Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2018: An Update

Click here to go straight to the fundraising page.

There are times in life when you realise you're in the middle of making an incredibly stupid mistake, and you have to decide whether to see it through or to try to reverse what you've done, no matter how awkward and embarrassing that might be. As regular readers will be aware, I've been trying to fundraise over the last few weeks to help keep this blog going for another year, but I've been doing it in a fairly low-key way as a sort of bolt-on to last year's fundraising page. That was a really daft idea, because the £7000 target on that page was met twelve months ago and the money has since been completely used up, so there was no proper indication of how much I was trying to raise this year or how far away the new target was from being met. A significant amount was raised during July and the first couple of days of August - more than £3000, in fact, and a million thanks to everyone who has contributed. That's not quite halfway towards the rough target, though, and I began to realise that I was potentially going to have to bore people to tears with reminders about the fundraiser for months to come if I didn't bite the bullet and set up a new page with a more meaningful target figure. I was just in the middle of doing that when I suddenly noticed that it was perfectly possible to edit an existing fundraiser and adjust the target! Remind me to actually check these things in future. So I've now adjusted the target to £15,500. For the avoidance of doubt, that does not mean I'm seeking to raise anything like that amount during the current fundraising period - the running total stood at £7,800 after last year, so if/when the £15,500 target is met, that will mean that just over £7,500 has actually been raised this year.

Here are a few questions and answers about the fundraiser...

What's the plan for Scot Goes Pop over the next twelve months?

The mind boggles as to what might happen over that period. A Tory leadership contest? A snap general election? A referendum on the terms of Brexit? The calling of a second independence referendum? Any or all of the above could happen at any time and at very short notice. The beauty of these fundraisers is that it gives me the flexibility to drop everything and provide extensive polling analysis when called for, even if that temporarily becomes a task almost on a par with a full-time job. That was very much the case during the 2014 independence referendum, the 2015 and 2017 general elections, and the 2016 EU referendum. (Oddly enough, there was no spike in visitor numbers during the EU referendum in the way that there was for the other three votes, but I still gave you the round-the-clock polling analysis whether you wanted it or not!)

What gap in the market does Scot Goes Pop fill?

We generally only ever see opinion polls through a unionist filter. The vast majority of Scottish polls are commissioned by anti-independence clients in the media, and even if the results are favourable for the SNP or Yes, that's rarely the story that people actually read about. Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage is a pro-independence corrective to that bias, although I would stress that it isn't about propaganda or wishful thinking - I also spend a fair bit of my time correcting misinformation about polls put about by Yes people.

How many people does Scot Goes Pop reach?

I have to sheepishly admit at this point that I'm not quite sure. I've had Google Analytics installed for years, but it suddenly dawned on me a few months ago that I've had it set up incorrectly all along, and that the figures I was seeing completely excluded visitors to the mobile version of the site. So any traffic/visitor numbers I mentioned until the end of the last year were likely to be a very significant underestimate.  According to the latest figures from Traffic Estimate, the blog reached a combined total of 55,400 unique visitors across two domains over the last 30 days (48,400 for scotgoespop.blogspot.com, and 7000 in the early part of the month for the now-defunct scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk domain).  I've no idea how accurate that is, but to give you a rough guide, it compares to an estimated 39,500 unique visitors for The Ferret, and 74,100 for Bella Caledonia.

Are the fundraisers your sole income?

No, of course not, and I really must stress that point for the benefit of our resident troll who likes posting comments along the lines of "get out of bed and do a proper job, you Jocknatsis scrounger". I have other writing-related income, and I'm glad to say I also do some work that has absolutely nothing to do with either writing or politics. However, I simply wouldn't be able to devote anything like as much time to the blog if it wasn't for the fundraisers.

Does the fundraiser help towards running costs?

Strictly speaking no, because the blogging platform I currently use is free.  However, there are a few miscellaneous expenses that are indirectly associated with blogging - for example travel costs if I'm asked to go somewhere for a podcast or rally or whatever, so the fundraiser does help with that.  In the past I've also experimented with using a portion of the funds on Facebook advertising, which is hopefully a win/win for all concerned - promoting this particular blog while also widening the reach of the wider pro-indy alternative media and its message.

Why don't you use the funds to commission an opinion poll?

