Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide

Jimmy Carter, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is widely regarded as the classic example of someone who performed exceptionally well as an ex-president.  No-one could accuse Bill Clinton of aiming for a similar accolade.  Indeed with a single deranged pro-genocide speech, he may have just destroyed his reputation as both a president and ex-president forever.  That might seem like an overstatement, but you have to remember that the only reason there is even any debate over whether what Clinton said was acceptable is that we're currently in a sort of antechamber where it's still possible to maintain the fiction that genocide is not occurring because Israel isn't allowing access to journalists to actually document the atrocities.  But that situation won't last forever - eventually journalists and academic researchers will get into Gaza and reliable estimates of the death toll will emerge.  It'll almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands, taking into account both those directly murdered by the Israeli military and those who died of starvation and disease due to Israel depriving them of the essentials of life.

Once that happens, the discussion will move on to how on earth the genocide was permitted to occur.  And as with previous genocides such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, there will be a lot of focus on the way in which genocidal language was normalised, for example Israeli officials suggesting that all residents of Gaza are legitimate targets because they are 'human animals' or because they supposedly all support Hamas.  Or an equally good example is Clinton stating that large numbers of innocent people "have" to be mass murdered by Israel because Hamas is hiding behind them.  That evades the obvious point that if one Hamas fighter is hiding behind 400 civilians, you actually have the option not to massacre the 400 civilians because you have the moral sense to know that in doing so you'd be committing a war crime every bit as grave as the one you claim to be avenging.  Always assuming, of course, you actually believe that the Hamas fighter is hiding behind the 400 in the first place, and that you aren't using that as a flimsy excuse because your real and sole aim to is to massacre the 400 as part of a step by step plan to drastically reduce the Arab population of Gaza.

And just as the Nazis prepared the ground for genocide by advancing pseudoscientific gibberish about racial superiority, it'll be considered highly significant that Clinton prayed in aid a mythology of racial entitlement to the land, with the Israelis' actions justified on the ahistorical basis that they were there in the time of King David, long before the Palestinians' own religion was created.  In truth, historians are sceptical as to whether King David actually existed, but even if he did, using the events of thousands of years ago as the basis for a racial hierarchy would undoubtedly give Native Amerìcans free license to do to Bill Clinton and millions of people like him exactly what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians.

Last but not least, Clinton tried to resurrect his own equivalent of Hitler's "stab in the back" myth by arguing that he has inside knowledge from the Camp David talks at the end of his own presidency that all the ills of the region, including the lack of a Palestinian state, had nothing to do with the Israelis, but were instead the fault of Yasser Arafat, who supposedly torpedoed the most generous offer in the history of the known universe because he was so hellbent on eradicating Israel and having a Palestinian state on 100% of the territory of historic Palestine.  The reality, of course, couldn't be more different.  Arafat conceded before the 2000 talks even began that the 1967 boundaries were the baseline, meaning that Israel would be keeping 78% of historic Palestine, a position far closer to Benjamin Netanyahu's lebensraum fantasy than to the total destruction of Israel. But that, of course, was not enough for the Israelis, who demanded -

* Just over one-tenth of the West Bank, recognised by the international community as indisputably Palestinan territory, would be confiscated by Israel.

* There would be no proper compensation for this land grab.  There would be a nominal "land swap", but the amount of Israeli territory transferred to the Palestinian state would be little over one-tenth the size of the confiscated Palestinian land.

* The land grab would split the Palestinian sovereign territory in the West Bank into three non-contiguous segments.  Adding in the fourth segment of the state in Gaza, this would make Palestine one of the most non-contiguous states in the world, evoking an obvious comparison with "Bantustans".

* The Palestinian state would be demilitarised and Israel would have a veto on any alliances it entered into.  Its airspace would also be controlled by Israel - an absolutely absurd demand that no self-respecting sovereign state would ever agree to.

* Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel, even though they were violently and illegally displaced by Israeli forces.

