tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9301209226279197682024-03-19T07:34:16.741+00:00SCOT goes POP!A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - voted one of Scotland's top 10 political websites.James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.comBlogger4459125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-16861027585734361312024-03-15T10:10:00.005+00:002024-03-15T10:10:48.643+00:00From 3rd May onwards, the Conservative government will owe its presence in office not to the will of the people but to the will of itself<p>Well, it's typical, isn't it. Rather similar to the Azhar Ali incident, no sooner had I blogged about the chatter over a May election than Rishi Sunak had taken to the airwaves to rule it out. I think technically he's only ruled out an election on the same day as the locals, so theoretically other dates in the spring remain possible. But much more likely now is the autumn, which will mean an unusual juxtaposition between our own election and the US presidential election.</p><p>One thing that shouldn't go without note is that when the current parliament and government were elected in December 2019, the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was still in force, and 2nd May 2024 was thus fixed in law as the date of the following general election. Voters were therefore choosing who they wanted to govern them until that date, but were expressing no view at all about what should happen thereafter. It was well after the election that parliament voted to give the Prime Minister the power to extend his own term of office by up to eight months, and for the first time we now know for sure that he intends to take advantage of that power. Which means that from 3rd May onwards, the government will owe its presence in office not to the will of the people but to the will of itself.</p><p>In peacetime, that is uncharted territory. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to happen in Venezuela or Myanmar, not in an established Western European democracy. Why it hasn't attracted more comment is beyond me.</p>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com212tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-6702736127430720272024-03-14T18:07:00.000+00:002024-03-14T18:07:12.385+00:00Would an early general election improve or worsen the SNP's chances?<p>There was a bit of excitement yesterday about the possibility of a general election in May. I said on Twitter that I couldn't think of any logical reason why Sunak would go early, rather than wait until the autumn in the hope that something might turn up. OK, there's an outside chance of a Tory leadership challenge, and an early election would cut off that possibility - but an early election would also end Sunak's leadership anyway, thus defeating the whole purpose. </p><p>Suzanne Blackley responded with a contrary view: she said Sunak would struggle to hold onto power until October and might be contemplating an early election as a way of resigning as Tory leader on his own terms. Another Twitter user suggested the rationale might be to take advantage of the Tories' local government base by holding the general election on the same day as the English local elections, and thus get more boots on the ground.</p><p>I still think it's unlikely, but even if it's a 20% chance it's worth considering what the implications would be. If yesterday's Redfield & Wilton poll is correct, it's not just the Tories who need something to turn up - the SNP do too, because they're currently heading for defeat, at least in terms of seats. Not a crushing defeat, but a defeat just the same. So from that perspective they might be better off with a few more months to see if they can devise a way of turning things around (hint: find a more popular leadership team and revert to a more radical independence strategy).</p><p>On the other hand, the earlier the election is, the more likely it is that Gaza will still be at the forefront of voters' minds. For the vast majority of people that won't affect how they vote, but I suspect there's a subset of idealistic, mostly young voters out there who would struggle to vote Labour if Gaza was heavily in their thoughts. A useful comparison might be with the 2003 Holyrood election, which took place only a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq. The circumstances didn't stop Labour retaining their status as the largest single party, but they suffered a net loss of several seats, and some of that could be directly attributed to the war - most notably the defeat to Mike Pringle of the Liberal Democrats in Edinburgh South, a constituency with a large student population.</p><p>A similar phenomenon in a May election this year would be most likely to favour the SNP, and possibly the Greens - although because the Greens can't win seats, a Green surge would be much less harmful to Labour's chances of beating the SNP.</p><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-30392647081282785792024-03-13T18:01:00.017+00:002024-03-13T21:37:05.571+00:00More despair for Starmer as Labour loses its outright lead in Scotland, and support for independence remains high at 48% - but Humza Yousaf's worst personal numbers yet suggest the SNP must sort out its leadership problem *before* the general electionThe monthly Redfield & Wilton poll is out, and in a continuation of the familiar pattern, support for independence is impressively high but just can't seem to break into the outright lead.<div><br /></div><div><b><i>Should Scotland be an independent country? (Redfield & Wilton)</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><b>Yes 48% (-)</b></div><div><b>No 52% (-)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Before Don't Knows are stripped out, the No lead has actually dipped slightly from four points to three.</div><div><br /></div><div>On Westminster voting intentions, Redfield & Wilton have been oscillating recently between small Labour leads and level-pegging, and we're back once again to the latter today.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="font-weight: bold;">SNP 34% (+1)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Labour 34% (-)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Conservatives 16% (-2)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Reform UK 4% (-)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Greens 4% (+2)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Alba 1% (-)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></div><div style="font-weight: bold;">Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): Labour 27 (+26), SNP 20 (-28), Conservatives 6 (-), Liberal Democrats 4 (-)</div><div style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></div><div>As you can see from the seats projection, level-pegging just isn't quite good enough for the SNP, because when the two largest parties are closely matched, first-past-the-post starts working firmly in Labour's favour.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what will concern the SNP more than the seats projection (or at least ought to) is Humza Yousaf's personal numbers, because headline voting intentions are often less predictive of election results than leadership ratings. Last month's Redfield & Wilton poll showed Yousaf slumping to a new all-time low net rating of -17. He essentially hasn't recovered from that at all this month, bouncing back only to -16. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it gets worse. Redfield & Wilton also regularly ask alternative leadership questions, pitting Yousaf in separate head-to-heads with Anas Sarwar and Douglas Ross respectively. Until last month, Yousaf had always come out on top on those questions, perhaps suggesting an underlying respect for his basic competence that the net ratings don't pick up. But last month, Anas Sarwar drew level with him for the first time, and this month Sarwar has overtaken him for the first time.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better First Minister of Scotland?</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Anas Sarwar 32% (-1)</b></div><div><b>Humza Yousaf 31% (-2) </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Arguably even more dismal is the head-to head with Ross. Here Yousaf clings on to a six-point lead, but that is staggeringly low in the context of the current Tory unpopularity, and also in the context of Ross being widely regarded as a joke leader.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better First Minister of Scotland?</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Humza Yousaf 36% (-3) </b></div><div><b>Douglas Ross 30% (+2) </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>We all know Yousaf is only where he is for factional reasons, ie. the ruling Sturgeon faction identified him as their least worst candidate available and pulled out all the stops to get him installed as leader. But there comes a point where the electoral crisis is great enough that factional interest has to give way to party interest. There is simply no point in retaining factional control of a party that cannot win at the ballot box. There are no guarantees, but if Yousaf is replaced by a more popular leader (probably Kate Forbes) before the general election, the likelihood is that the SNP vote will recover a bit, and that might make the difference between defeat and victory. And even if Yousaf stays in harness, bringing an end to factional rule by appointing a unity Cabinet with Forbes in a senior position could have some positive effect.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:</i></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><div><b>SNP 35% (-)</b></div><div><b>Labour 31% (-2)</b></div><div><b>Conservatives 18% (-)</b></div><div><b>Liberal Democrats 5% (-3)</b></div><div><b>Reform UK 4% (+1)</b></div><div><b>Alba 3% (+2)</b></div><div><b>Greens 3% (-)</b></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><i>Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><div><b>Labour 29% (-)</b></div><div><b>SNP 28% (+1)</b></div><div><b>Conservatives 16% (-)</b></div><div><b>Greens 9% (-)</b></div><div><b>Liberal Democrats 9% (-)</b></div><div><b>Reform UK 5% (-)</b></div><div><b>Alba 3% (-)</b></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Seats projection (with changes from 2021 election): SNP 42 (-22), Labour 41 (+19), Conservatives 21 (-10), Liberal Democrats 12 (+8), Greens 10 (+2), Reform UK 3 (+3)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>The Holyrood voting intention changes are for the most part statistically insignificant, although because they're in the SNP's favour, they're still enough to push the SNP back into a slight lead in the seats projection - albeit with fewer seats than Alex Salmond had when the SNP first took power with a precarious one-seat advantage in 2007. In spite of what has been said in some quarters, I'm not sure it's impossible that the SNP could retain minority power on numbers like these. Labour and the Liberal Democrats would be well short of a majority between them, and once you add external support from the Tories into the mix, the arrangement becomes presentationally very messy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alba will be moderately heartened by these numbers - they're still not projected to win any seats, but they're only two points behind Reform UK, who are projected to win three seats. So that shows you what's possible with a modest increase of support.</div><div style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></div><div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-82897968156414313362024-03-12T12:46:00.001+00:002024-03-12T12:46:33.173+00:00No, Professor Robertson, young people do not support gender self-ID. They oppose it.<p>So the exciting news is that we've had another visitation from Professor John Robertson in the comments section. I was trying to work out what the recurring theme of his comments is, and it suddenly struck me that a lot of his strictures have got a distinctly macho-man feel to them. "Man up", "grow a pair", "surely you've had harder knocks than that, son". It's reminiscent of a craggy-faced PE teacher in the 1950s going purple with rage because one of his eight-year-old pupils has a feminine side, spends "too much time with girls", and refuses to take up boxing.</p><p>Which is gloriously ironic, of course, because Professor Robertson is in fact the fairy godfather of the snowflake brigade who demand to be "kept safe" from opinions that offend them. He doubtless earnestly believed that the unlawful cancellation of Joanna Cherry's appearance at the Edinburgh Festival was a "safety at work" issue, ie. the staff would have been so upset by hearing her gender critical views that they would have suffered the equivalent of a serious industrial injury.