In an ideal world I'd love to do that (if I can find a polling firm that is still willing to speak to me, that is!).  However, polls are expensive and I'd realistically only be able to do it if the target was significantly exceeded.  I've found in the past that fundraisers tend to only just about reach their target, so it's probably unlikely that I'd ever be able to take the idea forward, but I'll certainly keep an open mind about it.

What happens to the funds if you can't keep blogging?

That point always troubles me, because fundraisers are effectively there to cover a mountain of work that hasn't actually been done yet, and it's impossible to know when personal circumstances might suddenly change and get in the way.  As I've said in past years, if I wasn't able to keep going for any reason I would pass any remaining funds on to other pro-independence alternative media.

If everyone who has read this blog in the last month donated just 50p, would the target be met straight away?

Yes!

Click here if you'd like to donate.

Questions for the BBC on the YouTube controversy

A great deal has been written about the closing down of the Wings and Moridura YouTube accounts, but there are a few points that I don't think have received enough attention yet.  The BBC suggested in their statement that the initiative for targeting the two accounts did not come from themselves, but rather that they always take action on copyrighted content when they receive a sufficient number of complaints.  This implies, somewhat implausibly, that dozens if not hundreds of public-spirited citizens have been spontaneously sending in complaints in an attempt to protect the BBC's copyright.  If there's any truth at all to it, much more likely is that any complaints sent to the BBC were malicious and politically motivated.  That would drive a coach and horses through the BBC's insistence that they take action on copyright regardless of the political views of the alleged "infringers", because self-evidently their own policy means that they would be taking more action against one side of the constitutional debate if it was the other side that happened to be putting in the bulk of complaints.

It may be, of course, that the "we take action whenever we receive complaints" thing is just a face-saving PR cover story anyway.  It has that sort of ring to it, a bit like Radio 1 pretending recently that they pulled an interview because it "wasn't good enough", and not because of the sea of outrage about the interviewee.  One obvious question is: how would someone actually go about alerting the BBC to a copyright infringement?  If there is an established procedure for doing that, is it really likely that large numbers of ordinary people would know about it?

The BBC appear to be alleging that the copyrighted material on the two channels was extensive enough to negate the "limited" fair use exemption.  That's a subjective argument, and one that a court might well disagree with.  But even if the BBC truly believe that their copyright has been technically infringed, it doesn't automatically follow that a state-owned and publicly-funded broadcaster always has to seek redress, or that it would be in the interests of those they serve for them to do so.  If it was drama or comedy, it would be an entirely different matter - they would be protecting the creative work of actors, writers, comedians, etc, who have a right to receive revenue when their product is viewed.  But who is being protected when the words of a politician who just happened to be speaking on the BBC are censored?  If there's a public interest in these videos being removed, why can't the BBC articulate what it is?  Why have they not even attempted to do so?

There's also an issue here about BBC centralisation and disrespect towards Scotland.  We were told a few months ago that BBC Scotland were about to make a conscious effort to build bridges with Yes voters and to win back the trust in the corporation that was lost during the independence referendum.  What looks like a political attack by the BBC in London on two leading pro-independence bloggers makes that task ten times harder.  Shouldn't it have occurred to the people responsible to clear such an enormously sensitive move with BBC Scotland, who after all were best placed to understand the repercussions?  If it didn't occur to them to do so, what does that tell you?

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On an unrelated subject, I just thought I'd bring the following to your attention.  Faisal Islam of Sky News has posted a screenshot of Pembrokeshire County Council's planning for Brexit, which makes an observation about devolution -

"There are powers in devolved areas which HMG [Her Majesty's Government] wishes to withhold from WG [Welsh Government] under the EU Withdrawal Bill that are currently implemented under EU law by Welsh local authorities.  How long they will be withheld, and for what purpose, is unclear.  This introduces some legal uncertainty for Welsh local authorities."

Perish the thought that there's any sort of power grab going on, eh? 

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

The Chequers shambles brought UKIP back from the dead - and May's fear of UKIP could increase the chances of a no deal Brexit

One of the paradoxes of last year's general election is that the Tories had to increase their vote sharply just to avoid going backwards any further than they did.  Theresa May took 42% of the popular vote and yet lost the overall majority that had been won by David Cameron two years earlier with only 37% of the vote.  It's easy to dismiss what happened as a form of general polarisation in which both the Conservatives and Labour were bound to see their support increase while smaller parties were inevitably squeezed out, but in fact the processes that led to the Tory and Labour increases were largely separate.  UKIP voters went home to the Tories because the issue of Brexit seemed to be settled (laughable in retrospect, I know), while Labour were only able to capture former abstainers and Green voters because Corbyn had become leader - something that had absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.  So if circumstances had been different it would have been perfectly possible for the Corbyn surge to occur without any corresponding swing back from UKIP to Tory - and we're now starting to see what the effects of that would have looked like.

