Addressing the bizarre claims that the Redfield & Wilton poll was "good for Humza"

There's a small section of the media, both mainstream and alternative, which wants to prop Humza Yousaf up at all costs - an entirely self-defeating objective from a pro-independence perspective, because Yousaf's departure would open up a genuine opportunity for the SNP to recover electorally, perhaps at some speed.  A couple of days ago, that section of the media attempted to turn the new Redfield & Wilton poll on its head and claim it as a good news story for Yousaf - a rather unpromising tactic, you would think, given that the poll was only the second poll from any firm for many, many years to show that the SNP have lost their outright lead in Westminster voting intentions.  However, there were two main aspects of the poll that were claimed as good for Yousaf, so let's take a look at each of them in turn.

Firstly, the fact that the Holyrood seats projection from the poll points to a pro-independence majority.  Now, I suppose from a propagandist's point of view, it must have been difficult to resist praying this in aid, because most polls in recent times have suggested a unionist majority, so the obvious temptation would be to try to make it look as if a pro-indy majority projection means Yousaf is achieving solid progress.  But to put it mildly, that is somewhat misleading.  Look at the list vote percentages in the new poll - 

Labour 30% (+1)

SNP 25% (-4)

Conservatives 15% (-3)

Greens 14% (+5)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-)

Alba 4% (+2)

Reform UK 3% (-)

In terms of who is in the lead and by how much, that is by far the worst result for the SNP on the list, in any poll from any firm, for many years.  They hadn't previously slipped more than two points behind, but now the deficit is five points.  In the real world, it's almost inconceivable they could get away with a result like that.  The reason the poll technically translates into a pro-indy majority in terms of seats is partly because the Greens are offsetting the SNP's disastrous showing on the list, but crucially it's also because the SNP's constituency lead over Labour is just high enough to crowd out the unionist parties in the constituencies and ensure that there aren't enough list seats available to correct for the SNP's constituency over-representation.  But that leaves the SNP in an incredibly vulnerable position, because it means that if their constituency vote falls even modestly, they'd suddenly be staring down the barrel of not only losing the pro-indy majority but also losing their status as the largest single party at Holyrood.  Without an in-built constituency bonus for any party, the list vote automatically becomes the more important vote and Labour's lead on the list would be very real indeed.

Secondly, the pro-Humza lobby are inviting us to ignore the fact that Yousaf is way behind Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer on net approval ratings, and to focus instead on the fact that Yousaf is ahead of Sarwar on an alternative leadership question posed by Redfield & Wilton.  That's actually been a consistent pattern in the monthly Redfield & Wilton polls - Yousaf always trails Sarwar on net approval ratings but always leads Sarwar on the alternative question.  Other firms haven't generally been asking the alternative question, so there's no way of knowing whether they would replicate the same pattern.  

But even if we accept the dubious belief that only the results on the alternative question matter, the problem is that the UK general election will take place much earlier than the Scottish Parliament election, so the electorate thinking Yousaf would make a better First Minister than Sarwar is not of any great relevance for now.  No poll is likely to ask whether Yousaf or Starmer would make a better UK Prime Minister, because it's an obviously nonsensical question, but actually the answer to that question would probably tell us quite a lot about why the SNP are currently struggling in Westminster voting intentions.  A big part of the reason for the SNP winning majorities in the last three general elections is that Nicola Sturgeon was far more highly regarded than Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn, and also that she was regarded as a political figure of enough significance to be worthy of being part of the Westminster 'conversation', which is not usually the case for SNP leaders and is unlikely to be the case for Yousaf.

*  *  *

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and Stuart Campbell is somehow still in favour of Scottish independence even though he's announced he won't vote in favour of it.  Or so you'd believe if you listened to the angry participants of the social media pile-on that Mr Campbell instigated within literally minutes of my blogpost last weekend.  It's probably fair to say that he was deeply concerned that his new stance was going to be correctly characterised as him abandoning his support for independence, because he seemed to be checking this blog every five minutes, with a rather half-hearted personal attack on me ready to go as soon as any post appeared.  But if he wants to maintain the ludicrous position that he can support independence by opposing it, I must say it's rather odd that he's just doubled down with another lengthy "now is not the time for independence" post, in which he advances the bogus case that there is widespread support for an indefinite delay of independence until the SNP and Scottish Government change out of all recognition and drop all the policies he dislikes.

Let me just gently point out what should be obvious: Scottish independence is for life, not just for Christmas.  Although it's theoretically possible that an independent Scotland would change its mind and rejoin the UK, we all know from the history of other former London-ruled countries that it wouldn't happen.  So if Scotland becomes independent, you have to face the fact that at some point over the next few decades, there will inevitably be an independent Scottish government that you will despise and that will do all sorts of things that you loathe.  There is no country in the world in which all citizens get what they want 100% of the time.  Democratic elections will sometimes go against you.  If you want to "delay" independence until that inescapable fact of life somehow changes, you will "delay" it forever.  If your default is to prefer London rule to an elected Scottish government that you personally wouldn't have chosen, then independence was never anything more than a passing fad for you, and you never believed in it in any real sense.

And I must just reiterate how astoundingly hypocritical it is for Mr Campbell to have spent the last few years castigating the SNP for not holding an immediate independence referendum ("The Betrayers!, The Backstabbers!"), when he now openly admits he would not vote for independence in any such referendum and thinks Scotland should remain in the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future.  I defy anyone to try to get that risible position to make sense with any sort of rational argument.

