Swing against the unionist parties in Murdostoun by-election

I've lived in North Lanarkshire all my life (or rather in places that the Tories creatively reimagined as North Lanarkshire as part of their botched mid-90s gerrymandering effort), but I must admit I didn't have a clue where Murdostoun ward is until I looked it up for the purposes of this blogpost.  It's unusual in that it's a central belt ward in which an independent candidate topped the poll in the last two rounds of local elections.  That pattern continued in yesterday's by-election, and the winning candidate had exactly the same name as before - because he's the son of the late Councillor Robert McKendrick, whose untimely death caused the vacancy.

Murdostoun by-election result (24th June 2021):

Independent - McKendrick: 41.3% (n/a)

SNP: 24.3% (-3.3)

Labour: 16.9% (-6.8)

Independent - Arthur: 8.0% (+5.6)

Conservatives: 7.2% (-5.7)

Greens: 1.7% (n/a)

Independence for Scotland: 0.4% (n/a)

Reform UK: 0.2% (n/a)

I haven't given a percentage change for Mr McKendrick because he's technically a new candidate, but he increased his father's vote share from four years ago by a whopping 13.7%.

A few people on Twitter are suggesting this is a terrible result for the SNP, but I think that's a bit of a stretch - there were clearly unusual local and personal factors in play.  The SNP's vote dropped by less than their two main party political rivals, ie. Labour and the Tories - or to put it another way, there was a net swing from Labour to SNP and from Tory to SNP.  So it's not too bad an outcome, really.  The SNP candidate was Julia Stachurska, who is a New Scot (I presume she's from Poland if her surname is any guide), so even in defeat, that sends out a strong message about the ongoing electoral rights of EU citizens in Scotland.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the first time Independence for Scotland have actually stood in an election, because of course they withdrew their planned candidates from the Holyrood election last month and backed Alba instead.  I must say I can't really understand why they're continuing in existence, given that they're in total agreement with Alba on their main policy preoccupations (ie. greater urgency on independence and women's sex-based rights).  I wonder if this result will give them pause for thought, because it's markedly worse than Alba's supposedly 'disastrous' result a few weeks ago.  It does answer one question I had, though - I thought the 'Ronseal' name of Independence for Scotland might in itself attract a few votes, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

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You can catch up with the latest episode of the Scot Goes Popcast HERE.

Will identity politics zealotry on both sides scupper the SNP-Green deal?

First of all, thanks for all the kind words about the podcast with Maggie McNeill the other day.  It turned out to be extremely timely, because as you may have seen in the Scotsman today, the SNP's plans to introduce the Nordic model on prostitution law may end up scuppering the proposed deal between the SNP and the Greens on a programme for government. 155 members of the Green party have written an open letter to Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, citing the Nordic model as one of the main reasons for not pushing ahead with a deal.  If you'd like to learn more about why there is such strong opposition to the Nordic model, you can catch up with the podcast HERE.

But it won't surprise you to hear that the other main objection to a deal raised in the letter is the SNP's supposed "transphobia".  It's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry about this, because whatever position you take on the trans debate, it's beyond all credible dispute that the SNP leadership have come down decisively on the side of trans activism. To still accuse them of transphobia, even after Nicola Sturgeon's notorious "hostage video", even after the treatment of Joanna Cherry, smacks of zealotry and extremism. What more are they supposed to do?  Are they supposed to expel or hound out of the party every single SNP member that holds gender critical views?  Incredibly, it appears the answer is yes.  Dare I say it, some Green members seem to be liberally partaking of the parfum d'obsession.

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Over the last 24 hours or so, I've taken a complete break from moderating comments on this blog - I haven't even read the comments that have come through to my inbox, so apologies if you're innocently caught up in this and are still waiting for your comment to be approved.  I've once again reached saturation point with the whole thing, this time because one of our long-term regular commenters has been having a bit of a meltdown on the basis that not all of his comments have been approved quickly enough for his liking.  The nadir was reached a few days ago when he attempted to post an epic rant that literally accused me of being Stuart Campbell (!).  He also sent me a long email a week or two back that was chummy in tone, but that basically tried to dictate to me what my moderation policy should be - and that just ain't on.  Anyone is welcome to post comments here (well, apart from two or three specific individuals who I've told are not welcome), but whether comments are approved or not is entirely at my discretion.  That's a feature, not a bug.  

