Find Out Now - ZAP WHAM POW - that a new MRP poll shows the SNP on course for an overall majority

As you may have seen, a new Find Out Now MRP poll commissioned by The National is suggesting that the SNP are on course for an overall majority at the Holyrood election.  They would take 67 seats, all on the constituency ballot.  I've been trying to work out what those 67 are, or to put it more simply which six constituencies they wouldn't win, but so far I'm struggling with navigation in the table of results - if anyone can let me know in the comments section, that would be great.  It's probably safe to assume that Orkney and Shetland will both be staying Liberal Democrat, but I wouldn't want to guess which other four constituencies are projected to be in the unionist column.  The basic figures are - 

SNP 67

Labour 17

Greens 14

Reform UK 14

Conservatives 10

Liberal Democrats 7

I have a new article at The National discussing the track record of past MRP projections, which you can read HERE.

UPDATE: OK, thanks to Michael and Keith in the comments section, we now know which six constituencies are projected to elude the SNP.  They are:

Caithness, Sutherland and Ross (LibDems)

Edinburgh North Western (LibDems)

Edinburgh Southern (Lab)

Fife North East (LibDems)

Orkney Islands (LibDems)

Shetland Islands (LibDems)

That means the SNP are projected to enjoy a whole string of eyebrow-raising wins elsewhere: 

Dumbarton: I'm struggling with this one.  It should be a Labour hold on the basis of the swing in national polls, and bearing in mind the track record of tactical voting in the constituency, it's hard to see how the SNP take it.

Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire: An SNP gain is possible here, but it's like trying to thread a needle - the unionist vote would have to be divided almost perfectly.  Unlikely in my view.

Dumfriesshire: A bit more plausible, but still a very tough one - the SNP are starting from ten points behind the Tories.

Galloway & West Dumfries: The most winnable of the three Blue Wall seats in the south, and the SNP have a past track record of success here, although on the basis of national trends they would still be expected to fall just short.  But I can accept this one as a plausible SNP gain.

Banffshire & Buchan Coast: The SNP look vulnerable here to both the Tories and Reform, but it's by no means outlandish to think they'll hold on.

Aberdeenshire West: On paper this doesn't look promising for the SNP, but we keep hearing the Tory canvass results in the northeast are dreadful, so yes, this is a possible gain.

Inverness & Nairn: I don't think anybody really knows yet what the impact of Fergus Ewing's independent candidacy will be, so there's a big question mark on this one. 

East Lothian Coast & Lammermuirs: Looked like a lost cause not that long ago, but could now be very close.

Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill and Glasgow Southside have all been touted as Green gains.  As previously explained, those predictions are based on a smoke-and-mirrors statistical exercise and shouldn't be taken seriously, but with an effective Green campaign the SNP are not necessarily safe in any of the three, and they're also vulnerable to Labour in Edinburgh Central.   Each of the three in isolation looks like a probable SNP hold, but is it really likely their luck will hold out in all three?  Even if just one of the three were to go to Labour or the Greens, it would make winning an overall majority very tough.

So as you can see I'm still very sceptical about the prospects of a single-party overall majority, but believe me about one thing: I do want to believe.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Fife North East and Galloway & West Dumfries.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Bombshell GB-wide Ashcroft poll is the first not to show Reform in an outright lead for the first time in almost a year - Greens are in joint lead for the first time ever - Labour are in FOURTH - and the SNP have overtaken Labour UK-wide in the seats projection

So this is a genuine landmark for the reasons given in the title, and it's also worth making the point that the data tables (unless I'm misinterpreting them, but I don't see how I can be) show that the Greens are actually in a slight overall lead over Reform and the Tories - but that seems to have been disguised by the rounding to the nearest whole number.

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (Lord Ashcroft, 26th-30th March 2026)

Greens 21%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

SNP 3%

Plaid Cymru 1%

I know somebody listed Scottish subsample numbers on the previous thread, but I can't see any in the data tables with the "don't knows/will not votes" removed.  However, I've used what I presume was a rough recalculation to fine-tune a UK-wide seats projection, which shows: Reform UK 204, Conservatives 175, Greens 116, SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 47, Labour 33, Plaid Cymru 8, Others 19.

The target for an overall majority is 326, so it's not hard to see why a hung parliament is currently the strongly favoured outcome on the exchanges.  Nevertheless, under first-past-the-post not all that much movement is required to transform an absolute guddle into a clear majority, and by the same token not much movement would be required to turn a projection showing a right-wing parliament, as this one does, into one showing a centre-left parliament in which the SNP might just hold the balance of power.  Even if they don't hold the balance of power on their own, the huge strength of the Greens is a potential game-changer, because at the very least the English Greens are not opposed to independence.

On the exchanges, the Greens are currently estimated to have a 1 in 8 chance of winning most seats in the general election, but as the above numbers demonstrate, they might not actually need to win most seats to end up with influence.

An intriguing quirk is that the SNP are currently the fourth-largest party in the Commons (albeit only just, and they may soon be overtaken by Reform).  The projection from this poll shows they would still be in fourth place, but in a radically different way - they would have five times as many seats as now, they would re-overtake the Liberal Democrats, and they would overtake Labour for the first time.  Let's just reiterate that: the SNP would have more seats than Labour, UK-wide.

Ashcroft himself concedes that the reason his results might be different from other pollsters is that he has a completely different approach to the voting intention question - instead of directly asking people how they will vote, he asks them to rate their chances of voting for each party in turn.  As I understand it, any respondent who does not estimate a 50%+ probability of voting for at least one party is assumed to be an abstainer and excluded, and everyone else is assigned to the party they gave the highest probability to.  That method seems intuitively reasonable to me, but whether the results it produces will be more accurate, or less so, is anyone's guess at this stage.

For weeks after the Gorton & Denton by-election, YouGov were putting "footnotes" of sorts on their polls to give the impression that the Green advantage over Labour must just be a temporary effect caused by the by-election and would fade.  There is now some doubt over that, not just because of this Ashcroft poll, but also because last week's YouGov poll showed the Greens moving back ahead of Labour, after having slipped behind for one week.

In case you're wondering, the last GB-wide poll not to show an outright Reform lead was a Survation poll in late April/early May of last year.  That showed Labour and Reform tied on 26% apiece.

There is actually some relief for Starmer in the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll.  It's generally believed that head-to-head leadership polls are more predictive of election results several years in advance than headline voting intentions, and Starmer does have a clear 15-point lead over Farage.  However his lead over Badenoch is just three points, which amounts to a statistical tie - and Ashcroft doesn't even bother to ask whether respondents prefer Polanski to Starmer, which many will suspect is because he feared what the answer might be.  

There are a couple of results that I actually found quite surprising.  When asked whether nuclear power should be phased out, with wind power expanded and the net zero target brought forward a decade, respondents are almost split down the middle - 40% in favour, 45% against.  My guess is that Ashcroft asked it as a "shopping list" question in the hope that most respondents would find something on the list to object to, thus producing a result he'd be able to spin as clear and decisive support for nuclear power, but that didn't happen.

