Friday, June 4, 2021

Drama as it emerges that Gordon Brown's post-election propaganda poll showed a majority for independence - and found that voters don't think they should have to wait "a generation" to get a choice on their own future

I noticed earlier that the Stack Data poll from shortly after the Holyrood election, which showed the independence question tied at 50-50, still hadn't been added to the Wikipedia list of polls.  So I've just put that right.  The poll was a wide-ranging propaganda survey commissioned by Gordon Brown's anti-independence organisation Our Scottish Future, and the detailed datasets make for fascinating reading.  As you'd expect, the questions were framed in a way that maximised the chances of getting the desired results, but there were a number that backfired.  Most importantly, there was a question that asked respondents to rate their support or opposition to independence on a scale of 0 to 10, and the results were startlingly different to the standard question...

In favour of independence (6-10): 55%
Opposed to independence (0-4): 38%
Neutral (5): 8%

With neutrals stripped out, that implies a split of roughly Yes 59%, No 41%.  In all honesty that surprises me, because similar polls in the past from Survation have often shown lower support for Yes in this format.

Elsewhere, there's exactly 50% support for holding an independence referendum between now and 2026, with an additional 12% who want one held between 2026 and 2031.  Only 18% think there should never be another indyref.  

Short shrift is given to the notion that London should call the shots on the terms of a referendum.  For example, just 12% think the composition of the electorate should be decided by the UK Government.  If combined with a further 27% who think the Scottish and UK Governments should decide the matter jointly, that takes the figure to 39%, but that's still smaller than the 43% who think either the Scottish Parliament or the Scottish Government should decide on its own.  There are similar results on the questions of who should choose the date and the legal terms of the referendum. 

Perhaps most tellingly of all, the idea that the fabled "generation" should pass before there can be another referendum is rejected by respondents.  Only 37% agree with that notion, and 41% disagree.  
Posted by James Kelly at 5:25 PM 3 comments

Take 3: The parliamentary petition on transferring all powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament! (Updated)

UPDATE: Thanks to your help, the petition has received enough signatures to be checked for publication, and no more signatures can be accepted while that is happening, so I've removed the links below.  I'll let you know what happens.

So, as you'll probably remember, I made a second attempt a few days ago at starting a petition on the UK Parliament website calling for all necessary steps to be taken to bring about a Scottish entry at the Eurovision Song Contest.  I completely changed the wording to address the stated reasons for the rejection of the first one, and I identified specific steps that could be taken that are fully within the Westminster parliament's powers.  I suggested on this blog that a second rejection would leave little room for doubt that the people in charge of the petitions process weren't acting in good faith - and that's exactly what has happened.  Ludicrously, the wording of the rejection email this time was identical to the first one, even though the reasons in it quite plainly didn't apply to the new petition.  

What seems to be going on is that they have a stock rejection wording for any petition with "Eurovision" in the title, and are just sending that out regardless of what the petition actually calls for.  That being the case, there's clearly no point in trying to adjust the petition any further, and it's time for a completely new tack.  I'm now attempting to start a petition calling for the wholesale transfer of broadcasting powers to the Scottish Parliament, and I've merely mentioned a Scottish Eurovision entry in passing as one of several possible benefits.

On paper, this petition meets all the conditions for publication, so it should be accepted, but in practice there are no guarantees - I had a look through a number of rejected petitions relating to devolution, and the reasons for rejection were often entirely bogus (ie. "this is a matter for the people of Scotland and Wales", when in reality Westminster retains the absolute power to unilaterally change the devolution settlements without consent, and indeed has repeatedly used that power).  But all we can do is try.  Once again, five signatures will be needed for the petition to be checked (and thank you for your patience in this matter!).

By the way, I know some people will object to this petition on the basis that we shouldn't be trying to 'make devolution work', we should instead be trying to get independence and that way we'll automatically get broadcasting powers.  But the whole point of the exercise is to demonstrate that devolution isn't working and can't work, because no UK government will ever respect the wishes of the people on what powers should be devolved.  If by any chance the petition is published and reaches 10,000 signatures, the government would be required to respond to it.

Petition title: Devolve legislative powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament 

What is being called for: Scotland's devolution settlement should be strengthened by removing broadcasting from the long list of policy areas that are reserved to Westminster. The elected Scottish Parliament should be given the power to restructure the TV and radio landscape in line with the wishes of the people of Scotland. 

