An important update on forthcoming Scot Goes Pop polling on GRA reform and independence

With grateful thanks for your patience, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that I've finally commissioned the comprehensive poll on reform of the Gender Recognition Act and related gender issues that I crowdfunded for in the summer.  However, this has been a much more challenging and stressful process than previous Scot Goes Pop polls, so I'll need to briefly explain how we've ended up where we are.

First of all, the fundraising process during the summer proved to be extraordinarily messy.  I already had a general fundraiser underway to support the blog itself, and I was reluctant to have two fundraisers running at the same time.  So when the GRA poll idea came up, I tried to use the general fundraiser to crowdfund for the poll - but that was clearly a mistake, because it made it too hard for people to visualise what the target figure was.  What complicated it further was that The National got in touch and kindly reported on my fundraising for further independence polling - but that meant I effectively had to stop crowdfunding for the GRA poll, because obviously independence polling and GRA polling are different things, and not everyone who helps to fund one will be interested in helping to fund the other.

Neither set of fundraising produced enough on its own for the type of full-scale poll I ideally wanted to run - although the two in combination did raise just about enough.  Nevertheless, I've felt honour-bound to keep the two sets of funds separate.  The GRA funding was the more successful of the two, and enough money was raised for me to be reasonably confident I could still commission a GRA poll if I shopped around for the most competitive rates and limited the number of questions.  However, having looked into that possibility and given it my very best shot (I put in an enormous amount of work over the last few weeks and was almost in despair at times), I'm afraid it just wasn't a runner.  There's very little point in spending thousands of pounds on a poll where the questions aren't the ones we actually want to ask, and don't even resemble the ones we want to ask.

So in order to break the logjam, I've gone ahead and commissioned a full-scale GRA poll from my first-choice firm.  That's a much better option anyway, because it's the comprehensive poll we had originally intended, rather than a half-hearted or slimmed-down effort.  However, it's also more expensive, and I'm going to cover the shortfall with my own money - I can't see any other way of getting the poll done in a timely manner, and it's important it's done soon because Holyrood may not be far away from making some fateful decisions.  

Obviously I'd rather only be losing that money temporarily, though, so to solve the problem I've set up a new dedicated polling fundraiser, which you can find HERE and which I will be promoting heavily as the results of the new poll are published.  The funds raised will compensate me for what I'm spending on the current poll, but mostly it will complete the funding for the next Scot Goes Pop independence poll (I'll keep my options open on the timing of that one but I hope it'll be within the next few months).

Just so you're aware, I've also added voting intention questions and a couple of topical political questions to the GRA poll - it would have seemed a wasted opportunity not to do that.

If you prefer Paypal to GoFundMe, my Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

And a reminder that the fundraiser page can be found HERE.

Some concrete suggestions of how to achieve Yes unity

I gather that Ruth Wishart has issued a call for an end to "internecine warfare" in the Yes movement, although ironically I can't see what she said because she blocked me in the summer after I sent her a couple of polite replies.  Nevertheless, unity is obviously a desirable objective, and here are my own concrete suggestions about how it can be achieved.

1) Set a date for a referendum, and immediately start the process of a) requesting a Section 30 order and b) legislating for the referendum after the Section 30 order is refused.  This would end the deep suspicions on the leadership-sceptic side of the movement that the SNP are stringing us along, and are more interested in reaping the career benefits of what Wings called "the independence industry" than they are in delivering independence itself.  The stock objection of "but we're still in a pandemic" is bogus, because it would be perfectly possible to choose a date some time in 2023, by which time the pandemic will either be over or there'll be sufficient normality to hold a referendum.  As soon as we have a fixed date to build towards, we'll all start moving forward together with a common purpose.

2) Find a genuine compromise on GRA reform.  In saying this, I'll infuriate some of my fellow Alba members just as much as SNP leadership loyalists, because both sides of the debate believe there is no room for compromise due to the fundamental principles at stake.  Nevertheless, the only apparent alternative to compromise at the moment is an imminent total victory for the trans rights lobby, which will poison relationships in the independence movement for years to come.  The likes of John Nicolson and Mhairi Black may not want to hear or admit this, but a very substantial proportion of the movement is made up of what they describe as "transphobes", without whom there's unlikely to be any victory for Yes in a referendum.  The two sides will somehow have to learn to co-exist under the same umbrella.

3) Establish normalised relations with Alba.  Parties in electoral competition with each other don't have to be in a state of all-out war, especially if they agree on the same flagship policy.  The SNP regard the Greens as friendly rivals, not enemies, and there's no reason why the SNP and Alba can't develop a similar relationship.  At the very least, stop treating Alba like a terrorist organisation.

4) And Alba should do its bit in return.  As I've said before, it's important that Alba's electoral strategy is soberly calculated to maximise the chances of independence, rather than to maximise the chances of revenge against the Sturgeon leadership of the SNP.  We must be incredibly cautious about the risk of splitting the pro-indy vote by putting up candidates in first-past-the-post elections, and we should show generosity of spirit in the local elections next year by urging Alba voters to give their lower preferences to the SNP, the Greens, and any other pro-indy parties or candidates.

