New Redfield & Wilton poll confirms the public want an independence referendum to be held - and shows 48% support for independence itself

We at last have our first independence poll since June, and it's also only the fourth to be conducted since the Holyrood election in early May.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Redfield & Wilton Strategies)

Yes 48%

No 52%

Redfield & Wilton are a relatively new pollster, and as far as I can see this is their first ever full-scale Scottish poll on independence.  That means there's nothing to directly compare these numbers to, although they're pretty much in line with polls from other firms in the late spring and early summer which suggested either a slim No lead or a dead heat.  On the plus side, that means there's been no slippage for Yes, which is perhaps the most we can realistically hope for while the Scottish Government continue to shy away from campaigning for independence or firing the starting gun for a referendum.

The sample is close to being split down the middle on whether an independence referendum should be held within the next year: 40% are in favour and 47% are opposed.  Naturally, most Yes supporters are in favour, which gives the lie to Councillor Hunter's notorious recent claim that Yessers don't want an early referendum.  Once the time-frame is extended to the next five years, there is clear support across the population for a referendum.

You can still come across the odd zealot on social media who risibly believes that Alba - a party that is largely ignored by the media - is somehow, God knows how, responsible for the fact that we no longer have the outright Yes majority that we enjoyed for so long last year, and even into the start of this year.  A supplementary question in the poll provides a somewhat more plausible explanation.  Slightly more respondents say that the pandemic has strengthened the arguments in favour of the Union than say it has weakened those arguments.  My guess is that the opposite result would have been obtained a year ago, and that it's the vaccine rollout that has changed the dynamic.  But the story of the pandemic is far from over yet, and there's still the potential for the pendulum of perception to swing once again.

A very significant result is that Keir Starmer's personal ratings are now well into negative territory.  Labour are the only party that can realistically depose the SNP as Scotland's leading political force, and that simply will not happen for as long as they have such a deeply unpopular leader.

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I'm continuing to fundraise for forthcoming polling via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser - please click HERE if you'd like to donate.

Just a reminder that we have hard evidence that the Scottish public want to be represented by Team Scotland at the Olympics, not Team GB

As we move towards the end of Tokyo 2020 and the accompanying #ButchApronFest, it's worth reminding ourselves of the result of a Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll from the start of this year, which asked in very straightforward, neutral language whether people wanted to be represented at the Olympics by Team Scotland or Team GB.

Currently, Scottish athletes represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games, and Great Britain at the Olympic Games.  Do you think Scottish athletes should represent Scotland or Great Britain at the Olympic Games?  (Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll, 11th-13th January 2021)

Scotland: 47%

Great Britain: 42%

With Don't Knows excluded...

Scotland: 53%

Great Britain: 47%

Some people expressed disappointment at the narrowness of that result, but I think that looks at the issue the wrong way round.  Team GB has been one of the very few propaganda successes for unionism in recent years.  Look at the medals table from the last three Summer Olympics - Great Britain finished fourth in Beijing 2008, third in London 2012, and second in Rio 2016.  There's no question that this means they punched above their weight - to finish second five years ago, they had to outperform countries with much bigger populations, such as China, Russia, Germany and Japan.  There's also no great mystery as to how or why that happened - it's the legacy of the sports-mad Prime Minister John Major setting up a National Lottery in the mid-90s that to a large extent helped to fund athletes from a wide variety of sports.  That's a template that an independent Scotland could quite easily follow if it had similar priorities, but in the meantime British nationalists have the opportunity to claim that Scottish sportspeople are hitched along to a Rolls Royce outfit and that we'd be foolish to give that up for also-ran status.

Not everyone is convinced by that argument, because far more Scottish athletes would be given the chance to actually compete at the Olympics if we had our own team.  But nevertheless, the GB medal haul in recent Games makes a powerful case for some, which I would suggest means it's actually quite remarkable and significant that there's still a majority among the public - however narrow - in favour of Team Scotland and against Team GB.

It may be that GB won't quite match their recent stellar performances in Tokyo anyway.  They're currently in fourth place in the medal table, which would equal 2008 but not 2012 or 2016.  And they also have Australia and the Russians breathing down their necks, so it's still possible that they could finish as low as fifth or sixth.

