Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024

Hi, my name is James Kelly and for sixteen years I've been writing Scot Goes Pop, consistently one of the most popular pro-independence blogs in Scotland. With its distinct focus on opinion polls (although not to the exclusion of other subjects), it has been able to challenge the conventional narratives about polls that are mostly set by the unionist media.

During the 2014 referendum campaign, I was able to demonstrate that the position was nowhere near as hopeless for the Yes side as was often portrayed by the media, and just after the referendum was over, I was faster than anyone in the mainstream media (I think literally) to spot and point out the extraordinary swing that was occurring from Labour to the SNP.

With your help, Scot Goes Pop has also commissioned several opinion polls of its own from reputable polling firms affiliated to the British Polling Council. Some of these were genuinely landmark polls, for example our poll in June 2020 was the first in the famous long unbroken sequence of Yes-majority polls that lasted for around a year, while the 56% for Yes in our November 2020 poll was the highest ever Yes vote in a Panelbase poll, and one of the highest ever in any type of poll.

In 2021, I also started a 'Scot Goes Popcast' to accompany the blog, in which (among other things) I interviewed a number of fascinating guests including the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond. There have been numerous spin-offs from the blog - I've been a monthly columnist for iScot magazine since 2017 and I've written extensive poll analysis for The National newspaper since 2015. I've been interviewed for TV and radio, including for BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio Five Live, Al Jazeera, the Bauer radio network and CTV News (Canada).

This is general election year, with the most likely date for polling day being October or November. That means the number of published Scottish opinion polls is likely to steadily increase as the year progresses (with perhaps a little lull in the summer). With your help I hope to be able to provide Scot Goes Pop's usual standard of coverage of the coming vote, which will be a genuine political crossroads for Scotland as a whole and for the independence movement in particular. The funds raised will help give me the flexibility to drop everything (circumstances permitting!) and post analysis whenever a new poll comes out. It will also help cover various miscellaneous "running costs", such as the small monthly fee for podcast hosting. And if the full target is reached, I will put some of the funds towards commissioning a new poll. Any donations, whether large or small, will be tremendously helpful.

You can learn a bit more about Scot Goes Pop from the promotional video below.