SCOT goes POP!

The question that Anas Sarwar now needs to answer

2026-04-15T12:44:00.002+01:00

The Scottish Labour party and its allies, including Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record and Professor James Mitchell (who is increasingly dropping the pretence of being anything other than a Labour propagandist), have today been doubling down on the idea - which I don't think anyone in their heart of hearts truly believes - that Malcolm Offord's claim that Anas Sarwar approached him about a post-election deal is an outright lie. That is very hard to square with an article in the Scotsman from only two weeks ago in which a Labour source was saying that Sarwar wanted to form a government from second place with the help of Reform MSPs.

If Sarwar wants his denial to have any credibility, particularly his pious suggestion that it is somehow unimaginable that a decent man like himself would have anything to do with a monster like Offord, it will surely now be necessary for him to explicitly rule out forming a minority government with the votes of Reform MSPs. It's no longer good enough for him to say, as he and others have done in the past, that he cannot control how Reform MSPs vote in the election for First Minister, and that it is fine for him to simply accept the result of that vote. He must definitively rule out serving as First Minister on that basis, because irrespective of whether there is a Labour-Reform deal written down on paper, a Labour minority government arithmetically dependent on Reform votes to sustain itself will be a Labour government beholden to the politics of Reform.

The distinction between the Labour spin machine and the Daily Record seems to have broken down again. Funny how that always seems to happen at this stage of the electoral cycle. https://t.co/e6cS1IVOl1
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

Professor Mitchell is getting beyond parody. What matters is whether Offord's claim is *true*. It can be as "appalling" or "illogical" as you like, but if it's "true*, the issue here is Sarwar, not the SNP or anyone else. https://t.co/M7pV0nUneQ
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

Reading between the lines here, what Professor Mitchell is saying is that it was totally fine for Sarwar to informally approach a far-right party for a deal, and the only problem is that others broke the "rules" by letting the public in on his secret. Just not cricket, old boy! https://t.co/apjOS2hhQX
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

In an analogue age Anas Sarwar might have got away with that - but this is a digital age, and he didn't

2026-04-15T00:26:00.003+01:00

I forgot all about the Channel 4 leaders' debate, so I didn't watch it live, but obviously I soon heard of Offord's revelation about Anas Sarwar approaching him about a post-election deal to keep out the SNP, so I've just watched it back online. What absolutely stunned me when I reached the crucial moment was that Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who in other ways was a reasonably good moderator, seemed completely oblivious to the significance of what had just happened. I would have expected him to laser straight in and ask for as much clarification and detail of the Sarwar-Offord conversation as possible, and then to demand that Sarwar either confirm or deny those details. Instead he allowed the debate to instantly move on.

You could see John Swinney patiently biding his time for several minutes and waiting for his turn to speak so he could bring the subject back up, but when Sarwar then did the Sarwar thing of dealing with a moment of maximum danger by drowning it out with a wall of noise, Guru-Murthy passively allowed him to do that and then hurriedly wrapped the segment up before Swinney had a chance to say anything more. It was absolutely bizarre. In other circumstances we might have put it down to a London-based presenter not understanding the nuances of Scottish political debate, but I wouldn't have thought any journalist anywhere in the UK should have any difficulty understanding why proposing a deal with Reform is taboo. I suspect he'll be kicking himself now.

I was reminded tonight of why I was so convinced that Scottish Labour had taken leave of its senses when it first chose Anas Sarwar as its leader, in spite of him being the media's darling. Prior to then I had always regarded him as an utterly atrocious politician, and the main reason for that was my recollection of his performance in the televised indyref debates, including in particular a head-to-head on STV with Nicola Sturgeon in which he simply refused to let her speak. Every time she opened her mouth, he shouted over her with a stream of utter drivel about anything and everything, including even the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo. I suppose in some ways that's quite an effective defensive tactic, because if you literally prevent the audience at home from hearing anything your opponent says, it stops any attack lines against you from hitting home. But the problem is that you can't do that without the audience concluding you're an ill-mannered buffoon. He was straight back to that problem tonight. I'm sure he thought it was a wizard idea to try to prevent Swinney taking advantage of Offord's revelation by screaming "HOW DARE YOU JOHN THIS MAN WANTS TO DEPORT MY CHILDREN THIS IS A MORAL ISSUE HOW DARE YOU JOHN DON'T YOU DARE JOHN", but most viewers will just have been thinking: well, if this is a moral issue, and if Offord wants to deport people's children, why on earth did you ask him to do a deal with you? Doesn't that, in fact, make you rather immoral and cynical and opportunistic and unprincipled?

In another age the Sarwar noise-fest and Guru-Murthy's lapse might have meant that Offord's comment would have got lost, but instead none of that mattered because the clip was soon all over social media and is now dominating the headlines. One thing is for sure: any slim chance of Sarwar becoming First Minister by a back door route has just become even slimmer, because if any chance emerges of him getting into Bute House with the votes of Reform MSPs, his antics tonight will be played back on a loop and he'll lose all credibility.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

The Greens have now been crowned the undisputed Olympic champions of misleading bar charts on election leaflets - they're bizarrely claiming that SNP-held Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between themselves and Labour, and their source for this improbable claim is (drumroll, please) themselves. So brazen it deserves a reward biscuit!

2026-04-14T12:16:00.002+01:00

A few weeks ago, the Green co-leader Ross Greer posted a Labour leaflet from Strathkelvin & Bearsden, mocking it for containing a particularly extreme example of a misleading Lib Dem-style bar chart. Ironically, its sole purpose was to try to convince local voters that the Lib Dems couldn't win the constituency. It showed the SNP on "three", Labour on "two", and others on "one". The explanation of these mysteriously small numbers was that they represented the amount of times each party had won Strathkelvin & Bearsden since devolution began in 1999. But as Greer pointed out, Labour's two victories were in 1999 and 2007, and so were pretty much irrelevant to the question of who the main challengers to the SNP are in the present-day.

It has to be said, though, that the Greens themselves have managed to top Labour's effort with an even more bonkers leaflet in Edinburgh Central. It not only claims that "Lorna Slater is winning Edinburgh Central" but provides a bar chart which purports to show that "it's between the Scottish Greens and Labour in Edinburgh Central". (As fluent speakers of Barchartese will instantly know, those words translate as "it's actually a three-cornered fight between the SNP, Labour and the Greens, but we'd rather you didn't know that because it's mainly the SNP we need to take votes from".) The bar chart specifically claims that the Greens are on 28%, Labour are on 22% and the SNP are in only third on 21%. These numbers are, to put it mildly, somewhat improbable because:

* The SNP won Edinburgh Central five years ago, with the Tories in second place, Labour third, and the Greens a distant fourth.

* Although the boundaries of the constituency have changed, the notional results suggest the SNP would still have won in 2021, with Labour moving into second, the Tories in third and the Greens remaining in a distant fourth.

* Even making a common sense adjustment for the fact that there was no Green candidate in the new part of the constituency in 2021, the Greens would still have been in fourth place.

* Although the Greens are undoubtedly in a stronger position now than they were in 2021, no MRP projection of the campaign so far supports their claim that Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between themselves and Labour. YouGov have the constituency as a virtual three-way dead heat, with the SNP and Greens both on 25% and Labour on 23%, while Find Out Now have the SNP clearly ahead on 28%, the Greens in second place on 23% and Labour not that far behind on 21%.

So what on earth could the source be for this wildly improbable notion that Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between Labour and the Greens? If you check the small print on the Green leaflet, you'll find out. It states: "source: ballotbox.scot". That means the Ballot Box Scotland website. You know, the same Ballot Box Scotland website that is run solely by a young gentleman by the name of Allan Faulds, who is a former serial Scottish Green party candidate in local elections and European Parliament elections. He's since nominally "left" the party, although he's made little secret of the fact that he did that solely for appearance's sake, ie. in the hope that people would stop laughing quite so hard whenever he angrily protests that his "project" is "non-partisan". He's also (perhaps surprisingly) made no secret of the truly heroic lengths he's gone to in order to flatter the Greens in the constituency projections on his site - he states in black and white that he factors in the 2021 list vote for projecting the Green constituency vote in 2026, but that he does not do this for any other party. To put in some perspective just how absurd that is, if you did use the 2021 list vote as a baseline for other parties, you'd be pretty close to projecting the SNP as being ahead in the Lib Dem fortresses of Shetland and Edinburgh North Western, which would plainly be barmy.

It's even worse than that, though, because notional figures show the Greens were a long way behind the SNP even on the list in Edinburgh Central in 2021 - and although they were in second place, both Labour and the Tories were only fractionally behind them. Any reasonable person looking at the bar chart on the Green leaflet would assume it's based on some kind of real measure of public opinion - either a real election from the past, or a real constituency-level opinion poll from the present. But it's neither. It's no more than a piece of candy-floss from Allan Faulds' own imagination, which piles wild assumption upon wild assumption in order to justify using the wrong baseline figures and then 'reimagining' them as he sees fit.

