As requested, here's more statistical detail on why Stew's nutty claim that the SNP will win an all-time record of 65 constituency seats, and no list seats at all, is so obviously wrong

Several of you have asked me to go into more statistical detail about my blogpost on Sunday, which pointed out why Stuart "Stew" Campbell was so obviously wrong in the angry claims he made about the supposed certainty that the SNP will fail to win any list seats at all in next year's Holyrood election.  

So I'll do that, but first of all it's worth pointing out that three days have now passed since that Sunday blogpost, and in that time Stew has continued to post repeated tweets about me (so good luck to him the next time he tries his "I don't stalk James, I barely even mention the guy" schtick!), and one of those tweets even references the Sunday blogpost, so it's highly likely that he read it.  But what we haven't seen from him is any substantive reply to the points I made in that post, most importantly the specific constituency seats I identified that the SNP are actually unlikely to win even though Stew insisted they were nailed-on certainties.  I think it's fair to say that if Stew was actually capable of providing a credible rebuttal of those points, he'd have done so by now.  The fact that all we've seen from him instead is a continuation of his usual "James is a raving lunatic" repertoire ought to tell his cult followers something rather important.

There was a huge amount of padding in what Stew called his "stats post", but his basic claim can be condensed to the following:

* The SNP are certain to reach the target of 65 seats for an overall Holyrood majority, and they will do it on constituency seats alone.

* They will have so many constituency seats that for the first time in their history they will not be allocated any list seats at all, and therefore all of their list votes will be "wasted".

That's an extraordinary and wildly implausible claim in umpteen ways.  It directly contradicts Stew's own insistence from five months ago that there is "zero" chance of a pro-indy majority at Holyrood after the election, let alone a single-party SNP majority.  It means he is predicting that the SNP will win a majority for only the second time in their history, and will do it on constituency seats alone for the first time ever (when Alex Salmond led the SNP to their only majority to date in 2011, he was nowhere near the target of 65 on constituency seats and required substantial numbers of list seats to get over the line).  And Stew is saying that all of this will happen in spite of the fact that the SNP are only polling at 33-34% of the constituency vote at present, which is between thirteen and fifteen percentage points lower than they received in the 2016 and 2021 elections, when they failed to win a majority.  It's all, to put it mildly, a bit bonkers.

The best way of visualising Stew's nutty claim that the SNP are guaranteed to win at least 65 constituency seats is to look at the eight other constituency seats that he is conceding they won't win or might not win. (By the way, all of this is massively complicated by the fact that there's a boundary revision going on, but it hasn't been completed yet so we just have to work with what we've got.)  As I understand it, the Stew Eight are: 

Dumbarton
Edinburgh Southern 
Caithness, Sutherland & Ross

North East Fife

Orkney

Shetland

Edinburgh Western

Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire

This means by Stew's own admission, if you can find seats the SNP are unlikely to win that are not on the above list, it debunks his claim that the SNP are guaranteed to win 65 constituencies and by extension invalidates his claim that the SNP will win zero list seats and that SNP list votes will be "wasted".

Finding examples of other seats is not at all hard to do, because literally every single seats projection from every single opinion poll is showing the SNP failing to win a number of constituencies from outwith the Stew Eight - hardly surprising given the big drop in the SNP constituency vote.  Here are some hard examples - 

East Lothian constituency, 2021 result:

SNP 39.2%

Labour 36.7%

Conservatives 20.7%

Liberal Democrats 3.4%

Now, come on, you don't need me to hold your hand here - you can see why the SNP's position is so vulnerable.  In a situation where both the SNP and Labour vote may fall, all that would have to happen to allow Labour to gain the seat is for the SNP vote to fall just that little bit more than Labour's.  In reality, opinion polls are suggesting the SNP's vote will fall far more than Labour's - the most recent Survation poll had the SNP down fifteen percentage points from 2021 and Labour down only three points.  On a uniform swing, Labour would gain East Lothian easily, thus driving a coach and horses through the Stew Theorum.  In truth, there's a good reason for thinking Labour might even outperform a uniform swing, because there's a substantial Tory vote in the constituency which they may be able to tactically squeeze.

Galloway & West Dumfries constituency, 2021 result:

Conservatives 47.0%

SNP 39.9%

Labour 7.9%

Greens 2.6%

Liberal Democrats 2.5%

It would be an exaggeration to call this a safe seat for the Tories, but they do have a bit of a cushion over the SNP and there would need to be a significant Tory to SNP swing for the SNP to be able to win here.  In reality, the polls are suggesting a swing from the SNP to the Tories.  Although the most recent Survation poll shows a big eleven point drop in Tory support since 2021, that's dwarfed by the fifteen point drop in SNP support, which means that there's a modest net swing from SNP to Tory of 2%.  The Tories ought therefore to hold Galloway & West Dumfries with a bit to spare, and the same is also true of three other Tory constituencies which Stew is claiming the SNP are certain to gain, namely Eastwood, Aberdeenshire West and Dumfriesshire.

Ayr constituency, 2021 result:

SNP 43.5%

Conservatives 43.1%

Labour 11.0%

Liberal Democrats 1.9%

Although this is an SNP-held seat, it's an ultra-marginal.  The 2% swing to the Tories implied by the recent Survation poll would overwhelm the SNP lead in the constituency and put it back in the Tory column.  For the same reason, the Tories would be likely to gain Banffshire & Buchan Coast from the SNP (even without any help from Christina "Of The Blood" Hendry).

All of these seats are outwith the Stew Eight, and therefore demonstrate why the SNP are likely to fall well short of 65 constituency seats and will thus have much more scope to pick up compensatory list seats than Stew's fraudulent "analysis" suggests - as long, of course, as SNP supporters actually vote SNP on the list and don't waste their votes on no-hoper fringe parties in the way that siren voices such as Stew's are trying to persuade them to do.

I've spoken to three or four stats-minded people since the weekend and all of them are utterly baffled as to how Stew arrived at some of what might laughably be called his "constituency projections", most particularly for the several seats that ought to be Tory but that he's inexplicably awarded to the SNP.  There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in his post - he goes into extensive detail when it suits him to give the impression that he's engaged in some kind of rigorous Curtice-quality statistical analysis, but for the substantial parts of his claim that make no sense whatsoever, he tries to paper over the cracks with throwaway, bombastic statements such as "there is no sane way to imagine [the Tories] holding the four seats we’ve turned SNP yellow".  Er, yes there is, Stew.  Yes, there is, and I've just explained it.

I confidently predict that Stew will provide no substantive response to any of the points raised above.  I also confidently predict that he'll instead treat us to another sixty-seven "James Kelly is a shambolic wreck of a gibbering imbecile" tweets.  It really is great fun, I'm not going to deny that I always thoroughly enjoy his epic meltdowns and temper-tantrums.  But all I'd say to his dwindling band of cult followers is this: if you enjoy that kind of thing as much as I do, fine, but don't ever come to me again and try to pretend with a straight face that your guy is some kind of serious, credible, rigorous "analyst" (let alone a "journalist").