</p><p>Apparently oblivious to the contradiction, about five seconds after telling me last night to be more robust and manly he reverted to telling me to shut up about my beastly opinions because some vulnerable soul might hear them.</p><p><i>"Wow! You really think that? You've gone positively Zionist there son.</i></p><p><i>However, I must be clear, it was never my intention to sabotage your funding and I don't think I suggested that people should not fund you. I stand ready to be corrected and if I did, I apologise and withdraw the statement.</i></p><p><i>I am genuinely disappointed in the way Alba has developed and as researcher and teacher with 40 years experience in schools, colleges and universities, I know that the gender reforms are supported by the young who have grown up with trans individuals and by professionals who understand the risks. That SGP and WOS have campaigned against these reforms makes me justifiably very angry."</i></p><p>So that's basically the "not up for debate" entitlement complex in a nutshell. "It makes me very very VERY cross that you haven't abandoned your opinion after I and other unspecified authority figures informed you that you were wrong. What do you think this is - some kind of liberal democracy?" </p><p>If Robertson spent just a bit less time wallowing in his "justified anger", he might be able to, y'know, actually argue his own case calmly and rationally, but I suspect he's forgotten how to do that by now. Not much call for debating skills when you've got "safe spaces" to hide in.</p><p>I must say that when Robertson describes Scot Goes Pop, it sounds like a blog I don't even recognise. In reality I've spent a miniscule fraction of the time discussing the trans issue that Wings has, and I've also gone out of my way at times to express my bewilderment at the sheer number of consecutive trans-related posts that Wings has managed to publish. Stuart Campbell is, if I may say so, almost as obsessed with the bloody topic as Robertson himself.</p><p>Is it even true that I've "campaigned" against the introduction of gender self-ID? I expressed my own view that it was a terrible piece of legislation that would cause immense harm to people's lives, although unlike Stuart Campbell I also made clear that it would be outrageous for the UK Government to veto the law. Other than that, the only act I took was to commission an opinion poll on the subject, which sought to use neutral, clear and balanced questions to find out what people really thought. Most of the polls prior to that had been of dubious value due to their use of either leading questions or ideologically-loaded language. I suspect the poll is what Robertson is really getting at when he refers to my "campaigning" - to a "no debate" zealot, neutrality and balance will look like an all-out attack.</p><p>But it's precisely because I commissioned the poll that I know Robertson's assertion that young people support self-ID has no basis in fact. I had to trawl through my email account to re-find the data tables, and while it's true that opposition to self-ID is significantly lower among young people than among older people, there's nevertheless a clear plurality against self-ID among the young. Only 34% of 16-34 year olds think that anyone should be able to change their legal sex or gender by simply making a solemn declaration that they are living in their new gender. A total of 47% of 16-34 year olds think either that no-one should be able to change their legal gender, or that the threshold should be higher than self-ID - either a medical diagnosis or surgery should be required.</p><p>Furthermore, by a narrow margin of 37% to 36%, young people say that those who have changed their legal gender from male to female should not be able to access female-only spaces on exactly the same basis as other women. And by a whopping margin of 46% to 28%, young people think women's sport should be reserved for biological females and should exclude anyone born as a male.</p><p>(The above figures are all taken from a <b><a href="https://scotgoespop.blogspot.com/2021/10/exclusive-scot-goes-pop-panelbase-poll_28.html" target="_blank">Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll</a></b> conducted 20th-26th October 2021.)</p><p>It's a logical fallacy to suggest that because young people hold a particular view, they must be right and the older generations have a duty to fall in behind them. If that was the case, only under-35s would have the vote. But if Robertson really believes that's how it should work, the conclusion is inescapable: he must renounce his views immediately and become a TERF. And we shall justifiably be very, VERY angry with him if he doesn't. </p><p>Listen to the kids, John. They've suffered enough. *Listen* to them.</p>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com48tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-65626668575084054972024-03-11T00:04:00.005+00:002024-03-11T02:09:24.874+00:00Like it or not, independence is unlikely to be won without leading involvement from the "elephant"<p>As long-term readers of this blog may recall, I was an elected member of the Alba Party's NEC between September 2021 and October 2022. For most of that year-and-a-bit, I was pretty happy with the party's general direction of travel, both in policy and strategic terms. However a watershed moment of sorts arrived in the summer of 2022 when Nicola Sturgeon finally announced her strategy for winning independence, which involved asking the Supreme Court to rule if the Scottish Parliament had the power to unilaterally call an independence referendum, and then moving on to using the Westminster general election as a de facto referendum if the Supreme Court ruled the wrong way.</p><p>That plan was a lot more radical than I expected, because prior to that Ms Sturgeon had always rubbished the idea of any non-referendum route. Now, the details of the plan were absolutely not the ones I would have chosen if I had been in charge. I would have preferred to see the Scottish Parliament go ahead and legislate for a referendum and put the onus on the UK Government to launch a legal challenge if they wished. I would have preferred to see Ms Sturgeon engineer an early Holyrood election to use as a de facto referendum rather than taking a gamble on the 'away fixture' of a Westminster general election. But as I said on this blog at the time, we had to be realistic and accept the fact that the Scottish people had selected Ms Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP leadership to be the decision-makers, and therefore they were the ones who were always going to choose the details of any plan, and not anyone else. What mattered is whether the thrust of the plan was taking us in broadly the correct direction, and if it was, we needed to throw our weight behind it.</p><p>I believed - and still believe - that Alba's response should have taken that realistic approach. By all means spell out where you think the details of the plan are wrong, but make very clear that you're not going to let those quibbles get in the way of fully supporting the central element, namely the use of an election to finally allow the Scottish people to make a decision on independence, and undertaking to do whatever you can to secure a successful outcome. And, for good measure, claim the announcement of the plan as an astounding triumph for Alba's campaigning to pressurise Ms Sturgeon into reversing course and accepting the wisdom of a de facto referendum.</p><p>What Alba actually did was pretty much the complete opposite of that. From the word go, Ms Sturgeon's announcement was treated as an obvious con-trick, and instead of discussing how we could make the de facto referendum work, all the chatter seemed to be about how we could cause as much damage to the SNP as possible at the general election. Talk of standing against the SNP across the board in every constituency actually increased rather than decreased, even though a single, unified slate of pro-indy candidates is plainly an absolute must in any de facto referendum fought under first-past-the-post. And Alba seemed to double down on its determination to help bring about Ms Sturgeon's resignation as First Minister, which history now shows made no sense at all. When Ms Sturgeon departed, the de facto plan went with her. Whereas by keeping her in harness, we could have given the SNP no easy way off the hook, and perhaps forced them to reluctantly deliver the goods just for once.</p><p>I suspect we came across as angry that Ms Sturgeon had "spoiled" things for us by giving us more or less what we had been demanding all along. It must have looked like nothing she announced would ever have been good enough for us, we would just have reflexively denounced it anyway. In a nutshell, we must have looked disingenuous and like bad faith actors. So not only was the approach unhelpful for the independence cause, it was bad for Alba's own future electoral prospects.</p><p>I disagreed with Alba's response and I spoke out about it at some length. From a personal point of view, the timing couldn't have been much worse, because I suspect what I said may have cost me a handful of crucial votes at the Alba conference in October 2022 and led to me being narrowly voted off the NEC. But after all these years as a blogger, I just wouldn't know how to stifle an opinion on an important subject or say something I don't believe to be true.</p><p>That's why <b><a href="https://scotgoespop.blogspot.com/2024/03/professor-robertson-is-entitled-to-his.html" target="_blank">Professor Robertson's comments the other day</a></b> about this blog having become my "Alba career blog" were so offensive and ludicrously off-beam. Yes, I stand in Alba internal elections, and I have the same competitive instinct as anyone else and always want to be successful. But the reality is that if I only cared about that, or even if that was what I mostly cared about, the content of this blog would often have been the complete opposite of what I actually wrote. A great many Alba conference-goers took the very simple view that the one and only objective was to bring the SNP down and have Alba become the main independence party in the SNP's place. They didn't want to hear an unpalatable message from me about how the world is more complicated and messy than that, and that actually the most effective and quickest method of winning independence may be to help make an SNP plan work, even if that means lots of SNP MPs we may not be crazy about on a personal level being re-elected. That was the message I delivered just the same, and I suspect I paid the price for it.</p><p>After I was voted off the NEC, it seemed to me that things got even worse for a few months. The antagonism towards the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon just seemed to be off the scale, culminating in a tweet along the lines of "a vote for the SNP is a vote for Jimmy Savile". That genuinely shocked me. Senior Alba figures started to give the impression of "celebrating" bad polls for independence, on the basis that it made the SNP look bad, and anything that was bad for the SNP must be good for Alba - thus losing sight of the cardinal rule (which in fairness Alba have since seemed to relearn) that a pro-independence party should only ever be seen to be talking up independence support in the polls, not talking it down.</p><p>Once again I spoke out loudly about where I thought my own party was going wrong, and that led just over a year ago to The National doing a double-page spread without my prior knowledge about how I as an "Alba blogger" had been heavily critical of the party's direction and "didn't know what the hell was going on anymore". This was all deeply uncomfortable. A number of people tried to tell me, effectively, that I wasn't "real Alba" - that the only true Alba position was to want to totally destroy the SNP, no matter how long that took, and that anyone who didn't susbscribe to that view could only ever be marginal in the Alba party.</p><p>So I can't help but note the irony that a year later here I am, still at the heart of the Alba party - not as an NEC member but as an elected member of other committees - while a considerable number of the "destroy the SNP and replace it with Alba" diehards have suddenly walked out. I would never have seen this chain of events coming in a million years, and clearly there must have been a lot going on behind the scenes to lead those people to become so disillusioned so quickly. They've moved on swiftly to the new "Independents 4 Independence" project, but I think yet another reality check is in order here. While it's merely an incredibly hard task for Alba to replace the SNP, even in the long term, it's utterly impossible for independent candidates to replace the SNP, so in a strange way by going down this road they've given up on their whole goal - although they may not realise that yet.