More details: Westminster's retention of essentially all powers over Scottish broadcasting is inconsistent with the claim that the Scottish Parliament is "the most powerful devolved parliament in the world". The long-overdue transfer of these powers to the Scottish Parliament would enable BBC Scotland and the Scottish ITV franchises to be reformed to meet the needs of Scottish audiences in terms of drama, news, comedy, a Scottish entry at the Eurovision Song Contest, and coverage of Scottish sporting teams. 

Posted by James Kelly at 1:17 PM 4 comments

Thursday, June 3, 2021

One law for the children of Daddy, and another law for everyone else?

So this is, as far as I can see, a legitimate observation - Jack publicly resigned from the SNP in precisely the same way that the defectors to Alba did, and yet he's been readmitted well within the two year period that he should have been automatically banned for.  It seems that different rules apply (or different interpretations of the rules) if your stated reason for resigning was that the SNP weren't taking a sufficiently extreme stance on identity politics.

I must confess I had no idea before this exchange that Jack harboured such bitter hatred towards me on a personal level.  I've met him twice in real life at 'separatist dinners' and he seemed very pleasant and friendly.  As a result we followed each other on Twitter for a number of years, although he quietly unfollowed me (in fairness he didn't block me) after the 2019 general election.  I'm 70-80% sure the reason he did that was a single tweet I posted listing my personal five favourite results from the election, which amounted to aggravated thoughtcrime because Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath was one of them.  It wasn't top of the list, I hasten to add - East Dunbartonshire was, but it seems that simply celebrating a pro-independence win is deemed a form of "bigotry" these days.  If memory serves me right, Jack had said he would like to campaign for Labour in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and he also gave a pretty strong indication that he wanted Joanna Cherry to lose her seat - which was even more outrageous, given that Ms Cherry, unlike Neale Hanvey, wasn't suspended from the party, and her only credible challenger was the Tory candidate.  

I've belatedly put Jack out of his misery and blocked him, along with a few of his ultra-zealot tag-team chums.

Posted by James Kelly at 4:52 AM 13 comments

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

The UK Government was elected on 44% of the vote, and the Scottish Government was elected on 48% of the vote. Murdo Fraser, naturally, only thinks the latter is a problem.

The Tory MSP Murdo Fraser finishes his latest Scotsman column with some perfectly reasonable suggestions for reforming the Holyrood voting system.  He advocates replacing the two-ballot set-up with a single ballot to eliminate the possibility of gaming the system, scrapping closed lists in favour of open lists that would give the opportunity for voters to choose between individual candidates (that ought to be a no-brainer), and possibly switching wholesale to the Single Transferable Vote system.  But unfortunately his journey to these sensible conclusions, ie. his stated reasons for thinking the system needs to change, involves some of the most mind-bending 'logic' you'll ever see.

Murdo seems to think the fact that the SNP are considering a deal with the Greens will somehow lead to a greater 'distortion' of the way people voted.  But self-evidently the opposite is true - the SNP on their own took 48% of the constituency vote and 40% of the regional list vote, but the SNP and Greens in combination took 49% of the constituency vote and 48% of the regional list vote.  A two-party government would therefore be closer to representing the majority, not further away.  Contrast that with the single-party Tory government at Westminster that just 44% of the electorate voted for.  Crucially, that government claimed a mandate for a hard Brexit even though a significantly bigger share of the popular vote went to parties opposed to leaving the EU on the basis Boris Johnson wanted.  If Murdo wishes to talk about 'distortion' and open-and-shut cases for reform of the voting system, Westminster is the place to start.

Another bogus point Murdo makes is that the pro-indy majority at Holyrood was artificially created by SNP voters gaming the system and switching to the Greens on the list.  That really is absolute rubbish.  There was a pro-indy majority on the popular vote in the regional list ballot - a point that Murdo conveniently glosses over.  It may be theoretically possible that voting for different parties on the two ballots can make pro-indy votes work more efficiently, but what it can't do is increase the overall number of pro-indy votes.  And yet the combined vote share for pro-indy parties was significantly higher on the list ballot than on the constituency ballot.  Murdo needs to reflect on where those extra votes came from. It can't have anything to do with gaming the system.  The most likely explanation is that some people voted for a unionist party on the constituency ballot because their favourite pro-indy party didn't have a candidate in their area.
Posted by James Kelly at 11:07 AM 9 comments

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

How many resignations will it take before the leadership recognise that the problem is not the NEC's critics, it's the NEC itself?

