The "Schrodinger's De Facto" announced by Yousaf today is a deliberately ambiguous and contradictory policy - but it may still represent a step forward *if* he can be held to it

The minutes immediately after Humza Yousaf reached the key part of his speech were rather comical, with the BBC claiming that he had announced a de facto independence referendum, LBC claiming that he had announced something even more radical than a de facto referendum, and Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson claiming that he had announced that the de facto referendum had been scrapped.  The confusion was, of course, wholly intentional.  Yousaf's team had callibrated the speech so that everyone would hear precisely what they wanted to hear, and if someone didn't have any particular preference, they would just hear one of the three possibilities roughly at random.  

The formulation the leadership have come up with is what happens when you try to please both the people who want the SNP to be seeking an outright mandate for independence, and the people who want the SNP to only be seeking yet another mandate for a Section 30 order that everyone knows will never be granted.  It's a pretence that you can seek both types of mandate at one and the same time, which of course you can't. But for as long as that pretence is the holding position, you can kind of say that all of the journalists were both right and wrong simultaneously.  What Yousaf has proposed can't really be described as a de facto referendum, because the retention of a conventional referendum as the preferred outcome of post-election negotiations with the UK Government implies that an election victory would not in itself be a sufficient mandate for independence.  But it also can't really be described as *not* being a de facto referendum, because if you clearly state in the SNP manifesto that a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence, and if the SNP win more than 50% of the vote, that would plainly constitute the first ever democratic mandate for independence.  The more fair-minded journalists down south would actually acknowledge that, and it could potentially build some pressure on the UK Government.  There would be a very clear contrast with earlier SNP election victories in the devolution era, when Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and others always replied to the question "is this a vote in favour of independence?" with "no, it's a vote for an SNP government which will give people a choice on independence at a later stage".  

So it isn't a de facto, it isn't *not* a de facto - it's some sort of weird purgatory that hovers ambiguously in between the two concepts.  An alternative interpretation of how we've ended up here is that it wasn't a straight compromise between two warring camps, but instead a case of the opponents of a de facto referendum winning the leadership election and then completely changing their minds very soon afterwards due to the opinion poll evidence showing that independence is now far more popular than the SNP.  They had previously assumed that independence would be a drag on SNP support, and then suddenly realised the opposite was true, but because they had made such a song and dance about a de facto referendum being the worst idea since the "Ed Stone", they had to find a dignified way of making a U-turn.  So they hurriedly came up with a plan very similar to a de facto referendum, but called it something else as a face-saving exercise.  I don't think that interpretation really holds water, though, because this plan must have already been devised a couple of weeks ago when both Yousaf and Jamie Hepburn were persevering with the line that there needed to be a sustained supermajority in order to somehow force the UK Government into granting a Section 30 order.

Which of course flatly contradicts the apparent revelation today that Team Humza will define a mandate for independence as being a majority of seats, not a majority of the popular vote, meaning that they're actually setting a lower threshold for victory than Nicola Sturgeon did.  No obvious sign of joined-up thinking there.  Last year, I found myself among a small minority within the Alba Party, because I said that it was actually perfectly reasonable for Sturgeon to declare that a majority of votes would be required - I felt she was just stating the obvious, because nobody (not the public, not the London establishment, not the international community) would be remotely impressed by a mandate that fell short of that, and if she didn't acknowledge that truth upfront, the voters would think she was trying to win independence by tricksy or underhand means.  But most Alba people, all the way up to Alex Salmond, disagreed with me and felt strongly that a majority of seats should be sufficient for an independence mandate.  Logically they ought to now welcome the unexpected fact that Yousaf has decided they were right and Nicola Sturgeon was wrong, although he could have a hell of a job defending that position during the general election campaign.

To my mind, the biggest problem with what Yousaf has announced is that the creative ambiguity he's deliberately built in will be picked up on by voters, who won't believe that they would 'really' be voting for independence if they put their cross in the SNP box.  That could cancel out any benefit of trying to galvanise the independence vote, in a way that wouldn't have happened if Yousaf had simply stuck with the clarity of Sturgeon's de facto referendum message.  Nevertheless, if the SNP and other parties with similar language in their manifestos were to somehow pull off a popular vote majority, in spite of Yousaf making that majority less likely due to his own strategic missteps, it would be the first time in history that Scotland has voted in favour of independence, and for that reason I would have to say that today marks a step forward - provided that Yousaf doesn't backtrack on what he's said, which is always the million dollar question given how many cowardly U-turns the SNP leadership have performed since 2017.  I had thought that the way Nicola Sturgeon practically signed in blood the original de facto referendum policy meant that it couldn't be scrapped, and yet they still found a way of backtracking by the extreme method of changing leader.  

