FUNDRAISING UPDATE: Scot Goes Pop (still) needs your help to continue!

With the usual distractions of August, blogging has been much lighter than usual recently, but as September approaches we'll soon be back to politics with a vengeance.  The recent general election was a wake-up call for all of us that the massive unionist bias of the mainstream media remains a monumental problem. The most obvious and important counterweights are The National and the Sunday National, but those are such a small percentage of the MSM that they do need to be supplemented by a thriving pro-independence alternative media.  

Nobody is indispensable, and I'm not suggesting that Scot Goes Pop necessarily has to remain part of the mix. But whatever alternative media does exist going forward, it'll require a degree of funding to be sustainable.  That's just inevitable.  Political writing, whether you choose to call it blogging, or journalism, or citizen journalism, is incredibly time-consuming and whoever does it on a regular basis needs to keep body and soul together.  I do have other sources of income, and I live on a shoestring budget, but nevertheless I rely on some fundraising to make it possible for Scot Goes Pop to keep going.

Until 2021, our annual fundraisers always used to hit their targets pretty quickly.  There's been no drop-off in readership since then, but the fundraising has become far, far more of a problem - I can think of three or four possible reasons for that.  I've had to promote the crowdfunders over a much more prolonged period, and even then they've generally fallen well short.  This year, I took a prolonged break from promoting the crowdfunder over the general election period, but I'm going to have to start making some serious progress now if Scot Goes Pop is to have a realistic chance of continuing.

Many thanks to everyone who has already donated over the last few months.  If you'd like to donate, there are three main options - 

For card payments, the crowdfunder page is HERE.

Payments can also be made direct by Paypal.  In some ways that's a better option because the funds are usually transferred instantly and fees can be completely eliminated depending on which option you select from the menu.  My Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

I know a few people prefer direct bank transfer, and if you'd like to do that please email me and I'll send you the 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).

Some of you have also suggested that this might be a good time to commission an opinion poll, to get post-election baseline numbers. Again, that would be funding-dependent.  I had hoped to run a poll before the election (in fairness that was when we all thought the election would be in October or November), but the fundraiser for it was well short of its target after a couple of months and I had no choice but to go back to the general fundraising.  I'll still get the poll done as soon as it's possible.  If you're donating by Paypal specifically for polling, please add a note saying "for the poll" or something like that.

Apologies for interrupting normal service with this post, but it was getting to the point where it was unavoidable.  Many thanks once again to everyone who has donated so far.

Angus Robertson's error was treating Israel as a normal country while it does abnormal things

The SNP are in an 'interesting' place in respect of Israel.  I don't in any way celebrate the withdrawal of the whip from John Mason, because we've seen in the past that throwing seats away can have serious consequences.  However it sounds like it will be for a limited period only, and it sends out a powerful signal because it suggests that at least as far as the SNP are concerned, the genocide in Gaza is an established enough fact that denying it has taken place is just as unacceptable as denying the extermination of the Jews in the 1940s.  That is absolutely not the position of some political parties - indeed we've seen leading figures from other parties suggest that it is unacceptable to accuse Israel of genocide for the very reason Mason gave, ie. that 'not enough' Palestinians have been killed.  The German government even take the extreme view that admitting the reality of genocide in Gaza in itself an extension of Holocaust denial or of anti-semitism.

So it's principled and in some ways brave for the SNP to suspend Mason on the basis that they have, but it surely leaves them in a hopelessly contradictory position in defending Angus Robertson for meeting the Deputy Ambassador of Israel and being photographed with her.  If Israel's committing of genocide is so undeniable, you surely don't offer tacit approval or acceptance of that genocide by holding business-as-usual meetings with Israeli officials.

