Politics
Wings Over Scotland | Clocks And Calendars
We think The Scotsman might have gotten a bit confused and/or carried away when it came to putting the clocks forward at the weekend. At 6am on Sunday morning they tweeted this:
But the link was a 404. We checked the print edition of Scotland On Sunday but there was nothing there. Finally, though, the article has shown up in today’s paper and on the website, and to be honest, readers, we still think it must be some sort of mistake, because it’s two days early for April 1st.
And this is too batshit crazy to explain any other way.
Fortunately it’s the end of the month and time for our latest election analysis piece, so let’s pick our way through the madness. Heaven knows we could all do with the laugh.
“Labour believes it has identified a route to forming the next Scottish government by flipping a dozen constituencies from the SNP and relying on a strong Reform performance on the regional list to deprive John Swinney’s party of the keys to Bute House.
Anas Sarwar’s team believe that in battlegrounds across the Central Belt, where constituencies can be framed as a straight fight between Labour and the SNP, turning 11 or 12 seats red would create three large party blocks, with an assumption Labour would be the only party able to form a government with the help of Reform.”
Good lord, where to even start? The first thing to note is that given all current polling figures, any constituency gains by Labour would be all but guaranteed to be wiped out by a corresponding loss of list seats, so the entire premise of this strategy is demented from the start.
If you look at the last 10 polls, Sarwar’s party is sitting on anywhere from 12% to 19% of the list vote, which ought to be good for 2-3 list seats per region, but if they picked up a few constituencies across the Central Belt that’d be slashed into single figures.
The definition of “Central Belt” is a matter of interpretation, but by any reasonable measure includes at least five regions and possibly six. West Scotland includes areas that anyone would class “Central Belt” – Clydebank, Milngavie, Strathkelvin, Eastwood.
Obviously Edinburgh And Lothians East counts.
Same goes for Central Scotland (clue’s in the name!) And Lothians West.
Ditto for Glasgow.
Mid Scotland And Fife is probably the most debatable, but Dunfermline, Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy are hardly in the Highlands and are areas Labour has traditionally been strong in and will at least fancy a shot at. And remember, even picking up a single seat in (say) Kirkcaldy would be enough to halve Labour’s list vote for the whole region.
There can’t be much debate about South Scotland either, unless you’re going to seriously try to dispute that Hamilton and East Kilbride are in the Central Belt.
(Wikipedia defines it as including large swathes of Fife and the Borders.)
So even if Labour picked up “11 or 12” constituencies due to their concentrated vote – and that’s a very, very big ask unless their polling dramatically improves – the likely impact on their total seat count would be zero, because they’d lose the same number on the list.
“The claim is they would have a “moral mandate” to govern, but in order to stand a chance of forming the next government, Labour needs the polls to tighten dramatically to around four or five points. Currently, Labour trails the SNP by around 18 points – meaning Mr Sarwar’s campaign will need to bring forward something extraordinary to move the dial on public opinion in the coming weeks.“
No kidding. But even that understates the magnitude of the problem. Labour’s current constituency-vote polling (again on the last 10 polls, covering the whole of 2026) ranges from 12% to 20%, so to close an 18-point gap they’d need to almost DOUBLE it in the next five weeks, and if you think there’s the tiniest chance of that happening then please contact us at once to take advantage of a fantastic offer we’re currently running on magic beans.
(Labour still haven’t managed to identify a single meaningful policy difference between themselves and the SNP, as Wings has been pointing out for the last three years and which the Scottish mainstream media has finally noticed.)
To be honest, after this arrant nonsense the rest of the Scotsman article is just padding and waffle to fill out the page.
“Labour’s potential route to Bute House would rely on unionist parties, including Reform, to vote in Mr Sarwar as first minister following May’s election, with Labour attempting to govern as a small minority administration.”
Even the most outlandish arithmetical scenario by which Sarwar could win a vote to become FM would require the support not just of Reform but also the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens. Let’s all just pause for a moment and ponder that five-party coalition including Malcolm Offord, Alex Cole-Hamilton and Ross Greer, shall we?
(I asked Grok to visualise it. Yikes.)
But the paper clutches at one last straw.
“One potential scenario, seen by The Scotsman, forecasts that if Labour can take four of the six Glasgow constituencies, the SNP would not be fully supplemented for the losses on the regional list due to the strength of the anticipated Reform vote.
The scenario suggests that instead of the SNP picking up three regional list seats for Glasgow, Reform would come first as the highest performing party that has not won a constituency, with it likely four seats would then be split evenly between Labour and the SNP – with Reform picking up a second regional MSP.”
So even in the miraculous event of Labour picking up FOUR seats in Glasgow (where the SNP’s average majority is around 8,000), the supercoalition would only make a net gain of two, with Labour somehow getting TWO list seats despite their list vote having been divided by FIVE, which would currently put it on something like 3%.
(Which of course is nowhere even REMOTELY close to enough for a SINGLE list seat, let alone two. If they won four constituencies they’d need to be on around 40% of the list vote to have a chance of ONE list seat. They’ve achieved that exactly once in Scottish Parliament history, in 1999.)
The only tiny theoretical chance for the Unionist parties to oust the SNP on anything like current polling is if Reform (the only opposition party who are reasonably strong across the country, not just in pockets of concentrated support) win a lot of constituencies, clearing the others to sweep up on the list. But that’s stupendously unlikely, because no other party is going to knock doors and tell people to vote for Reform. Labour trying to somehow achieve it by picking up a few seats in Glasgow is just suicidally stupid.
So, y’know, wow. We have every sympathy with the press in having to find stuff to write about over the next five wretched weeks and attempt to create some sort of jeopardy as to who’s going to win this election, but if this – “What if Labour suddenly DOUBLED their vote?” – is how crazy they’re getting when it’s still March, we dread to imagine what sort of desperate insanity we’re going to be reading by the start of May.
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