In a nutshell, then, the Greens' source for the baseless claim that Edinburgh Central is a two-way fight between themselves and Labour is a baseless claim made by a Green party candidate - ie. their source is themselves. This election is increasingly moving into Alice Through The Looking Glass territory, because the only reason I even saw the leaflet was because it was posted by the Brit Nat propagandist Sam Taylor of These Islands fame. He's trying to boost the Green campaign in Edinburgh Central, even though he clearly has more in common with the more centrist politics of the SNP candidate Angus Robertson than he does with Lorna Slater. Why is he doing that? Because it's the SNP he sees as the threat to his beloved Union, and he thinks losing Robertson would leave the SNP weakened.

Might just be worth bearing that in mind.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill. I'm on a roll with these constituencies that I can claim a connection to, because I'm a graduate of Glasgow University, which is in the Kelvin & Maryhill seat.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

REVEALED: The hard science that makes Both Votes SNP such an effective strategy - why the "Make Mine A Double" voting craze is mathematically sound as well as fashionable and trendy

2026-04-12T18:24:00.004+01:00

OK, the title of this blogpost is mainly there to wind up Stew, but there is actually a very serious point behind it, and it's one that may make you think about the importance of voting SNP on the list ballot in a wholly new way. Patrick English, who seems to have been the key figure behind YouGov's new MRP poll for the Holyrood election, posted a thread on Twitter about the poll with some observations that I found genuinely startling -

"Scotland is never an easy place in which to project elections, but we've given it a go.

Based on the data, our central expectation is that the SNP would win an outright majority if the election were happening right now

They do so in our model by hoovering up all but seven of Holyrood's 73 constituencies, plus a regional list seat in the Highland and Islands.

Such is the extent of the SNP constituency sweep, our central projection has Labour winning zero constituencies for the first time ever.

Each of Labour's 15 seats come from the lists.

Similarly, while we currently have Reform in second place, all their 20 projected wins are also list seats.

The Greens however we think have a good shot at winning their first ever Holyrood constituency (either Glasgow/Edinburgh).

Our model is, as it stands, pretty bullish on an SNP majority despite them only being two seats above the line (65).

The reason why is that even if the SNP start losing constituency seats, in many such scenarios they start winning extra regional list seats to compensate.

For example, let's imagine that Labour benefited from a big push of tactical Unionist support in Central and took three seats off the SNP there.

Unless the SNP also started dropping list votes, they'd win one regional seat to take them back up to 65!

Similarly, let's say the SNP lost Moray in the Highlands and Islands to Reform, who are currently second placed there.

The SNP would immediately then win a list seat in that region to compensate for that loss.

Another reason for model bullishness is the fragmentation of the pro-Union constituency vote behind the SNP, plus the boost they get from the Greens stepping aside in all but six seats.

Projected SNP majorities range from 7pts in Dumfriesshire to 27pts in Coatbridge and Chryston

These SNP cushions, plus the projected strong performance of the Greens, make it very difficult to see anything other than yet another SNP-led administration after May 7th *as things stand*.

As for securing official opposition status, it's a battle between Reform and Labour."

Remember that he's saying all of this about a state of play in which it's assumed that the SNP will be taking just 32% of the list vote nationally - way down on what they have received in all of the last three Holyrood elections. I wouldn't previously have thought that a 32% list vote could have much role to play in getting the SNP over the line for a majority in a situation where they fall a little short of 65 constituency seats, but this guy has run all of the simulations and he's clearly saying that it very well could. Even on the central projection from the poll, the SNP would take one list seat in the Highlands & Islands, but it sounds very much like a list vote for the SNP will play a crucial back-up role in other regions by compensating the SNP if they fail to take as many constituency seats as they hope.

As 32% of the national list vote is a perfectly achievable target, this should really be enough to convince SNP supporters to back the party on both ballots. Clearly much of the commentary so far (including from the former YouGov president Peter Kellner in the bizarre article that was picked up by Lesley Riddoch recently) has severely underestimated the SNP's chances of taking seats on the list. Perhaps for independence supporters who don't identify strongly with any particular political party, there may still be a difficult choice to make between the SNP and the Greens on the list, because clearly the Greens are capable of winning list seats too, and may win more than the SNP do. But for anyone weighing up whether to vote for the SNP on the list, or for one of the wide array of pro-indy fringe parties like Atlas or ISP, there's strictly no contest - the SNP have a chance of taking seats on the list, and the fringe parties have no chance whatsoever. That decision is an absolute no-brainer.

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You can read my constituency profile of Glasgow Easterhouse & Springburn for The National HERE. That's another Glasgow constituency that I can claim a tenuous connection to, in the sense that I was born there (at Stobhill Hospital in Springburn).

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Even YouGov now say the Union Jack could soon be LOWERED as sensational MRP poll shows SNP on course for an overall majority

2026-04-10T22:55:00.019+01:00

MRP Seats projection (YouGov / Sky News / The Times, 23rd March-8th April 2026):

SNP 67

Reform UK 20

Labour 15

Greens 11

Liberal Democrats 9

Conservatives 7

Now, I've estimated the chances of the SNP winning a single-party overall majority as around 1 in 200, and I maintain that it's a long-shot because the voting system is specifically designed to produce hung parliaments. As we saw in 2021 it does that job very effectively indeed. The SNP had a record-breaking 48% of the constituency vote but still fell one seat short of a majority. However, I know there are many disciples of the YouGov MRP method out there, and I don't think it's realistic to pay no heed to YouGov of all firms saying, as they are tonight, that in 89% of simulations the SNP win a majority. Even the lower bound of the estimate has the SNP on 63 seats, which would be only two short of a majority.

Crucially this is not happening simply because of a freakish split in the unionist vote - the SNP's own constituency vote share has recovered to a very healthy 41%, which if true is a great tribute to the leadership of John Swinney.

Another thing I've said repeatedly is that there is no route to an overall majority that involves list seats, and technically this poll even casts doubt on that, because the SNP are projected to take a list seat - but it would be just the one, as Magnus Magnusson used to say. The majority would essentially be won with 66 constituency seats, meaning the SNP would miss out on only seven constituencies:

Shetland Islands

Orkney Islands

Caithness, Sutherland & Ross

Fife North East

Edinburgh North Western

Edinburgh Central

Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire

Even among those seven, there are some real possibilities for the SNP if the detailed YouGov numbers are to be believed. They're just three points behind the Tories in Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire, where a big Reform vote could split Tory support just enough to give the SNP an opening. Edinburgh Central is virtually a three-way dead heat, with the SNP and Greens both projected to be on 25%, and Labour just behind on 23%. So in a best-case scenario the SNP may well still hold the seat, and in a worst-case scenario this could be a repeat of 2016 when the Greens handed the seat on a silver platter to a unionist party by putting up a candidate against the SNP - although in this instance the beneficiary would be Labour rather than the Tories.

In spite of the perception that Caithness, Sutherland & Ross may be a lost cause, the SNP are projected to be only four points behind the Lib Dems there. So the only four seats where the SNP would be out of the running completely are the true Lib Dem fortresses of Fife North East, Edinburgh North Western, Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands.

On the other hand, among the 66 constituencies the SNP are projected to win, there are of course some close ones, and none more so than the increasingly weird seat of Dumbarton, which the SNP should have gained from Labour in both of the last two Holyrood elections, but didn't because Tory supporters in Helensburgh tactically switched en masse to Labour. The projection has the SNP winning by a mere two points this time, so to put it mildly that one can't be taken for granted.

In both Aberdeenshire West and Edinburgh Southern I'd have thought the SNP should be regarded as underdogs, but YouGov have them winning both by margins of seven points and six points respectively. That's narrow enough that the results in both seats remain highly unpredictable.

As far as the three Tory "blue wall" rural seats in the south are concerned, YouGov have the SNP taking two, but both are still in the balance: in Galloway & West Dumfries the gap is nine points and in Dumfriesshire it's seven. The Tories are in second place in both, but with Reform playing spoilers in a very close third place.

Banffshire & Buchan Coast has been touted as possibly Reform's most promising seat, but YouGov don't have them even close there: the SNP are on 41%, Reform are on 23%, and the Tories have been pushed into a dreadful third place in territory they held at Westminster level until two years ago.

A couple of other seats the SNP have to worry about are the ultra-marginal East Lothian Coast & Lammermuirs, where they're projected to be just six points ahead of Labour, and also Strathkelvin & Bearsden. The latter really ought to be a reasonably safe seat, but YouGov have the Lib Dems just six points behind. I'm slightly sceptical about that, though - that's an area that traditionally votes completely differently in Holyrood and Westminster elections, and YouGov may be making the mistake of factoring in the Westminster baseline numbers too much. But who knows, maybe this will be the year that the Lib Dems finally break the usual pattern. A leaflet that Ross Greer posted on Twitter certainly gave the impression that Labour were concerned about the Lib Dems in Strathkelvin & Bearsden.