SNP on course for general election defeat, says new Redfield & Wilton poll - intensifying the pressure on Yousaf to either resign, or end rule-by-faction

For only the second time in many years, a polling firm has reported that the SNP have lost their outright lead on Westminster voting intentions.  They haven't been overtaken - Labour have merely drawn level.  However, due to the inbuilt advantage Labour enjoy courtesy of the grotesque first-past-the-post voting system, a dead heat in the popular vote equates to clear defeat for the SNP in terms of seats.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Redfield & Wilton Strategies, 2nd-4th September 2023):

SNP 35% (-2)

Labour 35% (+1)

Conservatives 15% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)

Greens 4% (+2)

Reform UK 2% (-)

Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): Labour 27 (+26), SNP 22 (-26), Conservatives 5 (-1), Liberal Democrats 5 (+1)

Stewart McDonald, Alison Thewliss, Anne McLaughlin, David Linden, Deidre Brock and Tommy Sheppard would all be losing their seats on these numbers, along with many other SNP colleagues.  And this, of course, is well before a UK general election campaign in which Labour will be lavished with TV coverage and the SNP will be treated as an afterthought.  It's entirely possible that a further swing to Labour in the closing weeks before polling day could leave the SNP with only a tiny handful of seats.

In fairness, most polls in recent times have given the SNP a very small lead in Westminster voting intentions, which means that you'd expect the occasional poll with Labour either level or slightly ahead, due to the standard margin of error.  So it's possible that nothing has really changed and that we're just seeing 'margin of error noise' in the new poll.  However, these numbers certainly make it less likely that the situation is improving for the SNP, which underscores the point I made last night about how utterly baseless it was for Professor John Robertson to claim that "the polls" were showing that Labour's lead in Rutherglen & Hamilton West had been "slashed".  As of yet, there are no polls specifically for that constituency, and a uniform swing projection from the new national poll numbers suggests that Labour should be expected to win the by-election by something in the region of sixteen percentage points.  The odds on betting exchanges imply that Labour have close to a 90% chance of winning in Rutherglen - I personally think that's an underestimate.

I'd hope that the SNP would regard this poll as a wake-up call, rather than as a predictable milestone in a process of 'managed decline'. When you have a leader as unpopular as Yousaf, there's a very obvious step you can take that has a good chance of dramatically improving the situation.  But even if they can't bring themselves to jettison Yousaf, the minimum they've got to do is put an end to factional rule and bring Kate Forbes, Ash Regan, and at least a couple of Forbes' key supporters back into senior positions in the government.  That might at least help to offset Yousaf's unpopularity somewhat.  Falling short of that is frankly no longer an option if the SNP are remotely serious about winning elections, or even about damage limitation in elections.

Elsewhere in the poll, Redfield & Wilton ask their usual complement of independence-related questions.  The trend is marginally negative for the Yes side in most questions, but the changes are so minor that they do look like they could just be "noise", and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the status quo ante is restored in next month's poll.  An intriguing exception to the general trend is on the 'Jack Principle', ie. Alister Jack's statement that there should only be an independence referendum if opinion polls consistently show 60%+ support for one.  Backing for the Jack Principle has, for whatever reason, plummetted by six percentage points over the last month from 52% to 46%, leaving it a mammoth fourteen points short of the Jack Threshold itself.

Even with the negative changes elsewhere, there is still majority support (after Don't Knows are excluded) for an independence referendum to be held within the next five years, while voters are exactly split down the middle over whether there should be an independence referendum within the next year.

There's a weird contradiction in the poll's Holyrood numbers, which show a sharp increase in SNP support on the constituency ballot, but a sharp decrease in SNP support on the list.  A partial explanation for this phenomenon is Alba rising to an unusually high 4% of the list vote.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 39% (+3)

Labour 30% (-2)

Conservatives 16% (-3)

Liberal Democrats 8% (-)

Greens 3% (+1)

Reform UK 3% (+2)

Alba 1% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

Labour 30% (+1)

SNP 25% (-4)

Conservatives 15% (-3)

Greens 14% (+5)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-)

Alba 4% (+2)

Reform UK 3% (-)

Seats projection (with changes from 2021 election): SNP 53 (-11), Labour 36 (+14), Greens 16 (+8), Conservatives 15 (-16), Liberal Democrats 9 (+5)

Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland has spent the last 5 years pretending to be furious with the SNP for not holding an independence referendum which he now openly admits he would abstain in. It's been a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing (other than his own hypocrisy).

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) September 5, 2023

POLL: If you had to make a straight choice between independence and your side of the gender / trans debate coming out on top, which would you choose?

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) September 5, 2023

No, "the polls" are not showing Labour's lead in Rutherglen has been "slashed" over the last week - not least because there haven't been any polls

There's a deceitful post - there's no other word for it, really - on Professor John Robertson's blog tonight, and it's resulted in a number of copycat tweets from people who really ought to know better by now.  Professor Robertson is claiming that "the polls" are showing Labour's lead has been slashed in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election over the last week, but in fact so far there haven't been any polls in Rutherglen & Hamilton West - not only in the last week, but not at all.  Nor have there been any Scotland-wide polls over the last week from which an extrapolation can be made.  It's plainly ludicrous to suggest the polls are showing a certain trend when no polls from the relevant period actually exist.

What Robertson is referring to as "two polls" are in fact not polls, but predictions made by websites.  One comes from the newly resurrected UK Polling Report and the other from Electoral Calculus.  Robertson does not present any evidence that either website's prediction has suggested a drop in the Labour lead in the constituency over the last week, and indeed he does not even claim that they have.  Instead, he makes an apples-and-oranges comparison between what the Electoral Calculus prediction was showing a week ago and what the UK Polling Report prediction is showing now, and pretends that it can be taken of indicative of the SNP closing the gap, even though each prediction is based on a completely different methodology, and even though the data being inputed into each prediction can't have changed over the last week for the obvious reason that there's been no new polling data from the last week to input.  (In fact there's a graph on UK Polling Report suggesting their prediction has been stable for many weeks.)

Oh, and the predictions aren't even for the by-election, but instead for the Rutherglen constituency in the general election.  Apart from all that, though, a characteristically bang-on accurate contribution from the Prof.

