Thursday, March 28, 2024

On Craig Murray and pluralism of party allegiance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

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

A query on the previous thread - 

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

Actual "new poll"?"

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

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

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

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Alba and the road-map to independence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, March 22, 2024

If Sunak falls, who will replace him?

I said in the last post that if the opinion polls spook Tory MPs enough to install a fourth Prime Minister in a single parliament, the replacement would presumably be Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat or perhaps Kemi Badenoch.  But at least according to the betting that's wrong, with Tugendhat still rated as having less of a chance of being the next Tory leader than Nigel Farage - even though Farage is currently a member of another party and might even be about to become the leader of that party.

Next Conservative leader betting:

Kemi Badenoch 4.5
Penny Mordaunt 5.7
Suella Braverman 9.6
James Cleverly 10.5
Priti Patel 15
David Cameron 20
Nigel Farage 27
Boris Johnson 28
Tom Tugendhat 34

Remember this is the betting for the next Tory leader regardless of whether the vacancy occurs before or after the election, so for that reason it may make sense that Badenoch is clinging on to her position as favourite.  The big advantage Mordaunt and Tugendhat would have in a pre-election contest is that Tory MPs would be in survival mode, and would be looking for the stop-gap leader who is most likely to connect with the public and limit the damage.  But after the election, that advantage would disappear, and with years of opposition facing them, the Tories might well revert to ideological type.  

As far as I know, the leadership rules remain unchanged, so it's not hard to imagine Suella Braverman winning a post-election contest.  If she could somehow sneak into the top two in the MPs' ballot, she would probably storm to victory among the members on a populist pitch.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Tories on the brink of being pushed into third place by Reform UK, says bombshell YouGov poll

Apologies for the radio silence over the last few days, but rest assured I haven't been completely idle - I was working on my iScot column for next month, and there was also Alba committee stuff going on.  Today brings word of an extraordinary opinion poll that must make the Tories wonder why they even bothered to replace Liz Truss...

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov / The Times, 19th-20th March 2024):

Labour 44% (-)
Conservatives 19% (-1)
Reform UK 15% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 9% (-)
Greens 8% (+1)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 35%, Labour 33%, Conservatives 16%, Greens 6%, Liberal Democrats 6%, Reform UK 4%

In other circumstances we might look at these numbers and think it's still fanciful that Reform UK could overtake the Tories - much more likely, we would think, that the more traditional party will re-establish itself when polling day comes into view.  But what makes this situation different is the chance of a Nigel Farage comeback.  If Reform UK are only four points behind the Tories without him as leader, where will they be if and when he's back in harness? This is a man, remember, who has led two different political parties to outright first place in two successive European elections, and also took UKIP to third place in the popular vote in the 2015 general election.

But whether second place in the popular vote for Reform UK would make the election more interesting or less interesting is difficult to say, because first-past-the-post ensures that the threshold for the party to win more than a tiny handful of seats is extremely high.  So in terms of seats, the election could simply be turned into an even more boring triumphal procession for Starmer.

And there's essentially no chance of Reform UK using second place in the polls (if they get there) as a springboard for greater things.  We know from the pre-Brexit period that their natural ceiling of support is somewhere in the mid-20s - that was enough to get them into the outright lead in a handful of polls in 2019, but only because the division of support between other parties was so unusual at the time (incredibly, the Liberal Democrats were in second place in some of those polls).  25% in the polls right now would still leave them light-years behind Labour.  

An achievement they might notch up, though, is to become the indirect cause of Rishi Sunak's demise. Tory MPs who are worried about making themselves look ridiculous by installing a fourth Prime Minister within a single parliament (presumably it would be Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat or perhaps Kemi Badenoch) would start to think they have nothing left to lose if third place is staring them in the face.

There's only limited comfort for the SNP in their narrow lead in the Scottish subsample, because Labour have led other recent YouGov subsamples and thus an average of the last few would show the SNP trailing.