* The vast bulk of the conquered Arab-dominated East Jerusalem would be annexed by Israel.  At best, Palestine would be allowed to cobble together some of the newer outlying suburbs, artificially call it "the city of East Jerusalem" and make it the capital.

* Most crucially, Arafat was told that any agreement required him to permanently renounce any further "demands". More than anything else, this made agreement utterly impossible, because the Israeli proposals on issues like Jerusalem and airspace were so inherently unfair and so obviously justified only by blackmail due to Israel's present-day military strength that the only way Arafat could ever agree to them in good conscience was on a provisional basis subject to a review.

Really the only mistake Arafat made in 2000 was to wrongly take Clinton for an honest broker.  Clinton was playing an each-way bet - he was happy enough to pose as peacemaker if he bullied the Palestinians into accepting a deal that would permanently stitch them up.  But just as good for him was for the Palestinians to sensibly walk away, allowing him to self-righteously "stand with Israel" and to spend the next few decades lying through his teeth about what had just happened and who was to blame for it.

Tonight, Matthew, BMG stands for "Bong! Majority's Gone": Labour fall behind in a GB-wide poll for the first time since 2021

The general assumption is that Kemi Badenoch is just minutes away from becoming leader of the Conservative Party, and I expect that assumption to prove correct - although other types of election have proved highly unpredictable in recent years, ballots of Tory members have always played out exactly as billed. If so, Badenoch will surprisingly be inheriting an outright Tory lead, and the question now is whether Tory leads will become the norm over the next four or five years.  In spite of her own obvious shortcomings, that may well be the case.

BMG poll of GB-wide voting intentions (30th-31st October):

Conservatives 29%
Labour 28%
Reform UK 17%
Liberal Democrats 13%
Greens 8%

The fieldwork dates for the poll were the day of the Budget and the day after, although the impression given is that it's a post-Budget poll, ie. the Wednesday fieldwork started after Rachel Reeves had finished her speech.  If so, this is particularly disappointing for Labour, because it suggests that what they thought of as their trump card hasn't staved off crossover.

That said, there's also a Techne poll with similar fieldwork dates showing a slight increase in the Labour lead, albeit well within the margin of error and statistically insignificant.

Between the Trussmageddon of September 2022 and the general election of July 2024, the Tories never even came close to claiming the lead in a single poll.  They seemed to have Everest to climb, and yet it's taken only four months of the public seeing what Starmer is actually like in power for that Everest to be climbed.  In Scotland the hope must be that this will translate into a sustained SNP lead.

Has the Reeves Budget produced anything that would stand in the way of an SNP win in 2026?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article at The National about whether Rachel Reeves' first Budget today will help to arrest Labour's tumble in popularity.  You can read it HERE.

The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed

Thanks to Paul Kirkwood on Twitter for pointing out to me that the data tables are now available for the recent Find Out Now poll showing a majority in favour of independence.  It's a single question poll (or if there were other questions they haven't been released yet), so there's not a huge amount to add, but there are a few points of interest.

Firstly, the poll excluded 16 and 17 year olds, not for any sinister reason but simply because the Find Out Now panel is comprised of over-18s only.  When I commissioned a Find Out Now poll eighteen months ago, they actually managed to source the necessary number of 16 and 17 year old respondents from another polling panel, but that may not have been possible this time, or it may have just been decided not to do that because of cost. Whatever the exact reason, it means there's a chance that the Yes vote is being slightly underestimated even at 52%.

The turnout adjustment was decisive in pushing Yes into the lead in this poll.  Before the adjustment, No was ahead by 52% to 48%, and after the adjustment there was an exact reversal, with Yes ahead by 52% to 48%.  That doesn't in any way invalidate the result, because almost all polling firms use a turnout filter, but it does demonstrate the greater enthusiasm levels among Yes voters.