And on Europe, there are any number of people who will tell you that if you spell out in a poll question what returning to the EU would actually mean in practice, the pro-EU majority evaporates.  It looks to me like Ashcroft set out to prove that theory and spectacularly failed.  When asked whether they want to rejoin the customs union, restore freedom of movement and then rejoin the EU itself as soon as possible, 55% supported the idea and only 34% were opposed.  That's absolutely remarkable.

Ashcroft did manage to get a result which he can spin as showing massive opposition to scrapping the "nuclear deterrent", but as he lumped "and cut defence spending" into the question, the result is pretty meaningless.

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Loopy billionaire lord tries to convince us that funding the NHS with fair taxation is as impossible as enhancing the size of women's breasts with hypnotherapy

I cannot in all good conscience conclude my discussion of this poll without drawing your attention to the fact that Ashcroft has made a complete blithering idiot of himself with one particular part of his write-up - 

"Perhaps more controversially, nearly a third of voters said they felt less favourable towards Polanski when they heard that in his days as a hypnotherapist he once claimed he could increase the size of women’s breasts by hypnosis. Polanski claims to have apologised and put all this behind him, but in a different way he is arguably still at it. Just as there are those who want to change their body shape through the power of mind over matter, there will always be people eager to believe we can fund the NHS by taxing the rich"

Nice try, Mike, but you are believed to be worth £2 billion.  That alone would be enough to fund 1% of the entire annual budget of NHS England.  Quite plainly, taxing the rich could very easily fund the NHS - and the only use hypnotherapy would be on that front would be for those like you who don't want us to notice or believe a simple arithmetical fact.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"C'est trop bruyant!": The settled will klaxon is so piercing tonight that it can even be heard IN FRANCE, as Norstat show a pro-independence majority for a SEVENTH poll in a row

Tonight brings word of the latest in the regular series of Norstat polls for the Sunday Times, and although the newspaper has buried the results of the independence question at the bottom of the write-up as if it's of no great significance, it certainly looks pretty significant to me.  If I'm counting correctly, this is now the seventh Norstat poll in a row to show a Yes lead - and remember Norstat were one of the more No-friendly firms until a couple of years ago.  To this day (as far as we know, anyway), they continue to weight by 2014 recalled vote, which is a huge disadvantage for the Yes side, who are nevertheless repeatedly coming out on top.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat / Suday Times, 30th March - 1st April 2026)

Yes 52% (+1)

No 48% (-1)

The Sunday Times are far more interested in the Holyrood voting intention numbers, which are a bit of a curate's egg for the SNP.  Their own vote share has held up perfectly well, but a decline for Reform UK means that the unionist vote is no longer split as perfectly as it was, opening up the possibility that Labour and the Tories may take a few more constituency seats than previously expected and push the prospect of a single-party SNP overall majority further away.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34% (-1)

Labour 19% (+2)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Conservatives 11% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

Greens 8% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30% (-)

Labour 17% (-)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Greens 12% (+1)

Conservatives 10% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+3)

Seats projection: SNP 57, Labour 20, Reform UK 16, Greens 13, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 11

That would obviously be a very comfortable pro-independence majority (70 for the SNP and Greens in combination, 59 for the unionist parties), but it would leave the SNP well short of their self-imposed target of a single-party majority.  However, even if Reform's setback is indirectly bad news for the independence cause, I nevertheless find it strangely reassuring.  Every time Paul Hutcheon has written an over-the-top headline about "Reform's campaign in total meltdown", I've thought to myself "it won't make the slightest bit of difference you know, nothing sticks to them", so it's a bit of a relief to discover (or provisionally discover) that the laws of political gravity do actually apply to Offord and Reform after all, and that if they run a shockingly bad campaign it does have negative consequences for them, just as it would for any other party.

There's still a month for them to put their house in order, and all they'd really have to do is work their way back to where they were fairly recently in order to help the SNP back into the 60s in the seats projection.  Even if Reform don't recover, there's another very plausible get-out-of-jail-free card for the SNP, which is that the Greens plainly can't take 8% of the constituency vote when they're not standing in the vast majority of constituency seats.  What would happen if, say, the SNP were to take half of their votes and Labour were to take one-quarter?  The seats projection from this poll would then be: SNP 60, Labour 18, Reform UK 17, Greens 12, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 10.

Still not a majority, but a bit closer to one, and it might be a slightly more realistic estimate of where the SNP stand right now.

John Curtice also makes the point in the Sunday Times piece that if the public become aware that Reform's support is falling away, that could encourage greater anti-SNP tactical voting for Labour and the Tories.  There may be some logic to that, although there may also be a side-benefit for the pro-indy camp, because Reform are currently taking a non-trivial percentage of independence voters and we need as many of those people as possible back on the side of light if we're going to end up with a decent vote share on the list - which in practice may be just as psychologically important as the seats tally.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Falkirk West.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"But what if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying 'we say no, and we are the state'?"

A former commenter on this blog from way back in the 2014 indyref period got in touch with a question a few days ago, and I've been so busy that I haven't responded to him yet - but it's an interesting and important question, so I thought I might as well turn my answer into a blogpost.

"Suppose Mr. Swinney really does win 65 or more seats (no longer a laughing matter). What if Mr. Starmer does not perform his usual U-turn? 

What if he does not feel he can win a referendum? I'm thinking of possible successors who could fight a referendum, but the only one I can even see fighting indyref2 with any confidence is Andy Burnham. 

What do you think is Mr. Swinney's plan?"

The first thing I should stress here is that I still regard a single-party SNP overall majority as a long-shot, simply because the AMS voting system is designed to produce hung parliaments, and it does that job very effectively.  Unless the SNP's list vote recovers massively to 2011-style levels, the route to a majority essentially consists of winning 65 out of 73 constituency seats, and even though those seats are elected by the first-past-the-post element of AMS, it's still very unusual for first-past-the-post to produce quite such an extreme result.  In the last hundred years, it's only happened once in a UK general election, when Ramsay MacDonald's Tory-dominated 'National Government' took 90.1% of the seats.  That's the feat the SNP will have to emulate to hit John Swinney's target.

Nevertheless, when I was at the SNP campaign conference a couple of weeks ago, a number of senior figures did sound genuinely confident of a majority, and of course they have access to canvassing data.  There are three possible explanations: a) it's a bluff, b) it's wishful thinking, or c) there might just be something in it.  So purely hypothetically, let's imagine it's c) and work through what would happen if the SNP win a majority.

Would Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum?  No, although of course his own days as Prime Minister might be numbered by then anyway.

