Sensation as support for independence soars in new poll from traditionally No-friendly firm YouGov

Should Scotland be an independent country? (YouGov, 3rd-8th August 2023)

Yes 48% (+3)

No 52% (-3)

It took me a while to doublecheck, but I can confirm that the three point increase in the Yes vote, and the corresponding three point decrease in the No vote, is accurate.  The previous YouGov poll showed a 45/55 split - that was the strange poll that had independence numbers but no party political voting intention numbers.

I must say YouGov's own write-up of this poll seems a touch weird, which I suppose is another way of saying "biased" or "giving rise to suspicions of an agenda".  There is no acknowledgement of the scale of the increase in support for independence - the 52-48 No lead is shorn of all context, as if the fact that No is in the lead is all that matters.  And you'd be forgiven for forming the impression that this is an unalloyed bad news poll for the SNP, whereas in fact it's a rare example under Yousaf of a poll which genuinely offers something positive for the SNP to take from it.  Although the Westminster numbers are very worrying, with the gap between SNP and Labour slumping from nine points to four, the Holyrood constituency results show the opposite trend, with the SNP lead increasing from eight points to a semi-healthy ten, and with the SNP's own vote share moving back into the 40s. The SNP vote is also up two points on the regional list, with the lead over Labour holding steady at four points.  So it's a 'curate's egg' poll for the SNP, not the unmitigated disaster that YouGov are rather suspiciously portraying it as.

The Alba list vote, incidentally, is unchanged at 2%.

Alex Massie in DESPAIR as Redfield & Wilton poll shows the people of Scotland urgently want an independence referendum within just ONE YEAR

As you'll have gathered, we're in "blogging is light" territory, but I'll just very very briefly give you my thoughts on the new Scottish poll from Redfield & Wilton.  Again, the independence numbers are outstanding, with the Yes camp slightly closing what was already a very small gap, and with a slender majority (after Don't Knows are excluded) still wanting an independence referendum within the next year - an extraordinary finding that drives a coach and horses through the mainstream media narrative (hu-llo Alex Massie) that there is no public demand for a vote.

On the party political voting intentions, the best that can be said for the SNP is that it's not getting any worse for them. They maintain slender leads over Labour on both the Westminster ballot and the Holyrood constituency ballot.  They've slipped one point behind Labour on the Holyrood regional list ballot, but that's bound to happen now and again due to the very tight state of play. The real concern is the story the SNP are telling themselves that their "vote is holding up well in the circumstances".  That means, perversely, that they're regarding the police investigation as a plus, because they reckon they'll bounce back into a healthier lead once the "circumstances" disappear.  That's delusional in my view, and the only question is when they will realise that and start to panic.  If it's one week before polling day for the general election, it'll be too late for them to take the necessary action - ie. a change of leadership.

As far as the disgraceful expulsion of Angus MacNeil is concerned, it's a classic example of a weak leader overcompensating by trying to look strong.  My guess is that Fergus Ewing would also have been expelled (at least from the Holyrood parliamentary group) if the tragic death of his mother Winnie hadn't made that psychologically impossible.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

The cost of self-righteousness: the public's tepid response to the Ferrier recall petition suggests the SNP's support for it may have been decisive, and Yousaf may have just pointlessly thrown away a seat to a unionist party

As expected, the recall petition against Margaret Ferrier has hit its target and triggered a by-election.  What I didn't expect, though, was how relatively close it came to failing. Only 14.7% of the registered electorate signed the petition, which means that the drive to persuade people to sign may have made the decisive difference in reaching the 10% threshold - and of course that was a drive the SNP were active participants in, even though they knew any by-election was highly likely to see the Rutherglen seat move from the pro-independence camp to the unionist camp.  As I pointed out recently, there were only two officially registered campaigning organisations in favour of the petition succeeding - one was Labour, and the other was the SNP.  It's the absolute epitome of self-defeating behaviour.  And make no mistake, this isn't necessarily just about one seat - landmark by-election results often produce snowball effects in the subsequent general election.  We could look back on what the SNP have done to Ferrier as a crucial milestone on the way to the loss of the pro-indy majority at Westminster.