 *  *  *

Ed Coulson works in community radio in Ireland, and he was kind enough to record a sort of masterclass for me when I first started talking about the possibility of a Scot Goes Pop podcast.  By the time I listened to it, I had already recorded the first podcast, and unfortunately I realised that I'd done the complete opposite of a lot of what Ed had advised! However I've taken some of his advice on board for the subsequent episodes.  He got back in touch the other day and was the bearer of bad news - I had said the Scot Goes Popcast was now a 'proper' podcast because the episodes are downloadable from Soundcloud, but it turned out that's nowhere near enough, and I needed to set up an RSS feed and submit it to various podcast directories.

I finally seem to be getting there - the Scot Goes Popcast is now available on Spotify and on Stitcher, and I've also submitted it to a couple of other directories.  I haven't submitted it to Apple yet (which appears to be the most important one) because there were a few extra hoops to jump through, and I was a bit uneasy that they were asking for payment details.  However, I may still do that at some point.

Having gone to all this trouble, and having also taken out a paid subscription on Soundcloud, I kind of feel like I'd better continue with the podcast now, so keep the suggestions for potential guests coming.  My last three invitations all drew a blank, although as one of those was to renowned environmentalist Alistair McConnachie, maybe it was just as well.

Posted by James Kelly at 12:01 PM 18 comments

Sunday, May 30, 2021

Yes vote at 50% in spiffing Stack survey

Thanks to Scottish Skier for pointing me in the direction of an independence poll from a couple of weeks ago that is so obscure that it doesn't even appear on Wikipedia's list of polls.  I might add it to the list myself if nobody else does.  It was conducted by Stack Data, which is a "trading brand of Hanbury Strategy", and thus very much associated with the anti-independence campaign.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Stack Data)

Yes 50%
No 50%

Even with Don't Knows included it's level-pegging (48-48), so this rather helpfully breaks the little sequence of No-majority polls from before the Holyrood election.  The fieldwork dates precede the ComRes / Scotsman poll, which means it was probably the first post-election independence poll.  The bad news, though, is that the ComRes numbers I took from Wikipedia earlier weren't totally accurate - the No figure before Don't Knows were excluded was understated by 2%.
Posted by James Kelly at 9:25 PM 5 comments

Two weeks late, here's some analysis of the first post-election independence poll

I'm not entirely sure how I missed this, but I've just routinely checked the Wikipedia list of independence polls to see if there's anything new, and it turns out there was one a couple of weeks ago - the first post-election independence poll.

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Savanta ComRes / Scotsman)

Yes 47% (+1)
No 53% (-1)

However, it appears that rounding may have disguised a slightly bigger reduction in the No lead, because before Don't Knows are excluded the figures are Yes 43% (+1), No 47% (-3).

I wondered aloud after the election whether the feel-good factor from the SNP's landslide win would produce a boost in the Yes vote, and whether that might put Yes into an outright lead.  On the face of if, the answer to the first question is 'yes' and the answer to the second question is 'no'.  However, I'm just going to be slightly cautious until I see a poll from a firm other than ComRes, who have produced some very weird numbers in the last few months.  They had to retrospectively change some of their headline results due to a calculation error, and of course they were also caught up in the notorious #Matchettgate fake poll scandal - although that was almost certainly Scotland on Sunday's fault, not theirs.

*  *  *

A few housekeeping notes -

* I received an email about a week or ten days ago saying nine more people had donated to the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser and between them had contributed around £300.  That didn't make any sense, because I haven't been promoting the fundraiser for a few weeks (I thought I'd better wait until the election was out of the way), and there's no sign of the donations on the crowdfunder page.  It was probably just a rogue email, but if anyone did donate at around that time, let me know so I can check for any discrepancies.

* I've finally found the setting on Soundcloud that makes the Scot Goes Pop podcasts "proper" downloadable podcasts.  So if you'd like to download any of the nine episodes so far, you can now do so HERE.  (Go to an individual podcast, and look for a drop-down menu with a 'download' option.  It appears to only be there on the desktop version of the site, unless I'm still missing something.)

* For ages now, people who post Scot Goes Pop posts on Facebook have complained about bogus warnings of graphic or sensitive content.  Someone suggested to me that it may be my profile photo that's causing the problem, because the bots may be misinterpreting my raised finger as something else.  So when I have a moment, I'll try changing the photo to see if it makes any difference.
Posted by James Kelly at 11:59 AM 11 comments

Friday, May 28, 2021

"It's the blog that everyone's talking about!", no. 5492

Here's a puzzle.  The SNP were, by all accounts, deeply concerned about the arrival of the Alba Party - and they were self-evidently right to be, given the scale of defections from both MPs and councillors.  There was apparently considerable relief when it became clear that Alba were averaging around 2% of the vote, below the level at which they were likely to win any seats.  But wouldn't you think the SNP would then want to finish the job, and ensure they didn't have to worry about Alba anymore?  Instead, every comment uttered about Alba by certain key SNP parliamentarians since the election seems to have been perfectly callibrated to keep the new party going as a potential thorn in the SNP's side.  And if that appears to make no sense, it's because it doesn't.  Hatred of the people involved in Alba has caused the SNP leadership to set aside all strategic good sense.

It would have been perfectly possible to make Alba go away after the election.  New parties that suffer electoral setbacks on their first outing are vulnerable to total collapse, as Change UK demonstrated two years ago.  But Change UK ceased to exist largely because a number of the key players found an alternative home in the Liberal Democrats.  If the SNP wanted a similar exodus from Alba that would eventually lead to the party ceasing to be viable, the way to achieve that would have been to smother Alba with kindness.  They could have said "we have shared values and objectives, your poor result gives us no pleasure, our door remains open to you". Instead the SNP have treated Alba members as scum who have no place in civilised society, let alone the independence movement.  The latest manifestation of that is Pete Wishart's new "blog that everyone's talking about" (sic), which gloats at considerable length about Alba's low vote share and leaves little room for doubt that he viscerally despises Alba members.  To use Ian Davidson's immortal words, the likes of Wishart, Stewart McDonald and Kirsty Blackman want to spend their time "bayonetting the wounded" rather than healing the rift.  That destructive attitude is producing the natural and rational response: "if we have no home in the SNP, then our home is Alba, and we're going to make it work".

The point Alba-haters are missing is this: to try to jump from 2% of the vote to 5% is not really all that ambitious, and that's all Alba really need to do at this stage.  If they could get 5% of the first preference vote in the local elections (or perhaps even 4%), that would be enough to build up some credibility as a serious player as long as they get a few councillors elected as well.  And given that some of their candidates will be incumbents who have had time to build up a personal vote, that's not beyond the bounds of possibility.  With a half-decent local election result, they would then force their way into the conversation about which parties are entitled to TV and radio coverage under Ofcom regulations.  The SNP would constantly have to worry about losing the votes of the most radical independence supporters, in a way they simply haven't in the past.  That's the scenario Wishart's own handiwork could be helping to bring about.

Incidentally, because Wishart lists a series of largely spurious "reasons" for Alba's setback, it's worth pointing out one much better reason that was discussed at length before the election but not so much afterwards - the Electoral Commission's refusal to allow the Alba logo or description to appear on the ballot paper.  A lot of people were struck by how hard it was to find Alba, even though they were close to the top - they really didn't stand out at all.  That's where it might have been an advantage to have a "Ronseal" name like Independence for Scotland - because the name itself would have doubled as the description.  I'm not suggesting that the Electoral Commission's decision swung the balance between winning seats and not winning seats, but I do think it may have reduced Alba's vote share somewhat.

As for Alex Salmond's future, I'm just going to wait and see what he decides - there's no better political tactician than him, and whatever decision he makes will probably be the right one for the party.  I can see the argument that a new leader would remove the 'distraction' of every single BBC interview being an attempt to rerun the trial, but I think there's a strong counterargument as well - the grass doesn't always turn out to be greener on the other side.  Every time Nigel Farage has stepped down as leader of UKIP or the Brexit Party, that's always been followed by a slump, because Farage was not only the party's main electoral asset, he was also the glue that kept the whole outfit together.  Although Alba is a very different party from UKIP, and Alex Salmond is a very different politician from Nigel Farage, the same principle could apply.

That said, Alba are blessed in having two MPs (including a former Justice Secretary) as credible alternative leaders, so it's not impossible that a change at the top could work out - but I hope it's all thought through very carefully before any rash decisions are made.
Posted by James Kelly at 1:05 PM 33 comments

Parliamentary petition for a Scottish Eurovision entry, Take 2: updated

UPDATE: Thanks again for your help - the five signatures necessary for the petition to be checked for publication have been received.  No more signatures can be accepted while it's still being checked, so I've removed the links below, and I'll keep you updated.

Unsurprisingly, the UK Parliament petitions website have rejected my proposal for a petition calling for a Scottish Eurovision entry, but what did surprise me was that they took the trouble to give me specific reasons for the rejection.  That gives me the opportunity to make a second attempt using new wording that removes any basis for their objections.  I'm not going to go round in circles with this forever, but I think it's worth having at least one more go - either the petition will be approved this time, or they'll come back with a whole series of new objections which will leave little room for doubt that they're not acting in good faith.

The main issue they identified is that under the BBC Charter, the government cannot interfere with BBC managerial independence - but there's more than a touch of sophistry in that line of argument, because petitions on the website can call on either parliament or the government to take action, and it should have been abundantly clear from my deliberate use of the word "legislate" that it was parliament I had in mind, and not the government.  Under the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, parliament has unlimited power to undo or change legislation governing the BBC as it sees fit.  I've made that point explicit rather than implicit in the new petition wording.  

There was also a reference in the rejection to Eurovision being a matter for the BBC "and the organisers", so to avoid the European Broadcasting Union's jurisdiction being the next excuse, I've made clear that a Scottish entry should merely be a condition of any BBC involvement in the contest.  (In the real world it's highly unlikely the EBU would resist any proposal for a Scottish entry from the BBC, which is one of the contest's major funders.) 

The main problem with having to waste space on these legalistic clarifications is that there's a strict character limit, which hasn't left me much room to actually make the case for a Scottish Eurovision entry, which after all is what the petition is actually about.  However, there wasn't really much option if I wanted any chance of the petition being approved.  To get it checked for publication, I'll need at least five people to sign once again.

Petition title: Reform the BBC Charter to open the way for a Scottish entry at the Eurovision 

What is being requested: The UK Parliament has unlimited legislative powers on domestic matters, including the power to alter or revoke the BBC Charter, and even to disregard the principle of BBC managerial independence if it so chooses. It should use those vast powers to maximise the chances of a Scottish Eurovision entry. 

More details: The UK Parliament boasts of its unlimited sovereignty on domestic affairs, including for example the ability to unilaterally change the Scottish devolution settlement without Scotland's consent. There can therefore be no credible dispute that parliamentary sovereignty extends to legislation governing the BBC. That legislation should be reformed to require the BBC to make separate Scottish representation a condition of any BBC involvement with cultural competitions such as the Eurovision. 
Posted by James Kelly at 9:00 AM 0 comments

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Here's why the independence referendum must take place before the next UK general election

This was the result of the 2017 UK general election in Scotland...

Vote share:

SNP 37%
Conservatives 29%
Labour 27%
Liberal Democrats 7%

Seats:

SNP 35
Conservatives 13
Labour 7
Liberal Democrats 4

By any standards that was an exceptionally good result for the SNP - they took 59% of the seats in Scotland, higher than the percentage of seats Mrs Thatcher won across the UK in her 1987 landslide.  Their 37% vote share was identical to the winning UK-wide vote share for David Cameron in 2015 that paved the way for the EU referendum, and it was slightly higher than the 36% share Cameron took in his first election win in 2010, and the 35% won by Tony Blair in his third victory in 2005.

And yet the result was portrayed by the media as an unmitigated disaster for the independence movement.  Midway through the BBC results programme, the former President of YouGov, Peter Kellner, declared that independence was "dead" - a ludicrous claim that went completely unchallenged.  The general consensus among journalists was that the independence referendum that Nicola Sturgeon had only just announced was now a non-starter, and depressingly the SNP leadership themselves seemed all too eager to buy into that narrative.

We were fortunate to get a second chance in 2019, and most of the losses the SNP suffered in 2017 were reversed.  But we mustn't squander that good fortune by allowing another UK general election to happen before an independence referendum.  The 2017 experience shows that the SNP will be judged by an absurdly high standard in Westminster elections that are 'away fixtures' for them due to their exclusion from much of the TV coverage.  If they fail to meet that standard, momentum will drain away and it could be much harder to hold a referendum, let alone win it.

The obvious lesson: the independence referendum must by held by autumn 2023 at the absolute latest, and ideally by autumn 2022 in case Boris Johnson cuts and runs with an early election in May 2023.  Unfortunately, though, a suspicion is beginning to grow that the SNP plan to deal with the 'once in a generation' jibe by actually waiting for a generation.
Posted by James Kelly at 10:55 AM 25 comments
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