*  *  *

My blogpost two weeks ago, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

End of an era as the Wings Over Scotland website officially abandons its support for Scottish independence, putting on record what's been clear from social media posts for around a year - but rest assured that Scot Goes Pop and other leading sites from the 2014 period remain unequivocally pro-independence

One thing that has bemused me over the last year is that every so often someone has approached me in full-blown "intervention" mode and told me that I need to unite with others for the sake of the independence cause.  That sounds perfectly reasonable until you drill down into what those people actually mean, and 9 times out 10 it turns out they actually don't want me (or anyone else) to unite with others who support independence - indeed in many cases they want me to declare all-out-war-to-the-death against the largest pro-independence party and to try get their MPs replaced by unionists.  Instead, the 'unity' being urged is mostly with a high-profile individual who now votes Tory and who used to support independence but no longer does.

I always point out, in a state of some incredulity, that if you want to achieve a political goal, you generally unite with people who believe in that goal, and crucially you unite in opposition to the people who do not believe in it.  As a supporter of independence, the only circumstances in which it might make sense for me to unite with someone who doesn't want independence would be if we were aiming for some sort of grand national compromise between Yessers and unionists.  That's not where we are right now.  We actually are trying to win independence, not something less than it.

That fairly unanswerable point generally provokes indignation from the wannabe 'peacemakers'.  "Of course the fact that Stuart Campbell votes Tory doesn't make him some sort of 'Tory voter'.  Don't be silly, James.  And the suggestion that he no longer supports independence is ridiculous.  There's no more passionate supporter of independence than the Rev, that's why he's saying he wouldn't vote for it!"

I mean, people are quite rightly scornful of so-called "gender woo", but I'd have to say that the idea you can vote Tory without being a Tory voter, and that you can support independence by opposing it, is taking the mind-bending metaphysical gibberish into a whole new dimension.  It's thus something of a relief that Mr Campbell has randomly chosen today of all days to put the matter beyond all dispute with an article on Wings itself that makes clear he would not vote in favour of independence in any new referendum held in the prevailing political conditions.  He would not vote No either, seemingly for old times' sake, but it's plain that he'd be wanting No to win because he thinks an independent Scotland would be a "nightmarish Aunt Lydia nanny state".  He'd previously announced his abandonment of support for independence on social media quite a long time ago, but many people seem to regard his social media posts as throwaway in nature, so I suspect that this may be the first time they realise that his departure from the pro-independence camp is genuine and that his announcement of it can be regarded as definitive.

To be clear, Mr Campbell's defection is not something I welcome.  Indeed it's a matter of considerable regret, because it means that a website with a substantial readership (nowhere near as big as he claims, but substantial nonetheless) is now working against our cause rather than in favour of it.  However, until today we had the worst of both worlds, because people were deluding themselves that black was white and that Scotland could somehow be led to independence by a person who wants Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom.  At least now we can collectively start facing up to the new reality, and find new constructive constellations among those of us who are actually still inside the independence movement.

Doubtless a few people will cling to their denial due to Mr Campbell attempting the "Schrodinger's Yesser" trick by claiming elsewhere in his article that he remains in favour of independence "in principle".  But the unspoken words at the end of that sentence are "but not in practice".  Labour have been "in principle" supportive of democratic reform of the House of Lords for over a century, but have always failed to do anything about it when in government.  If you say you are in favour of a reform in principle but oppose it in practice, you are in fact an upholder of the status quo.  That's exactly the position Mr Campbell is now in.  The only objective and credible test of whether someone is a supporter of independence is whether they would vote in favour of it if given a chance, and Mr Campbell has clearly indicated he would not do so.  By definition, therefore, Wings Over Scotland is no longer a pro-independence website.  That's regrettable, but it's also the indisputable reality.

The only caveat on all of this is that Mr Campbell has stated that he might in the future revert to supporting independence if the SNP perform a mass clear-out of the "deranged ideologues".  There would only be a chance of that happening in the near-term or medium-term if Kate Forbes replaces Humza Yousaf as leader, and admittedly that's perfectly conceivable - Ms Forbes has established herself as the most likely successor if the unpopular Mr Yousaf is toppled due to some sort of entirely foreseeable electoral calamity.  But there's certainly no guarantee of that happening, and there's also no guarantee that Ms Forbes would go far enough as leader to satisfy Mr Campbell, or indeed that anything at all would even be capable of satisfying him.  My suspicion is that, while most of us who left the SNP did so in desperation because we wanted to get the independence campaign back on track, Mr Campbell turned against the SNP at around the same time because he was becoming Yoon-curious.  For him, the reasons he has found to hate the SNP leadership are a gateway drug that is leading him towards out-and-out unionism.  In fact he may well already be there and is in the process of trying to break the news to his most devoted readers by installments to avoid alienating them with a sudden admission that even they might find too unpalatable.  His hint at the end of the article that he may not even be "in principle" supportive of independence for very much longer would tend to support that suspicion. Wherever precisely he is on the journey, though, there seems little doubt about the final destination.

This generates a major peril for the Alba Party, of which I am a member.  There is substantial overlap between the Alba membership and the Wings readership, and many senior figures in Alba routinely praise Mr Campbell to the skies on social media.  But we simply cannot afford to allow Mr Campbell to be the Pied Piper figure who leads us to being a "Yes in principle" party or a "Yes but not really" party or a "we might be Yes one day but only when and if a long list of terms and conditions are met in full" party.  We only have a future as what we started out as - a totally committed "Yes, just Yes, no ifs, no buts, no caveats" party.  Indeed the whole point of Alba's existence is to be far more full-throttled about independence than the SNP.  If we start doing the total opposite, we might as well never have bothered getting the party off the ground.