It's specified that the poll result was weighted by gender, age, region, and recalled vote from the 2024 general election.  If that's an exhaustive list, it means there was no weighting by recalled referendum vote in 2014, which would be a very good thing, and other polling firms would be wise to learn from that example, because weighting by a vote from more than a decade ago (with all the dangers of false recall) is getting into the realms of the ridiculous now. However, this methodological difference isn't necessarily the reason for Find Out Now being one of the more Yes-friendly pollsters.  If memory serves me right, they did introduce 2014 weighting at one point but it didn't change their results much.

I always wince when people start treating the regional voting breakdowns as gospel, because the subsample for each region is far too small to produce meaningful results. However, for what it's worth Glasgow has the highest Yes vote in this poll and the Highlands & Islands has the lowest.

A significant minority of independence supporters may have drifted back to Labour at the general election, but that doesn't mean they were giving up on independence.  The poll shows that 25% of people who voted Labour in July would vote for independence, and that rises to 28% if Don't Knows are stripped out.

Depressingly, the old gender gap we'd hoped we'd seen the last of is evident in this poll - there's a bulky Yes majority among men but a slender No majority among women.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: THE FINAL PUSH

To donate by card, please visit the fundraiser page HERE.

Direct Paypal payments can be made to my Paypal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024: The Final Push

Click here to go straight to the fundraiser page.

This is 'take two' for the 2024 fundraiser's final push, because as you might remember I attempted a post like this a couple of weeks ago, but literally just an hour after I published it, the tragic news came through that Alex Salmond had died.  However, I can't put off returning to the issue for any longer, because financial realities are what they are, and I think realistically I would need to raise a minimum of an additional £800 within the next two weeks or so to keep the blog afloat on the same basis that it's been operating for many years.  I can't delay the decision beyond that very tight timescale, because I'm in a situation that will be horribly familiar to many of you, ie. the numbers are just not quite adding up, and if I'm going to keep going, I'll need to keep the lights on and I'll need to eat.

To reiterate the points that I always make about fundraising: no, Scot Goes Pop is not my sole income, in spite of the constant "why not get a job" sneering from the trolls.  I'm sure that's self-evident to most sensible people, because the target figure for the annual fundraiser is always well below what is generally needed to live on.  I have multiple other income streams, but for a variety of reasons they aren't bringing in as much as they did prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately that sharp downward turn coincided with the problem of the post-2021 fundraisers repeatedly failing to meet their targets.  It's been a perfect storm, and consequently for the last three years I've been lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis.  What the fundraiser money always used to do was give me enough flexibility to just drop everything and blog at length whenever a poll came out or whenever a major story broke, regardless of whether that was at 11am on a weekday or midnight on a Saturday.  In other words, the non-blogging work that I do is mostly freelance and ad hoc, and I fit it around the blogging when required.  

Why are the fundraisers proving such a struggle these days, when they never were prior to 2021?  I'm sure it's partly due to the cost of living crisis, but it must also be partly down to my decision to join the Alba Party in the spring of 2021.  That seemed to displease almost everyone, because SNP supporters didn't like it but strangely many Alba supporters weren't much happier either.  I was a relative moderate within the party - I didn't think we should be waging total war against Nicola Sturgeon or attempting to totally destroy the SNP, and I was very troubled about the chatter over restricting the voting rights of English people living in Scotland.  Some of the harder line Alba members clearly didn't think there should be room for someone like me in the party, and regarded me with severe mistrust.

Hopefully, if there's one silver lining from Chris McEleny's apparent determination to expel me from Alba, it's that nobody can mistake me any longer for a partisan drone.  I literally have no idea what I will do after my likely expulsion.  There are three basic options - a) apply to rejoin the SNP, b) apply to join a smaller pro-indy party, or c) try to assist in setting up something new, and I am genuinely and totally undecided about which of those three would be best.  My mind has almost been like a war zone trying to work it out, and I wish to goodness the Alba powers-that-be would just do the decent thing and drop the malicious proceedings against me so that my dilemma would vanish in a puff of smoke, but I very much doubt that will happen.  So there's little point trying to pin labels on me just now when none really fit.