I have no time whatever for the notion that the SNP's actions were made inevitable by the gravity of Ferrier's trangressions.  In February and March 2020, the Scottish Government, including Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, ignored the pleadings of the World Health Organisation and deliberately allowed Covid to move freely through the population.  They even sent Jason Leitch out on a Grand Complacency Tour of the TV and radio studios to hubristically imply that the WHO were wrong and that "what the science is telling us" is that people should keep going to large events, such as Stereophonics concerts, held in confined indoor spaces.  The only thing that put a stop to that unforgiveable folly was the realisation that the NHS would literally collapse if the "libertarianism for pathogens" approach was maintained.

And over the last year to eighteen months, of course, all mitigations against Covid have been completely dropped, even though the virus is still ubiquitous and is still causing considerable amounts of death and severe illness.  Literally the only thing that seems to matter to the government is that the numbers are no longer high enough to overwhelm the NHS - they simply don't care about the human toll along the way.

In a nutshell, then, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf must by definition be responsible for many, many times more Covid deaths than Margaret Ferrier was (and of course there's no way of knowing whether Ferrier was responsible for any deaths or infections at all).  To portray Ferrier as a monster, as the SNP leadership shamelessly did, and themselves as saints, is just rank hypocrisy.  And I would stress that I've been making similar points about the Scottish Government's catastrophic early handling of Covid since 2020, when I was still a member of the SNP myself.

There's also the question of what we can glean about the characters of SNP politicians who turned on Ferrier so instantly and savagely.  This is a woman they used to praise to the skies as the SNP's hardest-working campaigner, especially in local council by-elections. If they can decide literally overnight that she's irredeemably evil and untouchable, who is actually safe from being betrayed by them?

If the coming by-election is not going to be reported as a straightforward tale of Labour triumph and Yes disaster, it may well be that it can't be allowed to be a straightforward Labour v SNP battle.  As has been well-rehearsed, I think in normal circumstances Alba need to be incredibly cautious about splitting the Yes vote in first-past-the-post elections - but in this particular case, with the SNP seemingly almost guaranteed to lose, a good showing for a big name Alba candidate could be the only thing with any chance of preventing Labour from using the by-election to generate unalloyed momentum for themselves.  And a big name Alba candidate can only really mean Alex Salmond.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

A word of advice for Alba - there's a danger in being assumed, however wrongly, to be associated with the nutty Neil Oliver-style climate change denialism outlined by Stuart Campbell today

As regular readers will know, I've been a member of the Alba Party since its formation in spring 2021.  I was a member of the Alba NEC between 2021 and 2022, and to the best of my knowledge I'm still a member of the party's Appeals Committee.  One thing that has slightly concerned me over the last two years is the number of global warming denialists, anti-vaxxers and 'plandemic' conspiracy theorists who have become Alba members - however that has generally seemed only a minor concern, because such views are clearly not shared by people at the top of the party.  Before she was stripped of her column in The National, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was in fact one of the very few remaining voices of sanity on the subject of Covid to be found anywhere in the Scottish media, and Chris McEleny often spoke out about the issue too.  On the subject of climate change, it's fair to say Alex Salmond places a greater emphasis than many others on technological solutions such as carbon capture, which the Greens (and indeed Robin McAlpine, the author of the Wee Alba Book) regard as essentially a pseudoscience.  But there's no disagreement at all between the Alba leadership and the environmental movement on the urgency of the threat or on the responsibility of all countries to play their part in tackling it.