Friday, March 15, 2024

From 3rd May onwards, the Conservative government will owe its presence in office not to the will of the people but to the will of itself

Well, it's typical, isn't it.  Rather similar to the Azhar Ali incident, no sooner had I blogged about the chatter over a May election than Rishi Sunak had taken to the airwaves to rule it out.  I think technically he's only ruled out an election on the same day as the locals, so theoretically other dates in the spring remain possible.  But much more likely now is the autumn, which will mean an unusual juxtaposition between our own election and the US presidential election.

One thing that shouldn't go without note is that when the current parliament and government were elected in December 2019, the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was still in force, and 2nd May 2024 was thus fixed in law as the date of the following general election.  Voters were therefore choosing who they wanted to govern them until that date, but were expressing no view at all about what should happen thereafter.  It was well after the election that parliament voted to give the Prime Minister the power to extend his own term of office by up to eight months, and for the first time we now know for sure that he intends to take advantage of that power.  Which means that from 3rd May onwards, the government will owe its presence in office not to the will of the people but to the will of itself.

In peacetime, that is uncharted territory.  This is the sort of thing you'd expect to happen in Venezuela or Myanmar, not in an established Western European democracy.  Why it hasn't attracted more comment is beyond me.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Would an early general election improve or worsen the SNP's chances?

There was a bit of excitement yesterday about the possibility of a general election in May.  I said on Twitter that I couldn't think of any logical reason why Sunak would go early, rather than wait until the autumn in the hope that something might turn up.  OK, there's an outside chance of a Tory leadership challenge, and an early election would cut off that possibility - but an early election would also end Sunak's leadership anyway, thus defeating the whole purpose.  

Suzanne Blackley responded with a contrary view: she said Sunak would struggle to hold onto power until October and might be contemplating an early election as a way of resigning as Tory leader on his own terms.  Another Twitter user suggested the rationale might be to take advantage of the Tories' local government base by holding the general election on the same day as the English local elections, and thus get more boots on the ground.

I still think it's unlikely, but even if it's a 20% chance it's worth considering what the implications would be.  If yesterday's Redfield & Wilton poll is correct, it's not just the Tories who need something to turn up - the SNP do too, because they're currently heading for defeat, at least in terms of seats.  Not a crushing defeat, but a defeat just the same.  So from that perspective they might be better off with a few more months to see if they can devise a way of turning things around (hint: find a more popular leadership team and revert to a more radical independence strategy).

On the other hand, the earlier the election is, the more likely it is that Gaza will still be at the forefront of voters' minds.  For the vast majority of people that won't affect how they vote, but I suspect there's a subset of idealistic, mostly young voters out there who would struggle to vote Labour if Gaza was heavily in their thoughts.  A useful comparison might be with the 2003 Holyrood election, which took place only a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq.  The circumstances didn't stop Labour retaining their status as the largest single party, but they suffered a net loss of several seats, and some of that could be directly attributed to the war - most notably the defeat to Mike Pringle of the Liberal Democrats in Edinburgh South, a constituency with a large student population.

A similar phenomenon in a May election this year would be most likely to favour the SNP, and possibly the Greens - although because the Greens can't win seats, a Green surge would be much less harmful to Labour's chances of beating the SNP.

*  *  *

The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway.  Please click HERE if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.

Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account.  In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu.  My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

More despair for Starmer as Labour loses its outright lead in Scotland, and support for independence remains high at 48% - but Humza Yousaf's worst personal numbers yet suggest the SNP must sort out its leadership problem *before* the general election

The monthly Redfield & Wilton poll is out, and in a continuation of the familiar pattern, support for independence is impressively high but just can't seem to break into the outright lead.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Redfield & Wilton)

Yes 48% (-)
No 52% (-)

Before Don't Knows are stripped out, the No lead has actually dipped slightly from four points to three.

On Westminster voting intentions, Redfield & Wilton have been oscillating recently between small Labour leads and level-pegging, and we're back once again to the latter today.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 34% (+1)
Labour 34% (-)
Conservatives 16% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-2)
Reform UK 4% (-)
Greens 4% (+2)
Alba 1% (-)

Seats projection (with changes from 2019 general election): Labour 27 (+26), SNP 20 (-28), Conservatives 6 (-), Liberal Democrats 4 (-)

As you can see from the seats projection, level-pegging just isn't quite good enough for the SNP, because when the two largest parties are closely matched, first-past-the-post starts working firmly in Labour's favour.