</p><p>By their very nature, independent MPs are ephemeral and leave no party organisational structure behind them when they depart office. All that happens is that the established parties then come back and fill the gap. But the other fundamental truth about independent candidates is that they very rarely get elected in the first place. I think we all know that Eva Comrie is a genuine one-off, and although the odds are heavily against her, it may just about be possible for her to build up a head of steam by campaigning on the Grangemouth issue and through sheer force of personality. But if what Alf Baird was proposing the other day comes to pass, and if pro-indy independents stand in every Scottish constituency, the likelihood is that the vast majority of them will score a very low vote. It will be an almighty struggle to even get the media to count those votes as votes for independence - the likelihood is they'll just tot up SNP + Green + Alba and won't even look at the independents. </p><p>So how this is going to help the Yes cause is far from clear. I worry that people will look back in a few years and only then will they realise the extent to which they lost all perspective. At this moment of danger for the independence cause, we need to go into the general election as united as possible - not in the sense of liking each other or agreeing with each other about everything, but in the sense of being a cohesive voting bloc in a first-past-the-post election. Instead most people seem to be perversely focussed on making the independence vote as fragmented as possible - and that of course includes the SNP leadership themselves, with their idiotic decision to expel Angus MacNeil and put up a candidate against him.</p><p>The SNP are not, as Somerset's leading Tory blogger put it yesterday, a "dead elephant blocking the road to independence". They in fact still represent the considerable bulk of the independence movement and it's therefore hard to foresee any circumstances in which independence can be won without the SNP playing a leading role. Any hard-headed Alba strategy for winning independence should thus be about using electoral success to exert pressure on the SNP to belatedly start playing that leading role. The only exception to that, the only route to independence without the SNP, might be if Humza Yousaf somehow clings on as leader after a crushing defeat, and then 10-15 SNP MSPs decide their party cannot be won back and strike out on their own. But right at this moment that looks like a long shot.</p><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com107tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-84007468720496466552024-03-10T13:21:00.003+00:002024-03-10T14:21:34.912+00:00Scot Goes Pop soars to become the fifth most-read pro-independence website in Scotland, according to bombshell claimed numbers from Stuart CampbellEvery so often, Stuart Campbell randomly decides to have a prolonged boast about how he is supposedly by far the most popular blogger in the known galaxy, and one of the advantages of that from my point of view is that he sometimes draws up entire ranking lists of blogs with Wings at the top, which allows me to see how Scot Goes Pop is getting on in his alleged pecking order. Pretty darn well at the moment is the answer...<div><br /></div><div><b><i>Alleged "traffic share" of pro-independence websites in February 2024 (unsourced figures posted by Stuart Campbell):</i></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>1) Wings Over Scotland: 63.29% (-0.84%)</b></div><div><b>2) Yours For Scotland: 11.08% (+63.88%)</b></div><div><b>3) Talking Up Scotland: 7.90% (+7.95%)</b></div><div><b>4) Bella Caledonia: 7.73% (+117.98%)</b></div><div><b>5) Scot Goes Pop: 4.18% (+25.98%)</b></div><div><b>6) Robin McAlpine: 2.60% (-40.30%)</b></div><div><b>7) Wee Ginger Dug: 1.70% (-71.22%)</b></div><div><b>8) Believe In Scotland: 1.22% (+296.71%)</b></div><div><b>9) Barrhead Boy: 0.30% (-93.52%)</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Curiously, as far as I can see Mr Campbell doesn't offer any source at all for these figures. His previous boast-fests attributed any numbers to SimilarWeb, a notoriously inaccurate "guesstimate" website which also claimed Wings Over Scotland was based in Glasgow (rather than, say, Bath), had between eleven and fifty "employees" (ahem), and had a "turnover" of between $2,000,000 and $5,000,000. But the last time I looked at SimilarWeb, it had introduced a paywall, so perhaps Mr Campbell's sudden bashfulness about his source means he's switched to another free comparison site which people would find even less credible. That would make sense, because the new numbers are presented in a different format from the old SimilarWeb estimates, and some of the rankings do not remotely tally up with what SimilarWeb used to show.</div><div><br /></div><div>As in the past, we can safely assume Wings Over Scotland's own wildly inflated "traffic share" is largely bulls*** caused by his readers treating the site as a de facto discussion forum - it's similar to the phenomenon we used to see in UK-wide political blogs ten or fifteen years ago, when Iain Dale's site had several times as many unique readers as Political Betting, but Political Betting could still technically claim to be the most-read site due to a small number of people constantly hitting refresh to see if new comments had been posted, and thus artificially generating lots of page views. So if there is any interest in the numbers Mr Campbell has posted, it lies in the rankings of the non-Wings sites. (And I'll gloss over the fact that Wings is no longer a pro-independence site anyway, because he's said he would abstain in any new indyref held in any remotely foreseeable circumstances, ie. with the SNP still in existence.)</div><div><br /></div><div>It's no surprise at all to see Yours For Scotland by Iain Lawson at the top, due to the constant supply of well-informed gossip and exclusives. Talking Up Scotland, better known in these parts as Global Ferry News, is usually updated several times a day and is extremely popular with SNP leadership loyalists (of which there are still plenty), so its runner-up spot also makes sense. Bella Caledonia, as a well-resourced, multi-author site, really ought to be doing better, but of course it may well be, because we know nothing at all about the provenance of these numbers.</div><div><br /></div><div>I know from my own real stats that Scot Goes Pop's traffic has indeed increased significantly in recent weeks (perhaps because it's election year and this is a polling blog), so that might tally with the sharp increase also seen in Mr Campbell's figures - but there again it might just be a lucky guess. I'm much more sceptical about the lower rankings. Wee Ginger Dug isn't updated as often as it used to be, so perhaps there's been some slippage as a result, but I can't see any particular reason for a slump in traffic for either Robin McAlpine or Barrhead Boy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Treat with caution. Wherever Mr Campbell is getting his numbers from, they'll be vague ballpark guesses at best.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>UPDATE: </b>Since I published this blogpost, Mr Campbell has changed his ranking list to include a tenth site, Off Topic Scotland, which has a small "traffic share" of 0.25%. This very slightly reduces the traffic share of the other nine, but weirdly the percentage changes have been altered out of all recognition. Bella Caledonia, for example, has gone from a 117.98% <i>increase </i>in the original list to a 3.18% <i>decrease </i>in the new list. That plainly makes no sense whatsoever.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-13180518912588613732024-03-08T18:14:00.000+00:002024-03-08T18:14:31.610+00:00Holocaust Deniers For LabourFor those who have been asking, here is how voters for the far-right party "Independent Green Voice" transferred in the Hillhead by-election yesterday - <div><br /></div><div><b>Greens 55</b></div><div><b>SNP 37</b></div><div><b>Labour 27</b></div><div><b>Conservatives 7</b></div><div><b>Non-transferable 20</b></div><div><br /></div><div>So I don't think there's much doubt that the vast majority of these people were successfully conned and honestly thought they were voting for a left-wing environmentalist party at the very least, and probably many thought they were voting for the official Green party. Intentional far-right voters would have transferred in pretty much the polar opposite way, with the Tories getting the most transfers and the Greens the fewest.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a way you have to grudgingly admire Alistair McConnachie's cunning, because one of the very reasons the Electoral Commission exists is to prevent cynical actors exploiting voter confusion, and yet he's clearly found a rare way around the rules. The name "Independent Green Voice" is different enough from "Scottish Green Party" that it's hard for the Electoral Commission to disallow it, but the party emblem which appears on ballot papers has the word "Green" in much bigger lettering than the other two words in the name, and there's also a leaf which looks very much like the sort of logo a real Green party might use. Even if a voter notices the word "independent", they might still be led astray due to the well known fact that the Greens support Scottish independence.</div><div><br /></div><div>However ingenious the tactic is, though, you'd still have to ask: what's the point? There's only so far you can get by pretending to be something you're not. You aren't going to ride all the way to far-right revolution by posing as tree-huggers. The only way it might be a stepping stone would be if it generated a big enough vote to actually get a few people elected to councils or to parliament, and we can clearly see it's falling short of that. Mr McConnachie took 3.3% of the vote in Hillhead, the most Green-friendly ward in the whole of Scotland, and even that wouldn't be enough to win a Holyrood list seat if you extended it across a whole electoral region. So logically the purpose must be to act as spoilers and to try to limit the number of seats the Greens win, in the hope that mainstream unionist parties (ie. the Tories or Labour) will win the seats instead. That didn't work yesterday, and it was never likely to work under a preferential voting system like STV, but it very much did work in 2021 under the Additional Member System that is used to elect Holyrood.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mr McConnachie's official ballot description yesterday was "Organic Green Scotland". The honest version would perhaps have been "Holocaust Deniers For Labour". </div><div><br /></div><div><div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com48tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-40374222058967832392024-03-08T05:53:00.001+00:002024-03-08T09:16:17.275+00:00Another week, another by-election humiliation for Starmer, as Labour lose seat to *the Greens* in historic Hillhead voteThe dubious practice we've had in Scotland since 2007 of using what is effectively a majoritarian voting system to fill local councillor vacancies, in seats that were originally elected proportionally, often leads the media to use paradoxical and misleading language about a party "holding" a seat when they actually had to overtake another party to win, or "gaining" a seat when they've gone backwards or stood still. But what we've seen in Hillhead overnight may be the wackiest example so far. The Scottish Green Party have "gained the seat from Labour" in what is their first by-election win in history, in spite of the fact that the Labour vote went up, the Green vote went down, and Labour <i>overtook the Greens</i> to win the popular vote in the ward. And yet objectively it's still a bad result for Labour. How is any of this possible? Let's take a deep breath and go through it step by step.<div><br /></div><div><b><i>Hillhead by-election result, first preferences (7th March 2024):</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><b>Labour 31.9% (+9.7) </b></div><div><b>Greens 31.5% (-4.7) </b></div><div><b>SNP 24.9% (-3.7) </b></div><div><b>Conservatives 5.3% (-1.4) </b></div><div><b>Independent Green Voice 3.3% (n/a) </b></div><div><b>Liberal Democrats 2.6% (-2.8) </b></div><div><b>Independent - McGinley 0.5% (n/a)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>As far as I can see, Hillhead appears to be the only ward in the whole of Scotland where the Greens won the popular vote in the last local council elections two years ago. There are a few other wards where an individual Green candidate topped the poll, but the combined vote for another party's candidates still outcounted them.