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I'm continuing to fundraise for forthcoming polling via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser - please click HERE if you'd like to donate.

Pro-independence vote increases markedly in East Livingston and East Calder by-election, as SNP take the vacant seat

There was a by-election yesterday for a seat on West Lothian council, and three pro-independence parties were involved.

East Livingston and East Calder by-election result (first preferences):

SNP 42.5% (+1.7) 

Conservatives 24.4% (+2.4) 

Labour 21.8% (-9.1) 

Greens 7.6% (+4.0) 

Liberal Democrats 2.7% (-) 

Independence for Scotland 1.1% (+1.1)

This will be portrayed as an SNP gain from Labour, although as is often the case in the wacky world of STV by-elections, things are not quite as they seem - the SNP comfortably won the popular vote in the ward last time around.  Nevertheless, the result is still dreadful for Labour - their vote share has slumped, and they've dropped from second place to third. The swing from Labour to SNP is a little over 5%, although it must be remembered the baseline for these numbers is the 2017 local elections, when the SNP underperformed expectations somewhat.

Independence for Scotland are continuing to contest by-elections, which presumably means they think they'll have a place in the Scottish party system going forward - which seems unlikely given that Alba's policy programme is so similar to their own.  However, they can at least claim that they've achieved a semi-respectable result this time, markedly better than the 0.4% they recorded on their first outing in June.

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I'm continuing to fundraise for forthcoming polling via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser - please click HERE if you'd like to donate.

No, we don't need "considerably more" than 50% of the vote to win independence - just a simple majority. That's democracy.

The Glasgow SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter posted this truly jaw-dropping tweet the other day - 

"You are comparing apples & pears. To win independence we need considerably more than 50 per cent of people to vote for it. That's not the same thing as trying to win elections, where you don't need to do that. Policy is probably actually less important than tone right now."

I'm not sure if anyone can make sense of this, but I certainly can't.  There is, in fairness, a distinction between the winning posts in referendums and elections, but it's categorically not the one that Councillor Hunter identifies.  In a referendum, you need a simple majority of 50% plus one vote, whereas it's possible to win an election on a minority of the vote.  But you don't need to secure "considerably" more than 50% to win a referendum, unless of course you've artificially added a needless and anti-democratic supermajority rule, of the type that has only ever been used once in the UK - to notoriously rig the 1979 devolution referendum.  Is that what the SNP are proposing?  If so, it contradicts decades of party policy - they were quite rightly opposed to the 40% rule in 1979, which it's sometimes said permitted the dead to be counted as No voters (a bit of an over-simplification but there's a grain of truth in that).  They were also quite rightly adamant that the 2014 independence referendum had to be decided by a simple majority.

There's a very good reason for opposing what George Robertson called "a fancy franchise", and to understand why, you only need to think through the ramifications of more people voting Yes than No in any indyref, and then the returning officer declaring that Scotland has voted against independence.  That's not exactly a recipe for stability or for 'losers' consent', and nor should it be, given the obvious demonstration that some votes are more equal than others.  

Councillor Hunter's hints about rigging the franchise (and doing so, eccentrically, in a way that would make it much harder for what is supposed to be her own side to win) need to be seen in the context of another recent tweet in which she adopted strikingly unionist rhetoric in saying that the public didn't want an indyref in the near future, and that the onus was on anyone who wanted one to change people's minds.  Er, isn't it supposed to be the SNP themselves who want independence, and a referendum to bring independence about?  If there are any minds needing to be changed (there aren't, incidentally, because the mandate has already been won), isn't it the SNP's job to change them?  And if they show no interest in meeting that challenge, and if they seem almost more comfortable when they can claim that the challenge is going unmet, doesn't that begin to call into question whether their support for independence and an indyref is anything more than nominal?

It's difficult to know what to make of this, because Councillor Hunter is known to be close to the SNP leadership, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that these are just personal views.  But if by any chance she's vocalising the views of the leadership, it's deeply, deeply concerning.  It would suggest to me they're looking for evergreen excuses to say "now is not the time for a referendum" no matter how much time elapses.  48% Yes in the polls?  "It's not a majority."  51% Yes in the polls?  "It's not a significant majority."  55% Yes in the polls?  "We need 60%."  60% Yes in the polls?  "We need a two-thirds majority.  We only get one shot at this."  

