The good news continues, a record pro-indy majority in Holyrood is possible
Speymouth
Following on from yesterday’s exceptional news from a poll which gave independence a double digit lead, The National has followed up with Holyrood polling from the same poll, which, if replicated in the Scottish election which is now only a year away, would give the pro-independence parties a massive majority of 29 in Holyrood, with a combined pro-independence total of 79 seats as opposed to just 50 seats for all the anti-independence parties put together. This would represent a record breaking majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament. The SNP would win 57 seats, the Scottish Greens 15, Alba 7, for a pro-independence total of 79.
The SNP looks like being the main beneficiary of the collapse in support for Labour. It’s almost as though when you win a Westminster general election promising a respite from the performative cruelty of the Tories and then set about cutting benefits for the elderly and disabled, reneging on your promises to cut fuel bills, deliver compensation for Waspi women,save the Grangemouth workers’ jobs, while touting the possibility of tax cuts for tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk then no one with a functioning brain cell is going to believe a word you say any more, while those without functioning brain cells are going to vote for Nigel Farage’s pound shop fascists instead of the Labour party.
For the traditional unionist parties other than the Lib Dems this poll is cataclysmic. If replicated in May 2026 this poll would leave Labour on 14 seats, a loss of eight, while the Tories would perform even worse, losing 16 of the 31 seats they won in 2021 and being left with just 15, the LibDems would gain five seats to win 13 while the far right ghouls of Reform UK would get their claws into Holyrood with eight seats.
The poll suggests Labour would keep just 52% of its support from July’s General Election – losing voters to all parties, but particularly to Reform UK and the SNP (13% and 12% respectively). It beggars belief that there are people who voted Labour in July who will not vote for them again because Starmer turned out to be a Tory in a red tie but who will instead vote for a billionaire backed far right party which will out-Tory the Tories. But as millions of Scottish mammies have often remarked, there’s no accounting for stupid.
Despite the fact that this result would see the SNP win its fourth Scottish election in a row, would deliver a Scottish Parliament with a record majority for independence, and would be a disaster for all the anti-independence parties currently represented in Holyrood, you could expect Anas Sarwar – if he’s still the branch manager by then – and whatever human shaped unpleasantness leads the Scottish Tories, aided and abetted by BBC Scotland, to claim that the election “proves” that Scots don’t really want independence as the SNP won seven fewer seats than it did in 2021. Different electoral rules apply in Scotland, rules which the Westminster parties make up as they go along in order to suit themselves.
It is imperative that the pro-independence parties do not permit the anti-independence parties and their Westminster colleagues undermine the democratic will of the people of Scotland a second time as they did in 2021. This would render democracy in Scotland meaningless.
We know that no British Prime Minister will ever agree to a second Scottish independence referendum as long as there is an outside chance that the Yes campaign might win, and given the current state of opinion polling which does not continue the increasingly indefensible practice of weighting results by the outcome of an independence referendum held eleven years ago, Yes is going to win another independence referendum. I would bet my one functioning arm on it.
All Westminster can offer is high fuel bills, the extraction of Scotland’s natural wealth and resources, the further impoverishment of the poorest while the rich grow ever wealthier and a politics which drifts ever further to the right and which is now at the point where the fascist National Front of the 1970s and 80s would be alarmingly mainstream and its leaders platformed frequently in the British media. Prime Minister Nigel Farage is no longer an unrealistic prospect, and that would spell the end of Scotland as a meaningful political entity.
So there will be no section 30 order giving Holyrood the legal right to hold another independence referendum. The only route to independence now is via using an election as a de facto referendum and for the pro-independence parties to seek a mandate for independence itself, not a mandate for a referendum which will never be allowed. That is what the pro-independence parties must do in 2026. There is little point in wasting time and energy arguing about how best to game the system and boost pro-independence representation in Holyrood while winning less than 50% of votes cast. The route to victory lies in maximising the pro-Yes vote and maximising its turn out. The next Holyrood election must be fought on winning a mandate for independence itself, a convincing and indisputable mandate. Recent polling strongly suggests that that is within our grasp.
Westminster will quite naturally try and finagle its way out of the mandate for independence the Scottish people give to Holyrood by applying the rules of a referendum to an election, and claiming that less than 50% of the electorate voted for pro-independence parties, or by asserting as they did in 2021 that the result doesn’t count because the SNP did not win a majority by itself, or by arguing that the result is meaningless because Holyrood doesn’t have the legal right to legislate for independence, an example of circular reasoning if ever there was one. Or more likely they will attempt some combination of these tactics.
Countering this attempted theft of Scottish democracy which will be legitimised by most of the Scottish media, will take boldness, nerve, and imagination. But it can be done. The suggestion of respected writer Neal Ascherson that Scotland needs to take an ‘as if’ approach to independence and act as if it were already independent has much to recommend it. He calls this a policy of institutional disobedience. He explains it as follows:
“It means that a Scottish government might enact – and deliver – legislation which the Scotland Act forbids as ‘reserved’ – outwith the powers of the Scottish Parliament. In the same spirit, a Scottish government might decide – after approval by Holyrood – to impede or block the application of Westminster measures which the Act reserves to the United Kingdom parliament.”
This will of course provoke a constitutional crisis, but that is the point. When Westminster subverts and denies the democratic will of the people of Scotland as expressed through the ballot box, we are already in a constitutional crisis, the key to independence is to turn that crisis to the advantage of independence. No nation ever achieved it independence through caution and timidity. It’s time to be bold, and recent polling suggests there is an appetite in Scotland for boldness on independence.
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