The moderation question

As you may have seen, the main result of my raising the issue of KC's increasingly extreme concern trolling was that a completely different batch of trolls took it as their cue to suddenly pop up out of nowhere and harass me for 24 hours, apparently because they've been nursing a personal grudge against me after I deleted one or two of their comments weeks ago.  I have now reached total saturation point, so just to give myself a break from the harassment for a few hours, I've temporarily changed the settings so that you have to be signed into a Google account to leave a comment.  It literally will be only a few hours, though - I don't want to curtail commenting too much during the election period, so I'll switch the settings back either later tonight or tomorrow.  Hopefully those people will belatedly take the hint and find somewhere else to go, but if they don't I may have to switch the settings back and forth when it gets too much.

One thing I will say, though, is that a key part of my moderation policy which has been absolutely crystal-clear for years is that any criticisms or questioning of my moderation decisions are deleted when I see them. If people are just going to flatly refuse to accept that, and are just going to re-post the same protests over and over and over again, and are then going to start demanding "evidence" to support my moderation decisions as if the trolls themselves are the higher authority I have to answer to, it becomes like an ongoing mini-insurrection, and I cannot be dealing with that on a daily basis. It would waste hours of my time.  So if pre-moderation is going to stay off in the longer-term, people are going to have to start behaving more constructively. (And unfortunately it only takes one or two people to spoil things for everyone.)

Returning to the issue of KC's concern trolling, a number of you suggested that a partial solution might be to warn people of his modus operandi so he's less likely to sucessfully deceive them. He mostly posts anonymously (we call him KC because he briefly used that name) and he has two different personas - one is as an openly gloating Brit Nat sneering about independence and telling unfunny "Nessie" jokes, and the other posing as a "concerned independence supporter" who posts misinformation about polls and says how "worrying" and "not good" it all is.  

Often he'll have little conversations with himself.  Concerned Independence Supporter A will ask for information about a particular poll, and then he'll go away and have a cup of tea, and regenerate into Concerned Independence Supporter B, who will come back an hour later with the "requested" misinformation and explain how worrying it all is for Concerned Independence Supporters.  It's just an attempt to sap morale, and it may work to a limited extent if you're not wise to what he's doing.

The reason I am wise to it is that, unbelievably, during the two years I had pre-moderation switched on, he used to attempt to post here just as relentlessly as he does now, even though I hardly ever let his comments through.  So even though his comments literally had an audience of one person (me), that was apparently enough of an incentive for him to carry on.  That speaks to a level of obsessiveness that is bewildering and almost frightening.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Midlothian and Moray West, Nairn & Strathspey for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.

Thoughts on the latest Survation MRP seats projection

I must admit I've taken an hour or so to let the news of the latest Survation MRP projection sink in before attempting to blog on it.  Although it looks really bad, with the SNP dropping from 37 seats in the last update to 12 now, I think to a large extent it's just telling us what we already knew in a slightly different form.  The only reason the previous update was so good was because the popular vote numbers had the SNP seven points ahead, and we've known for 48 hours that the latest full-scale Survation poll had the SNP six points behind.  It's possible that poll even used some of the same fieldwork as the MRP poll.

It's a statement of the obvious that the voting system magnifies any swing and produces extreme variations in seat returns within quite a narrow band of results. If you actually look at the Survation MRP data tables, they show the lower band of SNP support at close to 1% (a GB-wide percentage) and the upper band at 4%. In other words, a near-wipeout is within the poll's margin of error, but so is an outright majority.  When seat numbers are so sensitive to much, much tinier variations than that, I'm beginning to wonder if we should just regard the seats projections as essentially meaningless (they're all over the shop anyway) and concentrate on the popular vote instead.  And that, actually, seems to be a picture of relative stability.  Survation are outliers, so far at least, in suggesting a major change over the course of the campagn.

That said, we do need to have at least one eye on what happens if these poorer projections prove to be accurate next Thursday.  The media will try to proclaim that independence is dead and that we are moving into a post-indepedence era of Scottish politics. Much will depend on whether the SNP can be persuaded to resist that narrative, or whether they will cave into it as they did in June 2017 (even though, ironically, they had just won a landslide majority!).

For what it's worth, some of the individual seats projections from Survation do not remotely tally up with gossip I've heard from the ground, so hopefully Labour are being overestimated and the WeThink and Find Out Now MRPs are closer to the truth.

