Independence will not be won by drifting through time and waiting for Alister Jack's dismal vision of restoring "a YouGov democracy by 2039"

With the normal caveat that I'm not a legal expert, it seems to me to be utter nonsense to claim that the Supreme Court ruling a few days ago scuppers hopes that a legal referendum can be held without a Section 30 order.  The issues involved are very different.  The crux of the ruling was that the Scottish Parliament cannot constrain the UK Parliament's unlimited powers to legislate for Scotland, even on devolved matters.  But as far as a referendum is concerned, the argument of the legal experts who believe Holyrood already has the powers to hold a vote is that the UK Parliament's right to legislate would not be constrained in any way, because they would not be bound by the outcome of a purely consultative referendum.  (Of course they'd be bound in a moral rather than a legal sense, which is why they're so terrified of a consultative referendum).

A slightly more convincing argument is that, although the ruling is not directly relevant to the legality of a referendum, it nevertheless reveals the Supreme Court to be a deeply conservative and instinctively British Nationalist body which is highly likely to dream up a legal argument for striking down a referendum, even if we have no idea yet what that argument will be.  Well, that may or may not be the case, but it strikes me that the amateur psychoanalysing of judges is not the most sensible or reliable way of forecasting the outcome of complex legal cases.  We need to concentrate on the things we can control, and stop worrying about the things we can't.  What we can control (and by "we" I mean the pro-independence side under the leadership of the Scottish Government) is legislating for a referendum - something that frankly we should already be doing or already have done.  What we cannot control is whether that legislation is then challenged by the UK Government or by a private citizen used by the UK Government as a proxy, or whether any such challenge is successful.  In a sense that doesn't really matter, because this is a process that has to be gone through.  If a legal challenge fails, the problem is solved - we won't need a Section 30 order and a referendum will go ahead.  But if the challenge is upheld, we'll still be further forward because we'll have demonstrated to the Scottish people that the referendum route is totally closed off and that the UK Government's pigheaded intransigence has left us with only one reasonable option for pursuing a democratic mandate for independence - namely via a parliamentary election.  That will be a moment of liberation, because it will break us out of the "No to Indyref2", "now is not the time", "once in a generation" paradigm.  Parliamentary elections take place at least once every five years, and there's not much the UK Government can do about that, short of a Nazi-style Enabling Act.

As ever, though, the real problem is that the ruling may encourage the Scottish Government's ongoing passivity.  Let's be honest, pretty much everything encourages the Scottish Government's ongoing passivity.  "We might fail so it's really important we don't even try" has been the guiding principle since the catastrophic loss of nerve in 2017, and that shows no sign of changing.  Anyone who seriously wants independence should be terrified by Nicola Sturgeon's admission that she doesn't know how the impasse will be broken, but that she thinks it somehow will be, one way or another, because "time is on her side". Decoded, that means the SNP leadership's solution is to do absolutely nothing with even more studied determination and wait for something to turn up.  Spoiler alert: nothing will turn up, even if we wait decades, because the British constitution does not change and the British state's vested interest in keeping Scotland prisoner does not change.  If we want the weather to change, we have to change it ourselves.

And there's another way in which a truly radical and daring pro-independence government might have reacted to the Supreme Court ruling.  Aileen McHarg pointed out that there's now a clear incentive for the Scottish Parliament to refuse to agree to Sewel motions giving the UK Parliament consent to legislate on a specified devolved matter, because the court has created a novel distinction between laws on devolved matters passed by each parliament - Holyrood can only control/influence the interpretation and implementation of legislation it has passed itself.  But that also, I would suggest, means there's an incentive for Holyrood to "re-legislate" on swathes of laws passed after previous Sewel motions, so that the new Holyrood laws replace the Westminster laws, thus rendering the ruling largely redundant.  That would be roughly analogous to what the Parti Québécois administration used to do when it invoked the "notwithstanding clause" (allowing Canadian provincial legislatures to override court rulings of unconstitutionality) on every single piece of legislation it introduced, even when there was no particular reason to think that was actually necessary.

In other news over the past week, Alister Jack has revealed that Scotland will only be held as a prisoner against its will for another eighteen years. In the year 2039, dictatorship will be replaced by a "YouGov democracy", ie. we can have the things we want as long as YouGov say we want them (supermajority requirements apply, naturally).  So that's exciting.   Only six thousand, five hundred and seventy-four more sleeps to go.