It's become commonplace to observe that "I didn't leave the SNP, the SNP left me".  Well, by the same token, I can honestly say that I didn't leave Wings, Wings left me.  I was once a staunch supporter of him, and long-term readers might remember that in 2017 I defended him to the hilt in his absence at a sort of alternative media "summit" in Edinburgh attended by a passive-aggressive Mike Small and an openly hostile Angela Haggerty. I have no regrets about doing that, because at the time Mr Campbell was still a pro-independence blogger and on balance was still a strong asset for our movement.  My own political views have remained constant since 2017, while Mr Campbell's have darted off in a radically different direction, in a way that could never have realistically been predicted.  It's also fair to say I had no way of predicting in 2017 that Mr Campbell would behave in a frankly unforgivable way towards me personally four years later, first by sending me an abusive email out of the blue for literally no other purpose than to call me a "c**t", and then the following night getting his solicitor David Halliday to attempt to intimidate me with thinly-veiled threats of what might happen if I refused to give in to his outrageous demands that I should delete Douglas Clark's criticisms of him in a comment that had already been published in the Scot Goes Pop comments section.  That, of course, is a further reason why it was always barking mad for people to suggest I could or should somehow "unite" with Mr Campbell.  It's impossible to make peace with someone who has overstepped the mark so outrageously unless genuine contrition is shown later, and that was never going to happen in a million years.  

For what it's worth, my own response to the question "do you support Scottish independence?" is not "yes, in principle", but simply "yes".  My answer to the question "would you still support Scottish independence if it meant trans self-ID would be introduced?" is "yes".  My answer to the question "would you still support Scottish independence if you were required to worship weekly at a statue of Fiona Robertson, inscribed Mother Of The Nation?" is "yes".  My answer to the question "would you still support Scottish independence if it ushered in twenty unbroken years of Tory rule?" is "yes".  My answer will always be "yes", irrespective of which hypothetical you hit me with, because my support for independence is not rooted in transient bread and butter policy matters but in the simple, fundamental belief that Scotland is a country and should be able to choose its own governments.  It's entirely up to the Scottish people which governments and policies they choose, and even if I think they made the wrong decision, I'll still be glad they were able to make it and I'll still want them to be free to keep making their own choices in the future.

Say what you like about Brit Nats, but their sense of identity is authentic and deep-rooted enough that they don't start pining for rule from Paris or Berlin just because an election goes a way they don't like or because they disapprove of a particular law passed by Westminster.  The fact that all it took for Mr Campbell to abandon independence was for Scots to vote in a way he disapproved of suggests that his belief in the cause was always much, much shallower than most of us ever suspected.  In retrospect, his weird desire to eradicate the Gaelic language, something which I've literally never encountered in any other Yesser, should perhaps have been taken as a massive red flag.

*  *  *

On a semi-related matter, I was recently asked by an anonymous commenter to write a blogpost about a factually inaccurate claim of truly astounding scale that Mr Campbell included in a Wings article.  But the comment itself explains the inaccuracy and the surrounding issues admirably - you can read it HERE.

The Summer Of Independence will be taking place on the second day of autumn

Exactly three months ago, in the early hours of 1st June, I warned independence supporters that they'd better pace themselves during the "summer of independence" that Humza Yousaf had promised them, because the packed programme of seminars, festivities and cultural events threatened to leave them utterly exhausted.  I was being sarcastic, of course, because we were all fairly confident that the summer of independence was a total sham and that nothing of any substance had been planned. That's pretty much how it's panned out, but if we're sarcastic when big events are absent, I suppose we have to give the SNP leadership some credit when a big event does come along and they give it their wholehearted backing.  And, in fairness, the march planned for Saturday is the sort of thing our minds might conjure up if we were trying to imagine what a genuine 'summer of independence' would look like.  Just a couple of snags - it's a one day thing, not a three month thing, and it's taking place on what in the UK is traditionally regarded as the second day of autumn, not in summer.  But it's better than nothing.

And, come to think of it, there's more than one definition of when the seasons begin and end - in the US, summer is regarded as starting with the Solstice on 21st June and ending with the autumn Equinox on 23rd September. Even in Scotland, average temperatures in September are only marginally cooler than average temperatures in June, which leads me to suspect that if you drew a circle around the warmest three month period of the year and called it "summer", it would incorporate at least the first few days of September - maybe the first five, maybe even the first ten or twelve.  So if you stretch the point, you could perhaps regard Saturday's march as our promised summer of independence, condensed into one intense late summer's day.

The other sense in which it's fair to give the SNP leadership some credit is that we've always criticised them in the past for not turning up at independence marches, but being perfectly happy to endorse identity politics rallies with their presence.  OK, it's naturally vexing that they're only going to Saturday's march because it's a top-down, tightly-controlled, carefully-scripted affair, and that equivalent grass-roots marches are still routinely cold-shouldered.  But logically we have to acknowledge that the leadership organising their own sanitised indy marches to go to is a hell of a lot better than them not going to any indy marches at all.

Having doled out the credit where it's due, I now feel compelled to point out some of the oddities of Saturday's event.  The designated presenters of the rally, Alistair Heather and Kelly Given, presumably selected because they combine youthful trendiness with cast-iron political loyalty to the ruling faction, have made some downright peculiar statements in recent days.

"The stars are finally aligning...the independence fever is spreading again like it did in 2013/14...it feels like we're moving into a space now where we've cultivated this new movement that is kind of reminiscent of the campaign in 2014"

Does that describe the Scotland of 2023 that you recognise?  We're actually in a mixed situation at best.  It's true that support for independence is holding up admirably, and may even have increased a touch in recent weeks.  But the Yes vote is still lower than it was during the period between mid-2020 and early 2021, which is when the stars really aligned but when the opportunity was entirely squandered.  (That was the height of the Covid emergency, but it didn't stop planning going ahead for a major sporting event in Glasgow in the summer of 2021, or for a massive international climate summit in Glasgow in the autumn of 2021.)