When I was younger, I took up penpalling for a spell, and I had penpals in many different countries.  It finally demonstrated to me that I have a northern European temperament, because in spite of the language barrier I found I connected far more easily with people from Scandinavia, France and Germany than with people from the USA or Australia (although my typically brash Aussie penpal from Brisbane did very kindly offer to send me some vegemite, once she had explained what it was). I very briefly had a penpal from Israel, and she was totally different from all the others, because she wasn't interested in talking about herself - all she wanted to do was talk about Israel and educate me about it.  She wasn't being overtly political, it was more like a one-to-one tourism advert, but I realised years later what she was doing. There seems to be a deep-seated insecurity among some Israelis, rooted in the idea that people elsewhere don't see them as a 'proper country'. This leaks out sometimes even among the most seasoned propagandists - one of them blurted out on social media recently "what these people cannot come to terms with is that Israel is a real country!"  I don't think all that many people don't regard Israel as a real country - their issue is that it's a real country committing genocide.

There was an American article recently referring to the protests at Hampden when the Israeli women's team played Scotland, and it suggested that the value of an international  football ban on Israel would be to deprive Israelis of what they really do crave - the respectability of being seen as a normal country on a par with any other. Or more specifically, they crave that normality even while doing abnormal things like genocide, and that's what shouldn't be acceptable and what they must be deprived of.  If they want to be treated as a normal country, they must earn it by acting like one.  They can't have their cake and eat it. That's what Angus Robertson allowed them to do, albeit in a very small way.  Whether that's a sacking offence, I don't know, but it certainly must never happen again.

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Huge relief for the SNP as early post-election polls show no honeymoon for Labour, whose vote is DOWN since 4th July

Thanks to Cassandra on Twitter for pointing out to me that two new GB-wide polls have been published since my last update.  They won't attract much attention so soon after a general election, but this is actually the period in the electoral cycle when polls can tell you something really important and surprising, and I think that's the case here. Labour should be very, very concerned.  A month after a supposedly "landslide" triumph, they should be basking in a honeymoon as Tony Blair was at the equivalent point in time, but they're not. They're one point down on what was already an underwhelming vote share from 4th July.

Omnisis GB-wide poll (7th-8th August 2024):

Labour 33%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 20%

Liberal Democrats 11%

Greens 8%

SNP 3%

Scottish subample: SNP 29%, Labour 22%, Reform UK 19%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Greens 6%, Conservatives 4%

BMG GB-wide poll (5th-7th August 2024):

Labour 33%

Conservatives 24%

Reform UK 18%

Liberal Democrats 12%

Greens 8%

SNP 2%

Scottish subsample: Labour 33%, SNP 25%, Conservatives 19%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Reform UK 8%, Greens 6%

OK, we don't have proportional representation for Westminster elections, so even on a reduced vote share Labour would win another landslide on these numbers.  But of course the point is that the split in the opposition vote is not going to remain static over the coming years. If and when the right-of-centre vote starts coalescing behind either the Tories or Reform UK, 33% would be a losing vote share for Labour.  Indeed, it's almost identical to Jeremy Corbyn's vote in the heavy 2019 defeat.  If this is as good as it gets for Labour, Keir Starmer could quite easily be a one-term wonder.

Scotland's disgraceful mainstream media have been making a none-too-subtle attempt to use the general election result to bury the SNP once and for all.  In such a difficult context, the SNP were never going to be setting the heather alight in these early polls, and I think they'll settle for being ahead in one of the two Scottish subsamples.  What matters by far the most to them is that there's no Labour honeymoon, because that means once the post-election dust settles, there'll be a golden opportunity to re-establish themselves as Scotland's leading party as the 2026 Holyrood election approaches.

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Well, THAT was a short honeymoon, Sir Keir! Less than one month after taking office, Starmer has negative approval ratings - including in Scotland

As far as I can see, we've still only had one proper voting intentions poll since the general election - which must mean that polling companies and their clients are deliberately avoiding them, because several other political polls have been conducted.  The latest one is from YouGov and has personal ratings for a number of leading politicians. They make startlingly poor reading for the new Prime Minister.