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, local government wards in Scotland are multi-member, and the Greens' triumph in 2022 still meant they only took one of the three seats in Hillhead. The SNP in second place took one, and Labour in third place also took one. The vacancy that triggered yesterday's by-election was caused by the death of the Labour councillor, the former MSP Hanzala Malik. So simply to "hold" a seat they were "defending", Labour had to jump from third place to first. They actually did just that - but still lost. How so? Because it's a preferential voting system, and it's therefore possible for a party that finishes a close second on first preferences to be declared the winner after transfers are taken into account.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's important to stress, though, that the reason I'm saying this is an objectively bad result for Labour has nothing to do with their travails in the transfers - it's simply that a 9.7% increase in their first preference vote share is a bit underwhelming at a time when they're supposedly making a big comeback in former heartland areas. That can perhaps be explained by the fact that Hillhead, just like Rochdale last week, has special demographics which mean that the local electorate is much more likely to be deeply unimpressed by Keir Starmer's apologism for genocide in Gaza. In the case of Rochdale, it was the high percentage of Muslims, whereas in Hillhead it's the big student population.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the most worrying thing of all for Labour is that the SNP vote has held up pretty well - a 4 point drop is not too bad in the context of the times. And it's probably fair to say that the Greens would almost certainly have beaten Labour on the popular vote if it hadn't been for the artificial effect of the intervention from "Independent Green Voice", which is in fact the far-right party run by Alistair McConnachie (who once ignored an invitation to be interviewed on the Scot Goes Popcast!). There's a long history of Green supporters being hoodwinked into voting for Independent Green Voice due to the name, and it's pretty obvious that's what happened yet again yesterday - there's no way McConnachie would have finished ahead of the Liberal Democrats on his own merits. So if you see Labour trying to draw solace from their first place in the popular vote, bear in mind it was delivered to them by deceptive tactics from the Holocaust-denying far-right.</div><div><br /></div><div>How did the Greens overtake Labour to win the seat on transfers? Fairly straightforward - there were far more SNP voters in the ward than Tory voters or Lib Dem voters, and SNP voters were always going to transfer more towards another pro-independence party that is critical of Israel's atrocities. The small number of Tory voters did of course transfer mostly to Labour, which pushed Labour a full one hundred votes ahead of the Greens on the fifth count. That perhaps should give Labour-curious pro-independence voters pause for thought over just what it is about Keir Starmer that is so very attractive to Tory voters. But once the SNP votes were redistributed, it was strictly no contest. 536 SNP voters transferred to the Greens, and only 249 transferred to Labour, leaving the Greens with a comfortable 187-vote cushion over Labour on the decisive count. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's obviously encouraging to see Yes supporters sensibly tranferring from one pro-independence party to another, but in truth it's fairly rare for SNP voters to get a chance to transfer to the Greens. What usually matters much more is whether the SNP are the second-choice party for Green voters - and that's certainly what will matter in the general election as both the SNP and Labour seek to squeeze the Green vote in a first-past-the-post system.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-45341478899029391192024-03-07T10:50:00.002+00:002024-03-07T10:51:46.230+00:00Are the Tories handing three north-east seats to the SNP on a silver plate?In spite of the SNP landslide in 2019, in spite of the Tories losing more than half their Scottish seats, the SNP were nevertheless unable to regain three Tory seats in the north-east. Two of those were former SNP heartlands which they used to win even when they were losing almost everywhere else in Scotland. Banff & Buchan actually bucked the national trend in 2019 by showing a small swing from SNP to Tory. However, it's now possible that the fortunes will flip and the SNP could take the north-east seats back even if they have a grim result nationally.<div><br /></div><div>Just as a rough guide, I had a look at the seats projection from YouGov's latest Scottish subsample, which is on the unfavourable side for the SNP, showing Labour five points ahead. That would see the SNP lose their majority and be reduced to 22 seats - but they would still gain the boundary-revised seats of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East, Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine and Gordon & Buchan from the Tories. And that's before you take into account the effect of local factors.</div><div><br /></div><div>A few weeks ago, I wondered if the SNP were getting into dangerous territory by opposing Labour's windfall tax proposals and thus giving Labour a free run to pose as Robin Hood. But we started to see the upside of the SNP strategy with the now-famous P&J front page depicting senior Labour politicians as "Traitors" over the windfall tax, and the SNP painted in a more positive light. And now Christmas has come early, with Douglas Ross helpfully identifying for voters that the Tory Budget is an attack on the north-east due to the windfall tax extension, and with Jeremy Hunt even more helpfully volunteering in a live BBC interview that the "Scottish oil and gas industry" is one of the two main losers from the Budget.</div><div><br /></div><div>If Ross thinks the voters will give "the Scottish Tories" credit at the general election for standing up to their colleagues in London, he's mistaken. Voters will not see any Scottish Tories on the ballot paper, merely candidates representing the UK Tory government. If they want to hit out against the treatment of the north-east, they're obviously not going to vote Tory or Labour, and it's the SNP that leap out as the most likely beneficiaries.</div><div><br /></div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div>It's fair to say it's been a mixed few days for my own party Alba, with several high-profile departures balanced out by two high-profile new recruits. And because the second of those new members is Karl Rosie, an elected local councillor in Highland who left the SNP three weeks ago, it's arguable that this week's balance sheet is now actually positive for Alba. That said, Eva Comrie is still a big loss for the party, and I know several Alba members who think an absolute priority for the leadership should be to do whatever it takes to persuade her to rejoin.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alba now have five elected representatives across the three tiers of government - two MPs (Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill), one MSP (Ash Regan) and two local councillors (Chris Cullen and Karl Rosie). In that sense, Scottish politics has become a six-party system, at least for now, although obviously Alba will have to start making electoral breakthroughs if they're going to maintain that state of affairs.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-21075974443632394152024-03-06T10:31:00.003+00:002024-03-06T10:31:20.461+00:00BREAKING: The Scotsman newspaper thinks its readers won't understand the word "stramash" and so translates it into English<p>I thought you might enjoy some light relief related to the recent difficulties in the Alba Party. The Scotsman's article about Denise Findlay's departure offers the following purported quote from Alex Salmond's email to party members - </p><p><i>"Although Yvonne deleted her tweets and apologised for her mistake, the online row continued."</i></p><p>The thing is, though, I received that email when it was sent, and I was sure Mr Salmond had used the word "stramash". I doublechecked, and sure enough the Scotsman's quote was accurate apart from the fact that they had replaced "online stramash" with "online row". This presumably means the Scotsman had made an editorial decision that its readers would not understand "stramash" as a non-English word and thus felt justified to translate it into English.</p><p>Surely even the poshest Scots in Morningside or wherever have encountered the word "stramash"? Just who is the Scotsman's target audience these days? You can imagine the conversation: "we'll look ridiculous if we add an explanatory note about what the word means, so best just to pretend he never said it..."</p><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com73tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-56820156471613947662024-03-05T10:25:00.001+00:002024-03-05T10:50:33.450+00:00Professor Robertson is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own factsYou might have seen yesterday that Professor John Robertson, well known for his long-running blog Global Ferry News, left two comments here in a fairly unsubtle attempt to sabotage the <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank"><b>new Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser for 2024</b></a>. It seems his bitterness towards this blog is now so severe that he literally wants it <i>to cease to exist</i>, and is taking active steps to attempt to bring that outcome about. I gave him a piece of my mind, and told him that if he really wanted to open up a conversation about whether each individual pro-independence blog has any worth or value, it was high bloody time that someone explained to him that a blog obsessively seeking out obscure stories about faults with ferries in New Zealand, the Channel Islands and Bulgaria is unlikely to be of any use whatsoever in bringing about Scottish independence. It doesn't make the Scottish Government's handling of the ferry situation look less bad in a relative sense, it just makes himself look a bit odd.<div><br /></div><div>What you may not have seen, though, is that Professor Robertson also left a couple of comments on an older thread while he was here. Curiously, he was angry with me for my blogpost about the Survation poll showing the SNP lead extending their lead over Labour from two to five points. Even though my post was largely positive for the SNP, he was furious that I had added a caveat that Survation had recently been more favourable for the SNP than some other pollsters and there was thus no guarantee that another firm polling at the same time would have shown the SNP ahead. It seems that "largely positive for the SNP" is not enough to meet the Prof's exacting requirements - he expects nothing less than unadulterated propaganda from us all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Every single pollster has had the SNP ahead for as long as anyone can remember!, the Prof harrumphed. Well, at least since November!, he hurriedly added. I pointed out to him that, in fact, polls from Redfield & Wilton and Norstat have shown the SNP behind Labour since then. A few hours later he came back to absurdly bellow that ALL Redfield & Wilton polls have shown the SNP ahead! ALL of them! He's moving into Comical Ali territory at this stage. For the avoidance of doubt, the result of the most recent Redfield & Wilton poll, conducted 3rd-4th February, was <b>Labour 34%, SNP 33%, Conservatives 18%, Liberal Democrats 8%</b>. The Norstat poll conducted in late January showed: <b>Labour 36%, SNP 33%, Conservatives 16%, Liberal Democrats 7%.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Nobody can stop Professor Robertson from making claims that are flatly untrue. But it's important that people understand the nature of his propaganda - he's going beyond putting the most positive spin on facts, and has started inventing facts of his own. That's a dangerous, and dare I say Trumpian, game.