*  *  * 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Supreme Court ruling (and it's interesting that many eminent experts believe the judges erred in law), it's worth remembering that the Scottish people were firmly opposed to the UK Government taking the matter to court in the first place.  Here is the result of a Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll conducted in April - 

The Scottish Parliament recently passed legislation that incorporates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots Law. The law seeks to protect children's rights by forbidding public authorities from acting in a way that is incompatible with the UN Convention. However, the UK Government are challenging the law in the Supreme Court on the basis that it would interfere with the UK Parliament's right to make laws for Scotland. Although the UK Government are allowed to challenge laws that they think may exceed the Scottish Parliament's powers, they are under no obligation to do so.  Do you think the UK Government are right or wrong to challenge the new Scottish law on children's rights? 

Right: 33% 

Wrong: 42% 

With Don't Knows excluded - 

Right: 44% 

Wrong: 56% 

*  *  * 

Courtesy of the fatalistic rabbit in Watership Down, here is the Scottish Government's current strategy for securing independence -

Where are you going, wind? 

Far, far away 

Over the hills, over the edge of the world. 

Take me with you, wind, high over the sky. 

I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind.

Where are you going, stream? 

Far, far away 

Beyond the heather, sliding away all night. 

Take me with you, stream, away in the starlight. 

I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-stream. 

Questions for Kirsty Blackman

Did Kirsty Blackman genuinely retweet a call for Joanna Cherry to be expelled? Any chance a screenshot was doctored or something like that? It's extraordinary (and appalling) if she did.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 4, 2021

The fiction that Joanna Cherry was sacked because she's "not a team player" is wearing a bit thin. There's clearly been a very nasty, bitter vendetta against her from some of her colleagues.https://t.co/ubB6Q0mbxw

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 4, 2021

No matter who you are or what you do no one is immune from the curse of workplace bullying. It can be a dark & lonely experience so if you know someone in that position offer them support. Trust me it makes the world of difference

— Joanna Cherry QC (@joannaccherry) October 4, 2021

Have deleted an earlier RT. I am clear though, @theSNP needs to do more to tackle internal transphobia, including sanctioning or expelling those in the party who are transphobic.

— Kirsty Blackman (@KirstySNP) October 4, 2021

As you can see, Kirsty Blackman's eventual attempt to draw a line under this episode did not involve an apology - it was simply an announcement of a deletion without any explanation of either the original retweet or of the deletion itself.  That being the case, I don't think it's unreasonable that she should be invited to answer the following questions to clear the matter up rather more satisfactorily...

* Did you not read the tweet properly before retweeting it?  All of us have been guilty of that sort of carelessness at some point in time, but is that what you're claiming happened in this case?

* If you did read the tweet properly, why did you knowingly retweet a call for one of your MP colleagues to be expelled from the SNP?

* Do you, in fact, believe Joanna Cherry should be expelled?

* If you do believe Joanna Cherry should be expelled, why did you delete the retweet?

* Does your clarification imply that you want transphobes to be expelled, but that you accept that this principle does not apply to Joanna Cherry because she is plainly not transphobic?  If so, have you apologised to her for the confusion?

* Do you accept that calling for a colleague to be expelled, when that colleague is in fact in good standing, should in itself be a disciplinary offence?  If not, why not?

When Ms Cherry was sacked from the frontbench, I said that one of my big concerns was that it might prove to be merely a staging post, and that the next step would be to make it a little less unthinkable for spurious disciplinary action to be taken against her, with a view to eventually having her suspended or expelled.  That may have seemed a tad outlandish when I said it.  It looks a hell of a lot less outlandish now, and we're only a few short months further on.  The many decent people who decided to stay in the SNP after Alba broke away in the spring now need to stand up and be counted.  They don't need to lose their party - there's nothing inevitable about it.  But time may be running short.

"Name one country that allows FOREIGNERS to vote in constitutional referendums. Go on, James, name just ONE!"

Naming no names, but someone has been challenging me today to...well, to do what you can see above in the title of this blogpost.  Where on earth is this nonsense coming from all of a sudden? Brexit has given EU citizens an enormous incentive to vote Yes in any future independence referendum, and anecdotally that does seem to be exactly what the majority of them plan to do.  This is absolutely the last moment to be retreating into 'blood and soil' nationalism and trying to strip 'non-natives' of their right to vote - it makes no strategic sense, even leaving aside the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the proposal.

