Wings Over Scotland

The last faint hope of any remotely positive or at least interesting outcome of May’s election just left the building.

It wasn’t MUCH of a hope, and it’s absolutely no surprise in the wake of the comically shambolic, belief-defyingly inept farce that has been the birth of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s fringe-of-the fringe Your Party, but all the same its extinguishing means the next two months will be even more of a waste of time than they looked like being.

Frankly, readers, we may as well not bother having an election at all.

Firstly because it’d save a fortune. A whopping 40 MSPs are standing down at the election, and they’ll all be eligible for redundancy payments (called “resettlement grants”), and some will also be eligible for additional payments for standing down as ministers or officeholders – we reckon Alison Johnstone, the current Presiding Officer, will score the biggest payday, picking up a tidy £105,706.

Most will trouser the maximum (£77,710), and the total will be in the region of £2.65 million. That’s a heck of a wedge for hard-pressed taxpayers to be laying out just because people have voluntarily decided they don’t want their jobs any more. (It’s not like we’re SAVING anything from their redundancies, because their roles will be taken over by new gravy-seekers.)

But it’s small beer compared to the overall cost of the election, which will be in the region of £50 million. The 2026-27 budget allots £37m for the election specifically, but there are various other costs and contingencies that come on top.

So what will we get for this £53m? Well, more of the same. While there’s actually a fairly wide range of possible arithmetical outcomes, they all amount to the same thing. There is zero doubt that the SNP will form the “new” government, and zero prospect of them doing anything differently.

The best-case scenario for the SNP (though it’d actually be a nightmare) is probably around 66 seats, backed up with double-digit Greens. The absolute worst-case for them, if Unionists really get their tactical voting together – which they won’t – is maybe 45-50, which would still be double anyone else, and there’d be no credible way for anyone else to get enough support to form a government.

The Unionist parties will rearrange the deckchairs, swapping a bunch of Labour and Tory MSPs for Reform ones, but all will be equally irrelevant. Polling (which is all over the shop) suggests that Reform, Labour and even the Greens are in the running for second place, but who other than themselves actually cares? (There is no “official opposition” at Holyrood.)

Independence? Don’t make us laugh. Less than a quarter of SNP voters even think it’s a pressing issue, and no other party’s voters are interested in the constitution either. Everyone knows it’s a dead political duck and only political pundits and (during the campaign) candidates are forced for professional reasons to pretend otherwise.

A “pro-independence” majority now looks all but a certainty with the collapse of Your Party Scotland, and an SNP-alone majority is a possibility, but neither outcome would be any different to a minority and more to the point, everyone knows it. Whatever the result, the SNP will bleat pitifully at Keir Starmer for another referendum, Starmer will tell them to sod off, and they’ll scuttle away happily to bag another five years’ wages.

So why are we bothering with six more weeks of wretched, transparent pretence that anything about this election matters? Nothing will change except the names on the paycheques. We’d be as well just carrying on as we are, and if anyone wants to stand down we’ll just have a by-election. The only real losers would be Reform, but pretty much everyone seems to hate them anyway (including, irrationally, SNP voters) so there wouldn’t be much of a protest.

Of course, we’d still be left with a useless government almost nobody likes. Barely half of SNP voters think the party’s record has been even fairly good in anything but the vague, unmeasurable “standing up for Scotland”.

And almost six in ten of them are unwilling to even say John Swinney is “honest”, let alone have faith in him to turn the country around.

But they understandably don’t think any of the other halfwits applying for his job are any better. Hilariously, the least unpopular political leader in Scotland is the Lib Dem UK leader Ed Davey, who gets a negative approval rating of only -9, mainly because 57% of Scots can’t be bothered to have an opinion of him at all.

(Swinney gets -17 in seventh place, just below Russell Findlay and Malcolm Offord on -16 each, and Anas Sarwar gets a brutal -31, although he’ll be pleased to be only seven points behind Nicola Sturgeon. Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer tie for last on -52, so it’s not looking good Prime Minister-wise for the UK for the next nine years. Poor old Humza Yousaf, meanwhile, doesn’t even get a look-in.)

Last night STV called this “the scunnered election”, but we think a better word is “accursed”, because like COVID-19 it’s a plague nobody wants but that we’re all going to have to grit our teeth and endure anyway, at enormous cost to the public purse, to gain nothing.

The Six Nations is over and the World Cup isn’t until June. If you’ve been thinking of taking a lengthy holiday somewhere with no internet access, readers, there’s never been a better time than now.