One of the extraordinary things about the general election campaign in Scotland was that Labour got away with the "change" messaging, even though what they were actually doing was demanding that independence supporters should abandon any hopes for change and embrace the dismal status quo.  But if in the Labour leadership's own heads they were genuinely offering some sort of "change", what was the nature of it? We got a remarkable insight last night when a "Labour insider" briefed the extremist pro-genocide journalist Lee Harpin that "Changed Labour Means Changed Labour" - about as moronic ..read more

I just want to make one simple point.  Although it's an important point, there's nothing complicated about it and it can be explained very briefly.  On polling day, Stuart Campbell broke his word to his readers.  He had previously assured them he would never tell them how to vote, but instead he ended up instructing them to vote Labour: "there’s a job that needs doing...grit your teeth and gird your loins and get it done".  Although this would mean they'd be voting for an avowedly anti-independence party, Campbell tried to make out that they'd somehow be playing a game of f ..read more

Scot Goes Pop readers who are members of the Alba Party will have received the weekly party email yesterday, which this time was written by the General Secretary, Chris McEleny. It urges members to attend a meeting on Holyrood election strategy tomorrow, and encouragingly it specifically states that Alba is a "member-led party".  That was a phrase that was used a great deal at the time of the party's founding, and it's fantastic to hear it reiterated now, because I know there had been an alternative view gaining traction that the members should be treated with suspicion and that as much i ..read more

I note that David Davis has used parliamentary privilege to allege that Liz Lloyd, the former Chief of Staff for Nicola Sturgeon, was the person who unlawfully leaked details of allegations against Alex Salmond to the repugnant Daily Record and its political editor David Clegg.  I also note the weird media blackout on reporting of Davis' allegation - a Google search only turns up a solitary article in The Times, which would suggest the Scottish media is ignoring it completely.  This illustrates again how media bias works - it's often not how they report on things but whether the ..read more

The Nation.Cymru news website has been making the news recently rather than just reporting on it.  It played a key role in the downfall of the Welsh First Minister Vaughan Gething, a man so arrogant and entitled that a sitcom could be written about him.  (Having been dragged kicking and screaming from office, his first reaction was - with no apparent sense of irony - to sympathise with the people who would be devastated by his departure!) Yesterday, Nation.Cymru was fast out of the blocks with an opinion piece blasting Labour's proposed "Council of the Nations and Regions" as an insu ..read more

The first GB-wide poll since the general election is out, but it's quite hard to interpret.  There's no sign of the data tables (if anyone finds them, let me know), and I can't see any methodological note confirming that past vote weighting from the election has been introduced.  If by any chance that hasn't happened, the results would be really poor for Labour because they show a decline in support from the last pre-election poll from the same firm. GB-wide voting intentions for the next general election (WeThink, 11th-12th July 2024): Labour 39% (-2) Conservatives 20% (-3) Reform ..read more

It's worth reiterating that Alba did not directly cost the SNP any seats at all at the general election.  There was a huge element of luck in that, because Labour came close to winning both Dundee Central and Aberdeen North, and any very narrow SNP losses in those seats would have been blamed on Alba's intervention.  But it didn't happen and ultimately that's what counts.  I know some people have tried to lump the Alba and Green interventions together and look at the combined effect, but that's stretching it a bit - Alba and the Greens were pretty obviously not acting in concert ..read more

The former SNP MP Stewart McDonald reckons his party has a problem with credibility and seriousness, but the 'solutions' he puts forward to this supposed problem are nothing short of batty.  Most weirdly of all, he claims to believe that the SNP's future in government depends on them abandoning their policy of removing Trident from Scotland within two years of independence, which he doesn't think is achievable. Now, I defy the self-styled 'realists' in the SNP's ranks to think this through logically and come to a different conclusion from the one I have reached.  It may well be that ..read more

I can claim an assist from Jackson Carlaw on this post, because I remember him trying to undermine the SNP's 2017 win by saying their margin of victory was the smallest in Scotland for a long time.  As Labour's margin of victory is even smaller than the SNP's in 2017, it was obviously going to look even less impressive by historical standards.   To avoid the customary objection from pedants, I'm referring to the pre-1965 Tory party by the official names of "Unionist" and "National Liberal", which were organisationally separate parties but to all and intents and purposes function ..read more

I repeatedly warned that if independence supporters were foolish enough to vote Labour last Thursday (which undoubtedly happened in large numbers, although in the vast majority of cases for "Daily Record" rather than "Stuart Campbell" type reasons), the media and the establishment would leap on the outcome and try to turn it into a generational 1979-style setback that would draw a line under independence for the foreseeable future.  We're seeing those attempts before our eyes right now, for example with Andrew Marr claiming that the 'risk' of the UK breaking up has "vanished" - an objecti ..read more