Today has seen something of a crossing of the Rubicon, though, because Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland has suddenly gone full global warming denialist nutjob, and published a Neil Oliver-style article in which he sneers at the idea that the extreme and life-threatening recent weather conditions in southern Europe are anything out of the ordinary for July, and essentially argues that Scotland and the wider UK should abandon all further efforts to tackle climate change.  Campbell is not, of course, a member of the Alba Party, and never has been - he's a Tory voter in Somerset who a few months ago revealed that he is "ashamed of Scotland" and would not support independence in any new referendum.  With near-comical irony, the only political party he has ever attempted to join is the Green Party of England and Wales.  Nevertheless, he is unofficially associated with Alba due to his role in editing the Wee Alba Book, and more particularly because of the significant overlap between his readership and Alba membership.  I know from personal experience the discomfort and stresses of being an Alba member who is opposed to Campbellism or Wingsism or whatever you want to call it - in my case that's literally the only type of Alba member I'll ever have any interest in being, so I just make a virtue of it, but I know of others who bite their tongue for a quiet life.  It's likely that if Campbell expresses a view on something, it'll be automatically assumed in many quarters to represent either official Alba policy, or at least the centre of gravity within the Alba membership.  And that's dangerous on a day like today.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - if Alba are going to make the transition from small party to major player, they need to position themselves in the sweet spot on the radical end of the pro-independence mainstream.  "Radical end" because that's the purpose of the party's existence, but "mainstream" because there will always be a severe limit on the support that can be won by a party too closely associated with wacky fringe views or preoccupations.  And I'm afraid the views that Campbell has expressed today do belong to that vote-repelling fringe, at least as far as the left-leaning, pro-independence pool of voters in Scotland is concerned.  The idea that the UK doesn't need to do anything on climate because we account for only 1% of global emissions, and the real polluters are the likes of China?  Well, any region of 50 million people in China could just as easily draw a circle around themselves and say "we're not the problem, it's the rest of the world that's the problem, so we can just get on with doing whatever we like".  Ultimately all countries have to make a serious effort, because China and Russia are hardly likely to make substantial enough cuts in emissions if they see that the western world can't be arsed to make any sacrifices at all.

If Campbell's thuggish behaviour in the past, and some of the extremist views he's previously expressed, have not been enough for the Alba leadership to consider putting up at least a touch of distance between themselves and him, I'd suggest today ought to give them pause for thought about whether the time has come to start quietly doing that.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

History suggests next year's general election may not be the triumphal procession for Starmer that so many are expecting

Someone claimed on Twitter a couple of days ago that there have only been four previous occasions when the main opposition party in the UK has had such a big lead in the opinion polls.  In practice that means since the 1940s, because polling wasn't around before that.  The four occasions mentioned were - 

* 1968-69, when Harold Wilson's Labour government was suffering a severe spell of mid-term unpopularity following the forced devaluation of the pound.

* 1990, when Mrs Thatcher was about to be dislodged due to the public's hatred of the poll tax.

* 1993-97, when John Major's government was in its prolonged death throes.

* 2008, at the lowest point for Gordon Brown.

It's not easy to double-check the claim that those are the only four periods on a par with the present day, but assuming it's right, the fascinating aspect of it is that only one of the four saw the opposition party sail through to an easy victory in the way that had been anticipated - 

* By 1970, Wilson had somehow turned it around for Labour.  He even called a snap general election a year earlier than he needed to, and was fully expected to win.  The Tories under Edward Heath did claim a surprise victory in the end, but they had to come from behind to do it, which certainly wasn't what they had been expecting a year or two earlier.

* Labour's big poll lead evaporated as soon as Mrs Thatcher was replaced as Tory leader in November 1990.  Thereafter, the polls still made the 1992 election look competitive - but the polls were wrong, and Labour suffered a crushing outright defeat. 

* 1997 was the one occasion when it was plain sailing for the opposition, with Labour under Tony Blair winning the landslide that the polls had been pointing towards for several years.

* The Tories did end up in power after the 2010 election, but only courtesy of a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats.  Gordon Brown clawed things back sufficiently that Labour could have stayed in power if the Lib Dems had backed them.