</div><div><br /></div><div>* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-15935627573383695702024-03-04T18:47:00.001+00:002024-03-04T19:04:57.344+00:00Why Alba shouldn't go beyond a round dozen of candidatesIf, like me, you're a member of the Alba Party, you'll have received an email from Alex Salmond today, setting out changes that have occurred to the NEC line-up due to the turbulence of the last couple of days. Suzanne Blackley has replaced Eva Comrie as Equalities Convener, albeit on an interim basis for now. As I understand it, Yvonne Ridley officially remains Women's Convener but has stepped back from the role for the time being, with Ash Regan taking over on an informal basis. People reading the email will probably be left with the impression that Eva Comrie's departure was straightforwardly due to Yvonne Ridley's tweets about the trans issue. I think it should be borne in mind that there's almost certainly far more to it than that, however it's obviously understandable that the leadership will be keen to play down the significance of her decision.<div><br /></div><div>My bigger concern, actually, is with a different part of the email, where Mr Salmond once again talks up the possibility of Alba standing more than the target number of twelve candidates at the general election. The subtext is essentially "the more the merrier", as if it's self-evidently a good thing to stand as many candidates as possible if there are no financial or organisational barriers to doing so. In reality there are other strategic considerations that ought to be taken into account, both in Alba's own best interests and in the best interests of the independence cause.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's no secret that I think the most sensible thing to have done at the general election would have been to just stand two candidates, ie. the sitting Alba MPs Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill, and concentrate all the available resources on their campaigns. That would have been the best of all worlds because it would have given the two MPs the best possible chance of either holding their seats or getting respectable results, while avoiding the danger of Alba candidates acting as spoilers in other constituencies and letting in unionist MPs. The latter would be a bad thing for two separate reasons - a) it's objectively a setback for independence if unionist MPs are unnecessarily elected, and b) any <i>perception </i>among independence supporters that Alba is to blame for that could damage Alba's reputation and undermine the party's chances at the 2026 Holyrood election. Remember how sharply Ralph Nader's vote dropped between the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections due to the perception among progressives that he was to blame for George W Bush's contested win in Florida.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a democratic party, you have to accept democratic decisions, even if you think they're badly mistaken. My preference for standing only two candidates was not the democratic decision made by Alba, which instead opted to stand in at least twelve constituencies. As I understand it, the significance of the number twelve is that it's the minimum threshold for being given a Party Election Broadcast. Although that's a desirable thing to have, I don't think three minutes on the TV comes close to outweighing the disadvantages of standing too many candidates.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, a democratic decision to stand at least twelve candidates in order to get the election broadcast is perfectly consistent with standing just the twelve, banking the broadcast, and not going beyond that. I really would urge the Alba leadership to see the wisdom of that course of action and not allow the party's intervention in the general election to become a runaway train. The greater the number of candidates that go forward, the greater the risk of causing inadvertent harm.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's been suggested that Alba can navigate the risk by selecting the seats it intervenes in with great care to avoid SNP marginals. But that reminds me of some of the wild claims we used to hear about how it was possible to "vote tactically on the Holyrood list", when in reality that would have depended on the voter having a degree of foreknowledge about the election result that would never realistically be available. Alba will have to choose which constituencies to target months or at least weeks before polling day, at which point there is bound to still be massive uncertainty about which SNP seats are most likely to be on a knife-edge. Seats projections from recent opinion polls have varied wildly, with some putting the SNP in the low teens (in which case the "safer" SNP seats are the most likely to be the real marginals), and others putting the SNP in the mid-to-high thirties (in which case it's seats with lower majorities that will be in the balance). I suppose there's an argument that the seats in which the SNP have the lowest majorities over Labour look like lost causes in any of the scenarios we're seeing at present, so those might be the 'safest' seats for Alba to intervene in. But even there, an outside chance exists that the SNP might recover enough to bring those seats back into play, and in any case, do Alba really want to give the impression that they're deliberately trying to help "finish off" the most vulnerable SNP MPs?</div><div><br /></div><div>The original concept of Alba was as a list-only party that Yes voters could back to get the best bang for their buck, safe in the knowledge that no damage was being done to the SNP in first-past-the-post elections. I'd suggest Alba would be foolish to stray too far from that concept. The real opportunity for Alba to make gains and change the weather for independence will be on the Holyrood list vote in 2026, and the important thing in the meantime is not to do anything that would imperil that opportunity.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not an absolutist about avoiding first-past-the-post elections - I advocated Alba standing in the Rutherglen by-election as long as Alex Salmond was the candidate, because in that scenario they wouldn't have been spoilers, they could have taken a very significant vote share and generated momentum that might have really got them off the ground. I also think it's reasonable to say that sitting Alba MPs have every right to defend their seats if they wish to do so. But if you stand in a large number of first-past-the-post seats where you're likely to get a very small vote share, the effect will probably be counter-productive.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway. Please click <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">HERE</a> if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-15644272292122408452024-03-03T16:37:00.000+00:002024-03-03T16:37:51.218+00:00The launch of the Scot Goes Pop General Fundraiser for 2024<b><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">Click here to go straight to the fundraiser page.</a></b><div><br /></div><div>As I explained last year, I really am reliant on the success of the annual general fundraisers to keep Scot Goes Pop going, at least in the sense of being a blog that is updated frequently and provides comprehensive coverage of Scottish opinion polls. That's perhaps even more the case now than it was six, seven or eight years ago, because a couple of my other income streams (one of which had nothing whatever to do with writing or with politics) dried up as a result of the pandemic and so far haven't restarted. So for that reason, although the poll fundraiser I launched towards the end of 2023 is still well short of its target, I'm going to have to launch the 2024 general fundraiser now and concentrate on that for the time being. I will get the poll done as soon as humanly possible, and if by any chance the general fundraiser eventually hits its full target, I'll set aside some of the funds from that to top up what has already been raised for the poll. Doubtless the general fundraiser will be another slowburner due to the cost-of-living crisis, so please bear with me as I continue to promote the fundraiser link at the bottom of some/most blogposts over the coming days and weeks (and possibly months) - it'll probably take a fair bit of persistence.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is my pitch from the <b><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">new GoFundMe page</a></b> I've set up - </div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>Hi, my name is James Kelly and for sixteen years I've been writing Scot Goes Pop, consistently one of the most popular pro-independence blogs in Scotland. With its distinct focus on opinion polls (although not to the exclusion of other subjects), it has been able to challenge the conventional narratives about polls that are mostly set by the unionist media.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>During the 2014 referendum campaign, I was able to demonstrate that the position was nowhere near as hopeless for the Yes side as was often portrayed by the media, and just after the referendum was over, I was faster than anyone in the mainstream media (I think literally) to spot and point out the extraordinary swing that was occurring from Labour to the SNP.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>With your help, Scot Goes Pop has also commissioned several opinion polls of its own from reputable polling firms affiliated to the British Polling Council. Some of these were genuinely landmark polls, for example our poll in June 2020 was the first in the famous long unbroken sequence of Yes-majority polls that lasted for around a year, while the 56% for Yes in our November 2020 poll was the highest ever Yes vote in a Panelbase poll, and one of the highest ever in any type of poll.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>In 2021, I also started a 'Scot Goes Popcast' to accompany the blog, in which (among other things) I interviewed a number of fascinating guests including the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond. There have been numerous spin-offs from the blog - I've been a monthly columnist for iScot magazine since 2017 and I've written extensive poll analysis for The National newspaper since 2015. I've been interviewed for TV and radio, including for BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio Five Live, Al Jazeera, the Bauer radio network and CTV News (Canada).</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>This is general election year, with the most likely date for polling day being October or November. That means the number of published Scottish opinion polls is likely to steadily increase as the year progresses (with perhaps a little lull in the summer). With your help I hope to be able to provide Scot Goes Pop's usual standard of coverage of the coming vote, which will be a genuine political crossroads for Scotland as a whole and for the independence movement in particular. The funds raised will help give me the flexibility to drop everything (circumstances permitting!) and post analysis whenever a new poll comes out. It will also help cover various miscellaneous "running costs", such as the small monthly fee for podcast hosting. And if the full target is reached, I will put some of the funds towards commissioning a new poll. Any donations, whether large or small, will be tremendously helpful.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>You can learn a bit more about Scot Goes Pop from the promotional video below.</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jm7aQz5bbYM?si=AJgaJK3XctXJC8yC" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/scot-goes-pop-fundraiser-2024" target="_blank">Click here if you'd like to donate via the GoFundMe page.</a></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Alternatively, direct payments can be made to my Paypal account. In many ways this is preferable, because the payment is usually processed instantly and fees can be eliminated entirely depending on which option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is: </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>A small number of people prefer direct bank transfer. If you'd like to donate that way, please email me directly via my contact email address, and I'll send you the details. My contact email address is different from my Paypal address and can be found on my Twitter profile or in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version only).