But what will concern the SNP more than the seats projection (or at least ought to) is Humza Yousaf's personal numbers, because headline voting intentions are often less predictive of election results than leadership ratings.  Last month's Redfield & Wilton poll showed Yousaf slumping to a new all-time low net rating of -17.  He essentially hasn't recovered from that at all this month, bouncing back only to -16.  

But it gets worse.  Redfield & Wilton also regularly ask alternative leadership questions, pitting Yousaf in separate head-to-heads with Anas Sarwar and Douglas Ross respectively.  Until last month, Yousaf had always come out on top on those questions, perhaps suggesting an underlying respect for his basic competence that the net ratings don't pick up.  But last month, Anas Sarwar drew level with him for the first time, and this month Sarwar has overtaken him for the first time.

At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better First Minister of Scotland?

Anas Sarwar 32% (-1)
Humza Yousaf 31% (-2) 

Arguably even more dismal is the head-to head with Ross.  Here Yousaf clings on to a six-point lead, but that is staggeringly low in the context of the current Tory unpopularity, and also in the context of Ross being widely regarded as a joke leader.

At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better First Minister of Scotland?

Humza Yousaf 36% (-3) 
Douglas Ross 30% (+2) 

We all know Yousaf is only where he is for factional reasons, ie. the ruling Sturgeon faction identified him as their least worst candidate available and pulled out all the stops to get him installed as leader.  But there comes a point where the electoral crisis is great enough that factional interest has to give way to party interest.  There is simply no point in retaining factional control of a party that cannot win at the ballot box.  There are no guarantees, but if Yousaf is replaced by a more popular leader (probably Kate Forbes) before the general election, the likelihood is that the SNP vote will recover a bit, and that might make the difference between defeat and victory.  And even if Yousaf stays in harness, bringing an end to factional rule by appointing a unity Cabinet with Forbes in a senior position could have some positive effect.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 35% (-)
Labour 31% (-2)
Conservatives 18% (-)
Liberal Democrats 5% (-3)
Reform UK 4% (+1)
Alba 3% (+2)
Greens 3% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

Labour 29% (-)
SNP 28% (+1)
Conservatives 16% (-)
Greens 9% (-)
Liberal Democrats 9% (-)
Reform UK 5% (-)
Alba 3% (-)

Seats projection (with changes from 2021 election): SNP 42 (-22), Labour 41 (+19), Conservatives 21 (-10), Liberal Democrats 12 (+8), Greens 10 (+2), Reform UK 3 (+3)

The Holyrood voting intention changes are for the most part statistically insignificant, although because they're in the SNP's favour, they're still enough to push the SNP back into a slight lead in the seats projection - albeit with fewer seats than Alex Salmond had when the SNP first took power with a precarious one-seat advantage in 2007.  In spite of what has been said in some quarters, I'm not sure it's impossible that the SNP could retain minority power on numbers like these.  Labour and the Liberal Democrats would be well short of a majority between them, and once you add external support from the Tories into the mix, the arrangement becomes presentationally very messy.

Alba will be moderately heartened by these numbers - they're still not projected to win any seats, but they're only two points behind Reform UK, who are projected to win three seats.  So that shows you what's possible with a modest increase of support.

*  *  *

The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway.  Please click HERE if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.

Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account.  In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu.  My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

No, Professor Robertson, young people do not support gender self-ID. They oppose it.

So the exciting news is that we've had another visitation from Professor John Robertson in the comments section.  I was trying to work out what the recurring theme of his comments is, and it suddenly struck me that a lot of his strictures have got a distinctly macho-man feel to them.  "Man up", "grow a pair", "surely you've had harder knocks than that, son".  It's reminiscent of a craggy-faced PE teacher in the 1950s going purple with rage because one of his eight-year-old pupils has a feminine side, spends "too much time with girls", and refuses to take up boxing.