And on and on it goes into infinity.

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I'm continuing to fundraise for forthcoming polling via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser - please click HERE if you'd like to donate.

Last year, the UK political class and their scientific advisers expected us all to accept Covid infection and a great many of us to die - and, no, they have no right to tell us to shut up about that episode now

This is an observation I've made before.  I'm sometimes accused of being "on the wrong side of history", particularly in relation to the trans issue, even though my views are more nuanced than some.  The jury has to be out on that - when you have two movements that regard themselves as progressive (gender critical feminism and trans activism) in direct conflict with each other, anyone who claims to know for sure the future verdict of history is over-reaching themselves.  So, it's true, I can't say for certain that I'm on the right side of history on the trans debate or several other debates.  But there's one debate that I'm fully entitled to say that history has already judged me to be on the right side of - and that's the herd immunity debate of early 2020.  At a time when the Scottish Government was locked into a Westminster-led "Four Nations" herd immunity strategy, I was putting out blogpost after blogpost begging them to change course, to come into line with WHO guidance, and to start trying to suppress the virus.  Frankly, it's beyond all credible dispute that I made the right call, and that the Scottish Government were following the wrong course until they finally U-turned in late March, by which time a lot of the damage was already done.

Early yesterday morning, I tweeted something that should have been utterly uncontroversial.  I contrasted a media report revealing that many people are being reinfected after a previous natural Covid infection with Jason Leitch's claim in early 2020 to know that it was essentially impossible to catch the virus twice.  He was using that claim to justify his insistence that the whole Scottish population had to be infected with Covid, albeit in a "smooth" and "safe" fashion, and that doing so would bring the crisis to an end.  Even at the time, it was a statement of the obvious that the herd immunity policy was idiotic and devoid of all sense of human responsibility if there was any chance at all that Leitch's claim was wrong - and, sadly, we now have cast-iron proof that it was.  To make any sense of where we are now, a year and a half later, it's important to recognise and face up to the truly catastrophic error of judgement that was made.

But, remarkably, an awful lot people disagree and want the whole matter swept under the carpet.  The first person to react to my tweet yesterday was the veteran journalist Ruth Wishart, who demanded to know what the point was of "badmouthing" Leitch, who in her view has given "heroic" service during the pandemic - a downright bizarre way of describing the contribution of a man who became the public face of a policy which deliberately allowed a highly contagious virus to move through the population during early-to-mid March 2020, and thus led directly to several thousand avoidable deaths.  Yes, it's good that the mistake was eventually tacitly accepted and that the policy was belatedly changed, but all that achieved was to prevent thousands more people from needlessly dying - it didn't reverse the disaster that was already occurring.  

I pointed this out to Ruth, and her only response was to demand to know what my epidemiological qualifications are, and to contrast that with Leitch's allegedly peerless expertise.  Hmmmm.  You know, I'd have thought Leitch and his cheerleaders would want to maintain a diplomatic silence on his qualifications at this stage, given the notorious incident last spring when he tried to shut down Piers Morgan's perfectly reasonable questions by smugly referring to his fabled masters degree in public health.  We now know that the masters-less Morgan was correct and the "highly qualified" Leitch was completely wrong, because Leitch was arguing that from a public health point of view it was right to go to a mass-attended indoor concert in late March 2020.  "I would have gone myself" he fatuously added.  Morgan pointed out that this was an utterly incredible position for a man such as Leitch to take, and at that point Leitch refused to engage further, instead taking the "I'm qualified and you're not" tack.  If ever there was an interview that ought to have put a government official out of a job, that was the one.

Ruth Wishart quickly blocked me, apparently taking the view that unqualified adoration of the saintly Jason Leitch is an indispensable part of social media etiquette.  However, that wasn't the end of the matter, because the inexplicably enormous Leitch Fan Club picked up where she left off, and for the remainder of the day my notifications were buzzing with literally dozens, possibly well over a hundred, furious replies.  Some of them were downright abusive.  In particular, there was one anonymous troll who tried to pull rank on me by claiming to be a bioscientist involved in Covid research.  Given that he/she became increasingly abusive as the exchange progressed, and given that he/she was peddling false information that has long since been debunked, I can only hope that the bioscientist claim was untruthful too. After many, many hours I blocked the individual in question, to which they reacted by calling me a "w***er".  I've since reported them to Twitter.  (On past form that's probably a waste of time, but as a matter of principle I'm not going to pretend that abusive behaviour is OK.)