On a more positive note, there's no sign of the close SNP-Lib Dem race in Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch that was suggested by Find Out Now's MRP poll. YouGov have the SNP way ahead of the Lib Dems there by a margin of 46% to 24%.

Last but not least, I should just remind you that MRP projections have a much patchier record in Scotland than they do elsewhere in the UK. For more details, read the piece I wrote for The National a few days ago HERE.

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My latest Holyrood constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Central.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

The "Make Mine A Double" voting craze that is sweeping the nation: why all the most fashionable trendsetters - and Stew - agree it has to be BOTH votes SNP in May

2026-04-09T19:41:00.005+01:00

There's actually a serious point here, because Stew is far from the only right-wing commentator who has argued that a Green return to government would be an unmitigated catastrophe - we've heard the same message repeatedly from the Express and the Telegraph. But the problem they all have is that by far the most likely way of preventing an SNP-Green coalition is to vote SNP.

If the SNP win a majority or get very close to one, the likelihood is that they'll form a single-party government. The more inconclusive the result, the more likely it is that they'll have to cut a deal with the Greens. And this time the Green involvement in government will probably be much more extensive than it was under the Bute House Agreement - on the basis of current opinion polls, the Greens might have a claim to as many as one-quarter of the ministerial posts. Paradoxically, that's what people will be making more likely by voting Labour or Reform to try to harm the SNP.

By the looks of it, Angus Robertson and the other SNP constituency candidates who are in a battle with the Greens thought it was Christmas when the Green candidate Kate Nevens made her now-notorious comment about wanting to abolish prisons. Even I, who would like to see the justice system reoriented towards rehabilitation, think abolition is too extreme a policy because I don't see how it's viable not to lock up the most serious violent offenders. The big danger for the Greens, though, is not what people think about the policy in isolation - it's any sense that takes root that the Greens are a bit nuts, and that was pretty obviously what Angus Robertson was trying to cultivate.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

The crazy, topsy-turvy logic (and in some cases hypocrisy) of the "tactical voting on the list" advocates

2026-04-09T11:05:00.001+01:00

I'm beginning to think I'm going to have to mute certain accounts on Twitter to get through the rest of the Holyrood campaign with my sanity intact. Every single time I log in, I see retweet after retweet from the Atlas brigade of Tommy Sheridan basically lying through his teeth (or being misleading, to put it charitably) by claiming there was recently a Find Out Now poll predicting that Atlas will take 8% of the national list vote. That poll showed no such thing, and he damn well knows it, because he and his colleagues commissioned it themselves and chose the question. Indeed, there were Glasgow-specific results from the poll which were startlingly poor for Tommy. They suggest that his popularity in the city has dipped and make it overwhelmingly unlikely he can win a seat there on the basis of his personal vote, no matter what party he chooses to stand for.

But the worst part of the dishonesty is his claim that "SNP 1 & 2" (there are no numbers in this voting system, chaps!) is a "unionist voting strategy" and that all independence supporters should vote for him and the Atlas gang instead to stop Reform winning seats. Now the case for SNP supporters to vote Both Votes SNP is clear enough and I've set it out many times. The list vote is the more important vote because it is the only vote that directly determines the composition of parliament. If you think you are voting tactically by voting for your first-choice party on the constituency ballot and your second-choice party on the list, there is a very high risk of you kicking yourself afterwards, because if your first-choice party doesn't win in your constituency, literally the only thing you will have done is cast a vote for your second-choice party in a proportional representation election. That's the only vote that will count, which is a perverse outcome. By contrast, if you act in the way that the system was intended by voting for your first-choice party on the list ballot, your two votes will effectively operate in tandem with each other and ensure that your preference is counted towards seats. If your first-choice party doesn't win your constituency, that's not a problem because your list vote will still count and will help your party win list seats. But if that party does win your constituency and other neighbouring constituencies, even if that means it doesn't win any compensatory list seats, that's still OK because your preference has still counted towards the party winning a seat.

Now, some people just viscerally hate the fact that the two votes work in tandem in this way, and that you often effectively end up using one vote as a back-up in case something goes awry with the other. They feel that it shouldn't work like that and that if both votes don't actively count towards getting pro-independence MSPs elected, something has gone fundamentally wrong and it must be corrected. That's not a realistic attitude, but after decades of listening to this stuff, I know it's never going to go away. But what I also know is that if you truly believe that both votes have to count in all circumstances, and that if you truly believe the SNP cannot win any list seats in this election (definitely not true by the way) what you would do is look for a non-SNP pro-independence party that actually has a chance of winning list seats. The only such party in existence is the Green party.

And yet Tommy and the others tell you NOT to vote Green on the list, but instead to throw your vote away on a no-hoper fringe party that cannot possibly win any seats. By doing that they are guilty of *exactly* what they accuse SNP list voters of doing, ie. of following a 'unionist voting strategy' that can only help Reform win list seats. Why do they not tell people to vote Green, as their own logic points inexorably towards? I'm trying to imagine what answer they would give to that question, and all I can think of is that they would say "because the Greens don't know what a woman is". Hmmm. That doesn't sound much like "independence nothing less, independence nothing else". Quite the reverse, it sounds like you're massively prioritising an unrelated issue over independence. It's just sheer hypocrisy.

My own message is simple: tactical voting on the list is a mug's game because it carries too high a risk of backfiring. You should always vote for your first-choice party on the list, and yes, if your first-choice party is the SNP, you should vote SNP on the list. However, if you are reckless enough to go down the tactical voting route, for the love of God at least make sure you're voting for a pro-indy party that can actually win seats on the list. If you vote for a party on the list that is not your first choice, and which cannot win any seats because it is too small, and if by doing so you are helping unionist parties to win seats instead, and if you imagine all of this constitutes some sort of ingenious "strategic" vote...well, there is only one word for what you are doing and that word is stupidity.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Cathcart & Pollok (where Anas Sarwar is standing for Labour).

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Pro-independence parties on course to win an astonishing 62% of seats in the next Scottish Parliament, says sumptuous Ipsos poll

2026-04-08T12:55:00.013+01:00

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot (Ipsos, 26th-31st March 2026):

SNP 39% (+3)

Reform UK 15% (-1)

Labour 15% (-5)

Conservatives 11% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (-)

Greens 7% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 29% (+3)

Greens 16% (-)

Reform UK 16% (+2)

Labour 15% (-4)

Conservatives 13% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 9% (-1)

Seats projection:

SNP 63

Greens 17

Reform UK 15

Labour 14

Conservatives 12

Liberal Democrats 8

I'll update this post with full commentary when I have more time later this afternoon or this evening, but while I'm thinking of it, just one point - does anyone know whether STV are still commissioning these Ipsos polls? At some point a few months ago they stopped using the words "exclusive poll commissioned by STV", so I'm starting to wonder if Ipsos are now self-funding them, but are continuing an informal relationship with STV as a convenient way of promoting the results.

UPDATE: OK, the commentary follows from here! This poll basically contradicts the Norstat poll, because it shows the SNP getting closer to an overall majority rather than further away. It not only has the SNP gaining three points on both ballots, but also shows the Reform vote holding up on the constituency ballot and Labour slumping horrifically. The main reason that Norstat were suggesting the SNP's chances of a majority were slipping was because there appeared to be a big swing from Reform back to Labour - but Ipsos are showing the opposite. Theoretically that might be explained by the fact that Norstat's fieldwork dates were a bit more recent - but not by much. The Ipsos poll opened four days earlier than Norstat's on 26th March, and the two polls even overlapped by a couple of days later on. I think this is more a straightforward case of two different polling companies showing opposite trends for reasons that have yet to be determined.

The Greens clearly aren't really going to take 7% of the vote on the constituency ballot, because they're only standing in a handful of constituency seats, and I doubt if that's been taken into account in the seats projection. If the SNP take, say, just over half of that 7%, it might inch them a bit closer to a majority.

The 39% for the SNP on the constituency ballot equals their highest in any poll from any polling company since September 2023, when an Opinium poll commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute (!) had them on 42%. By contrast, Labour's 15% share appears to be their lowest in any poll from Ipsos or the predecessor firm Ipsos-Mori since the 2021 Holyrood election.

One small bit of bad news is that this is a rare example in recent times of an Ipsos poll not showing a lead for Yes on the independence question - instead it's a 50/50 split. However, the last couple of polls from the firm have had Yes on 51% or 52%, so normal sampling variation made it almost inevitable there would eventually be a poll showing either a small No lead or a dead heat.

As usual, John Swinney's net personal rating (-8) is superior to that of his main rivals, with Anas Sarwar on -29 and Reform's Malcolm Offord on an embarrassing -41. That should exclude the main danger of any major turnaround in the parties' fortunes over the remaining month of the campaign.

Although Westminster elections are not forefront in our minds just now, it shouldn't go unmentioned that the Westminster figures set the SNP up for a stonkingly good result in a first-past-the-post election...