So nothing can be relied upon - although the alternative way of looking at it is that what happened today is evidence that it wasn't actually possible to reverse the Sturgeon plan after she announced it, or not in full anyway.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.

"SETTLED WILL" SENSATION on eve of special SNP conference: yet ANOTHER Find Out Now poll shows a majority of Scottish voters want independence

I can't 100% guarantee the provenance of this, but Marcia has directed me towards a website claiming that yet another Find Out Now poll is showing Yes in the lead - if it's confirmed, that'll be six out of six for Yes in polls conducted by that firm.

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Find Out Now, 13th-20th June 2023)

Yes 47.9%

No 45.0%

I can't find the figures with Don't Knows excluded, but a rough recalculation suggests Yes may just about make it to 52% when rounded to the nearest whole number.  Very disappointingly, it looks like Find Out Now have introduced weighting by recalled 2014 indyref vote in this poll - that's a massive step backwards given the danger of false recall from a vote that took place almost a decade ago.  However, there's some reassurance to be gained from the fact that Yes still have the lead even after that retrograde methodological change.

Another limitation of this poll is that 16 and 17 year olds are excluded from the sample, which may conceivably have led to a very slight understatement of the Yes vote.  

The news that the Scottish people have maintained their settled will in favour of independence (assuming Find Out Now are getting it broadly right) should heap further pressure on the Yousaf leadership to restore Nicola Sturgeon's de facto referendum plan.  Certainly, for what it's worth, I'd urge all attendees of this weekend's SNP special conference to lend their full support to the excellent proposal Ash Regan will be putting forward.

“The time has come for #Scotland to move beyond dreaming of independence, and instead, establish a credible, tangible, and proactive path forward.”

Read the ‘#ReganProposal’, in full: https://t.co/QjQxEyQfFu#VEMforIndependence #IndyConv. pic.twitter.com/NpAm48t7HF

— Ash Regan MSP (@AshReganSNP) June 23, 2023

The Winnie Ewing effect

Many of the tributes to Winnie Ewing, who died yesterday, will rightly focus on her victory as the SNP candidate in Hamilton in 1967, which literally changed Scottish politics forever.   Apart from a few weeks at the end of the Second World War, the SNP had never held representation in Westminster prior to that landmark moment, but they've held it continuously ever since.

But for my money her biggest electoral achievement of all was single-handedly transforming the European Parliament constituency of Highlands & Islands from a three-way SNP-Liberal-Conservative marginal into an SNP fortress over the course of a decade and a half.  She was the SNP candidate on all four occasions that the enormous constituency, covering roughly one-eighth of the population of Scotland, was contested.

Highlands and Islands results in European Parliament elections:

1979:

SNP 34.0%

Liberals 30.7%

Conservatives 26.1%

Labour 9.2%

1984:

SNP 41.8% (+7.8)

Liberal-SDP Alliance 28.1% (-2.6)

Conservatives 16.0% (-10.1)

Labour 14.1% (+4.9)

1989:

SNP 51.5% (+9.7)

Conservatives 16.8% (+0.8)

Labour 13.9% (-0.2)

Greens 9.5% (n/a)

Social and Liberal Democrats 8.3% (-19.8)

1994:

SNP 58.4% (+6.9)

Labour 15.6% (+1.7)

Conservatives 12.3% (-4.5)

Liberal Democrats 10.1% (+1.8)

Greens 2.4% (-7.1)

UKIP 0.8% (n/a)

Natural Law Party 0.4% (n/a)

Make no mistake - a big part of those increases was the ever-growing personal vote for Winnie Ewing.  Not all of it, admittedly, because the SNP made big advances nationally in both 1989 and 1994, with the latter being at the time the highest national share of the vote (32.6%) the party had ever received in any type of election, even eclipsing October 1974.  Nevertheless, the bulk of the Westminster constituencies that overlapped with Highlands & Islands remained firmly in Liberal Democrat hands until as late as 2015, which gives you a guide as to the extent to which Winnie Ewing was denying gravity with her own results.

At around the time she left the European Parliament in 1999, she became one of Holyrood's inaugural MSPs, and famously chaired the first session, taking the opportunity to utter a line that caught the popular imagination so much that BBC Scotland even integrated it into their title sequence for the official opening of the Parliament a couple of months later: "The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March, in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened."  To this day her children Fergus Ewing and Annabelle Ewing carry on the family tradition as MSPs, with the latter serving as a current Deputy Presiding Officer of the Parliament.  Another famous member of the Ewing clan was Fergus's late wife Margaret, who was leader of the SNP group at Westminster between 1987 and 1999.

