Stew reacts badly to poll showing the SNP with a double-digit lead over Labour - let's fact-check his meltdown

The controversial Faragist blogger Stuart Campbell, known almost universally as "Stew", urged his followers to help elect a Labour government at the 2024 general election on a tactical anti-SNP basis.  It's unsurprising, then, that he hasn't coped at all well with the news that the SNP remain well ahead of both Labour and his beloved Reform UK in the first full-scale Scottish poll of the Burnham era, but I'm afraid to say that the blogpost he's written in response to the poll contains a number of inaccuracies and misleading claims - a major shock to us all, I'm sure.  Let's go through some of the key points in his post and see how they compare with factual reality.

"Not done with celebrating defeat in an imaginary UDI yesterday, The National has gone with another big polling-based front cover today"

That's very peculiar wording.  What does "defeat" in the context of UDI, whether real or imaginary, actually look like?  It would probably look like failure to attract international recognition for the new state, but you'd be well past the point of caring about domestic opinion polls by that point.  And yet all that Stew is referring to there is another question in the poll showing that 45% of voters in Scotland would support UDI even in current circumstances, which he apparently thinks is some sort of poor result.  Most commentators in fact believe it's an astoundingly high figure.  It's certainly much higher than I would have predicted if I'd known that question was about to be asked.

"That 29% figure [in Westminster voting intentions] is actually one point DOWN on the SNP’s support in the last UK election, at which they lost 39 MPs and recorded their worst result in 14 years."

Technically true as far as it goes, but the latter part of the sentence looks fairly redundant given that Stew actually preceded it with a screenshot of John Curtice projecting that 29% would see the SNP win 30 seats - a massive increase of 21 from that disappointing previous general election result.  That's the nature of first-past-the-post - a party's own vote share is far less important than the size of their lead or deficit in relation to other parties.  That's why Labour's trivial increase from 32% to 34% transformed a landslide defeat for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 into a landslide victory for Keir Starmer in 2024, and it's why the SNP could lose a percentage point or two in vote share at the next election and still treble or quadruple their number of seats.  If that happens, Stew is going to look faintly ridiculous if he tries saying "yeah, but just think how bad the result would have been for them if it was still 2024".  It's not still 2024, Stew.  Get over it.

"It’s also a whopping NINE points down on their constituency vote in the Holyrood election just three months ago"

That's a very silly apples-and-oranges comparison.  In February, a Find Out Now poll showed the SNP five points lower on Westminster voting intentions than on Holyrood constituency voting intentions.  You can't compare the SNP Holyrood constituency vote in May with a Westminster voting intention poll now and say it shows a drop in support for the SNP, because it doesn't and can't possibly show any such drop.  It's simply a measure of a completely different thing.

"It is by any measure a miserable set of figures for John Swinney’s party"

Well, it's not a miserable set of figures by *ANY* measure, now is it, Stew, I mean let's be serious here.  One obvious measure is the number of seats that the SNP would win, and on that measure it's a stellar set of figures for the SNP.  Another obvious measure is how the SNP's vote share compares with Labour's, and on that measure it's a stellar set of figures for the SNP.  A third obvious measure is how the SNP's vote share compares with Reform UK's, and on that measure it's...well, you get the idea.  

"30 seats at Westminster would of course be worthless in any practical sense anyway. In recent years we’ve seen the SNP have 56 out of 59, and we’ve seen them hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament, and neither situation was weaponised to any discernible effect."

That's simply untrue.  The SNP haven't held the balance of power in a hung parliament since the late 1970s, and it would be a bit of a stretch to call that "recent years".  But when they were in that position they successfully 'weaponised' it to really quite remarkable effect, directly bringing about the Scotland Act 1978, which would have resulted in a devolved Scottish Assembly being set up if it hadn't been for the Cunningham wrecking amendment.  Since 1979, there have been just two hung parliaments, and the SNP held the balance of power in neither.  Alas, it was utterly impossible for the SNP to 'weaponise' something that only existed in Stew's fevered imagination.  In reality, it was the Liberal Democrats who held the balance of power in the 2010 hung parliament, and it was the DUP who held the balance of power in the 2017 hung parliament.

The odds remain against the SNP holding the balance of power after the next election, but if it does happen it'll be the very first time in recent years.  We'll just have to see if they use that opportunity as skillfully as they did last time around in the days of Jim Callaghan.

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This is Post 2 of "Seven Days of Retro Scot Goes Pop" - a shameless gimmick in which I attempt to solve this blog's funding problems in the space of a week with a conventional text-blogging marathon to help promote my Ko-Fi donations page, during which period pre-moderation in the comments section will be switched off.  My target for the week is to either get up to 60 regular monthly supporters on Ko-Fi (as of this evening I have 19), or to reach £1500 in one-off donations to the page, or some sort of combination of a bit of both.  In an equally shameless attempt to coax KC's stinking rich Tory landowner chums in Surrey into helping to fund Scot Goes Pop, I have pledged to try to leave pre-moderation switched off even after the seven days are over, but only if at least one of the targets is met in full.  Yes, it's time to play hardball with our resident "Nessie" enthusiast.  

If you might be interested in making either a small recurring monthly donation or a one-off donation, please check out my Ko-Fi page HERE.