</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-58048166139153584652024-03-03T00:05:00.001+00:002024-03-03T00:05:15.910+00:00If Alba is to thrive, its members must feel empowered<p>I was extremely sorry - and frankly shocked - to discover an hour or two ago that Eva Comrie has left the Alba Party. I don't know her exact reasons for leaving, so I can't analyse the significance of it with any precision. But there are a couple of common sense observations that can be made. Firstly, I've always had the impression that she was probably the second most popular person in the Alba leadership, after only Alex Salmond himself (her 82% to 18% victory in the recent Equalities Convener election would support that impression), and she's always been very supportive of Mr Salmond personally. So this is not a development that can be brushed off lightly - people who see her as a political lodestar are going to be upset and bewildered about losing her and will want answers from the leadership that may not be immediately forthcoming. And secondly, this fits into a pattern of a number of very senior people within the party either leaving altogether or stepping back. It's a statement of the obvious that none of this would be happening if the party was in a good place internally, which is a frustrating thing to have to say at a time when Alba should really be going places after the addition of rocket-fuel from the defections of Ash Regan and Chris Cullen.</p><p>My own view, as I've said many times, is that the solution can only lie in greater transparency and internal democratisation. There was an interesting exchange in the comments section of this blog the other day between someone who felt that internal democracy doesn't matter because the most electorally successful parties are often centrally controlled, and someone who pointed out that a centrally controlled party which is <i>not </i>electorally successful is the worst of all worlds. I think that's right - members will tolerate almost anything if the electoral triumphs are free-flowing, but in a relatively small party which has yet to demonstrate an election-winning capacity, the trade-off needed to keep members on board is empowerment. They need to feel their voices are heard and that they are the party's ultimate masters - and if they don't feel that way, there's a danger they may start to look for that empowerment elsewhere.</p>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com88tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-24100063538932178342024-03-02T18:27:00.004+00:002024-03-02T18:31:47.827+00:00Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if the Commonwealth Games fold?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I was at the Emirates in Glasgow this morning to get a taste of the World Athletics Indoor Championships, and as you can see from the photos below I had a good spot to cheer on Jemma Reekie as she won her semi-final. I felt a bit sorry for the chap in the Morocco shirt, though - I'm not sure if he was a very passionate coach or a family member (probably the latter), but he was on the floor with his head in his hands for a good five minutes after the Moroccan runner went from being in the lead in one of the men's 800m semis, to being caught on the line by several athletes, and missed out on qualification altogether.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxW0EW7tzhAAc6rCih65L7vNVUrl5prMcNb0yiFb4uiancfHk-yodmDkgIzFNBRkJBfyoyjRcu88ZNb4qmTBo9ChDl37fwKYh4JahcSunjl11oAUbqJXwnXkRRILFwoCHMF4LaIeKkb3lK19_BPvRzM_jbQNhzldYBcL4lcipV4Q6-NKBgclSm_HydW8Y/s2576/20240302_132614.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1932" data-original-width="2576" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxW0EW7tzhAAc6rCih65L7vNVUrl5prMcNb0yiFb4uiancfHk-yodmDkgIzFNBRkJBfyoyjRcu88ZNb4qmTBo9ChDl37fwKYh4JahcSunjl11oAUbqJXwnXkRRILFwoCHMF4LaIeKkb3lK19_BPvRzM_jbQNhzldYBcL4lcipV4Q6-NKBgclSm_HydW8Y/w400-h300/20240302_132614.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7kgGYIp3Y5cYYrXr2QLld0ZNwLNRXxisLokEl59CIULvKmTb-4qxCrNahpwxEV0Rvz0rirOh7qIIVtonAPt9HEWSPIHnriuJ4fWHZywx5zuzN6kHgPWjD8nJKCyDnp_1tXCLvPavyjvo_5bDEsdQ1gnu05KE_wuWFQRbR0oWxsF9413WW1HBpgUw9MGE/s1280/Screenshot_20240302-174603.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7kgGYIp3Y5cYYrXr2QLld0ZNwLNRXxisLokEl59CIULvKmTb-4qxCrNahpwxEV0Rvz0rirOh7qIIVtonAPt9HEWSPIHnriuJ4fWHZywx5zuzN6kHgPWjD8nJKCyDnp_1tXCLvPavyjvo_5bDEsdQ1gnu05KE_wuWFQRbR0oWxsF9413WW1HBpgUw9MGE/w225-h400/Screenshot_20240302-174603.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhvtA3ZIyIiIEdf0bt73OluqbWV2RZMqv1Mb8puCFvllRyi8h9S8W1fMxKZNkmEmKZ9-Cnc_23SZBgtEpy4oF0kLvO8a0zLZxEW1PwSbMf6ZZAxvyTYeGC0axaPFJcfWKnY8oddn8HUp41xk2hDGY-7APFFcsA4AvQn0XykkRCTDCpRmG4RgYZErb6BNE/s1280/Screenshot_20240302-174723.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhvtA3ZIyIiIEdf0bt73OluqbWV2RZMqv1Mb8puCFvllRyi8h9S8W1fMxKZNkmEmKZ9-Cnc_23SZBgtEpy4oF0kLvO8a0zLZxEW1PwSbMf6ZZAxvyTYeGC0axaPFJcfWKnY8oddn8HUp41xk2hDGY-7APFFcsA4AvQn0XykkRCTDCpRmG4RgYZErb6BNE/w225-h400/Screenshot_20240302-174723.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg5-LBrODNAy2x0NNETj4AxdG16Tv2C2CmK3HEoEat8kbpEGizNEpLt6ogeh-e242xkkkk1kb9h_A6MrvoxjaEVF_3fgnjo1M82ljq_NSywqjSCH_Gzq_16CkYFCBPz_0RYoFCZASe5ImOvMB-NDXB0Kus3wY1-v_In5zhnOfJV8bI76EYT8Z_YOBZkvE/s1280/Screenshot_20240302-174455.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg5-LBrODNAy2x0NNETj4AxdG16Tv2C2CmK3HEoEat8kbpEGizNEpLt6ogeh-e242xkkkk1kb9h_A6MrvoxjaEVF_3fgnjo1M82ljq_NSywqjSCH_Gzq_16CkYFCBPz_0RYoFCZASe5ImOvMB-NDXB0Kus3wY1-v_In5zhnOfJV8bI76EYT8Z_YOBZkvE/w225-h400/Screenshot_20240302-174455.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Having been to several Davis Cup matches in the same venue over the years, I was fully braced for the now-familiar incongruity of a Union Jack Fest across the road from Celtic Park, but actually it wasn't too bad. It was a very international audience, and to the extent that there were 'home' flags, there were as many saltires as Butcher's Aprons.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was remembering that the first time I was at the Emirates was for the badminton during the Commonwealth Games ten years ago, which prompted me to check whether there has been any resolution to the crisis over the hosting of the next Commonwealth Games in 2026. It seems there hasn't been, and the likelihood is that the event will either be postponed for a year or cancelled altogether. If the latter happens, there must be a question mark over whether the Commonwealth Games will ever be held again.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not quite sure how I would feel about that. On the one hand, the demise of the event would be seen as accelerating the increased irrelevance of the monarchy, which would obviously be thoroughly welcome. Queen Elizabeth was obsessed with the Commonwealth, because it was the only sense in which she had held together her supposed birthright of Empire. Without the Commonwealth Games, is there really a Commonwealth? It's the only thing that gives the institution any real meaning for most people.</div><div><br /></div><div>But on the other hand, the Commonwealth Games is the one and only opportunity for Scotland to compete as a nation in its own right in a number of high-profile sports, most notably track-and-field and swimming. It's also an opportunity for Scotland to win medals in sports that are popular here but are clearly never going to make the Olympic programme, with the obvious example being lawn bowls. </div><div><br /></div><div>So maybe on the whole the pros outweigh the cons and we should hope that the Commonwealth Games survive in some form.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-345952772592122112024-03-01T13:19:00.007+00:002024-03-01T15:38:19.607+00:00More heartbreak for Starmer as SNP stretch their lead in Scotland<b><i>Scottish voting intentions for next UK general election (Survation / Quantum Communications, 14th-20th February 2024):</i></b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><div><b>SNP 38% (+2)</b></div><div><b>Labour 33% (-1)</b></div><div><b>Conservatives 15% (-1)</b></div><div><b>Liberal Democrats 8% (-)</b></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): SNP 37 (-11), Labour 14 (+13), Liberal Democrats 4 (-), Conservatives 2 (-4)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Although this is moderately good news for the SNP and bad news for Labour, the big caveat is that Survation have tended to be one of the more favourable pollsters for the SNP since Humza Yousaf was elected leader, so there's no guarantee that another firm polling at the same time would even put the SNP ahead, let alone as much as five points ahead. Nevertheless, this is the biggest SNP lead in any Survation poll for around ten months, so it's not impossible that it's picking up a genuine - if modest - recovery.</div><div><br /></div><div>Among Remain voters from the EU referendum, the SNP lead Labour by 46% to 32%. Why isn't that gap bigger? I still think the SNP are missing a trick by not hammering home to voters that Labour have fully embraced Brexit. They mention it now and again, but the messaging is nowhere near strong enough.</div><div><br /></div><div>As you'd expect, the number of voters that Labour have taken from the SNP is lower than in certain other polls. 16% of SNP voters from 2019, and 18% of Yes voters from the 2014 independence referendum, are currently in the Labour column.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's no sign of any Holyrood voting intention numbers in this poll, or any indyref voting intention numbers, unless they're being held back for another day.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-88288450835525303302024-03-01T03:29:00.000+00:002024-03-01T03:29:50.505+00:00Keir Starmer learns there *is* a price to pay for genocide-apologism: utter humiliation for Labour in Rochdale as they slip to FOURTHIn his now infamous dual letters to Muslim and non-Muslim voters, George Galloway said that victory for him in Rochdale could lead to Keir Starmer being displaced as Labour leader, and that it would "Make Rochdale Great Again". I wouldn't have thought the second promise is any more likely to be kept than the first, but on the whole I'm glad that Galloway won, because it finally demonstrates that weaponising antisemitism against the Left is not a cost-free exercise forever, especially when it leads a Labour leader to tack so close to Israel that he even suggests that Netanyahu has the right to commit the genocidal act of cutting off food, water and electricity to the civilian population of Gaza.<div><br /></div><div><b><i>Rochdale by-election result (29th February 2024):</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><b>Workers Party of Britain: 39.7% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Independent - Tully: 21.3% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Conservatives: 12.0% (-19.2)</b></div><div><b>Labour: 7.7% (-43.9)</b></div><div><b>Liberal Democrats: 7.0% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Reform UK: 6.3% (-1.9)</b></div><div><b>Independent - W Howarth: 1.7% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Independent - Coleman: 1.5% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Greens: 1.4% (-0.7)</b></div><div><b>Independent - M Howarth: 0.8% (n/a)</b></div><div><b>Official Monster Raving Loony: 0.7% (n/a)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>There's always a frisson of excitement when a new party wins a parliamentary seat for the first time, so I turned to Wikipedia in the hope of discovering what manner of party we were getting, but I ended up more confused than when I started. The Workers' Party of Britain ideology is described as (among other things) "far-left" and "communist", which if taken literally would mean a communist party now has representation in the UK Parliament for the first time since Willie Gallacher lost his seat in 1950. But curiously, Wikipedia's only source for this claim is a webpage in which communists denounce the Workers Party of Britain for "transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anticommunism"!</div><div><b><br /></b></div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-60554755282150057572024-02-29T23:51:00.006+00:002024-02-29T23:53:19.686+00:00Ian Dunt admits he wanted Israel to cease to exist, until the Corbynites made him cross by being antisemiticThe absurdity of the title says it all, really, but I was staggered by something I saw on Twitter earlier. Owen Jones challenged centrist dad hack Ian Dunt on why he regularly calls out Russia for its war crimes in Ukraine but rarely does the same to Israel for its even worse crimes in Gaza. As far as I know, Dunt himself didn't reply, but someone else dug out the most recent thing Dunt had written on the subject of Israel. Extraordinarily, it stated that he used to find the very idea of Israel "disturbing" and that he regarded the country's existence as the root cause of the Middle East conflict, and that the only reason he changed his mind about that was the "antisemitism" of the Corbyn years!<div><br /></div><div>I mean, where to start? Anyone who has looked at the matter seriously knows that instances of antisemitism under Corbyn, to the extent that they actually existed, were blown out of all proportion into a Hollywood production cynically intended to discredit Corbyn and bring about Labour regime change. The whole enterprise was surprisingly successful given that the pro-Israel lobby in the UK is traditionally weaker than in the US, but it was, nevertheless, an obvious confidence trick. To purport to be so overwhelmed by the seriousness of the confected "Corbyn antisemitism crisis" that it totally changed your view on a question as fundamental as whether Israel should exist or not is practically centrist-dad-gone-parody. It's also astoundingly parochial to claim that any internal matter within a British political party could possibly have had that effect.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the real elephant in the room here is that Dunt's pre-2017 position as he has set it out can only be described as "anti-Zionist" - that's the catch-all term for hostility to Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Probably most of Israel's critics don't go anything like that far and never have done. I dare say if I'd been around in the 1940s I would have supported Palestine's right to self-determination without any imposed partition on the basis of ethnicity or religion, and I certainly wouldn't have said a self-declared Israeli state had any right to drive Palestinians from their homes and land in order to create or buttress an artificial Jewish majority in the state. But you can't really wind the clock back after several decades of Israel's existence, and nor should you want to when Palestine's own leaders accept it. Paradoxically, the greatest threat to Israel as a Jewish state is Israel's own attempt to render a Palestinian state non-viable, which could eventually leave a one-state solution - with all Palestinians granted citizenship and voting rights in Israel - as the only game in town.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dunt was, then, well outside the mainstream in his anti-Zionist views, and if he'd been a Corbynista, an expression of those views would have been more than enough to qualify him as an antisemite as far as the likes of Margaret Hodge and Luke Akehurst were concerned. So the alleged antisemitism that shocked Dunt into dropping his anti-Zionist stance was simply other people espousing exactly the same stance as his own, or in some cases a much less radical stance. The circularity of it is almost painful.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-57126406419642538952024-02-28T18:37:00.000+00:002024-02-28T18:37:12.863+00:00Yes, I'm giving constitutional advice to George Foulkes, and I'm doing it *deliberately*His Eminence Baron Sir Lord Georgie Foulkes on Twitter yesterday - <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Next project is to look at how we can get an early election to Holyrood if the SNP lose a majority of seats at Westminster. Any advice from constitutional experts would be welcome.</p>— George Foulkes (@GeorgeFoulkes) <a href="https://twitter.com/GeorgeFoulkes/status/1762452635527852141?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 27, 2024</a></blockquote><p>Now I'm certainly not claiming to be a constitutional expert, but I don't really need to be because this is a remarkably simple question. The date of the next Holyrood election is set by law as 7th May 2026. That date can only be changed in certain narrow circumstances that are also specified by law:</p><p>1) If the First Minister resigns, and no successor is selected by the Scottish Parliament within 28 days, an early election is triggered.</p><p>2) If two-thirds of MSPs vote for dissolution, an early election is triggered.</p><p>3) There is small discretion for the Presiding Officer (or technically the King acting on the Presiding Officer's advice) to change the date of the election by up to a month in either direction.</p><p>You'll note that unelected Westminster legislators like George have absolutely no part to play in any of these possibilities, and in any case it's far from clear why he thinks the outcome of a Westminster election should make an early Holyrood election any more or less likely.</p><p>So the only constitutional option open to him and his colleagues is to change the law, ie. rewrite the Scotland Act to give themselves the power to arbitrarily force an early Holyrood election on their own whim. In theory there's nothing to stop them doing that - but if key parts of the Scotland Act can be torn up so easily and casually, good luck trying to persuade voters that The Vow, and specifically the part about the Scottish Parliament's permanence, has been upheld or even meant anything in the first place.</p> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-88654981423396657312024-02-27T17:52:00.001+00:002024-02-27T17:52:45.176+00:00What Westminster needs now is a big round of applauseWhen a corrupt Speaker is in place, when that Speaker is in the pocket of the leader of one particular party, and when there aren't currently the numbers to dislodge that Speaker, there's a limit to what the SNP can do to fight back against their rights being trampled on. But that doesn't mean they can do nothing. Opposition parties have run campaigns of constructive parliamentary non-cooperation in the past, sometimes quite effectively. I recall Labour did it for a few months under John Smith in around 1993 or 1994.<div><br /></div><div>You'd need to have better knowledge of the arcane list of Westminster rules and conventions than I have to know what is possible and where the vulnerabilities of the system lie, but to give one trivial example, the SNP should refuse to use "Hear, hear" as the indication of agreement with what another member is saying, and just use clapping instead. They clearly did that the other day as an intentional form of low-grade resistance to Hoyle (ie. to wind him up) but they should make it a universal practice from now on. Hoyle will go nuts every time it happens, and that would be the whole aim of the exercise. There's nothing realistically he can do about it - he can't suspend the entire SNP parliamentary party on a daily basis. In a sense he'd be doing the SNP's work for them by constantly causing his own parliamentary disruption with pointless, pompous lectures on the subject. And I'm not sure the SNP would get the blame for it, because the public would just be bemused that the Speaker is so obsessed with forcing MPs to use weird grunting noises rather than clapping like normal people do.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-16872988770939490582024-02-26T18:08:00.000+00:002024-02-26T18:08:10.764+00:00An embarrassingly corrupt Commons Speaker who now feels safe to revert to double-dealing in plain sight<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">It's hard not to suspect that the only reason Hoyle ever offered the SNP an emergency debate was out of blind panic that he might lose his job, and now that the pressure is off due to the planet's most gullible media falling for the "all I was trying to do was prevent...</p>— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesKelly/status/1762149954603110934?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 26, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">...another 9/11" ruse, he now feels free to shaft the SNP yet again, which will always be his default setting. Let's be honest - he is a corrupt official who demeans his office and should never have been elected in the first place.</p>— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesKelly/status/1762150344975372761?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 26, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com64tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-66910099393689251382024-02-24T19:40:00.004+00:002024-02-24T20:23:04.285+00:00The Alba Party needs a bit less authoritarianism and a bit more transparency<p>I noticed yesterday that Alba Dundee's Twitter account had been suspended, which seemed a strange coincidence given the controversy that was swirling over Alba Dundee's go-it-alone decision to back a spoilt ballot campaign at the general election. The allegation today is that Alba HQ reported the Alba Dundee account as an "impostor" and got it suspended and replaced with an HQ-run account. Allan Petrie, who was an elected member of the Alba NEC until a few short weeks ago, has reacted in fury and left the party. This follows several other high-profile departures due to the fall-out from the internal elections in October and December.</p><p>Now, to be clear, I think Alba Dundee's spoilt ballot campaign decision was extremely unwise, because it would have harmed the cause of independence, and it was probably also unsustainable, because it wasn't really reconcilable with Alba's national strategy of standing candidates in at least twelve constituencies. But that meant a mature conversation needed to be had between the national party and the Dundee LACU. And yes, the national party's position had to take precedence if agreement couldn't be reached, but draconian action should have been a last resort. It sounds as if it was more like a first resort.</p><p>There's been a bit of a trend of high-handedness recently, most obviously in the reaction to some of the questions that were raised about the voiding of the national office bearer elections and the cancellation of the NEC elections in October, and the subsequent decision to keep the results of the rescheduled NEC elections secret in December (other than the names of those elected). Specifically, a question was asked about an alleged discrepancy between the number of people registered for conference in October and the number who were actually able to vote in December. The General Secretary responded on the Alba website, as was entirely proper, but he ended his response by attacking those who had raised concerns and accusing them of being out to harm Alba. That was more than a little unfair given that some of those people were very senior party members and even former NEC members. But subsequently there seemed to be a concerted effort on social media to get them shouted down as enemies of the party.</p><p>This is all a bit silly, because the reality is that it is highly unusual to suddenly void elections when everyone is sitting in the conference hall waiting to hear the results. It's highly unusual to suddenly cancel an election that everyone is sitting there waiting to vote in. And it's highly unusual to keep an election result secret. In such genuinely strange circumstances, you can quite rightly expect to be asked questions about what the hell is going on, and the best thing to do is just chill out and answer those questions as transparently as you can, rather than getting all passive-aggressive about being challenged.</p><p>There are all sorts of claims and counter-claims flying around about the conduct of the elections, and it's very difficult to know who to believe. But there are two points in particular that still trouble me. Firstly, did anyone know what the results of the original office bearer elections were before they were voided? If so, there's a theoretical danger that the decision to void may have been influenced by the identities of the winners. (I have no personal axe to grind there, because I would guess I almost certainly did better in the <b><a href="https://scotgoespop.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-nearest-of-near-misses-in.html" target="_blank">re-run version of the Membership Support Convener election</a></b> in December than I did in the original in October.) And secondly, if it's true that the NEC results had to be kept secret for data protection reasons, why was the same not the case in the previous two years, when the results were published without any difficulty? There may well be perfectly simple and reasonable answers to these questions, but to the best of my knowledge we haven't heard any yet.</p><p>To avoid continuing alienating members in the way that's been happening, Alba need a bit less authoritarianism and a bit more transparency. To be fair, the same could be said for most political parties, but it's been very much Alba's turn to struggle with these issues in recent months. As regular readers will know, I was <b><a href="https://scotgoespop.blogspot.com/2024/01/alba-committee-election-results-this.html" target="_blank">recently elected to a working group</a></b> that is reviewing the Alba constitution. For confidentiality reasons I can't give a running commentary on the progress of that, but let's hope that in a year or two we have a reformed party which is more comfortable in its own skin, and where everyone feels their voice is heard and valued. We should expect nothing less from an exciting new party which ought to be blazing a trail for internal democracy and transparency, rather than slipping straight back into the bad habits of the much older party its members broke away from three years ago.