It's thus horribly ironic that stories started surfacing this week that the Yousaf leadership plans to withdraw the SNP whip from Fergus Ewing.  The blogger Paul Kavanagh even used his column in The National yesterday to call for the SNP to give Mr Ewing the boot.  The timing is of course just a tragic coincidence, and I'm sure Paul will be mortified about it.  Nevertheless, out of common decency it's surely now unthinkable that the SNP will go ahead with their plan of expelling Mr Ewing in the short-term, and hopefully they'll now have the space to reflect and forget the whole thing in the longer-term.  The Kavanagh column implied, as the controversial journalist David Leask might put it, that Mr Ewing is somehow not "real SNP".  But as SNP members look back on his mother's legacy, they'll surely ask themselves the simple question: "if the Ewings aren't real SNP, who actually is?"  

Paul Kavanagh branded Mr Ewing a Tory, and said the only thing that separates him from "yer actual Tories" was his belief in Scottish independence.  I doubt if that's true, actually, but even if it is, and with all due respect to Paul, it's belief in independence that is supposed to separate SNP politicians from unionist parties.  Fergus Ewing might have been a Tory if he hadn't believed in independence.  Margo MacDonald might have been Labour.  Kate Forbes might have been a Lib Dem.  But they all joined the same party because it was independence they had in common.  But now?  Why would it seem so obvious to Paul Kavanagh that independence-supporting Fergus Ewing belongs outside the SNP and the (effectively) opponent of independence Ben Macpherson belongs within it?  What does that tell us about the core principle of the SNP in 2023 - the one that defines who is inside the tribe and who is outside?  Is it trans rights? Pronouns? Bottle return schemes?

Hopefully today's tragic news will play a small part in helping the SNP to step back, and reconnect with what they once were as a party, and should never, ever have stopped being.

The SNP need to start getting real - they face a full-blown emergency, and they will not resolve it with "steady as she goes" or with minor tweaks

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that polling had lulled the SNP into a false sense of security in the run-up to the 2017 general election.  As it's Panelbase polling we have at the forefront of our minds just now, let's use a Panelbase poll as an example of what I meant.  With around a week or ten days to go until polling day in 2017, this is what Panelbase were showing - 

SNP 42%

Conservatives 30%

Labour 20%

Liberal Democrats 5%

No obvious cause for alarm there - the SNP were clearly going to lose a few seats to the Tories, but the vast bulk of their seats looked rock solid, because Labour were the only potential challengers in most of them, and the lead over Labour was almost as big as it was in the landslide of 2015.  But when the real votes were counted, the SNP were five points lower than Panelbase had suggested and Labour were seven points higher, wiping out more than half of that lead.  Six SNP seats were lost to Labour, and it was very close to being a lot, lot worse.  The Tories also made more gains than expected, because in the end they trailed the SNP by only eight points, not the twelve suggested by Panelbase.

Now, it may be there was simply a systemic error in the polling.  But it's also possible that there was genuine movement against the SNP as the campaign drew to a close, due to the disadvantages any Scotland-only party has always faced and always will face in UK general elections.  (You can guarantee that next year our wonderful impartial BBC will want so-called "Prime Ministerial Debates" featuring only Sunak and Starmer.) So just imagine for the sake of argument that next year's campaign goes as badly for the SNP as 2017 did.  Taking last night's Panelbase poll as a starting-point, a similar type of further swing to Labour could see a result along the lines of - 

Labour 41%

SNP 29%

Conservatives 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election result): Labour 41 (+40), Conservatives 7 (+1), SNP 6 (-42), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

The above is not in any sense a prediction, because sometimes momentum can catch you out by going into reverse very dramatically.  2017 actually offers a demonstration of that phenomenon, because the wheels seemed to be coming off for Jeremy Corbyn in the local elections of May 2017, and nobody would ever have believed that Labour would be making gains and depriving the Tories of a majority just a month later.  But nevertheless, I do think the above numbers are a perfectly reasonable illustration of what could easily happen if the SNP don't take drastic action to change the direction of travel.  

As you can see, it would be an unmitigated calamity for the independence movement.  We'd be right back to where we were prior to the 2014 indyref, with the SNP reduced once again to fringe status in the House of Commons.  And once Labour have their feet under the table in those Westminster constituencies, it would be very difficult to dislodge them.  The SNP might find themselves once again ghettoised as a Holyrood party, which would make independence more difficult to win.  The London establishment will scoff at the idea that independence is even on the agenda for as long as the SNP have only a handful of Commons seats, given that Nicola Sturgeon didn't come close to the Holy Grail when she had 48 or 56 seats.