I probably would have responded to the email eventually, but finding the time became a bit tricky because the same person continued to attempt to post multiple War and Peace length diatribes every day, and I had to wade through those and decide what to do about them.  To give you a general rule of thumb about the sort of comments that are at risk of not getting through, obviously I have to be careful about anything that may cause legal problems or that contains extreme swearing.  But there's a broader category of comments that waste my time in some way or another, because the only way I can realistically publish them is if I take the time to reply.  For example, personal attacks on me, attempts to troll me, or determined attempts to call into question the factual basis of the blogpost that is being commented on.  It's one thing if stuff like that appears elsewhere on the internet, but if I allow it to appear here without any rebuttal, that can be taken (wrongly) as tacit acceptance on my part that the comments are valid.  So a lot depends on whether I have the time to reply at any given moment, and if I don't, it's not unusual for me to keep a comment in the moderation queue in the hope that I'll have time later on.  But obviously if the comment contains paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of trolling or attacks, there's a much greater likelihood that I'll never have enough time.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about.  I recently wrote a blogpost that pointed out that the SNP had asked voters to use the 2017 Westminster general election to give them a "triple lock" mandate for an independence referendum. The commenter in question posted a long comment - which I reluctantly approved - that falsely claimed that the SNP manifesto did not mention anything about a triple lock mandate, and that he would not have voted SNP if it had.  I politely told him to read the manifesto again - and he responded with another epic comment insisting that he had checked the manifesto and that the words weren't there.  He supplied lengthy quotes as supposed 'proof'.

Here's the thing, though: I actually went to the SNP's manifesto launch for the 2017 election in Perth.  Everyone who attended was given a free copy of the manifesto, and I clearly remember reading the triple lock section while I was actually sitting there.  I didn't have time to set the commenter straight by searching for the manifesto and trawling through it to find the relevant passage, but nevertheless I knew for a fact that he was misleading people.  Was I really supposed to approve, without rebuttal,  a comment that a) was factually inaccurate and b) would have falsely left me looking either deluded or like a liar?  For the record, here's what the 2017 manifesto actually said - 

"Last year’s Holyrood election delivered the democratic mandate for an independence referendum. The recent vote of Scotland’s national Parliament has underlined that mandate. If the SNP wins a majority of Scottish seats in this election, that would complete a triple lock..."

However, by far the biggest problem in recent days has been the sustained attempt to propagandise away the legitimate concerns about the £600,000 that was donated to the SNP's "ring-fenced indyref fund" and that mostly appears to have been spent on other things.  A recurring theme has been "if the police decide to take no action, that means the allegations are baseless and those who have made them must apologise".  My tolerance for that kind of nonsense is practically zero at this stage.  Not all breaches of trust reach the threshold for criminality - indeed the vast majority don't.  What the police do or don't do is essentially irrelevant to the question of whether members' trust has been betrayed in this case.

Scot Goes Popcast with guest Maggie McNeill, speaking about her opposition to the Nordic Model on prostitution law

A few months back there was yet another Holyrood consultation about the idea of introducing the Nordic model on prostitution law - but this one was a bit different from the previous efforts, because it was initiated by the government itself.  Two or three years ago, the SNP changed its policy on prostitution, which it now regards as a form of 'gendered violence against women' that can be tackled by 'challenging men's demand for paid sex' - in other words by criminalising the clients of sex workers and by (theoretically) decriminalising sex workers themselves.  That's the Nordic Model in a nutshell, although for presentational reasons it's instead being referred to as a new 'Scottish Model'.  However, the dynamic may have changed again very recently due to the subtle realignment in Scottish politics - some of the people who were probably most enthusiastic about a change in the law have defected to Alba because of the trans issue, while the ascendancy of people like Rhiannon Spear, and the SNP's nascent alliance with the Greens, should ensure that the case against the Nordic Model at least gets some sort of hearing.  The Greens, as I understand it, favour full decriminalisation of prostitution.