</p>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com111tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-11351257725719430682024-02-23T21:52:00.005+00:002024-02-23T22:09:45.615+00:00WINGS-WATCH: No, "Victory to Palestine" does not imply the destruction of IsraelIt's been a long time since I last did a 'Wings-Watch' fact-checking post, and I can't deny I'm surprised to find myself doing one about a Wings post full of pro-Israeli government talking points in the midst of the ongoing genocide, but then Mr Campbell is often the champion of unpopular causes (most notably the Conservative party, the anti-Gaelic lobby and the people who think Liverpool fans were to blame for the Hillsborough disaster).<div><br /></div><div>Basically what he's trying to claim this time is that Ross Greer is an antisemite who seeks the total destruction of Israel because he used the words <i>"Victory to Palestine". </i>This requires several stages of convoluted logical gymnastics, and some of them are rooted in outright factual inaccuracies.</div><div><br /></div><div>Campbell claims that Greer's support for Palestine must mean that he's siding with Hamas, because<i> "Palestine has no traditional armed forces, and in so far as it has a government, that government is also Hamas"</i>. Not true. If he was referring only to Gaza he'd have a point, but Gaza is only one part of the Palestinian territories. The other part is the West Bank, which is slightly bigger in population terms and much bigger geographically. The autonomous parts of the West Bank are governed by Fatah, not Hamas.</div><div><br /></div><div>Campbell goes on to make a variant of the same false claim when he says: <i>"What else could “Victory to Palestine” possibly entail? The closest thing it has to a legitimate government is Hamas". </i>Rubbish. The most obvious way in which 'legitimacy' is conferred is by international recognition, and Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah is universally recognised as the President of the Palestinian National Authority. Around two-thirds of the world's countries also recognise him as President of the sovereign State of Palestine. If Campbell is talking about<i> democratic </i>legitimacy, it's a score draw between Fatah and Hamas, because Fatah won the last presidential election and Hamas won the last parliamentary election. But both of those elections were an eternity ago, and the terms of office have long since expired. So neither government can really claim to be 'elected' as of right now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Having tried and completely failed to establish that Greer's support for Palestine must mean support for Hamas, Campbell ploughs on regardless by claiming that the supposed support for Hamas must also mean that Greer wants the destruction of Israel, because<i> "Hamas’ policy is unambiguous and unequivocal: the only acceptable resolution to the conflict is the complete obliteration of Israel". </i>Curiously, though, the screenshot Campbell offers in support of this claim doesn't explicitly say any such thing, and if you read Wikipedia's article about Hamas, you'll find that there is scholarly disagreement over whether they still want to destroy Israel or whether their goal is now a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 boundaries.</div><div><br /></div><div>Campbell further claims (and I think this is probably getting to the point where his words may be 'actionable') that Greer must regard the Jewish people of Israel as "sub-human", with a strong implication that he does so in a similar way that the Nazis looked upon the Jewish peoples within Europe. The justification here is that Greer said a victory for Palestine would be a "victory to humanity", which Campbell claims must be placing Israelis outside the concept of humanity, because he cannot conceive of any victory for Palestine that doesn't entail Israel's annihilation. But as I've demonstrated, one and possibly both of Palestine's governments support the continued existence of Israel within a two-state framework, so "victory to Palestine" could very well just mean the ending of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, thus leaving plenty of room for Israelis within the concept of humanity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Campbell's blogpost really is a dire and wretched thing, and I suspect some of his regular readers are going to be dismayed and bewildered that he seems to be calling into question the appropriateness of referring to Israel's actions as "genocide", even after the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide may plausibly be happening. They will also be disturbed that Campbell shares the Netanyahu view that it is impossible to support Palestine without supporting Hamas, and that expressing support for Palestine should therefore be illegal (he specifically calls for Greer to be prosecuted). I suspect there might be a touch of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" in all of this, but when your disdain for the unimportant Green MSP Ross Greer (which I share, incidentally) leads you to offer a degree of support for the worldview of the genocidal Netanyahu regime, it's just possible you may have lost a touch of perspective somewhere along the way.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-14646166200181559552024-02-23T11:21:00.007+00:002024-02-23T11:23:47.322+00:00The autumn of the wrong side of historyProbably a betting person would say Lindsay Hoyle is still likely to cling on to his job, but from a historical perspective he's now become one of the very few Speakers who does/did not enjoy more or less universal support and respect among MPs. I suspect it will bother him greatly that several dozen MPs have openly called for him to go. In his quieter moments he must wonder if he would be on firmer ground today if he hadn't made the bizarre decision to visit Israel in November with the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, described in her Wikipedia biography as a "far right diplomat".<div><br /></div><div>But there are any number of people who would be on stronger ground now if they hadn't said and done some very strange things back in the autumn. I've gone back and taken a look at an article put out by the Spectator on 15th October entitled 'Ireland's disgusting response to the Israel attack'. What was so disgusting about Ireland's response? Basically a number of tweets by random people (which of course the Irish government had no control over) and Leo Varadkar urging the Israelis to act responsibly. The bastard. What you're about to read are genuine quotes from the Spectator. They are not a parody.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"Rather than offering unequivocal support and succour to the Israeli people, he began scolding them and stood up in the Dail to warn that any response ‘must be proportionate’...What does that even mean? More than a thousand Israelis have been slaughtered. Young women were raped over the bodies of their dead friends. Holocaust survivors have been kidnapped and brought to Gaza as human shields (or worse) and 260 children who were attending a rave in the desert were brutally slaughtered and defiled. And Varadkar is worried about a disproportionate response?...To make matters worse, Varadkar warned the Israelis that they would quickly lose international solidarity if they went ‘too far’...Varadkar then slammed Israel for cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip, saying: ‘To me, it amounts to collective punishment. Cutting off power, cutting off fuel supplies and water supplies, that’s not the way a respectable democratic state should conduct itself.’...The sickening scenes in the Dail continued throughout the week. Mary Lou McDonald, head of Sinn Fein, ludicrously called for an immediate cease fire."</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Can anyone doubt in retrospect that Leo Varadkar and Mary Lou McDonald had it completely right and the Spectator had it completely wrong? You'd be forgiven for thinking from the text above that the scale of the 7th October attack by Hamas somehow made it arithmetically impossible for any Israeli response to be disproportionate, and yet here we are, only a few months on, and at least 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel - around thirty times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas in October. At least 12,000 Palestinian children have been killed, around thirty-three times the number of Israelis killed at the music festival.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it's not as if Varadkar needed any special foresight to know that Israel was likely to go much too far unless it was pre-emptively reined in by the international community. Time and again over decades we've seen that Israeli responses to attacks have been crazily disproportionate and have ended up causing ten, twenty, thirty times as many civilian deaths as the original attacks. It was entirely rational in October to be largely preoccupied with the unspeakable horrors the innocent Palestinian civilian population was about to face - unless of course you're a Spectator columnist who thinks one Israeli life is worth as much as one hundred Palestinian lives, as in fairness most Spectator columnists probably do.</div><div><br /></div><div>With the benefit of hindsight, the few western leaders who got the tone spot-on by extending huge sympathy to Israel but warning that there could be no blank cheque for revenge attacks do not look like the "disgusting" ones.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-930120922627919768.post-26990287175465072352024-02-22T18:33:00.002+00:002024-02-22T18:34:26.423+00:00Stephen Flynn comes of age by standing up to a corrupt Commons Speaker - so will the next SNP leadership contest boil down to Forbes v Flynn?One thing that's been fascinating on political Twitter over recent hours is how Stephen Flynn has almost overnight become a hate figure for right-wing English Labour activists. They suddenly can't bear the sight of him or the sound of his voice, and they're trying to convince themselves that the public are viewing him in the same way. Of course the reason English Labour people hate him is exactly the same reason he's shot up in the estimation of Scottish independence supporters. The raw anger he displayed at the corruption of the Speaker and the disregarding of the rights of Scotland's elected representatives, and his courage in telling Lindsay Hoyle to his face that it's time to go, is exactly the sort of thing many Yessers have been crying out for from the SNP at Westminster for years.<div><br /></div><div>Until the events of yesterday, Flynn was at best on the fringes of contention for the next SNP leadership election. But by turning himself into something of a folk hero, I wonder if he might now have given himself a genuine chance - if he actually decides to throw his hat in the ring, of course, which is far from certain given the awkwardness of running for leader as a non-MSP. If he does have a crack at it, he'll presumably have to nominate someone else to be a temporary First Minister for however long it takes him to get a Holyrood seat, which is far from ideal and would doubtless be used by his opponents as an argument against voting for him.</div><div><br /></div><div>Personally, I'm not sure he's the right person to be leader, because from the second-hand information we've heard from journalists about the strategic differences between himself and Yousaf, I actually think he's even further away from being right than Yousaf is. He seems even keener than Yousaf on de-emphasising independence, which is not the way to win elections for the SNP and is self-evidently not going to help bring independence any closer. </div><div><br /></div><div>In a strange way, though, I might welcome it if the next leadership contest boils down to a straight choice between Flynn and Kate Forbes, because that might mean that the Sturgeon Faction's fight to retain total control of the party will be lost before the votes are even counted. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression of Flynn is that he wouldn't be an out-and-out change candidate like Ms Forbes, but neither would he be a Continuity Sturgeon candidate like Yousaf or Mairi McAllan or Angus Robertson - he'd be ambiguously somewhere in between those two concepts. So even if he defeats Forbes (and I suspect she'd be more likely to defeat him), there'd be a much-needed break with the Sturgeon era and a move towards something new.</div>James Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01516007141763230886noreply@blogger.com62