So all of that suggests next year's general election may not be the triumphal procession for Keir Starmer that both Labour and the media think.  The Uxbridge by-election result would tend to support the theory that what is happening now is not akin to the mid-1990s, because it's almost unthinkable that the Tories would have won any by-election at all during the latter John Major period, irrespective of local circumstances.  Otherwise intelligent people like Ian Dunt are spectacularly missing the point about the Uxbridge result, which they are dismissing as caused by a specific issue that only has resonance in a tiny number of constituencies.  In reality, what the result showed is that voters are still giving the Tories a hearing if a potent enough wedge issue can be identified - and Ulez is not the only such potential issue out there.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Why it would be a good thing if Chris Hanlon challenges Yousaf for the SNP leadership

First of all, let me acknowledge that Chris Hanlon's own personal reasons for considering a leadership challenge may be very different from my own reasons for believing Humza Yousaf needs to be challenged.  What I'm about to say is based on the premise that it would be a good thing if Yousaf is dislodged because it could save the SNP from a defeat next year that the wider cause of independence might never recover from.  From that perspective, the objective of a challenge by a relatively unknown figure like Hanlon is not to oust Yousaf in one go, but instead to weaken his position in preparation for a better opportunity later on.  The only exception to that would be if a more high-profile figure uses the opening up of a leadership contest to put themselves forward as a candidate, but at the moment that seems unlikely.

It has to be said that a leadership challenge does not in itself weaken the incumbent.  The total opposite can even be true if the challenger underperforms, as for example Tony Benn did against Neil Kinnock in 1988.  Allowances will be made for Hanlon given his low profile, but nevertheless if he was to be defeated by, say, 95% to 5%, that would probably strengthen Yousaf's position in the short term, especially given that Kate Forbes and her supporters would probably feel obliged to explicitly give their backing to Yousaf during the contest.  Team Humza would doubtless spin it as an astounding surge in their man's popularity in a short space of time due to people seeing him in action as First Minister.  They would say he had gone from narrow victor in the spring to having the party totally united behind him in the autumn.

So that's the potential danger, but in this case it's outweighed by the urgency of the electoral crisis the SNP face.  As I keep pointing out, Yousaf really needs to be dislodged before a general election defeat occurs, not afterwards, and time is running out if that's going to be done.  Kate Forbes, assuming she still wants the top job, appears to be biding her time until Yousaf crashes and burns at the general election, which may make perfect sense from her own personal point of view, but will be too late from the point of view of the independence cause.  Others will have to take the initiative, and a 'stalking horse' leadership challenge may well be worth trying just to see if it's the pebble that starts the avalanche.  Even if it goes wrong and Yousaf is temporarily strengthened, that may not make much difference in the long run because an SNP defeat at the general election would swiftly undo the effect anyway.  (And if the SNP somehow avoid election defeat under Yousaf, he'll have proved us all wrong, in which case fair enough.)

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

'Yes to Independence' on the ballot paper

I did my periodical search yesterday to see if there were any new Scottish opinion polls out, and there weren't any, but it drew my attention to something else that is rather surprising and that might be of interest - The National are running an unofficial readers' poll about whether the SNP should use the ballot paper description "Yes to Independence" at the general election.  At time of writing, 1253 people have voted in the poll, with 75% in favour of the idea and 25% opposed.  I'd like to suggest everyone votes in the poll and bumps up the Yes vote as much as possible, because a ballot description like that, coupled with the top line in the manifesto stating that a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence, would make it very difficult to argue after the event that the election was not a de facto referendum on independence.  You can vote in the poll HERE.