Sex workers themselves tend to be viscerally opposed to the Nordic Model, so to find out why, I spoke to Maggie McNeill for the latest episode of the Scot Goes Popcast.  Maggie has several decades of experience as a sex worker and now writes a popular blog called The Honest Courtesan, in which she has discussed the flaws of the Nordic Model at considerable length.  In the podcast she explains...

* That the Nordic Model deprives women of agency and is thus incompatible with feminism.

* That the Nordic Model has its origins in racist impulses.

* That she cannot relate to the idea that she has experienced "violence against women" by being a sex worker.

* That the supposed "decriminalisation" of selling sex as part of the Nordic Model does not in fact protect women from prosecution in practice.

* That she does not believe the world would be a better place if prostitution is eradicated, even if that were possible.

* That the only practical way of reducing the number of women involved in sex work is not by criminalising their clients, but instead by tackling poverty, and specifically by introducing a Universal Basic Income.

* That Scotland should take the opposite route from the Nordic Model by instead embracing the New Zealand Model of full decriminalisation.

You can listen to the podcast via the embedded player below, via the direct link to the Soundcloud file HERE, or on either Stitcher or Spotify.

James Kelly · Scot Goes Popcast Episode 10: Maggie McNeill

You can also catch up with previous episodes of the Popcast -

Episode 1: Yvonne Ridley

Episode 2: Tim Rideout

Episode 3: Denise Findlay

Episode 4: Ellen Höfer

Episode 5: Len Pennie (Miss PunnyPennie)

Episode 6: Alex Salmond

Episode 7: Chris McEleny

Episode 8: Election Results

Episode 9: Eurovision 2021

The echoes and ghosts of 2017

Although I always want the Tories to lose every election they fight, I had a sense of foreboding last night when it became clear the Liberal Democrats had unexpectedly won the Chesham and Amersham by-election, because the result has a potential 'game-changer' feel about it.  Until now, the Lib Dems had been beginning to look like an irrelevance, and that suited the SNP down to the ground, both electorally and in the sense of staking their claim to be treated by the media as their status as the third largest party in the Commons would warrant.  We know from the experience of the 2017-19 parliament that the BBC and others will leap on any signs of Lib Dem recovery as an excuse to get back into the comfort zone of pretending that the UK has a three-party system - with the Lib Dems as the third party.

The by-election result can perhaps be seen as the Tories' equivalent of what happened to the SNP in 2017 - the moment it becomes clear that a slightly unnatural coalition of support can't hold together forever.  In 2015 the SNP had made dramatic inroads into former Labour heartlands by becoming the undisputed party of Yes voters - and yet they hadn't paid a corresponding penalty in the No-voting areas they had held for decades, like Moray.  2017 was the inevitable belatedly catching up with them, and by the same token the Tories can't really expect to continue to have a clear run in seats like Chesham and Amersham where voters are unlikely to approve of the nationalistic, illiberal and populist message that demolished the Red Wall.  The SNP reacted to their 2017 setback by completely losing their nerve and putting their objectives firmly on the backburner (it appeared that losing Moray was harder for them to bear than losing the prospect of independence) - my guess is the Tories will not make the same mistake.

To return to the subject of the controversy over the "missing £600,000" of donations that the SNP were supposed to have ring-fenced to fight an indyref campaign, in a sense that's the chickens coming home to roost after the strategic error of 2017.  The SNP paid a lot of heed in the aftermath of the 2017 election to the voters that had lost them seats to the Tories - but they forgot to pay heed to pro-independence voters who had, after all, just won them the election on the specific basis that such an outcome would constitute a "triple-lock mandate" for a referendum.  They also paid no attention to the wishes of the people who had donated so generously to the referendum campaign fund - indeed they very cynically did the opposite by scrapping the referendum and spending the money on other things (nobody seems to know quite what).  Exactly the same principle applies to the SNP's core support as it does to SNP-Tory floating voters in Banffshire or wherever - if you take those people for granted, eventually there'll be a penalty to be paid, even if it takes a while to feed through.