Keir Starmer:

Favourable 40% (-4)

Unfavourable 49% (+5)

With the usual caveats about the limitations of small subsamples, the Scottish figures for Starmer are Favourable 46%, Unfavourable 48%, so he's in net negative territory here too.  I suspect the SNP will be mildly encouraged by this, because by far the biggest danger for them in the run-up to the 2026 Holyrood election would be an extended honeymoon for Labour.  It looks tentatively as if that risk has been lessened by Starmer's key mis-steps in his first month in power - particularly the retention of the two-child cap, the heavy-handed treatment of Labour rebels on the cap, and the scrapping of winter fuel payments for pensioners.  Notably, the front-woman for the new austerity, Rachel Reeves, has seen a similar much-deserved knock in her popularity and now has a net rating of minus 11.  Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy have also dropped back but by a lesser amount.

An anonymous SNP "official" was quoted a few days ago in a Politico article saying: "The SNP want to send a message to Westminster, we want to send a government’ is one of the best [Scottish Labour] attack lines I’ve ever heard."  You'd kind of have to wonder if this person is in their early 20s, because that attack line is far from new - the exact words may be, but Labour have been using variants of that line against the SNP in general elections for as long as I can remember. It was highly effective in both 1992 and 1997, for example.  It should always have been obvious - and many of us pointed this out well before the election - that the SNP cannot compete with Labour in a UK-wide election by talking solely about bread and butter issues, because Labour can form a government and the SNP can't.  They can only trump Labour by pointing out that independence is a much bigger and better change than a transient Labour government, and that while Labour can only offer five years of the Tories out of office, independence can keep the Tories out for good.

To be fair, Nicola Sturgeon got that, and the real authors of the election setback were the "ditch the de facto" plotters like Stewart McDonald and Humza Yousaf himself.  Hopefully they've learned the lesson the hard way, and the SNP will never again go into a UK general election without foregrounding their unique selling point of independence.

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Could elections in the UK be RIGGED as they are in VENEZUELA? Here's John Curtice on how it could happen!

Being an unreconstructed leftie, I would have felt a pang of regret if Venezuela had ceased to be a socialist country, but there's no point pretending that the result of the presidential election yesterday was anything other than fraudulent - the evidence is overwhelming.  Of course if anyone suggests that an election in the UK may be rigged, they're always dismissed as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, and indeed I had little time for the suggestions that the indyref was stolen, because there was simply no evidence at all to support that. Nevertheless, this might be an appropriate moment to draw your attention to an extraordinary observation made by Professor John Curtice a few weeks ago.  To be clear, he's not suggesting UK elections have been rigged, he's just identifying how the system is theoretically wide open to abuse - 

"In most countries, before anyone would dare let a ballot box leave the polling station, they would want the votes to be counted.  Because the moment it leaves the polling station, who knows what might happen to it on the way to its supposed destination?  Maybe it won't make it, maybe it will get stuffed, etc, etc, right?  So for most countries that is a crucial part.  In our case we go 'Oh it's fine.  We'll put a ballot box in a boat between Eday and the mainland on Orkney in the middle of winter and it's absolutely fine, you know, we'll have a little police car on it to make sure everything is OK', and we expect all these ballot papers to happily arrive unstuffed, safe arrival, right?"

Everyone knows the Tories introduced photo ID in the hope that supporters of other parties would be prevented from voting, but their nominal excuse was that they were trying to stop electoral fraud.  Perhaps it's time to call that bluff and start demanding that votes should be counted in polling stations, which would be a more important safeguard.  However, an even bigger weakness in our system is postal voting on demand, and if fraud does occur on any sort of significant scale, that would almost certainly be the place to look for it.  There's probably a grey area where people are actually filling in their own ballot paper, but without any secrecy and under tremendous pressure to vote in a particular way from someone watching over them as they do it - perhaps a family member or a party activist.

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Two plus two equals five, Winston, and that is the change Scotland needs

One of the extraordinary things about the general election campaign in Scotland was that Labour got away with the "change" messaging, even though what they were actually doing was demanding that independence supporters should abandon any hopes for change and embrace the dismal status quo.  But if in the Labour leadership's own heads they were genuinely offering some sort of "change", what was the nature of it?

