Wings Over Scotland | Seven Days Too Long

It’s nearly over, readers. Just one more week of this to endure.

The most miserable election campaign of all time will end next Thursday with an election which will deliver Scotland’s most miserable devolved government of all time. Only the exact form, colour and shape of the misery remains to be determined.

So as the SNP promise through forked tongues to cut the cost of living with a pledge they know full well they have no chance of being able to actually implement, while using the powers they DO have to INCREASE the cost of everything that makes life WORTH living, let’s look at exactly what flavour of dog vomit we can expect to be choking down along with our state-approved organic broccoli and fat-free gruel for the next half-decade.

These are our own, purely plucked from thin air, estimates of the likelihood of each possible outcome of next week’s election.

(1) SNP majority: 18%
(2) SNP minority, indy majority: 65%
(3) SNP minority, Unionist majority: 16%
(4) Any other outcome: 1%

(We’ve rounded that last one up from 0.1%.)

The least desirable of those outcomes is also, sadly, the most likely. John Swinney is DESPERATE to avoid an SNP majority, because it leaves him with no excuses when he fails to deliver the “100% guaranteed” second referendum he’s been promising.

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It would, however, provide him with an excuse for another coalition with the Greens, which also lets him pretend that his hands are tied about pushing through their “social justice” agenda of super-fringe extremist bigotry opposed by the vast majority of the Scottish electorate.

The second-worst outcome is the second-most likely. The upside of an SNP majority is that it starkly exposes the fraud of that referendum pledge. However, the effect of that exposure is likely to be pretty minimal. Most SNP voters now don’t prioritise independence, so they’ll just shrug as Swinney sticks it on the back burner for another five years.

There’ll be fewer insane Green policies enacted, but that’s about it for good news. As the SNP desks in the chamber are filled with the sort of brainless career drones the party cultivated in the Sturgeon era as she ruthlessly expelled anyone of talent as a potential threat, even the rank incompetence of the last 10 years will take a sharp turn for the worse, and as the looming £5bn deficit crisis takes hold over the course of the Parliament, public services will suffer catastrophic cuts and failures.

The government will rapidly become toxically unpopular in much the same way that Keir Starmer’s UK administration has, but there’ll be nothing anyone can do about it for half a decade.

Outcome (3) is theoretically the best we can even slightly realistically hope for, but even that is a proper grade-A mess. Everyone with even a crumb of intelligence (including the few sane people still in the SNP) recognises that the SNP need a spell in opposition to recover their purpose, but the chances of that happening are slim, even in the already unlikely event of Unionist MSPs being in the majority. (Something that’s only a possibility at all because of the “Both Votes SNP” strategy.)

Whether Reform or Labour were the second-largest party it’s highly doubtful that the Unionist parties could marshal enough votes to make either Malcolm Offord or Anas Sarwar FM. So the most likely upshot of outcome (3) is – may God have mercy on all of our souls – another election, and honest to God if that happens we’re closing down Wings forever and going to live in a cave.

So, y’know, good luck, folks. With the exception of Fergus Ewing in Inverness & Nairn, we’re struggling to think of a single constituency candidate we could bear to vote for. Anywhere else we’d be spoiling our paper in the most creatively offensive way we could think of, or casting a purely token vote for an independent.

When it comes to the list, there are at least options. There’s zero prospect of any minor pro-indy parties getting seats, but then that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s nothing to LOSE by voting for any of them, so you could give it a punt, hope for a miracle and at least have a clear conscience.

If you vote for Unionist parties on the list you’re doing the exact same thing as Both-Votes-SNP-ers (increasing the number of Unionist MSPs) but at least you’d be doing it for a better reason – the longterm benefit of the independence movement – and not lying to yourself about it.

But the true, grim reality is that it simply doesn’t matter. There is nothing you can do next Thursday to meaningfully change anything in Scotland, and certainly not for the better. (The least HARM you can do is simply to NOT vote SNP or Green.)

The long-range weather forecast currently suggests a chilly (11C) day with a high chance of rain across the whole country, making staying home with a nice bowl of soup and a sandwich an attractive prospect, and we suspect if we lived there it’s the option we’d be taking.

We used to think this was overly cynical:

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But these days it’s the moral choice. The collection of useless gravy-chasers trying to get elected next week will take every vote cast, however reluctant, as an endorsement. Pretty much all you can do right now is keep your own hands clean.