Would any successor to Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum?  No, unless it's someone we haven't given serious consideration to yet.  Personally I would welcome Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham taking over, simply because they would probably represent a slight shift to the left, but I would expect all of them to be just as intransigent on the constitutional issue (especially Rayner, who seems almost robotic in her thinking).

Does that mean electing an SNP majority is pointless?  Definitely not, because John Swinney has made so many promises about the effect of a majority that he would have to try to deliver - and that is the real value of the exercise, because no First Minister is actually powerless in the face of Westminster intransigence, unless they make themselves powerless by being too passive, which has been the recurring problem since the summer of 2017.  Judging from the very few clues that were dropped last October, it sounds like a judicial review might be sought of any Westminster refusal to grant a Section 30 order - I can't see that going anywhere, but by the same token I can't see SNP members just accepting John Swinney saying "oh our application has been rejected, never mind, at least we tried".  There would have to be a follow-up with a Plan B, which is where the legendary 'secret plan' kicks in, although by definition we don't know what that is.

The simplest option is the one that Believe in Scotland have proposed, which is to finally bring this matter to a head by using the Westminster election of 2028 or 2029 as a de facto referendum on independence.  However, although Believe in Scotland are SNP allies and have close organisational links with the party, we know that John Swinney and other leading SNP figures like Stephen Flynn seem to be viscerally opposed to the whole concept of a de facto referendum.  Maybe they would reconsider if other options closed off and they needed to show SNP members they were taking their mandate seriously.  Or maybe they would be able to devise an imaginative alternative way of using the Westminster election to advance the cause.

One thing is for sure: if the SNP can win back their majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, they would have potential leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table as long as they are bold enough to use it.  They could engage in parliamentary disruption tactics (which remember even the moderate John Smith did as Labour leader in the mid-1990s), or they could boycott the Commons for a period of time.  The latter would create a genuine constitutional crisis: it wouldn't be considered sustainable for the bulk of one of the constituent nations of 'Our Pweshus Union' to go unrepresented in the national parliament for any prolonged period.

Again, Mr Swinney is so instinctively cautious that it's hard to imagine him going down that road, but the value of giving the SNP a mandate in May is that it opens these possibilities up and a conversation can at least be had about them.

On a semi-related point, I may actually have been proved wrong about something I said two years ago, although as with the French Revolution it's still too early to tell.  I repeatedly said back then that losing the SNP majority at Westminster would be an unmitigated calamity, because it would lose us the main legacy of the 2014 referendum and we'd never get it back. Once Labour were the dominant party once again, there would be a sense of normal service being resumed and the SNP would thereafter only be able to compete in Holyrood elections.  

That doesn't seem to be the case at all, and there's a real chance that Labour's 2024 victory will end up looking like a meaningless one-off.  The real normal service will be resumed in 2028 or 2029 when the SNP return to dominance, the 2014 legacy will turn out to be assured, and that will be a massive psychological shock to the Scottish Labour Party.  They thought they had established in 2024 that independence supporters would always sell themselves cheap by going back to Labour without any constitutional concessions whatsoever, but that was a mirage.  There might eventually be some long-overdue soul-searching about what it will actually take for Labour to build bridges with their Yes-supporting former voters - and the two obvious potential answers to that question would be either a) greater flexibility on a referendum, or b) a significantly enhanced devolution package.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh Southern, Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire and Falkirk East & Linlithgow.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

My plans for Scot Goes Pop's coverage of the Holyrood election campaign

This post will come as a relief to some of you, because I've decided to temporarily go back to conventional blogging for the remainder of the Holyrood campaign.  The emphasis is on the word "temporarily", because on the whole I think the YouTube experiment is working out well - the number of subscribers has built quicker than I was expecting, and the average number of views per video is pretty decent.  However, I think the situation changes in an election campaign, because it suddenly doesn't feel good enough to wait 24 or 48 hours to cover a particular poll result, and doing it by video just slows everything down massively.  You'll have noticed that I still haven't covered the Survation poll from the other day - that's because I was intending to make a video about it but still haven't found the time.  Of course I'm also writing daily constituency profiles for The National throughout the campaign, which takes a few hours per day and leaves me with even less time to make videos.

So for the remaining month-and-a-bit of the campaign I'm going to go retro and do pretty much what I've done in every election since the 2010 UK general election, which was the first major vote that Scot Goes Pop covered.  That should speed everything up and hopefully I can cover major polling developments much more effectively.

However, to make this work I'm going to have to ask for your patience and indulgence on a couple of points.  I'm going to add a sort of promotional link for my YouTube channel at the bottom of every post, so that it will hopefully still pick up a few subscribers even if there are fewer videos until 7th May (although I'll still try to make at least one or two).  And I'm afraid I'm also going to have to resume the fundraising promotions at the bottom of each post - I was hoping not to have to do that, but it's become unavoidable.  I'm due to receive some significant funds in a few weeks' time, probably in late May or early June, so from that point on there shouldn't be any problem for a few months, but until then there's practically nothing scheduled to come in at all, and I'm going to have plug the gap somehow to keep everything afloat over the next month or two.

As ever, there are three main ways to donate...

1) For card payments, the crowdfunder page is HERE.

2) Direct PayPal donations can be made to my PayPal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

3) Bank transfers are also fine.  I was advised not to post my bank details publicly, so if you'd like to donate that way, drop me a line by email and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

Many thanks for the support that readers have shown Scot Goes Pop over the years.

Joani of (Noah's nuclear-armed) Arc

The senior naval officer Reid was reported for 'inappropriate' behaviour with at Faslane is *separate* to the captain she is linked to tonight by the FT's @LOS_Fisher

The captain has reportedly stepped back from duties after text messages exchanged with Reid

— Anna Mikhailova (@AVMikhailova) March 31, 2026

We're going to need some sort of diagram here. https://t.co/pI9M6N3AJD

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

BBC Scotland will obviously just dismiss this story as Naval Gazing..

— David Nichol (@DavidNi09148795) April 1, 2026

How does one actually go about finding love with the captain of a nuclear-armed submarine? Is there some sort of niche dating app? https://t.co/b1T6Av5Zp0

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Ruddr

— calanbosch (@calanbosch) April 1, 2026

Would you like to see the plutonium rivet?

— JimMcDonald (@mcdonji1) April 1, 2026

Maybe the King should abdicate

Even the Pope isn't safe https://t.co/86GfE2t6Q1

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Just remembered about this pic.twitter.com/drJ3hISNm0

— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) April 1, 2026

If Joani Reid ends up being the cause of global nuclear destruction, I'm going to be very annoyed with her. https://t.co/S1lqYBj1M4

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

In all seriousness, what do we think are the chances of a by-election in East Kilbride & Strathaven? Must be at least 25%, surely?