If I'm unable to raise enough over the next couple of weeks and I have to "stop" blogging, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete cessation, because I would always get a bee in my bonnet about something or other and have a burning desire to blog about it.  However, Scot Goes Pop would revert to being a hobby as it was when I started it way back in 2008, and I would imagine there might be two or three posts a month at the absolute most.

But let's accentuate the positive.  What can readers look forward to if the fundraiser does raise just about enough to keep things going into 2025?  Above all else, of course, there'll be extensive polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective.  We're potentially in quite an exciting phase of the electoral cycle, as the public seem to have decisively concluded that the Labour government is a dud, meaning that instead of the SNP being caught in the death spiral that so many unionist commentators predicted prior to the general election, they're actually showing signs of recovery.  That could set the scene for a much more favourable outcome in the 2026 Holyrood election than we dared to hope for even a few weeks ago.  I'd like Scot Goes Pop to be around to tell that story - because I'm not sure we can rely on the unionist mainstream media to tell it for us.

Secondly, although I'm not impartial about independence, you can rely on me to blog about my own honest views without fear or favour.  I've resisted the menacing demands (which you've probably seen repeatedly in the comments section) for me to turn Scot Goes Pop into an Alba propaganda blog in return for avoiding expulsion, and neither am I interested in being an SNP leadership drone.  I just call things exactly as I see them, and frankly that does set me apart from some (but not all, I hasten to add) of the most prominent pro-indy bloggers.

And no promises, but it would be nice to revive the Scot Goes Popcast - it was going really well for a year or so, with some cracking guests, but again, that was another victim of my decision to join Alba, because SNP and Green people started to blanket-refuse my invitations, not wanting to be associated with an "Alba blogger".  But if I'd been more persistent, I probably could have found some takers, so I might have another crack at it.  

And of course there's the possibility of another Scot Goes Pop poll at some point.  In fact I'll have to get that done eventually even if I do stop blogging, because my last attempt at fundraising specifically for a poll ended up in no-man's-land with some funds raised but not enough to go ahead.  One way or another I'll get it done somehow!

To put in perspective what would be needed to keep Scot Goes Pop going, as I write this the running total on the fundraiser page is £3764.  Another £800 would take it to £4564, so that's a rough guide to where the total would need to be two weeks from now if this final push is to be just about a success.  Obviously more would be better and would give me more of a cushion, but I've got to be realistic and we'll see if another £800 can be managed.

Thank you to everyone who has already donated.  If you haven't donated yet and would like to, there are three main options.

To donate by card, please follow this link to the fundraiser page on GoFundMe.

To donate via PayPal, simply make a direct payment to my PayPal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

To donate via direct bank transfer, please contact me by email and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter profile or in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version of the site only).

People sometimes ask about fees: GoFundMe now rely on tips to make a profit, but the payment processor they use does still directly deduct a small percentage from donations.  So if you want to avoid fees completely, please select either the PayPal or bank transfer option (and if you choose PayPal, select the non-fee option from the menu).  PayPal also has the advantage of (usually) transferring the funds instantly, whereas with GoFundMe there is a delay of at least several days.

Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out HOLY COW!!! A majority of the Scottish public want independence in bombshell new poll

It's actually only four months since the last time an opinion poll showed a clear pro-independence majority - that was a telephone poll conducted by the UK's gold standard firm Ipsos, no less, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since June, particularly the SNP's setback in the general election.  So it's incredibly heartening to discover that Find Out Now still have Yes in the lead.  I say "still" because for years Find Out Now polls have tended to show Yes majorities, as indeed have Ipsos polls - if those two companies are right, we've been in 'settled will' territory for quite some time.

Should Scotland be an independent country?  (Find Out Now)

 

Yes 52% (-)

No 48% (-)

So far I haven't found the fieldwork dates, but they must be fairly recent because the poll is billed as being "the first since Alex Salmond's death".

As far as I can see this is the ninth poll Find Out Now have conducted on independence, and of those no fewer than eight have shown a pro-independence majority.  The sole exception was the poll commissioned by Independent Voices in September 2023, although oddly some sources list even that one as showing a Yes majority.  That'll be because of the way the data was presented by the client at the point of initial publication, which must be an almost unique example of a pro-independence client, as opposed to a unionist client, pulling a fast one and getting away with it.