We got a remarkable insight last night when a "Labour insider" briefed the extremist pro-genocide journalist Lee Harpin that "Changed Labour Means Changed Labour" - about as moronic a reworking of "Brexit Means Brexit" as you could ever wish to see.  It was a reference to the draconian suspensions of seven Labour MPs for backing the SNP amendment to the King's Speech calling for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, and therefore implied that the "change" Labour stands for is about one of two things: either a) the crushing once and for all of a hated past in which Labour actually cared about child poverty and social justice, or b) the crushing once and for all of a hated past in which members of parliament could think for themselves and cast votes of principle on matters of importance.  

Judging from the coordinated strop that leadership loyalists were instructed to have on social media last night, it appears to be the latter.  We were treated to an extraordinary display of self-styled "centrists" and "moderates" denouncing their suspended colleagues as "virtue signallers" and purveyors of "performative politics" and "vibes politics".  It was like proponents of Ingsoc reminding the population that the true enemies are not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the counter-revolutionaries and thought-criminals in their own midst.  The only people standing in the way of alleviating child poverty are apparently the bastards who vote in favour of alleviating child poverty, just as two plus two equals five. The narrative seemed to be that the country had tolerated the evil of "vibes politics" for far too long but that the patience of decent, hard-working families had finally snapped all at once due to one of the most disgraceful displays of performative virtuing in world history.

Labour voters of Scotland: you may or may not have realised that what you'd had enough of was pluralistic parliamentary politics and that the change you voted for was the destruction of pluralism, but apparently that's what you were doing, so I hope you enjoy the next five years.  As far as Starmer himself is concerned, the assumption seems to be that he can do this stuff with impunity, but I'm not sure that's true.  We've already seen his disciplinary heavy-handedness directly cost Labour specific seats like Islington North and Chingford & Woodford Green. If the Tories get their act together, the luxury of throwing seats away may no longer be afforded to him. He may only have a chance of winning the next general election if he can reassemble the sort of coalition of support that took Jeremy Corbyn to 40% of the vote in 2017 - and that included a lot of people who without Corbyn might well have been voting Green or for other small left-wing parties.

There's also the problem of incongruous messaging.  Some people will have been wide-eyed and naive enough to take Starmer at his word on the day after the election when he said he was putting "country before party", but will now have seen that he's openly demanding a total slavish loyalty to the party machine in a way that has no precedent in British parliamentary politics.  In other words, he's putting party before country more than any Prime Minister in history, and at some point the penny will drop with voters that this is a guy who means the polar opposite of what he says and simply cannot be trusted.

It's also somewhat ironic that the rebels are being accused of "walking into an SNP trap" and "helping the SNP up off the canvass", because it's not the rebellion that handed the SNP a propaganda victory, it was the suspension of the rebels, which needlessly turned the vote on the SNP amendment into a landmark political event with real consequences.  The SNP can't believe their luck today, and they owe it all to Sir Kid Starver.

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Former independence supporter Stuart Campbell effectively admits trying to "kill" indy at the general election - and he wrongly thinks he's succeeded

I just want to make one simple point.  Although it's an important point, there's nothing complicated about it and it can be explained very briefly.  On polling day, Stuart Campbell broke his word to his readers.  He had previously assured them he would never tell them how to vote, but instead he ended up instructing them to vote Labour: "there’s a job that needs doing...grit your teeth and gird your loins and get it done".  Although this would mean they'd be voting for an avowedly anti-independence party, Campbell tried to make out that they'd somehow be playing a game of five-dimensional chess and bringing independence closer.

So having got the election outcome he wanted (I doubt if many people were stupid enough to follow his advice, but he got the outcome anyway), you might have been forgiven for expecting some kind of guidance from him about where the cunning masterplan goes from here and how precisely independence has been brought closer.  But nope.  Instead, he brazenly asked his readers for suggestions about how he should spend the next two years, because he couldn't see any way forward.  And then on Thursday, he announced that: "Independence is dead as a political issue in Scotland for the next few years. This much should not be in any dispute."