I said to someone last night that this passionate support for Leitch almost resembles a religion, given how irrationally angry people become at the sight of even the mildest and most legitimate criticism of their hero.  Insisting that his detractors must acknowledge "what he's sacrificed for us during the pandemic" carries a distinctly Jesus-like connotation.  The other similarity with religion is the dependence on a 'founding myth' of what happened in the early days of Covid, which naturally absolves Leitch of all blame.  The core beliefs of the Church of Leitch are as follows...

* That Leitch was correct when he claimed that you couldn't catch the virus twice, but that "the science has since changed".

* That Leitch did not in fact support a herd immunity policy, and that his statements on the subject were "misunderstood".

* That, in any case, Leitch was speaking in line with a monolithic global scientific consensus when he said that the virus had to be allowed to move through the whole population.  (This appears to contradict the claim that he never actually supported herd immunity, but don't worry - faith sometimes involves contradictions.)

* That Leitch was fully in conformity with WHO guidance, and that he has simply "moved with the times as the science has evolved".

Every single one of those is a fairy tale.  In February and March 2020, Leitch and all the other propagandists for the Westminster approach were in open defiance of the world-leading experts of the WHO, who were stressing again and again that coronavirus was not flu - it had a much higher death rate but was also transmitted in a way that made suppression possible by means of social distancing and rigorous contact tracing.  WHO leaders urged all countries to follow the good examples of China and South Korea by preventing transmission.  Leitch and his counterparts in England decided that they knew better than the WHO, and that the South Korean approach couldn't work (even though it was plainly working remarkably well in South Korea itself).  Instead Leitch wanted us all to catch what he clearly believed to be a relatively mild illness, and the only purpose of any limited restrictions was to create a sort of "orderly infection queue system" so that not too many people would be ill at any one time and the hospitals would not be overwhelmed.

That, of course, is the herd immunity strategy in a nutshell.  The notion that Leitch was "misunderstood" in his support for herd immunity is laughable beyond belief.  Indeed, the very thing that makes Leitch important in the story of the UK epidemic is that his public statements in support of herd immunity were considerably more explicit than those from Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance (although Vallance famously let his guard slip on a couple of occasions and made fairly direct comments about seeking an infection rate of around 60%).

There are so many quotes related to herd immunity from Leitch's Grand Complacency Tour of the TV and radio studios, but for convenience all the quotes below are taken from a Channel 4 interview on 16th March 2020.  It can be viewed in full HERE. 

Interviewer: "You'll be aware of this Public Health England document...that says they expect 80% of the population to be infected, and perhaps 15% to be hospitalised.  Are those sort of percentages that you recognise...?"

Leitch: "They are...and they're the kind of numbers we've been working with for the last few weeks.  They're not all going to happen on Wednesday.  Which is one of the reasons why the method we're trying to apply in Scotland and the UK is to smooth that hospitalisation over time."

In other words, he was totally cool with huge numbers of infections and hospitalisations, as long as they happened sloooooowly.  He does go on to say that the absolute numbers talked about in the Public Health England document could be reduced somewhat with "mitigation" measures - but "mitigation" has a very different meaning from "containment" or "suppression".  It still implies mass infection.  

Leitch: "To be honest, some people are going to die of the disease this virus causes.  The vast majority of people are going to recover.  They're going to have minor illness, they're going to stay at home for seven days..."

Note the complacency dripping from that statement - clearly he believes Covid is not a SARS-like event, and that it's basically safe to expose the population to it.  His breezy prediction that "some" people would die was something of an understatement - there have in fact been over 10,000 deaths in Scotland so far, and crucially that happened in spite of the fact that the Scottish Government later changed course and tried to stop transmission.  The mind boggles as to how many tens of thousands of deaths would have been recorded if the policy Leitch set out to Channel 4 had been seen through to its bitter conclusion.  

Interviewer: "Do you agree with Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, that one of the aims of the UK Government is for people to develop an immunity to this disease?"

