On 22nd May of this year, the Scottish Daily Express website published one of its regular wildly misleading articles about Scottish independence opinion polling, and it once again strayed into outright falsehood on one key point. It claimed that “in fact, ‘Yes’ has only been higher than 46 per cent twice this year – both in polls carried on for the anti-Britain The National newspaper”. By definition that claim is a lie, because The National have only commissioned one poll this year – indeed, to the best of my knowledge that’s the one and only poll they’ve ever commissioned in their whole nine-year existence. Because the Express were referring to the numbers prior to Don’t Knows being stripped out, the second poll they were referring to can only have been the Find Out Now poll I personally commissioned for Scot Goes Pop in March. Before the exclusion of Don’t Knows, that poll had Yes on 50% and No on 46%. So the Express were falsely claiming that both polls with a high Yes vote had been commissioned by The National, when in fact only one of them had been. The clear implication was that the results of the polls were somehow suspect or less credible due to both having been supposedly commissioned by exactly the same “anti-Britain” client. Presumably we were supposed to believe The National had somehow been able to ‘influence’ or ‘direct’ the results of the polls, even though Find Out Now is affiliated to the British Polling Council and abides by that organisation’s strict rules.
Having commissioned the March poll, I’m ideally placed to state beyond all doubt that The National had nothing whatever to do with it, not even informally. I paid a significant sum of money for the poll from funds that had been contributed by generous Scot Goes Pop readers. I spent probably around two weeks in quite complicated discussions with Find Out Now over the wordings of the supplementary questions in the poll, involving several phone calls, one video call, and goodness knows how much drafting and redrafting. I didn’t even inform The National of the poll’s existence until after I received the results, which to my surprise included an outright Yes lead on the headline independence question. For the record, I’m still on perfectly good terms with The National, but it won’t surprise you to discover that they’ve contacted me far, far, far less often since I joined the Alba Party in 2021, and it’s probably safe to assume there’s a direct cause-and-effect explanation there. When I realised the poll was newsworthy enough that The National might want to report it, I even had to check who the new editor was, and you might have seen my increasingly frantic attempts on Twitter to try to attract the attention of the paper’s reporters, because I initially couldn’t make any contact at all. So any notion that I was somehow in cahoots with The National, or acting as their proxy, is utterly ludicrous.
When the Express published their lie, I was still waiting to hear back from the “press regulator” IPSO – in reality a self-regulator set up as window dressing by the press themselves – about the final outcome of my earlier complaint against the same publication for a lie published in October 2022. (That complaint was eventually upheld, but the only ‘punishment’ imposed on the Express, which I’m sure must have devastated them, was to be allowed to keep up their bogus ‘correction’ in which they reiterated the same lie in very slightly modified form.) That was an incredibly gruelling process that took around seven or eight months, so I certainly wasn’t going to jump into a fresh complaint lightly, but given that the Express’s new lie directly related to me, it was difficult to just let it pass. I talked it over with friends, including an Englishman who is a million miles removed from Scottish politics and was thus able to be totally objective, and they all agreed that what the Express had published passed the threshold of ‘what really ought to be complained about’, irrespective of the chances of success with IPSO. There was an absolutely clear-cut factual inaccuracy, and it was being used to support an implication of poll-manipulation that would have carried significantly less credibility and plausibility if readers had known that the claim was false. So with a certain degree of weariness I decided to take the plunge.
On this occasion, IPSO’s ‘bouncers’ refused to let the complaint get past the first hurdle, ie. they dismissed it out of hand without passing it on to their Complaints Committee for a full-scale ruling. As usual, however, their ‘reasoning’ – such as it was – will raise a few eyebrows. They freely accepted that the Express had not told the truth to readers, because only one of the two polls being referred to had been commissioned by The National. However, they felt that the only salient point was that the Express had identified The National as “anti-Britain”, which they apparently regarded as both an accurate characterisation and one that is synonymous with “pro-independence”. Because the second poll had also been commissioned by a pro-independence client, ie. me, they felt it had essentially come from the same source as the first poll – yes, IPSO apparently regard every single pro-independence person, organisation and publication in Scotland as all being part of the same amorphous ‘Blob’, which acts with a single will. They therefore believed the Express had not told a particularly important lie because it was such a close approximation to the truth. That raises the obvious question of whether IPSO’s worldview also includes the existence of an equivalent unionist ‘Blob’, encompassing the likes of such disparate publications as the Daily Record and the Spectator, and regards them as all exactly the same entity. It seems rather unlikely somehow, doesn’t it?