The simplest way to sort out this mess is simply to name the date for the independence referendum, even if it's in 2022 or 2023.  People won't mind quite so much about misused/squandered cash if we get back on track for the goal that cash was raised for.  Indeed, if a referendum was called, it would probably be quite easy and quick to raise another £600,000.  Everyone would be a winner - well, apart from the unionist parties.

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Have you signed our parliamentary petition calling for devolution of powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament? If you haven't yet, you can do so HERE.

The SNP need to understand that independence supporters will not wait forever

A couple of recent comment pieces in The National have caught my eye.  First of all, and most importantly, there's David Pratt's much-praised article today expressing his disquiet that the SNP government have made no progress on independence since their election win last month.  This is highly significant, because David is not one of the usual suspects who have been criticising the SNP for inaction for many years - quite the reverse, in fact.  As I've said a number of times, I genuinely don't know whether the SNP leadership are serious about holding a referendum in this parliamentary term, or whether they're stringing us along.  But if by any chance it's the latter, David's piece should serve as a wake-up call.  It must be easy for them to assume that independence supporters who loyally accepted the logic for delay in 2017, and then again in 2019, and then again in 2021, will always accept the logic for yet more and more delay. Perhaps some will, but most will have a tipping-point where 'good reasons' start to look like excuses.  

My suspicion is that's why certain people in the SNP were so insistent that Alba's setback in the election had to mean the final end for the party and that it should "never receive any coverage ever again".  If Alba survives indefinitely, as it now looks like it may do, it will always be a tempting alternative home for those who reach their own personal tipping-point and decide the SNP aren't serious about independence. The number of those people will just keep growing and growing - until and unless the SNP actually start taking some action.  We were told that three SNP MSPs were ready to defect to Alba after the election if Alex Salmond had been elected.  While it may now be unlikely for them to take that step in the short term, it's far from unthinkable in the medium term, especially if Alba can rebuild some credibility in the local elections next May.

Is the SNP's current excuse for delay good enough or convincing enough? We can see with our own eyes that it wouldn't be impossible to hold a referendum, even right now - we've just held a national election as scheduled, and we're in the middle of co-hosting one of the biggest sporting events in the world.  However, there's a case to be made that it's far from ideal to go ahead with a referendum while the virus is still circulating widely and while the vaccination drive has not yet been completed.  That's fine, but those factors will not apply for much longer anyway.  What is totally indefensible is to argue that there will have to be more delay even once the virus is tamed, because "Scotland must rebuild before holding a referendum". You can guarantee that the rest of the world, including Westminster, will not be putting its politics on hold for several years.  Clement Attlee did not say that creating the welfare state had to wait until Britain had recovered from the war - instead he knew the welfare state was essential to the recovery.

(Note: Stephen Paton specifies preferred pronouns of 'they' and 'them', so out of basic courtesy - not because of diktat from the thought police - I am doing my best to respect Stephen's wishes.  Hence the odd-looking use of language in the remainder of this blogpost.)

Elsewhere, Stephen Paton is continuing to liberally apply the parfum d'obsession with yet another rant about how much they hate Alba.  Which begs the obvious question: if Alba are so "irrelevant", why the need to keep stamping on them week after week? Ostensibly Stephen's article is a call for pluralism within the Yes movement, and yet the subtext is entirely the opposite - that Alba (a moderate, centre-left, social democratic party, let's not forget) should somehow be treated as the equivalent of Siol nan Gaidheal, with no place in the movement whatsoever.  This is of course consistent with the "no debate" line taken by Stephen's side of the debate (ironically) about trans rights.

It's perhaps slightly amusing that people are reacting to Stephen's piece as if they're ('they' meaning Stephen) speaking on behalf of the SNP - because Stephen is, as I understand it, a Green voter.  They even made a video in the run-up to the 2016 election calling for people to game the system by voting against the SNP on the list, in much the same way that Alba advocated this year.

Once again, Stephen trots out the tired old line about Alex Salmond being "the most unpopular politician in Scotland". We should really start calling this nonsense out, because there's simply no evidence to support it.  There are 129 MSPs, 59 Scottish MPs, over one thousand councillors, and many other politicians who do not currently hold elected office.  Stephen is implying that there is polling evidence to suggest that Mr Salmond is less popular than every single one of those individuals - well, if that evidence exists, by all means let's see it.  So far I've only seen polls comparing him to around half a dozen fellow politicians.