I know some people may be suspicious, because The National are running the poll in response to a suggestion from Toni Giugliano, who is one of the SNP's nearest equivalents to Labour's notorious Luke Akehurst.  He's perhaps not quite as powerful as Akehurst, but the similarity is that he's an open, unapologetic Godfather of factionalism, who preaches the virtues of division and exclusion at every opportunity - perhaps on the theory that driving enough of Yousaf's critics out of the SNP would synthetically produce 'unity', albeit with a hollowed out base, which is the very definition of a pyrrhic victory.  So yes, doubtless he has some kind of convoluted factional / careerist motivation for making this suggestion, but here's the thing - it doesn't really matter what the motivation is for holding a de facto referendum or something similar to one, because it empowers voters anyway.  It's up to voters to decide what to do with that power, and if they use it to choose independence, the SNP leadership will find they are on a train that they are not actually driving.  The pressure to deliver on an independence mandate will have a momentum of its own.  The important thing is to lock them into something as close as possible to a de facto referendum while the chance is there, and if they believe they're doing it for their own self-interested reasons, so much the better, because it makes them more likely to see it through.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year's fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it's been partially successful - it's around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500.  Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there's very little point in leaving the job half-done - that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping.  We wouldn't necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made.  Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be?  Obviously it's partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it's far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it's pumping out a "purist" message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum - ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed.  Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes.  But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as "being in the scunnered middle") have their place.  A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE.  Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man).  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

YouGov poll finds the Scottish public want a referendum on independence within the next five years - and reject the idea that London's permission should be required before a vote is held

Slightly to my astonishment, at about the seventh or eighth attempt I've finally managed to track down the data tables from the YouGov Scottish poll that I was becoming increasingly suspicious about, and it turns out that it's a genuine YouGov poll.  However, it's in a part of the website that is insanely difficult to find - whether it was sitting there the whole time, or whether it's been quietly added over the last couple of days, is not entirely clear.

As ever, the results that were reported in the media are not necessarily the most interesting or telling ones.  It transpires that, albeit by the narrow margin of 45% to 42%, the public in Scotland think there should be an independence referendum within the next five years.  That represents a slight one-point increase in support for a referendum since the last YouGov poll. And by the somewhat wider margin of 50% to 40%, voters think the Scottish Government should be able to hold a vote on independence without London's permission.

There's slight opposition to a total ban on new oil and gas development on "British" North Sea territory (ahem), and interestingly that's a sentiment that cuts across the political divide.  Yes voters and No voters are both opposed to the idea of a ban, as are voters for all parties apart from Labour (and presumably the Greens, although the Green figures are not provided).

There's increasing evidence that the police investigation has had a severely negative effect on Nicola Sturgeon's standing and reputation.  By a margin of 50% to 32%, voters think she should be suspended from the SNP.  That's a sharp increase on the margin reported by the previous poll.  Admittedly it's driven mainly by anti-independence voters, but even 26% of SNP voters from 2019, and 30% of Yes voters from 2014, think she should be suspended.  Her personal approval rating, meanwhile, now languishes at minus 16.

The approval ratings from the poll for both Humza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak have already been widely reported, but here they are in a fuller context - 

Net approval ratings on the question of whether each person is doing well or badly at their job:

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -3

Keir Starmer (Labour): -15

Alex Cole-Hamilton (Liberal Democrats): -15

Patrick Harvie / Lorna Slater (Greens): -25

Humza Yousaf (SNP): -27

Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -36

Rishi Sunak (Conservatives): -37

Net approval ratings on the question of whether respondents have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of each person:

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -11

Keir Starmer (Labour): -14

Stephen Flynn (SNP): -15

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP): -16

Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats): -16

Alex Cole-Hamilton (Liberal Democrats): -16

Patrick Harvie (Greens): -20

Humza Yousaf (SNP): -23

Lorna Slater (Greens): -25

Douglas Ross (Conservatives): -37

Rishi Sunak (Conservatives): -41

Net approval ratings for political parties:

"Scottish" Labour: -5

Greens: -11

SNP: -17

"Scottish" Conservatives: -51

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £2100.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Abject humiliation for Keir Starmer in Uxbridge by-election casts doubt over whether Labour's national poll lead has any real substance to it at all

I know Labour and commentators sympathetic to Starmer will attempt to dismiss the shock Uxbridge by-election win for the Tories as a freak outcome caused by local factors (ie. the unpopularity of Sadiq Khan's Ultra Low Emission Zone).  As I write this, the results of the other two by-elections have yet to be announced, but it looks virtually certain that the Tories will lose both, including Selby, which was a much tougher nut for Labour to crack.

