyalty to the leader should trump those doubts.  So if Mr Swinney doesn't meet the expectations he's built up, it's hard to see how he can then credibly present himself as the man best-placed to lead the SNP on a "pivot to the slow boat".  Essentially he's staked his leadership on literally delivering an independence referendum in a very short period of time via a single-party majority.

The other problem is that if pro-independence parties do win a majority in combination but the SNP don't win a majority on their own, I would suggest the lesson the independence movement will take from that is not that we were pushing too hard for independence and should slow down, but instead that we were self-evidently daft to bet the house on a single-party majority.  And I would also suggest that anyone dismayed by what happened at the weekend should use that as really strong motivation to get as good a result for the SNP as possible at the Holyrood election, because if, say, the SNP win 60 seats and the Greens win 12, I think it's pretty likely that delegates at future SNP conferences will learn the correct lesson and realise that the new strategy was a dreadful mistake that must never, ever be repeated.  And that means a good election result will indirectly help us to win independence, albeit a few years later than should really have been necessary.

I know many people felt they were slipping into an alternate universe when a speaker at the debate said that she had honestly thought that an independence referendum was imminent several years ago, but had woken up to reality now, and wanted the rest of us to join her in the real world, stop chasing shadows and back a credible way forward, by which she meant the leadership motion.  Anyone listening to that speech would have been forgiven for thinking that the SNP have been pursuing de facto referendums for the last ten years, and it's that which has proved a hopeless failure - when in fact they haven't tried a de facto referendum even once.  What they have tried, and tried, and tried again, and has hopelessly failed every single time, is precisely what the leadership have successfully argued must be tried yet again in a new "let's make it even more difficult for ourselves" variant form.  If you want to argue that the de facto referendum plan has failed every time it's been tried, get back to us when you've allowed it to be tried even once.  If you want us to believe the current plan of seeking a Section 30 order is the credible grown-up alternative, get back to us if you ever manage to break its seemingly endless run of being tried repeatedly without even the remotest hint of success.

Contradictions and paradoxes abound in the new variant of the Section 30 strategy.  We're told that the SNP will be campaigning on "Scotland's right to choose", when in fact the SNP have just decided for the very first time that Scotland does *not* have the right to choose, or at the very least that it does not have the right to make certain choices or in certain ways.  For example, if Scottish voters look at a Green party manifesto that offers independence, and if they vote Green on that basis, the SNP are now saying that is not a decision they have a right to take - or at least that it's not a decision the SNP will respect or recognise the legitimacy of.  We're also told that a key part of the strategy will involve reaching out to the rest of the movement and uniting it, but how are you even going to get a hearing from the non-SNP parts of the movement when you've just told them that they have no legitimacy whatsoever and that votes for them don't even count?

For what it's worth, I have no doubt that when the history of the Scottish National Party is written, this strategy will look like a weird and exotic little blip.  It will soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, because belief in Scottish self-determination is in the SNP's DNA.  A situation where the SNP are themselves curtailing Scotland's right to choose in certain circumstances will not and cannot be sustained for very long.  But as I stated above, the best way to get over this blip as soon as possible is to win as good an election result for the SNP as possible - that's what will most powerfully demonstrate to delegates at future conferences that the only real barrier to independence is the single-party majority strategy we've needlessly imposed upon ourselves.  Don't listen to the siren voices of the Stews of this world who are trying to convince you that somehow the way to win independence is by first destroying it with a vote for the far-right British nationalist party Reform UK.

A final plug for my candidacy in the SNP internal elections - plus some photos from the second day of conference

I'm going to offer some more analysis, probably tomorrow, of the fateful decision the SNP have made on independence strategy.  But if you'll bear with me, given that conference delegates have only a few short hours left to vote in the SNP internal elections, I think my priority for now should be to give one last plug to my own candidacy in those elections.  I know from my own experience that with so much going on at conference, the internal elections completely went out of my head for quite a while on Saturday, and when I eventually remembered them I had to set aside some time to vote.  So I'd be willing to bet that there are still quite a few delegates who have been meaning to vote but have so far forgotten to do it. 

All delegates, regardless of where they come from in Scotland, can if they wish vote for me in the Conferences Committee election - that's a nationwide vote.  And if you happen to be a delegate from the Central Scotland region (or Central Scotland & Lothians West as it's now become under the new boundaries), you can also vote for me in the NEC election.  I'm also standing for the Policy Development Committee.  You can watch my pitch for the elections HERE.  

I actually had a really good second day at conference.  I skipped lunch to go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign fringe meeting, which had one speech in particular that I think everyone in the room found truly remarkable.  I can't remember what the name of the speaker was, but she was a young woman from Al-Haq, which is described on Wikipedia as a "Palestinian non-governmental human rights organisation based in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank".  She explained how difficult they had found it to operate after Israel baselessly branded them a "terrorist" group, with banks dropping them out of fright and problems like that, and how there was recently a repeat performance after they were informed by Marco Rubio that the US was sanctioning them for so-called "lawfare", defined as engaging with the International Criminal Court without Israeli permission!

About half an hour after the fringe meeting ended, I was back in the main conference hall to hear the historic speech from the State of Palestine's newly-upgraded Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot.  And as you can see below, I even found some time late in the day to do some impromptu sightseeing and then go to the beach.  I have actually been known to stick my feet in the sea as late as October, but I thought better of it today.  

As you may have seen, there was a tribute to Alex Salmond as part of the "In Memoriam" segment in the morning, and it included the famous clip of him announcing "I heard a rumour, I think we won the election" in 2007.  That was a classy thing to do, and it was the right thing to do, and it was very much appreciated by many people in the hall, who burst into spontaneous applause when he appeared on screen.  There used to be complaints that the SNP were editing Mr Salmond out of their history, but that certainly hasn't been the case since he died.  As I always point out, the Scottish National Party has existed for ninety-one years, and Mr Salmond was leader of the party for no fewer than twenty of those years, so regardless of what happened in the final years of his life, he's very much woven into the party's story.