Stephen also claims that Scotland is "on the cusp" of independence and that there's no need for anyone to look to Alba when the Yes movement is already so "buoyant". Which takes me back to where I started this blogpost.  Get back to us, Stephen, when the SNP have actually done something to justify the belief that independence might be imminent.

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Have you signed our parliamentary petition calling for devolution of powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament? If you haven't yet, you can do so HERE.

Important message for email subscribers to Scot Goes Pop

I've been meaning to mention this for a while - the email subscription option that is automatically built into blogs on the Blogger platform is being discontinued in July.  In all honesty, I didn't think that was going to make all that much difference to Scot Goes Pop, because I assumed there were only a small number of email subscribers.  In general the only reason I remember there are any at all is that every few months, I get an irate email saying "YOU'RE A DISGRACE, KELLY, PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST", and I say "why not just unsubscribe?", and they say "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT?", and I say "there's a link at the bottom of each email" and they say "OH RIGHT DIDN'T NOTICE".

Anyway, I've just checked, and to my astonishment it turns out there are currently 1,422 email subscribers to Scot Goes Pop.  So it looks like this could be much more of an inconvenience to people than I initially realised.  In theory I have the option of exporting the entire mailing list to another service, and I received a marketing email this morning urging me to do that - although whether the firm being advertised is really the best option, I've no idea.  I think what would happen is that everyone on the list would be sent a confirmation email asking whether they wish to continue with the new service or not.

If anyone has any strong feelings about the best way forward, let me know - I'll have to make a decision within the next couple of weeks.

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Have you signed our parliamentary petition calling for devolution of powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament? If you haven't yet, you can do so HERE.

Mebyon Kernow on the up

As the eyes of the world have been on Cornwall over the last few days, this might be a good moment to mention that the Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow, a sister party of both the SNP and Plaid Cymru, did reasonably well in the elections to Cornwall Council last month - it increased both its vote share and its number of seats.

Popular vote:

Conservatives 37.9% (+2.7)

Liberal Democrats 18.5% (-11.3)

Independents 16.3% (-4.0)

Labour 11.3% (+3.3)

Greens 9.1% (+7.1)

Mebyon Kernow 5.3% (+2.0)

Seats:

Conservatives 47 (+1)

Independents 16 (-14)

Liberal Democrats 13 (-25)

Mebyon Kernow 5 (+1)

Labour 5 (-)

Greens 1 (-)

It's not easy for a minority party to win multiple seats under first-past-the-post, and the increase from four to five is even better than it looks because the overall number of seats on the council was drastically reduced for this election.  Sadly, though, in an overall sense the result was probably a setback for Cornish autonomy, because the Tories took control of the council with an overall majority.  The previous council leader had been an independent, and was on record as regarding Cornwall as a Celtic nation worthy of Scottish/Welsh-style devolution.  It's hard to imagine a Tory administration taking a similar attitude.

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Have you signed our parliamentary petition calling for devolution of powers over broadcasting to the Scottish Parliament? If you haven't yet, you can do so HERE.

All systems go: PLEASE SIGN the parliamentary petition calling for powers over broadcasting to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament

My persistence (and your persistence) has finally paid off - at the third attempt, I've managed to get a petition published on the UK Parliament website.  It calls for the full devolution of broadcasting powers to the Scottish Parliament, and also incorporates my original call for a Scottish entry at the Eurovision Song Contest.  This is a very timely moment to be considering the question of where decisions relating to broadcasting should be made, because the Westminster power-grab is currently being replicated within the BBC's own internal structures - control over BBC Scotland's studios is being seized by London, and since BBC Scotland is but a mere branch office, there's not a damn thing they can do about it.

The new Director-General of the BBC, Tim Davie, is a former Tory politician, and his political views have quite clearly not changed one iota - his notion of "addressing BBC bias" is, ludicrously, to make the corporation even more right-wing and British nationalist.  The chances of it reflecting on, let alone addressing, the catastrophic mistakes it made during the 2014 independence referendum, are now even more remote.