Leitch: "I do, I ABSOLUTELY AGREE WITH HIM, because WE HAVE NO CHOICE. You can't get rid of the virus.  You can wish it away but it will not go.  Therefore we have to MANAGE THE INFECTION SAFELY ACROSS THE WHOLE POPULATION."

Remember this was open defiance of WHO guidance at the time, which clearly stated there was a choice: suppression of the virus, in their view, was both perfectly achievable and essential.  And there were umpteen statements from the WHO making clear that the idea that people could be mass-infected "safely" was grotesque and wrong.  The aim, they stressed, had to be to stop people becoming infected in the first place.

Interviewer: "The British Society of Immunology say they don't know yet if this novel virus will induce long-term immunity.  So why are you so sure that it will when they're not?"

Leitch: "So we KNOW that if you get it, you don't appear to get it again."

This removes any alibi for Leitch that "the science has changed" and that his claim about reinfection being impossible was "true at the time".  He was invited by the interviewer to agree with a statement of the bleedin' obvious that we simply didn't know yet after a few short weeks whether reinfection was possible.  And he declined.  He stated that we "knew" enough to be confident that infecting "the whole population" was "safe" and would bring the crisis to an end.

Frankly, anyone who reads or watches that interview and continues to maintain that Leitch was "misunderstood" over his support for herd immunity is making themselves look utterly ridiculous.  As I've said before, I look forward to Leitch's appearance before the inevitable public inquiry, because any semi-competent QC will identify all of the above points within about 0.003 microseconds.  He doesn't have a leg to stand on, and it's incomprehensible that he's still in office.   

The last thing I want to say is this.  The abusive troll claiming to be a "bioscientist" said he was sick and tired of people like me, without any relevant qualifications, giving their views on this subject.  Well, frankly, that person can take a hike, because herd immunity/mass infection was not the private project of Leitch, or of Catherine Calderwood, or of Chris Whitty, or of Patrick Vallance, or of other WHO-defying British scientists, or of the political class at Holyrood or Westminster.  All of us were expected to dutifully become infected because of decisions these people made, a large minority of us were expected to accept hospitalisation with a serious illness, and many of us were expected to die.  We all have a stake in Leitch's reckless approach last year, and to tell us to shut up about it is breathtaking arrogance that I and many, many others will simply never accept.  I will be continuing to speak out, no matter how inconvenient that may be to a small number of officials and their devoted fans.  

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Another person has let me know that they plan to nominate me for one of the three male positions on the Alba Party's National Executive Committee, so I'm now at least 20% of the way towards making the ballot.  The chances of actually being elected are probably pretty slim, but there's a case to be made for giving members as wide a choice as possible, so if you're a party member, by all means nominate me for the NEC if you'd like to.  I gather Denise Findlay might be standing for one of the three female spots, so she'd be a great person to nominate too (as would many others - we're really spoilt for choice).

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I'm now home from my staycation, so I can reveal the answer to the "guess the location in the video" teaser - it was in the north-west of Skye, about three miles from Neist Point Lighthouse.  Stravaiger got it bang on, but the precision of his answer (he even provided a grid reference) freaked me out and I didn't publish his comment!  A couple of people thought it was Uig in the north-east of Skye, and having also passed through there on my travels I can see why - it does look quite similar.

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Click here for the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser.

Solidarity with Craig Murray, and Alba nominations

I think we're all a bit in shock that Craig Murray is actually going to jail, even though we've known for a few weeks that this moment was likely to arrive.  Some will say "well, he's not above the law, you know", but what's truly staggering about this case is that we've discovered that equality before the law does not actually apply: bloggers are held to a higher standard, and are dealt with more punitively, than mainstream journalists.  Lady Dorrian ludicrously justified that novel principle with reference to the IPSO code - an entirely voluntary code which has no legal standing that I'm aware of and that is rather selectively enforced, to put it politely.

As for Lady Dorrian's cheerleaders, probably the most reprehensible thing I've seen is a relatively well-known person within the SNP who indicated that she wanted Craig in jail, because if he was sentenced to community service he'd worm his way out of it due to his health conditions.  Either the implication is that his health conditions are fake (in which case doctors are lying about them for some unspecified reason) or that she would rather Craig's life was put at risk than see him escape punishment.  Never again can that individual claim to be a progressive: she has betrayed a repugnant right-wing belief system that is incompatible with restorative justice or rehabilitation, or indeed common decency.