And why is independence dead in his view?  Oh, he is in no doubt whatever about the reason: "A Labour government with a crushing majority sits firmly in Westminster with absolutely no intentions of granting a second referendum". That'll be the Labour government he instructed his readers to elect with as crushing a majority as possible.  In other words, he knowingly gave his readers advice intended to "kill" independence - exactly as I and others pointed out he was doing at the time.  Those who said we were wrong owe us an apology.

Independence is of course not dead, whatever the fantasies of the Brit Nat commetariat and Stuart Campbell (essentially one and the same thing).  The era of "muscular unionism" and "now is not the time" under Theresa May started, seemingly, at a moment of maximum weakness for the Brit Nat side - the SNP had 54 of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, and were dominant at Holyrood.  It's therefore not at all hard to imagine the pro-indy movement starting a fightback in the current circumstances which are far less unfavourable than anything the Scottish Tories faced in 2016-17.  But it does actually require someone to go out there and make the political weather, rather than just passively accepting the fatalistic nonsense being put about by the likes of Campbell.

I won't give Campbell any advice about how he should spend the next two years, but I'll make a prediction about how he will spend them - he'll campaign for a Labour-led Scottish government under Anas Sarwar, because he thinks independence hasn't been killed quite enough yet.  It would be grand if we could stop pretending this guy is anything other than an anti-independence campaigner at this stage.  If that's what his dwindling band of die-hard fans actually believe in, fine, but if not, they've been brainwashed by a bog-standard cult leader.

BREAKING: Alba remains a "member-led" party

Scot Goes Pop readers who are members of the Alba Party will have received the weekly party email yesterday, which this time was written by the General Secretary, Chris McEleny. It urges members to attend a meeting on Holyrood election strategy tomorrow, and encouragingly it specifically states that Alba is a "member-led party".  That was a phrase that was used a great deal at the time of the party's founding, and it's fantastic to hear it reiterated now, because I know there had been an alternative view gaining traction that the members should be treated with suspicion and that as much information as possible should be withheld from them because they might be infiltrators.  It obviously isn't feasible for members to lead a party that regards them as suspects, so it's tremendously reassuring that Alba won't be going down that road.

There's also been an alternative view that members shouldn't want or need to lead the party or have any democratic control over it, because they've elected a leader and should just sit back and passively trust that person to make the right decisions on their behalf.  It sounds like that won't be the path Alba goes down either, and I think that's the right call.  If Alba is going to have enough members to survive and thrive, it needs to be able to offer both new recruits and existing members a meaningful say over both policy and direction.  Hopefully now we can move forward, at a minimum, to a National Executive Committee that is elected on a one member, one vote basis, rather than the current system of restricting the franchise to a small subset of members on a sort of "pay-per-vote" basis.  Clearly a party will only be truly member-led once the members are allowed to choose who sits on its governing body.

In the meantime, though, do go along to Perth tomorrow if you're free and express your views on strategy for 2026.

The blackout on reporting of David Davis' revelation tells us a lot about how media bias works in the UK - but we still need to start separating out the Sturgeon v Salmond battles from the internal politics of the independence movement

I note that David Davis has used parliamentary privilege to allege that Liz Lloyd, the former Chief of Staff for Nicola Sturgeon, was the person who unlawfully leaked details of allegations against Alex Salmond to the repugnant Daily Record and its political editor David Clegg.  I also note the weird media blackout on reporting of Davis' allegation - a Google search only turns up a solitary article in The Times, which would suggest the Scottish media is ignoring it completely.  This illustrates again how media bias works - it's often not how they report on things but whether they choose to report them in the first place.  Deciding what members of the public should know and what they should remain in ignorance of is a tremendous power, and it's one that is routinely and cynically abused by the mainstream media.  Because this is a rare example of non-reporting that potentially benefits the independence movement, it's a particularly useful illustration of the process.