Could Starmer's Rivers of Blood speech be the death-knell for the Labour Party as we know it?

I wondered after Starmer's "Rivers of Blood" speech on Monday whether it was one of those key political moments that everyone would remember decades later, like Mrs Thatcher's "the lady's not for turning", or Harold Wilson's "the pound in your pocket" or James Callaghan's "there was I, waiting at the church" or Callaghan's "Crisis? What crisis?" (although of course he never used those exact words).  Then I thought I might be a getting a little bit carried away - but now 48 hours later I'm back to my original position.  The speech seems to have fundamentally changed how people view Starmer, and many of his former backers have now distanced himself from him.

When asked to explain how an unreconstructed Bennite like Jeremy Corbyn managed to be elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015, something which was supposed to have been impossible, some commentators pinpointed the "controls on immigration" mug released under Ed Miliband's leadership as having been pivotal - it moved some Labour members away from the imperative of "we must find a winner to lead us" and towards "we must find a leader who will uphold some basic standards".  If a mug with a generic message about "controlling" immigration could have that effect on Labour members, the mind boggles as to the effect of the party leader echoing the language of Enoch Powell.

I'm not suggesting this means history will repeat itself and Starmer will be replaced as Labour leader by a Bennite or Corbynite - the rules have been stitched up to ensure that is highly unlikely.  But Labour members who cannot stomach what Starmer has become will look for an alternative, and if they can't find a viable alternative within the Labour party, they'll find one outside.  It's always a mistake to assume that people have nowhere else to go.  The same is true for the more liberal component of Labour's rump voter coalition, which offers a major opportunity for the Greens and possibly the Lib Dems in England, and for the SNP in Scotland.  Labour may not have much of a support base left the way things are going.

But won't any liberal voters Starmer loses be offset by the racist Reform voters he clearly intended to attract with his speech?  I don't think they will, because if you hate immigrants enough for that to be the main determinant of your vote, you're going to vote for the Real McCoy of Reform, you're scarcely going to bother with an unreliable semi-skimmed version offered by a former human rights lawyer who can't seem to make up his mind what he believes in.

The thinking behind inserting the Powell language is puzzling, because it's not as if the ordinary racist on the street can recite Powell's 1968 speech backwards - they would only recognise where the words came from if the media explained it to them.  So presumably the idea must have been that racists would be informed that Starmer had borrowed Powell's language, would immediately accept that as intentional and authentic, and would think "he's just like us normal people who know Enoch Powell was right, I'm going to vote for that geezer".  Seems a bit of a stretch.

*. *. *

I hardly ever watch news bulletins on linear TV channels these days, and so I only caught the first few minutes of the Ten O'Clock News last night because it happened to immediately follow the first Eurovision semi-final.  My jaw dropped to the floor somewhat, because for the first time since the genocide started the BBC seemed to be doing something approximating to its job.  The gravity of the situation, and Israel's responsibility for it, was laid bare, and Jeremy Bowen even repeatedly used the words "stop genocide" without any of the usual caveats about strenuous Israeli denials.

It's too little, too late, of course, but even at this late stage anything that educates the public will increase pressure on the Labour government to temper its unlimited support for the genocidal Israeli regime, and is thus better than nothing.

Labour seem to be dropping the pretence that HMP United Kingdom is anything other than Greater England. When statements like this used to be made, there were always exceptions that speaking Welsh or Scottish Gaelic would do too - are they even bothering with that now? Seems not. https://t.co/XqlkMDTy2z

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 12, 2025

In years of Sam's tweets popping up on my Twitter, this is the first time he's said the SNP are right about anything. Which maybe ought to make us question whether it's actually a significant mistake the SNP are making - ie. you don't abandon the democratic principle of 50% + 1. https://t.co/h5Z0in0sY5

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 12, 2025

In case you missed it: Bonnie Prince Bob's excoriating video calling out leading Alba Party politicians for their support of genocide-apologist blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell

I am extremely confident that eventually, although it may take several years, there will be an official ruling from the international court that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and that as a result, however slowly and reluctantly, western European governments (but probably not the government of the United States) will start to accept their own complicity in one of the gravest crimes in modern human history.  If that seems implausible at present, remember that changes of government regularly occur in democratic states, and it's a lot easier to accept blame for something that occurred when a different set of politicians were in charge.  Even the Iraq War was eventually denounced as "illegal" from the government despatch box at PMQs - albeit by Nick Clegg when he was deputising for David Cameron.

I also have little doubt that once academic experts can access Gaza and examine the full range of evidence, it will be established that Israel has slaughtered (either directly, or by indirect methods such as starvation) far, far, far more Palestinians than the official death toll from what the BBC call the "Hamas-run health ministry" currently suggests, and that a very substantial percentage of the target population will therefore have been exterminated in the genocide.  Anyone who supported or defended the Israeli government's actions during this period will be permanently stained by history - and it'll be very hard for them to resort to the excuse that they didn't properly understand what was going on, given how extensive the video evidence of both Israel's war crimes and its genocidal intent has been.

Which brings us inevitably to the subject of the formerly pro-independence blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell, who initially fully supported Netanyahu's war crimes as a legitimate response against "terrorist scum", and who more recently has settled into trivialising the genocide as a silly little squabble between two sides who are no better than each other, and that everyone else should stay out of - ie. he clearly doesn't think countries such as the UK should take any action to prevent Palestinians being exterminated on an industrial scale, because he apparently sees their lives as being of very little value, or that there should be any effort to break the Israeli blockade to stop Palestinian children being literally starved to death.  He also mocks anti-genocide protestors in the UK as "flagshaggers".

All of the great many other things that are so thoroughly objectionable about Campbell, not least his current unsubtle attempts to steer his disciples towards voting for the soft-fascist Reform UK at next year's Holyrood election, pale into insignificance compared to his disgusting apologism for Bibi and the genocide.

The well-kent figure of Bonnie Prince Bob has now posted a video criticising leading Alba Party politicians Tommy Sheridan and Neale Hanvey (but particularly Mr Sheridan) for seemingly defending Campbell and his views on the genocide.  This is a contradiction that has struck me a number of times.  Alba has made a big effort to portray itself as being on the right side of history as far as Gaza is concerned, and yet at exactly the same time it has persisted with its excruciating declarations of unrequited love for Campbell, still regarded as the party's spiritual godfather even though he continually tells his disciples to vote against Alba by backing unionist parties.  And remember it's not just Campbell himself who has some sympathy for the Netanyahu regime - if you read through the comments on Wings you'll find plenty of support for what Israel is doing.