This is why I despair at the current lack of perspective in SNP ranks.  Remember the leadership loyalist Twitter account who said during the early spring that party members had the luxury of electing someone as unpopular as Humza Yousaf, because if he turned out to be an election-loser at the "less important" Westminster vote, it wouldn't matter that much because they could then correct the mistake in time for the 2026 Holyrood election?  Well, no, actually, you don't have that luxury.  The Westminster election isn't one you can afford to be drubbed in, because you and the independence cause might never recover from that.  I sometimes get the impression that people think 20-30 seats is the lowest the SNP can possibly fall to next year, but as you can see above that's far from the case.  Under first-past-the-post, relatively small movements can result in total carnage. And frankly, I think this is a mistake that even Kate Forbes' allies are making.  All the mood music suggests they think they can afford to wait until Yousaf crashes and burns at the general election, but in the very plausible worst case scenario, there may not actually be much left for a new leader to inherit.  The SNP need to save themselves before the general election, not afterwards.

Perhaps the most dispiriting part of the Sunday Times' write-up of the new Panelbase poll was the revelation that SNP MPs under Stephen Flynn are alive to the danger they face, but that their proposed "solution" is to double down on Yousaf's shelving of independence rather than reverse it.  I'm sure it's possible to squint at focus group results and convince yourself that Labour can be beaten at a general election in Scotland by sidelining independence and concentrating on the bread and butter issues that "people really care about", but the stark reality is that you will just never get away from the fact that Labour can form a government at Westminster and the SNP can't.  It doesn't matter how wonderful your proposals are - people will stop listening because you can't do anything about them.  What you really need to do is put your proposals in the context of independence - say "this is how we will fix the economy and public services in an independent Scotland" and invite people to vote SNP in a de facto referendum so that independence negotiations can start.

As far as the problem of Yousaf's leadership is concerned, I hold no brief for Kate Forbes.  If I was going to construct my perfect SNP leader, I'd want someone a bit more left-wing than Forbes, a bit more socially liberal, and certainly someone who is committed to a de facto independence referendum (Forbes distanced herself from that plan during the leadership election almost as much as Yousaf did).  But if you look at the qualities that are required in the current circumstances, Forbes is quite plainly the nearest fit the SNP have actually got.  She's liked, trusted and regarded as credible by the public.  She's capable of injecting some optimism and ambition on the subject of independence while all Yousaf does is drain the life from everyone's veins.  And most importantly of all, she would represent a decisive break from the Sturgeon leadership, whereas Yousaf represents a continuation of it (as indeed would other potential alternative leaders such as Angus Robertson and John Swinney).

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Landmark Panelbase poll shows SNP on course for defeat at the general election. This has to be the reality-check that causes denial within the SNP to end. They chose the wrong leader in March and that mistake has to be faced up to.

As expected, opinion polls since the unpopular Humza Yousaf became First Minister in highly controversial circumstances three months ago have shown voters punishing the SNP for their choice.  The party's lead over Labour has dwindled to almost nothing in many cases, and there have even been a few polls that have shown Labour either level or in the lead on the Holyrood list ballot.  And yet the denial from Team Humza has been quite simply astounding - anonymous briefings to the press have suggested that the poll results are somehow even heartening in the circumstances.  That may simply be because, until now, no conventional poll has shown the SNP quite losing their lead on the Westminster ballot or on the Holyrood constituency ballot, which are regarded (wrongly) as more important votes than the Holyrood list.  If so, tonight will bring a shuddering halt to the complacency, and that may be no bad thing.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Panelbase / Sunday Times, 12th-15th June 2023):

Labour 34% (+3)

SNP 34% (-5)

Conservatives 18% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 7% (+2)

Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): Labour 26 (+25), SNP 21 (-27), Conservatives 7 (+1), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

Incidentally, the percentage changes above are from a Panelbase poll conducted just after Yousaf became leader in March, so there's no real doubt that the SNP have lost substantial support on his watch.  I know some will argue that any SNP leader would be facing exactly the same problems he is right now, but that doesn't wash for two clear reasons.  Firstly, although the current SNP leadership can't control the fact that Yousaf's predecessor has just been arrested, what they absolutely can control is their own reaction to that news, and in no sane world would that involve sending Nicola Sturgeon flowers or saying that disloyalty to her is incompatible with SNP membership.  Those actions send an unmistakeable message to the public that the current leadership is just a continuation of the Sturgeon leadership in all but name.

And secondly, it's not as if there's isn't a clear alternative to Yousaf who we have good reason to believe the public would be responding to a lot better.  Just like the Savanta poll the other day, Panelbase are showing that Yousaf's narrowly defeated leadership opponent Kate Forbes, who of course unlike him would not be a continuity leader in any shape or form, is now the most popular senior politician in Scotland.