But ask yourself this - would Labour have failed in any by-election in a relatively marginal seat like Uxbridge in the mid-90s when Blair was heading for power?  Of course they wouldn't.  No matter what the local difficulties, Labour would have stormed through effortlessly because the public had simply decided that they'd had enough of the Tories, that they liked Labour enough, and that they wanted a change of government.  Something is very different this time, notwithstanding the opinion polls, because somehow the Tories are still able to get a hearing and don't have to scratch too hard to find a way to win in a constituency that Labour should easily have taken on a uniform national swing.

And of course this is also a huge psychological blow for Labour in the here and now, because it will drain away the momentum that Starmer would otherwise have generated from the Selby result. One result offsets (perhaps more than offsets) the impact of the other, and that will perhaps be something of a relief for the SNP and the rest of the Scottish independence movement.  It's also, rather comfortingly, a horrific setback for the Labour Right's behind-the-scenes wannabe Robespierres, most notably the grotesque Luke Akehurst.

Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election result (20th July 2023):

Conservatives 45.2% (-7.4)

Labour 43.6% (+6.0)

Greens 2.9% (+0.7)

Reclaim 2.3% (n/a)

Liberal Democrats 1.7% (-4.6)

SDP 0.8% (n/a)

Independent - Hamilton 0.7% (n/a)

Count Binface 0.6% (+0.5)

Independent - Phaure 0.6% (n/a)

Rejoin EU 0.3% (n/a)

Let London Live 0.3% (n/a)

Independent - Bell 0.3% (n/a)

Christian Peoples Alliance 0.3% (n/a)

UKIP 0.2% (-0.4)

Climate 0.2% (n/a)

Monster Raving Loony 0.1% (-0.2)

Independent - Joseph 0.0% (n/a)

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £2100.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Huztae be a way back from this

Note: This was intended to be my column for the latest issue of iScot, but it didn't make the cut due to constraints of space.  So here it is for your delectation and delight.  Bear in mind it was written several weeks ago, and a few aspects of it have since been overtaken by events (for example the "Schrodinger's De Facto" plan announced at the special conference).

So how was it for you?  It was certainly a very different experience from a typical election or referendum in which you'd have a chance to gradually come to terms with the results as they come in bit by bit.  There wasn't even a wave of rumours to act as a cushion, because the secrecy of the outcome was successfully guarded.  All we had was a minute or two to draw conclusions from the candidates' body language, and by goodness that hit me like a sledgehammer.  

Instantly noticeable was that Ash Regan had a face like thunder, which left no room for doubt that the result was poorer for her than she hoped for or expected.  But did that dismay only relate to her own vote tally, or did it also extend to the Forbes v Yousaf result?  After all, Kate Forbes herself was wearing a beaming smile, so maybe there was still a chance that Humza Yousaf had been beaten after the redistribution of Regan's votes?  But no, wait, Forbes is the sort of person who would smile much more easily as a mark of graciousness, and would be more likely to look very serious if she had just been told that she was about to assume a heavy responsibility.  And Yousaf himself was looking far too happy and relaxed to support the notion that what he had assumed to be his by right had been snatched from him.  The moment I became almost certain he had won was when a close-up from the TV camera caught him shutting his eyes for a couple of seconds with a subtle smile, as if he was inwardly saying "OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!" and savouring what he regarded as the supreme moment of his life.

For me, those couple of minutes were a highly condensed repeat of the emotions of the awful night in September 2014 when the realisation slowly dawned that Scotland had voted against becoming an independent country.  Most people I know share the view that Yousaf's victory was a calamity at least on a par with the 2014 referendum result, or perhaps even worse than that, because the SNP electing a leader committed to indefinitely abandoning all plans to try to win independence is a scenario that leaves all of us in the Yes movement completely snookered.

