Two queries

Someone claimed on the previous thread that there was a new poll out today showing the SNP on 49 seats.  That seemed highly unlikely, and having checked I couldn't see anything.  I then made five or six attempts to respond to the comment by asking if people were just inventing numbers at this point in the hope that no-one would bother checking.  But I couldn't get my comment published.  I don't know if the bug is at my end or if it's affecting everyone.  I was going to ask people to let me know if they were having the same problem, but of course if they are, it would be difficult to tell me!  You could always email me.  And if anyone has seen this mysterious poll, please let me know about that too.

YouGov MRP poll shows SNP on course to lose almost thirty seats, piling pressure on Yousaf to go, or to end factional rule, or to change strategy on independence

I'll try to update this after I've had a chance to look at the details more, but I gather that the SNP's share of the vote in the YouGov MRP poll is very similar to their share of the vote in the Survation MRP poll, which had them on course for over 40 seats.  This underscores the point I made the other day about how there's a very narrow band of results in popular vote terms that could see the SNP winning anything between 12 and 45 seats.

YouGov MRP seats projection:

Labour 403

Conservatives 155

Liberal Democrats 49

SNP 19

Plaid Cymru 4

Greens 1

Ross Colquhoun, who as far as I know is still an SNP strategist, reacted to the much more favourable Survation numbers by trotting out the new mantra: "This shows that Labour don't need seats in Scotland to win."  As inspiring pitches go, that's right up there with "OK I know you don't fancy me anymore but at least I don't beat you up" or "I know you're sending me to the clink, your honour, but let's keep it down to a few years".  It's ultra-defensive and tacitly concedes that Scottish voters want a Labour government, which is a mindset that is going to make it very difficult to persuade people not to vote Labour.  What the SNP need to do is give people the choice of independence and convince them that independence is the change we all need, rather than a Labour government that will barely change anything at all.

The SNP could also do with a new leader who doesn't have heavily negative net approval ratings, or failing that they need Humza Yousaf to end factional rule by bringing Kate Forbes and one or two of her key supporters into senior ministerial positions.

Fresh despair for Labour as Anas Sarwar finishes third behind Humza Yousaf *and Douglas Ross* in a "who would be the best First Minister" poll

It's more than a touch ironic that the closest thing Humza Yousaf has had to a good personal showing in an opinion poll has just arrived courtesy of a poll commissioned by the Alba Party.  The reason that Alba have decided to release the numbers is presumably that they're also reasonably good for Alex Salmond.

Who would make the best First Minister? (Find Out Now / Alba Party, 18th-24th March 2024):

Humza Yousaf (SNP) 25.8%

Douglas Ross (Conservatives) 18.2%

Anas Sarwar (Labour) 17.1%

Alex Salmond (Alba) 15.4%

Lorna Slater (Greens) 8.5%

Patrick Harvie (Greens) 8.0%

Alex Cole-Hamilton (Liberal Democrats) 7.0%

These numbers aren't directly comparable to other polls we've seen over the last year.  The reason both Humza Yousaf and Alex Salmond usually have poor personal ratings is that the respondents who dislike them are subtracted from those who like them to produce a net approval rating.  But this poll has a different format that doesn't take account of negative views, it just ranks the leaders in the order of the percentage of people who view them most positively.  So it doesn't indicate that anything has changed, it's just a different way of looking at the situation.

Although Alex Salmond would have been horrified to be in fourth place if this was ten years ago, the reason this result can be regarded as encouraging for him is that his 15.4% support is more than double the percentage of list votes that would be required for Alba to win a decent number of Holyrood seats in 2026.  Conversely, although Yousaf's 25.8% puts him top of the pile, it's a lower percentage than would be needed for the SNP to have a good election result.  As many as 22% of SNP voters from 2019 think Alex Salmond would be the best First Minister, while Yousaf doesn't even quite manage double that (43.4%).

So the real comfort for the SNP in these numbers does not lie in Yousaf's showing but in Anas Sarwar's.  Labour will surely be dismayed to see their man languish behind not only Yousaf but also the hapless Douglas Ross.  And he's only just barely ahead of Alex Salmond.

*  *  *

I'm obviously not a fan of JK Rowling after her harmful intervention in the indyref. But yesterday she posted a thread about some of the most controversial trans women, and dared the police to arrest her for it when she arrives back in Scotland.  The columnist Kelly Given reacted by calling Rowling the "most boring human being in the country surely".  Well, it does seem unlikely that the most boring person in the country would have been able to dream up the Harry Potter universe, but what Rowling was actually doing was very usefully setting some boundaries for the interpretation of the Hate Crime Act.  If she dares the police to arrest her and they don't (and they're very unlikely to because of her fame), it becomes much harder for them to later arrest an ordinary member of the public in similar circumstances.  If, as the Scottish Government and its supporters claim, the Hate Crime Act is not intended as an assault on free speech, they should be grateful to Rowling for such a vivid and immediate demonstration that legitimate debate on the trans issue will be able to carry on unimpeded.