As you probably know, for several months in the early part of this year, the Tories had re-established a small but significant GB-wide lead over Labour, but that was reversed at the time of the Chequers "deal"/shambles.  Labour briefly went into the lead, but we now seem to be back to roughly a neck-and-neck race.  Although Labour may have taken some support direct from the Tories, the most important impact of Chequers appears to have been to bring UKIP back from the dead.  In every poll published in May and June, UKIP had been somewhere between 2% and 4%, and in most cases they were on 3%.  Since Chequers, they've been hovering between 5% and 8%, with the most common figure being 6%.  So their support has essentially doubled, and needless to say a lot of the extra votes are coming from the Tories.  In the last two YouGov polls, 9% or 10% of respondents who voted Tory in 2017 said they would now vote UKIP, which compares to an equivalent figure of just 3% in the last YouGov poll of June.  Labour's position relative to the Tories could therefore have improved without any direct boost for Labour at all (and indeed after the reversal of a temporary bounce that is effectively what has happened).

The question that forms in my mind is whether what we're currently seeing is merely a staging-post.  UKIP's support may be double what it was a few weeks ago, but it's still only half of what it was at the 2015 election.  With talk of Nigel Farage just possibly returning as leader next year, there's surely scope for a much bigger swing back from Tory to UKIP if the narrative of "Brexit betrayed" is allowed to develop.  There's no particular reason to think Labour would lose support to smaller parties at the same time, which means that the polls could move firmly into Labour overall majority territory by default.  Fear of that happening could be another constraint on Theresa May that will make it less likely that she'll agree to any deal remotely acceptable to the EU - thus further increasing the chances of a disastrous no deal Brexit.

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

Any Blairite breakaway from Labour could be Christmas for the SNP

Subscribers to iScot magazine might remember that for my December 2017 column, I made a series of non-predictions for the year ahead.  That is to say, I made the point that the range of possibilities was much wider than the conventional wisdom would have you believe, and that there were a number of perfectly conceivable events being prematurely ruled out by pundits because of what the mood music happened to be at the end of the year.  For example, it seemed silly to me that the possibility of a Blairite/"moderate" breakaway from Labour at some point during 2018 was being completely excluded.

The small minority of you who bother trying to get past the New Stateman's intensely irritating registration-wall may have seen a recent piece by Stephen Bush in which he suggested that the prevailing private view among many Corbynsceptics is that a new party may well be necessary.  Now, admittedly there are only five months left in 2018, so if a breakaway does happen it's likely to be in 2019 or later.  But nevertheless this gossip (which should be taken seriously given Bush's track record) does go some way towards vindicating my point that the cowing of the Blairite tendency at one particular point in time did not tell you a great deal about what the position would be a few months later.  The rebels have cynically used the issue of antisemitism to breathe life back into their cause, and the question has reverted to being how to fight back against Corbyn rather than whether to do so.

If a new centre party emerges, would it be Christmas for the SNP?  Answer: probably, but not necessarily.  It's just possible that a fresh political force with a charismatic leader could ride the backlash against no deal Brexit and sweep all before it, including even the SNP in Scotland.  More likely, though, is that the new party would be strong enough to do severe damage to Labour, but not strong enough to come close to taking power itself.  The outcome would be a split and demoralised Labour and ex-Labour vote, which in a first-past-the-post Westminster contest would be a boon for any parties in competition with Labour in marginal seats.  That would obviously include the SNP.  There might even be limited benefits in a Holyrood election fought under proportional representation, because if either Labour or the new party fell below 5% of the list vote in any region, any votes they did receive in that region would be effectively wasted and would free up list seats for other parties.