But I have to recognise that there are people out there who felt, or at least claimed to feel, the complete opposite when Yousaf was declared the winner, and who said there was an intense sense of relief that the SNP had narrowly turned its back on what they alleged to be the "bigotry" represented by Kate Forbes.  I must say I have very little time for the claims that it would have been somehow intolerable for some of our fellow citizens to live in a Scotland led by Forbes.  She had made abundantly clear that she would uphold the law as it stood on abortion and equal marriage, and common sense should have been enough to tell anyone that it would have been politically impossible for her to go back on her word, given the views of the people she would have been relying upon to sustain her in office.  I can only assume that the supposedly intense stress reported by some when they contemplated a Forbes premiership was an affectation.  Or, where it was genuine, people were falling victim to bogus fears whipped up by those with a very cynical agenda.

Either way, it's telling that the people punching the air when Yousaf won were thinking about identity politics issues when they did it, rather than about independence.  Tacitly, there seems to be an acceptance even among some Yousaf supporters that his victory pushes independence further away rather than brings it closer.  It's not that these people don't care about independence - at least some of them do.  But the mood music from them has been along the lines of "well, maybe this won't be quite as bad as we fear", which is a pretty clear indication that they know they've settled for a downgrade in their independence leader, whether for reasons of careerism, or factionalism, or non-independence-related hobby horses.

For my own part, the despair I felt in the days after the result was announced has dissipated to some extent, and that's largely because of the helpful clarity of the situation we now find ourselves in.  Under Nicola Sturgeon, there was always a disorientating ambiguity - she had a stated plan for independence, but it was hard to read whether she had any real intention of ever implementing it, given how the details kept changing and the timetable kept being pushed forever back and back.  An additional complicating factor was Ms Sturgeon's immense talent as a communicator, which meant that if an independence vote did come about, it was likely that she was the ideal person to have in place to lead the Yes campaign.  The simplistic claims of certain bloggers (and politicians) that independence hinged upon Ms Sturgeon being removed from office thus never rang true.

By comparison, the situation with Yousaf is extremely straightforward.  He has no plan for independence ("I'll magically get Yes support to 60% and the barriers will then magically melt away" is not a plan) and he would be completely the wrong front-man even if he did.  What the SNP have just done is not far off the equivalent of the Tories choosing Iain Duncan Smith as their leader in 2001, because they ignored polls showing that Yousaf was the least popular of the credible candidates, and significantly less popular than Labour's Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer.  Not only, then, is Yousaf's departure a prerequisite for winning independence, it's also a prerequisite that can very plausibly be expected to happen, because there must be a high probability that the SNP are heading for electoral defeat under their unpopular new leader, a setback likely to trigger a new leadership contest.

It's important to stress that it's entirely coincidental that Humza is both bad for independence and unpopular with the public. It would be nice (in a sense) to think that any SNP leader who abandoned plans to win independence would automatically get their comeuppance by losing voters' support, but it doesn't work like that, and it's actually not too hard to imagine a charismatic SNP leader getting away with embracing devolutionism.  But Humza is not that person, because voters don't rate his ministerial track record and probably dislike his personal style too.  Just by chance, then, there's a strong possibility that he's unpopular enough that another change at the top could very swiftly get the independence campaign back on track.

But the snag is that it's impossible to wish for the sequence of events most likely to bring that about.  The SNP losing its majority among Scottish seats at Westminster would be a heavy price to pay for bringing Humza down, and indeed it might be a blow his successor would never recover from. The UK Government and unionist commentators would almost certainly start arguing that independence must be off the table until the SNP get their Westminster majority back, which at the very least would take several years, and might never happen.

It would be much better if Yousaf could be brought down before he leads the SNP to defeat at the general election.  But that would require the SNP to suffer some massive pre-election shock, and the only places I can see that shock coming from are poor opinion poll results, or a very heavy defeat at the likely by-election in Rutherglen.  Would either of those be sufficient to dislodge Yousaf?  Frankly, I'm not convinced they would.  But our hopes of independence may rest on me being proved wrong about that.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023 a few weeks ago, and the running total has now passed £2100.  The target figure is £8500, however, so there's still quite some distance to travel.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue by making a donation, please click HERE.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.