Essentially the message of this poll is that the general election has had no effect - pollsters that have previously shown a small Yes lead can be expected to continue to show a small Yes lead, while the bulk of online pollsters that have tended to put Yes in the high 40s can be expected to continue doing that too.  So for all of KC's endless propaganda about "Statista polls" ("Statista" is not a BPC-affiliated polling firm, you won't be surprised to hear), it looks like the popularity of independence is untouched.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

The paradox for the most radical independence supporters is that they will act most effectively if they go against their own natural instincts, and instead of talking about "national liberation", start speaking the language of voters' real world concerns

A few weeks before the general election, I used my iScot column to bemoan the fact that there was no billboard ad campaign from the SNP (or any other pro-indy party or organisation) hammering Keir Starmer and Labour.  I felt Labour's narrow poll lead in Scotland was potentially highly vulnerable if voters became better acquainted with Starmer's well-documented history of lying, cheating and breaching trust, and indeed with how right-wing Labour's programme had become. However, I did concede that if the SNP simply didn't have the money to run such a campaign, there wasn't much that could be done.

However, now that we're on the other side of the general election, the independence movement has a golden second chance, because if Labour were vulnerable before July, they're even more vulnerable now - voters have spontaneously started to notice Starmer's true nature and his popularity has fallen off a cliff.  We'd now be pushing at an open door with billboard ads that make voters think about how Labour presented themselves as 'change without independence' and have utterly failed to deliver or have even been a change for the worse.  That effectively leaves voters with nowhere to go other than independence if they're looking for a radical change for the better.

So my heart started to sing this morning when Believe in Scotland sent out an email announcing that they intend to run another two billboard ads and are giving followers a chance to choose between three options, two of which are in line with what I think is the correct messaging.  One points out that Labour's own research shows that 4000 pensioners will die as a result of the winter fuel allowance being cut, adding that "Scotland didn't vote for this".  Another says "Starmer gets freebies while your granny freezes - Britain is broken".  I think "Scotland didn't vote for this" is the more effective of the two, because "Britain is broken" is open to interpretation and not everyone will realise that the nudge is towards independence.  They might think they're being urged to "fix" Britain with a new government.

Nevertheless both are good, and therefore I was dismayed when I submitted my vote and saw that the runaway leader in the poll was the only one that doesn't tackle Labour, and instead reverts to the independence movement's comfort zone by portraying the saltire as "dreaming big" and the Union Jack as "living small".  That doesn't really do anything at all - it's affirming and feel-good for the hardcore of already committed independence supporters, but doesn't hit any buttons for people who have yet to be convinced.

This is where I think potentially bad campaigning decisions are made when they're taken by radical independence supporters who assume that the rest of Scotland think like themselves.  I recently took a look at small pro-indy parties to see if any of them would be a suitable political home for me in the event that Yvonne Ridley's boast proves true and a decision has already been taken to expel me from the Alba Party.  But I found that almost all of them were making the same kind of mistakes as Alba, but on an even bigger scale - lots of talk about "national liberation" and "salvation", which in my view sounds like alien language to most voters.

Not long before Alex Salmond died, I was asked why I thought Alba had failed thus far, and I said that I thought perhaps the party's branding had been conceptually flawed from the start.  Although I'm passionate about the Gaelic language, from a hard-headed point of view the name Alba may have been a mistake, because for many voters it may have conjured up an image of a romantic, "Celticist" party, far removed from their own day to day concerns.  The smaller parties aren't learning from that error as far as I can see.  If a non-SNP, non-Alba party of independence is ever going to emerge as a serious contender, I suspect its messaging will have to go in a very different direction from the natural instincts of those who set it up.  It'll have to promote itself as a party primarily concerned with solving specific economic or social problems (or seeking to rejoin the EU, or whatever), but one that just happens to be utterly uncompromising in viewing independence as an essential part of the solution to those problems.  

