The Broken Rainbow
This is a graph of how many seats each party won in last week’s supposedly “proportional” Scottish Parliament election, compared to how many they would have won if the electoral system had been actually proportional.
The SNP and Greens are now over-represented by 37% and 50% respectively, while the Unionist parties are all under-represented compared to their vote share by (left to right) 26%, 19%, 20% and 23%.
“Pro-indy” parties have 73 seats (57%) rather than the 52 seats that their 40.8% vote share should have earned, while Unionist parties have 56 seats (or 43%) when they should have 69 for their 56% of the vote.
(The other 4% of the vote was scattered among 24 other parties or independents, with 1.8% going to identifiably pro-independence candidates, increasing the total “pro-indy” vote to 42.6%, fully 10 points short of current polling for independence itself.)
It is, therefore, a little bit of a stretch to present the refusal of the UK government to grant a second independence referendum on the basis of the results as an outrage against “democracy”. If an outrage against democracy has taken place, it happened last Thursday.
The over-representation of the indy side is a combination of the unbalanced First Past The Post system that elects more than half of MSPs, and of pro-indy voters splitting their votes, mostly between the SNP and Greens, despite the SNP urging its voters to cast both votes for the SNP.
The differences between each party’s constituency and list votes are instructive.
SNP LIST VOTE
29% lower than constituency vote
LABOUR LIST VOTE
16% lower
REFORM LIST VOTE
6% higher
CONSERVATIVE LIST VOTE
0.001% lower
LIB DEM LIST VOTE
17% lower
GREEN LIST VOTE
612% higher
That’s not a typo at the end – the Green list vote was more than six times their constituency vote, because they’re not really a proper party like the others and only ran in half-a-dozen constituency seats.
Had each party’s list vote share matched its constituency one, the results would have come out like this, according to the Devolved Elections seat projector.
The “pro-indy” parties would have fallen one short of a majority. The other way round (constituencies adjusted to the same as the list vote), the result would have been very different.
Tilting in favour of the list vote would have produced 81 seats for the “pro-indy” parties, an increase of 17. Which is a stark illustration of what was already blindingly obvious to everyone even within touching distance of sanity or arithmetical competence – “both votes SNP” is an absolutely cretinous strategy if what you want is a majority of pro-indy MSPs.
The reason such a majority was achieved this year was because of the 250,000 SNP voters who didn’t also vote SNP on the list, not the 625,000 who did.
Now, that’s a purely statistical argument, not a political one, because a “pro-indy” majority of MSPs will make absolutely no difference to anything in terms of securing independence. We know that for a fact because there’s been one for every single day since the indyref, but it has achieved nothing whatsoever.
But don’t worry! The same imbeciles who came up with that plainly demonstrable proven serial failure of a plan have another one for you!
Hooooooooo boy. Let’s just assess that one for a moment, shall we?
Firstly, as this site explained three and a half years ago, using a Westminster election rather than a Holyrood one as a plebiscite is monstrously stupid for a whole raft of reasons. The media coverage will treat Scotland as an afterthought because it’s only 8% of the country, and you’ll lose the heavily indy-favouring 16/17-year-olds and EU citizens who can vote in the latter but not the former.
(In fact, treating any single election as the plebiscite is dumb. It should simply be standing SNP policy that ANY time a majority of Scottish voters vote for parties whose manifesto says that a vote for them will be taken as a vote for independence, a clear and indisputable democratic mandate has been achieved. Of course it never will be, because the SNP is pathologically jealous of other indy parties’ votes.)
Using a UK election also prevents voters from separating the issues of the plebiscite and normal politics (because they only have one vote), whereas in a Holyrood vote you can say that the constituency vote is for independence and the list vote is for the actual election.
But secondly, you really do have to be an Olympic-class moron to imagine that the SNP are likely to be MORE popular in 2029 than they are now.
They’ve been in power for 19 years already, have record low approval ratings and have been haemorrhaging members and voters for the last half-decade. They won because the opposition was divided four ways, not because anybody likes them. Their vote share at this election dropped from 44% in 2021 to less than 33%. They’ve just elected loads of hopelessly inexperienced new MSPs. There’s a huge budget crisis thundering down the line towards them.
We’ve just had an election in which the SNP swore blind voting SNP would lead to a “100% guaranteed” referendum, and offered the electorate all manner of ludicrous bribes, yet over a third of independence supporters still refused to vote for the party.
In three years time the SNP can only conceivably be less popular than it is now, and the Greens are a pretend party who won’t be running candidates in the vast bulk of Scottish seats. The chances of achieving 50% of the Scottish vote in that election are less than zero. (They’d be doing miraculously well to get 35%.)
The infantile idea that the bogeyman of Nigel Farage as PM would be enough to boost that vote by half again is embarrassing. We were told the same about Boris Johnson, and about Liz Truss, and about Brexit, and about COVID and about Theresa May’s refusal to grant a Section 30 order, and etc etc etc. It never transpired. The dial never moved an inch.
The prospect of a Reform government in Westminster was baked into THIS election, Swinney never shut up about Reform, and it still only got the SNP constituency vote to 38%. There is NO chance, not a ghost of a crumb of an atom of a hope, that the SNP can secure 50% of the Scottish vote in the 2029 UK election. Even the indy movement’s very thickest dungwits know that in their hearts.
So why they’re urging us to rush headlong to what would be an utterly catastrophic defeat, well, you’d have to ask them, because we can’t unhinge our minds far enough to put ourselves in their shoes.
There is no pot of gold waiting for us in three years’ time, only the sort of pot you used to find under the bed, full of the stuff they’re talking.