The real problem we face now, though, is not that the Yes vote isn't high enough but that the SNP vote isn't high enough.  A huge Yes vote is devoid of all value if there aren't going to be enough pro-independence elected politicians to put the people's wishes into action. Strictly in terms of party political voting intentions we're in a weaker position than we've been at any time for around a decade.  Rather than everything suddenly going from wrong to right, as Given and Heather would have you believe, the events of 2023 have at dizzying speed taken the SNP from being in a commanding position to being on the ropes and trying to find a way of fighting back.

Worse still, the independence movement is not starting to resemble the healthy state it was in back in 2014, as Given and Heather claim, but in fact is more demoralised than it's been since 2014 due to Nicola Sturgeon suddenly nipping away without having kept her promises, the lies about SNP membership numbers, the poor leadership of Humza Yousaf, and the essentially rigged election process which installed him.

The positive interpretation of Given's and Heather's strange comments would be the same as the one I recently attributed to the Alba Party's actions, ie. that they're trying to "fake it until it's real".  If so, I don't disapprove of that, because sometimes grand optimistic gestures can prove to be a turning point.  But there's a fine line between faking it until it's real and slipping into a world of total delusion, and what troubles me is that I can't quite work out which side of that line Given and Heather are on.

Also, what do they mean when they say the rally "feels like a changing of the guard"?  Do they mean between unionists and Yessers?  If so, I don't really get what their point is, but the only alternative meaning would be a changing of the guard within the independence movement, which given how the rally is being organised would point to a transition from grass-roots control to establishment/SNP leadership control.  Few people would see that as a step forward, so it's an odd thing to be openly celebrating or boasting about.

Lastly, there's the strange specificity of the rally being about independence within the EU, thus excluding Yessers who are anti-EU or who prefer EFTA to full EU membership.  I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, but it hopelessly lacks congruity with the Yousaf strategy of "let's take our time, Rome wasn't built in a day".  Almost by definition, the 'delay' faction of the SNP have rejected Brexit as a central argument for independence, because if that card was going to be played, you really needed to have a referendum or equivalent democratic vote before Brexit or before leaving the single market and customs union.   You'd have had to say "Brexit is an emergency which independence can avert".  It's much harder to do that now, because the SNP have been sending the message that Brexit is perfectly tolerable and must (like Covid) be "lived with" for an indefinite period.  

But certainly if you ever want to use the unpopularity of Brexit to win independence, you can't delay any further.  If you wait as long as Yousaf apparently wants to, people will quite reasonably say "if Brexit was tolerable to the SNP for every single year between 2021 and 2034, why is it suddenly intolerable in 2035?"  It just won't wash.  Delaying means finding a case for independence which doesn't feature Europe particularly strongly - which, yes, renders nonsensical pretty much everything the SNP said and did in the years after the EU referendum.

*  *  *

My blogpost last Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Why has McDougall served up a NoN-sense poll? Probably because Labour fear Kate Forbes becoming SNP leader

A few days ago, Blair McDougall (mastermind of the original and self-styled "Project Fear" in 2014, for younger readers who don't know who he is) announced that he was commissioning a poll to find out whether replacing Humza Yousaf with Kate Forbes would improve the SNP's electoral fortunes.  My immediate reaction was that Labour must have identified a Forbes leadership as the biggest threat to their chances in Scotland at the general election, and want to head that danger off by keeping Yousaf in harness at all costs.  McDougall's poll would therefore be calibrated to produce results intended to misleadingly give the SNP pause for thought about the electoral appeal of Forbes.  Let's face it, McDougall is a Machiavellian political actor - he's often pretty rubbish at it, most notably when he talked East Renfrewshire up as a two horse race between himself and the SNP and ended up finishing third, but nevertheless that's the scheming level on which his mind always operates.  If he goes to all the trouble and expense of commissioning a poll, it's hardly likely to be 'curiosity driven'.  It'll have a very specific practical purpose in the service of the Labour party.

Predictably, then, McDougall has come up with a poll that purports to show Forbes as leader would not increase the SNP's vote.  It may look like the question he asked was neutral enough, ie. whether people would be more likely or less likely to vote SNP if Forbes becomes leader, but the problem is that there are now enough people out there who hate the SNP that if you ask whether pretty much any hypothetical scenario would make them more likely or less likely to vote SNP, you'll get a negative response because a significant minority of respondents will want to use every question to bash the party if at all possible. Pretty much the only exception to that would be if the hypothetical scenario is every voter getting a free supply of beer for life.

McDougall knew that perfectly well from previous polls, of course, which is why he framed the question in the way that he did.  Don't fall for this ruse - if he really thought a Forbes leadership would work in Labour's favour, he'd be talking her up for all that he's worth, not talking her down.  There are various ways in which public opinion could have been more meaningfully tested, for example by asking people whether a Yousaf leadership or a Forbes leadership would make them more likely to vote SNP.  That way the question would have become genuinely about the individuals and not a proxy for SNP-bashing, and it probably would have come out firmly in Forbes' favour, bearing in mind how consistently she outpolls Yousaf on net approval ratings.

If money was no object (which certainly isn't the case) and I was able to commission another Scot Goes Pop poll in the near future, I'd try to explore this issue in some depth.  However, I don't actually think McDougall's stunt will reduce Forbes' chances of becoming leader, even if there are no alternative polls to challenge the narrative he's trying to weave.  If Yousaf is toppled before the general election, it'll be for negative reasons about his own leadership rather than positive reasons about his likely successor.  Some sort of major shock to the SNP's system would probably have to trigger it.  Remember that the 2004 European election result was enough to bring John Swinney down as leader even though, unlike now, there was absolutely no expectation that a more popular leader would step into the breach.  (We all wrongly assumed that a return for Alex Salmond wasn't a realistic option.)

