For lack of anything more interesting to write about, we thought we might do a monthly rundown of polling in the leadup to next year’s Holyrood election, with seat projections from a neutral source, in the shape of the newish Devolved Elections website.
And very quickly, things got a bit weird.
We’ve written a number of extremely, painstakingly detailed articles in the last few months explaining why list votes for the SNP at next year’s election will be wasted, and will serve only to elect Unionist (and in particular Reform) MSPs.
Unfortunately, some people still don’t get it.
And that’s understandable, because super-detailed articles are long and people have terribly short attention spans nowadays, especially if there are large tranches of fiddly arithmetic involved. So let’s go the opposite way.
There’s been a very unfortunate typo here.
“Scotland’s independence” should read “SNP’s gravy bus”.
We’ve just taken delivery of some REALLY interesting polling results, readers, but it’s going to take a while to fully analyse and write them up, so in the meantime let’s look at some slightly less interesting ones which came from the same poll – the Norstat one commissioned by the Sunday Times and published today, which we hitched a lift on.
The headline figures show an eight-point Yes lead, which is nice, although it’s also entirely abstract since the SNP has no current policy for translating independence support into actual independence (or even another referendum about it).
All the same, it seemed a good time to assess the wider picture.
Hi! I noticed, with very considerable amusement, your complaint last night that I hadn’t made a “substantive reply” to the [EDIT] EIGHT posts (totalling nearly 11,000 words) of semi-coherent ranting about me that you’ve made on your site in the last eight days.
(I’ll be absolutely honest, I’ve only skimmed the last few.)
We both know the reason that’s so tear-streamingly comical, of course.
Because you certainly are a bit light-headed if you’re buying this horse-plop.
We don’t normally spend much time analysing opinion polls more than a year out from an election because it’s a complete chump’s game – too much can happen. But this one’s so absolutely batshit mad that we couldn’t resist a bit of a probe.
The wild thing about this poll isn’t the headline that six months after winning a massive landslide majority, Keir Starmer now trails Nigel Farage – leader of a party with five MPs to Starmer’s 411 – as the electorate’s choice for best Prime Minister.
It’s the little grey numbers sitting quietly at the bottom.
Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.
The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.
In slightly over a month from now, Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as the longest-serving First Minister of Scotland. It seemed a reasonable time to take stock.
It’s very nearly six years since the Sunday Herald headline above from 1 May 2016. (Remember the Sunday Herald, readers? It feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?)
April/early May is very often the period leading up to an election, which is when the SNP traditionally ramp up the carrot-dangling about independence to secure the votes of the faithful for yet another “cast-iron mandate”, so it’s not a bad barometer. Let’s see how far we’ve come.
We’d actually planned to leave Chris Cairns’ fabulous cartoon at the top of the front page all day today, but this post is important so we’re putting it in here again (no, Chris, you don’t get paid twice) so we can say this.
Because no matter how much you hate the Unionist parties or certain of their individual MSPs, if you want Alba MSPs elected today there are several seats where you really, really can’t afford to vote SNP on the constituency ballot.
Any time you’re not sure whether something that happens in Scottish politics is good or bad for the cause of independence, here’s a top tip for you: see how the enemies of independence feel about it.
“Running scared” would seem to be a fair, if understated, summary.
We enjoyed doing this site a lot more when it was the dishonesty of Unionists and the Unionist media, not the SNP, that represented the main threat to independence. So let’s make like it’s the old days, just this once.
Because today has seen the Scottish press falling over itself once again to trumpet the latest joke poll from notorious idiots Scotland In Union as if it was at all meaningful:
And of course it’s purest garbage.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