Let's get the awkwardness out of the way - I have a new title

Not everything in life makes sense, and one example is that Scottish political bloggers seem to be judged by their clerical titles, or lack thereof.  Stuart Campbell has styled himself a "Reverend" since entering the fray a decade ago, and although he's always insisted that's a genuine title, he's nevertheless been coy about how he acquired it.  A Google search suggests the answer may be the "Universal Life Church", which bills itself as "the world's leading online church" (whatever that means), and which allows anyone to be ordained as a priest within minutes simply by filling in a form.  No fee is even required.

The suggestion that Campbell's title comes from this rather dubious source was made several years ago by a well-known Brit Nat troublemaker.  But I can't find anything that contradicts it, and it has the ring of truth to it, because it's hard to think of any other religious denomination that wouldn't have cast Campbell out of the priesthood long before now due to his repeated foul-mouthed tirades.  The Universal Life Church has no standing whatever in the UK, but it does have limited recognition in the US, and there are a few US states that for some reason even recognise marriages conducted by its "Reverends".  So if you want to live in wedded bliss but only in Texas or South Carolina, Stu is your man.

Naturally I couldn't allow myself to be outdone by this, so I had a look to see if the Universal Life Church also offer titles that outrank a Reverend, such as Bishop, Cardinal or Pope.  I couldn't see any sign that they do, so I looked elsewhere.  There actually are plenty of "online churches" out there that offer an array of ranks, but most of them have no legal standing anywhere in the world.  What I was looking for was a church that allows its clergy to officiate at legally recognised weddings, even if only within a very limited jurisdiction.

As is often the case in situations like this, the answer was to be found in the South Pacific.  There is a small church, consisting of little more than a webpage, called the Pirate Mercator Communion.  It nominally worships the sea, and it seems to have a cosy financial arrangement with the government of the Cook Islands.  Anyone it ordains can indeed conduct weddings, but only in the Cook Islands.  Crucially it also allows anyone to become a Bishop for a nominal fee of 17 New Zealand dollars.

Reader, the deed is already done.  On Wednesday, I was ordained as a priest (by email) and on Thursday I was consecrated as a Bishop (by Zoom call, but it only took three minutes).  The fantastic thing is that I was able to select my own Bishopric, and although most of Scotland had already been nabbed, I was able to put together a distinctly squiggly looking and non-contiguous Bishopric consisting of Speyside, Tranent, Yetts o' Muckhart, Milngavie and approximately five-eighths of Benbecula.

I am advised that the correct form of address for a Bishop is "Your Excellency" or "Your Grace".  Suck it up, Stu.

Astounding Survation mega-poll suggests the SNP will win more than two-thirds of Scottish seats - and retain outright third place in the House of Commons

Happy Hate Crime Eve, everyone.  (And it's Easter too, apparently.)  I'll just very quickly give you the MRP seats projection from Survation's new mega-poll for the Sunday Times -

Labour 468 (+265)

Conservatives 98 (-267)

SNP 41 (-7)

Liberal Democrats 22 (+11)

Plaid Cymru 2 (-2)

That would obviously be a quite astonishing achievement for the SNP - they would have made Scotland the only place in Britain to resist the enormous Labour tide, they would hold the vast majority of their current seats, they would retain majority status among Scottish seats, they would hold off the Liberal Democrats to retain overall third place in the Commons (thus retaining Stephen Flynn's weekly questions at PMQs), and they would wipe out the Tories in Scotland.

If that sounds a bit too good to be true, it may well be.  In popular vote terms, there is a very narrow band of results that would have the SNP at 40+ seats at one end of the band, but on 15 or fewer at the other end.  When we see the data tables from this poll, it may turn out that the SNP are nestling at the favourable end of that narrow band, in which case they're still in considerable peril.  Remember also that Survation have tended to be more SNP-friendly than some other polling firms since Humza Yousaf became leader.