Before starting this petition, I did an internet search for "devolution of broadcasting" and discovered to my surprise that it's recently been a much more live topic in Wales than in Scotland.  There's a hilarious article from last year in which the director of BBC Wales declares himself to be "neutral" on transferring powers from London to Cardiff but then lists umpteen sneering reasons why it shouldn't happen, and not a single reason why it should.  If that's what "neutrality" looks like, the mind boggles as to what he'd be saying if he was opposed to the idea!

If the petition reaches 10,000 signatures, the UK Government will be required to respond to it.  If it reaches 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in the Commons.  (I believe it depends mainly on whether there's been a recent parliamentary debate on the subject, and off the top of my head I've no idea whether that's the case.) To reach those target figures will require a lot more than simply promoting the petition on this blog, so if this is a subject you feel strongly about, please share the petition on social media and let your friends and family know about it.

To view and sign the petition, please click HERE.  As the new Eurovision bigwig would say: you're good to go.  (Incidentally, if you were one of the 21 people who signed on Friday before the petition was checked for publication, your signature already counts.)

No, polls do not show "consistent" support for self-ID - indeed the weight of evidence is that there is overwhelming opposition to the principle of self-ID

A step forward.

It gives me the chance to ask whether @JamesKelly would be able and willing to critique this selection of public opinion. (I see that it features our old friends SavantaComRes.)https://t.co/3qaiON6m9P

— Alba Loun (@LounAlba) June 9, 2021

I'm not sure there's much to say about that - if I was an unwitting member of the public and was asked that question, I would say "yes", and I wouldn't mean by that answer what Stephen Paton wants me to mean. Most people are unaware of the kitchen sink definition of transphobia.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 9, 2021

The article linked above has plenty more polling data that backs up my point. pic.twitter.com/2YLAn3dnL9

— Stephen Paton ☀️ (@stephenpaton134) June 9, 2021

Oh I see, it's not actually a poll, it's just a selective pick-and-mix of individual results that suit you from a variety of different polls. Anyone can play that game - there are plenty enough results out there that could be woven to tell the opposite story.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 9, 2021

It's been pretty consistent over the past few years that polling data (and for that matter, public consultations) has returned results showing that the majority of women are supportive of trans rights, across polling companies.

— Stephen Paton ☀️ (@stephenpaton134) June 9, 2021

Well, that's only true if you have a more realistic definition of "trans rights" than I suspect you actually do. On the more kitchen sink definition, there's no consistency, and as you know there have been polls showing overwhelming majorities in the opposite direction.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 9, 2021

By 'trans rights', I mean exactly that. Support for self-id. Support for access to single-sex spaces, etc. Supported by the majority. Repeatedly.

— Stephen Paton ☀️ (@stephenpaton134) June 9, 2021

Well, on that basis your statement is untrue. There's no consistency in polls on that subject.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 9, 2021

The data would disagree with you on that front.

— Stephen Paton ☀️ (@stephenpaton134) June 9, 2021

Sigh. I don't begrudge people using the block function because I do it myself, but I defy anyone to read the above thread and say that I was being offensive. I was robust but not rude, and simply stated verifiable facts. Stephen Paton has blocked me as a result.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 9, 2021

Note: Stephen gives preferred pronouns of they/them, so out of basic courtesy (not because of diktat from the thought police) I'm going to do my best to use those, although I do feel the need to explain what I'm doing, because it would otherwise look like a very odd use of vocabulary. I'm also inclined to wonder aloud whether there's an issue with blocking people on Twitter and still expecting them to use the pronouns you have listed on your Twitter profile.

I suspect the reason Stephen chose that particular moment to block me was because they knew where the conversation was inexorably heading otherwise - they would have asked me to supply proof that the polling evidence was not consistent, and it would have taken me about five seconds to do that.  Here, for example, is a YouGov poll from 2018, with a neutrally-worded question on self-ID commissioned by Pink News (not exactly a hotbed of 'TERF'-ism).

Do you think a person should or should not have to obtain a doctor's approval to change their legal gender on official documentation (e.g. birth certificate, passport)? 