The reality is, though, that the Express did not identify The National as “pro-independence” but very specifically as “anti-Britain”. IPSO’s suggestion that I was merely another part of The National’s “Blob”, and that by extension the source of the two polls was to all intents and purposes the same, could thus only make sense if they were inferring that I, too, was “anti-Britain”. When I prepared my initial complaint, I seriously considered taking issue with the claim that The National was anti-Britain, but I decided against it because I can’t claim to have read more than a fraction of The National’s output since 2014, and I thus can’t exclude the possibility that it has occasionally included IRA-style or Gaddafi-style anti-British material – I very much doubt it but it’s theoretically possible. But I know for absolutely certain that neither I nor Scot Goes Pop are “anti-Britain”, so I certainly wasn’t going to stand for that sort of baseless implied allegation from a so-called “press regulator”. I was allowed an appeal to the Complaints Committee against the decision of the “bouncers” (the appeals process is just for show, of course, appeals are rarely if ever successful), and this is what I said –
“Yes, I would like to request that your decision is reviewed by the Complaints Committee, for the following two reasons –
1) You have arbitrarily disregarded the meaning of the statement that the Express actually made, ie. that they were implying that the results of the two polls were somehow suspect or less reliable due to having been commissioned by *exactly the same client*. If they had intended to make the implication that you attribute to them, ie. that polls can still be regarded as suspect if they are commissioned by more than one client, as long as those clients all happen to share the same view on independence, they would have done so. But they did not – they clearly and falsely stated that only one client was involved. This makes a crucial difference, because if they had made the statement you attribute to them, rather than the one they actually did make, it would have carried significantly less credibility. Readers might find it plausible that a single client could somehow have found a way of ‘influencing’ the results of a poll conducted by a reputable polling firm, but the more clients are supposed to have pulled off this feat, the less plausible it becomes that it could really have happened. Your suggestion that the false claim in the article that both polls were commissioned by the same client is somehow an ‘insignificant inaccuracy’ is thus without any foundation.
2) You hinge your decision entirely on a false conflation between the terms “pro-independence” and “anti-Britain” – in other words, because you apparently agree with the Express that The National can be accurately described as “anti-Britain”, and because you have found that my blog is described as “pro-independence”, and because you apparently think the terms “anti-Britain” and “pro-independence” are identical in meaning, you therefore think it doesn’t really matter that the Express falsely attributed one of the two polls to The National rather than to me. This amounts to an implied allegation (and to be clear, this is an implied allegation made by you on behalf of IPSO, and not by the Express) that I and the blog I write are “anti-Britain”. That is a baseless smear against me, and is bordering on defamatory in much the same way as any allegation that an opponent of independence is “anti-Scotland” (such extreme allegations are rarely made these days, and when they are, they are invariably denounced by all sides). I do not wish Scotland to cease to be a British nation. I am not opposed to British culture, or British values, or the British way of life. I do not wish Scotland to withdraw from the British-Irish Council. I do not wish Scotland to withdraw from the Common Travel Area of the British Isles. I wish the three countries that share the island of Great Britain to enter into a more mature and mutually beneficial pan-British relationship based on interdependence, respect, full self-government, and a continued British social union. That does not make me “anti-British” any more than a supporter of continued Norwegian independence is “anti-Scandinavian”. Ask yourself this – would you even dream of calling a supporter of Norwegian independence “anti-Scandinavian”? Of course you wouldn’t. Then ask yourself *why* you wouldn’t. Because you intuitively know it is absurd, and self-evidently the polar opposite of the truth. Norway is a Scandinavian nation, and believing in Norway makes a person *pro-Scandinavian*, not anti-Scandinavian. Exactly the same principle applies to Scotland. The term “Britain” is not synonymous with “whatever territory happens to be politically ruled by London at any given moment”. It’s instead the name of the island shared equally by the nations of Scotland, Wales and England, and that will always be shared equally by them, irrespective of the political arrangements of the day.
I am not personally aware of any evidence that The National is, as the Express allege, an “anti-Britain” newspaper, and therefore that wording in the article probably constitutes an inaccuracy in its own right. What I can tell you for absolutely certain, however, is that neither I nor my blog are “anti-Britain”, and as the logic of your decision rests wholly on your erroneous belief that I am, your decision is thus fatally flawed and must be revisited.
I would be grateful if you’d let me know that this email requesting a review of your decision has been safely received within the seven-day period that you specified.”