Big drop in Labour vote as SNP win Falkirk by-election

As you may have seen, the SNP won a local council by-election in Falkirk overnight.  It's being reported as an 'SNP gain from Labour', although as is often the case with STV by-elections, things are not quite as they seem - the SNP won the popular vote in the ward last time around, and the real battle was with the Tories, who came very close to topping the first preference vote.  Nevertheless, there has been a very real and substantial swing from Labour to SNP.

Falkirk South by-election result (first preference votes):

SNP 39.2% (+3.5) 

Conservatives 38.9% (+6.8) 

Labour 15.7% (-11.4) 

Greens 6.2% (+1.1)

Our regular commenter 'Independence for Scotland' made an intelligent point about the reaction of SNP leadership loyalists to this result - they've said Alba have demonstrated themselves to be an irrelevance because they didn't stand a candidate.  But the same people would undoubtedly have slammed Alba for splitting the vote if they had stood a candidate, which suggests that somewhere along the line the criticisms are intellectually dishonest.

The reality is, of course, that local elections (including by-elections) are conducted by a preferential voting system, which means Alba can stand without doing any harm whatsoever to other pro-independence parties, as long as they urge their voters to give lower preferences to the SNP and the Greens.  The much trickier issue is first-past-the-post contests - ie. Westminster general elections, Westminster by-elections and Holyrood by-elections.  In those cases, the vote can genuinely be split and in the worst-case scenario a unionist might end up winning unnecessarily.  My own personal view is that Alba should sit out first-past-the-post elections unless there's an exceptionally good reason - with an example of an exceptionally good reason being that there are sitting Alba MPs in two Westminster constituencies.  If there's a snap general election at any point, I think it would make strategic sense for Alba to pour all its resources into defending East Lothian and Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, and not actually stand anywhere else (unless there are other defectors, of course).

The curious Britishness of the pro-independence Scottish Government

Reading through the account in the Guardian of the report into the UK's catastrophic failings in the early weeks of the pandemic, I initially got the impression that the ludicrous fiction that there was never any herd immunity policy was being maintained.  But thankfully no.  The distinction being drawn is simply that the authorities didn't necessarily believe that mass infection was desirable, but thought that any other outcome was impossible and so 'fatalistically' decided to give up on trying to stop the virus and instead merely managed the supposedly 'inevitable' herd immunity process.  The report makes clear that all the governments of the four nations of the UK wholeheartedly adopted this approach in the early stages, leading to a large number of wholly avoidable deaths.  This won't be news to those of us who followed the antics of the Scottish Government's National Clinical Director Jason Leitch during his Grand Complacency Tour of the TV and radio studios in February and March 2020.  Instead of offering much-needed information about how the public could play their part in stopping the virus in its tracks, he was propagandising for total and abject surrender.  All that was left for us, he explained, was to form an orderly queue and wait patiently for our turn to catch the virus, so that mass infection happened slowly enough to ensure the NHS wasn't overwhelmed - a contradiction in terms, as it turned out.

The fact that the Scottish Government got it so badly wrong during those crucial weeks is an uncomfortable truth for the independence movement, which explains why many Yes supporters are still in denial about it.  Some still defend the indefensible by suggesting that Leitch and co were simply following the science as it was then, and that the science subsequently changed.  Frankly, that is complete rubbish.  Leitch was explicitly rejecting the clear advice of the world-leading WHO experts, which was to test every suspected case, to trace the contacts of anyone who tested positive and to isolate them.  Crucially, the WHO had established that coronavirus did not behave like flu - the speed of transmission was not rapid enough to make suppression through contact tracing impossible, as the experience in both China and South Korea was demonstrating before our eyes.  The British scientific advisers, though, were in love with their own sense of resignation, and simply refused to believe this growing body of evidence.  Newspapers were briefed with gibberish about how the virus was supposedly just 'hiding away' in South Korea, implying that the country's apparent success in suppressing the virus was illusory.

In a nutshell, then, there was world science and there was British science, and the Scottish Government plumped for British science without a moment's hesitation.  That perhaps isn't a surprise as far as the civil service aspect is concerned, because ultimately people who work for the Scottish Government are part of the UK civil service and have to serve two masters.  But as for ministers themselves? Why would the leading members of the Scottish National Party "think British, not global" at the most critical moment of government decision-making since the Second World War? Ultimately, that is why this episode is even more uncomfortable for unionism than it is for the independence movement, because the only possible lesson to draw is that the Scottish Government did make a terrible error, and that error was to be too slavishly loyal to the British state, to the British system, and to the myth of British exceptionalism.  As soon as we departed from UK government policy, the situation improved markedly.

Curiously, though, I'm not sure even the SNP leadership themselves have fully learned that lesson.  They still seem to instinctively prefer a Westminster-led 'Four Nations' approach wherever possible, including on oil, of all things.  There are also some symbolic giveaways of the underlying attitudes behind all this, for example the comments from Nicola Sturgeon about how it was so exciting to have Emma Raducanu to support in the way that we've always supported Andy Murray.  Now, I totally understand being excited by Emma Raducanu as an individual player - she's a sensation who may well go on to dominate women's tennis for the next decade.  But if you bracket her with Andy Murray, and say those are the two players who excite you, and imply that it's because of something they have in common, then that something can only really be that they're both...British.  Which implies that you regard yourself as British and feel a strong loyalty to Britain as a country.  Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what that could be.

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.