I am, however, going to answer the challenge directly.  Before I do, though, I'll explain why the question would still be a monumental red herring even if it could not be answered.  It wouldn't actually matter if there was no country in the world that allowed foreign nationals to vote on constitutional matters, because excluding foreign nationals is not actually what is being proposed here, or at the very least it's not the main thrust of the proposal.  The suggestion is that some English people who hold both residency and citizenship in Scotland, in other words people who are not foreign nationals, should be stripped of their right to vote.  You only have to think of it in those terms to realise what a total non-starter this proposal is - even if it was remotely desirable, which it is not.

But my answer to the challenge is very simple, and it's the United Kingdom, which allowed non-British Commonwealth citizens to vote in the referendums on European membership if they were resident in the UK.  That includes, for example, citizens of India, a country that contains eighteen per cent of the entire population of the world.  As I was only asked to provide one country that allows foreign nationals to vote in constitutional referendums, I don't need to go any further than that, but there will almost certainly be other examples if anyone wants to trawl through the electoral rules of other countries.  One possibility is New Zealand, which allows all resident non-citizens to vote.  If there's any exception to that general rule for constitutional referendums, I haven't been able to find any sign of it yet.

Sunday Miscellany

So a few miscellaneous things while I'm thinking of them.  First of all, I meant to mention last week that I was quoted in Alasdair Soussi's latest piece for the Al Jazeera website, about the UK Government's attempts to turn COP26 in Glasgow into a Union Jack fest.  You can read it HERE.

Secondly, I promised our regular commenter 'Independence for Scotland' that I'd let him know if I heard anything about how to buy Alba Party merchandise in a way that ensures the funds go to the right place.  The latest email update from the party reveals an online Alba shop is on its way, and that in the meantime merchandise can be bought by emailing:  merchandise@albaparty.org

And lastly, there's an uncharacteristically helpful headline in the Herald on Sunday suggesting that a Tory-funded poll has backfired by showing a majority of the Scottish public think "the Union is bad for the environment".  Skimming through the article, though, I get the impression this may just be a Scottish subsample from a GB-wide Opinium poll (albeit one with an unusually large sample size).

The problem with trying to graft the politics of one country onto another country

This is bordering on defamatory. I'm a Catholic of overwhelmingly Irish ancestry. I went to Catholic schools. I still go to the Easter vigil every year. When Rangers fan sing about Fenian blood, who do you think they're singing about? https://t.co/w6VBlHWjuS

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) September 28, 2021

But then, this is Jeggit we're talking about, so I'm too busy laughing to consider a defamation case.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) September 28, 2021

Many thanks to the Twitter user Alba Loun for alerting me to a lengthy and bitter hit-piece that Jeggit wrote about me on his blog Random Public Journal a couple of days ago.  The fact that I was oblivious to the article's existence until today may indicate that it didn't have quite the impact hoped for, and it's certainly the case that Jeggit has been making determined efforts in recent weeks to alienate practically all of his previous allies with gratuitously nasty attacks on Marion Millar and the Women Won't Wheesht movement more broadly.  Many people will therefore think I should regard his rant about me as a veritable badge of honour, and at the very least it's unlikely to do me any harm.  Nevertheless, just as I said a few weeks ago when Ross Anderson was using the Wee Ginger Dug blog as a platform to publicly attack me, it's important as a matter of principle to have the right to reply to personal attacks and to be able to set the record straight.

Basically what has upset Jeggit so much are three tweets I wrote about him several weeks ago.  Why he's suddenly decided to react after so long is a bit of a mystery - maybe he just didn't notice at the time.  But given that he thinks "the knives are out for Jeggit", all I can say is they must be bloody slow knives if they've taken this long to reach him.  This is what I tweeted - 

"A theory about Jeggit (and it's only a theory). His real loyalty is to Sinn Fein and the cause of Irish unification and sovereignty. Nothing wrong with that, but he's unusual in that he's decided his main contribution to the cause will be via the Scottish independence movement. This has led to him tying himself up in knots, because he's trying very hard to stay faithful to the Sinn Fein stance on trans rights - which puts him firmly on the side of SNP centrists, and against the more radical elements of the indy movement, who he otherwise sees as allies. This is the problem with trying to graft the politics of one country onto another country."

