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.

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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.