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If you're a fellow member of the Alba Party, you'll have received a flurry of emails over the last few days about registration for the forthcoming conference, the election of office bearers, and a consultation about the party's draft constitution.  A few people have messaged me to ask whether I'll be going to conference, and one person also wanted to know if I'd have any objection if he nominated me for one of the ordinary places on the National Executive Committee.  I certainly would very much like to go to conference - the only snag is that I have a lot of contact with a vulnerable person, so I'll have to see how risky the virus situation seems at the time.  But I plan to register to give myself the option of going if it's safe.  And I don't have any objection if anyone genuinely wants to nominate me for the NEC - other than the inevitable mild embarrassment when only one person actually does it!  (Ten nominations are required to make the ballot.)  I'll probably send in nominations of my own for some of the various positions, but as the deadline is a few days away I'll give myself time to have a proper think about who to nominate.  Alex Salmond for leader is a no-brainer if he wants to continue, but there are several possibilities for depute leader: Kenny MacAskill, Neale Hanvey and Chris McEleny would seem to be the obvious candidates, but there may be a feeling that a woman should take the role if the leader is male.

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Poll fundraising: We'll get there eventually!  I'm still fundraising for the poll via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser - if you'd like to donate please click HERE.  A million thanks for all the generous donations so far.

Bombshell poll from Redfield & Wilton shows support for holding an independence referendum IN THE NEXT YEAR

There doesn't seem to have been a full-scale Scottish poll on independence for over a month - OK, it's summer, but I wouldn't be surprised if such polls continue to be thin on the ground for the rest of 2021, unless the SNP start injecting some urgency.  However what we do have, weirdly, is a Britain-wide poll on the subject - the rough equivalent of a Europe-wide poll on whether Brexit is a good idea and whether it should have been 'allowed' to happen.

Redfield & Wilton Strategies found 29% of the GB public in favour of independence, and 33% opposed to it - roughly a 47-53 split with neutrals stripped out.  Far more interesting is of course the Scottish subsample, which shows 40% in favour and 41% opposed - essentially a dead heat, which is better than the last couple of full-scale Scottish polls, although the small size of a subsample means the findings are much less reliable.

One unusual feature of the poll is that there are figures for people who identify as Scottish, irrespective of where in Britain they live.  These should provide a warning for Tories and unionist commentators hankering after a blood-and-soil franchise for the next indyref, because Scottish identifiers are much more strongly supportive of independence and an early independence referendum than other groups.  53% want a referendum in the next year and 35% don't.  However, even among the actual indyref franchise (people who live in Scotland regardless of their national identity), there is a plurality in favour of a referendum in the next year, working out at roughly 52% in favour when neutrals are removed.  That rather helpfully gives the lie to Councillor Hunter's provocative comments of the other day.

Incidentally, the supposedly poor personal ratings for Nicola Sturgeon commented upon recently appear to come from another GB-wide Redfield & Wilton poll, so can essentially be disregarded.

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Scot Goes Pop poll fundraising update:  We're kind of in no-man's-land at present - a substantial amount of money has been raised, but we're still quite a way short of where we'll need to be to make a full-scale poll happen.  I know some will say I shouldn't have used the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser to seek the funds, because that makes it harder for people to keep track of how much has specifically been raised for the poll, but there would also have been substantial downsides to running two different fundraisers simultaneously.  Rest assured I'm not going to leave the job half-done, the poll will definitely happen sooner or later, it's just a question of when.  If you haven't donated yet and would like to speed things up, please click HERE.  To give you a rough idea, the £5500 required for the type of poll we've run in the past will have been raised when the running total on the general fundraiser is a little above £13,000.  For a cheaper option (which may be more realistic at this stage), the running total will have to be slightly in excess of £11,000 at an absolute minimum.

Scot Goes Pop essay-writing competition

As a number of you have spotted, there's been a little flurry of below the line comments on another pro-indy blog attacking me and Scot Goes Pop.  The trigger for it was a lengthy comment from an individual who was formerly a prolific commenter here.  It contains a number of lies (I was going to call them "half-truths", but let's call a spade a spade - they're fully intended to mislead).  However, I'm not particularly worried about that - most people have long since clocked that he's a longwinded blagger who frequently contradicts himself.  What puzzles me more are some of the comments from others - for example, this one from "Tatu3"...