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 37%

Reform UK 16%

Labour 16%

Conservatives 11%

Greens 9%

Liberal Democrats 8%

In terms of a seats projection, I make it: SNP 49, Liberal Democrats 5, Conservatives 2, Labour 1.

The Find Out Now poll did not predict 8% for the Alliance to Liberate Scotland. Don't be silly. If you were simply honest about what that poll actually did show, you'd instantly have your answer as to why nobody else regards the result as being of much interest. https://t.co/tVu7ARVVg1
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Catastrophe for Starmer as Labour slump to joint all-time low in weekly YouGov poll, level with the Greens - the SNP have huge 18-point lead in Scottish subsample

2026-04-08T12:07:00.006+01:00

YouGov have suddenly and belatedly started including Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain and Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party as options in their weekly GB-wide polls, which on the whole is a good thing because to some extent we've been flying blind about the impact of those two parties (especially Lowe's). The curious thing is, though, that you'd expect a non-trivial vote share for Restore Britain to reduce Reform's vote share significantly, but in this poll Reform's vote share has actually increased. A recent Find Out Now similarly found that including Restore made only a trivial difference to the Reform vote. The only logical explanation I can think of is that most Restore supporters were previously selecting 'other party' when answering polls - which would indicate that they're quite committed in their choice of party, it's not just a casual preference affected by what they see in front of them in a menu of options.

So on the whole you'd have to say this is good news for Farage, because it looks as if his support hasn't been exaggerated by recent polls in the way that had seemed a logical possibility.

(UPDATE: Having looked at the data tables more carefully, it appears that YouGov are only including Restore Britain and Your Party on a secondary menu which only appears if respondents choose "some other party", so that would explain why Reform's vote is unaffected.)

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 6th-7th April 2026):

Reform UK 24% (+1)

Conservatives 19% (-)

Greens 16% (-3)

Labour 16% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)

Restore Britain 4% (n/a)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Your Party 1% (n/a)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 15%, Labour 14%, Greens 11%, Conservatives 11%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Restore Britain 2%, Your Party 1%

In one sense a three-point drop makes this a very disappointing result for the Greens, but on the other hand what they probably care most about is where they stand in relation to Labour, and at the moment they're tied, which is good enough to be getting on with. I constantly have to remind myself what Labour's record low vote share is (because it keeps changing), but I'm pretty certain 16% is the lowest they've ever been with YouGov, so this is a return to an all-time low. No poll from any polling company during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership ever had Labour lower than 18%, so Starmer is unambiguously performing worse than his predecessor ever did.

The Iran war has (undeservedly) seen a partial recovery in Starmer's personal ratings, and some supplementary questions in polls have delivered a not too dreadful verdict on his response to the crisis. Some have suggested that meant he and Labour were "having a good war", but it would be hard to argue that case now.

To reiterate the point that people always miss about YouGov's Scottish subsamples, they can be taken more seriously than subsamples from other firms because they're correctly structured and weighted. However, they do still have a big margin of error due to the small sample size, so you will still sometimes get wildly misleading results, as happened a few weeks ago when there were two subsamples in a row showing the SNP below 30%. This week's result is more routine, and is pretty encouraging on the whole - the unionist vote is split in an ideal way, and there's a substantial Green vote that the SNP will hope to squeeze on the constituency ballot next month, where in most cases the Greens are not standing candidates.

* * *

My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Baillieston & Shettleston - a seat I can claim a tenuous connection to, because my dad was once an assistant headmaster of the long since demolished St Gregory's secondary school in Cranhill.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

If Trump was Chamberlain: "This morning I handed the Iranian Government a final TruthSocial stating that unless we heard from them by 8pm Eastern that they were prepared at once to open the f****n' Strait you crazy b******s I would wipe our their civilisation. I have to...
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

...tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, but that Iran have sent me a neat 10-point counter-proposal, and that consequently, I might not bother committing genocide after all. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 8, 2026

More on the MRP poll: the 67-seat projection for the SNP may even be an underestimate due to the Greens being included in too many seats

2026-04-07T17:52:00.001+01:00

Some more details of the Find Out Now MRP poll for The National have been published on the Electoral Calculus website. Whoever wrote the article (presumably Martin Baxter) doesn't seem to be fully versed in devolved Scottish politics, because references are repeatedly made to the "official opposition" party in the Scottish Parliament, which is a concept that does not actually exist. The leader of the largest opposition party is called first at FMQs, but apart from that there's no special status.

However, what matters is whether the numbers in the poll are accurate, and I've been looking through the individual seats projections with interest. The first thing that leaps out is that there is a Green vote share given for every constituency, when in fact the Greens are only standing in a handful of constituency seats. That might conceivably make a difference in two cases: in Caithness, Sutherland & Ross, the Lib Dems are projected to have a four-point lead over the SNP, and the Greens are on 4%, while in Edinburgh Southern, Labour are projected to be three points ahead of the SNP, with the Greens on 4%. So if you take the numbers in the poll absolutely literally, the 67-seat projection for the SNP could even be a slight underestimate.

On the other hand, the SNP are projected to be just two points ahead of the Lib Dems in Skye, Lochaber & Badenoch, which in 2021 returned the largest SNP majority in the country, with the Lib Dems in third. Now, of course that's not totally implausible, because the SNP will be losing any personal vote for Kate Forbes, and the Lib Dems surprised us all by winning the overlapping constituency of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire in the 2024 UK general election. But it does make me wonder about the assumptions baked into the poll's methodology. It's almost as if the Westminster numbers are being used as a baseline. I note, for example, that there's no sign of a Lib Dem breakthrough in the projection for Argyll & Bute, which is a similar constituency in many respects but not in one: there was no major Lib Dem recovery there in 2024.

The SNP are projected to hold on to the seats where the Greens are actually standing and are purported to have a decent chance. However, the Greens are in either second place or joint second in Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill, and are a relatively modest 5-9 points behind the SNP in each. Intuitively, that strikes me as a much more plausible estimate of the state of play than we've been seeing in certain quarters.

Reform UK's best showing is projected to be 24% in Banffshire & Buchan Coast, which is presumably based partly on that being the most pro-Brexit constituency. More startling, however, is the 23% for Reform in both of the North Ayrshire seats (Cunninghame North and Cunninghame South).

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Anniesland.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Even if he doesn't follow through on this clear threat of genocide, it strikes me that the threat itself constitutes the gravest of crimes. What does "terrorism" mean if not acts designed to instill terror in a civilian population? https://t.co/n04RyXnXYB
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 7, 2026

Find Out Now - ZAP WHAM POW - that a new MRP poll shows the SNP on course for an overall majority

2026-04-06T19:07:00.008+01:00

As you may have seen, a new Find Out Now MRP poll commissioned by The National is suggesting that the SNP are on course for an overall majority at the Holyrood election. They would take 67 seats, all on the constituency ballot. I've been trying to work out what those 67 are, or to put it more simply which six constituencies they wouldn't win, but so far I'm struggling with navigation in the table of results - if anyone can let me know in the comments section, that would be great. It's probably safe to assume that Orkney and Shetland will both be staying Liberal Democrat, but I wouldn't want to guess which other four constituencies are projected to be in the unionist column. The basic figures are -

SNP 67

Labour 17

Greens 14

Reform UK 14

Conservatives 10

Liberal Democrats 7

I have a new article at The National discussing the track record of past MRP projections, which you can read HERE.

UPDATE: OK, thanks to Michael and Keith in the comments section, we now know which six constituencies are projected to elude the SNP. They are:

Caithness, Sutherland and Ross (LibDems)

Edinburgh North Western (LibDems)

Edinburgh Southern (Lab)

Fife North East (LibDems)

Orkney Islands (LibDems)

Shetland Islands (LibDems)

That means the SNP are projected to enjoy a whole string of eyebrow-raising wins elsewhere:

Dumbarton: I'm struggling with this one. It should be a Labour hold on the basis of the swing in national polls, and bearing in mind the track record of tactical voting in the constituency, it's hard to see how the SNP take it.

Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire: An SNP gain is possible here, but it's like trying to thread a needle - the unionist vote would have to be divided almost perfectly. Unlikely in my view.

Dumfriesshire: A bit more plausible, but still a very tough one - the SNP are starting from ten points behind the Tories.

Galloway & West Dumfries: The most winnable of the three Blue Wall seats in the south, and the SNP have a past track record of success here, although on the basis of national trends they would still be expected to fall just short. But I can accept this one as a plausible SNP gain.

Banffshire & Buchan Coast: The SNP look vulnerable here to both the Tories and Reform, but it's by no means outlandish to think they'll hold on.

Aberdeenshire West: On paper this doesn't look promising for the SNP, but we keep hearing the Tory canvass results in the northeast are dreadful, so yes, this is a possible gain.

Inverness & Nairn: I don't think anybody really knows yet what the impact of Fergus Ewing's independent candidacy will be, so there's a big question mark on this one.