The Hate Crime Act: my verdict

A few people have been asking (perhaps with a touch of mischief in mind) for my views on the Hate Crime Act, which is less than thirty hours from entering into force.  Not for the first time, I find myself somewhere in between the two extremes.  I certainly rolled my eyes to the heavens when I saw that Stuart Campbell had announced that he's temporarily shutting Wings Over Scotland down while he supposedly seeks urgent legal advice (which he's crowdfunded for, naturally) on whether it's safe to put the site back up.  This is a classic exercise in tiresome Campbell theatrics to try to make it look as if SNP-run Scotland has turned into East Germany overnight, and if anyone is gullible enough to think the outcome will be anything other than Wings Over Scotland reappearing next week, possibly as early as Monday lunchtime, then, well, I've got a bridge to sell you.  I dare say he will genuinely spend the crowdfunded cash on legal advice, incidentally, but as with his stunt legal action against Kezia Dugdale, there are plenty of other ways in which independence supporters could be getting far better value for money.  I confidently predict that the outcome of this legal advice will be exactly what Campbell already knows from common sense, ie. that of course he can continue publishing a political website, but if he wants to be on the safe side he could remove certain controversial posts and stay off certain topics in the future.  There you go, I've just saved you £12,000.

On the other extreme, though, there are people talking and writing as if support for the Hate Crime Act is somehow an extension of support for independence, simply because it was passed by the SNP and the Greens.  That's a very dangerous road to go down, because anyone passionately opposed to the law may take the cue and decide there's no place for them anymore in the independence movement.  As has been pointed out in many quarters, the problem is not that the Act does not have adequate safeguards against unjust convictions, it's that there aren't adequate safeguards against unjust arrests.  There's not much comfort in being eventually acquitted if you've already been locked up, had your possessions seized and gone through the unimaginable stress of a prosecution.

I suppose I would sum up my view as this: not only is it wrong in principle to crack down on freedom of speech, it's also incredibly annoying that the SNP government has devoted so much time and energy to a bad law that can only divide the independence movement.  If they hadn't done it, we could at last be moving on from the divisions of the trans issue, but there's not much chance of that now.

Moderation problems, and a bit more on Craig Murray

At time of writing, there are almost 200 comments on the previous thread - in one sense that's a good thing, because it demonstrates how widely-read Scot Goes Pop is.  But yesterday was a nightmare day from a moderation point of view, because there were several dozen more comments that had to be deleted.  An anonymous commenter had falsely accused me on Thursday night of posting anonymously on the thread myself, and I warned him that if he kept making that accusation, he would no longer be welcome to post here.  Needless to say, he did keep making the accusation, so I started blanket-deleting his comments, which is the only way to "ban" someone on the Blogger platform.  He then tried to take advantage of the fact that it is difficult to distinguish between different anonymous commenters, and started posing as an innocent participant who was having comments deleted for no other reason than that they were supportive of Craig Murray - which makes no sense, because if you read through the thread, there are as many comments that are supportive of Craig (indeed perhaps slightly more) than there are critical of him.

I made abundantly clear in the previous blogpost that I was not having a go at Craig, and personally I have no problem whatsoever with him standing as a Workers Party of Britain candidate in England.  The point I was making wasn't really about Craig at all, it was about the fact that Alba are clearly prepared to interpret their rules generously in his case, and my hope that "the little guy" will in future benefit from similar flexibility and tolerance in equivalent situations.  As I said, my fear is that Alba is becoming a bit too authoritarian, and it's not hard to think of instances where lesser-known members have had the book thrown at them for far, far less than what Craig has done.  The solution to that is not to throw the book at Craig, it's to be consistent and chill out a bit when dealing with rank-and-file members.  

Based on what I've seen happen in the past, my strong suspicion is that if anyone who is not a Craig Murray or a similarly prominent figure had announced an intention to stand for the Workers Party, they would have been deemed to have "publicly resigned" from Alba - in other words they would have been to all intents and purposes banned from the party, and wouldn't have been allowed to rejoin without advance permission from the NEC.  The reason for that is the Workers Party registration with the Electoral Commission, which shows it as being active in Scotland and therefore an opponent of Alba.  Interestingly, Craig implied in a couple of comments on the previous thread that he is using his candidacy as leverage with George Galloway to try to get assurances from him that the Workers Party will not stand in Scotland and will no longer campaign against independence.  But, again, I'm not sure Alba would have cut that sort of slack with a less prominent person - there would just have been a knee-jerk ruling that the rules had been broken and that would have been that.

In a nutshell, I think the blind eye that has been turned to Craig's decision is a good thing and should be the template for the treatment of rank-and-file Alba members in future.  Nobody joins a political party, particularly a fledgling small party, to be subject to military-style discipline.  Alba will not thrive as a Leninist sect that keeps its members in constant terror of stepping out of line. It needs to be an open, welcoming party that gives its members room to breathe and that is enjoyable to be part of.