"Glad to see you here. I used to enjoy reading your comments on the other site, but gave up reading him just before the election when he sadly turned against the SNP and, I believe, independence."

It's debatable whether it can be reasonably said that I "turned against the SNP", given that I voted SNP on the constituency ballot in May and strongly urged my readers to do the same - even though that meant parting company with one or two other pro-Alba bloggers who advocated a more irresponsible course. But the idea that I've turned against independence is just bonkers beyond all belief.  The whole point of backing Alba was to press for greater urgency on independence, and indeed just for any movement towards independence at all.

Presumably what this is about is a conflation of the independence cause with the SNP - if you give anything less than wholehearted support to the latter, you must be attacking the former, even though there's considerable doubt over whether the SNP are actually serious about pursuing independence in the coming parliamentary term.  However, if someone can come up with a more rational justification for the claim that "Scot Goes Pop has turned against independence", I'm all ears.  I'm happy to receive submissions of 500 word essays on the subject - the best will be published (with a response from me, needless to say!).  Overly imaginative winter sport enthusiasts who think I'm an agent of the British state need not apply.

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I'm still fundraising via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser for a comprehensive poll on GRA reform - if you'd like to help make the poll happen, please click HERE.

Spot the mystery location as I continue fundraising for a GRA / gender issues opinion poll

 For convenience (at least for the time being) I'm fundraising for the GRA poll via the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser for 2021 - everything donated over the coming period will go towards the poll.  To commission a poll in a similar way to most of the previous ones I've done would require around £5500 - that takes into account processing fees.  To give you a rough idea, the running total on the general fundraiser prior to me seeking funds for the poll was below £8000, so the earmarked £5500 will have been raised when the running total reaches a little over £13,000.  More realistically, I could shop around for a cheaper option and limit the number of questions, but even to do that the running total will probably have to hit a minimum of £11,000.  If you'd like to donate to help make the poll happen, please click HERE.

GRA poll fundraising update: around £1700 raised so far

I did a bit of totting up, and - as of two hours ago, anyway - we've raised around £1700 for the comprehensive poll on gender issues and GRA reform.  Thank you to everyone who has donated so far.  To feel really confident about going ahead, probably £5500 would be the ideal figure - that's based on prices I've been quoted in the past and takes into account fundraiser fees (GoFundMe no longer make a direct deduction, but their payment processer does still take a modest percentage).  However, if we fall anywhere between around £1000-£2000 short of that, I may still be able to make the poll happen if I shop around between firms and limit the number of questions.  Either way, though, we still have some distance to travel.  For the time being I'm still using the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser for 2021 to raise the money - that makes it harder for people to tell how much is required, so to give you a rough idea, an earmarked £5500 for the poll will have been reached when the running total on the fundraiser stands at a little over £13,000.  But, as stated above, I may be able to go ahead with less than that.

I'm bemused by the suggestions in some quarters that an exercise in testing public opinion is in itself "transphobic".  I'd suggest that reveals rather a lot about the ideology of the people who say these things, because it appears to be incompatible with free speech or tolerance of alternative views.  That, really, is my own concern in a nutshell.  I'm a bloke, I'm not steeped in gender critical feminism by any means, but nevertheless I do worry that we're hurtling into an Orwellian world where language and thought is policed by the state. (And if anyone thinks that's a hysterical exaggeration, two words for you: Marion Millar.)

As for the other objection - "what does this have to do with independence?", the obvious reply is that not everything we do has to be about independence, as the SNP government have been helpfully demonstrating in the four years since they "called an independence referendum" in 2017.  However, the reality is that GRA reform has become a considerable problem for the independence movement - it's led to a breakaway from the SNP once, it has the potential to do so again. If high-quality polling evidence can increase the pressure on the SNP leadership to dial down somewhat on the GRA issue, it would be a good step towards re-unifying the movement.

Although the fundraising drive still has a way to go, feel free to make suggestions for poll questions in the comments section below - we might as well be ready for when the funds are there.  And if you'd like to donate to make the poll happen, please click HERE.