East Lothian Coast & Lammermuirs: Looked like a lost cause not that long ago, but could now be very close.

Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill and Glasgow Southside have all been touted as Green gains. As previously explained, those predictions are based on a smoke-and-mirrors statistical exercise and shouldn't be taken seriously, but with an effective Green campaign the SNP are not necessarily safe in any of the three, and they're also vulnerable to Labour in Edinburgh Central. Each of the three in isolation looks like a probable SNP hold, but is it really likely their luck will hold out in all three? Even if just one of the three were to go to Labour or the Greens, it would make winning an overall majority very tough.

So as you can see I'm still very sceptical about the prospects of a single-party overall majority, but believe me about one thing: I do want to believe.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Fife North East and Galloway & West Dumfries.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

Bombshell GB-wide Ashcroft poll is the first not to show Reform in an outright lead for the first time in almost a year - Greens are in joint lead for the first time ever - Labour are in FOURTH - and the SNP have overtaken Labour UK-wide in the seats projection

2026-04-06T00:37:00.003+01:00

So this is a genuine landmark for the reasons given in the title, and it's also worth making the point that the data tables (unless I'm misinterpreting them, but I don't see how I can be) show that the Greens are actually in a slight overall lead over Reform and the Tories - but that seems to have been disguised by the rounding to the nearest whole number.

GB-wide voting intentions for next general election (Lord Ashcroft, 26th-30th March 2026)

Greens 21%

Reform UK 21%

Conservatives 21%

Labour 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

SNP 3%

Plaid Cymru 1%

I know somebody listed Scottish subsample numbers on the previous thread, but I can't see any in the data tables with the "don't knows/will not votes" removed. However, I've used what I presume was a rough recalculation to fine-tune a UK-wide seats projection, which shows: Reform UK 204, Conservatives 175, Greens 116, SNP 48, Liberal Democrats 47, Labour 33, Plaid Cymru 8, Others 19.

The target for an overall majority is 326, so it's not hard to see why a hung parliament is currently the strongly favoured outcome on the exchanges. Nevertheless, under first-past-the-post not all that much movement is required to transform an absolute guddle into a clear majority, and by the same token not much movement would be required to turn a projection showing a right-wing parliament, as this one does, into one showing a centre-left parliament in which the SNP might just hold the balance of power. Even if they don't hold the balance of power on their own, the huge strength of the Greens is a potential game-changer, because at the very least the English Greens are not opposed to independence.

On the exchanges, the Greens are currently estimated to have a 1 in 8 chance of winning most seats in the general election, but as the above numbers demonstrate, they might not actually need to win most seats to end up with influence.

An intriguing quirk is that the SNP are currently the fourth-largest party in the Commons (albeit only just, and they may soon be overtaken by Reform). The projection from this poll shows they would still be in fourth place, but in a radically different way - they would have five times as many seats as now, they would re-overtake the Liberal Democrats, and they would overtake Labour for the first time. Let's just reiterate that: the SNP would have more seats than Labour, UK-wide.

Ashcroft himself concedes that the reason his results might be different from other pollsters is that he has a completely different approach to the voting intention question - instead of directly asking people how they will vote, he asks them to rate their chances of voting for each party in turn. As I understand it, any respondent who does not estimate a 50%+ probability of voting for at least one party is assumed to be an abstainer and excluded, and everyone else is assigned to the party they gave the highest probability to. That method seems intuitively reasonable to me, but whether the results it produces will be more accurate, or less so, is anyone's guess at this stage.

For weeks after the Gorton & Denton by-election, YouGov were putting "footnotes" of sorts on their polls to give the impression that the Green advantage over Labour must just be a temporary effect caused by the by-election and would fade. There is now some doubt over that, not just because of this Ashcroft poll, but also because last week's YouGov poll showed the Greens moving back ahead of Labour, after having slipped behind for one week.

In case you're wondering, the last GB-wide poll not to show an outright Reform lead was a Survation poll in late April/early May of last year. That showed Labour and Reform tied on 26% apiece.

There is actually some relief for Starmer in the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll. It's generally believed that head-to-head leadership polls are more predictive of election results several years in advance than headline voting intentions, and Starmer does have a clear 15-point lead over Farage. However his lead over Badenoch is just three points, which amounts to a statistical tie - and Ashcroft doesn't even bother to ask whether respondents prefer Polanski to Starmer, which many will suspect is because he feared what the answer might be.

There are a couple of results that I actually found quite surprising. When asked whether nuclear power should be phased out, with wind power expanded and the net zero target brought forward a decade, respondents are almost split down the middle - 40% in favour, 45% against. My guess is that Ashcroft asked it as a "shopping list" question in the hope that most respondents would find something on the list to object to, thus producing a result he'd be able to spin as clear and decisive support for nuclear power, but that didn't happen.

And on Europe, there are any number of people who will tell you that if you spell out in a poll question what returning to the EU would actually mean in practice, the pro-EU majority evaporates. It looks to me like Ashcroft set out to prove that theory and spectacularly failed. When asked whether they want to rejoin the customs union, restore freedom of movement and then rejoin the EU itself as soon as possible, 55% supported the idea and only 34% were opposed. That's absolutely remarkable.

Ashcroft did manage to get a result which he can spin as showing massive opposition to scrapping the "nuclear deterrent", but as he lumped "and cut defence spending" into the question, the result is pretty meaningless.

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Loopy billionaire lord tries to convince us that funding the NHS with fair taxation is as impossible as enhancing the size of women's breasts with hypnotherapy

I cannot in all good conscience conclude my discussion of this poll without drawing your attention to the fact that Ashcroft has made a complete blithering idiot of himself with one particular part of his write-up -

"Perhaps more controversially, nearly a third of voters said they felt less favourable towards Polanski when they heard that in his days as a hypnotherapist he once claimed he could increase the size of women’s breasts by hypnosis. Polanski claims to have apologised and put all this behind him, but in a different way he is arguably still at it. Just as there are those who want to change their body shape through the power of mind over matter, there will always be people eager to believe we can fund the NHS by taxing the rich"

Nice try, Mike, but you are believed to be worth £2 billion. That alone would be enough to fund 1% of the entire annual budget of NHS England. Quite plainly, taxing the rich could very easily fund the NHS - and the only use hypnotherapy would be on that front would be for those like you who don't want us to notice or believe a simple arithmetical fact.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"C'est trop bruyant!": The settled will klaxon is so piercing tonight that it can even be heard IN FRANCE, as Norstat show a pro-independence majority for a SEVENTH poll in a row

2026-04-04T21:36:00.013+01:00

Tonight brings word of the latest in the regular series of Norstat polls for the Sunday Times, and although the newspaper has buried the results of the independence question at the bottom of the write-up as if it's of no great significance, it certainly looks pretty significant to me. If I'm counting correctly, this is now the seventh Norstat poll in a row to show a Yes lead - and remember Norstat were one of the more No-friendly firms until a couple of years ago. To this day (as far as we know, anyway), they continue to weight by 2014 recalled vote, which is a huge disadvantage for the Yes side, who are nevertheless repeatedly coming out on top.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat / Suday Times, 30th March - 1st April 2026)

Yes 52% (+1)

No 48% (-1)

The Sunday Times are far more interested in the Holyrood voting intention numbers, which are a bit of a curate's egg for the SNP. Their own vote share has held up perfectly well, but a decline for Reform UK means that the unionist vote is no longer split as perfectly as it was, opening up the possibility that Labour and the Tories may take a few more constituency seats than previously expected and push the prospect of a single-party SNP overall majority further away.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 34% (-1)
Labour 19% (+2)
Reform UK 15% (-4)
Conservatives 11% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)
Greens 8% (-)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30% (-)

Labour 17% (-)

Reform UK 15% (-4)

Greens 12% (+1)

Conservatives 10% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+3)

Seats projection: SNP 57, Labour 20, Reform UK 16, Greens 13, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 11

That would obviously be a very comfortable pro-independence majority (70 for the SNP and Greens in combination, 59 for the unionist parties), but it would leave the SNP well short of their self-imposed target of a single-party majority. However, even if Reform's setback is indirectly bad news for the independence cause, I nevertheless find it strangely reassuring. Every time Paul Hutcheon has written an over-the-top headline about "Reform's campaign in total meltdown", I've thought to myself "it won't make the slightest bit of difference you know, nothing sticks to them", so it's a bit of a relief to discover (or provisionally discover) that the laws of political gravity do actually apply to Offord and Reform after all, and that if they run a shockingly bad campaign it does have negative consequences for them, just as it would for any other party.

There's still a month for them to put their house in order, and all they'd really have to do is work their way back to where they were fairly recently in order to help the SNP back into the 60s in the seats projection. Even if Reform don't recover, there's another very plausible get-out-of-jail-free card for the SNP, which is that the Greens plainly can't take 8% of the constituency vote when they're not standing in the vast majority of constituency seats. What would happen if, say, the SNP were to take half of their votes and Labour were to take one-quarter? The seats projection from this poll would then be: SNP 60, Labour 18, Reform UK 17, Greens 12, Conservatives 12, Liberal Democrats 10.