Anyone who was aware of the context of those remarks will know that I was actually trying to defend him, at least up to a point, but is he intelligent enough to spot that?  A great many people were accusing him of being a woman-hater due to his declaration of all-out war on Ms Millar and gender critical feminists, and I was simply pointing out that there was a plausible alternative explanation - one that potentially reflected less badly on him.  Some of you may also remember that I stood up for Jeggit several years ago when the SNP tried to paint him as a monster due to comments that were, to put it mildly, ambiguous and open to more than one interpretation.  But "no good deed goes unpunished", as the saying goes.

His article is quite astoundingly dishonest and packed full of toddler-tantrum insults ("Kelly is a moral coward", "Kelly is an intellectual lightweight" and the like), but what is most remarkable about it is that he claims to be setting out to prove my theory wrong, but ends up unwittingly proving it right in most respects.  I did emphasise it was only a theory (ie. I was acknowledging it could be totally wrong), and while it may not have been bang-on accurate, it appears to have been very, very close to the mark.  Consider the following -

* At the top of the article is a selfie of Jeggit with Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald.  (Even though I was a long-term supporter of the SNP until very recently, I can't retaliate with a selfie of me and Nicola Sturgeon, because I must be just about the only person in Scotland who doesn't have one.) 

* He goes on to say he is "fiercely" loyal to Sinn Fein, and thirty-two county Irish sovereignty.

* He then indignantly asserts that it is entirely natural for a Scot living in Dublin who supports Irish unity to also support Scottish independence.  In other words his belief in Scottish independence is subsidiary to his loyalty to Sinn Fein and Irish unity, precisely as I suspected and suggested.

* He explains that the reason his support for Scottish indy is such a natural extension for him is that it flows from opposition to "British imperialism".  That's a very telling use of language, which suggests he is viewing the subject entirely through an Irish republican prism.  Not everyone in the Scottish independence movement regards this country as a victim of imperialism or colonialism, but those that do would generally refer to it as "English imperialism" or "London imperialism".  Scotland can scarcely be the victim of British imperialism given that we are part of the island of Great Britain and always will be.  There is, quite simply, no British state without us - which explains why an Irish republican like Jeggit might happily be a co-belligerent of the Yes campaign for reasons that have little to do with Scotland's own future.

* He really gives the game away when he contrasts the supposedly relaxed attitude of the Irish population to self-ID for trans people (recent polling tells a radically different story, incidentally) with the British "fixation" with debating the subject.  What does he mean by "British"?  We know what he means.  He's talking about the Scots, about Marion Millar et al.  We're just "Brits" to him.  This isn't unusual in the Irish nationalist worldview, I've found over the years.  The perception is that these islands consist of just two nations - Ireland and Britain, with the words "England" and "Britain" used interchangeably.  No real harm is meant by that, and if you point out the existence of Scotland and Wales, people will generally smile and apologise.  But nevertheless the basic worldview is that there are essentially two countries, with Britain the oppressor and Ireland the oppressed.  Jeggit seems to instinctively buy into that.

Jeggit of course regards me pointing all of this out as an indication that I am an "anti-Irish bigot" with an aversion to "the stink of Fenian", and a "unionist" (!) whose mind has been "penetrated" by the "Orange sash".  (The article really is every bit as hysterically funny as it sounds.)  As I said in my tweets above, these claims are bordering on defamatory.  Either he's intentionally lying, or he's making a wild guess about my attitudes to Ireland that can only be regarded as somewhat "brave" given that my surname is Kelly.  I and hundreds of thousands like me in west-central Scotland are exactly what Rangers fans mean when they sing about "Fenians".  You'll find no self-loathing here - I know what community I come from, I'm proud of that community, and my political views are entirely typical of that community.  Where I part company from Jeggit is that I believe the statelet of Northern Ireland has existed for long enough that it's simply not realistic any longer to deny the people of NI the right to self-determination within the borders of that statelet, as artificial as they may be.  I therefore accept that the future of Northern Ireland must be determined by the people of Northern Ireland, and if they choose to remain in the United Kingdom, they may be misguided but they are entirely within their rights.  Be under no illusions, though - if I lived in NI myself, I'd be voting for a nationalist party.  Sinn Fein are a bit rich for my blood given their historical baggage, and the SDLP are perhaps not rich enough, so I'd have a difficult choice between the two, but it would be one or the other.  All of this poses something of a problem for Jeggit's barking mad thesis, which rests on the assumption that I am somehow the reincarnation of Lord Carson.