Which is gloriously ironic, of course, because Professor Robertson is in fact the fairy godfather of the snowflake brigade who demand to be "kept safe" from opinions that offend them.  He doubtless earnestly believed that the unlawful cancellation of Joanna Cherry's appearance at the Edinburgh Festival was a "safety at work" issue, ie. the staff would have been so upset by hearing her gender critical views that they would have suffered the equivalent of a serious industrial injury.

Apparently oblivious to the contradiction, about five seconds after telling me last night to be more robust and manly he reverted to telling me to shut up about my beastly opinions because some vulnerable soul might hear them.

"Wow! You really think that? You've gone positively Zionist there son.

However, I must be clear, it was never my intention to sabotage your funding and I don't think I suggested that people should not fund you. I stand ready to be corrected and if I did, I apologise and withdraw the statement.

I am genuinely disappointed in the way Alba has developed and as researcher and teacher with 40 years experience in schools, colleges and universities, I know that the gender reforms are supported by the young who have grown up with trans individuals and by professionals who understand the risks. That SGP and WOS have campaigned against these reforms makes me justifiably very angry."

So that's basically the "not up for debate" entitlement complex in a nutshell. "It makes me very very VERY cross that you haven't abandoned your opinion after I and other unspecified authority figures informed you that you were wrong.  What do you think this is - some kind of liberal democracy?"  

If Robertson spent just a bit less time wallowing in his "justified anger", he might be able to, y'know, actually argue his own case calmly and rationally, but I suspect he's forgotten how to do that by now.  Not much call for debating skills when you've got "safe spaces" to hide in.

I must say that when Robertson describes Scot Goes Pop, it sounds like a blog I don't even recognise.  In reality I've spent a miniscule fraction of the time discussing the trans issue that Wings has, and I've also gone out of my way at times to express my bewilderment at the sheer number of consecutive trans-related posts that Wings has managed to publish.  Stuart Campbell is, if I may say so, almost as obsessed with the bloody topic as Robertson himself.

Is it even true that I've "campaigned" against the introduction of gender self-ID?  I expressed my own view that it was a terrible piece of legislation that would cause immense harm to people's lives, although unlike Stuart Campbell I also made clear that it would be outrageous for the UK Government to veto the law.  Other than that, the only act I took was to commission an opinion poll on the subject, which sought to use neutral, clear and balanced questions to find out what people really thought.  Most of the polls prior to that had been of dubious value due to their use of either leading questions or ideologically-loaded language.  I suspect the poll is what Robertson is really getting at when he refers to my "campaigning" - to a "no debate" zealot, neutrality and balance will look like an all-out attack.

But it's precisely because I commissioned the poll that I know Robertson's assertion that young people support self-ID has no basis in fact.  I had to trawl through my email account to re-find the data tables, and while it's true that opposition to self-ID is significantly lower among young people than among older people, there's nevertheless a clear plurality against self-ID among the young.  Only 34% of 16-34 year olds think that anyone should be able to change their legal sex or gender by simply making a solemn declaration that they are living in their new gender.  A total of  47% of 16-34 year olds think either that no-one should be able to change their legal gender, or that the threshold should be higher than self-ID - either a medical diagnosis or surgery should be required.

Furthermore, by a narrow margin of 37% to 36%, young people say that those who have changed their legal gender from male to female should not be able to access female-only spaces on exactly the same basis as other women.  And by a whopping margin of 46% to 28%, young people think women's sport should be reserved for biological females and should exclude anyone born as a male.

(The above figures are all taken from a Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll conducted 20th-26th October 2021.)

It's a logical fallacy to suggest that because young people hold a particular view, they must be right and the older generations have a duty to fall in behind them.  If that was the case, only under-35s would have the vote.  But if Robertson really believes that's how it should work, the conclusion is inescapable: he must renounce his views immediately and become a TERF.  And we shall justifiably be very, VERY angry with him if he doesn't. 