I've had to temporarily switch pre-moderation back on in the comments section of this blog for one simple reason: I've been swamped by literally hundreds of attempted comments over the weekend containing puerile insults and abuse from the Stew Fan Club.  But there was one anonymous insult that interested me, because in a sense it made a perfectly fair point.  It simply said: "Stu > James"-- Alex.  That's actually entirely accurate.  At Slanszh Media's IMAX event not long before Salmond's death, the former First Minister went out of his way to invite Campbell to attack "the lesser internet figures" who had pointed out that Campbell no longer supports independence.  I have little doubt, given the context, that this was an indirect reference to me, and that it was intended as a coded signal of three things: a) that I was no longer "in favour" with Salmond, b) that Salmond had okayed the demand from Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and the Corri Nostra that I be expelled from the Alba Party, and c) that the Netanyahu apologist Campbell, by contrast, was still regarded as beyond reproach and as the party's spiritual lodestar.  That strikes me as considerably more of a problem for the Alba Party than it is for me.

I don't agree with everything in Bonnie Prince Bob's video.  I personally think it's a mistake to bang on about the evils of "Zionism" too much, because it needlessly drives a wedge between anti-Zionist opponents of the genocide, and those who oppose the genocide while also supporting Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state within its legal pre-1967 boundaries.  However, the best way of being sure that the video also makes plenty of telling points is that it's really, really got under Campbell's skin.  Apart from well over a dozen tweets in the space of a few hours trying to portray Bonnie Prince Bob as "unhinged", he's even running a Twitter poll asking whether Bonnie Prince Bob or me is "winning the mental-off".  To even be mentioned in the same breath as me in the "Stew is calling you lots of synonyms for a lunatic" stakes means that BPB is almost certainly doing something very, very right.

The video has also been lauded by the critics as "more compelling than Slanszh Media's little-watched weekly YouTube show Tas Is Still Talking".

How can @citizentommy - a governing member of @KennyMacAskill’s @AlbaParty express solidarity with 🇵🇸 whilst endorsing @WingsScotland ? A man who abuses Palestinian protesters including @Lowkey0nline & claims 🇵🇸 is irrelevant to Scottish Independence. pic.twitter.com/i4DH9KCHKQ

— Bonnie Prince Bob (@VoteBPB) May 12, 2025

The dizzyingly fast transition between "Old Stew" and "New Stew": fickle Somerset blogger's shock confession that he has gone from saying there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood after the 2026 election to now saying there is a 100% certainty of the SNP winning an *outright majority on their own*

I'm indebted to an anonymous commenter on the previous thread for pointing out another astounding feature of Stew's blogpost today that I initially overlooked - 

"Campbell is making a complete blithering idiot of himself at this point. It really is great fun. In the space of just six months, he's gone from 'there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority, barring an alien invasion' to 'anyone who says the SNP will take fewer than 65 constituency seats is manifestly, obviously, indisputably idiotic'. 65 seats means he's now predicting not just a pro-indy majority, but a single-party SNP majority! Life comes at you fast.

Keep doing what you're doing, James, in his frantic desperation to 'prove you wrong', all he's succeeding in doing is exposing his own bluster for what it is."

And in case anyone is in any doubt, yes, he really has transitioned over a period of a few months (actually five months or so) from saying that there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority after the 2026 Holyrood election to saying that there is a 100% chance of the SNP on their own having a single-party majority after the 2026 Holyrood election.  The evidence is there in black and white - 

"Old Stew", 3rd December 2024: "We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

"New Stew", 11th May 2025: "Labour are the opposition in most of the 62 constituency seats currently held by the SNP, and we cannot think of a single one they could credibly hope to capture...Similarly, with the Tory constituency vote in the True North poll having been HALVED from the 22% they got in 2021, there is no sane way to imagine them either holding the four seats we’ve turned SNP yellow on that map...or capturing any that are currently held by anyone else...And as far as we can think off the top of our heads, the only seat anywhere in Scotland in which the Lib Dems are in 2nd place and might therefore have a realistic chance of taking it from the SNP is Caithness, Sutherland and Ross...so we’ve given them it on our projection...That gives the SNP 65 constituency seats...we invite anyone to provide examples of seats they think we’ve got wrong."

For the uninitiated, there are 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, so if the SNP win a minimum of 65 constituency seats, as Stew claims they are certain to do, they will have an outright majority in the parliament even if they do not win a single list seat.  So Stew really has gone from saying in December that there was a zero per cent chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood to saying now that there is a 100% chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood, and indeed that there is a 100% chance of the SNP winning only their second outright single-party majority in Holyrood, and their first since Alex Salmond was First Minister.

I don't know if he thinks his readers have the memory-span of goldfish or if he just thinks they're stupid, but to state the bleedin' obvious, this is not a credible 'evolution of a prediction'. He's turned the compass completely upside down and hoped no-one will notice.  And there hasn't been an alien invasion or a nuclear war since December, so there are no excuses for him there - there have been political events over the last few months, of course, but nothing that wouldn't have looked to be well within the bounds of the possible.  

For those of you who still haven't twigged how Stew operates, I'll let you into a little secret - he didn't believe in December that there was no chance of a pro-indy majority, and he doesn't believe now that the SNP are certain to win a majority on constituency seats alone.  What he does is look at the prevailing situation and try to find an 'angle' to bash the SNP with.  In December, it was "oh the SNP are doing so badly, there's no chance of a pro-indy majority so there's no point in voting for them, best be sensible and cast a protest vote instead, troops!", and now it's "oh the SNP are doing so well, they're going to win practically every constituency, that means they have no chance to win any list seats, best be sensible and cast a tactical vote against the SNP, troops!"

Both versions are complete tripe.  He's been challenging people all day to identify which of the 65 constituency seats he says are nailed-on for the SNP might be won by another party.  Well, that's not actually a very difficult thing to do, because the standard projections from current opinion polls are not showing the SNP on 65 constituency seats - hardly surprising, because even under first-past-the-post it's phenomenally improbable that a party could win 89% of the seats on 33% or 34% of the vote.

For example, if you plug the results of the most recent Survation poll into the best known seats projector, it has the SNP winning only 57 constituency seats - eight fewer than what Stew claims is a certainty.  They would lose East Lothian to Labour, Banffshire & Buchan Coast and Ayr to the Conservatives, Caithness, Sutherland & Ross to the Liberal Democrats, and Glasgow Kelvin to the Greens (I'm dubious about the latter, but who knows).  They would also fail to gain the four seats from the Tories that Stew says they would be certain to do.

I really don't know how the cult members manage to keep taking this guy seriously given the regularity with which he makes claims of absolute certainty that rapidly turn out to be completely wrong, and then tosses them into the memory hole with a shrug and a "that never happened, you know".  But what I would say is this: for God's sake, keep your money firmly in your pocket when he claims today on Twitter that the SNP are so certain to take 65 constituency seats and no list seats that such an outcome can be safely bet upon.  He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying, and if by any miracle he really is daft enough to believe it, he is catastrophically wrong, yet again.