But Jeggit's most dishonest claim of all is that he is "almost entirely unaware" of Sinn Fein's position on trans rights, and therefore cannot possibly be influenced by it in the way I suggested.  Pull the other one, Jegsy.  You expect us to believe that you've written multiple detailed articles on this topic without even bothering to check what the party you give your "fierce" loyalty to thinks about it?  Aye, whatever.

I also couldn't help but raise a smile at Jeggit's implication that I am an "ethno-nationalist".  Given that the root cause of his antipathy towards me is his stated view that I am not "revolutionary" enough, and given my own long history of moderate civic nationalism, I'm quite content for others to judge which of the two of us is the ethno-nationalist.

Last but not least, we have the rabbit from the hat - Jeggit claims he can't possibly be slavishly loyal to Sinn Fein policy positions because he strongly disagrees with the party's support for abortion rights.  He makes reference to the existence of the small breakaway Aontu party, which is essentially a socially conservative, anti-abortion version of Sinn Fein.  Jeggit states that he decided against leaving Sinn Fein for strategic reasons - he thinks the national struggle is more important than the abortion issue due to the fact that the latter has already been "settled".  

So essentially all that was wrong with my theory is that his heart lies midway between the ideals and values of Aontu, and Sinn Fein's.  Wasn't out by much, was I?

No matter how much time passes, we always seem to be "just one more election victory away" from holding an independence referendum

Do you remember back in 2018 or early 2019, when the bulk of us in the independence movement were still giving the SNP leadership the benefit of the doubt in relation to their assurances that an independence referendum had merely been delayed slightly and would still take place before Brexit? Journalists and certain academics used to treat us as hopelessly naive, and would say that "everyone knows privately" ("everyone" being code for the political elite and their journalistic chums) that talk of a referendum in the foreseeable future was just for show, and that the real battle to decide whether a referendum took place would come in the form of the 2021 Holyrood election.

Now, it's easy to say in retrospect that those people were right about our naivety in taking the SNP leadership at their word, but here's the thing: if they had also been right about the 2021 election being the true moment of reckoning, they would now be saying "the SNP won decisively, it's over, a referendum is happening".  But they're not doing that, are they?  Take a look at this quote from a new newspaper article (it appears to be from The Times) which is suddenly talking about the 2024 Westminster general election in exactly the same way that the 2021 Holyrood election was previously talked about - as the decisive electoral event.

"The next general election is seen as key to the prospects of a second referendum.  If the SNP increases its number of MPs, which at present stands at 45...further pressure would be placed on the prime minister to agree to re-run the 2014 vote."

Are you beginning to see how this works?  Every time an election billed as "the big one" takes place, it magically turns out afterwards not to have been particularly important after all, but oh my God, the next election, just you wait, that'll be the one to make civilisations tremble.  

If by some miracle we actually improve on the 81% of Scottish seats we won in the 2019 general election - a ridiculously tough target that we shouldn't be setting for ourselves, and that nobody should be setting for us if they have a democratic bone in their body - we'll then be told that the SNP need to win an overall majority in the 2026 Holyrood election, and Boris Johnson will be sure to buckle under the pressure at that point.  And then if the SNP win that majority, hey presto, it'll turn out that they also need to make yet more gains in the 2029 Westminster election - which by that point may mean winning more constituencies than actually exist.

I've no idea if this is an intentional con-trick on the part of the SNP leadership to keep us distracted while they get on with staying in power and delivering the stuff they really care about (like GRA reform), or whether it's a sign that they lack confidence in themselves and are too nervous to bring matters to a head.  But either way, we need to break out of this endless cycle of passivity.  We have an immaculate mandate to hold a referendum, and we must use that mandate before the next general election even takes place.  It's as simple as that.

Update for anyone lodging a complaint about the Daily Record's lies

A reader has just emailed me.  He had complained to the press regulator IPSO this morning about the Daily Record's blatant lie that the new Redfield & Wilton poll shows a "drop in support for independence" (in fact the result is literally identical to the previous poll).  IPSO wrote back to him requesting supporting evidence within seven days about the results of the poll and how they show no change.  Just in case anyone else finds themselves in the same position, I'll copy and paste my reply - 

Hi ******,

Thanks for your message.  I presume that in order to have made the complaint, you must have provided the link to the Daily Record article, which itself includes the figures IPSO are requesting.  However, just in case, here is the Record link -

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/scottish-independence-poll-falls-latest-25024009

The poll was commissioned by Politico, whose write-up also includes the figures - 

https://www.politico.eu/article/poll-scots-nicola-sturgeon-2023-independence-vote/

And here is the link to the previous Redfield & Wilton poll from last month, showing identical numbers of Yes 44%, No 47% - 

https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/scottish-independence-referendum-voting-intention-4-5-august/

As further supporting evidence, you could also provide IPSO with the list of polls on the What Scotland Thinks website - which is run either by John Curtice or by his close colleagues. Since Professor Curtice is President of the British Polling Council, that should be considered a reliable source. It clearly shows that both the new and previous Redfield & Wilton polls had identical results -

https://whatscotlandthinks.org/questions/how-would-you-vote-in-the-in-a-scottish-independence-referendum-if-held-now-ask/

Cheers,

James 

When I checked the Record link, I was half-expecting it to have already been taken down or corrected - they've had several hours to get it sorted, and umpteen people have pointed out the inaccuracy to them.  But nope, they're just sticking their fingers in their ears as usual.

Daily Record's credibility lies in TATTERS this morning as it falsely claims that a no change poll shows a "drop in support for independence"

Answers on a postcard, folks.  The new Redfield & Wilton poll on independence shows a literally identical result to the last one, with 44% saying they would vote Yes and 47% saying they would vote No.  (Those figures do not exclude Don't Knows.)  And yet for some inexplicable reason that is probably a mystery even to themselves, the Daily Record have decided to report the poll as a "drop in support for independence". Paul Hutcheon himself has cluelessly tweeted the inaccurate headline.

Back in the real world, the poll adds to the weight of evidence suggesting that public opinion has remained fairly static of late.  Politico, who commissioned the poll, place greatest emphasis on the finding that a narrow plurality of respondents think that a referendum shouldn't take place unless Westminster agree to it.  We seem to be caught in a vicious circle - the more the Scottish Government talk up the need for an agreed referendum, the more the public buy into that concept themselves.  That does not actually increase the likelihood of an agreed referendum, but instead produces opinion poll results that simply strengthen Westminster's hand in saying no.

This strategic naivety must be swept away.  The message must be that a referendum is taking place - it would be great to have Westminster on board, but it's taking place anyway. And the word "legal" should be expunged from the Scottish Government's lexicon.

*  *  *

If you'd like to make a complaint to the press regulator IPSO over the Daily Record's blatant breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors' Code, the online form you'll need is HERE.

*  *  *

Scot Goes Popcast: You can watch the full videos of my recent interviews with Yvonne Ridley and William Duguid HERE and HERE. 

Savanta ComRes poll suggests the rumours of the Alba Party's demise have been greatly exaggerated

A few years ago, I had a brief discussion on Twitter with the pollster Keiran Pedley (then with GfK NOP, now with Ipsos-Mori) about what I believed to be the unfair practice of polling firms failing to include one particular political party in the main menu of options that respondents are provided with, even though other parties of similar size are included.  He made the point that it wasn't about 'fairness' as such, but instead about what experience had shown to be the most accurate approach - if including that party in the main menu consistently led to an overestimate of their support, it was absolutely justified to exclude them. I'm not convinced it's quite as simple as that, because polls (absurdly) have a quasi-constitutional role these days - they're factored in to decisions about the airtime each party is entitled to, and they supposedly will determine whether or not Northern Ireland is allowed a referendum on its constitutional future.  When poll results are an integral part of the democratic process, it's arguable that poll methodology needs to be fair and even-handed as much as it needs to be accurate.