As it turns out, there just isn't enough of a gap in the market for a party catering for voters who think the SNP isn't going far enough or fast enough on independence.  The SNP have well and truly monopolised the market as "the party of independence", and that isn't about to change. But where there may be a gap is by first speaking the language of voters' real world preoccupations, and then tying those preoccupations to the urgent necessity of independence.  That way you might even get soft No voters backing a Yes party, and help build a pro-indy majority in the Holyrood popular vote without directly harming the SNP much.  (From a more Machiavellian point of view, there's also a clear gap in the market for a pro-independence version of Reform UK, ie. one that blames everything on immigrants, but that's certainly not something most of us would ever touch with a bargepole.)

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Is Green party activist Allan Faulds right to claim Alba is now finished?

My eye was caught by an article in the Herald entitled 'Salmond's death signals end for Alba, pollster predicts', because if the pollster in question had turned out to be someone like Martin Boon or Anthony Wells, I might not necessarily have agreed with the assessment but it would certainly have been worth listening to.  Comically, though, it turns out that the individual is not actually a pollster at all, but is instead the Green party activist Allan Faulds, whose bitter dismissal of Alba is long-standing and clearly rooted to at least some extent in his own partisan politics.  He once claimed Alba needed to ditch Alex Salmond to have any chance, which self-evidently makes a nonsense of his new claim that Alba are finished specifically because they no longer have Mr Salmond.

Faulds does of course run a website which is purported to be politically neutral (but isn't - his own views and prejudices constantly leak through) and which sometimes analyses polls and has commissioned a couple of crowdfunded polls, but that's not what a 'pollster' is.  A pollster is either a person or organisation that actually conducts polls, which to the best of my knowledge Mr Faulds has never done.  Admittedly it's probably not his fault that he's been falsely billed in that way, because the same word has been used about me at times.

My own reading of the situation, for what it's worth, is that one of Alba's most long-standing problems has just been solved, although a counter-balancing problem has just been created, and it remains to be seen which of the two problems is/was more significant.  The problem that has been solved is the negativity associated with Alba's brand, which to a large extent derived from Alex Salmond's deep personal unpopularity, something that was consistently seen in polling from 2021 until this year.  The rapid reappraisal of Mr Salmond's legacy since he died means the party's association with him is suddenly no longer such a negative and may even have become a net positive.  But the new problem is of course that Alba will no longer attract media interest from being led by one of the true heavyweight politicians of the age, and once the coverage of Mr Salmond's death subsides, they may find it a lot harder to get noticed than they did before.

The one remaining big asset that they have, the sole factor that still sets them apart from a fringe party, is that they have a member of the Scottish Parliament.  I don't know whether Ash Regan will run for leader, but even if she doesn't, she'll need to be pushed firmly to the forefront if Alba are going to be recognised by the media as relevant.

Because Chris McEleny arbitrarily suspended my own party membership a few weeks ago after he took exception to my public calls for the party to be democratised, I am barred from viewing the party website and am thus somewhat in the dark about what is going on.  (My so-called "disciplinary" hearing was postponed after Mr Salmond's death to an unspecified date but my suspension was not lifted, so the longer this drags on, the more it feels like constructive expulsion from the party at Mr McEleny's whim.)  However, I've been told that there has been a boost in Alba's membership numbers in recent days.  If that's true, the party needs to think long and hard about how it is going to retain those new people.  The pattern so far has been that the only Alba members who have truly been happy are the ones who see their membership as a kind of 'fan club' status and just want to applaud whatever the leadership says or does.  Anyone with ideas of their own who wanted to play a part in (for example) policy formation has tended to become quickly disillusioned because they've been regarded by the party as 'problematical'.  Members have even sometimes been talked of with extreme suspicion as 'possible infiltrators' - although in their heart of hearts I don't think anyone in the leadership group truly believes that nonsense, it's just a handy excuse to treat members with 'undesirable' views as an 'enemy within'.