Net approval ratings:

Kate Forbes (SNP): +3

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -2

Humza Yousaf (SNP): -12

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): -18

Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -34

There is the now-customary silver lining in this poll - on the independence question, Yes support is holding up impressively, which suggests that the constitutional debate has now matured to the point where people can easily separate out their views on independence from their dislike of the SNP leadership of the day.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 47% (-1)

No 53% (+1)

With SNP support now 13 points lower than independence support, it looks as if literally the only way the SNP could recover their position without changing leader is by restoring the Sturgeon plan of a de facto referendum, thus giving a reason for Yes-supporting switchers to Labour to return to the SNP fold.

The Holyrood numbers in the poll are almost as bad for the SNP as the Westminster numbers, but not quite -

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot: 

SNP 36% (-1)

Labour 32% (+2)

Conservatives 13% (-4)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+1)

Greens 7% (+2)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30% (-1)

Labour 28% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-3)

Greens 12% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 8% (+2) 

Alba 4% (-1)

Seats projection (with changes from 2021 election): SNP 47 (-17), Labour 37 (+15), Conservatives 23 (-8), Greens 14 (+6), Liberal Democrats 8 (+4)

That would leave the SNP with exactly the same number of seats that they won under Alex Salmond in 2007 when they pipped Labour by just one seat to take power for the first time.  As in 2007, there would be no pro-independence majority - the unionist parties in combination would have 68, while the SNP and Greens between them would have only 61.

*  *  *

I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1800.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

The growing gap between independence support and SNP support means that a de facto referendum has undoubtedly become the smart strategic call for the SNP at this stage - even when viewed only through the prism of self-interest and careerism

Both The Times and The National are reporting that Humza Yousaf appears to be reverting to Nicola Sturgeon's policy of a de facto independence referendum, based on language he used in an email to SNP members trying to sell the remaining tickets for the special independence conference.  I would be only too delighted if that was true, but my strong sense is that it's a fundamental misreading of what he's said, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if The National are invited to publish a "clarification" before the day is out.  The language about a vote for the SNP being a vote for independence is pretty much identical to what he was saying a week ago when both he and Jamie Hepburn were being scathing about any route to independence that doesn't involve a Section 30 order, so I can't detect much sign (or any sign at all) of a change of heart.  Probably the idea is that SNP votes will be interpreted as evidence of public backing for independence, in the same way that Tory votes can be interpreted as general support for conservatism, and Labour votes under Starmer can be interpreted as general support for some kind of Frankenstein's monster of syncretic authoritarianism.  But the sole purpose of demonstrating that support for independence will just be to continue with the endless futility of begging for a Section 30 order.

A true de facto referendum is an election in which the manifesto states "if we and our allies secure an absolute majority of the popular vote, Scotland will have decided to become an independent country and we will then invite the UK government to negotiate an independence settlement with us".  There's no mention of a Section 30 order or a referendum, because the election *is* the referendum and no further vote is required.  Now, it's true that the unprecedented leverage that we would accrue from Scotland having voted for the first time to become an independent country might well force the UK government into a negotiation that results in a referendum as a compromise.  That's fine, we live in the real world and sometimes political obstacles can only be removed by means of dialogue and imperfect trade-offs.  But at the point at which you actually seek the mandate, it's important to be crystal-clear about what the intended purpose of the mandate is.  If all anyone hears is "what we really want is a Section 30 order", no-one - not the UK Government, not the media, not the voters, no-one - will actually treat a successful outcome as a genuine mandate for independence, and you'll never have the leverage in the first place.  You'll also have a much harder job persuading independence supporters to vote for you if they're not convinced they're really voting for independence.

When Nicola Sturgeon first committed the SNP to the de facto referendum policy, it was widely reported that many SNP parliamentarians at Westminster were furious about it.  I'm not sure it was ever clearly explained what their problem with it was, but there are two logical explanations.  The most charitable one is that they were worried about the effect on the independence cause itself, ie. they thought the 50% + 1 target wouldn't be achieved and that as a result independence would be off the agenda for decades.  We can put that worry to rest now, because the penny has dropped even for the formerly arch-plebiscite-election-sceptic Pete Wishart, who now realises that the beauty of using elections to seek an independence mandate is that there's no such thing as a generational defeat.  If you fall a few percentage points short in any given election, you can just try again at the next election.  There can be as many de facto referendums as there are scheduled elections.

