Wings Over Scotland | List Voting For Cretins

This week The National published a poll it commissioned from Find Out Now for this May’s Scottish Parliament election, alongside a seat projection from Sir John Curtice. Here are the list-vote figures from the poll.

The seat projection calculated that the election would result in 59 SNP MSPs (six short of the number John Swinney says is the minimum needed to force a second indyref), 25 for Reform, 13 for the Greens, 12 each for Labour and the Tories and eight for the Lib Dems.

It didn’t specify how many of the seats were constituency ones and how many were list ones, so we dropped Sir John a line and asked him.

If we say for illustrative purposes that turnout is the same as in 2021, the SNP’s 30% share of the list vote will be 815,420 votes. The combined 31% for Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems would be 842,600, and Reform’s 21% would come to 570,793.

Here’s a chart of how those votes translate in the projection.

Because Sir John told us that the SNP’s 30% got them just ONE list seat in his projection – most likely in the Highlands, though he didn’t say. That means they’d have failed to win 15 constituencies, which we’ve given here to the three traditional Unionist parties, as they already hold 13 and it seems pretty unlikely that Reform or the Greens will take any.

(If Reform did snag a few Tory ones, which is a massively better bet than the Greens winning a constituency seat anywhere, it’d make no difference to the overall point.)

So we’ve deducted those 15 from the Lab/Con/LD total of 32 in the projection to leave them with 17 on the list. And what that means is that the price of each list seat for each party is as follows:

What that means is that by voting SNP on the list you’re ensuring that every Unionist list vote effectively counts as either 17 votes for Labour/the Tories/the Lib Dems, or a whopping 37 votes in the case of Reform.

(Because in terms of delivering list seats their votes already count for more than those of the other Unionist parties who have some constituency seats.)

If you care at all about getting “pro-independence” MSPs elected in May, that is a folly of monumental, galactic proportions. Anyone doing it is a demonstrable imbecile who shouldn’t be trusted not only with a vote, but with buttering a slice of bread, because they’d likely somehow contrive to set their own face on fire and stab any nearby small children in the eye with a garden fork.

Readers will be only too aware by now that in this site’s view, casting ANY votes for the SNP in this year’s Holyrood election is an act of sabotage against the independence movement. Voting for literally anyone else at all, whether on the constituency or list ballots, will ultimately do a greater service to the cause. (With the possible exception of the Greens, because dear sweet Jesus imagine trying to persuade any halfway-normal human to vote in a referendum for an independent Scotland led by Ross Greer.)

But it is at least possible to construct a coherent argument – not a convincing or a credible one, but one that at least holds up as an abstract theory if you imagine a completely different future SNP – for voting for them in constituencies.

Voting for them on the list, however, is a vote to actively and knowingly usher dozens of Reform, Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem MSPs into the chamber on a red carpet, flanked by fanfares of glistening trumpets. (And to do so for the third time in a row, having learned absolutely nothing in the intervening decade, like some sort of moron.)

Anyone telling you to do so, therefore (and offering no better argument than “Oh well, maybe the polls are all totally wrong and something weird will happen”), is a liar and a charlatan whose motives should be regarded with the greatest of suspicion.