U OK hun? Stew's extraordinarily epic squeal of pain after suffering that rarest of experiences for him: being confronted with the *truth*

Well, what a truly unexpected treat.  The man who famously "never even mentions me" has now written a second novel-length blogpost about me within the space of just three days.  And you can tell he's really angry this time, because he hasn't even bothered trotting out his usual schtick of "the fact that I'm writing this blogpost about him doesn't detract from my strenuous denials that I ever mention him, indeed if you think this blogpost about him exists or that you're reading it, that's probably just a figment of your imagination".  And yes, that's what tells you he's angry, and not his claims that I'm "blinded by hate", "disturbingly close to a complete psychotic mental breakdown", and "demonstrably insane to the point of requiring psychiatric intervention", because that's just Stew's little thing, it's his equivalent of love poetry.  We'd be worried about him if he didn't do it.

So what on earth could have made him so furious with me?  Remarkably, it was the fact that I dared to point out the obvious to him - that, far from his fraudulent claims that all SNP list votes will "definitely" be wasted next year and that "we know this", in reality the SNP have won list seats in every single Holyrood election in history and in 2026 will have a stronger opportunity to win a substantial number of list seats than in any election since 2007.  The reason is that their current share of the vote on the constituency ballot in opinion polls is significantly lower than it was in the 2011, 2016 and 2021 elections, and at least for large parties, the worse you do on the constituency ballot, the greater the scope to be compensated with significant numbers of seats on the list ballot - but only, of course, if you attract enough list votes, which you may not do if some of your own supporters are foolish enough to follow Stew's advice and vote for their second-choice or third-choice party on the list on a supposedly "tactical" basis.

According to Stew, what I've just outlined is not only a lie, but "the most dishonest, knowingly false and wildly extreme lie about Scottish politics we’ve ever seen anyone tell in the 13.5 years of Wings Over Scotland’s existence".  Crikey, what an accolade.  I'm touched, Stew.

Just one snag, though: it's not a lie.  And the fact that's it not a lie is remarkably easy to demonstrate.  "We'll keep this brief", as the Great One himself would say.

In the 2011 election, the SNP took 45.4% of the vote on the constituency ballot.

In the 2016 election, the SNP took 46.5% of the vote on the constituency ballot.

In the 2021 election, the SNP took 47.7% of the vote on the constituency ballot.

Whereas in an average of the last five Holyrood opinion polls, conducted between January and this month, the SNP's constituency vote share stands at just 34.4%.  That's a very considerable drop on all of the last three elections, thus opening up an obvious opportunity for the SNP to improve their allocation of compensatory list seats.

Understandably, Stew can't bring himself to directly acknowledge this elephant in the room, because to do so would drive a coach-and-horses through his fatuous claim that (and I paraphrase) "the SNP didn't win many list seats in 2021, and 2026 will be just like 2021", when in fact 2016 is highly likely to be radically different from 2021, and from 2016, and from 2011.  However, he does tacitly nod towards his little problem by claiming "FPTP (first-past-the-post) does not care the tiniest jot what size your vote share is".  Blimey, that's handy for you, isn't it, Stew?  

So what, pray tell, does FPTP "care about"?  It certainly doesn't always care about which party is in the lead, because in the 2007 Holyrood election, the SNP won the popular vote on the constituency ballot (albeit narrowly), but only won 21 constituency seats compared to Labour's 37.  That's right - Labour won an absolute majority of the 73 constituency seats despite being in second place on the constituency vote.  If SNP supporters had been daft enough to think "my party are going to win the constituency ballot so they don't need any list votes", Alex Salmond would never have become First Minister and we'd have been stuck with Jack McConnell for another four long years.

The best that can be said is that there's a weak correlation between the gap in the popular vote between the first-placed party and the second-placed party, and the share of constituency seats that the first-placed party takes.  But if we make that the test, as Stew wants us to do, does it actually help his case?  No, I'm afraid it doesn't.  "This won't take long", as the Great One himself would say.

In the 2011 election, the SNP had a 13.7% lead on the constituency ballot over the second-placed party.

In the 2016 election, the SNP had a 23.9% lead on the constituency ballot over the second-placed party.

In the 2021 election, the SNP had a 25.8% lead on the constituency ballot over the second-placed party.

Whereas in an average of the last five opinion polls, the SNP have a 14.4% lead over the second-placed party.  So that lead is way down on both 2016 and 2021, and is roughly identical to 2011 - when of course the SNP took no fewer than sixteen list seats, and won at least one list seat in seven of the eight electoral regions, thus ensuring that the overwhelming majority of SNP list votes were not "wasted".  So whichever way you cut it, the SNP have a much better chance of winning substantial numbers of list seats in 2026 than they've had for many, many years.  The only thing that will stop them doing that will be if they fail to win enough list votes - and remember the number of list votes they'd require is not in some sort of 'unachievable zone', because all they'd need is the sort of percentage vote on the list they've achieved many times before.   The fact that Stew is so desperate to convince you that it is somehow unachievable tells you three things: a) he knows the SNP could well increase their number of list seats and doesn't want that to happen, b) he thinks the only way to stop it happening is by deceptive means, and c) he thinks you're stupid enough to be duped.

We all know that some people are so totally infatuated with the elusive notion that the list vote can somehow be "hacked" (it's the modern-day equivalent of turning lead into gold) that a very small percentage of independence supporters will probably ignore the immense risks and attempt to "tactically vote on the list".  But if Stew was being honest with his readers (which of course is the one thing that will never happen) he'd warn them that the danger of inadvertently helping unionist parties is far greater than it was in 2021 or 2016, because the SNP do have a good chance of winning a fair number of list seats on this occasion, and if you don't vote SNP on the list you could gift-wrap those seats and hand them to Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems or Reform.  An honest Stew would also point out that anyone even thinking about taking a punt on tactical voting needs to be responsible and consider the question of which pro-independence parties are actually capable of winning any list seats at all, because if you 'tactically' vote for a no-hoper party with no chance of winning list seats, you really are throwing your vote away and helping the Brit Nats.

It's not possible to say with any precision what percentage chance each party has of winning list seats, because there are too many variables involved.  But let's try to make an intuitive stab at it anyway.

Alba: Their chances of winning list seats are close to zero.  They would have to treble or quadruple their negligible vote share from last time around, whereas opinion polls (with the exception of the occasional outlier) suggest that their popularity has not significantly increased since then.  Their probability of winning even one list seat must surely be below 10%, and some would say below 5%.