But so convinced was our anonymous troll chum that I was waging some sort of anti-Murray campaign that he re-posted exactly the same comment fifteen or twenty times last night.  He seemed to be refreshing the page every two minutes to see if I had deleted it, and as soon as I did, he re-posted it yet again.  To give myself a break, I temporarily changed the settings to only allow comments from people signed in to a Google account.  Needless to say the troll was not brave enough to put a name to his comment, and he stopped for a while.  But as soon as I changed the settings back this morning, he started all over again.

Believe it or not, I do have better things to do with my Easter weekend than to moderate blog comments every few minutes.  I very much want to keep pre-moderation switched off, but that's going to require a bit of responsibility from the people leaving comments.

On Craig Murray and pluralism of party allegiance

A Scot Goes Pop reader contacted me last night to ask what I thought about Craig Murray's decision to join the Workers Party of Britain and stand as one of its general election candidates in England, even though it is an avowedly British unionist party led by George Galloway, who famously voted Tory in 2021 in an attempt to stop independence.

To be perfectly honest, this was the first I'd heard of Craig's decision, so I had to read up on it.  I suppose it's the sort of thing you can look at either way - on the one hand it compromises Craig's support for independence, but on the other hand having a prominent independence supporter as a leading candidate also compromises the Workers Party's unionist credentials.  

Craig of course has one of the most complicated and unusual histories of party allegiance of anyone I can think of.  When I first read his blog around fifteen years ago, he was a member of the Liberal Democrats, and when the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government was formed in 2010, he wrote a blogpost flatly titled "I support this government".  But he quickly became disillusioned with the Cameron-Clegg administration (unsurprising given his radical views) and defected to the SNP.  He later left the SNP and joined the Tommy Sheridan-linked Action for Independence umbrella party, which unveiled him as one of its list candidates for the 2021 Holyrood election, before withdrawing all of its candidates in Alba's favour.  Craig has subsequently been a high-profile member of Alba, and was one of my fellow candidates in the highly controversial Alba NEC elections last year.  (Indeed he was elected to the NEC but declined to take up the position.)

As regular readers will know, I was elected in January to a special working group that is reviewing the Alba constitution.  And as you can probably imagine, that's meant I've spent more time over the last few weeks reading through obscure clauses of a party constitution than is really healthy for anyone.  Craig's decision to join a new party brought to mind this section - 

"6.1 A member who is a member of another party registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission in the Great Britain register and intending to contest elections in Scotland is regarded as being a member of a political party expected to contest elections in opposition to the Party. A member in this situation ceases to be a member."

That's fairly unambiguous, so I checked the Electoral Commission website.  The Workers Party of Britain is registered in the Great Britain register, and has declared an intention to stand candidates in Scotland.  I assumed, therefore, that Craig must have reluctantly left Alba to become a Workers Party candidate, but I checked his Twitter account and in fact he said this - 

"I haven't left Alba. I checked with Alex who said what I do in a foreign country is up to me!"

Now I want to make crystal-clear that I'm not in any way having a go at Craig here, because I think Alba were extremely foolish to introduce the rule barring membership of other parties.  As what Alex Salmond initially billed as a "list-only party", there was a golden opportunity for Alba to break new ground with more relaxed rules that encouraged ties between different pro-independence parties.  OK, in practice it would still have been impossible for Alba members to also be members of the SNP and/or the Greens, because those parties would still have had the more draconian rules.  But it would have sent a really powerful signal.  I thought it was incredibly disappointing that Alba after only a few months became just like any other party, demanding exclusive loyalty to itself and sometimes taking punitive action against members who fell short of that.

(To be clear, though, this is not one of the areas of the constitution I'm actively seeking to change, because I know I'd be banging my head against a brick wall.)

So in a way it's a good thing that what I regard as a bad rule is being disregarded in Craig's case.  But there's not much doubt that it *is* being disregarded, and what I would say is that I hope such flexibility and tolerance will also be shown with the "little guy" and not just with big-hitters like Craig who Alba particularly wouldn't want to lose.  I've expressed my worry recently that Alba is becoming a touch too authoritarian, and what mustn't happen is a two-tier system whereby a select few members benefit from minimalist interpretations of the rule-book, while others are subjected to military-style discipline based on maximalist interpretations.

It's Wednesday, so the Express must be lying about Scottish opinion polling again

A query on the previous thread - 

"Rob here, seen on another site best not named, 'New poll suggests the SNP will only win 18 seats and lose 30.'

Actual "new poll"?"

