Wings Over Scotland | The Marshalling Plan

Another month has passed, so we suppose it must be time for the third of our poll-analysis pieces for the Scottish Parliament election in May.

(Last time round we assessed the grotesque rank idiocy of voting SNP on the list if you want a pro-indy majority, and the time before that we considered the possible impact of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party on seat numbers, which now looks rather less potentially semi-interesting than it did last summer.)

So what can we look at this time?

Well, what if Unionists were slightly less stupid and tribal than SNP voters?

The poll above – a YouGov one from last week – shows Reform putting some clear water between themselves and the rest of the Unionist parties. What if that trend were to continue and anti-independence voters started to think that tactical votes for Reform were the best way to damage the SNP?

The short answer, unfortunately for anyone looking to find some sort of suspense or jeopardy about the election, is “not much”.

Because the SNP’s 14-point lead guarantees them the large bulk of constituency seats as things stand, everyone else is going to be fighting for the scraps on the list vote, and the Holyrood electoral system ensures that those seats are distributed more or less proportionally. It doesn’t really matter HOW the Unionist vote is divided between Reform, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, their total combined seat count will still be the same.

But just to pass the time, let’s try putting those numbers into the new seat predictor at Devolved Election Projections.

The site does include a “Tactical voting” tickbox, but doesn’t say what sort of effects it calculates, so let’s do it manually. Let’s say, purely for the sake of argument, that Labour and Tory voters stick with their parties on the constituency vote, but half of them try a tactical list vote for Reform. That would actually put Nigel Farage and Malcolm Offord’s party in first place on the list.

(It’s pretty unlikely, because Labour and the Tories get the bulk of their seats from the list and have done for years, but we’re just spitballing here.)

Ironically, according to the predictor that makes things WORSE from the Unionist perspective. Concentrating too list many votes in Reform leaves both the main Unionist parties reduced to near-total irrelevance – not even reaching the five-seat minimum to guarantee a question at FMQs – but also increases the SNP/Green majority by four, from 12 to 16.

So that’s a disaster for Unionists. What about the opposite approach, where they keep voting Labour and Tory on the list but half tactically vote for Reform in constituencies, leaving Reform just two points behind the SNP on the constituency vote?

Blimey.

Just 7% of voters switching from Labour to Reform, and 5% switching from Tory to Reform, actually WINS Reform the election, becoming the biggest party with 40 seats to the SNP’s 38.

The result would be a super-hung Parliament: even an SNP-Labour coalition would be 10 seats short of a majority and would need the support of the Greens. (Even then, just three rebels on any given vote would see the government defeated.) On the right, Reform and the Tories would be 14 short, and even roping in the Lib Dems wouldn’t get them over the line.

Of course, 7% and 5% sound like pretty small numbers, but in terms of the Labour and Tory votes they’re 47% and 50% respectively. Those are stratospherically high figures for tactical votes, especially given that all the low-hanging fruit in both parties has already shifted to Reform.

But here are the figures for that second tactical-vote scenario compared to the projection on current polling:

SNP: -20 (38 vs 58)
Lab: no change (17 either way)
Con: +2 (11 vs 9)
Grn: +1 (13 vs 12)
Lib: no change (10 either way)
Ref: +17 (40 vs 23)

None of the Unionist parties lose anything, and they end the SNP domination of Holyrood for the first time in almost 20 years.

All of these numbers, of course, are contingent on the accuracy of a seat projection, which is a notoriously tricky art and doesn’t take much account of local factors, vote concentration and the like.

But with every poll suggesting a whopping SNP win and a (notionally) pro-indy majority and very little prospect of a significant shift in polling between now and May, for Unionists it’s a free shot to nothing. Depending on whether Labour and Tory voters hate the SNP or Reform more, they could flip the result on its head.

Is there a defence? Let’s run the numbers again with half the SNP list vote diverted to the Greens and Alba. (Again, very unlikely as the SNP has indoctrinated its voters to despise the latter, but just for fun.)

Reform still come out on top, but they’re still miles short of a majority even in alliance with the Tories and Lib Dems, while the combined indy numbers are now 59 rather than 51, making the error margins much tighter. An SNP loss of five seats is compensated by a Green/Alba gain of 13.)

Yet again, then, we see that list votes for the SNP are a suicidal choice for indy supporters. But the surprise is that risk-free tactical constituency votes from Labour and Tory could completely overturn what currently looks like a foregone conclusion.

For the reasons noted above, that’s a long-odds bet. But the Unionist parties already collectively command a substantial majority of the vote (on that YouGov poll, the total Unionist vote is 58% combined vs 42% combined for “indy” parties). If they were to marshal those votes intelligently, they could turn it into a majority (61% to 39%) of seats too. (And a much more democratic outcome, ironically.)

It’s very dangerous to be complacent, and to continue to govern as badly and arrogantly as the SNP are, when you’re outnumbered.