Alba desperately needs a cultural shift to make members feel both valued and empowered.  That can't wait a couple of years, it needs to happen right now - otherwise the current boost in member numbers may be the last one that ever happens.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

All of the last six GB-wide polls have put Labour in the 20s - that's the sort of unpopularity associated with Michael Foot, John Major and William Hague

A new GB-wide poll from Techne shows that Labour's lead is down to just three points, which is the lowest that any firm with the exception of More in Common has shown since the Trussmageddon of autumn 2022.

GB-wide voting intentions (Techne, 16th-17th October 2024):

Labour 28% (-1)

Conservatives 25% (+1)

Reform UK 19% (-)

Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)

Greens 7% (-)

SNP 2% (-)

And although the changes from the previous Techne poll are well within the margin of error and thus statistically insignificant, there's no real doubt that Labour's popularity has taken a further significant hit within this calendar month.  Until early October, all but one poll from every firm had put Labour at 30% or higher, whereas all of the six polls conducted since 4th October have put Labour on 29% or lower - that's well below anything Jeremy Corbyn scored at a general election, it's closer to the levels of unpopularity suffered by Michael Foot, John Major and William Hague (although even Major and Hague managed to just about stay in the 30s, at least in general elections).  

Again, the fact that Labour are nominally still ahead with such an abysmally low vote share may be almost irrelevant, because it's hard to believe that the right-wing vote will still be as heavily split in four or five years' time - one way or another, it's surely going to coalesce more behind one particular political force.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: I took a prolonged break from promoting the fundraiser during the general election period, but I'll have to make some serious progress over the coming days and weeks if the blog is to remain viable.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  Card donations can be made via the fundraiser page HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

So, Tory voters of Falkirk South: what was it that first attracted you to Keir Starmer's hard-right Labour party?

I'm slightly puzzled that one or two people are defending Labour's false claim to have "gained" the seat in yesterday's Falkirk South by-election.  It's true that it was one of those paradoxical situations which frequently crop up in STV by-elections, where Labour had to try to "hold" the seat even though the SNP were well ahead in the ward last time around.  But there are two fatal problems with the claim of a Labour "gain".  Firstly, a lack of consistency - there have been any number of times in the past where Labour have claimed to have "gained" a seat in a by-election even when they had been in the lead in the ward at the previous election, so they can't have it both ways. And secondly, what is actually the alternative to determining "gain" or "hold" by looking at the party that held the seat before it fell vacant?  The only one I can really think of is to tot up the first preference votes for all of a party's candidates in the ward at the previous election, see which party had the most first preference votes overall, and then see if there's any change at the by-election.  And if you do it that way, if anything the Falkirk South by-election comes out as an "SNP hold" rather than a "Labour gain" or even a "Labour hold", because the SNP were the leading party in the ward in 2022 and also narrowly won the first preference vote yesterday.

Falkirk South by-election result on first preference votes, 18th October 2024:

SNP 31.3% (-10.3)
Labour 30.5% (+8.1)
Conservatives 14.7% (-13.9)
Reform UK 9.9% (n/a)
Independent - McKean 5.5% (n/a)
Greens 4.5% (-1.1)
Liberal Democrats 3.6% (n/a)

A 0.8% lead on first preferences was never likely to be enough for the SNP to hold on for the win given that there were so many Tory and Reform UK votes waiting to be transferred, but as ever the sheer extent of the affection of right-wing voters for the Labour party is quite the sight to behold.  Excluding non-transferable votes, 85% of Tory voters transferred to Labour and only 15% to the SNP.  Better news is that Green voters once again broke more for the SNP, although not overwhelmingly so - 65 Green voters transferred to the SNP, and 42 to Labour.

I think the SNP can take some consolation from topping the poll in a central belt location, because that wasn't happening much (arguably not at all) on 4th July.  That said, this result is poorer for the SNP than last week's results in North Lanarkshire and the previous week's results in Dundee, because the swing of around 9% to Labour would be enough to put Labour approximately six points ahead Scotland-wide - very much in line with the general election result.  

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