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026 

Shock poll portends weather boffin coup threat for Atlas chief Lyon

You've probably seen the propaganda poll from yesterday that the hapless Alliance to Liberate Scotland, aka "the Atlas", commissioned from Find Out Now.  It used the infamous Archie Stirling question, ie. "would you consider voting for party X at the election?", which in the case of Stirling's party Scottish Voice overestimated their potential support in 2007 by a factor of 200.  It said that 20% of the population would "consider" voting for them on the Holyrood list, whereas in the event only 0.1% actually did so.

Atlas' own poll yesterday found that only 8% of people would consider voting for them, so if the "Stirling devisor" is applied, that would imply they are on course to take just 0.04% of the list vote.  I personally think that's a bit of an underestimate, simply because Tommy Sheridan does still have some residual support in Glasgow - you could imagine him getting around 1-2% of the vote there, while in the other regions Atlas may hover around 0.1% or 0.2%, producing a national figure of around 0.3% or 0.4%.  That would obviously still leave them light-years short of winning seats.

But it was interesting that they were concerned enough about not registering in the polls at all that they were willing to shell out for a propaganda poll, because it must have cost them around 10% of the relatively modest amount they've crowdfunded for their election fund.  (Although there again, as someone pointed out in the comments section of this blog the other day, they must also have "private means" simply to be able to pay for their election deposits, and perhaps that explains why they've been so willing to get into bed with a far-right party.)

Given what we know about the Mafia-like internal politics of these fringe parties, it perhaps isn't a surprise to find that not only has money been spent on a polling astroturfing exercise for Atlas as a whole, but that someone appears to have also paid for a poll to try to put one particular faction of Atlas into the ascendancy.  It's not hard to guess who may have commissioned this morning's new poll from OpinoSpa:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Hazel Lyon, the leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, has been a failure because she is unknown to the public and has been unable to boost the party's profile? (OpinoSpa, 25th-27th March 2026)

Agree strongly: 21%

Agree slightly: 37%

TOTAL AGREE: 58%

Disagree slightly: 11%

Disagree strongly 4%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 15%

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the former STV weather presenter Lloyd Quinan, who was a member of the Scottish Parliament for four years, would be a better leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland than Hazel Lyon because he would get the party more attention?

Agree strongly: 23%

Agree slightly: 45%

TOTAL AGREE: 68%

Disagree slightly: 7%

Disagree strongly 2%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 9%

Hold on to your hat, Hazel: strong gusts are forecast as a Quinan coup attempt comes in from the west.

The Alliance to Liberate Scotland and their "Big Lie": the Sovereignty Party are so spooked by being identified as far-right that they have started telling direct, flat-out lies about the contents of their 2024 manifesto

My latest Holyrood constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Northern.

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.

*  *  *

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

"Alliance to Liberate Scotland" angrily defend their pact with the far-right - but their excuses simply don't make any sense

Later in this video, I also give my thoughts on the extraordinary but somehow totally unsurprising news that the self-styled 'independence ultra' Chris McEleny, who expelled and drove out so many genuine independence supporters from the Alba Party, tried to defect to the hardline anti-independence party Reform UK - but was rebuffed!

 

My latest constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Eastern, Musselburgh & Tranent.

Revealed: the far-right have almost totally taken over the "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" fringe party in the Highlands & Islands region

I said in my video about the far-right elements of Barrhead Boy's new fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "the Atlas") that I had spotted at least two of the party's candidates as being from the far-right Sovereignty.  But I knew that would be an underestimate, so I've now checked and it appears that a grand total of six of the party's thirty-nine candidates are from Sovereignty.  That's close to one-sixth of the total, and presumably it would have been an even higher proportion if it hadn't been for the last-minute influx of ex-Alba candidates.

The six far-right candidates are:

Alan McManus (Central Scotland & Lothians West)

Brian Nugent (Highlands & Islands)

Andrew MacDonald (Highlands & Islands)

Flora Badger (Highlands & Islands)

Kenneth MacKenzie (Highlands & Islands)

Laurie Moffat (Mid-Scotland & Fife)

As you can see, there's a particular concentration in the Highlands & Islands, where Barrhead Boy seems to have handed over the party organisation lock, stock and barrel to the far-right.  Four of the six Atlas candidates in the Highlands & Islands are from Sovereignty, including all of the top three on the list.  However, the two far-right candidates standing elsewhere in Scotland are also extremely prominent on their respective lists.  Laurie Moffat is number 2 candidate on the Mid-Scotland & Fife list, the region where Eva Comrie is number 1 (which makes me repeat my perpetual question: what on earth is Eva doing?).  And Alan McManus, who has been exposed in recent days as a regular speaker at the far-right rallies organised by arch-unionist and holocaust denier Alistair McConnachie, is number 2 in Central Scotland.

Again, all I can do is urge you to avoid Alliance to Liberate Scotland like the plague if you care about the cause of independence.  We simply cannot afford to allow our movement to become associated, even at the fringes, with these neo-fascists - it would undo the good work of decades.  Stick with the mainstream pro-indy options on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.

Incidentally, on a more nerdish point, it looks like five of the six far-right candidates will be standing under the Sovereignty banner on the constituency ballot, and the Alliance to Liberate Scotland banner on the list ballot.  That means, to state the obvious, that people will be standing for two different parties in the same election, which brings to life as never before the danger Michael Ancram identified during the passing of the Scotland Act 1998 of "alter ego" parties standing on the two different ballots to try to cheat the system.  However, as this is all happening completely openly, and as Atlas seem to have declared their intentions to the Electoral Commission, presumably a ruling must have been made on whether any hypothetical Sovereignty constituency wins would count against Atlas when the d'Hondt calculation is done to distribute list seats.  If anyone knows for sure what the position is, please let me know.

*  *  * 

My two latest constituency profiles for The National are Eastwood and Edinburgh Central.

Let's keep the independence movement clean: avoid the dodgy far-right links of the fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "The Atlas")

The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it

I received a Reform leaflet through the door this morning, emblazened with photos of Malcolm Offord.  And because I'm interested in polls, I immediately noticed the rather amusing error in the Lib Dem-style bar chart.  It's obvious that the idea was to use percentage changes from the 2021 Holyrood election, rather than from the most recent poll, to maximise the sense of Reform momentum and to make it look like the SNP are collapsing.  And in seven out of eight cases they've done that, but some unfortunate minion seems to have made an almighty blunder on the SNP's list vote - it should read SNP 29% (-11), but instead they've used the most recent poll as the baseline and given it as SNP 29% (+1).

Thanks, Malc, for that remarkably helpful piece of pro-SNP spin!

On the reverse side of the leaflet are four policy priorities which are obviously calibrated to appeal to socially conservative working-class voters.  The fourth is about improving the NHS, which I presume is intended as a key point of reassurance for the target electorate, who really do care about the health system.  And I think above all else this is where Reform are getting away with absolute murder, because if other parties, including the SNP, hammered them over their plans to semi-privatise the NHS, a lot of working-class voters would recoil in horror and not even the most hysterical immigrant-bashing messaging would be able to offset the impact.