Greens: Their chances of winning list seats are close to 100%.  That wasn't the case in previous elections, but they're now well enough established to make it more or less unthinkable that they'll fall short.  That doesn't necessarily mean that they'll win a list seat in all of the eight electoral regions, but in the last election they managed it in seven of the eight regions, and their support may be a touch higher than it was back then.  So if you vote Green on the list, at the absolute mimimum there must be an 80% chance that your vote will not be wasted.

SNP: This is the hardest one to judge, because unlike the Greens and Alba, the SNP will be winning constituency seats, and the number of constituency seats they win in each region (which is unknowable in advance) will have a huge impact on their chances of winning big numbers of list seats.  However, past evidence suggests that their chance of winning at least one list seat somewhere in Scotland is not that much lower than 100%.  The number of electoral regions they win a list seat in could be anywhere in a broad range between zero and all eight, depending on how well they fare on the constituency ballot.

So even taking into account the high level of uncertainty, one truth shines through - that the chances of a tactical vote for the Greens being effective, or at least of it not backfiring, are many, many, many times greater than the chances of a tactical vote for Alba being effective.  Anyone in their right mind thinking of going down the tactical voting route (which I repeat I think would be very foolish) will be forced to conclude that the Greens are the only rational option available.  But don't ask Stew to be honest about that fact, because he'll start turning purple, stamping his little feet furiously, and calling you "deranged", "a lunatic" and "on the verge of a total psychotic mental breakdown".  

Or come to think of it, maybe you should get Stew to do all of that, because I can tell you from personal experience that there really is no entertainment quite like it.

Explaining how the Holyrood voting system works to Primordial Stew

Welcome to part two of Scot Goes Pop's latest comprehensive Stew coverage, in which I'm going to respond in detail to the characteristically abusive rant he left in the comments section of this blog yesterday afternoon.  The reason I'm doing this part in a separate post is that his comment contained a string of inaccurate claims (in fact, fraudulent is probably the word) about how the Holyrood voting system works, and it's therefore important to bring the corrections to those claims to as much attention as possible.  I'm not naive enough to think his hardcore of brainwashed followers will take the remotest heed of what I'm about to say - Stew could spin a cock and bull story about the Earth being shaped like an inverted rectangle, and the Fan Club would breathlessly say "Outstanding, Rev!  Now we understand!" But planting a little seed can sometimes be of use.  Sometimes people eventually drop out of cults because a tiny sliver of doubt causes them to start asking questions they never would have asked before.

So let's dive in.  I'll take it line by line.

"Never stop being such a hilarious coward, Jimbo."

I think this is supposed to refer to me deleting other misleading comments about the voting system.  Well, if a blog owner deleting comments that breach his moderation policy is a sign of being a "coward", I'm not sure what we'd call a man who reacts to a brief comment on someone else's blog criticising his repugnant views on the Hillsborough disaster by getting his solicitor David Halliday to send legal threats about what will happen if the blog owner doesn't censor the comment out of existence.  "Coward" doesn't really seem a strong enough word to describe such behaviour.  Would even "craven, spineless poltroon" be sufficient?  For those of you unaware of the incident, you can read my full email exchange with David Halliday HERE.

"The entire point is that people who want a pro-indy majority SHOULD vote for other indy parties on the list. If they don't want to take that advice, fine, but that's what the advice should be."

I'll be honest and say I haven't a scooby what the function of that sentence is supposed to be.  If he thinks the idea that independence supporters should vote for pro-independence parties is some sort of radical, incisive observation, he's been listening to the sound of his own voice far too much.

"- If they vote SNP, their vote will DEFINITELY be wasted and Unionists will be elected. We know this."

This is when you know he's deliberately lying and is making a very calculated attempt to deceive his disciples in order to distort their voting choices.  This is when you have every right to be angry with him.  The reason you know he's lying is that what he's said is not the product of naivety or of lack of knowledge or of wishful thinking.  Even Stew is capable of checking Wikipedia, and therefore he knows perfectly well that the SNP have won list seats in every single Holyrood election in history.  In 2021 they took two list seats, in 2016 they took four list seats, and in 2011, the only Holyrood election in which they have ever won an outright majority, they took a whopping sixteen list seats, and grabbed at least one list seat in seven of the eight electoral regions.  There has never been an election in which all SNP list votes have been wasted, which of course can be contrasted with Alba's failure to even come close to winning a single seat in 2021, thus ensuring that 100% of Alba list votes were totally wasted and, to put it in Stew's own terms, "unionists were elected as a result".

Because the scope for a large party to take list seats increases the less well that party does on the constituency ballot, and because the SNP's constituency vote share in current opinion polls is well below what they received in all of the last three Holyrood elections, the opportunity for the SNP to take a substantial number of list seats is higher than in any election since 2007.  If they fail to capitalise on that opportunity, it'll be for one reason only - that they didn't get enough list votes.  Which, of course, is precisely what Stew is trying to ensure happens.

In a nutshell, Stew's claim that list votes for the SNP will "definitely" be wasted and that "we know this" is a deliberate and outrageous lie.  His disciples should hold him accountable for it and demand an apology.  But, of course, they won't.

"- But if they vote for non-SNP indy parties, those parties WILL win seats. So if you care about a pro-indy majority, tell people to vote SNP 1 Other indy 2. You can't MAKE them do it, but you can be truthful and tell them it's the only way to keep those Unionists out. Personally I *don't* care about it..."

And of course with that final sentence he nullifies the piety of his earlier advice - it's merely the advice he supposedly would have hypothetically given if he wanted a pro-independence majority, which he doesn't, so he won't.  He'll instead once again tell his readers to vote Labour or Tory or Reform (almost certainly the latter, given the recent mood music).  But nevertheless he knows that a non-trivial fraction of his disciples don't share his born again British nationalism and do still want independence, so it's important to him to persist with the fairy tales and convince the crew that he'd be telling them to vote against the SNP on the list even if he was still an independence supporter.  Which, of course, he wouldn't, because the logic he has set out is utterly bogus.

The reason the list vote is the more important of the two votes is that the overall composition of parliament is roughly proportional to how people voted on the list ballot.  If you vote for your first choice party on the list, you can be sure that if that party fails to pick up its fair share of constituency seats (or even if it fails to pick up far more than its fair share), it will be fully compensated with seats on the list.  But if you start mucking around with "tactical votes" for second-choice or third-choice parties on the list, you're chucking away the safety net and ensuring that if your first choice party gets an unfair result in constituency seats, it won't be compensated with list seats and will be severely under-represented in the parliament as a whole.

But even if you're conceited enough to think you 'know' exactly how many constituency seats the SNP will win before any votes have been counted, to cast an effective "tactical vote on the list" you'd still need to find an alternative pro-independence party that is actually capable of winning any list seats at all.  Alba is not such a party.  It took only 1.7% of the list vote last time around, which is only about one-third of what it would probably have needed to pick up even a small number of seats.  Opinion polls suggest Alba's popularity has not significantly increased since then.  Other than the SNP, the only pro-indy party capable of winning list seats is the Greens, so if as an SNP supporter you were foolish enough to muck around with "tactical voting", the Greens would be the only possible rational choice.  And we know that Stew doesn't want the Greens to do well, so if he was still an independence supporter he'd undoubtedly be telling his readers to vote SNP on both the constituency and the list ballot - exactly as he did in 2016.