Still not a majority, but a bit closer to one, and it might be a slightly more realistic estimate of where the SNP stand right now.

John Curtice also makes the point in the Sunday Times piece that if the public become aware that Reform's support is falling away, that could encourage greater anti-SNP tactical voting for Labour and the Tories. There may be some logic to that, although there may also be a side-benefit for the pro-indy camp, because Reform are currently taking a non-trivial percentage of independence voters and we need as many of those people as possible back on the side of light if we're going to end up with a decent vote share on the list - which in practice may be just as psychologically important as the seats tally.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Falkirk West.

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Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

"But what if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying 'we say no, and we are the state'?"

2026-04-03T21:18:00.002+01:00

A former commenter on this blog from way back in the 2014 indyref period got in touch with a question a few days ago, and I've been so busy that I haven't responded to him yet - but it's an interesting and important question, so I thought I might as well turn my answer into a blogpost.

"Suppose Mr. Swinney really does win 65 or more seats (no longer a laughing matter). What if Mr. Starmer does not perform his usual U-turn?

What if he does not feel he can win a referendum? I'm thinking of possible successors who could fight a referendum, but the only one I can even see fighting indyref2 with any confidence is Andy Burnham.

What do you think is Mr. Swinney's plan?"

The first thing I should stress here is that I still regard a single-party SNP overall majority as a long-shot, simply because the AMS voting system is designed to produce hung parliaments, and it does that job very effectively. Unless the SNP's list vote recovers massively to 2011-style levels, the route to a majority essentially consists of winning 65 out of 73 constituency seats, and even though those seats are elected by the first-past-the-post element of AMS, it's still very unusual for first-past-the-post to produce quite such an extreme result. In the last hundred years, it's only happened once in a UK general election, when Ramsay MacDonald's Tory-dominated 'National Government' took 90.1% of the seats. That's the feat the SNP will have to emulate to hit John Swinney's target.

Nevertheless, when I was at the SNP campaign conference a couple of weeks ago, a number of senior figures did sound genuinely confident of a majority, and of course they have access to canvassing data. There are three possible explanations: a) it's a bluff, b) it's wishful thinking, or c) there might just be something in it. So purely hypothetically, let's imagine it's c) and work through what would happen if the SNP win a majority.

Would Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, although of course his own days as Prime Minister might be numbered by then anyway.

Would any successor to Keir Starmer immediately agree to a referendum? No, unless it's someone we haven't given serious consideration to yet. Personally I would welcome Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham taking over, simply because they would probably represent a slight shift to the left, but I would expect all of them to be just as intransigent on the constitutional issue (especially Rayner, who seems almost robotic in her thinking).

Does that mean electing an SNP majority is pointless? Definitely not, because John Swinney has made so many promises about the effect of a majority that he would have to try to deliver - and that is the real value of the exercise, because no First Minister is actually powerless in the face of Westminster intransigence, unless they make themselves powerless by being too passive, which has been the recurring problem since the summer of 2017. Judging from the very few clues that were dropped last October, it sounds like a judicial review might be sought of any Westminster refusal to grant a Section 30 order - I can't see that going anywhere, but by the same token I can't see SNP members just accepting John Swinney saying "oh our application has been rejected, never mind, at least we tried". There would have to be a follow-up with a Plan B, which is where the legendary 'secret plan' kicks in, although by definition we don't know what that is.

The simplest option is the one that Believe in Scotland have proposed, which is to finally bring this matter to a head by using the Westminster election of 2028 or 2029 as a de facto referendum on independence. However, although Believe in Scotland are SNP allies and have close organisational links with the party, we know that John Swinney and other leading SNP figures like Stephen Flynn seem to be viscerally opposed to the whole concept of a de facto referendum. Maybe they would reconsider if other options closed off and they needed to show SNP members they were taking their mandate seriously. Or maybe they would be able to devise an imaginative alternative way of using the Westminster election to advance the cause.

One thing is for sure: if the SNP can win back their majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, they would have potential leverage to bring the UK government to the negotiating table as long as they are bold enough to use it. They could engage in parliamentary disruption tactics (which remember even the moderate John Smith did as Labour leader in the mid-1990s), or they could boycott the Commons for a period of time. The latter would create a genuine constitutional crisis: it wouldn't be considered sustainable for the bulk of one of the constituent nations of 'Our Pweshus Union' to go unrepresented in the national parliament for any prolonged period.

Again, Mr Swinney is so instinctively cautious that it's hard to imagine him going down that road, but the value of giving the SNP a mandate in May is that it opens these possibilities up and a conversation can at least be had about them.

On a semi-related point, I may actually have been proved wrong about something I said two years ago, although as with the French Revolution it's still too early to tell. I repeatedly said back then that losing the SNP majority at Westminster would be an unmitigated calamity, because it would lose us the main legacy of the 2014 referendum and we'd never get it back. Once Labour were the dominant party once again, there would be a sense of normal service being resumed and the SNP would thereafter only be able to compete in Holyrood elections.

That doesn't seem to be the case at all, and there's a real chance that Labour's 2024 victory will end up looking like a meaningless one-off. The real normal service will be resumed in 2028 or 2029 when the SNP return to dominance, the 2014 legacy will turn out to be assured, and that will be a massive psychological shock to the Scottish Labour Party. They thought they had established in 2024 that independence supporters would always sell themselves cheap by going back to Labour without any constitutional concessions whatsoever, but that was a mirage. There might eventually be some long-overdue soul-searching about what it will actually take for Labour to build bridges with their Yes-supporting former voters - and the two obvious potential answers to that question would be either a) greater flexibility on a referendum, or b) a significantly enhanced devolution package.

* * *

My latest constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh Southern, Ettrick, Roxburgh & Berwickshire and Falkirk East & Linlithgow.

* * *

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

My plans for Scot Goes Pop's coverage of the Holyrood election campaign

2026-04-02T20:30:00.003+01:00

This post will come as a relief to some of you, because I've decided to temporarily go back to conventional blogging for the remainder of the Holyrood campaign. The emphasis is on the word "temporarily", because on the whole I think the YouTube experiment is working out well - the number of subscribers has built quicker than I was expecting, and the average number of views per video is pretty decent. However, I think the situation changes in an election campaign, because it suddenly doesn't feel good enough to wait 24 or 48 hours to cover a particular poll result, and doing it by video just slows everything down massively. You'll have noticed that I still haven't covered the Survation poll from the other day - that's because I was intending to make a video about it but still haven't found the time. Of course I'm also writing daily constituency profiles for The National throughout the campaign, which takes a few hours per day and leaves me with even less time to make videos.

So for the remaining month-and-a-bit of the campaign I'm going to go retro and do pretty much what I've done in every election since the 2010 UK general election, which was the first major vote that Scot Goes Pop covered. That should speed everything up and hopefully I can cover major polling developments much more effectively.

However, to make this work I'm going to have to ask for your patience and indulgence on a couple of points. I'm going to add a sort of promotional link for my YouTube channel at the bottom of every post, so that it will hopefully still pick up a few subscribers even if there are fewer videos until 7th May (although I'll still try to make at least one or two). And I'm afraid I'm also going to have to resume the fundraising promotions at the bottom of each post - I was hoping not to have to do that, but it's become unavoidable. I'm due to receive some significant funds in a few weeks' time, probably in late May or early June, so from that point on there shouldn't be any problem for a few months, but until then there's practically nothing scheduled to come in at all, and I'm going to have plug the gap somehow to keep everything afloat over the next month or two.

As ever, there are three main ways to donate...

1) For card payments, the crowdfunder page is HERE.

2) Direct PayPal donations can be made to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

3) Bank transfers are also fine. I was advised not to post my bank details publicly, so if you'd like to donate that way, drop me a line by email and I'll send you the necessary details. My contact email address is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

Many thanks for the support that readers have shown Scot Goes Pop over the years.