Should have to obtain a doctor's approval: 58% 

Should not have to obtain a doctor's approval: 18% 

That's pretty much the end of the discussion right there - the result drives a coach and horses through Stephen's claim that there is consistent support for self-ID across polls and across polling firms.  Indeed, the result is clear-cut and robust enough to suggest that there is in fact overwhelming opposition to the principle of self-ID.  And contrary to Stephen's implication, gender makes no difference - the majority among female respondents is actually very slightly bigger than among male respondents.

Elsewhere, there are any number of Panelbase polls commissioned by Wings Over Scotland showing similarly huge opposition to self-ID.  Stephen would doubtless query the wording of those questions, and he might even be justified in doing so - but the snag is that the same problem applies to many of the polls purporting to show support for self-ID.  You might remember a ComRes poll from a few months ago that was leaped on by Mark McGeoghegan (not exactly a neutral analyst on this subject, given that he has "he/him" on his own profile) as absolute proof that Scotland has no truck with 'transphobia' - but the wording was just as leading as anything Wings could ever come up with.  It presented self-ID as a minor, tidying-up, administrative exercise, something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with.

The bottom line is that Stephen is so steeped in this subject that they must be aware of the polling evidence that doesn't paint a picture that they're at all comfortable with - so why are they trying to convince people that those polls don't exist and never existed?  

Craig Murray should be receiving an award for services to journalism, not going to prison

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and one of Scotland's leading pro-independence bloggers, was today denied leave to appeal over his conviction for...well, for blogging, and his eight month jail sentence.  The ostensible reason he will be sent to prison is the harm allegedly caused by threatening the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond trial.  I've even seen it being argued on Twitter that it's entirely appropriate to treat Craig as the equivalent of a violent offender and to put his life at risk (he has significant health problems) because the harm caused to the women in question was on a par with a violent offence.

The most obvious response to that point is that it hasn't actually been established that any harm whatsoever has been caused to the women - no-one has credibly demonstrated that identification occurred as a result of anything Craig wrote.  But some would go further and ask why the law is taking such punitive steps to protect the women at all, given that the jury in the Salmond trial didn't - or so the theory goes - believe their claims.  The reality, of course, is that the jury weren't faced with a binary choice between "the defendant committed the crimes" and "the women are perjurers".  They were simply asked to decide whether the charges had been proved beyond reasonable doubt, which means that the acquittal verdicts can cover a spectrum of meanings, of which the possibility that the complainers lied is only one.  It's therefore not a contradiction to say that Alex Salmond is innocent in the eyes of the law and also that his accusers are not perjurers in the eyes of the law - which by extension suggests that it's not necessarily wrong for the latter to continue to enjoy some protection.

But to me the real question here is why that protection is so one-sided.  As Alex Salmond is innocent, why isn't the law extending him some protection, given that it's beyond all reasonable dispute that media reporting of the trial caused infinitely more harm to his own reputation than it did to the reputation of his accusers?  That's precisely the problem that Craig Murray's coverage of the trial was intended to address.  It's been pointed out by a number of people that if it hadn't been for Craig's reporting of the defence evidence, they would have been none the wiser as to why Mr Salmond was actually acquitted.  The coverage would have consisted of blanket reporting of the prosecution evidence, followed by a seemingly inexplicable not guilty verdict, thus creating the bogus impression that "he got off on a technicality" or whatever.  Indeed, that's exactly the impression that anyone who didn't read Craig's blog was left with.

As we have a post-trial legal process that is (theoretically) giving redress to the complainers, why isn't similar redress available to Mr Salmond?  Why shouldn't the media be held accountable for one-sided reporting that caused immense reputational harm?  And shouldn't we look at whether it's appropriate for the complainers to have been able to continue to use the cover of anonymity to try to get Mr Salmond found guilty in the court of public opinion after he had already been found not guilty in the real court?  Legal protection must surely carry responsibilities as well as rights, and shouldn't be abused with impunity.  

As Craig Murray's blog was the corner of the media that came closest to redressing the disgraceful imbalance in this episode, he should really be receiving an award for outstanding journalism, rather than facing jail time.