WHEN YES TRIBES GO TO WAR, ONE LESS MSP IS ALL THAT WE CAN SCORE

THE MAJORITY ILLUSION

From the off the SNP campaign warned repeatedly that #BothVotesSNP was the only insurance policy against them losing their majority in Holyrood. For the non-aligned YES voter that argument was never enough in itself to make a commitment to mirror a tactical vote in their constituency with another in the region.

It sounded too similar to the kind of refrain played by Scottish Labour at elections. Secondly, any increase at all from 53 constituencies would diminish further the finely balanced SNP list seat allocations anyway, even if everyone bought into #BothVotesSNP, regardless of their vote share smashing it or not. Thirdly, it wasn’t just mathematically wrong, it was predicated on the dematerialisation of the Scottish Greens, an essential part of the Independence movement, from Holyrood.

To guard against the SNP advance in the constituencies being only enough to set their list seats tumbling, the only cast iron guaranteed way to protect the pro-Independence majority, with the bonus of mowing down Unionist seats by the dozen, was for the YES voter to cast their vote for the Scottish Greens’ list in the regions. Finally, and some might say in the context of the ‘new’ post-referendum politics most of all, its premise was a bit of a fib too. There was in fact most days no SNP majority to lose!

Their nomination for Presiding Officer, a suspension, a by-election defeat to Labour, and 3 party resignations by MSPs over NATO membership and recently ex-FM Alex being in Westminster most of the time had seen to that. The SNP went into the Scottish Parliament elections in 2016 with only 64 MSPs out of the 69 they had won in May 2011.

The pro-Independence majority elected then, 72 falling to 70 after the sad death of Margo MacDonald and the loss of Dunfermline to Labour in a by-election, wasn’t even essential for the SNP to govern. They only needed to outnumber the Unionists’ combined total of 58 to have a working majority, which they did by 6, hence the ability of ‘Big Eck’ to absent himself regularly after May 2015.

An SNP government was to be judged by most of the Scottish electorate, unknowingly, on the record of what was more or less a second minority term and their vision for the next 5 years, which didn’t include a commitment to another Independence referendum ‘unless there was a material change in the circumstances’.

This was supposed to be the infinitely flexible statement that would both deflect the pro-Union parties from making the election about the constitution and keep the YES movement on board to help get an SNP majority elected.

That didn’t work out as planned either, as the Unionists don’t have anything substantial to say that’s all that popular with their own supporters, besides there must not be another Independence referendum. While there was something similar in the volume of the racket Rise or Solidarity made trying to reach beyond their own small bands of adherents, by insisting there must be another referendum and soon, that right now would almost certainly be lost. Matched in emptiness, that gladdened the Unionist parties’ campaigns, by some of their cyber-activists promoting a nihilistic #NoVotesSNP!

A number of keyboard warriors, SNP members or supporters and a few non-aligned YES converts to the theory, claimed that without an SNP overall majority, at least 65 seats, the demise of the Independence objective was assured. This hypothesis was only ever a proposition made by some of #BothVotesSNP’s true believers, rather than the official position of SNP HQ itself, who just wanted a majority for their party, kept shtum about the risk they were willing to take to get it and crossed their fingers.

 

IS WINNING 59 OF 73 WINNABLE CONSTITUENCIES A DEFEAT?

The day after the Independence referendum in 2014 Target 59% undertook detailed psephological analysis of the results, adding in historical electoral data of the  combined votes of all the pro-Independence parties at all elections. This enabled them to rank all 59 Westminster constituencies from the 1st easiest to defend to the 59th hardest to gain for an imaginary YES party in the upcoming UK General Election. This database has been updated with every election and by-election since.

We discovered that 54 of them had notionally been won by the votes cast for YES in the referendum and the next 5 required between 1% and 6% swings to be taken also. This is why we started the ’59 winnable constituencies’ campaign. When a ‘Yes Alliance’ failed to materialise to fight the election, all Independence supporters were asked to back the SNP to be the standard bearer for the YES movement. YESNP was floated early in 2015 and took off.

On 7th May the high water mark of this campaign was to gain the 58th target Westminster constituency out of 59, evicting Jim Murphy in East Renfrewshire. 56 YESNP MPs were above expectation with misses only at numbers 32, Edinburgh South, 50, Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweedale, and the 59th itself, Orkney & Shetland, resulting in 95% of the target being achieved.

The same exercise was begun the day after the General Election to rank all the Scottish Parliament constituencies, from easiest for the SNP to defend to the hardest for them to gain to inform the 2016 campaign. However, their performance in 2011 had been so patchy that it was difficult to predict an expectation of holds and gains. There were 8 seats they’d won that they shouldn’t have and there were another 8 they should have.

Eventually this had to be reported as a range of between 52 and 66 seats, with a pro-Independence majority on constituencies alone at risk. With 59 constituencies the median of that range, running a ’73 winnable’ campaign was somewhat optimistic, but hardly anymore than we’d been in 2015. However, the locations of the 59 constituencies and numbers were fed in for the development of the regional list seat strategy or #BothVotesYES as it became known.

The very same constituencies that were the bugs in the programme in 2015 made their presence felt with a vengeance in the Scottish Parliament Election, making up 4 constituencies not gained and casting a malign influence over 5 others not captured and even 3 losses within 1 region.

Serious damage to the idea of getting an official majority SNP government came from the loss of two constituencies way down the target list, numbers 18, North East Fife, and 39, Aberdeenshire West.