Joani of (Noah's nuclear-armed) Arc

2026-04-01T17:04:00.002+01:00

The senior naval officer Reid was reported for 'inappropriate' behaviour with at Faslane is *separate* to the captain she is linked to tonight by the FT's @LOS_Fisher

The captain has reportedly stepped back from duties after text messages exchanged with Reid
— Anna Mikhailova (@AVMikhailova) March 31, 2026

We're going to need some sort of diagram here. https://t.co/pI9M6N3AJD
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

BBC Scotland will obviously just dismiss this story as Naval Gazing..
— David Nichol (@DavidNi09148795) April 1, 2026

How does one actually go about finding love with the captain of a nuclear-armed submarine? Is there some sort of niche dating app? https://t.co/b1T6Av5Zp0
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Ruddr
— calanbosch (@calanbosch) April 1, 2026

Would you like to see the plutonium rivet?
— JimMcDonald (@mcdonji1) April 1, 2026

Maybe the King should abdicate

Even the Pope isn't safe https://t.co/86GfE2t6Q1
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Just remembered about this pic.twitter.com/drJ3hISNm0
— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) April 1, 2026

If Joani Reid ends up being the cause of global nuclear destruction, I'm going to be very annoyed with her. https://t.co/S1lqYBj1M4
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

In all seriousness, what do we think are the chances of a by-election in East Kilbride & Strathaven? Must be at least 25%, surely?
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 1, 2026

Shock poll portends weather boffin coup threat for Atlas chief Lyon

2026-04-01T08:57:00.001+01:00

You've probably seen the propaganda poll from yesterday that the hapless Alliance to Liberate Scotland, aka "the Atlas", commissioned from Find Out Now. It used the infamous Archie Stirling question, ie. "would you consider voting for party X at the election?", which in the case of Stirling's party Scottish Voice overestimated their potential support in 2007 by a factor of 200. It said that 20% of the population would "consider" voting for them on the Holyrood list, whereas in the event only 0.1% actually did so.

Atlas' own poll yesterday found that only 8% of people would consider voting for them, so if the "Stirling devisor" is applied, that would imply they are on course to take just 0.04% of the list vote. I personally think that's a bit of an underestimate, simply because Tommy Sheridan does still have some residual support in Glasgow - you could imagine him getting around 1-2% of the vote there, while in the other regions Atlas may hover around 0.1% or 0.2%, producing a national figure of around 0.3% or 0.4%. That would obviously still leave them light-years short of winning seats.

But it was interesting that they were concerned enough about not registering in the polls at all that they were willing to shell out for a propaganda poll, because it must have cost them around 10% of the relatively modest amount they've crowdfunded for their election fund. (Although there again, as someone pointed out in the comments section of this blog the other day, they must also have "private means" simply to be able to pay for their election deposits, and perhaps that explains why they've been so willing to get into bed with a far-right party.)

Given what we know about the Mafia-like internal politics of these fringe parties, it perhaps isn't a surprise to find that not only has money been spent on a polling astroturfing exercise for Atlas as a whole, but that someone appears to have also paid for a poll to try to put one particular faction of Atlas into the ascendancy. It's not hard to guess who may have commissioned this morning's new poll from OpinoSpa:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Hazel Lyon, the leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland, has been a failure because she is unknown to the public and has been unable to boost the party's profile? (OpinoSpa, 25th-27th March 2026)

Agree strongly: 21%

Agree slightly: 37%

TOTAL AGREE: 58%

Disagree slightly: 11%

Disagree strongly 4%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 15%

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the former STV weather presenter Lloyd Quinan, who was a member of the Scottish Parliament for four years, would be a better leader of the Alliance to Liberate Scotland than Hazel Lyon because he would get the party more attention?

Agree strongly: 23%

Agree slightly: 45%

TOTAL AGREE: 68%

Disagree slightly: 7%

Disagree strongly 2%

TOTAL DISAGREE: 9%

Hold on to your hat, Hazel: strong gusts are forecast as a Quinan coup attempt comes in from the west.

The Alliance to Liberate Scotland and their "Big Lie": the Sovereignty Party are so spooked by being identified as far-right that they have started telling direct, flat-out lies about the contents of their 2024 manifesto

2026-03-31T03:06:00.005+01:00

My latest Holyrood constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Northern.

A brief reply to Ballot Box Scotland about my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency

2026-03-30T02:27:00.004+01:00

Allan Faulds, the former serial Scottish Green Party candidate who runs the psephological Ballot Box Scotland site, has taken a passive-aggressive swipe at me because of something I wrote in my profile of the Edinburgh Central constituency for The National -

"Personally if I'd been associated with the Alba Party and repeatedly exaggerated their prospects for success, I might consider not taking poorly informed swipes at three sources - myself, @devolvedelections.bsky.social and @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social - who have taken reasonable modelling positions!"

What he's referring to is my point that projections showing that the Greens are on course to win Edinburgh Central are based on a smoke-and-mirrors exercise, because they rely on using the high Green list vote from 2021 as a proxy for what might happen on the constituency ballot this time. That makes no sense, because the Greens actually stood on the constituency ballot in Edinburgh Central in 2021, and indeed put forward a very high-profile candidate in Alison Johnstone, who was on the cusp of becoming Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament. They did not perform particularly well, and even making reasonable assumptions about how they might have performed better if the latest boundary changes are taken into account, they would almost certainly still have finished a distant fourth, probably almost thirty percentage points or so behind Angus Robertson of the SNP who won the seat. So that has to be regarded as the realistic baseline for this year's race, although I did go on to say that the task was "not mission impossible" for the Greens, and that with a focused campaign they might have a chance - but I summed up by saying that if they won, they "would be defying the odds, not merely meeting expectations".

I absolutely stand by those comments, which constitute a balanced summary of the true position. Frankly, I struggle to see how anyone can reasonably dispute them, and by coming out in such an absurdly shrill, precious, self-righteous way I believe Mr Faulds is allowing his protective bias towards his own political party to reveal itself clearly yet again. He goes absolutely nuts, and has done for many years, whenever anyone suggests that his "project" (as he refers to his website) might not be as pristinely "non-partisan" as he insists, or that he in fact relatively frequently allows his own prejudices to shine through in his commentary. But I suspect the only reason that's such a sore point for him is that he knows perfectly well it's sometimes a fair allegation.

By contrast, I've never pretended that this blog is non-partisan. I am a member of the SNP, I will be voting SNP on both ballots in May, and on the blog I am strongly encouraging others to do the same. But the constituency profiles are in a completely different category to the blog, and I do take the exercise very seriously and only say things that I believe to be 100% accurate and fair, and that can be justified and supported by hard facts. I've gone out of my way to give proper attention to the Green challenge in the Edinburgh seats, where they are clearly a credible force, and I have most certainly not been talking them down in any way whatsoever.

Contrary to Mr Faulds' claims, I did not in fact identify him, or Mark McGeoghegan (whose strident political leanings are also well known from social media), or anyone else as being behind the bizarre projections for Edinburgh Central that I mentioned in the constituency profile, and the fact that he knew exactly what I was referring to anyway speaks volumes. He openly admits on his site that the Greens' numbers in his constituency projections are based partly on their list performance - something that he does not do for any other party. So in fact my commentary was not "ill-informed" - it was extremely well informed by Mr Faulds' own words and clarifications.

Incidentally, this is a very rare point of consensus between myself and Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland - he also commented a few weeks ago on how baffling it is that a projection would show the Greens on course to win a constituency in which they've never polled higher than 14%. On this occasion Campbell's logic was actually sound, and it looks very much like Mr Faulds is simply indulging in special pleading for his own party as a form of "soft astroturfing". To be clear, I would definitely not be astonished if Lorna Slater wins Edinburgh Central for the Greens, but if that happens it will be for the reasons I gave in the profile, not because of the heroic and frankly silly assumptions that are driving the dodgy projections.

As for Mr Faulds' dig about my former involvement with the Alba Party, he clearly knows very little about that subject, because I actually spent a fair bit of my time as an Alba NEC member begging Alex Salmond and others to adopt a greater sense of realism about Alba's electoral prospects. I was almost in despair after the 2022 local elections, because Mr Salmond was waxing lyrical about how he had supposedly detected signs in the results, based mostly on second and third preference votes, that Alba were on course for the 6% needed to win list seats at Holyrood this year. He seemed to be absolutely genuine about that - it was like he had succumbed to wishful thinking and had started to swallow his own propaganda. In reality, Alba were firmly stuck on 2% and were making no progress towards winning list seats whatsoever. I pointed that out more than once on the Alba NEC - it was a thoroughly unwelcome and unwanted message, but I pointed it out just the same.

Perhaps Mr Faulds is going back to way before that and is referring to what I said about Alba's prospects before the 2021 Holyrood election even took place. But at that point there were numerous Panelbase polls suggesting Alba were on course to win list seats, and as I do not actually possess psychic abilities I had no way of knowing that the Panelbase panel contained far too many Alba supporters and that the numbers were therefore misleadingly inflated. If Mr Faulds does possess psychic abilities, I salute him, but there's not much I can do about being inferior to him in that unusual respect. In fact, I distinctly remember pointing out to someone just after the 2021 election that I had made three or four predictions about the result, and all of them had proved to be accurate apart from the one about Alba, "and I never actually claimed to be Nostradamus". It would be interesting to go back over all of Mr Faulds' past election predictions and see if his own 'strike rate' is any better - and I do mean all of the predictions, not just the ones he cherrypicks with the benefit of hindsight.

* * *

My latest two constituency profiles for The National are Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith and Edinburgh North Western.

"Alliance to Liberate Scotland" angrily defend their pact with the far-right - but their excuses simply don't make any sense

2026-03-28T02:44:00.003+00:00

Later in this video, I also give my thoughts on the extraordinary but somehow totally unsurprising news that the self-styled 'independence ultra' Chris McEleny, who expelled and drove out so many genuine independence supporters from the Alba Party, tried to defect to the hardline anti-independence party Reform UK - but was rebuffed!