Well, the only mention I could find of it on a news site was at the Express, so that probably answers the question.  The Express have such an extreme track record of inaccuracies and distortions in their reporting of Scottish opinion polling that I actually achieved the impossible last year by getting a complaint upheld against them by the sham "press regulator" IPSO.  On that occasion, they had been trawling Twitter in the desperate hope of finding anything they could use for an anti-independence article, and it looks like the same thing has happened again this time.  When I searched for some of the details of the supposed "poll" on Twitter, I traced it back to a single tweet from some random bloke who had taken the numbers of a GB-wide YouGov poll and on his own initiative punched them into the Electoral Calculus model.  In other words, the entire Express article appears to have been based on a small Scottish subsample with an enormous margin of error, not on a full poll. But needless to say that is never really made clear.

That's probably misleading enough to warrant a complaint to IPSO, as is the fact that the subsample is wrongly described by the Express as an "Electoral Calculus poll".  Having been royally mucked around by IPSO on multiple occasions, though, I'll need to have a think about whether I can face yet another round.  If anyone else fancies taking it on, let me know.

The Express piece is weirdly meandering - for no apparent reason it suddenly jumps halfway through to the subject of a completely unrelated poll from four months ago, and dredges up an ancient quote from Professor Robert Ford about that other poll.  I doubt if 99.9% of people who read the piece will have had a scooby what it was all about.

Alba and the road-map to independence

On Saturday night, I started replying to a commenter on the previous thread who was on the wind-up about the Alba Party.  He said he was "just trying to introduce some realism" about Alba by calling it a "role-playing" outfit.  My reply began with "oh get over yourself", but it kind of sprouted wings from there, and it went on for so long that I fell asleep and lost the whole thing.  So I thought if I was going to have a second go, I'd probably better turn it into a full-blown blogpost.

So yeah, let's introduce some realism.  The SNP leadership in its current form is not interested in delivering independence, they want to get on with enjoying their careers as masters of a devolved country (although paradoxically by shelving independence they may be putting their own power at risk).  This creates a dilemma for genuine independence supporters who want to get the cause back on track.  Do they work to change the SNP from within, or do they try to pressurise the SNP into changing direction by applying electoral pressure from outside?

The problem with trying to change the SNP from inside is that the party's internal democratic structures have been hollowed out.  The most vivid example of that was the ultimate failure of what initially appeared to be a quiet revolution in the SNP in the autumn of 2020, when the old guard like Fiona Robertson were swept away by modernisers who wanted to increase transparency and accountability, and to protect women's rights.  But almost immediately, many of the people who had been voted off the NEC were back on it by unelected means.  Fiona Robertson no longer had the title of Equalities Convener, but effectively carried on with the actual role of Equalities Convener while her successor looked on bemused.  An election defeat barely proved to be even a minor inconvenience for her.

No, it's the leadership faction that controls the SNP, not the other way around.  But the one exception to that is during leadership elections, where members do still just about have the power to depose the ruling faction altogether - and of course they almost did that exactly one year ago.  The dice will always be loaded in favour of the handpicked continuity candidate, but nevertheless as far as we know the actual election results are not falsified, so there's an argument that if independence supporters just bide their time as members of the SNP, they'll be eligible to vote in the next leadership election whenever it comes up.  At that point they can pounce and reclaim their party.  In the meantime, though, there's a hell of a lot of powerless thumb-twiddling going on, so it's a bit daft to pretend not to understand the motivations of those of us who have chosen the alternative path of trying to bring about change from outside the SNP.

The troll suggested that I must agree with him that the SNP is the only possible vehicle for independence, given the number of articles I've written about the need for a change of SNP leadership, and the supposed lack of articles I've written about a road-map to independence that actually involves Alba.  I'll have to gently point out that our troll seems to be guilty of a selective memory, because I've written plenty of blogposts about the two possible routes by which I think Alba can play a key role.

The first is indirect.  It involves taking just enough pro-independence votes away from the SNP that the SNP leadership start to panic and become more like Alba (in other words more serious about independence) to get their winning coalition of support back.  That would be analogous to how Labour reacted to losing masses of votes to the SDP in the early 1980s.  It moved sharply to the centre ground that the SDP already occupied, and eventually took power in 1997 as a party Shirley Williams described as "very like the SDP, but a bit further to the right".  So although the SDP never won, it still achieved a lot of its objectives by forcing Labour to become the SDP.

The second route is direct.  It involves winning perhaps 5-8 list seats in 2026, holding the balance of power, and offering informal support for an SNP-led government in return for a credible strategy on independence.

So Alba could well have a decisive role to play, but I'll reiterate again that Alba will need to put its own house in order first.  I'm in a vantage point where I can see as clearly as anyone that Alba is increasingly replicating the SNP as a top-down party, and that is not the way it's going to win new recruits.