The less charitable explanation is that they were worried for their own careers and were stuck in a scared-of-their-own-shadows 2017-style mindset of thinking that the way to shore up the SNP vote is to talk about independence as little as possible and to make independence seem as distant as possible.  Well, if that made any sense at all last year when Nicola Sturgeon first adopted the de facto referendum plan, it certainly doesn't make any sense now.  The SNP vote has since dropped sharply while support for independence has held up or possibly even increased.  In the Savanta poll yesterday, independence support was at 49% while the SNP were only on 38% in Westminster voting intentions - a gap of eleven points.  There are clearly substantial numbers of pro-Yes, ex-SNP votes out there, mostly in the Labour column, which can be won back by giving people the chance to vote directly for independence, and that frankly won't be won back in any other way.  The clarity of Labour's message of "vote Labour on Thursday, get rid of the Tory government by Friday afternoon" means that the SNP will only be able to compete if their offer is just as clear and captures people's imaginations even more.  "Vote SNP and we'll negotiate independence" will cut it, but "send a message to Westminster", "stronger for Scotland", "standing up for Scotland", "elect a local champion", or any of the other meaningless formulations that have been tried, will not.

And if a de facto referendum only boosts the SNP vote to 43% and not to 51%, so what?  We go again at the following election, and in the meantime scores of pro-independence seats have been saved.  Even from the most hard-headed, cynical, self-interested, careerist point of view, a de facto referendum is undoubtedly the smart strategic choice for the SNP at this stage.

*  *  *

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Familiar pattern in new Savanta poll: independence support up, SNP support down, and Kate Forbes replaces Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland's most popular politician

This is another sobering poll for Humza Yousaf.  His ill-judged Interflora moment ("you send the abject subservience, we'll send the flowers"), together with the extraordinary revelation that he told SNP parliamentarians that disloyalty to Sturgeon was incompatible with SNP membership, has put paid to any notion that he'll ever be anything more than Sturgeon's handpicked continuity leader.  That ties his fate inextricably to his predecessor's - if she comes out of the current process OK, so might he, but if she doesn't, he could well lose his job before the general election simply because he backed her so unreservedly.

However, in one sense the damage is already done for Nicola Sturgeon.  You live by the sword and you die by the sword - she and her allies directed Yes supporters and the public to regard Alex Salmond's acquittal as a meaningless technicality, and to view the process against him as sufficient reason for him to lose his reputation and his political career.  Judging from the personal ratings in the new Savanta poll, she's starting to suffer from the same brutal principle herself.  Earlier polling suggested her popularity was holding up astonishingly well during the police investigation, but the fact that she has now been personally arrested, rather than just people close to her, may have made the decisive difference.  (In fact, only some of Savanta's fieldwork took place after the news of her arrest broke, so future polling could be even worse for her.)

Net personal ratings of senior politicians (Savanta / The Scotsman, 9th-14th June 2023):

Kate Forbes (SNP): +2

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -1

Keir Starmer (Labour): -3

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): -7

Humza Yousaf (SNP): -10

What can you even say about Yousaf's dismal showing here?  He's foolishly hitched his wagon to a yesterday's leader whose popularity has plummeted, and yet he's still more unpopular than her anyway.  It's rare to find yourself in a situation where someone who is dropping like a stone still has the theoretical capacity to drag you upwards (slightly).  And given the extent to which the SNP leadership election boiled down to a two-horse race between Yousaf and Kate Forbes, party members can be in no doubt that they made the wrong choice in March.  If they had picked Forbes, leadership would currently be an asset for the SNP and would give them an advantage over Labour - as it is, the total opposite is true.  They may wish to reverse that mistake before too much damage is done at the general election next year.

Now for the good news: this poll adds further to the already considerable weight of evidence that Yousaf's unpopularity with the public, and the ongoing Sturgeon soap opera, is not damaging support for independence.  If anything, the trend for Yes is slightly upwards.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 49% (+1)

No 51% (-1)

The National have got into the habit of accompanying any front page headline about good polling news for Yes with a photo of Humza Yousaf, as if he was personally responsible for independence support increasing or holding up.  Which is a touch comical in a way, because the evidence is now overwhelming that it's happening in spite of him rather than because of him.  The trend on independence has become completely decoupled from the SNP's own polling fortunes, which as you'll see below look markedly different.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 38% (-1)

Labour 34% (+1)

Conservatives 17% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 7% (+1)

Seats projection (current boundaries, with changes measured from 2019 election result): SNP 27 (-21), Labour 22 (+21), Conservatives 5 (-1), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

