SNP leadership election

[aaid]

17 minutes ago, Alibi said:

Wings has generally been on the button. That's why so many people turned on him when he started posting stuff they didn't like.

That’s not strictly true.  I actually learnt a lot from Wings in 2014 about how the media misrepresent things and make something appear to be different from what it was.

it was when he started his transgender obsession and started using the same tricks and techniques he’d been exposing that I realised he was full of shit.

I suspect he taught a load of people too well.

Those that still hang on his every word and believe him regardless we’re obviously not paying attention to what he was saying.  It’s a shame because when you know, it’s very easy to see it.

[aaid]

1 hour ago, Ally Bongo said:

That’s just a naked political stunt to attempt to embarrass Nicola Sturgeon and by implication Humza Yousaf.   I’m not really sure what difference the number of voters makes to the process of the collection of votes.  

For arguments sake, let’s say HQ come out and say it’s 75,000 - what are they going to do, ask for everyone’s name and phone them up?

Edited March 15, 2023 by aaid

[Ally Bongo]

https://scotgoespop.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-liz-truss-episode-is-warning-from.html

Last summer, the Tories held a leadership contest in which the polls showed the public had a clear preference between the contenders - they wanted Rishi Sunak rather than Liz Truss.  Tory members made the opposite choice, which perhaps wasn't surprising given what tends to happen when parties have been in power for a very long time.  Parties that have been out of government for an eternity, such as Labour in the early-to-mid 1990s, are generally pretty disciplined in looking at what will help them connect with the public and doing whatever it takes to get elected, even if that means stepping outside their own comfort zone in their choice of leader.  But after a decade or more in government, complacency often sets in, and there's a tendency to just stay inside the comfort zone with the choice of leader and to expect the public to learn to live with the person you've selected.  That can be a very dangerous game if the leader is not just someone the public wouldn't have chosen, but someone who polls show the public actively dislikes.  We know only too well that the Tories paid an incredibly heavy penalty for defying the public with their selection of Truss, and indeed that the heaviest penalty of all probably still lies in store for them.

If the SNP elect the unpopular Humza Yousaf as their leader, it will be an act of complacent self-indulgence comparable to the election of Truss, although the nature of the self-indulgence will be somewhat different.  It starts with the fact that Yousaf is the hand-picked successor of the faction that currently controls the SNP, and in that sense the mistake of anointing him can be compared with the Corbynites' strategic blunder in betting the house on Rebecca Long-Bailey rather than a more suitable left-winger such as Clive Lewis.  They had fallen in love with the idea that they had control of the party machinery and effectively control of the membership, and could thus install whoever they wanted - but in retrospect it's obvious that they would have been far better off making the hardheaded choice of rejecting Long-Bailey in favour of Lewis.  In the SNP's case, it's still possible the current leadership will 'get away' with making the poor selection of Yousaf,  but if they do, it will be for all the wrong reasons.  It won't primarily be about ideological purity in the way that it was with Truss (although admittedly the identity politics divide is playing a big role), it'll be more about factionalism, and personal loyalties, and even sentimentality to some extent. If a member votes for Yousaf mainly because John Swinney tells them to, ultimately that boils down to a sentimental attachment to Swinney after so many decades of him being around in a senior role.

If Yousaf wins, I don't expect the wheels to come off quite as quickly as they did with Truss.  But even if he learns from Truss' mistake and governs circumspectly over the coming months, there's one ticking time-bomb that he can't avoid for very long.  A Westminster general election will almost certainly take place next year (most likely in May, June or October), and the SNP would be going into that battle with a leader who has significantly poorer public approval ratings than either the UK Labour leader Keir Starmer, or the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.  Given that Westminster elections are 'away fixtures' for the SNP where the media won't allow them to compete with the UK-wide parties on a level playing-field, and given that Labour will have momentum behind them as they seek to eject the Tories from power after a decade and a half, it's not hard to see where this ends.  In my judgement (to use the late Paddy Ashdown's favourite pompous phrase), there is a greater than 50% probability - perhaps far greater than 50% - that a Yousaf-led SNP would lose their position next year as the majority party among Scottish MPs at Westminster.

That event would shock the SNP membership to their core.  It might lead to Yousaf swiftly being deposed, and you could imagine that the subsequent leadership contest may boil down to a battle between Kate Forbes and Angus Robertson.  If that had been the line-up in the current contest, Robertson would have been favourite to win, but it would be a very different story after a landmark Westminster defeat.  As was the case for Sunak last autumn, Forbes would be in pole position as the popular runner-up who history had proved completely right.  It would be plain for all to see that 'continuity didn't cut it', and in all likelihood the SNP would belatedly install the First Minister that the public had wanted all along.

But the real warning from history is this: even though Sunak became Prime Minister only one month later than he would have done if he had defeated Truss in the summer, he inherited a completely different legacy.  If he had won at the first time of asking, he would have taken over a Tory party that was only slightly behind Labour in the polls.  He would probably have either maintained that position or improved on it.  Instead, he came in when polls were pointing to a landslide defeat for the Tories, and thus far he hasn't been able to turn that around, because the damage Truss did in her short period in office was simply too great.

A post-Yousaf SNP could face a similar fate.  The SNP have defied gravity in the last three UK general elections by winning a majority in Scotland, but if Labour return to being the majority party, the new Labour MPs will start enjoying an incumbency boost and they will be very, very difficult to dislodge.  The SNP would retreat to being what they were prior to 2015 - essentially a Holyrood-only party.  Now, in fairness, Alex Salmond took Scotland to the brink of independence in 2014 without much of an SNP presence at Westminster.  But here's the thing: both leadership frontrunners are now saying that the way in which we almost won independence in 2014 is no longer good enough.  50% + 1 of the vote on a single day won't do anymore, apparently, we need "sustained supermajorities".  That being the case, permanently throwing away the tremendous leverage of a pro-independence majority among Scottish MPs at Westminster is self-evidently a luxury we cannot afford - and yet that is precisely what the SNP are flirting with by even thinking of someone as unpopular as Yousaf as their new leader.

[Ally Bongo]

1 hour ago, aaid said:

That’s just a naked political stunt to attempt to embarrass Nicola Sturgeon and by implication Humza Yousaf.   I’m not really sure what difference the number of voters makes to the process of the collection of votes.  

For arguments sake, let’s say HQ come out and say it’s 75,000 - what are they going to do, ask for everyone’s name and phone them up?

MSM Monitor has deactivated his account after a last swipe at Kate Forbes because of this letter

[aaid]

9 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

MSM Monitor has deactivated his account after a last swipe at Kate Forbes because of this letter

I thought he had blocked you.

[Ally Bongo]

38 minutes ago, aaid said:

I thought he had blocked you.

He had

Someone retweeted someone else mentioning it and i saw it Einstein

 

Child of Alba

 

@ChildOfAlba

 

 

To everyone wondering what’s happened to MSM Monitor - he’s given up. Deactivated his account. He was tweeting about attempts to discredit election then suddenly tweeted he’d had enough & that Twitter used to be good place for Indy movement.

 

 

Edited March 15, 2023 by Ally Bongo

[Caledonian Craig]

8 hours ago, Malcolm said:

what if you want independence but don’t want the snp, or labour, or the Lib Dems and certainly not the greens?

It depends what you want most. I am staggered you have not fathomed out that the Tories are as anti-independence as you can get. A vote for that collection of scum candidates is as far removed from support for independence you can get. The desire for independence is part driven by desire to rid Scotland of Tory rule - that has blighted this country for far too long.

[Ally Bongo]

4 minutes later the account was deactivated

 

 

Edited March 15, 2023 by Ally Bongo

[PapofGlencoe]

1 hour ago, Ally Bongo said:

MSM Monitor has deactivated his account after a last swipe at Kate Forbes because of this letter

i feel his/her exasperation.  It's really trumpy stuff this from these candidates at this stage.  Murrell is overpaid and questionable but to make these insinuations is really low, we all know what they're doing.  There is no evidence to call impropriety here.  Will we be getting Rudy Giuliani involved soon?

Twitter has eaten up the indy movement- from the patronising SNP to the Alba zoomers.  London just needed to let the over zealous, opinionated arses fester and it's worked a treat.  There's no listening going on.  

[Lobey]

Going into an election for the next First Minister of the country and we don't even know how many folk are eligible to vote seems farcical.

[Ally Bongo]

48 minutes ago, Lobey said:

Going into an election for the next First Minister of the country and we don't even know how many folk are eligible to vote seems farcical.

Exactly - but it's Regan and Forbes that are the problem because they made their request public ?