However, at least in the example I discussed with Mr Pedley, the pollsters were actually attempting to estimate support for the party in question.  If respondents indicated that they were planning to vote for "some other party", they were taken to a second menu of options in which the party was included.  A much greater problem occurs if respondents have no means at all of indicating their preference for a party - when all they can do is say "some other party" and it goes no further than that.  If decisions about airtime are made on the basis of such a poll, there's a gross unfairness, because no effort was made to measure the party's support.  And that, unfortunately, is the point we've reached with Panelbase polls of Holyrood voting intentions - the two that have been conducted since the election in May have not allowed respondents to express support for Alba in any form.  

I can't understand the rationale for that.  Although Alba didn't meet its own targets in May, it did secure 2% of the list vote, and for as long as any party is "troubling the scorer", so to speak, you'd think it's important to continue to know how well or badly it's doing.  Alba also of course has two Members of Parliament and a significant number of local councillors, which makes it of greater interest than most parties that receive 2% of the vote on their first outing.

All of this presents me with a bit of a dilemma, because I'm hoping to commission another Scot Goes Pop poll reasonably soon (funding permitting) and Panelbase would usually be my first choice - but I have a feeling they would want to maintain consistency by using the same question/answer format for Holyrood voting intentions in every poll they conduct, regardless of client.  However, I'll cross that bridge if and when I come to it.

On a more positive note, the Savanta ComRes poll published last Friday did include Alba as an option on the Holyrood list ballot, and 2% of respondents said they would vote for the party.  That will be a great disappointment to the Alba-haters who gloated at considerable length about the Opinium poll published the previous day which showed Alba on zero for the very first time - a result that was taken to mean that "the monster had been slayed" and that Alba could expect to receive negligible support from that point on.  The difference between the two polls is actually quite striking and hard to explain - in absolute terms, Opinium found only two Alba voters among their sample, while Savanta ComRes found seventeen.  Here are the full ComRes results...

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 48%

Conservatives 22%

Labour 20%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 36%

Conservatives 23%

Labour 18%

Greens 13%

Liberal Democrats 7%

Alba 2%

Although that's very much in line with the results Alba were receiving during the election campaign, it's arguably a more credible finding now.  There was always a suspicion in the spring that Alba were being overestimated due to being a completely 'new entry', but now it's possible to weight respondents by their past history of actually voting for Alba.

There was also a Stack Data poll on independence last week, which seems to be the propaganda poll Gordon Brown has been wittering about.  Looking through the datasets, I'm struck by how the framers of the questions struggled to get the results they were hoping for.  In total, 53% of respondents want an independence referendum to be held by the end of 2024, and just 25% of respondents think that the passing of a decade since 2014 should be a "condition that has to be met" before holding a new referendum.  In fact, none of the proposed "conditions" managed to attract majority support.  The one that came closest was that the Scottish Government should be required to make clear which currency an independent Scotland would use - but even that was only backed by 45%. 

The most laughable "condition" suggested (which a mere 30% of respondents found reasonable) was that there should be no referendum until the UK has "had a chance to reform its own constitution to change how Westminster works and give Scotland more powers".  Forgive me for being harsh here, Gordon, but just how much more of "a chance" do you guys need?  Westminster has been in control of Scotland for the last three hundred and fourteen years, and could have reformed the constitution at any time.  You yourself, Gordon, were Prime Minister for three years between 2007 and 2010, and did practically nothing to boost devolution.

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Scot Goes Popcast: You can watch the full videos of my recent interviews with Yvonne Ridley and William Duguid HERE and HERE. 

Alba NEC election outcome

I'm really honoured to say that I've been elected as one of the eight ordinary members of the Alba Party's National Executive Committee.  The successful candidates are:

Female ballot: Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, Michelle Ferns, Denise Findlay, Suzanne Blackley

Male ballot: Roddy MacLeod, Josh Robertson, James Kelly, Hamish Vernal

Congratulations to all of the above, and commiserations to the many excellent candidates who weren't elected on this occasion.  I'd like to also thank the Alba members who nominated me, and the conference delegates who voted for me at the weekend.  I really appreciate it.  

I'll do my best to be one of the voices of the rank and file membership on the NEC.  On that subject, I noticed earlier today that two people had emailed me on Saturday with specific questions, but both messages ended up in my spam folder.  I'll try to reply later tonight (although in one case the answer may not be very helpful, because I'm a bit hazy on the subject matter).

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Scot Goes Popcast: You can watch the full videos of my recent interviews with Yvonne Ridley and William Duguid HERE and HERE.