...and I completely forgot an article of mine was due to be published by The National. It's a polling review of 2025, which I wrote just before Christmas. But I needn't have worried, because my devoted Somerset-based stalker decided to promote it for me. Nine retweets, thirty-seven likes, and counting! Many thanks, Stew. What would I do without you.
Note how he addresses "Yes supporters" as if that's a body of opinion he's no longer part of. There's probably a reason for that. As we turn our attention to 2026, the easiest prediction of all to make is that Stew will endorse the far-right British nationalist party Reform UK (albeit with some sort of caveat about how you should vote for whichever unionist party is best-placed to beat the SNP in your area, unless you happen to live in Fergus Ewing's constituency). He will unconvincingly try to make that sound like a spontaneous last-minute decision that only became regrettably inevitable due to the specific circumstances of the time, rather than something he has been pre-planning for a couple of years and painfully gradually preparing the ground for (while assuming the rest of us are too thick to notice what he's doing).
What perhaps isn't clear yet is what his cover story will be. Will he argue that to win independence, we must first destroy independence, so that some wonderful brand new pro-independence force can somehow magically appear out of nowhere in the midst of the "purifying flames" of Reform rule? Or will he claim that there's literally no way of voting for independence at present (he recently test-drived the narrative of "the SNP aren't going to do anything about independence and their voters don't even want them to"), and it's therefore fine to vote for soft-fascist unionism because the priority for now has to be to "protect women and girls" by electing the arch-feminist (checks notes) Nigel Farage?
Oooooh, the suspense.
You can read my article for The National HERE.