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If anyone has any thoughts about how to deal with the increasingly extreme levels of concern trolling in the comments section of this blog, please let me know.  I think it's reaching the point where it can't just be regarded as a silly game anymore, because unusually high numbers of people are coming here in the run-up to the election to find out polling information, and they shouldn't be deceived by a Tory nutter posing as a "concerned independence supporter" and having elaborate pretend conversations with himself in an attempt to sap morale and spread misinformation.  Switching on pre-moderation just before an election wouldn't be great either, but I may have to decide which is the lesser of the two evils.

The Daily Record revise their endorsement from "Labour" to "It's Complicated, here's TV's Carol Vorderman to explain" - the list of constituencies where *even the Daily bloody Record* are endorsing the SNP

I was ready to be furious with Carol Vorderman when I saw her on the front page of the Daily Record today calling for "tactical voting to stop the Tories", because I was convinced the Record had roped her into a "Vow" type stunt to con people into voting Labour with dodgy "maths".  But to be fair to her, she's promoting a tactical voting website which from the couple of example postcodes I've just entered may possibly be giving reasonably honest advice - ie. vote SNP in SNP-Tory marginals, and vote however you like in other seats that the Tories can't win.

The Record have even emphasised the point by listing the seats and candidates where a tactical SNP vote is recommended.  So, for the avoidance of doubt, here are the Scottish constituencies where even the Daily bloody Record, even Paul bloody Hutcheon, are endorsing the SNP - 

Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (formerly Banff & Buchan, ie. David Duguid's seat)

Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale

Dumfries and Galloway

Gordon and Buchan (formerly Gordon, ie. Richard Thomson's seat)

West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine

Perth and Kinross-shire (formerly Perth and North Perthshire, ie. Pete Wishart's seat)

Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey (formerly Moray, ie. Douglas Ross' seat)

Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock

Admittedly that's a suspiciously short list that excludes a number of seats where the SNP are pretty obviously the best anti-Tory tactical option, but it's a start.  I said the other day that you could tell from the language the Record used when endorsing Labour that they were nervous they might be overplaying their hand and might suffer from independence supporting readers voting with their feet.  I'm wondering if the pushback they've received from readers is at the higher end of expectations and if today is a way of trying to placate independence supporters before sales start to drop.  It'll be interesting to see whether the polling day front page is out-and-out Labour propaganda or a bit more qualified.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Mid Dunbartonshire and Livingston for The National.  You can read the articles HERE and HERE.

*puts on Canadian accent* - it's another *terrrrrr*-ible night for the Conservatives - they slip to just 11% of the Scottish vote in YouGov poll

Scottish voting intentions (YouGov, 20th-25th June 2024):

Labour 35% (+1)

SNP 29% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (+3)

Conservatives 11% (-2)

Reform UK 8% (+1)

Greens 5% (-1)

There have now been three Scottish polls in the space of just over 24 hours. Two have shown the Labour lead increasing by two points, and the other showed a five-point Labour lead being completely wiped out. Put all that together and it may be that the position has been relatively stable.  (And remember it's only a few weeks since YouGov showed the SNP ten points behind, so the ship has been steadied since then.)

Here are the positives:

* The Scottish Tories look utterly doomed as never before.  Because a significant minority of Scottish seats are straight SNP-Tory battles, that should dramatically reduce the risk of the worst case scenario of the SNP being returned to single figures.

* The SNP's deficit is small enough that a modest recovery over the last week of campaigning could have a telling effect in terms of seats.

* It remains the case that Ipsos telephone polls show significantly better results for the SNP than online polls. It's easy to forget that, because phone polls are so much fewer in number, but polling accuracy is not determined by majority vote.  Who is getting it right is still an open question.

James Kelly · Scot Goes Popcast Episode 18: Verdict on English Local Elections

YouGov polling suggests Starmer will fall well short of the 40% vote share Corbyn took in 2017. So the question now is: will he at least save face by not falling below the 32% Corbyn took in 2019?

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 23rd-25th June 2024):

Labour 36% (-1)

Conservatives 18% (-1)

Reform UK 17% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 15% (+2)

Greens 8% (+2)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 31%, Labour 25%, Conservatives 13%, Liberal Democrats 13%, Greens 12%, Reform UK 5%

Under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Labour took 40% of the vote in the 2017 general election, which was almost a ten point increase on what Ed Miliband managed two years earlier. Of course initially no Labour supporter will care if Starmer achieves his landslide on a substantially smaller vote share than Corbyn's first election, but it will become a talking point. Starmer keeps boasting about how he's changed his party, but it will be pointed out that making changes is somewhat less of an achievement if they don't actually make the party more popular, and if by some measures they make the party less popular.  When Starmer's personal popularity plummets, as is bound to happen sooner or later, it might increase the chances of a soft left successor.