*  *  *

My blogpost last Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Why (and how) the Alba Party should be choosing its electoral battles

Craig Murray on Twitter earlier -

If Alba continue the policy of not standing for election, I shall be obliged to join an organisation that does stand for election.
I think they are called political parties.

— Craig Murray - (@CraigMurrayOrg) August 27, 2023

Whatever my misgivings about Alba's announcement yesterday in relation to the Rutherglen by-election, it's important to challenge the narrative contained in the above tweet, because it's entirely baseless.  Alba have in fact been standing in elections very extensively since they were founded two and a half years ago.  Every single voter in Scotland was given the opportunity to vote Alba at the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, because there were four Alba list candidates in every electoral region.  Roughly one-third of wards in the 2022 local elections had an Alba candidate, and there have since been a number of local by-elections in which Alba have stood.

But it's not unusual at all for small parties to sensibly pick their battles. Don't forget that Alba was the end product of years of agitation for the creation of a list-only party to attempt to "game the system" in Holyrood elections and dramatically increase the pro-indy representation on the list ballot while not harming the SNP at all on the constituency ballot.  The implicit logic of such a party is that it should only stand in proportional representation elections and in general should not risk splitting the Yes vote in first-past-the-post elections.  That principle is actually not especially limiting, because there are three tiers of electoral representation in Scotland - local council, Holyrood and Westminster - and only the latter is solely first-past-the-post.  History demonstrates how tough it is for a small party to gain more than a negligible number of votes in Westminster general elections, so much better to reserve your energies and resources for the other types of election in which both votes and seats can be more easily won.

Almost as soon as Alba came into being, matters were complicated by the defection of two MPs from the SNP who were always likely to want to defend their seats under Alba colours.  But again, squaring that circle is not rocket science.  You do it by pouring all your available resources for the general election into those two constituencies, and not standing elsewhere.  If a small party is going to defy gravity by winning seats in a first-past-the-post election, it'll do so with a geographically-concentrated campaign.  That gives you the best of both worlds - you maximise your chances of holding those two seats while avoiding the harm of pointlessly splitting the pro-indy vote anywhere else.

Unfortunately, for the last two years there have been senior individuals within Alba intentionally trying to crank up expectations of the party taking the reckless step of putting up candidates across the board at the general election, even though that was not agreed Alba policy, or even the publicly stated preference of the leadership.  What I found so dispiriting about yesterday's announcement is that it was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that the leadership have ever nailed their colours to that particular mast.  The language used was explicit - if the SNP don't agree to the Scotland United proposal, which they almost certainly won't in the absence of a pre-election change of leader, then Alba will make a "significant", "wide scale" intervention in the general election, "across Scotland".  Those words are plainly not consistent with the common sense option of only putting up two candidates: Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill.

Yesterday's statement was essentially a grenade wrapped in a love letter.  It was attempting to minimise the negative impact of revealing a plan to potentially act irresponsibly and recklessly at the general election by simultaneously revealing a plan to first of all act responsibly and put country before party in a one-off by-election.  It was like an ultimatum: "we'll act responsibly this one last time, but never again, unless you agree to our terms".  Now, it may be that this is still just tactical positioning intended to pile pressure on the SNP and that it shouldn't be taken too literally.  Perhaps just before the general election, Alba will once again say they'll be the grown-ups in the room and withdraw all their candidates (apart from Hanvey and MacAskill) at the very last minute.  But the problem is that if you have a lot of party members who are itching for an all-out fight with the SNP, no matter what the consequences, and if you allow expectations to build sky-high that those members will be getting what they want, it's very difficult to change course at a late stage even if you know that proceeding would be a dreadful mistake.  

My other concern about the announcement yesterday was the fairly unmistakeable subtext that Alba are giving the SNP a free run in Rutherglen in the hope that they will fail badly.  "The SNP say they want to fly solo, so let's give them the maximum opportunity to do that and see how they get on" - nobody is going to miss the sarcasm in those words.  Such cynicism isn't really the normal Salmond style.  I'd have expected him to say instead that the independence movement can't afford to collectively indulge itself with even one failed by-election, and that he'll fill the vacuum by standing himself, running a relentlessly positive campaign, and doing his utmost to ensure the media narrative about the final result is one of Alba on the way up rather than the SNP on the way down or Labour on the way to power.  If I'm honest, I'm extremely puzzled that he's decided against that course of action, because a parliamentary by-election (yes, even a first-past-the-post by-election) presents a rare and special "free hit" opportunity for a charismatic politician to seize the moment and change the political weather. Another such potential opening for Alba may not crop up for years.

*  *  *

My blogpost on Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £600 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

My verdict on Alba's decision to sit out the Rutherglen by-election

Alex Salmond has always been the master of surprise, and the Rutherglen episode has proved to be no exception.  It was obvious that the choreography of the last few weeks was preparing the ground for some sort of predetermined outcome.  I had assumed there were two serious possibilities of what that outcome might be - either that Mr Salmond himself would be standing as the Alba candidate in the by-election (which I thought would potentially be a good idea), or that a little-known Alba candidate would be standing for experience (which I thought would be a bad idea).  Instead he's surprised us all by announcing that Alba won't be standing at all.

In the short-term I'd have to say common sense has prevailed, because as I've pointed out repeatedly, if Mr Salmond didn't want to be the candidate for whatever reason, there was nothing to be gained for Alba in standing in Rutherglen.  A lesser known candidate probably would only have taken a small vote, which wouldn't have moved the dial for Alba at all, except in the negative sense that Alba might have been blamed for worsening the SNP's likely defeat at the hands of Labour.

