Wings Over Scotland

Sorry, readers, we’ve been too busy boiling with rage at revolting, cretinous Americans for the last few days to trust ourselves with writing a full-length article, but we’ve just about calmed down enough in time for this month’s polling analysis.

Which is handy, because today is also the day of the Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester (fun fact: a seat we’d very likely have lived in ourselves if not for Osama bin Laden, but that’s another story), and that throws up some interesting parallels.

But firstly let’s take a look at that Times story about a study which suggests that tactical voting from Labour supporters could give the SNP an outright majority at the Holyrood election in May.

The premise of the “global strategy and research” firm’s analysis is that Labour voters in Scotland hate Reform more than they hate the SNP. We’re a little sceptical of that, but it would be extremely revealing if it was true, because this site has been pointing out for some considerable time that there are in fact no meaningful areas of political dispute between Scottish Labour and the SNP.

(There is of course one big ABSTRACT one over the constitution, but since the SNP has no actual intention of, or strategy for, achieving independence it’s a moot point.)

Labour hate the SNP not for any ideological reasons but simply because they still feel like the SNP have stolen their “birthright” of power in Scotland, that the Scottish Parliament was expressly designed to enshrine forever until Alex Salmond smashed the walls down. They’ve been out of office for so long now that they can hardly even remember what they want it for, other than the ministerial salaries.

Voters, of course, are rather more susceptible to changing sides than the professional political class. Labour’s former voters in Scotland have already deserted en masse to the SNP, while half a million of the SNP’s voters stayed home or switched to the Tories in 2017, and Labour voters south of the border are now defecting in huge numbers in both directions – to Reform and the Greens – to the extent that Labour now look all but certain to lose in May in Wales, a country where they’ve won every single election in more than 100 years.

We’re still pretty doubtful, though, that they’d want to achieve this on purpose:

Stonehaven claim their figures show tactical votes from Scottish Labour supporters would condemn Labour to an abject third place, behind both the SNP and Reform.

SNP: 67 seats
Reform: 25
Labour: 15
Lib Dems: 8
Tories: 7
Greens: 7

(We quietly note in passing that obviously those 67 SNP seats in the projection are all constituency ones, with close to a million SNP list votes totally wasted. Who knew?)

And that doesn’t make a lot of sense. You don’t want BOTH of the parties you dislike the most miles in front of you, no matter which is worst. Now, that outcome might be unavoidable as the numbers stand, but in that case you also definitely don’t want one of them having an absolute majority, because if they don’t then you at least have a chance of SOME sort of political relevance and influence for the next five years.

(Because if the SNP don’t have a majority, they’ll need support from at least one other party to pass any sort of legislation, and on a case-by-case basis there’s always a chance that that party could be you.)

There’s also no chance whatsoever of Reform being in charge at Holyrood. Even if they did better than any poll has ever suggested – let’s say 30 seats – that’s a million miles short of enough to form a government even with another party on board, and neither Labour nor the SNP would form a coalition (formal or informal) with them, so whatever happens they’ll be shut out of power. There’s no risk to consider there.

So there’s no point in Labour voters voting according to whether they want an SNP government or not, because unless the polling numbers change to a pretty spectacular degree in the next eight weeks they’re getting an SNP government no matter what.

What they’re faced with is a straightforward choice between a very weak SNP government with – by its OWN admission – no mandate for independence, and a very strong SNP government with at least a superficially arguable claim to a mandate for independence. And that IS something of a risk.

(It would be an absurdly WEAK claim, and one that’d have no influence whatsoever on the UK government, but it’s a rhetorically strong one and at a minimum it would make Scottish Labour’s life even more of a misery than it currently is until 2031.)

Labour’s only hope of a sub-disastrous outcome for this election is that the SNP get (say) 50 seats and Labour get (say) 20, and become the only viable route to the SNP passing legislation (because none of the Greens, Lib Dems and Tories would have the numbers, and the SNP’s voters wouldn’t tolerate Reform support).

Reform, then, from Scottish Labour’s point of view, are a total irrelevance. It barely even matters how many MSPs Nigel Farage’s men get. The vital thing for Labour – their only hope of salvaging anything at all from their catastrophic polling – is to keep the SNP as far short of a majority as possible.

Now, voters don’t tend to think about things that way. They’re not playing seven-dimensional political chess, they just want someone reasonably close to a tolerable Parliamentary voice who might actually do something for them or their constituency.

But if the party has even some tiny shredded fragments of a collective brain left it should be drumming that bigger picture into its own supporters at branch meetings and on the doorsteps every chance it gets – “if you want Labour to have any chance of any degree of power for the next five years, for God’s sake don’t give either of your votes to the SNP”.

As our analysis last month showed, their best hope is in fact to tactically vote AGAINST the SNP in constituencies other than Labour strongholds (whether that’s for Reform or Lib Dems or Tories or even Greens), but stay Labour on the list vote.

(Because we know that tactical list voting is close to impossible in a PR system, but it’s very possible indeed on the constituency vote.)

At the extreme that could produce a super-hung Parliament in which not even any TWO parties could form a majority, meaning that every party would have power and influence in every vote.

From Labour’s perspective that’s a dream outcome from where they’re currently standing. It could even force a new election, something that would be beyond calamitous for the cash-strapped SNP but no problem for Labour with the UK party’s broad fiscal shoulders behind it.

So, give the SNP an absolute majority and a rhetorical battering ram, or reduce them to bit-part players in a 70%-Unionist chamber and maybe even nudge them over the cliff into bankruptcy before they can be bailed out by regaining loads of Westminster MPs in 2029? Even for the absolute dum-dums inhabiting Scottish Labour that ought to be a no-brainer.

But where does Gorton and Denton come in?

It comes in because it illustrates how difficult tactical voting can be to pull off. The anti-Reform, notionally left-wing vote in G&D is TWICE the Reform vote – 60% to 30%. There can be little doubt that most Labour voters would, if they can’t win themselves, prefer a Green MP to a Reform one, and definitely vice versa.

But because it’s not clear which of Labour and Green is most likely to win, they’re both fighting each other for ownership of the anti-Reform vote, which might just be enough to let Reform sneak through the middle. (Though it would be arithmetically almost impossible, and therefore politically seismic in multiple ways if they did.)

There are no such dilemmas in Scotland, however. A tactical vote for the SNP is plainly and indisputably insane from the point of view of a Labour supporter, for the reasons noted above. They’re going to struggle to even come second in this election, but their options are two VERY different kinds of third place – one apocalyptically bad (possibly even fatal), or one beyond their wildest fantasies.

The overwhelming statistical likelihood, in reality, is that May will produce a damp squib of a result that changes nothing. Whether there is or isn’t a “pro-indy majority”, and whatever the exact numbers are, it’s all but certain that we’ve got five more years of the same incompetent, malignant stagnation coming, at best.

But right out at the far edges of what COULD happen on the current figures are two outcomes – both dependent on tactical voting – which would be at least somewhat more interesting, and would amount to either the crippling of the SNP or the effective final destruction of Labour.

With very little else within their power to achieve, do Scottish Labour voters want an unstoppable, reinvigorated and bouyant SNP, or a weak and broken lame-duck version that spends the next half-decade being bullied from all sides? There are two months to go until we find out.