I'm being slightly tongue in cheek in suggesting Labour might fall short of the 32% Corbyn took in 2019, but on the current trajectory it's not totally impossible by any means.

Obviously the Scottish subsample has to be treated with caution, but even if you average the last three YouGov subsamples, there's only a tiny Labour lead.  So the SNP do seem to be hanging on in there.

Note that in the GB numbers there is a virtual three-way tie between the Tories, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats for second place.  On those numbers the voting system might work in the Lib Dems' favour, meaning there must be a fair chance Ed Davey will wind up as Leader of the Opposition.  Quite what the long-term consequences of that would be is anyone's guess.

Team Starmer in TOTAL DISARRAY this morning as SNP draw LEVEL in Scotland in staggering Savanta survey

Well, this is a turn up for the books.  There's been no particular evidence in recent times that Savanta are an unusually SNP-friendly pollster, so these numbers have to be taken seriously - although bear in mind that one swallow does not make a summer, and in any individual poll there's always a chance of an illusory trend caused by margin of error noise.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (Savanta, 21st-26th June 2024)

SNP 34% (+1)

Labour 34% (-4)

Conservatives 14% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 7% (-)

There is a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that if you have two polls within 24 hours of each other showing movement in opposite directions, the most logical thing to do is split the difference and assume nothing has changed.  Yesterday's Survation poll showed the Labour lead increasing from four to six points.  However, even if you average out the changes in the Survation and Savanta polls, you'd arrive at a small swing back to the SNP.  And you can't completely exclude from the mix yesterday's two MRP projections, which were also very favourable for the SNP.

Meanwhile, the run of polls showing the Tories on 14% continues, suggesting they could be on course for their worst general election result in Scotland in the democratic era.

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I've previewed the constituency race in Lothian East for The National - you can read the article HERE.

Scottish Tories may be on course for their all-time worst general election result - beating even the previous record low set in 2015 under Ruth Davidson

Although we're primarily wrapped up in the SNP-Labour battle for seats, it's important we still set aside some time between now and polling day to enjoy the predicament of the Scottish Conservative party.  It wasn't that long ago that the Tory vote seemed to be inexplicably firming up in Scotland and we were worried the SNP would really struggle against them in marginal seats. There were a couple of polls last October that had the Tories in the low 20s and the SNP in the low 30s, which would have been a recipe for calamity.  Even a few weeks ago, the Tories were regularly polling around 17%.

But the fears seem to be easing now.  The last eight polls have had the Tories in the 13-15% range with 14% being the most common figure.  And although Farage's return as Reform UK leader is not the whole explanation for that, it does seem to be a significant factor because the downturn coincided with his comeback and there has been a corresponding increase in the Reform vote, reaching a new peak of 8% in yesterday's Survation poll.

This has led to a rather amusing anti-Farage meltdown among the diehard unionist nutters on Twitter such as Effie Deans and "Erudite For Unity", who are demanding Reform UK voters must dutifully trot off back to the Tories to "stop the SNP".  I'm not sure anyone will really be listening at this stage, though, because anger against the Tories among right-wingers seems to be just as great as among left-wingers - although not necessarily for the same reasons.  

14% would be the lowest Scottish Tory vote share in the democratic era, beating the previous record of 14.9% which was amusingly set under Ruth Davidson's leadership in 2015.  A total wipeout of Tory seats is also now conceivable.  Yesterday's WeThink MRP projection has the Tories losing every single seat they hold, with four going to the SNP, although there are two seats where the Labour vote swells enough to jump from third or fourth place to first.  

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I've previewed the constituency race in Lothian East for The National - you can read the article HERE.

Methinks the WeThink MRP has just shown the SNP on course for an OVERALL MAJORITY

The polling news is a bit of a mixed bag tonight. There's a conventional Scottish poll out from Survation, showing the SNP six points behind Labour.  That could be a bit concerning because Survation have been relatively favourable for the SNP over the last year, and the Labour lead has grown since the last Survation poll.

