A few days ago, Blair McDougall (mastermind of the original and self-styled “Project Fear” in 2014, for younger readers who don’t know who he is) announced that he was commissioning a poll to find out whether replacing Humza Yousaf with Kate Forbes would improve the SNP’s electoral fortunes. My immediate reaction was that Labour must have identified a Forbes leadership as the biggest threat to their chances in Scotland at the general election, and want to head that danger off by keeping Yousaf in harness at all costs. McDougall’s poll would therefore be callibrated to produce results intended to misleadingly give the SNP pause for thought about the electoral appeal of Forbes. Let’s face it, McDougall is a Machiavellian political actor – he’s often pretty rubbish at it, most notably when he talked East Renfrewshire up as a two horse race between himself and the SNP and ended up finishing third, but nevertheless that’s the scheming level on which his mind always operates. If he goes to all the trouble and expense of commissioning a poll, it’s hardly likely to be ‘curiosity driven’. It’ll have a very specific practical purpose in the service of the Labour party.
Predictably, then, McDougall has come up with a poll that purports to show Forbes as leader would not increase the SNP’s vote. It may look like the question he asked was neutral enough, ie. whether people would be more likely or less likely to vote SNP if Forbes becomes leader, but the problem is that there are now enough people out there who hate the SNP that if you ask whether pretty much any hypothetical scenario would make them more likely or less likely to vote SNP, you’ll get a negative response because a significant minority of respondents will want to use every question to bash the party if at all possible. Pretty much the only exception to that would be if the hypothetical scenario is every voter getting a free supply of beer for life.
McDougall knew that perfectly well from previous polls, of course, which is why he framed the question in the way that he did. Don’t fall for this ruse – if he really thought a Forbes leadership would work in Labour’s favour, he’d be talking her up for all that he’s worth, not talking her down. There are various ways in which public opinion could have been more meaningfully tested, for example by asking people whether a Yousaf leadership or a Forbes leadership would make them more likely to vote SNP. That way the question would have become genuinely about the individuals and not a proxy for SNP-bashing, and it probably would have come out firmly in Forbes’ favour, bearing in mind how consistently she outpolls Yousaf on net approval ratings.
If money was no object (which certainly isn’t the case) and I was able to commission another Scot Goes Pop poll in the near future, I’d try to explore this issue in some depth. However, I don’t actually think McDougall’s stunt will reduce Forbes’ chances of becoming leader, even if there are no alternative polls to challenge the narrative he’s trying to weave. If Yousaf is toppled before the general election, it’ll be for negative reasons about his own leadership rather than positive reasons about his likely successor. Some sort of major shock to the SNP’s system would probably have to trigger it. Remember that the 2004 European election result was enough to bring John Swinney down as leader even though, unlike now, there was absolutely no expectation that a more popular leader would step into the breach. (We all wrongly assumed that a return for Alex Salmond wasn’t a realistic option.)
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My blogpost last Thursday, about the difficulty of keeping Scot Goes Pop going for much longer due to lack of funds, produced a substantial response. Not all of it is visible on the fundraiser page itself because around half the donations were made directly via Paypal, but over £700 has been raised since I posted. The fundraiser remains well short of its target, but I’ll certainly keep going for as long as I possibly can, and there’s still some sort of chance I may be able to keep going indefinitely, depending on what happens over the next few weeks. Many thanks to everyone who has donated, and if anyone else would like to contribute, the fundraiser page can be found HERE. Alternatively, direct payments can be made via Paypal – my Paypal email address is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
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