Listen to the kids, John.  They've suffered enough.  *Listen* to them.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Like it or not, independence is unlikely to be won without leading involvement from the "elephant"

As long-term readers of this blog may recall, I was an elected member of the Alba Party's NEC between September 2021 and October 2022.  For most of that year-and-a-bit, I was pretty happy with the party's general direction of travel, both in policy and strategic terms.  However a watershed moment of sorts arrived in the summer of 2022 when Nicola Sturgeon finally announced her strategy for winning independence, which involved asking the Supreme Court to rule if the Scottish Parliament had the power to unilaterally call an independence referendum, and then moving on to using the Westminster general election as a de facto referendum if the Supreme Court ruled the wrong way.

That plan was a lot more radical than I expected, because prior to that Ms Sturgeon had always rubbished the idea of any non-referendum route.  Now, the details of the plan were absolutely not the ones I would have chosen if I had been in charge.  I would have preferred to see the Scottish Parliament go ahead and legislate for a referendum and put the onus on the UK Government to launch a legal challenge if they wished.  I would have preferred to see Ms Sturgeon engineer an early Holyrood election to use as a de facto referendum rather than taking a gamble on the 'away fixture' of a Westminster general election.  But as I said on this blog at the time, we had to be realistic and accept the fact that the Scottish people had selected Ms Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP leadership to be the decision-makers, and therefore they were the ones who were always going to choose the details of any plan, and not anyone else.  What mattered is whether the thrust of the plan was taking us in broadly the correct direction, and if it was, we needed to throw our weight behind it.

I believed - and still believe - that Alba's response should have taken that realistic approach.  By all means spell out where you think the details of the plan are wrong, but make very clear that you're not going to let those quibbles get in the way of fully supporting the central element, namely the use of an election to finally allow the Scottish people to make a decision on independence, and undertaking to do whatever you can to secure a successful outcome.  And, for good measure, claim the announcement of the plan as an astounding triumph for Alba's campaigning to pressurise Ms Sturgeon into reversing course and accepting the wisdom of a de facto referendum.

What Alba actually did was pretty much the complete opposite of that.  From the word go, Ms Sturgeon's announcement was treated as an obvious con-trick, and instead of discussing how we could make the de facto referendum work, all the chatter seemed to be about how we could cause as much damage to the SNP as possible at the general election.  Talk of standing against the SNP across the board in every constituency actually increased rather than decreased, even though a single, unified slate of pro-indy candidates is plainly an absolute must in any de facto referendum fought under first-past-the-post.  And Alba seemed to double down on its determination to help bring about Ms Sturgeon's resignation as First Minister, which history now shows made no sense at all.  When Ms Sturgeon departed, the de facto plan went with her.  Whereas by keeping her in harness, we could have given the SNP no easy way off the hook, and perhaps forced them to reluctantly deliver the goods just for once.

I suspect we came across as angry that Ms Sturgeon had "spoiled" things for us by giving us more or less what we had been demanding all along.  It must have looked like nothing she announced would ever have been good enough for us, we would just have reflexively denounced it anyway.  In a nutshell, we must have looked disingenuous and like bad faith actors.  So not only was the approach unhelpful for the independence cause, it was bad for Alba's own future electoral prospects.

I disagreed with Alba's response and I spoke out about it at some length.  From a personal point of view, the timing couldn't have been much worse, because I suspect what I said may have cost me a handful of crucial votes at the Alba conference in October 2022 and led to me being narrowly voted off the NEC.  But after all these years as a blogger, I just wouldn't know how to stifle an opinion on an important subject or say something I don't believe to be true.

That's why Professor Robertson's comments the other day about this blog having become my "Alba career blog" were so offensive and ludicrously off-beam.  Yes, I stand in Alba internal elections, and I have the same competitive instinct as anyone else and always want to be successful.  But the reality is that if I only cared about that, or even if that was what I mostly cared about, the content of this blog would often have been the complete opposite of what I actually wrote.  A great many Alba conference-goers took the very simple view that the one and only objective was to bring the SNP down and have Alba become the main independence party in the SNP's place. They didn't want to hear an unpalatable message from me about how the world is more complicated and messy than that, and that actually the most effective and quickest method of winning independence may be to help make an SNP plan work, even if that means lots of SNP MPs we may not be crazy about on a personal level being re-elected.  That was the message I delivered just the same, and I suspect I paid the price for it.