It's worth bearing in mind, though, that the last time there was a breakaway from Labour, it was less widespread in Scotland than elsewhere.  It's no coincidence that George Robertson was one of only two members of the SDP's predecessor group in parliament who didn't ultimately join the new party.  Other Scottish MPs on the Labour right, such as John Smith, who would have been prime candidates to defect if they had represented constituencies south of the border, didn't even entertain the idea for a nanosecond.  There was a stronger cultural and emotional attachment to the Labour brand here than there was in parts of England.  Of course things have changed in the intervening few decades, and until the advent of Richard Leonard the Scottish party was almost starting to look like the last bastion of Blairism.  Many Scottish Labour MSPs will probably be sorely tempted to join a new party, but will sense deep down that by abandoning the Labour brand they would be giving up the one and only thing that makes them vaguely electable.  

Even if the history of the SDP breakaway repeats itself and Scottish Labour manages to basically hold together as English Labour falls apart, we can rest assured that the new party will still be beamed into Scottish homes courtesy of our wonderful homogenising broadcast media.  A split vote would effectively be imported from down south, and I suspect the SNP would still cash in quite heavily.

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

Tonight (and every other night until the end of time) Scottish Labour are gonna whinge like it's Nine-teen-Se-ven-ty-Nine

It's always bemused me that there are two opinions about the SNP's history that seemingly nobody is allowed to express because the self-appointed experts have already long since decided that they are wrong.  Those opinions are:

1) That the SNP did the right thing by withdrawing from the Scottish Constitutional Convention after initial discussions.

2) That the SNP did the right thing by voting in favour of a motion of no confidence in the Callaghan government in 1979.

The first opinion is actually very easily defensible, and indeed in my view is probably correct.  Labour were refusing to even nominally allow independence to be considered by the Constitutional Convention as a valid possible outcome.  Therefore, by staying in the Convention, the SNP would have been endorsing an explicitly anti-independence endeavour.  That would have been a strategically foolish thing to do, because the constitutional proposals of all the main non-Tory parties would have become identical.  Why would anyone have bothered voting SNP when you could back exactly the same devolution policy by voting for a Labour government?  As it turned out, the SNP were electorally more successful in the 1990s than they were in the 1980s (their 32.6% share of the vote in the 1994 European election was at the time a new record high), which would tend to suggest that leaving the Convention and retaining their USP was extremely wise.  And of course devolution happened as quickly as it would have done if the SNP had been inside the Convention.  Indeed there's an argument that it happened more quickly, because external electoral pressure from the SNP helped keep Labour honest.

The 1979 question is more finely-balanced, because it's fair to say that neither the SNP nor Scotland gained anything by the decision to vote against Callaghan.  But here's the thing: it's not at all clear that anything would have been gained by not voting against Callaghan.  Which is probably why Tommy Sheppard said the unsayable a few days ago by noting that, even with the benefit of hindsight, he would have voted the same way if he had been an SNP MP in that position.  The Daily Record then provided a helpful reminder that they remain a completely unreformed Labour fanzine by leaping on that comment with the disgraceful headline "Senior SNP MP slammed for claims nationalists would vote for Thatcherism again".  Sheppard of course had said no such thing, because the SNP did not 'vote for Thatcherism' in 1979 or at any other time.  The vote against Callaghan was not a vote for a change of government, but was instead a vote for hastening a general election in which the British people could elect any government they liked.  The public could, for example, have significantly improved Callaghan's position by re-electing Labour with an outright majority.  If they had done so, would it have meant that the SNP had "voted for Callaghanism"?  No, it would still have meant that they voted for a slightly earlier election and for nothing else.

The subtext of Scottish Labour's decades-long whinge about the 1979 vote is that the SNP allowed the British people to overrule Scotland's wishes by installing Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.  It's hard to know where to start with hypocrisy like that.  Suffice to say that Labour believe as a matter of principle that the British people should be able to overrule Scotland's choice of government, and the SNP categorically do not.  When Labour campaigned for a No vote in the independence referendum, they were shamelessly campaigning to allow the 1979 scenario to play itself out again and again and again and again into infinity.  If we had a media worth its salt, that point would be put to Labour every time the subject is raised.