Like most people who have looked at the facts as objectively as possible, I was forced to conclude that a small group of people close to Nicola Sturgeon decided for petty-minded factional reasons that Alex Salmond should never be able to return to front-line politics, and to prevent that happening they deliberately set in train a process that they knew might result in him going to jail for crimes he did not commit.  That is a disgraceful state of affairs, and I can only wish Mr Salmond the very best as he seeks long-overdue redress. But that is ultimately a personal matter (or it is now that Mr Salmond or Ms Sturgeon are no longer ministers) and we have got to start separating it out from the politics of the independence movement before it does any more damage.

That is one reason why it is to be greatly regretted that Kate Forbes was not elected SNP leader either last year or this year. Instead we still have a First Minister who was closely associated with the Sturgeon faction, which is making it harder for the warriors of the Salmond v Sturgeon cold war to move on.  And on the Alba side, I can remember saying three years ago that Alex Salmond was far too sensible to allow any antipathy towards Nicola Sturgeon to seep into Alba's campaigning and that instead the party would be making a relentlessly positive case.  I would have to say my confidence on that front was partly misplaced - not during the Holyrood campaign of 2021, but later on, and most especially during the last three months of 2022 and the early part of 2023.  Over that period, not only were senior Alba people sometimes painting the SNP as a party of perverts, they were also demonising Nicola Sturgeon on a personal level, seemingly in an all-out effort to bring her down as First Minister.  That was an entirely counter-productive objective because Sturgeon had intended to fight the general election as a de facto independence referendum, while anyone likely to replace her was going to ditch that strategy.  (And no, I'm not impressed by the argument that the general election outcome shows that the Sturgeon strategy was wrong - the whole campaign would have been different if the SNP had been fighting it as a de facto under Sturgeon's leadership, and no-one can say what the result would have been.)

After 4th July, we do not have the luxury of being able to permit ourselves distractions.  We need a totally committed push over the next two years to save the pro-independence majority at Holyrood and at the very least to ensure that a pro-independence government remains in power. The posture of an individual's legal team should not form part of the ideology of any political party - and I'm not just talking about Alba when I say that.  It was, after all, the SNP that sent Nicola Sturgeon flowers after she faced a round of tough questioning.

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The Scottish Government should boycott any "Council of the Nations and Regions"

The Nation.Cymru news website has been making the news recently rather than just reporting on it.  It played a key role in the downfall of the Welsh First Minister Vaughan Gething, a man so arrogant and entitled that a sitcom could be written about him.  (Having been dragged kicking and screaming from office, his first reaction was - with no apparent sense of irony - to sympathise with the people who would be devastated by his departure!)

Yesterday, Nation.Cymru was fast out of the blocks with an opinion piece blasting Labour's proposed "Council of the Nations and Regions" as an insult to Wales.  It points out that the plan would put the country of Wales on a par with non-national English regions and would drown out the voice of Wales in a body where it would be lost among a sea of English mayors.  Alex Salmond has today made a similar point about how the Scottish Government shouldn't accept being given the same status as devolved English regions.

I personally wouldn't be that bothered about Scotland being treated in the same way as an English region as long as devolution in England was meaningful.  Yorkshire has a similar population to Scotland, and if there was a Yorkshire parliament with similar powers to Holyrood, it would obviously make sense to regard them as having equivalent status.  But that's not the position.  The English metro-mayors are essentially local government figures. They've had very limited powers devolved to them from central government, but those are powers that in any sensible country would have been in the hands of local government long before now.  What the Scottish Government mustn't accept is being treated as a glorified local authority.

But that seems to be London Labour's plan.  The language from the King's Speech pointed to a deliberate levelling up/levelling down approach - devolution to English mayors is to be strengthened, but all that will be strengthened in Scotland and Wales is the UK Government's relationship with the devolved administrations, which in plain language means that London will be sticking its oar into matters that have been devolved for decades, re-establishing the sort of dependent relationship that exists between the UK Government and English local authorities.  John Swinney shouldn't play along with that.  He should say he wants good relations with the Starmer administration, but that they should be conducted bilaterally, or via the Joint Ministerial Committee, or via the British-Irish Council.

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