Wings Over Scotland

We’re supposed to be taking a few days off, but it’s been tipping it down outside for 36 solid hours, so when an alert reader emailed us a question relating to this article from Monday, we couldn’t help but go and research it just to pass some time.

They’d asked how many of the Tory MSPs elected last Thursday had been rejected by the voters of a constituency seat on the same day, and we were startled by the answer – of the 24 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament elected on the list last week, every single one was also a failed constituency candidate.

And that got us thinking.

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In amongst a torrent of pretty mad analysis of the election result at the weekend, we noticed the most insane reason yet suggested for the loss of the SNP’s majority:

The co-founder of a much-lauded but little-read pro-independence website asserted that the SNP were cruising to victory until the Nats got the backing of the Scottish Sun and Nicola Sturgeon was pictured posing with the front cover endorsing her party.

The whole litany of gaping flaws in that argument is something the Yes movement has needed to talk about for some considerable time now. So let’s bite the bullet and do it.

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We’ll just leave this here:

Actual percentage of female MSPs returned in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election:

Labour 46%, SNP 43%, Conservative 19%, Green 16%, Lib Dem 0%.

Hmm.

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A few weeks ago we rather cruelly highlighted an old post from Kezia Dugdale’s blog in which she bitterly bemoaned the practice of candidates who’d been rejected by voters in constituency seats still being able to get into Parliament via the “back door” of the regional lists.

Angrily Dugdale raged:

“Alex Salmond will try every trick in the book to get elected to the Scottish Parliament. Standing for both a constituency and a list seat this May doesn’t even register in his party’s mindset as being inappropriate.“

She also had a swing at a Lib Dem MSP:

“Mike Pringle has a majority of 158. He is I think, the third most marginal MSP in Scotland. Aware of his vulnerability, Mike has put his name forward for the Liberal Democrat Lothian List which means it’s nearly impossible to get rid of him at the next election. How unfair is that?”

So, y’know, she had this coming.

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The social-media reaction to this post yesterday was astonishing. Merely pointing out calmly and quietly that our warnings before the election had been entirely vindicated, and that everyone else’s unequivocal assertions of a guaranteed SNP majority had been the rubbish we always said they were, unleashed a torrent of abuse equal to any we’ve ever endured in the last four and a half years – distinguished only by the fact that so much of this one came from supposed Yes supporters.

But no amount of screaming and shouting will change the facts. Let’s look at them.

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The first (and from our perspective, most important) thing to note is that independence is now categorically and unequivocally off the table for at least half a decade.

The failure of the SNP to secure another Holyrood majority last night (for the want of just 360 votes) combined with the Greens’ weasel-worded opposition to a second referendum – and make no mistake, opposition is what it is – will ensure that even if the rUK votes to leave the EU and Scotland votes overwhelmingly to stay in, there will be no indyref before the next Holyrood election in 2021.

Whatever else happens, you can take that to the bank.

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The voting’s over. Let’s see how these get on, shall we?

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Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

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In so far as this Holyrood election has been a battle at all, the battleground for it has been tax. Not only the Unionist opposition but the pro-indy left have attacked the SNP for timidity over its plans to keep income tax rates the same as the rest of the UK, with only a tweak on the threshold for the top rate.

In their defence the Nats have deployed a line that’s been widely derided as an old Tory argument derived from the so-called “Laffer curve”, but in fact is nothing of the sort. It centres around the ways wealthy people legally shield their income from tax, but there’s a very specific and very important wrinkle that applies only in the particular case of a devolved, not independent, Scotland.

It’s not at all complicated but it’s absolutely crucial, and it’s barely been discussed on even the most superficial level in any supposed analyses of the situation undertaken in the media, so as usual we suppose it’s going to be down to us to do the job.

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The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.

That was a quick switch.

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It’s been quite a 24 hours for watchers of the UK media. The Sunday papers saw two of the most demented rants to have been committed to print about Scottish politics since the independence referendum.

One came from Neil Oliver in the Sunday Times – painting a blood-curdling picture of a “second hate-fest” should Scots ever choose to debate the subject again – and the other from Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Express, beside itself with unhinged rage that Scots, having voted to remain in the UK, might exercise their right as UK citizens to also vote to remain in the EU.

(As a result of which we’ve concluded that a narrow rUK vote in favour of Leave being overturned by a huge margin in Scotland for Remain would be the funniest thing that had ever happened in British politics.)

They were joined this morning by David Torrance in the Herald wailing that “Scottish nationalists and Brexiteers have much in common. Both are utterly vacuous” (which readers might feel was a bit rich coming from the unchallenged master of vacuity) and blaming the parlous state of Scottish political discourse mainly on this site and the vile cartoonist Greg Moodie – along, of course, with the ever-dastardly SNP.

Such was the onslaught, in fact, that Fraser “I’d put £1000 on Ed Miliband to win the election” Nelson of the Spectator, of all people, turned up as the voice of reason.

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We must confess, we don’t recall when this happened.

If anyone can help us out, please do.

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