But leaving Labour's nonsense aside, did the SNP make the right call in 1979?  Look at it this way.  For years, they had used their voting power within a hung parliament to attempt to bring about an elected Scottish Assembly.  They had done so by repeatedly backing the Labour government in confidence votes on the condition that devolution legislation would go ahead.  What actually happened is that dozens of Labour MPs sabotaged the Scotland Bill by inserting the 40% rule, and Callaghan let them get away with it by indicating he was not going to respect the majority Yes vote in the 1979 referendum.  (Contrary to popular belief, the Scotland Act 1978 did not say that a failure to reach the 40% threshold would automatically lead to repeal.  The Secretary of State was required to table a repeal order, but Callaghan could then have whipped Labour MPs to vote against it, which if done successfully would have meant devolution going ahead as planned.  He chose not to do that.)  The informal agreement between Labour and the SNP had therefore been broken, and it had been broken by Labour.  Were the SNP really supposed to react to that state of affairs by saying "oh it doesn't matter, we'll reward your broken promises and continue propping up your government in return for absolutely nothing?" 

Four decades on, Labour's answer to that question, and indeed the Labour-supporting media's answer to that question, is "yes".  I would suggest that's not remotely a realistic answer. 

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

Latest figures suggest Scot Goes Pop is Scotland's fifth most-read alternative media site

Apologies for another self-indulgent stats post (in fairness I think the last one was in March!), but like other bloggers I do sometimes have to fight to make sure Scot Goes Pop gets the full recognition it's due.  Indyref2 have today published a ranking of Scottish alternative media websites based on monthly traffic estimates from the appropriately titled Traffic Estimate site.  Scot Goes Pop is on the list in sixth place with 44,400 visitors, but that's an underestimate because for some reason Traffic Estimate are now splitting the blog's traffic between two domains - scotgoespop.blogspot.com (44,400 visitors) and scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk (16,800 visitors).  Given that we're talking about unique visitors, can those two figures be treated cumulatively?  Not necessarily - there may be a little overlap, although I strongly suspect that most people who visit the blog multiple times in a month do so on the same domain every time.  So the correct figure is probably much closer to 61,200 than to 44,400.

When I first discovered Traffic Estimate a few months ago, the .com domain was showing zero visitors and the .co.uk domain was showing anything between 60,000 and 80,000 visitors.  Why the flipover?  I don't really know, although one possible explanation is that Facebook links to Blogger now seem to be automatically directing to the .com domain, no matter which address is manually added.

I've also noticed that John Robertson's and Jason Michael's sites are missing from Indyref2's ranking list.  Assuming there are no other omissions, and assuming that other sites aren't suffering from the same multiple domain problem, here is the correct top nine.  I've put an asterisk next to Scot Goes Pop's traffic to take account of the slight uncertainty over how to treat the cumulative figure.

Wings Over Scotland 211,400
CommonSpace 88,800
Wee Ginger Dug 80,000
Bella Caledonia 79,800
Scot Goes Pop 61,200*
Talking Up Scotland 59,000
Indyref2 48,600
Random Public Journal 42,200
The Ferret 42,100

Obviously these are very broad ballpark estimates, but if Scot Goes Pop really does receive in the region of 60,000 unique visitors every 30 days, what would that mean?  It would suggest that getting on for 1% of this country's entire population drops by every month.  Not too shabby for a one-man operation.  That being the case, it may be a good moment (ahem, cough, violent sneeze) to mention the ongoing fundraiser.  I've been using last year's fundraiser for the sake of convenience, although that may prove to be a mistake because a specific target figure can often be a motivating factor for donations.  Basically you have to subtract £7800 from the figure on the page to calculate how much has been raised so far.  That means just over £2000 has been donated in the current fundraising period, and a million thanks to everyone who has contributed.  I have £7000 in mind as a very rough target, so that will be reached when the page says £14,800.

The exclusion of the SNP from the summaries of poll results is arbitrary, Anglocentric and indefensible

As I've spent a fair bit of the last 48 hours having exchanges (sometimes downright surreal exchanges) about this subject on Twitter, I thought I might as well make the point here as well.  It's a very simple one.  Here is how the Britain Elects account reported the results of the new YouGov poll a couple of days ago...

I'm not having a go at Britain Elects specifically, because the above is absolutely typical of how most news/political outlets summarise such polls - ie. with no sign of the SNP (or indeed of Plaid Cymru).

How do you think any reasonable person would be most likely to interpret the absence of the SNP?  I'd suggest they'd reach one of two conclusions.  Either: a) respondents in the poll were not given the option of expressing a voting intention for the SNP, or b) the SNP were on less than the 2% of the vote enjoyed by the Greens, the lowest-placed of the five parties that were deemed worthy of a mention in the summary.  But both of those conclusions would be completely incorrect, meaning that by either accident or design people are being very seriously misled.  In reality, the SNP and Plaid Cymru received 5% of the vote in this poll, putting them in a clear fifth place ahead of the Greens, and only just behind UKIP in fourth place.  (Because YouGov lump the SNP and Plaid together as a single option for GB-wide polls, it's impossible to separate out the support for each of the two parties, but given what we know about their respective levels of support it's inconceivable that the SNP would have received less than 4% if offered as an option in their own right, and would still have been well clear of the Greens.)  Why, then, is the sixth most popular party reported as if it was the fifth most popular?  Why is the fifth most popular not even mentioned at all?

A mistake?

An oversight?

Nope, it's the intentional withholding of information, and it's done as a matter of routine.  Over the last two days, apologists for this downright weird practice have put forward a number of speculative justifications for it, and not one of them makes any sense.  I'll go through them individually.

"Not editing out the SNP's vote would give a misleading impression of the trend in Scotland, because trivial changes that might barely register at Britain-wide level would be enough to make a big difference in terms of seats."  This doesn't stack up, because essentially the same is true of both the Greens and UKIP - any seats that they might win depend on very localised contests, meaning that their national share of the vote is hardly even relevant.  In 2015, UKIP took 13% of the vote but won just a single seat.  If the media can 'take the risk' of revealing information about the popularity of the Greens and UKIP that has little or no relevance in terms of seats, it's murderously hard to understand why the public must be 'protected' from similar information about the SNP.  The bottom line is that in a first-past-the-post election, the number of seats won by each party is only very weakly correlated to the share of the vote.  The winner of the popular vote may or may not be the largest party in terms of seats.  A third party with 17% of the vote may win more than twice as many seats as it did a decade earlier with 23%.  The purpose of polls is not first and foremost to predict the number of seats for each party, but rather to estimate each party's absolute popularity in terms of votes.  In that respect, the fact that the SNP is on 5% of the vote in this YouGov poll is no more or less important than the fact that the Greens are on 2% or that UKIP are on 6%.

"The estimated vote for the SNP is less reliable than the vote for Britain-wide parties, because it is drawn from a tiny subsample, not the full-scale GB sample."  Not true.  YouGov allow respondents across Britain to select the SNP/Plaid as a voting intention option, as can be seen from the fact that the two parties between them have 1% support in London in this particular poll.

"Nevertheless, in practice the vast bulk of support for the SNP and Plaid comes from Scotland and Wales, so effectively is based on a subsample that is too small to be statistically reliable."  That's really an argument for not taking individual subsamples too seriously, which indeed they shouldn't be.  But the SNP's GB-wide vote is not a subsample figure - it's rounded to the nearest percentage point and therefore normally falls in a range between 3% and 5%.  If anything, the SNP's reported vote is more stable than the reported vote for the Britain-wide parties and isn't subject to random variations outside the standard margin of error - which is what you'd expect if the charge of an unusual level of statistical unreliability had any truth to it.

"The SNP's support is not only effectively drawn from a small Scottish subsample, but one that might be incorrectly structured - for example, it might have far too many pensioners, or too many women."  Not so.  YouGov indicated a couple of years ago that they had decided to start structuring and weighting their Scottish subsamples separately to improve the accuracy of their polls.  It seems highly unlikely that they reversed that decision at any point, because their subsample figures have become (relatively) more stable since then.

"The SNP should be edited out of poll results because not everyone in Britain can vote for them."  That's a British nationalist argument rather than a statistical one, but it doesn't even make sense on its own terms, because not everyone in Britain can vote for UKIP or the Greens either.  In the 2017 general election, the Greens stood in only 467 of the 650 constituencies, and UKIP stood in only 378 of 650.  Both figures were sharply down on the candidates for each party in the 2015 election.  Nobody has a clue how many candidates UKIP and the Greens will put up at the next election, which means that in all probability many respondents will have told YouGov in good faith that they plan to vote for one party or another even though they will not be able to do so.  If reporting the SNP's Britain-wide vote "lacks context", reporting the Green or UKIP vote must inevitably lack a great deal more context.  And yet nobody would dream of withholding that information (unless of course the numbers fell to a statistically insignificant level).

