I did my periodical search yesterday to see if there were any new Scottish opinion polls out, and there weren’t any, but it drew my attention to something else that is rather surprising and that might be of interest – The National are running an unofficial readers’ poll about whether the SNP should use the ballot paper description “Yes to Independence” at the general election. At time of writing, 1253 people have voted in the poll, with 75% in favour of the idea and 25% opposed. I’d like to suggest everyone votes in the poll and bumps up the Yes vote as much as possible, because a ballot description like that, coupled with the top line in the manifesto stating that a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence, would make it very difficult to argue after the event that the election was not a de facto referendum on independence. You can vote in the poll HERE.
I know some people may be suspicious, because The National are running the poll in response to a suggestion from Toni Giugliano, who is one of the SNP’s nearest equivalents to Labour’s notorious Luke Akehurst. He’s perhaps not quite as powerful as Akehurst, but the similarity is that he’s an open, unapologetic Godfather of factionalism, who preaches the virtues of division and exclusion at every opportunity – perhaps on the theory that driving enough of Yousaf’s critics out of the SNP would synthetically produce ‘unity’, albeit with a hollowed out base, which is the very definition of a pyrrhic victory. So yes, doubtless he has some kind of convoluted factional / careerist motivation for making this suggestion, but here’s the thing – it doesn’t really matter what the motivation is for holding a de facto referendum or something similar to one, because it empowers voters anyway. It’s up to voters to decide what to do with that power, and if they use it to choose independence, the SNP leadership will find they are on a train that they are not actually driving. The pressure to deliver on an independence mandate will have a momentum of its own. The important thing is to lock them into something as close as possible to a de facto referendum while the chance is there, and if they believe they’re doing it for their own self-interested reasons, so much the better, because it makes them more likely to see it through.
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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year’s fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it’s been partially successful – it’s around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500. Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there’s very little point in leaving the job half-done – that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping. We wouldn’t necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made. Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be? Obviously it’s partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it’s far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it’s pumping out a “purist” message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum – ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed. Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes. But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as “being in the scunnered middle”) have their place. A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE. Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man). My Paypal email address is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