After I was voted off the NEC, it seemed to me that things got even worse for a few months.  The antagonism towards the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon just seemed to be off the scale, culminating in a tweet along the lines of "a vote for the SNP is a vote for Jimmy Savile".  That genuinely shocked me.  Senior Alba figures started to give the impression of "celebrating" bad polls for independence, on the basis that it made the SNP look bad, and anything that was bad for the SNP must be good for Alba - thus losing sight of the cardinal rule (which in fairness Alba have since seemed to relearn) that a pro-independence party should only ever be seen to be talking up independence support in the polls, not talking it down.

Once again I spoke out loudly about where I thought my own party was going wrong, and that led just over a year ago to The National doing a double-page spread without my prior knowledge about how I as an "Alba blogger" had been heavily critical of the party's direction and "didn't know what the hell was going on anymore".  This was all deeply uncomfortable. A number of people tried to tell me, effectively, that I wasn't "real Alba" - that the only true Alba position was to want to totally destroy the SNP, no matter how long that took, and that anyone who didn't susbscribe to that view could only ever be marginal in the Alba party.

So I can't help but note the irony that a year later here I am, still at the heart of the Alba party - not as an NEC member but as an elected member of other committees - while a considerable number of the "destroy the SNP and replace it with Alba" diehards have suddenly walked out.  I would never have seen this chain of events coming in a million years, and clearly there must have been a lot going on behind the scenes to lead those people to become so disillusioned so quickly.  They've moved on swiftly to the new "Independents 4 Independence" project, but I think yet another reality check is in order here.  While it's merely an incredibly hard task for Alba to replace the SNP, even in the long term, it's utterly impossible for independent candidates to replace the SNP, so in a strange way by going down this road they've given up on their whole goal - although they may not realise that yet.

By their very nature, independent MPs are ephemeral and leave no party organisational structure behind them when they depart office.  All that happens is that the established parties then come back and fill the gap.  But the other fundamental truth about independent candidates is that they very rarely get elected in the first place.  I think we all know that Eva Comrie is a genuine one-off, and although the odds are heavily against her, it may just about be possible for her to build up a head of steam by campaigning on the Grangemouth issue and through sheer force of personality.  But if what Alf Baird was proposing the other day comes to pass, and if pro-indy independents stand in every Scottish constituency, the likelihood is that the vast majority of them will score a very low vote.  It will be an almighty struggle to even get the media to count those votes as votes for independence - the likelihood is they'll just tot up SNP + Green + Alba and won't even look at the independents.  

So how this is going to help the Yes cause is far from clear.  I worry that people will look back in a few years and only then will they realise the extent to which they lost all perspective.  At this moment of danger for the independence cause, we need to go into the general election as united as possible - not in the sense of liking each other or agreeing with each other about everything, but in the sense of being a cohesive voting bloc in a first-past-the-post election.  Instead most people seem to be perversely focussed on making the independence vote as fragmented as possible - and that of course includes the SNP leadership themselves, with their idiotic decision to expel Angus MacNeil and put up a candidate against him.

The SNP are not, as Somerset's leading Tory blogger put it yesterday, a "dead elephant blocking the road to independence".  They in fact still represent the considerable bulk of the independence movement and it's therefore hard to foresee any circumstances in which independence can be won without the SNP playing a leading role.  Any hard-headed Alba strategy for winning independence should thus be about using electoral success to exert pressure on the SNP to belatedly start playing that leading role.  The only exception to that, the only route to independence without the SNP, might be if Humza Yousaf somehow clings on as leader after a crushing defeat, and then 10-15 SNP MSPs decide their party cannot be won back and strike out on their own.  But right at this moment that looks like a long shot.

*  *  *

The 2024 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is now underway.  Please click HERE if you'd like to help keep this blog going strong throughout this crucial general election year.

Alternatively donations can be made direct to my Paypal account.  In many ways this is preferable because the funds are usually transferred instantly, and fees can be eliminated altogether depending on which option you select from the menu.  My Paypal email address is:

jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk