A few days ago, I posted a critique of some polling analysis written by “Scottish Skier”, formerly a regular in the comments section of this blog, and since 2021 a regular in the comments section of the Wee Ginger Dug blog. Basically Skier claimed that the polls are completely wrong and that SNP voters have not been switching to Labour. That’s a very difficult claim to take seriously, given that even yesterday’s Ipsos poll, which used a completely different data collection method from other polls, shows that the SNP lead over Labour is much smaller than it was at the last general election, and that a substantial 14% of people who voted SNP in 2019 are now planning to vote Labour.
I’m grateful to “Independence for Scotland” for alerting me to the fact that Skier has responded to my piece. I took a look, and it really is quite an astoundingly angry and bitter reply. Ironically, Skier has instantly resorted to what might be called the Bath’ist playbook. He apparently has no plausible argument to offer against the critique, so instead he’s tried to pathologise the critique by suggesting its very existence is evidence of “stalking” or of mental illness. I’d just gently point out to him that he regularly posts what purports to be serious polling analysis in a prominent public space where it is presumably read by hundreds of people at the very least. If you go down that road, you can reasonably expect your work may well be critiqued in other public spaces, and there’s nothing unnatural or weird about that. If the “stalking” schtick is a tactic to try to deter me from writing similar critiques in the future, I’m afraid it’s likely to have precisely the opposite effect, as the Bath’ists themselves have previously discovered.
In his reply, Skier makes one specific claim about me that I can only describe as defamatory, and another claim that I’m highly dubious about. The defamatory claim is that I was adjudged three years ago to have been guilty of a breach of contract. That’s a ludicrous allegation without any basis in fact whatsoever. I’ve actually seen the correspondence he’s referring to, because he either sent it to me at the time or published it somewhere, and it quite simply does not contain the statement he claims it contains. Nor does it contain anything that could even plausibly be construed in that way.
The claim I’m merely dubious about is Skier’s suggestion that he put it to me that he and I should “team up for some joint work in the past when I used to post there, but he told me where to go”. I’m reluctant to call that a second outright lie, because I can’t totally rule out the possibility that something like that happened and I’ve somehow completely forgotten about it, but I very much doubt that’s the case. In fact I distinctly remember that just a few weeks before he threw his toys out of the pram about me joining the Alba Party, I had been seriously considering asking him if he’d like to team up for multiple episodes of an election podcast about polling. Although I’ve always thought some of his ideas about polling are a bit wacky and fantastical, he’s neverthless an articulate and provocative character, and I thought a joint podcast might work quite well. So if I was thinking along those lines, it seems pretty unlikely that I would have “told him where to go” if he had come to me with his own proposal. Obviously my reaction would have depended on the exact nature of the proposal, but I very much doubt I would have said anything like “sod off”, so what he’s claiming just doesn’t have the ring of truth to it at all.
What really does worry me, though, is that Skier goes on to double down on his claim that SNP voters haven’t switched to Labour, because he can’t think of any motivation for them to have done so. Several other WGD commenters are in complete and vigorous agreement with him on that point. What it reminds me of is Tories who reject polls showing support for independence because “I never meet anyone who supports independence” or “I can’t see any good reason why anyone rational would support independence”. Such claims always say much more about the people who make them – about their narrow-mindedness, their lack of imagination and empathy, or their limited social circle.
Anyone who thinks people can be expected to continue voting SNP by default (unless they have a reason for voting Labour that is strong enough to pass the “Skier test”) is potentially in for a very rude awakening, and so I just hope the delusion doesn’t extend to the SNP leadership itself. Many voters actually have the opposite default setting in Westminster elections – they’d be inclined to vote either Labour or Tory, depending on who they want in Downing Street, and it takes something quite special to get them to consider any other party. There have indeed been special circumstances over the last three general elections that have worked in the SNP’s favour, but most of those have gone now. For example, the SNP no longer have a leader who is far more liked and trusted than the counterparts from other parties. They’re no longer up against a Labour party thought to have little or no chance of winning in England. Their only real hope is to offset the loss of these advantages by making a strategic shift that can galvanise the Yes vote – and that has to mean a big and credible offer on independence.
I can at least thank Skier for one thing, though. I genuinely burst into prolonged, uncontrollable laughter when I saw that he had said of me: “If he ever shows his findings via graphs etc, I’d be interested in a head’s up. I don’t know how any analysis can be sensibly presented without this.” Never let it be said that our noted graph enthusiast is a walking caricature or anything like that. “If it’s not in a graph, it doesn’t exist!”