But the flipside of the coin is that Mr Salmond is making clear that Alba are only standing aside to give the SNP "one last chance" to agree a Scotland United electoral pact, and that if they don't, Alba will be making a widespread intervention at the general election.  That worries me greatly.  As I've said for two years, Alba have got to be extraordinarily cautious about standing in first-past-the-post elections.  The irony is that if I had been forced to make a straight choice between an Alba intervention in Rutherglen and a widespread Alba intervention at the general election, I'd have chosen Rutherglen like a shot, because the SNP's chances of winning there are so slim that there's little danger that a split pro-indy vote will do very much harm.  But at a general election in which John Curtice has suggested practically every Scottish seat will be a marginal seat, it's not hard to see what harm a split vote will do.  And remember the harm would not only be to the independence cause - it would extend to Alba themselves, because a mythology would grow that Alba are "the unionists' little helpers", thus undermining the party's chances in the Holyrood list vote in 2026, which is where the real opportunity lies.

So we come back to a modified form of the original question - what is the predetermined outcome in this extended choreography?  Does Alex Salmond just want a pretext to stand lots and lots of Alba candidates at the general election?  "We left no stone unturned, we even stood aside at the Rutherglen by-election when no-one could reasonably have expected us to, yet still the door was slammed in our face, leaving us with no choice."  If that's the plan, then the whole objective is wrong, and Alba are travelling down completely the wrong path.  On the other hand, it could be that Mr Salmond genuinely wants to force the SNP's hand and get them to accept the Scotland United offer, because he recognises the importance of Alba retaining elected representatives and thinks Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill would have a fighting chance of holding their seats with SNP support.  That line of thinking would make much more strategic sense, but I don't see how the moral high ground of standing aside in Rutherglen generates - or even helps to generate - the bargaining power required to get the SNP to seriously consider Scotland United, even if they are demonstrated to have failed hopelessly with a solo campaign.  By contrast, Alex Salmond standing as an Alba candidate in Rutherglen and winning 15-20% of the vote might just have given the SNP some pause for thought for the first time.

So pretty much any way you look at it, today's statement looks like a misstep and possibly a major missed opportunity that will be rued for years to come.  But time will tell.

*  *  *

My blogpost on Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response.  Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £600 has been raised since I posted.  The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I'll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there's still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE.  Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal - my Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Edinburgh Fringe mini-reviews: 1984, and Boris III, King of Bulgaria

Before the pandemic, I would typically go to the Fringe anything between four and eight times during August.  Since its return in 2021, I've just made one visit per year to avoid losing touch with it completely.  I had thought about maybe pushing the boat out by going twice this year, but the recent resurgence in Covid cases deterred me.  Even going once felt like a significant risk given that it's next to impossible (unlike in 2021) to find outdoor performances that go beyond the traditional street theatre.  But as with the Eurovision in May, I put on my FFP3 mask, restricted the number of indoor shows I was seeing, and hoped for the best.

I wasn't going to bother with the mini-reviews I used to do on this blog, because with only two or three days left of the Fringe I didn't think they'd be much use to anyone.  But one of the two shows I saw specifically asked people at the end to post reviews online, so I thought I might as well.

The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria (My rating: 4 stars ****)

I was intrigued to go and see this, because it's about the Second World War, but a corner of the war that most people know nothing about, namely the Bulgarian Tsar's half-hearted involvement on the Axis side, and his bureaucratic obstructionism that ultimately prevented several thousand Bulgarian Jews from being murdered in the Nazi extermination camps.  The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, although one or two noted the performance was "camp".  I had interpreted that as meaning a serious production in which one or two characters are portrayed in a slightly camp way, but in fact the campness is far, far more overarching than that - it's essentially an adult pantomime that never takes itself seriously for longer than twenty seconds.  That means there's no depth at all to the story or the characterisations, but the play works on the level of a 'painless history lesson' - you come out feeling you know something you previously didn't, and I'm sure I wasn't the only member of the audience who later did a Google search to find out more about the real events.  

The music is probably the strongest element - it sounds like they used authentic Bulgarian folk songs and even learned the lyrics in Bulgarian (although I'd be interested to know from real Bulgarians how accurate the use of the language was).  There's also a very funny outing for a stereotypical evangelical Christian ditty sung in English.  

The most confusing aspect of the play is a male Nazi officer played by a woman.  You constantly have to remind yourself that she's supposed to be a man because the general effect of her uniform and innuendo-laden dialogue is somewhat reminiscent of Helga in Allo Allo.

1984 (My Rating: 5 stars *****)

I think I'm right in saying the official name of Orwell's novel is "Nineteen Eighty-Four" rather than "1984", so presumably the use of the numerical title is supposed to emphasise that this is a modern retelling. It's possible that I'm 'marking this upwards', because I've seen so little live theatre over the last four years, and I'm therefore a touch more easily impressed than I used to be.  But I do think this is a really impressive production.  My concern about seeing it was that I've read the novel two or three times, I've seen the John Hurt/Suzanna Hamilton film adaptation a couple of times, and I've also seen the legendary BBC TV adaptation from the 50s that was thought to be lost for many decades.  There are some sequences that I feel I could almost recite backwards, so I was worried that sitting through the play would be like watching the same old film for the umpteenth time.  But I was actually struck by how fresh it felt throughout.  The sequences of Winston and Julia rebelling against the Party by meeting in secret are acted very naturalistically and with conviction.  Perhaps being invited to suspend disbelief in the face of a Winston with a strong Irish accent and a Julia with some sort of continental European accent (I initially thought she was eastern European but judging from the name in the credits she might be French) helps the scenes to feel completely novel even if the words are familiar and you already know how it all ends.