Maybe if there was more transparency within SNP HQ they wouldn't have needed to and lack of it has been a big problem for a while regarding finances and membership numbers

[Squirrelhumper]

56 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

Exactly - but it's Regan and Forbes that are the problem because they made their request public ?

Maybe if there was more transparency within SNP HQ they wouldn't have needed to and lack of it has been a big problem for a while regarding finances and membership numbers

I think the membership numbers are the tip of the iceberg. 

[Ally Bongo]

It looks as though the MSM Monitor account may have been used by SNP staffers

In February it was quite sympathetic to the attacks on Forbes because of her religion but it quickly reversed tack and became a Humza fan account

[Ally Bongo]

1 minute ago, Squirrelhumper said:

I think the membership numbers are the tip of the iceberg. 

The NEC are meeting tomorrow to "discuss it" according to Mhairi Murrell Hunter

Discuss whether to release member numbers ?

Discuss sanctioning Regan and Forbes ?

Discuss what happens after they release the numbers ?

Discuss what else they might be asked to divulge if they release them ?

[Squirrelhumper]

2 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

It looks as though the MSM Monitor account may have been used by SNP staffers

In February it was quite sympathetic to the attacks on Forbes because of her religion but it quickly reversed tack and became a Humza fan account

Probably deleting before they get rumbled.

[Squirrelhumper]

Just now, Ally Bongo said:

The NEC are meeting tomorrow to "discuss it" according to Mhairi Murrell Hunter

Discuss whether to release member numbers ?

Discuss sanctioning Regan and Forbes ?

Discuss what happens after they release the numbers ?

Discuss what else they might be asked to divulge if they release them ?

It seems bizarre and smacks of a stitch up.

It should be a very easy/,transparent process.

[Orraloon]

2 hours ago, Lobey said:

Going into an election for the next First Minister of the country and we don't even know how many folk are eligible to vote seems farcical.

How many members does Scottish labour have? How about the Tories?

Most folk don't have a clue how many folk are eligible to vote in a general election and most don't even care. 

[Squirrelhumper]

10 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

How many members does Scottish labour have? How about the Tories?

Most folk don't have a clue how many folk are eligible to vote in a general election and most don't even care. 

Ian Murray said he had full disclosure of the labour membership when he was running.

It's not a general election. It's a leadership for a political party. I'd say those running should be privy to that information. What good does hiding it do?

[Orraloon]

7 hours ago, Squirrelhumper said:

Ian Murray said he had full disclosure of the labour membership when he was running.

It's not a general election. It's a leadership for a political party. I'd say those running should be privy to that information. What good does hiding it do?

What was he running for?

That information for Scottish Labour hasn't been publicly available for a long time now. At least a decade.

I am guessing that any reasons they have for not disclosing membership information hasn't got anything to do with the election. I am very surprised that the candidates don't already know what the membership numbers are. I would have thought somebody with aspirations to lead the party would have made an effort to find that out long before now.

[aaid]

8 hours ago, Ally Bongo said:

It looks as though the MSM Monitor account may have been used by SNP staffers

In February it was quite sympathetic to the attacks on Forbes because of her religion but it quickly reversed tack and became a Humza fan account

So what you’re saying is that the SNP have actually been doing something to rebut bias in the MSM. 

[hampden_loon2878]

this is exactly why we need Forbes or even ash to win this

[TDYER63]

It should be pretty easy to work out how many members the SNP has. Every branch has a list of their members and a total, its not exactly rocket science to add them all together. 

[Orraloon]

16 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

It should be pretty easy to work out how many members the SNP has. Every branch has a list of their members and a total, its not exactly rocket science to add them all together. 

I don't think counting them is the problem.

[aaid]

10 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

It should be pretty easy to work out how many members the SNP has. Every branch has a list of their members and a total, its not exactly rocket science to add them all together. 

HQ will know exactly how many members there are. I’ve no issue with them releasing those numbers but I can’t see what difference it makes if it’s 10,000 or 100,000.   Maybe someone who is calling for the numbers to be released can explain it but I won’t be holding my breathe. 

This is all Trump bullshit that is designed to cast doubt on the integrity of the election.  I see Kate Forbes is demanding independent auditors.  The whole process is being run by an independent company - how independent do they want it to be?   Calling into question the election before it’s complete and while voting is running is very dangerous.  

[aaid]

51 minutes ago, hampden_loon2878 said:

this is exactly why we need Forbes or even ash to win this

please explain. 

Edited March 16, 2023 by aaid