But there are also two GB-wide MRP projections which are much more encouraging - and one of them, incredibly, has the SNP on course for an outright majority.  Remember 29 or above is a majority of Scottish seats.

WeThink MRP seats projection (GB-wide):

Labour 465

Conservatives 76

Liberal Democrats 52

SNP 29

Plaid Cymru 3

Reform UK 3

Greens 3

Find Out Now MRP seats projection (GB-wide):

Labour 450

Conservatives 71

Liberal Democrats 60

SNP 24

Reform UK 18

Plaid Cymru 4

Greens 4

The Find Out Now number for the SNP is roughly stable from where it was at the start of the campaign, so as I've said a few times, at least that suggests the SNP haven't had a bad campaign and the wheels haven't come off.  Although 24 wouldn't be a majority, it must be fairly close to making the SNP the largest single party in Scotland.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Kilmarnock & Loudoun and Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.

Now Wings aspires to become death, the destroyer of independence. But he's not Oppenheimer, he's just a bog standard Pied Piper, and frankly it's time to send him packing.

I've been keeping a vague eye on Wings Over Scotland during the election campaign, and what has struck me is how irrelevant he must suddenly seem to his dwinding band of sympathisers in the independence movement, simply as a result of his own apathy.  We're facing the most important and frankly most dangerous election in over a decade, and most independence supporters are rising to that moment by at least trying to do something positive. There's a sharp division of view about what positive action looks like, and I have my own doubts about whether splitting the pro-indy vote in lots of constituences will do more good than harm, but at least there's a kind of honest logic to picking a side and going out there and trying to win votes for your preferred pro-independence party or candidate.  That's not what Campbell has done.  He's just carried on wittering about the trans issue, like someone standing in a war zone trying to get wounded people to sign a petition to bring back smoking seats on planes. He just looks like an angry man shouting pointlessly and increasingly infrequently from the sidelines.

Or at least he did until yesterday, when he suddenly decided to participate after all in this maximally dangerous election for independence by telling his readers to vote against independence. If anyone can actually spot the difference between Campbell and the Daily Record these days, you're doing better than me.  Well, OK, maybe there are two differences - one is that the Daily Record is at least based in Scotland and the other is that it's going through the motions of pretending that its endorsement of Labour will not harm independence.  Campbell, by contrast, is making no secret of the fact that he's in the destruction business and that he wants the independence movement as we know it to cease to exist.  In fact he wants to subject it to total nuclear obliteration, as he makes clear by quoting the Bhagavad Gita via Robert Oppenheimer: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  There's an unintentionally hilarious bit in his blogpost where he cautions against the supposed dangers of voting Alba because it might not be destructive enough, ie. in his view it might split the anti-SNP vote and help a pro-independence party to win!

This is effectively fulfilling the prophecy that many people have been making in the comments section of this blog for years, that the absolutely intentional and pre-planned end-point of Campbell's tortuous process of repositioning and reframing was for him to be able to instruct his readers that the only way to achieve independence is to vote No in an independence referendum.  What he's doing now is the exact equivalent of that, because he's saying explicitly that if you vote emphatically enough against independence, you will somehow be helping independence to rise from the ashes afterwards.  He's not stupid enough to actually believe that, but like the Record he thinks and hopes that his readers will prove stupid enough.  He knows perfectly well that you don't heal something by turning it into a corpse.  He absolutely understands that if people are daft enough to kill independence in this election as per his directions, it will stay dead.

I'll let you into a little secret.  Campbell does not see destruction as a creative act.  He does not see defeat for the SNP as a means to an end that will renew the independence cause. He sees it absolutely as an end in itself, because he loathes the SNP with every bit as much bitterness as the Record do.  And he loathes them not because of any betrayal on independence, but purely and simply because of their actions on the trans issue, which is his first and only love these days.  (And maybe just a little bit because they didn't support him in his vanity legal action against Kezia Dugdale.)  He has led his readers like the Pied Piper to act against their own interests and beliefs in service to his own narrow and petty agenda.

This guy is a cult leader who has painstakingly brainwashed you into voting against independence, and into thinking you are somehow helping independence while doing it.

Wake up.

There is nothing complicated about this.

If you believe in independence, the way to help the situation is by voting in favour of independence, not by voting against it.

You don't spoil your ballot.

You don't vote for an anti-independence party.

You vote, obviously, for a pro-independence party.

You keep the flame alive.

You don't extinguish it.