Offord's personal message also makes a point of saying that he's a state-school Greenock lad who went to Edinburgh University on a full grant.  Er, are Reform planning to reintroduce maintenance grants?  Are they going to abolish tuition fees in England?  If not, what is the point of making that comment except as a form of brazen hypocrisy?

*  *  *

I had a brief but telling exchange this morning with Craig Murray, who after his time in the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Norwich Independents, the SNP, Action for Independence, the Alba Party, the Workers Party of Great Britain and Your Party, is now standing for Barrhead Boy's "Greater Prism" party at the Holyrood election (they call themselves "Atlas", I believe).  I had been making the point to someone else that the reasons "both votes SNP" makes sense are: a) that the SNP will desperately need list votes and seats if they underperform in the constituency ballot, and b) that the SNP can win several list seats even if they don't underperform in the constituencies as long as their list vote is high enough.  Imagining himself to be making a killer point, Craig popped up and claimed that this meant I was saying SNP list votes could only be useful if the polls are wrong.

Golly, who could ever imagine such a thing as the polls turning out to be wrong?!  But here's the thing: Craig's entire case hinges on the polls being wrong, because Atlas are not registering in the polls at all.  They are on zero.  Their chances of winning any seats at all are non-existent.  To believe that Craig is making a valid point about list votes for Atlas being of more use than list votes for the SNP, you would first have to believe that the polls are light-years out on the question of Atlas support, but cannot possibly be even slightly wrong about the SNP.  That would, with respect, be a galactically stupid thing to believe.

Lord Ashcroft's dodgiest poll question is one the health inspectors should be all over

I've been having a more leisurely look through the results of the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll, and I think there are three worth drawing to your attention.  First of all, Ashcroft has really pulled a fast one in order to produce an unhelpful result for the independence movement on one of his questions.  In the write-up of the poll, he claimed that only one-quarter of respondents thought that a majority of seats for pro-independence parties would constitute a mandate for an independence referendum, or to put it another way, he was implying that three-quarters either don't understand or don't accept the most fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy.  I thought that was a surprising result, because other pollsters have asked that question and found that a slim majority think there would be a mandate.  

But the data tables demonstrate in embarrassingly vivid detail how Ashcroft pulled his stunt off.  One of the basic rules of polling balance and impartiality is that if you are trying to measure whether respondents agree or disagree with a proposition, the negative option should be worded so that it's as close as possible to the natural opposite of the positive option.  In other words, if the positive option is "a majority of seats should be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum", the negative option should be "a majority of seats should NOT be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum".  But Ashcroft doesn't do that, and instead takes a walk on the wild side by offering as the negative option "People vote at elections for lots of different reasons - we cannot assume someone supports Scottish independence just because they vote for a particular party".  Not only is that self-evidently not the natural opposite of the positive option, it's not even about the same subject.  The positive option is about a mandate for an independence referendum, the negative option is about a mandate for independence itself.  Moreover, the negative option is a statement of the obvious that nobody would actually dispute regardless of their views on independence or a referendum. 

What Ashcroft is doing is forcing people to reject the positive option because they know that if they don't, it would look like they were denying a statement that everyone knows to be true.  If he had wanted to achieve the opposite effect, he could have done it by making the negative option something like "Many voters are not intelligent enough to check what they are voting for or to understand the issues, so of course they are not giving a mandate for any particular policy", and then respondents would have flocked to the positive option in a state of indignation.

In a nutshell, the results of the mandate question have no credibility, and the polling health inspectors should be all over that question like a rash.

The poll also has approval ratings for the various political parties, including for Alba.  The Alba rating is so utterly diabolical that if anyone has any lingering regret about the party's demise, they should consider themselves liberated to no longer entertain that feeling for even a moment.  Only 5% of respondents approve of Alba, and 55% disapprove, giving a net approval rating of -50, which is marginally worse than Reform UK and only slightly better than the Tories.  Alba is almost equally hated on both sides of the constitutional divide, with SNP voters giving it a rating of -37, and Green voters going even lower at -54.  By the end, Alba simply had nothing to offer because independence supporters themselves didn't even want the party to exist, and there's not really much point arguing the toss when people have so definitively made their minds up.

Lastly, there's a question revealing that a grand total of 46% of respondents say that one of the top three things in their minds when they cast their vote will be either "keeping Scotland part of the UK" or "getting an independent Scotland".  That rather gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that the independence question is a low priority for the electorate these days.

If you haven't watched my video about the poll yet, you can see it below.

Ashcroft poll: pro-independence parties could take overall majority of VOTES as well as SEATS

Thank you, your lordship! Sensational Ashcroft poll shows SNP on highest vote share of John Swinney's leadership - SNP-Green coalition preferred to all Labour-led alternatives - independence support up 4

The contents have it!  I'll try to make a video about this poll when I have a spare moment, but for now the basic facts deserve mentioning, because they bode extremely well for the SNP.  Lord Ashcroft is showing, as far as I can see, the highest SNP vote on the constituency ballot in any poll from any polling firm since the autumn of 2023 - in other words this is the highest since John Swinney became First Minister.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 39%

Reform UK 14%

Labour 12%

Greens 11%

Liberal Democrats 10%

Conservatives 9%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 31%

Greens 17%

Reform UK 15%

Labour 12%

Conservatives 10%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Alba 1%

Of course it's nonsensical to even be including Alba, a party that will not be standing at the election and that has announced its intention to abolish itself.  Hopefully other pollsters will stop including them.  There's also a lot of uncertainty about the real destination of the supposed 11% Green vote on the constituency ballot, because the Greens will apparently not be standing in most constituency contests, with their focus instead on the list where they will win most or all of their seats.  If even around one-third of those Green votes end up in the SNP column, that would take the SNP well into the 40s, pushing them closer to the type of result they had on the constituency ballot in their landslide years of 2011, 2016 and 2021.

Notably (and this will horrify and bewilder Stew), when respondents were asked the direct question of whether they prefer an SNP-Green coalition government to the plausible alternatives, they came down in favour of the SNP-Green option.

Which of the following would you rather see in a coalition government?

SNP-Greens 38%

Labour-Liberal Democrats 34%

SNP-Greens 42%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Conservatives 30%

SNP-Greens 45%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Reform UK 27%

SNP-Greens 44%

Labour-Liberal Democrats-Conservatives-Reform UK 28%

Last but not least, there's a narrow No lead on the independence question, but that still represents a big increase for Yes since the last Ashcroft poll on the subject (which was three years ago!).

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 48% (+4)

No 52% (-4)

My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dunfermline and East Kilbride.

A further thought on the defeat of the assisted dying bill

I just want to comment briefly on Andrew Tickell's column about the Scottish Parliament's rejection of the assisted dying bill.  He argues that the opponents of the bill, if they want to be logically consistent, would have to now argue for a new law to be brought in to criminalise and punish anyone who assists a suicide, by for example facilitating a journey to a clinic in Switzerland.  He suggests that all of the claims that were made about the risks of coercion would apply just as much to assisted suicides of Scots that occur in another jurisdiction, and thus to prove that the worries about coercion were genuine and not bogus, we are somehow obliged to want to send people to jail for helping others get to Switzerland.