So the Humza emergency deepens - if this poll is right, the SNP are on course to relinquish their majority among Scottish seats in the Commons.  They would be left with 27 seats and the unionist parties in combination would have 32.  In practice it would probably be even worse than that, because we've yet to go through the election campaign, which like all Westminster campaigns will be an 'away fixture' for the SNP and a 'home fixture' for Labour and the Tories.  The SNP slipping back into second place is very much on the cards unless appropriate action is taken (by which I mean replacing Yousaf as leader, or restoring the de facto referendum plan, or both).  Individual SNP MPs who stand to lose their seats on these numbers include Anum Qaisar, Tommy Sheppard, Deidre Brock, Alison Thewliss, this week's Question Time star David Linden, Anne McLaughlin, Stewart McDonald and Angela Crawley.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 40% (+1)

Labour 33% (+1)

Conservatives 16% (-3)

Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot: 

SNP 28% (-5)

Labour 28% (-2)

Conservatives 18% (-)

Greens 13% (+3)

Liberal Democrats 11% (+4)

Seats projection (with changes measured from 2021 election): SNP 50 (-14), Labour 34 (+12), Conservatives 21 (-10), Greens 12 (+4), Liberal Democrats 12 (+8)

The pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament would be lost on these numbers, although admittedly it would be a closer-run thing than suggested by some recent polls from other firms.  The SNP and Greens in combination would have 62 seats, and the unionist parties combined would have 67.

It's the drop on the list vote that's really killing the SNP here.  I know there's a perception that the SNP don't need list votes, but that theory goes totally out of the window when their constituency lead over the second-placed party drops to as low as seven points.  In that scenario they need to offset their constituency losses with list seats, and that's obviously not going to happen on 28% of the list vote, especially when that puts them level-pegging with Labour.

By the way, if you're an SNP member who wants a de facto referendum, why not register for the special conference and vote for it? What have you got to lose? One weekend out of your life, even if it's a leadership stitch-up.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) June 16, 2023

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1700.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Bellshill by-election result: Sirens are now screaming at full blast about the consequences of keeping Humza as leader after big drop in the SNP's vote

Just for once, we have a Scottish local by-election result that won't lead the hapless "impartial Liberal Democrat election expert" Mike Smithson to inadvertently reveal his astounding ignorance of the election system his own party is supposed to support, because this is a Labour gain from the SNP in both the literal and genuine sense, ie. Labour have had to overhaul a deficit in the popular vote in the ward in order to fill a vacancy left by a departing SNP councillor.  It's amazing how rarely STV by-elections work out quite as simply as that.

Bellshill by-election result (15th June 2023):

Labour 51.8% (+13.0)

SNP 27.1% (-13.7)

Conservatives 8.5% (-5.1)

British Unionist Party 4.3% (n/a)

Alba 3.9% (+1.7)

Greens 1.6% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 1.2% (n/a)

Scottish Family Party 1.1% (n/a)

Freedom Alliance 0.3% (n/a)

UKIP 0.3% (n/a)

It's impossible to put a positive gloss on this for the SNP.  This is a ward where they were marginally ahead in May 2022, and Labour have just beaten them by a 2-1 margin.  Bellshill is sufficiently similar territory to Rutherglen to suggest that the SNP are likely to be heading for a heavy defeat in the (probably) forthcoming parliamentary by-election unless something very strange happens - on a similar swing they would lose by around sixteen or seventeen percentage points in Rutherglen.  They desperately need a fresh start under a new, non-continuity leader who has considerably better net personal ratings than Humza Yousaf. 

No-one can accuse the Alba Party of not having thrown the kitchen sink at this by-election - my inbox and Twitter account have been buzzing with it for weeks, if not months.  Will they feel this result is a sufficient return for such a heavy investment?  Probably just about.  You can't dine out on 4% results forever, but when you're a party that has been at times branded as heading for extinction, modest progress that gets you ahead of two major parties is a phase you probably need to go through if you're going to make a genuine breakthrough later.  This is the second time Alba have beaten the Greens in a by-election, and I believe it's the first time they've beaten the Liberal Democrats.  Getting the equivalent of roughly one-seventh of the SNP vote is not too shabby either.

Nevertheless, a vote share of 4% after such a full-blooded campaigning effort would tend to confirm my observation of a couple of weeks ago - Alba can only hope to make a really big impact in Rutherglen if they put forward Alex Salmond as their candidate.  All the door-knocking in the world won't offset the lack of a big name on the ballot paper.

This is a strikingly poor result for the Tories, although they probably suffered more than any other party from the intervention of the British Unionist Party and the three other fringe right-wing candidates.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1500.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Poll shows most voters who express a view want pro-indy parties to put forward a united slate of election candidates to win independence for Scotland

The results of another question have been revealed from the new Find Out Now poll commissioned by the Alba Party.  This time I haven't been emailed the datasets, so I can only tell you what's been published on the Alba website, although the tables will probably appear publicly on the Find Out Now website before too long.  Of those respondents who "expressed a view", 53% think that pro-independence parties should put forward an agreed slate of candidates to seek a mandate to negotiate an independence settlement with the United Kingdom government.  That figure will exclude Don't Knows and anyone who said they preferred not to answer the question, so we'll have to wait for the tables to see how big those two groups are.