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I've previewed the constituency races in Hamilton & Clyde Valley and Inverclyde & Renfrewshire West for The National - you can read the articles HERE and HERE.

Memo to the Daily Record: you cannot say "this election is not about independence" just 24 hours after your own political editor angrily insisted that Westminster elections are the ONLY elections in which anyone is allowed to vote for independence. That is a direct and total contradiction, and you are treating your readers like idiots.

On one of the previous threads, someone posted about focus group findings suggesting that voters who were swithering between the SNP and Labour were most concerned about whether it was better to bolster Labour's majority and have Scottish MPs from the governing party, or whether it was best to have SNP MPs as an independent Scottish voice in the House of Commons.  I found that encouraging in a way because it strongly implies that nobody buys into the line that Labour are at risk of not winning in England and that Scottish votes might be decisive and that "this is an opportunity that Scotland can't afford to miss" and all the rest of the standard Sarwar guff.  But clearly the Daily Record, the most contemptible newspaper on the planet (a view I've consistently held since before I even started blogging in 2008), still think trying to treat Scottish voters like idiots in that way is a promising strategy, and in their front page endorsement of Labour have basically instructed the Jocks to "eat your cereal, stop thinking about independence and give the Tories a kicking".  As a visual aid for this Orwellian-style "two minutes hate", a rogue's gallery of Tories with demon eyes is presented so you can see who you're supposed to be kicking.  And what makes this truly Orwellian, of course, is that the real motivation for the endorsement of Labour is the Record editorial team's undying hatred of the SNP and burning desire to see the SNP defeated and humiliated.  They don't give a monkey's about the Tories and could quite happily tolerate living under Tory rule - as they proved in 2014 by helpfully arranging another ten years  of Tory rule by backing the No campaign in the independence referendum with the fraudulent "Vow".

In their tweet tonight, the Record claim that it's been fourteen years since they last backed Labour.  Anyone who follows their output may reasonably conclude that they've kept their supposed non-support for Labour over the last fourteen years exceptionally well-hidden.  If they've refrained from making an official editorial endorsement during that time, it was only due to a worry over sales, because they knew that many of their readers had become passionately pro-independence and pro-SNP during the indyref campaign and would probably instantly walk with their feet if the Record reverted to the explicit "be a sheep, baa-aa, vote Labour" stuff.  The editorial team have been gagging for the earliest possible moment that they could get away with resuming normal service, and they think they've found it - but you can tell they're not quite sure and are nervous they may be miscalculating and jumping the gun.  The giveaway is that the opening words of the endorsement are "this election is not about independence", imploring independence supporters to absurdly believe that they can somehow take a holiday from what they believe in and can vote against independence by voting Labour without that having any actual effect or consequence.

But wait - is this election really not about independence?  How can that be, given that only yesterday the Record's political editor Paul Hutcheon told us that John Swinney has no credibility in claiming a mandate for an independence referendum from the Holyrood election of 2021, because the Supreme Court had "ruled unequivocally a referendum is a matter for Westminster, not Holyrood".  In other words, he is not just saying that Westminster elections are about independence, but that Westminster elections are the ONLY elections that are about independence.  According to Hutcheon, you are literally NOT ALLOWED to vote for independence or for a referendum on independence in any other type of election - you have to do it in a Westminster general election, because that's your one and only shot.  If you're an independence supporter, Hutcheon is telling you that when a general election comes up, by Christ you do not muck around - you clear your diaries and use that election for the purpose God has ordained, namely to express your view on whether Scotland should be an independent country.

So the Daily Record is factually wrong to tell its readers that this election is not about independence, and we have that on the Highest Authority imaginable - no, not God, someone far more senior, it's Mr Paul Hutcheon, political editor of the Daily Record.  Congratulations, chaps, you managed to pre-contradict the entire thrust of your logic for endorsing Labour.  That takes some talent, and we salute you.

(And yes, we know what the get-out clause will be - although general elections can be about independence, not all of them are, and this is one of the exceptions.  You can tell it's one of the exceptions because the Daily Record says it is.  Don't even bother to try to think for yourselves, guys - you are sheep and that's why the Record exists.  If you're ever allowed to vote for independence, the Record will inform you in plenty of time.  However, don't wait up for that, because the Record have decided you will never be allowed to vote for independence.  They just haven't told you yet.)

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I've been continuing to write constituency profiles for The National, and here are the links for Glasgow South, Glasgow North East, Glenrothes & Mid Fife, and Gordon & Buchan.