After the election, the Alba support base was derided as a “Twitter bubble” – meaning something that seemed hugely strong on social media but barely existed elsewhere. That’s actually not true – you don’t get to 2% of the vote (enough to fill a large stadium) from social media diehards alone. A better example of a bubble phenomenon was the Bella Caledonia campaign in 2011 to persuade people to spoil their ballots in the AV referendum by writing the word “INDEPENDENCE”. A ‘masterstroke’ was how they described the wheeze, but the number of people who actually did it was vanishingly small.
There’s a more subtle variant of the bubble, too, and that’s when the nature of support for a very popular party is mischaracterised. How many times over the last few weeks have we heard the SNP’s win being appropriated as a vindication for GRA reform? Kirsty Blackman used words to the effect that “Scotland wants GRA reform and we must deliver”. Jack Deeth, one of the young identity politics extremists that I was finally forced to block on Twitter a few days ago, currently has a pinned tweet claiming that for every one person that defected from the SNP to Alba, two would rejoin (just like him!) because of self-ID. The impression we’re supposed to get is that “middle Scotland”, the quiet majority of decent people, are just gagging for GRA reform and decide how to vote largely on that basis. With all due respect, that’s every bit as fantastical as some of the more outlandish predictions we heard during April about how Alba might fare. The vast majority of people, regardless of whether they actively oppose GRA reform or don’t care about it, do not give the SNP any brownie points for prioritising it. As Alex Massie noted the other day, if the SNP haven’t taken an electoral hit from the GRA yet, that’s partly because people intuitively don’t believe that Nicola Sturgeon means her “trans women are women” statement quite as literally and inflexibly as she actually does. Just because this stuff seems totally mainstream to a small number of entryists who now wield vastly disproportionate influence within the SNP, that doesn’t mean people out in the real world see things in the same way.
One of those entryists is Mark McGeoghegan, who has spent the last few months marketing himself as a polling expert, and has used that platform to give the veneer of analytical objectivity to some of the downright bizarre claims he’s made in support of his anti-Alba hate campaign. For example, he said in the run-up to the election that, while he couldn’t prove that Yes support had dipped because moderate people (the army of self-ID supporters, presumably!) were being put off by Alba, that was obviously the reason and anyone who didn’t agree with him about that was a zoomer. A serious analyst would have just stopped at the “couldn’t prove” bit, because the idea that Yes support was being significantly affected by a small party receiving negligible coverage is self-evidently in the realms of fantasy.
What Mark really means is that he personally finds Alba ghastly and thinks the rest of Scotland looks like him (and that if it doesn’t, it should). This tweet, offered as a parting shot after I blocked him, Deeth and a number of the others, made me laugh –
At what point do we worry about failures of self-awareness? This is, after all, a chap who is so obsessed with Alba that he’s been ‘hilariously’ substituting the party’s correct name with ‘Abla’ each and every time he’s mentioned them over the last two months – which is quite a lot. Real people, of course, not only don’t find that remotely amusing, they don’t even know why they’re supposed to be laughing.
When your relentless attack lines are only understood by an in-group who are in on an in-joke, that’s a pretty strong indication that you’re on the inside of the bubble looking out, not the other way around.
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