There is no possible logic to the exclusion of the SNP from poll summaries.  It's an arbitrary decision rooted in Anglocentricity.

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Fundraiser: If you find Scot Goes Pop's polling coverage useful and would like to help it continue, donations can be made via the 2017 fundraiser page.  The initial £7000 target was reached last summer, but one year on that money has all been used up.  I know there are always lots of very worthy pro-independence causes looking for support, so I've held off for as long as I possibly could before actively seeking donations again.

Yes vote stands at 46% in Scot Goes Pop Poll of Polls

It's been ages since I last calculated a polling average on independence, so I thought it might be time to give it a spin.  For those who don't remember, the Scot Goes Pop Poll of Polls takes into account only the most recent poll from each firm that has asked the independence question at some point in the last six months.  Back during the indyref, I had an exchange with a pollster (I think it was someone from Ipsos-Mori) who was insistent that my method didn't make sense, and that a Poll of Polls should take into account all of the most recent handful of polls regardless of which firms had conducted them.  I pointed out to him that the 'house effects' in indyref polls were so extreme that his preferred method would generate crazily misleading trends - if you went from one average that was mostly based on polls from No-friendly firms (such as YouGov) to another average that was mostly based on polls from Yes-friendly firms (such as Panelbase), you'd get the firm impression there had been a sharp swing to Yes even if no such thing had actually happened.

The gap between pollsters is no longer as extreme these days, but there are still differences.  Panelbase has moved to the other end of the spectrum and is now a No-friendly pollster, usually reporting a Yes vote that is a little lower than one or two other firms such as Survation.  Needless to say YouGov remain a firmly No-friendly outfit, and as you know I've always been a bit cynical about them.  It's hard to escape the conclusion sometimes that they start from the assumption that the Yes vote should be on the low side and work backwards to find a methodology that will produce that outcome.  During the indyref, when they were still under the control of Labour supporter Peter Kellner, they used the notorious "Kellner Correction" to split SNP voters into two distinct categories and weight them separately, which magically produced figures that were much more No-friendly than other online firms - until the closing weeks of the campaign, when the small SNP group that they were artificially upweighting showed an enormous swing to Yes.  That was why Damian Lyons-Lowe of Survation argued on the evening of September 18th that the campaign had not had much impact on voting intentions, while Peter Kellner standing right next to him was equally insistent that the swing during the campaign had been dramatic.  It's impossible to know who was right, although I do suspect that if YouGov had been picking up a pro-Yes swing several months before polling day rather than a couple of weeks before, they might have changed their methodology again to make that swing look less significant.  Not because they were consciously trying to 'rig' anything, but because Kellner was bringing unionist preconceptions to the table and was much more likely to search for reasons why Yes was being overestimated, rather than the reverse.

Anyway, for today's update of the Poll of Polls, four polls are taken into account: very recent polls from Panelbase and Survation, a poll from YouGov that was conducted in early June, and a poll from Ipsos-Mori that was conducted in early March.  Obviously March is quite a while ago now, but that probably doesn't make too much difference - polling numbers on independence have been relatively stable of late.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 46.0%
No 54.0%

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If you haven't seen it yet, here is the second edition of Phantom Power's groundbreaking Nation documentary series starring Lesley Riddoch.  This time the focus is on Iceland.  Incidentally, did you know that more people speak Welsh than Icelandic?  And yet try telling the people of Iceland that their national language is "useless" and that they should just get on with speaking English like normal people do...

If an outright mandate for independence is sought at a parliamentary election, it should be done at Holyrood 2021, not Westminster 2022

You may have seen that Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp's column in The National today sets out what he believes is the most likely timetable for seeking a mandate on independence.  As you know, I entirely agree with him that the mandate must and will be sought in the near future, and it's great to see that point being made unapologetically by such an influential figure.  However, I do disagree with him about a number of the specifics.

First of all, he thinks Nicola Sturgeon may not renew her request for a Section 30 order until April or May of next year - by which time, of course, Scotland will already have been dragged out of the EU.  (That will be the case unless the exit date is extended by mutual consent, which is theoretically allowed under Article 50 but seems unlikely at the moment.)  I believe it would be a great mistake to let Brexit become an established fact on the ground before any action at all is taken.  The referendum itself may or may not have to wait until after Brexit, but the public should certainly know long before 29th March that an alternative choice is coming.  In any case, Nicola Sturgeon has been consistently saying for the last year that she will make her judgement this autumn, and if she were to backtrack on that, it would play into the London media's preferred (bogus) narrative that a referendum is to all intents and purposes off the table for the foreseeable future.  I do expect the announcement could be delayed until the tail-end of autumn, though, and I would just note in passing that Scotland's national day happens to be 30th November - the final day of meteorological autumn.  (Mind you, that choice of date might be just a little too obvious!)