Anybody rational would agree that the so-called "Scotland United" plan is the optimal one, but the snag is that we know the SNP and Green leaderships will never agree to it (barring a pre-election change in the SNP leadership, which admittedly is not impossible).  So what concerns me is what Alba are planning to do once they accept the plan is ruled out due to Humza Yousaf's intransigence.  Do they say "we'll be the grown-up in the room and avoid any risk of splitting the pro-indy vote in a crucial first-past-the-post election"?  That would be the strategically wise thing to do, both in the interests of the independence cause and in the self-interest of the Alba Party.  Brownie points would be earned with the Yes-supporting electorate that could prove to be very valuable on the Holyrood list vote in 2026.  It would avoid Alba needlessly becoming the bogeyman Yousaf uses to escape the blame (or to attempt to escape the blame) for catastrophic seat losses, if the worst happens at the general election next year.

Or will Alba say to the SNP: "we tried to reach out to you and you've reacted with contempt, so to hell with you, we'll stand against you in a significant number of Westminster constituencies"?  Lashing out in that way would be strategically foolish in my view, both for independence and for Alba.  I genuinely don't know what the plan is, but you can guarantee the leadership will already privately know - Alex Salmond won't have put forward the 'Scotland United' idea without knowing exactly what it and its near-inevitable rejection is really preparing the ground for.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1500.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Yet another BOMBSHELL Find Out Now poll confirms that independence is the consistent, settled will of the Scottish people - contradicting the claim made by Humza Yousaf only yesterday, and piling colossal pressure on him to reverse course and restore the Sturgeon policy of a de facto referendum

Well, well, well.  Just 24 hours since Humza Yousaf sold the jersey to some extent by telling the BBC (under no pressure at all from the interviewer, incidentally) that it was "obvious" that independence is "not the settled will of the Scottish people", along comes a poll to prove him totally wrong.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Find Out Now / Alba Party, 7th-12th June 2023)

Yes 52% (-)

No 48% (-)

The significant point here is that Find Out Now have conducted five polls on Scottish independence since they first entered the fray.  The five have been well spaced out, and each one has been commissioned by a different client.  There was one in March 2021 commissioned by the Daily Express, one in December 2022 which if I recall was commissioned by an independence supporter acting as an individual (although he crowdfunded for it retrospectively), one in January 2023 commissioned by The National, one in March 2023 commissioned by myself for Scot Goes Pop, and now one in June 2023 commissioned by the Alba Party.  All five have shown a majority in favour of independence, which suggests strongly that there has been a consistent Yes majority throughout the period Find Out Now have been polling - in other words, the polar opposite of the claim Yousaf made yesterday to justify indefinitely dropping all plans to win independence.

Now, of course, there have been many polls from other firms during the same period which have shown Yes below 50%.  But here's the thing: the consistency of Find Out Now's results suggests that the differences between polls have not been caused by Yes support on the ground bobbing up and down (as Yousaf misleadingly suggested yesterday) but instead by methodological differences between polling companies.  The two firms that have consistently shown Yes majorities in recent times are Find Out Now and Ipsos, and they differ from other firms in that they do not weight their results by recalled referendum vote from 2014.  The head of Ipsos explained a few months ago that they take that approach for a very sound reason, namely that there is a high probability of some respondents falsely recalling how they voted in 2014, especially after almost a decade.

It's about time Yousaf started speaking up for the cause he's supposed to believe in by forcibly pointing out the evidence that there already is a settled will in favour of independence, and challenging the questionable methodology of pollsters who show No leads, rather than eagerly buying into a unionist narrative to try to get himself off the hook of having to do anything to actually deliver independence.

A couple of technical notes about the poll - Alba in their press release have taken a leaf out of the Express / IPSO book by rounding the results to one decimal place, and not to a whole number, so they can say Yes are on 52.5% rather than 52%.  But at least, unlike the Express and IPSO, they've made an arithmetically accurate claim.  I've already received the datasets by email, and I can tell you that Yes are on 52.49%, so that number has been accurately rounded to 52.5%.

And Alba have also pointed out that the fieldwork covers the period of Nicola Sturgeon's arrest.  That's technically true, but I know from my own experience of commissioning a Find Out Now poll that the vast majority of responses will probably have come through on the first day of fieldwork, meaning last Wednesday.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £1500.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.