I have to say that doesn't stack up at all.  The point that was actually made about coercion during the debate was that it can be very subtle and it's thus impossible to know for sure whether it has occurred in any particular case.  That's one key reason why it would be irresponsible to legalise assisted suicide in our own jurisdiction, but it's also the main reason why it would be wildly disproportionate in most instances to prosecute someone who has already, as an established fact that cannot be changed or reversed, helped a seriously ill loved one to die in another jurisdiction.  You could never be certain of exact motivations, so the standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt' would rarely even come close to being met.  The legal system is not there to wreck the lives of nine people who acted with the best of intentions just to be sure of punishing the tenth person who actually did behave coercively, and I'd be amazed if Andrew Tickell of all people does believe that's the way it's supposed to work.

His notion that the logic of the bill's opponents is exploded by the mere possibility of assisted suicide in another jurisdiction can just as easily be turned on its head.  Andrew could be asked why, if people always have the option of going to Switzerland, such a song and dance was made about the supposedly vital importance of legalising assisted dying here?  The reality, of course, is that the need to go to another country is a very, very substantial bar for the majority of people.  Parliamentarians thus had a very real and meaningful decision to make, and a decision in the negative was no more of a sham or a cop-out than a decision in the affirmative would have been.

Are the results of independence polls being deliberately manipulated by organised unionist infiltrators in polling panels?

As explained in the previous blogpost, my main concern about the data tables from the Survation / Scotland in Union propaganda poll is that they show beyond all reasonable doubt that some respondents misunderstood the question (as they were presumably intended to) and said that they want Scotland to "remain in the United Kingdom" when in fact they want Scotland to become an independent country.  The section which allowed respondents to give reasons in their own words for "switching from Yes to Remain" not only produced declarations of outright support for independence, but also a number of comments about wanting to be in the EU, which implies that some people didn't read the question carefully enough and assumed they were being asked the Remain/Leave question from the EU referendum.  Accordingly, the 60-40 split in favour of "remain in the UK" in the headline results of the poll does not have any credibility.

However, someone raised an additional issue in the comments section of the blogpost, and suggested that even some of the genuinely anti-independence comments from "switchers" in the poll looked a bit suspicious.  Having thought about that, I think there may be something in it.  The two potential reasons for suspicion are: a) some of the responses are very similar to each other, which might suggest a degree of coordination, and b) some of them are a bit too enthusiastic about the "we are better together, the UK is simply wonderful" message.  I know there's such a thing as the zeal of the convert, but I'm a bit sceptical about whether people who actually voted for independence in 2014 and have since changed their minds would be quite so gung-ho in favour of the exact messaging they once rejected.  I'd have expected them to have quite nuanced reasons and to sound a bit more conflicted.

Here are some more examples of what the purported "Yes to Remain switchers" gave as their reasons:

"Stronger together"

"Stronger altogether"

"We are better as a nation"

"because I believe that togetherness will make a country"

"we are great britain if we remain together"

"As I think we are better together"

We should just be grateful that none of them broke into the chorus of Lord Offord's God-awful 2014 anthem "Why build another wall?  Oh why build another wa-a-a-all?"

The point is of course that if a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong unionist lies through their teeth and tells a polling company that they voted Yes in 2014, the weightings may ensure that their anti-independence responses are magnified, thus potentially distorting the headline results.  This sort of problem has been documented before - around twenty years ago, the then editor of Political Betting / Stormfront Lite openly admitted that he was a member of the YouGov polling panel and that he had falsely claimed to be a past Labour voter.  To their credit, YouGov then unceremoniously banned him, but they would have no way of knowing whether that was an isolated case or whether distortions are occurring on a bigger scale as a result of organised infiltration of the panel.  These Survation responses suggest that the latter is a real possibility, at least in Scottish independence polling.

And remember the only reason the system is open to abuse in this way is because some polling firms still insist on weighting their results by recalled 2014 vote.  They shouldn't be doing that anyway after twelve long years because of the danger of false recall, and going forward I'd suggest we should regard any poll that applies these weightings as potentially suspect for more than one reason.

*  *  *

I've received yet another pleasantry from the Liberate Scotland supreme leader Barrhead Boy - 

"Kelly is just a nasty wee man with a huge chip on his shoulder and a desire to be a ‘name’ in the movement."

Blimey.  I'm struggling to imagine a more clear-cut example of projection than that.  It's not exactly me who has set up his own vanity fringe party to pursue a destructive vendetta against the SNP, or who ludicrously imagines himself to be Alex Salmond's de facto successor as "The Boss", or who delusionally boasts about being on the cusp of "liberating the nation".  And doing all of that from luxury pads in Barcelona and the United Arab Emirates is just *chef's kiss*.

*  *  *

My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dumbarton, Dumfriesshire, and Dundee City East.

Survation cross a Rubicon by actively and knowingly pushing a fraudulent propaganda message on behalf of their client Scotland In Union - they must now be deemed partisan actors working willingly and enthusiastically on behalf of the cause of British unionism

As I pointed out in my video last night, the polling company Survation have seemingly prided themselves over the years on maintaining a particularly high standard of political neutrality and balance, even if that means not always going along with what their clients ask for.  And yet whenever Scotland In Union come calling and ask for another of their regular series of propaganda polls, all of Survation's principles just seem to fly straight out of the window.  Pretty much the cardinal rule of polling neutrality, which ironically virtually all polling companies OTHER than Survation religiously adhere to at all times, is that clients cannot interfere with the wording of voting intention questions - the wording of those questions must remain absolutely consistent regardless of the client, and that way the public can have confidence that the result would have been exactly the same no matter who the client was.

But it seems there is an exception to that rule which states that absolutely anything bloody goes when Survation are the pollsters and Scotland In Union are the client.  Suddenly in that context it becomes absolutely fine to replace the standard independence voting intention question "Should Scotland be an independent country?" with the propaganda question "Should Scotland remain part of the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?", even though Survation know perfectly well that this is not an independence question, it doesn't work as a proxy for an independence question, and it would not have a cat in hell's chance of being approved by the Electoral Commission for use in a referendum because of its ambiguity.  The key point is that it's perfectly possible to "leave the United Kingdom" without becoming an independent country - you could become part of another state, or become a dependency like Jersey, or become a freely associated state like the Cook Islands.