"You don't need to endorse Alba, you could just tell people to vote Green 2. And me and Chris McEleny would both really HATE loads more Green MSPs being elected, so big double win for you! Pro-indy majority AND we're pissed off!"

I've actually just covered that point pretty comprehensively and honestly, and I wasn't saying anything I haven't said umpteen times before, so if it's news to Stew I'd have to conclude, sadly, that he's not quite as devoted a fan of this blog as he sometimes appears to be.  Ah well.  But what is really interesting here is the overt display of chumminess with Chris McEleny.  Only a few minutes after he posted his comment, somebody claiming to be McEleny posted a short comment in agreement.  In normal circumstances I would assume that was one of our resident trolls playing silly buggers, but in this case I'm not so sure.  McEleny is an utterly devoted Stew fanboy, and it's precisely the sort of thing he would do - particularly if he and Stew were in regular email or Whatsapp or Signal contact, and Stew was able to alert him to what he had just posted.

If Stew and McEleny are indeed as thick as thieves as they appear to be, I'm wondering how Stew has reacted to McEleny's expulsion from Alba.  He's never actually been particularly supportive of Alba when it really mattered, so this might be the excuse he needed to make a complete break from Alba and go in all guns blazing for what he would call "Reform 1, Reform 2" at next year's Holyrood election.  But will even that be enough to make the scales fall from his disciples' eyes?

Concerns mount for controversial Somerset "feminist" blogger, as Stuart Campbell openly admits giving his readers the cretinous advice to "vote Labour to get progress on independence", but insists that he only did it because "John Swinney wanted me to". A worried nation has just one question on its lips: IS STEW HEARING VOICES?

Firstly, and this is perhaps the most important point of all, Stuart Campbell DEFINITELY does not stalk me.  The idea is utterly preposterous.  As he makes clear in all of his dozens of blogposts about me, and all of his hundreds of tweets about me, I'm somebody he barely even mentions.  It almost never happens, and frankly if it wasn't for his need to regularly and VERY BRIEFLY clear up the fact that I'm somebody he doesn't really mention, he'd scarcely have any call to write dozens of lengthy blogposts about me and hundreds of tweets about me.  As his fan club so rightly point out: "you're absolutely correct, Stew, apart from the dozens of blogposts and hundreds of tweets you write about him (all of which you have exceptionally good reasons for), you never even mention the guy, so his claim that you stalk him rather than the other way round is simply HI-LAR-I-OUS, please take lots of my cash for your satirical and ironic fundraiser about trans people".

Glad we've cleared that up.  So I'm now going to respond to Stew's lengthy blogpost about me from last night, and later on (probably in a separate post) I'll respond to the long comment he left on this blog earlier today, which he also screenshotted and reposted in a tweet.  However, I really do need to stress that the fact that he's been blogging at length about me within the last 24 hours, and tweeting about me within the last 24 hours, and leaving long comments on this blog within the last 24 hours, IN NO WAY DETRACTS from the fact that I'm someone he never, ever mentions, and that he DEFINITELY does not stalk me.  Please understand and accept this.

What set him off last night was the post in which I pointed out that he didn't have a leg to stand on when he whinges about the SNP doing nothing to deliver independence, given that his own contribution to the cause was to instruct his readers to vote Labour, and thus to vote against independence, at last year's general election.  Rather novelly, his response to my post has been to openly admit that he did indeed tell people to vote Labour (in the past he's always ludicrously denied backing unionist parties after the event, even when the evidence was there in black and white), but he's tried to excuse himself by basically saying "John Swinney wanted me to do it", ie. because Mr Swinney supposedly said that Labour's mis-steps in government would increase support for independence.  That's a pretty weak effort even by Stew's standards (I'm not sure his heart is really in this anymore), because of course Mr Swinney wanted the Labour government to be facing several dozen SNP MPs on the other side of the chamber, and you were never going to get that by voting Labour in Scotland.

However, let's humour Stew, assume that he somehow 'misconstrued' Mr Swinney's words, and check back to last summer to see if it's true that he only urged people to vote Labour to help Mr Swinney and the SNP out.

Ah.  It turns out it's not true, and that Stew wanted his readers to vote Labour to harm the SNP, which he claimed without explanation would somehow magically bring independence closer.  Well, that's a major shock, isn't it, who'd have thought it.  This is what he posted ten days before the general election -

"VOTING FOR UNIONISTS: This is, for obvious reasons, the least palatable option for indy fans, but also by far the most effective way to get rid of the SNP, which is the prerequisite for any progress towards independence..."

So I'm afraid I have to return to my original point.  As the "John Swinney told me to do it" schtick turns out, quite staggeringly, to be garbage, we still do need a progress report from Stew on how his advice to Scotland last July to elect a majority of Labour MPs (exactly what happened, but probably not because of him), has brought about "progress towards independence", as he promised it would.  We need some kind of estimate from Stew about exactly when Keir Starmer will deliver independence, and we need a brutally honest assessment about whether the pace of "progress" has been sufficient to justify the pain caused by voting Labour, namely the scrapping of winter fuel payments to pensioners, the devastating cuts to benefits for disabled people, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Alternatively, Stew could just admit that advising people to vote for an anti-independence party to get "progress towards independence" was without doubt the most galactically cretinous piece of advice to be given by anyone, anywhere in the world, in the last few thousand years, and delete his internet presence out of shame.  That's probably what I'd do in his shoes, but hey, everybody's different.  

"So next year for Holyrood, ignore what we say and take the frothing nutter’s advice: vote SNP1 and SNP2."

If the "frothing nutter" is supposed to be me, I can assure Stew that I've never advised anyone to spoil their ballot in the way he seems to think by writing the number "2" anywhere on their list ballot paper.  I do not use the moronic and highly misleading "1 & 2" shorthand, and never have done.  Nor, incidentally, have I specifically urged anyone to vote "both votes SNP" - that's what I personally intend to do, but all I've ever said to other people (including in all past Holyrood elections) is that the list vote is the more important of the two votes, and that they should use it on their first choice party, whatever that party happens to be.

"But hey, who are we to argue with the razor-sharp insight of the 143rd-most-popular politics blog of 2011, right?"

