A brief reply to Ballot Box Scotland about my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency

Allan Faulds, the former serial Scottish Green Party candidate who runs the psephological Ballot Box Scotland site, has taken a passive-aggressive swipe at me because of something I wrote in my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency for The National - 

"Personally if I'd been associated with the Alba Party and repeatedly exaggerated their prospects for success, I might consider not taking poorly informed swipes at three sources - myself,  @devolvedelections.bsky.social and  @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social - who have taken reasonable modelling positions!"

What he's referring to is my point that projections showing that the Greens are on course to win Edinburgh Central are based on a smoke-and-mirrors exercise, because they rely on using the high Green list vote from 2021 as a proxy for what might happen on the constituency ballot this time.  That makes no sense, because the Greens actually stood on the constituency ballot in Edinburgh Central in 2021, and indeed put forward a very high-profile candidate in Alison Johnstone, who was on the cusp of becoming Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.  They did not perform particularly well, and even making reasonable assumptions about how they might have performed better if the latest boundary changes are taken into account, they would almost certainly still have finished a distant fourth, probably almost thirty percentage points or so behind Angus Robertson of the SNP who won the seat.  So that has to be regarded as the realistic baseline for this year's race, although I did go on to say that the task was "not mission impossible" for the Greens, and that with a focused campaign they might have a chance - but I summed up by saying that if they won, they "would be defying the odds, not merely meeting expectations".

I absolutely stand by those comments, which constitute a balanced summary of the true position.  Frankly, I struggle to see how anyone can reasonably dispute them, and by coming out in such an absurdly shrill, precious, self-righteous way I believe Mr Faulds is allowing his protective bias towards his own political party to reveal itself clearly yet again.  He goes absolutely nuts, and has done for many years, whenever anyone suggests that his "project" (as he refers to his website) might not be as pristinely "non-partisan" as he insists, or that he in fact relatively frequently allows his own prejudices to shine through in his commentary.  But I suspect the only reason that's such a sore point for him is that he knows perfectly well it's sometimes a fair allegation.

By contrast, I've never pretended that this blog is non-partisan.  I am a member of the SNP, I will be voting SNP on both ballots in May, and on the blog I am strongly encouraging others to do the same.  But the constituency profiles are in a completely different category to the blog, and I do take the exercise very seriously and only say things that I believe to be 100% accurate and fair, and that can be justified and supported by hard facts.  I've gone out of my way to give proper attention to the Green challenge in the Edinburgh seats, where they are clearly a credible force, and I have most certainly not been talking them down in any way whatsoever.

Contrary to Mr Faulds' claims, I did not in fact identify him, or Mark McGeoghegan (whose strident political leanings are also well known from social media), or anyone else as being behind the bizarre projections for Edinburgh Central that I mentioned in the constituency profile, and the fact that he knew exactly what I was referring to anyway speaks volumes.  He openly admits on his site that the Greens' numbers in his constituency projections are based partly on their list performance - something that he does not do for any other party.  So in fact my commentary was not "ill-informed" - it was extremely well informed by Mr Faulds' own words and clarifications.

Incidentally, this is a very rare point of consensus between myself and Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland - he also commented a few weeks ago on how baffling it is that a projection would show the Greens on course to win a constituency in which they've never polled higher than 14%.  On this occasion Campbell's logic was actually sound, and it looks very much like Mr Faulds is simply indulging in special pleading for his own party as a form of "soft astroturfing".  To be clear, I would definitely not be astonished if Lorna Slater wins Edinburgh Central for the Greens, but if that happens it will be for the reasons I gave in the profile, not because of the heroic and frankly silly assumptions that are driving the dodgy projections.

As for Mr Faulds' dig about my former involvement with the Alba Party, he clearly knows very little about that subject, because I actually spent a fair bit of my time as an Alba NEC member begging Alex Salmond and others to adopt a greater sense of realism about Alba's electoral prospects.  I was almost in despair after the 2022 local elections, because Mr Salmond was waxing lyrical about how he had supposedly detected signs in the results, based mostly on second and third preference votes, that Alba were on course for the 6% needed to win list seats at Holyrood this year.  He seemed to be absolutely genuine about that - it was like he had succumbed to wishful thinking and had started to swallow his own propaganda.  In reality, Alba were firmly stuck on 2% and were making no progress towards winning list seats whatsoever.  I pointed that out more than once on the Alba NEC - it was a thoroughly unwelcome and unwanted message, but I pointed it out just the same.  

Perhaps Mr Faulds is going back to way before that and is referring to what I said about Alba's prospects before the 2021 Holyrood election even took place.  But at that point there were numerous Panelbase polls suggesting Alba were on course to win list seats, and as I do not actually possess psychic abilities I had no way of knowing that the Panelbase panel contained far too many Alba supporters and that the numbers were therefore misleadingly inflated.  If Mr Faulds does possess psychic abilities, I salute him, but there's not much I can do about being inferior to him in that unusual respect.  In fact, I distinctly remember pointing out to someone just after the 2021 election that I had made three or four predictions about the result, and all of them had proved to be accurate apart from the one about Alba, "and I never actually claimed to be Nostradamus".  It would be interesting to go back over all of Mr Faulds' past election predictions and see if his own 'strike rate' is any better - and I do mean all of the predictions, not just the ones he cherrypicks with the benefit of hindsight.

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My latest two constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith and Edinburgh North Western.