Survation also know that in practical terms the respondents in their panel are not replying to the question as if it's a proxy for an independence question, because the "Leave" vote produced by the question is consistently several points lower than the Yes vote in the 2014 referendum, whereas conventional independence polling using the standard question, including Survation's own conventional polls using that standard question, consistently show that the Yes vote is several points higher than in 2014, and may well be in an outright lead.  So the propaganda polls are literally producing worthless results which tell a story that is the opposite of the truth, and yet Survation have passively sat back and allowed their client to deliberately deceive both the media and the public by portraying those results as if they genuinely show that independence support has sharply declined since the referendum.

As I noted in the video, though, in the latest poll Survation have gone a step further, and have become active participants and collaborators in pushing this fraudulent and farcical propaganda fiction.  They have agreed to run a supplementary question that asks "switchers" from Yes to "Remain" to give reasons in their own words for "why they've changed their minds since 2014".  The clear subtext here is that a large drift from Yes to No is a real phenomenon that needs to be investigated, whereas Survation know - know for literally certain - that the polar opposite is true.  Survation have thus crossed a Rubicon and can now reasonably be considered partisan actors working willingly and enthusiastically on behalf of the cause of British unionism.  The only remaining question is why they are doing that - and I find it murderously difficult to come up with a plausible explanation that doesn't involve Scotland in Union paying an extra premium to buy themselves an exemption from the normal rules on impartiality and balance.

Genuine independence polls show that, since 2014, many voters have switched both from Yes to No and from No to Yes.  So it's unsurprising that some of the answers to Survation's question come from people who have genuinely turned against independence.  But it's equally unsurprising that other answers pick up a degree of bewilderment and confusion from people who have no idea why they're being asked to explain why they've changed their minds when they in fact still support independence.  Here is a little selection from the belatedly-published Survation data tables - 

"Scotland never wanted to leave the EU"

"Because I believe Scotland should be independent from England"

"No one has"

"I like the way they lead and organise"

"Needs to be independent"

"It would allow better autonomy"

"Better future and stronger if we stay in the European Union"

"Too much confusion in with the UK"

Remember these are all people who selected the "Remain" option on the headline propaganda question, and are all supposedly explaining in their own words why they "no longer support independence".

Take a bow, Survation, you've just made yourselves look utterly ridiculous.  But you've also just unwittingly demonstrated to the whole world why the headline results from Scotland In Union's propaganda polls are entirely false, and for that you do deserve our grudging thanks.

*  *  *

My latest Holyrood constituency profiles for The National are Dumbarton and Dumfriesshire.

Greens stay ahead of Labour for THIRD week in a row - SNP lead by 5 in Scotland

Later in this video I also give some preliminary thoughts on the ever-absurd latest outing for the Survation / Scotland In Union propaganda poll - although there's a limit to what I can say about it, because almost a week on, Survation still haven't published the data tables.

Why the new ScotRail minimum fare is unfair for passengers

I only discovered a couple of days ago that ScotRail are introducing a minimum fare of £10 for tickets bought on the train, except when you've boarded at a station where there is no ticket office open and no ticket machine available.  I've been thinking about how that will actually work in practice at my nearest station of Cumbernauld.  

I don't use it very often because it's an hour's walk from where I live, but I've used it maybe half-a-dozen times over the last year, including when I went to the SNP conference on Saturday.  Every single time I've been there recently, the ticket office has been shut.  There is a ticket machine, but to the best of my knowledge there's only one, and it's on the opposite platform from the main entrance.  That means if you were getting the train to Falkirk or Edinburgh, you'd have to make an otherwise needless trek over the bridge and back - which I can tell you on Saturday morning was a pretty treacherous trek because of ice.

Now, it may be that common sense would apply and the minimum fare wouldn't be imposed on journeys from stations like Cumbernauld because of the special problems.  But passengers aren't mind readers, and on a technical reading of the rules they might well make the pointless crossing of the bridge, even if they have a disability.  To even put the thought in people's minds that they may have to do that is, I would suggest, pretty poor.

There's also the problem that if you feel forced to use ticket machines, they're not always very easy to navigate and you may, through no fault of your own, end up with a ticket that is not technically valid for your journey.  Last summer I had to take a train from London to Portsmouth, but for the ticket to be valid for the journey it had to specify that I was not going via a particular station (I can't remember which one).  The ticket machine simply refused to offer me the right sort of ticket, and I couldn't find a ticket office.  In desperation I bought the wrong ticket just to get through the barriers, and thankfully the conductor took pity on me and pretended not to read the ticket very carefully.

Of course the main inconvenience of the minimum fare is that it leaves you with a dilemma if there's only a minute or two before the train leaves - do you take the time to buy the ticket in advance if it means you might miss the train?  It's needless hassle like this that makes you feel like rail travel just isn't worth the bother and it might be better to stick to buses.

Stephen Daisley owes the Scottish Parliament an apology tonight

The vote on assisted dying went the way I hoped it would, although even three hours ago I was still very pessimistic.  I think one thing all of us can agree on is that the standard of debate was exceptionally high, and indeed today was perhaps the Scottish Parliament's finest hour in the twenty-seven years of its existence.  And for that reason, Stephen Daisley owes MSPs a grovelling apology after his crassest ever article (admittedly the competition is tough) in which he suggested that the vote could mark the final "failure" of devolution, summing it up as: "Sorry, we can’t teach your child to read, but we can hurry along her granny’s death.’ Nearly 30 years and this is what devolution looks like."

Where do you even begin with hypocrisy like that, when Daisley's beloved UK House of Commons passed an assisted dying bill that was significantly worse and more dangerous than Liam McArthur's?  Perhaps he would argue that Westminster is a two-chamber parliament and all that matters is that the Lords are there to correct the mistake that MPs made, but I would much rather an elected chamber reached the correct decision by a democratic process after a high-quality debate, as happened tonight, rather than depending on the utter randomness of whether appointed legislators-for-life who are only there because they used to be good at cricket or swimming (or whatever) feel motivated enough to lay down hundreds of wrecking amendments on any given issue.  Holyrood 1, Westminster 0, Stephen bloody Daisley -5984.

Incidentally, his article also contained an appallingly cynical rewriting of history - 

"Holyrood has not distinguished itself as a great legislative body. The Gender Recognition Bill had to be blocked by Westminster for straying into UK-wide equalities law. (When the SNP government challenged this decision in court, it got sent away with a flea in its ear.)"

I strongly disagreed with the Gender Recognition Bill, but it was legitimately passed by our national parliament and for democratic reasons it should have stood.  Westminster did not "have" to block it, it chose to block it for nakedly political reasons.  And the courts did not "send the SNP government away with a flea in its ear", they simply concluded they had to uphold a provision of the Scotland Act 1998 passed by Westminster granting itself essentially unlimited power to veto any Scottish law on a whim.  If you rig the rules of the game to ensure you can't lose and then extravagantly celebrate the sweetness of victory, as Daisley has done on Westminster's behalf, then you're making yourself look a bit bloody ridiculous - but as the man who called the Israeli conquest and annexation of the Arab-populated East Jerusalem in 1967 "the liberation of East Jerusalem", perhaps Daisley is simply past the point of embarrassment by now.