You know, it's an interesting thing, Stew.  Whatever this blog's ranking may or may not have been in its infancy in 2011, it is now the third most-read political blog in Scotland according to SimilarWeb.  And the only reason I even know of the existence of the SimilarWeb rankings is that Stew used to boast about them on a monthly basis - until, mysteriously, he suddenly stopped mentioning them altogether after last autumn.  Now why would that be, I wonder?  It might possibly be because when he last mentioned them, Wings had more than 500,000 monthly visits, but those have now more than halved to around 240,000 as people finally tire of his neverending and tedious gender identity obsession. He also used to boast about having around ten times as many monthly visits as Scot Goes Pop, but that's now down to around four times as many, and a few weeks ago it had dipped to below three times as many.

Although I'll respond in a fresh post to his lengthy abusive rant in the comments section of this blog, there was one line that was sort of 'thematically linked' to the above, so I'll deal with it now - 

"You're a tragic, broken shambles of a man and I honestly just pity you and your increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempts to get people to pay you for your rants, when even the woeful Bella Caledonia can raise 10 times as much from their micro-audience."

Again, that seems to tacitly concede that Scot Goes Pop does have a much bigger readership than Bella, otherwise there'd be no call for surprise that Bella has been more successful in its fundraising.  I wasn't actually aware until now of how Bella's fundraiser had fared, because unlike Stew I don't obsessively monitor that sort of thing.  It has to be said that this stuff really matters to Stew.  Having more readers than any other Scottish political blog, having more funding than any other Scottish blog, having more Twitter engagement than other bloggers (and by God, he cares about Twitter engagement) is practically his whole life, and he checks on a daily if not hourly basis to make sure nothing has gone wrong yet.  He'd feel like he was nothing if it was all taken away from him.  But here's the thing, Stew: eventually it will be taken away.  Nobody can stay at the top of the pile forever, and your trajectory is already firmly downwards.  I'm not suggesting Scot Goes Pop will overtake Wings any time soon, but Wee Ginger Dug may well do.  I think you need more of what politicians call a "hinterland" so that it won't feel like quite so much of a blow when the moment inevitably comes.

And to put it mildly, there's a bit of a problem with choosing this moment of all moments to make snide comments about fundraising, because I haven't even mentioned my own fundraiser for weeks even though it does indeed remain well short of its target, whereas only a few days ago Stew launched an "ironic" and "satirical" fundraiser about the trans issue, and has so far pocketed £77 from it.  "For God's sake, it's quite clearly JUST A BIT OF FUN and it makes a GOOD POINT" chant the Stew Fan Club, to which all I can ask is "so, the money isn't real, then, and he isn't going to spend it on himself like he openly says he will?" And then silence falls, naturally.

For what it's worth, by the way, my guess as to why Bella's fundraising has been more successful than mine is that they have more 'highbrow' content, and I presume their readers are therefore a bit more likely to have a high disposable income.  That's just speculation, but it seems plausible enough.

Standby for more thrilling Stew coverage on Scot Goes Pop, because my next post will be a detailed reply to the foul-mouthed comment he left on this blog a few hours ago.

Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out BLESS MY SACRED SOW! Farage on course for 10 Downing Street as apocalyptic poll gives Reform a huge double-digit lead

By any standards, this poll is a major landmark - Reform hadn't previously broken through the 30% threshold, but now they've absolutely smashed through it and reached 33%.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 7th May 2025):

Reform UK 33% (+4)

Labour 20% (-1)

Conservatives 16% (-3)

Liberal Democrats 15% (+2)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

20% returns Labour to their post-election low across all polling firms, but perhaps of greater significance this time is that 16% is a new post-election low for the Tories across all firms - and without trawling through the archives for the last century, I would guess it must be very close to their all-time low too.  The 3-point drop for the Tories is similar to the 4-point increase for Reform, so one possible interpretation is that the main impact of the local election results was to persuade a substantial chunk of the remaining Tory support to throw in their lot with Reform, who now have more than double the vote of the Tories.

There is of course a house effect at play here - Find Out Now have consistently been better for Reform and worse for Labour than most other pollsters.  So this poll shouldn't be taken to mean that other firms are likely to show Reform in the 30s or with double-digit leads.  But the broad direction of travel is consistent across all pollsters, and as in the recent YouGov poll, it looks like the Tories are now in severe danger of slipping into fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats.

*. *. *

I'm aware that my devoted Somerset stalker had something of a prolonged 'emotional moment' about me last night (I'm touched, Stew!) and I'll hopefully find the time to respond in some detail later today.  But for now I just want to respond to one of my 'other' stalkers from the Stew Fan Club, the one and only Cath "Two Accounts" Ferguson, who seems more and more to be taking refuge in a world of sheer fantasy.

What on earth does this even mean?  Reform surging into second place in Holyrood polling, even if it turns out to be only temporary, is plainly a major story and I wouldn't be much of a polling blogger if I completely ignored it.  But I certainly haven't given any indication that it's a welcome development, because that's not what I believe.  What I do think, and I said this very recently, is that if the SNP leadership are determined to argue that a simple 50% + 1 majority is no longer enough to bring about independence and that we instead need some sort of overwhelming majority, then there's no point being squeamish about it - the only chance of that happening, in my view, is if some kind of major disruptive event occurs, and the only such event that realistically seems to be on the horizon is a Reform government that would pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But Reform moving into second place in Holyrood doesn't particularly assist that process.  At best there are pros and cons, and one of the major cons is that Reform are gobbling up a small but non-trivial percentage of the pro-indy vote, which will make it harder to produce a 50%+ combined vote for pro-indy parties in any plebiscite-type election.  So on balance it would be more optimal from a strategic point of view if no Reform surge was occurring in Scotland.

Where Cath seems to have totally lost touch with reality is in this nutty idea she's punting that the choice before independence supporters on the Holyrood list ballot is between Reform and Alba (!) and that people like me are part of some sort of pro-Reform conspiracy that will prevent Alba becoming the main opposition party.  Newsflash, Cath: barring miracles, Alba are not going to win any list seats at all, let alone get within light-years of becoming the main opposition party.  The last two polls have had them on 2% or 3% of the list vote, which is well below what they would need to win even one seat.

And second newsflash: I'm now an SNP member once again, and like the vast majority of SNP members I intend to vote SNP on both the list and constituency ballots.  Why on earth would we vote Reform, a party opposed to pretty much everything we believe in (with the possible exception of proportional representation)?  Under the AMS voting system the list vote is the more important vote, so SNP members will vote SNP on the list, Green members will vote Green on the list, and those who are content to pointlessly throw their votes away will, I suppose, vote Alba on the list.  This isn't rocket science.

Oh, and as I've gently pointed out many, many times - if Alba actually wanted my support on the list, it might have been an idea not to expel me.  You know, just sayin'.

Titbits from the Survation data tables: it looks as if 2014 weighting has once again transformed a Yes lead into a No lead

The Survation data tables are now out, and accordingly I can address the question that someone asked me yesterday about the impact of 2014 recalled vote weighting on the independence numbers.  On the raw unweighted numbers, Yes are ahead by 54% to 46% (compared to a 51% to 49% lead for No in the published headline results).  It doesn't necessarily follow that Yes would have such a big lead if you simply stripped out the 2014 weighting, because other more innocuous demographic weightings are also applied, but nevertheless it does look likely that 2014 weighting has once again been enough to transform a Yes lead into a No lead.