My latest constituency profile for The National is Edinburgh Eastern, Musselburgh & Tranent.

Revealed: the far-right have almost totally taken over the "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" fringe party in the Highlands & Islands region

2026-03-26T18:45:00.003+00:00

I said in my video about the far-right elements of Barrhead Boy's new fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "the Atlas") that I had spotted at least two of the party's candidates as being from the far-right Sovereignty. But I knew that would be an underestimate, so I've now checked and it appears that a grand total of six of the party's thirty-nine candidates are from Sovereignty. That's close to one-sixth of the total, and presumably it would have been an even higher proportion if it hadn't been for the last-minute influx of ex-Alba candidates.

The six far-right candidates are:

Alan McManus (Central Scotland & Lothians West)

Brian Nugent (Highlands & Islands)

Andrew MacDonald (Highlands & Islands)

Flora Badger (Highlands & Islands)

Kenneth MacKenzie (Highlands & Islands)

Laurie Moffat (Mid-Scotland & Fife)

As you can see, there's a particular concentration in the Highlands & Islands, where Barrhead Boy seems to have handed over the party organisation lock, stock and barrel to the far-right. Four of the six Atlas candidates in the Highlands & Islands are from Sovereignty, including all of the top three on the list. However, the two far-right candidates standing elsewhere in Scotland are also extremely prominent on their respective lists. Laurie Moffat is number 2 candidate on the Mid-Scotland & Fife list, the region where Eva Comrie is number 1 (which makes me repeat my perpetual question: what on earth is Eva doing?). And Alan McManus, who has been exposed in recent days as a regular speaker at the far-right rallies organised by arch-unionist and holocaust denier Alistair McConnachie, is number 2 in Central Scotland.

Again, all I can do is urge you to avoid Alliance to Liberate Scotland like the plague if you care about the cause of independence. We simply cannot afford to allow our movement to become associated, even at the fringes, with these neo-fascists - it would undo the good work of decades. Stick with the mainstream pro-indy options on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.

Incidentally, on a more nerdish point, it looks like five of the six far-right candidates will be standing under the Sovereignty banner on the constituency ballot, and the Alliance to Liberate Scotland banner on the list ballot. That means, to state the obvious, that people will be standing for two different parties in the same election, which brings to life as never before the danger Michael Ancram identified during the passing of the Scotland Act 1998 of "alter ego" parties standing on the two different ballots to try to cheat the system. However, as this is all happening completely openly, and as Atlas seem to have declared their intentions to the Electoral Commission, presumably a ruling must have been made on whether any hypothetical Sovereignty constituency wins would count against Atlas when the d'Hondt calculation is done to distribute list seats. If anyone knows for sure what the position is, please let me know.

* * *

My two latest constituency profiles for The National are Eastwood and Edinburgh Central.

Let's keep the independence movement clean: avoid the dodgy far-right links of the fringe party "Alliance to Liberate Scotland" (aka "The Atlas")

2026-03-25T03:02:00.001+00:00

The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it

2026-03-24T11:23:00.006+00:00

I received a Reform leaflet through the door this morning, emblazened with photos of Malcolm Offord. And because I'm interested in polls, I immediately noticed the rather amusing error in the Lib Dem-style bar chart. It's obvious that the idea was to use percentage changes from the 2021 Holyrood election, rather than from the most recent poll, to maximise the sense of Reform momentum and to make it look like the SNP are collapsing. And in seven out of eight cases they've done that, but some unfortunate minion seems to have made an almighty blunder on the SNP's list vote - it should read SNP 29% (-11), but instead they've used the most recent poll as the baseline and given it as SNP 29% (+1).

Thanks, Malc, for that remarkably helpful piece of pro-SNP spin!

On the reverse side of the leaflet are four policy priorities which are obviously calibrated to appeal to socially conservative working-class voters. The fourth is about improving the NHS, which I presume is intended as a key point of reassurance for the target electorate, who really do care about the health system. And I think above all else this is where Reform are getting away with absolute murder, because if other parties, including the SNP, hammered them over their plans to semi-privatise the NHS, a lot of working-class voters would recoil in horror and not even the most hysterical immigrant-bashing messaging would be able to offset the impact.

Offord's personal message also makes a point of saying that he's a state-school Greenock lad who went to Edinburgh University on a full grant. Er, are Reform planning to reintroduce maintenance grants? Are they going to abolish tuition fees in England? If not, what is the point of making that comment except as a form of brazen hypocrisy?

* * *

I had a brief but telling exchange this morning with Craig Murray, who after his time in the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Norwich Independents, the SNP, Action for Independence, the Alba Party, the Workers Party of Great Britain and Your Party, is now standing for Barrhead Boy's "Greater Prism" party at the Holyrood election (they call themselves "Atlas", I believe). I had been making the point to someone else that the reasons "both votes SNP" makes sense are: a) that the SNP will desperately need list votes and seats if they underperform in the constituency ballot, and b) that the SNP can win several list seats even if they don't underperform in the constituencies as long as their list vote is high enough. Imagining himself to be making a killer point, Craig popped up and claimed that this meant I was saying SNP list votes could only be useful if the polls are wrong.

Golly, who could ever imagine such a thing as the polls turning out to be wrong?! But here's the thing: Craig's entire case hinges on the polls being wrong, because Atlas are not registering in the polls at all. They are on zero. Their chances of winning any seats at all are non-existent. To believe that Craig is making a valid point about list votes for Atlas being of more use than list votes for the SNP, you would first have to believe that the polls are light-years out on the question of Atlas support, but cannot possibly be even slightly wrong about the SNP. That would, with respect, be a galactically stupid thing to believe.

Lord Ashcroft's dodgiest poll question is one the health inspectors should be all over

2026-03-24T02:14:00.004+00:00

I've been having a more leisurely look through the results of the supplementary questions in the Ashcroft poll, and I think there are three worth drawing to your attention. First of all, Ashcroft has really pulled a fast one in order to produce an unhelpful result for the independence movement on one of his questions. In the write-up of the poll, he claimed that only one-quarter of respondents thought that a majority of seats for pro-independence parties would constitute a mandate for an independence referendum, or to put it another way, he was implying that three-quarters either don't understand or don't accept the most fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy. I thought that was a surprising result, because other pollsters have asked that question and found that a slim majority think there would be a mandate.

But the data tables demonstrate in embarrassingly vivid detail how Ashcroft pulled his stunt off. One of the basic rules of polling balance and impartiality is that if you are trying to measure whether respondents agree or disagree with a proposition, the negative option should be worded so that it's as close as possible to the natural opposite of the positive option. In other words, if the positive option is "a majority of seats should be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum", the negative option should be "a majority of seats should NOT be taken as a mandate for an independence referendum". But Ashcroft doesn't do that, and instead takes a walk on the wild side by offering as the negative option "People vote at elections for lots of different reasons - we cannot assume someone supports Scottish independence just because they vote for a particular party". Not only is that self-evidently not the natural opposite of the positive option, it's not even about the same subject. The positive option is about a mandate for an independence referendum, the negative option is about a mandate for independence itself. Moreover, the negative option is a statement of the obvious that nobody would actually dispute regardless of their views on independence or a referendum.

What Ashcroft is doing is forcing people to reject the positive option because they know that if they don't, it would look like they were denying a statement that everyone knows to be true. If he had wanted to achieve the opposite effect, he could have done it by making the negative option something like "Many voters are not intelligent enough to check what they are voting for or to understand the issues, so of course they are not giving a mandate for any particular policy", and then respondents would have flocked to the positive option in a state of indignation.

In a nutshell, the results of the mandate question have no credibility, and the polling health inspectors should be all over that question like a rash.

The poll also has approval ratings for the various political parties, including for Alba. The Alba rating is so utterly diabolical that if anyone has any lingering regret about the party's demise, they should consider themselves liberated to no longer entertain that feeling for even a moment. Only 5% of respondents approve of Alba, and 55% disapprove, giving a net approval rating of -50, which is marginally worse than Reform UK and only slightly better than the Tories. Alba is almost equally hated on both sides of the constitutional divide, with SNP voters giving it a rating of -37, and Green voters going even lower at -54. By the end, Alba simply had nothing to offer because independence supporters themselves didn't even want the party to exist, and there's not really much point arguing the toss when people have so definitively made their minds up.

Lastly, there's a question revealing that a grand total of 46% of respondents say that one of the top three things in their minds when they cast their vote will be either "keeping Scotland part of the UK" or "getting an independent Scotland". That rather gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that the independence question is a low priority for the electorate these days.

If you haven't watched my video about the poll yet, you can see it below.

Ashcroft poll: pro-independence parties could take overall majority of VOTES as well as SEATS

2026-03-23T21:24:00.001+00:00