Secondly, Gordon argues that when the Section 30 request is made, there is only a 50% chance that Theresa May will refuse it.  I would say the chances are more like 99% or higher.  The Tories have put all their eggs in the "now is not the time" basket, and nothing will change on that front until one of two things happen: either a) they suffer the shock of losing a significant number of seats in a Holyrood or Westminster election, or b) Nicola Sturgeon sidesteps the Section 30 problem altogether by calling a vote against Westminster's wishes.  That does not mean, however, that a Section 30 request should not be made - quite the reverse.  But when the moment comes, it should be made abundantly clear to Theresa May that "now is not the time" is not an acceptable answer - we will require either a "yes" or a "no", and if no such answer is received by a specific date, a "no" will be assumed and we will move on to other options.

Thirdly, Gordon believes that if a Section 30 order is refused, the alternative option should not be a consultative referendum.  He thinks there would be a danger of a unionist boycott which would remove legitimacy from the vote.  As I've said before, I don't understand that argument, because a consultative referendum would be an each-way bet - the unionist parties might not boycott it, in which case it becomes binding to all intents and purposes, but if they do, a Yes vote becomes inevitable and the anti-independence mandate of September 2014 will no longer be uncontested.  Either way, it's a major step forward.

Nevertheless, there is of course the possibility that a consultative referendum may not be possible if the Supreme Court strikes the legislation down, in which case we would need the Plan C of using a scheduled election as a de facto referendum.  Which brings me to the fourth of Gordon's points that I disagree with.  He thinks that the Westminster election of 2022 should be used as the mandate vote, and that the 2021 Holyrood election should merely be used to establish a mandate for using the Westminster vote to seek a mandate.  There are all sorts of problems with that idea, not least the fact that we don't even know whether the next general election will take place before or after the Holyrood vote - it could be any time up to 2022, including even this autumn.  But the biggest issue is that a Westminster election will be a British contest in which media coverage will be dominated by British issues, and in which the independence issue will be treated as a colourful sideshow.  It's plainly far more appropriate (and more strategically promising for that matter) to seek a mandate in a Scotland-only election.  Given the first-past-the-post voting system, a Westminster election also carries the significant risk of a contradictory mandate - one where pro-independence parties win the majority of seats but anti-independence parties win a majority of the vote, as happened last year.  The proportional representation system used at Holyrood doesn't eliminate that risk altogether, but it does reduce the risk significantly.  There's no way, for example, that either pro-independence or anti-independence parties could win a majority of seats at Holyrood on less than 40% of the vote.

An independence referendum looks ever more inevitable tonight as Tory rebels FAIL to vote down a hard Brexit

As I understand it, the SNP's strategy on an independence referendum since last summer's "reset" has been to focus all their energies on full-bloodedly and sincerely attempting to secure a soft Brexit for the whole UK, knowing that if they failed, they could then look the public in the eye and say with total honesty: "Every conceivable avenue for remaining in the single market and the customs union as part of the UK has now been exhausted.  Independence is the only game in town from now on."

That means, paradoxically, that their honest endeavours could have been moving them a little further away from their primary political objective.  Both last night and tonight, SNP MPs have taken part in knife-edge votes on the Trade Bill.  If they had been on the winning side in those votes, a softer Brexit would have looked much more likely, and the case for an early independence referendum would have looked considerably less clear-cut.  But courtesy of the very small and eccentric band of hard-core Labour Brexiteers, the most important votes were all lost.  Theresa May's astonishing capitulation to the Rees-Mogg faction yesterday has been confirmed by the Commons, we are hurtling towards either a Hard Brexit or a no deal Brexit, and it looks increasingly hard to see how Nicola Sturgeon will be able to justify to herself (let alone to anyone else) a decision to let the current mandate for an independence referendum expire.

The London media may still be in a state of absolute denial about it, but with a decision about a referendum still promised by the autumn, the day of reckoning cannot be far off now.