Survation would probably say that is fully justified, because there are far too many Yes voters from 2014 in the raw sample, perhaps because independence supporters are more highly motivated to join online polling panels in the first place.  But more than a decade after the referendum, that's becoming a harder argument to sustain.  Ipsos have publicly stated that one of the reasons they don't weight by recalled indyref vote is the danger of false recall, which presumably becomes a bigger and bigger problem with every passing year.  I also suspect there might be a phenomenon of people who in retrospect wish they had voted Yes saying they actually did so.

A few months ago, our resident unionist trolls were trying to implant the idea that the traditional age divide on independence was becoming less clear-cut and that the very youngest voters were becoming more unionist.  There's certainly no sign of that pattern in this poll: 16-24 year olds would vote Yes by a monumental 83% to 17% margin, outstripping 25-34 year olds, who would 'only' vote Yes by 72% to 28%.  The youngest age group that would (narrowly) vote No is 45-54 year olds.

There's a similar neat pattern in party political voting intentions, with the Reform vote going up with each successive age group, apart from over-65s who to their credit ruin things by being less pro-Reform than 55-64 year olds.  The opposite pattern is seen with support for Greens - they have 28% support with 16-24 year olds, but only 5% with over-65s.  

*  *  *

I've been asked whether in spite of my issues with the Alba Party, I would at least give Kenny MacAskill some credit for supposedly "reaching out" and trying to build "pro-independence unity" for the 2026 election.  The answer is a flat no, and that's simply because of the neverending incongruity between what Alba say and what they actually do.  You can't run a Mafia-style organisation that regularly expels good independence supporters for factional reasons and still expect to be taken seriously when you innocently issue calls for unity.  You can't vote in the Scottish Parliament to bring down a pro-independence government (as Ash Regan did last year) and still expect independence supporters to trust you when, with a sense of entitlement the size of Saturn, you demand that they lend you their vote on a supposedly "tactical" pro-indy basis.  You certainly can't expect much trust when you do a grubby deal to prop up the minority Tory administration on South Ayrshire Council in return for nothing more than an extra title and a fatter monetary allowance for the local Alba councillor.  And when a senior Alba member calls openly for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament just because of some obscure dispute over the deputy convenership of a committee, the issue goes beyond trust.  Yes supporters will quite rightly wonder whether a belief in independence and self-government are even in Alba's DNA, or whether if you scratch deep enough you'd find something very different there.  

At the very least, the empirical evidence demonstrates that Alba's leadership would always sell the independence movement down the river for a bauble or two without a second thought.  Yes, it's true that I remained committed to Alba until I was betrayed by people I had been foolish enough to trust (McEleny, Ahmed-Sheikh, Josh Robertson, Hamish Vernal and perhaps even Salmond himself to some extent), but that was simply because I didn't want to change parties too casually, and I thought the priority had to be to fight for positive change within the party I was actually a member of.  But my misgivings were always there in private.  Now that I've been expelled by the Stalinist extremists who own the party, I owe Alba no further loyalty and am free to say what I see.  And what I see of Alba is not pretty.  It's certainly not an organisation worthy of the trust of any independence supporter.

Spare us your crocodile tears, Wings Over Argentina: former independence supporter Stuart Campbell backs Alba man's call for a referendum on abolishing the Scottish Parliament

The only thing missing from the collection now is Campbell calling for the abolition of Scottish local councils, so that even our bins are emptied (or not) by the UK state.  But doubtless he'll get there very, very soon.

Rather brazenly, Campbell starts his meandering demand for the abolition of Scottish self-government with yet another whinge about the SNP, which he claims is offering "an abject vision of a bleak future for independence".  Now, as regular readers know, I have my own concerns about the SNP's lack of a credible strategy for delivering independence, but the last person in a position to offer any critique is Campbell, who on general election day last year instructed his readers to vote Labour - and, get this, told them that in doing so they'd be bringing independence closer.  Given that he got the outcome he wanted, and dozens of pro-independence MPs were replaced with dozens of anti-independence MPs, I'd suggest what Campbell's readers really need to be hearing from him now is a progress report on when we can expect his brilliant "vote Labour, get indy" strategy to bear fruit.  While he's about it, he might like to apologise for unfortunate side-effects such as the scrapping of winter fuel payments for pensioners, devastating benefits cuts for disabled people, and the genocide in Gaza - although admittedly he seems pretty cool with the latter.  But hey, I'm sure all this pain will be well worth it once Keir Starmer delivers independence, doubtless within the next week or two.

Alternatively, Campbell could show some dignified remorse by falling silent for a few years.  I think that's what I'd be doing in his shoes.

As his post trundles closer to backing the call from Mike Dailly of the "pro-independence Alba Party" (ahem) for a referendum on the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and the resumption of direct rule from London, Campbell triumphantly quotes a string of "indy supporters" who want to get rid of Holyrood.  Yeah, just one snag, Stew: on what planet are people who want direct London rule "indy supporters"?  It's a contradiction in terms.  The words you're looking for are "hardline unionists".  One of these people is Morag Kerr, and yes, I remember when she used to be an independence supporter, because at the time she was a regular commenter on Scot Goes Pop.  But this is her quote - 

"Honestly, I remember the euphoria as the result of the 1997 referendum came in, and until 2015 I wasn't disappointed.  Now, thanks to her, I practically want to raze Holyrood to the ground and sow the ground with salt."

Those are not the words of an independence supporter.  And no, I'm not interested in any sophistry along the lines of "Jim Sillars opposed devolution in the 1990s while supporting independence", because his reasoning was very different.  In this case, we're expected to believe that people who despise devolved government with every fibre of their being would somehow support the same politicians (and it would be exactly the same politicians) having even more power in the parliament and government of an independent sovereign state.  Self-evidently, they would not and do not support that.  It's London rule they hanker after.

And so does Campbell, however much he tries to disguise it by modifying the original Alba proposal of a straight Yes/No referendum on abolishing devolution to turn it into a binary choice between full independence and total abolition of the Scottish Parliament.  He would face exactly the same question as above: how can he pose as someone who wants all powers to be transferred to Holyrood, when he's already admitted that the only reason he wants to put its existence on the line is that he viscerally hates the institution?  And that's before we even get to the inconvenient question of how he can justify subverting democracy with a 'stunt' referendum stitch-up that, no matter what its outcome, would end devolution - something that the Scottish people voted in favour of by an overwhelming 3-1 margin in the 1997 referendum. (And yes, the option of independence was excluded from the 1997 referendum, but opinion polls at the time left no doubt that devolution would have been the winner of a multi-option vote.)