A further 3 losses of numbers 53, Edinburgh Western, 54, Edinburgh Southern, and 56, Edinburgh Central, could have been avoided by much better election day organisation across the capital. Not gaining numbers 58, Ayr, 64, Dumbarton, and 65, East Lothian, can also be put down to glitches in their ‘Get Out The Vote’ operations.

The result in Edinburgh Central and to an extent North East Fife may have been influenced by the media exposure given to the winning candidates. The SNP vote in both increased slightly, but wasn’t enough. Had they been contested by relatively unknown candidates, their successful defence would have been much more likely.

Evidence to support that observation can also be seen in the Glasgow Kelvin result. It is generally shown by research that there’s at least a 6% bonus vote favouring candidates frequently featured on TV, mostly made up from people who weren’t going to bother to vote for anyone at all.

However, what works for everyone else, being given the limelight, is of course the reverse for poor Kezia. The highest target constituency in the Holyrood election with a YESNP MSP is the 67th, Edinburgh Eastern.  Although a hold and not a gain, it was an excellent achievement nevertheless to keep another leader of Scottish Labour in second place in a seat that was thought beyond reach.

Edinburgh Western, North East Fife, Orkney and also Shetland are examples once again of the Lib Dems’ tendency to emerge, as Tim Farron admitted, “Like cockroaches after a nuclear war, just a bit less smelly.”

Before anyone does any finger pointing at the Scottish Greens over the result in Edinburgh Central, they should consider some other statistics. If 2.6% of those who voted SNP across Scotland on 7th May 2015 and stayed at home on 5th May 2016, had only turned out to vote SNP again, there would have been 8 fewer Unionist constituency MSPs.

Not getting positive results in the 6 highest targets might also be disappointing, but the SNP came first in 59 constituencies, up 6 on 2011, and second in all 14 they didn’t win this time. Our fear, that they’d have a net loss of one constituency, was replaced with the joy of them squarely hitting the median of the target range calculated by our database. All 73 more winnable than before come 2021, with 81% of the target achieved this time.

 

WINNING 59% FOR INDEPENDENCE IS MORE THAN ANY SNP MAJORITY CAN GIVE

If we could countenance the removal of the only other pro-Independence party from the Scottish Parliament, then the SNP might have had an official majority. Anyone who thinks that would be good for the advancement of Scotland’s Independence cannot have listened to people who voted NO much or at all.

Indeed, if you’ve engaged with any genuinely reluctant voters for the Union or desperately wanted to shoot the Unionist press and parties’ ‘one party state’ fox, the opposite conclusion is inescapable. So if the cheerleaders for #BothVotesSNP had got it all their own way they might have made making the Independence case even more difficult and irreparably damaged the relationships within the cross-party YES movement.

As previously explained the SNP only needs more seats than the combination of the Unionists’ 60, which they have, to be properly in charge. We do not expect any political party to campaign on the platform of ‘vote for someone else’, but we’d hoped Independence supporters would have been able to see beyond that convention and to campaign for maximum electoral pro-Independence advantage.

For the YES movement this wasn’t the same as football scores or even to ensure a majority SNP government. It was, and every election is, about taking out NO campaigners that can access the media, cutting their finance, degrading their ground war infrastructure, damaging their local organisations fatally and disabling their ability to successfully fight another Independence referendum. The obvious drag effect of the 3 missed Westminster constituencies on the Scottish Parliament results is self evident and has already been mentioned.

If everyone who voted Scottish Greens in the regions had voted SNP instead, then the SNP would have only been allocated 10 regional list seats anyway. This would have meant a decrease of only 1 Conservative seat, but the winning of 1 extra by Labour and the disappearance of any other pro-Independence voice in Holyrood. Ruth Davidson would still be being feted by the Unionist press, leading a party with a total of 30 seats instead of 31. Kezia’s gang on 25, with Willie’s still on 5, getting the same media overexposure.

If everyone who voted SNP in the regions had voted Scottish Greens, then 37 regional list seats would have been allocated to them, a decrease of an extra 27 Unionists, with the SNP still forming the government on 59 constituency seats, a majority over the remaining Unionists, and with Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister.

The Liberal Democrats would have lost their one list seat and be on 4 constituency MSPs alone, Labour would have lost a further 11 with a total of 13 MSPs and the Tories would only have 9 list seats making their total 16. 33 ‘Yoons’ out of 129 MSPs, outnumbered by the Scottish Greens let alone the SNP.

However, the #BothVotesSNP tactic was thwarted in winning its other pyrrhic victory. Although the browbeaten resistance to it only managed to equal the same list seat total and pro-Independence majority, it more importantly preserved the plurality of the elected parties of the YES movement. The SNP are down 6, the Scottish Greens are up 4, the Independent list seat has gone and the Unionists are thankfully only up by 3 after all that bother and schism.

Let all YES voters now make up, be friends and never again be guided by what a political party campaign says about votes, not because they’re bad or wicked, they’re political parties. That’s what they do, campaign for the most votes for themselves, besides which the electoral commission would be forced to put a stop to anything remotely like tactical advice from a YES party standing in both constituencies and regions anyway.

The SNP or any other pro-Independence party are not the YES movement and in elections it is up to those of us within it, especially the non-aligned, to make the calculations and honest calls to advance the cause of Independence through the ballot box.

Target 59% put that case this time and makes a commitment now to do it again and again. Starting good and early, directly after the #GE2020 #VoteYESNP campaign. For #SP2021 it will be the same #BothVotesYES, that is vote SNP in your constituency and Scottish Greens in your region. Thank goodness it’s STV for the council elections in May 2017. Oh, wait a minute, #Vote1&2YES-SNP1or2ScottishGreens1or2…

Find campaigning memes and more on our facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/target59