I wondered in advance how such a complex story could be satisfactorily condensed into an hour or whatever it was, but in fact it never feels rushed or hyper-edited.  Only a modest proportion of the narrative in the novel is covered, and yet what is selected feels exactly enough to support the version of the story that is actually being told.  If you were going to be picky, you could maybe complain that a large proportion of the play is pre-filmed and presented on a screen (I wasn't keeping track, but it felt like it could have been anything between 25% and 50%), so at times you feel like you're in a small cinema rather than watching a live performance.  However, presumably that's done to create the effect that you're Big Brother and you're spying on people's most intimate moments through a telescreen when they have no idea there are surveillance cameras present.  Julia only ever appears on screen, which is such a consistent pattern that I assumed the actress wasn't even in the building, but in fact she appeared afterwards to take the applause.  I think they may have missed a trick there - it would have had real impact if she had turned up fleetingly on stage before Winston's death.  But perhaps the actress was doubling up with a backstage role and thus wasn't free to do that.

In terms of the Covid risk, the venue for 1984 (Assembly Roxy) felt like the safer of the two.  The air seemed to be relatively fresh, although I was relieved to find at the King of Bulgaria play that I wasn't the only mask-wearer - I counted three others.  Incidentally, in Waverley Station afterwards I thought for a second that I was under some sort of aerial bombing attack - I discovered today on Twitter that it was a low-flying military aircraft.  Absolute madness to allow that sort of thing over a heavily populated area at that time of night (it was well after 9pm). 

The future of Scot Goes Pop: an update

First of all, for those of you who have been asking, the reason blogging has been a bit light during most of August is that I was away on a family staycation last week and the week before.  In fact I may have some photos and videos for you at some point, because there was a slightly unexpected episode right at the start of the trip.

Since I got back home at the weekend, I've been doing some sums in my head based on the state of my bank balance and the current trajectory of the fundraiser, and I've been coming to the regrettable conclusion that we may be inching closer to the end of the road with Scot Goes Pop.  When I launched the 2023 fundraiser in May, I said that if the target was reached or even if we got well over halfway there, I'd be able to continue indefinitely, and that if nothing or almost nothing was raised I'd pretty much have to stop straight away, and that if the fundraiser was partially successful I'd keep going for however many months the funds allowed and then stop.  It's that third scenario we've ended up with - the fundraiser is over one-quarter of the way towards its target, and that has allowed me to keep going for the last three months and may allow me to keep going for a few weeks more.  But I can't keep lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis, so if substantial progress isn't made there'll come a point in the near future where I'll have to draw a line and start devoting far more time to other activities that will probably leave much less space for blogging, although I dare say you'd still see me pop up with an occasional blogpost every few weeks when I feel the urgent need to sound off about something!

Just to explain briefly how we've ended up at this point, until two or three years ago I was in an enviable position whereby the annual fundraiser was almost always hitting its target and I also had several other income streams from political writing that were essentially spin-offs from the blogging itself.  The combined funds from all of those income streams made it reasonably easy for me to devote huge amounts of time to the blog, especially during election periods and at other times of high political drama.  It also gave me the flexibility to just drop everything whenever a new poll came out and blog about it as quickly as possible.  I used to earn quite a bit by writing extensively for The National - in some years I was literally writing dozens of articles for them, but that more or less dried up after I joined the Alba Party in 2021, which I assume is not a coincidence (although admittedly no-one has said that to me directly).  For many years I was also earning from regular columns for the International Business Times, but that fizzled out gradually due to changes in the editorial team.  (One of them eventually ended up at the Talk Radio website and took me on again as a columnist there, although that time he wasn't able to offer payment.)  And in my early years as an iScot columnist, I was earning from that, but as many of you will know Ken has been walking an impossible tightrope recently trying to keep iScot financially viable, so for around the last three years or so I've been contributing my monthly column for free.  Basically what used to be an enviable position has become a perfect storm, with all of the income streams closing off more or less at the same time.  And even the part of my income that has nothing to do with politics or writing has taken a big hit over the last three years due to the pandemic - that's just a coincidence, but obviously it doesn't help.

I'm not quite ready to give up just yet, though, because I know from past experience that sometimes fundraisers follow odd patterns - they can appear to run out of steam and then there'll be a sudden spurt for no apparent reason.  So I'll make one final push via this post, and also at the bottom of every blogpost over the next few weeks, to see if I can raise enough to just about keep Scot Goes Pop going until next year, or at least to postpone the final decision for a bit longer.  Also if anyone has any brilliant suggestions that I may not have thought of about how I can find alternative income streams from the blog or from other forms of political writing, by all means let me know.  People always suggest a subscription model like Patreon, but my strong suspicion is that if there isn't the money out there to fund the blog by one crowdfunding method, it wouldn't be there to fund the blog by any other crowdfunding method either.  My guess is that Yessers are currently looking to fund blogs that tack to one of the two extremes, for want of a better word - either they want blogs that say the SNP leadership are saintly figures who can do no wrong, or they want blogs that say the SNP have stabbed the independence movement in the back and thus must be totally destroyed in an act of crazed revenge, even if that means installing unionist MPs and MSPs.  Scot Goes Pop has a nuanced position somewhere in between those two extremes, and I suspect that's why it's no longer attracting the scale of support that is still enjoyed by certain other websites.  I make no complaints about that - it's a form of market forces in action, and ultimately independence supporters will end up with whatever alternative media landscape that they think is worth having.

Once again, thank you to the dozens of people who have donated to the 2023 fundraiser so far, and if you're one of them please just ignore my ongoing crowdfunding efforts.  If you haven't donated so far and would like to do so (and please don't feel under any pressure to do it - I know most people are feeling the pinch right now), the preferable method is direct payment by Paypal.  That cuts out the middle man, which helps a lot because the payment usually comes through instantly and fees can be eliminated completely depending on which option you select.

For direct payments by Paypal, my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you don't have a Paypal account, payments can be made by card via the fundraiser page HERE.