Reddit tries to explain Stew - but struggles

Today is going to be an unpleasant day, because the stakes are high and the outcome is unpredictable, so I thought you might appreciate some light relief.  A Reddit thread suddenly appeared yesterday in which users were challenged to explain how on earth the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger ever ended up with any influence.  The bafflement is palpable, and some of the replies are instant classics.  You can read it HERE.

Meanwhile, my alphabetical odyssey of the 73 Scottish Parliament constituencies for The National alighted in my own home constituency of Cumbernauld & Kilsyth on Sunday, and since then I've also done Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South.

You might be interested in some feedback I received by email about the Cunninghame North profile yesterday, and in particular my reference to the ballot papers from Arran getting wet in 2007 - 

"I was at the count which was being conducted via ballot counting machines.  Prior to the arrival of the Arran ballots Labour were very narrowly in the lead (the count was being displayed electronically as ballots were being fed into the machines).

We, in the SNP, were by now reasonably confident of victory because Arran, from our canvassing, had appeared to be behind Kenneth but we knew the end result would be very close.

I made sure I was next to the machine into which the ballots would be fed and what happened was that quite a few couldn't be input at first and one of the Labour activists joked that "maybe they fell overboard".  The technician inputting the ballots explained that the ballots weren't wet but just damp due to the night air.  In the end all the ballots were successfully input and the result was victory for Kenneth by 48 votes.

It was only in the days after the result that Labour resorted to smears including that the Arran votes had been tampered with using the "wet ballots" as evidence!"

Why I hope the Scottish Parliament rejects assisted dying this week

Not that I expect my opinion to make the remotest difference, but as the Scottish Parliament is about to make one of the most consequential decisions in its history, I thought I'd offer my opinion anyway.  I don't know about anyone else, but I find it deeply disturbing that not all that long a period of time before I was born, in the 1960s to be exact, Scotland was still a country in which the state took the lives of its own citizens in the form of capital punishment.  I once had a look at the death certificate of Henry Burnett, the last person to be executed in Scotland, and there's nothing all that remarkable about the contents of it - the cause of death is curtly given as "judicial hanging", his residence is given as the prison in Aberdeen, and the informant (who would normally be the next of kin) is the prison governor.  Everything about it just says "this is totally routine".

I can't imagine how much more disturbing I'd find it to live in a Scotland where a culture of death has been reintroduced in a completely different but much more widespread form.  Death certificates giving state-assisted suicide as the cause of death would become extremely routine, far more so than was the case with the death penalty - 5% of all deaths in Canada are now assisted suicide, and it's likely that we would follow suit. If you could guarantee me that the only people who would die under the new system would be single-minded, determined individuals who had freely chosen to avoid suffering, and who had not been coerced or malignly influenced, either directly or indirectly, then probably my attitude would be different.  But anyone who actually believes that is astoundingly naive.

If this legislation goes through, there will be people who die for economic reasons - either because they've been told they are a burden or because they assume that other people regard them as a burden.  There will be people who die because of treatable depression or low self-esteem or personality disorders.  There will be people who die because doctors actively put the idea into their heads.  For the first time since 1963, society and the state will be deciding that some people are better off dead and actually making them dead.

I hope this bill is rejected. If it's not, I'm not sure I'll even recognise this country in the years to come.

Incidentally, when I spoke out a few weeks ago against Ash Regan's bid to introduce the Nordic Model on prostitution law, Stuart Campbell rather outrageously implied that I must have been motivated by self-interest, ie. that I must be someone who pays for sex myself.  I'll be interested to see what dark or cynical motivation he'll ascribe to me in this case.  It's true that I was brought up a Catholic, and that probably does influence me, because my default setting is that life is sacred unless there's an exceptionally good reason.  But I'm not sure that's such a bad principle to live by, and it's fair to say a great many atheists take exactly the same view, even if the terminology they use is different.

The "Liberate Scotland" alliance continues to both disintegrate and drift to the far-right - and Barrhead Boy's autocratic leadership looks to be the culprit

The Independence For Scotland party, which until today was one of the three component parts of the Liberate Scotland alliance along with the far-right Sovereignty and "Independents for Independence", has never been noted for being a particularly mainstream organisation or for being in touch with the concerns of the general public.  It's been utterly obsessed, for example, with the tedious and unimportant issue of oaths of allegiance to the monarchy.  So it would be tempting to characterise their decision to abandon Liberate in much the same way I characterised Allan Petrie's identical decision a couple of days ago, ie. "we can excuse fascism but we draw the line at sharing an alliance with people who do not agree with our views about gender recognition certificates".  

But that would perhaps be unfair, because they've actually given specific reasons which are maybe a bit more reasonable.  They've pointed out that until recently Liberate was an equal alliance of three parties/groupings, but was then forced to register as a party in its own right because of a ruling from the Electoral Commission.  It appears that the leadership of the new party then exploited that situation to bypass their partners when making important decisions, such as allowing Tommy Sheridan and Craig Murray to stand under the Liberate banner.  And judging from what Petrie said the other day, that leadership consists basically of the notoriously volatile and short-fused blogger Barrhead Boy, and the maverick former MP for Coatbridge, Phil Boswell (even though ironically neither are among the three officially registered party officers).  That ties in with everything I heard about Liberate in its early days - the message was overwhelmingly that Barrhead Boy was the de facto autocrat of the alliance in much the same way that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was the de facto autocrat of Alba.

So Liberate is now disintegrating for much the same reason that Alba began to disintegrate in late 2023.  However, the situation is even worse for Liberate, because however malevolent Tasmina was, she did at least have credibility as a seasoned politician and lawyer.  Barrhead Boy setting himself up as the dictator of a "national liberation movement" is faintly comical in comparison, and calls to mind the old saying about history repeating itself as farce.

The other significance of today's development, of course, is that it by definition moves the centre-of-gravity within Liberate even further to the nativist far-right - assuming Sovereignty are remaining inside the tent, that is.

SNP conference, and a housekeeping note

Never let it be said that I don't take my SNP membership seriously, because I've given up on watching the rugby today in order to attend the SNP campaign conference in Edinburgh.  (And there's precious little chance of doing a Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads by avoiding the result until I can watch it on catch-up, because ironically the rugby is one of the main topics of conversation at the conference.). While I've got a moment, I just wanted to apologise to some of the readers who have emailed me over the last few days, because I've been so rushed off my feet with the constituency profiles and whatnot that I haven't managed to reply to everyone.

One message I did reply to, though, was alerting me to the latest Scotland In Union propaganda poll, which I hope to cover later, because I'm afraid it sounds very much like Survation have moved up a gear in the assistance they're willing to give to Scotland In Union by subverting the polling process and knowingly producing misleading results.

My latest constituency profiles for The National are Clydesdale, Coatbridge & Chryston and Cowdenbeath.