Some rare good news for Scottish Unionists

[Emrys]

1. No, this could in fact be bad news for Scottish unionists, as their recent reactions have reflected!

Last edited Sun Mar 28, 2021, 12:02 PM - Edit history (1)

Cards on the table to start, I'm an SNP member, and will be voting for the SNP in both our local constituency and the regional list. I've never been a major fan of Salmond, knowing that he's Marmite to sectors of the voting public and for a variety of reasons. He secured the first independence referendum, but arguably called it too soon, as shown by the result, and his instinctive blustering, buccaneering approach meant that he performed less than convincingly in the final debates of that campaign. He was found not guilty at trial last year of multiple charges of historical sexual offences against female staff at Holyrood, but he and his counsel conceded that his behaviour had been transgressive, and if it had happened in any commercial business, he would have been guilty of various offences that would have warranted disciplinary measures and sacking.

Salmond's Alba Party won't compete with the SNP in the constituencies, and therefore can't split the vote with the SNP there. In fact, Salmond is encouraging people to vote for the SNP candidates at directly elected constituency level. It will only stand candidates on the regional lists. In the last few elections, the SNP has done so well in the constituencies that it has gained very few top-up seats from the regional lists (only four at the last elections). I don't want to get too far into the weeds about the D'Hondt PR system for Holyrood elections, but basically it's weighted such that the more seats a party gains in the constituencies, the harder it is for it to gain seats on the lists. Its intention is that the final tally of MSPs is in proportion to the number of votes each party gains Scotland-wide.

Salmond's rationale is that an additional pro-independence party has the potential to get around this hobbling arrangement by mopping up seats that would otherwise be distributed to other parties, mainly unionist, by the list vote. The D'Hondt system's quite unpredictable, but the rule of thumb is that to do this, his party needs to secure at least 5-6% of the vote in any given region to secure an MSP.

Polling before his party's launch put the SNP on course for an overall majority of seats relying on constituency votes alone, but with the possibility of a safety net of sufficent votes on the lists to overcome the weighting and gain a few more seats that way. Salmond claimed at his party's launch that it would secure a "supermajority" for independence at Holyrood. Arguably, this intervention isn't needed as the SNP have appeared well on course for a convincing majority anyway.

The risk for the SNP isn't splitting its vote so much as scaring "soft Yes" voters away from the SNP in a similar way to how the Tories spread fear about a Milliband victory at Westminster allowing the dreaded SNP to effectively ransom his party in return for support to gain a majority and form a government. Nicola Sturgeon has done very well with a gradualist approach that has won support from people who would not be natural SNP supporters (I know of a few surprising examples in my own neighbourhood). A brasher approach by Salmond's party risks undoing at least some of that progress by association. There's also going to be inevitable bad blood between supporters of the two parties, which may make matters a bit messy.

Nicola Sturgeon's personal approval ratings are sky-high in Scotland, streets ahead of any rival. Salmond ranks below even Boris Johnson in the same polls, so it remains to be seen whether his campaign can improve that standing and make him an asset rather than a liability among enough voters. The Scottish Green Party (which is pro-independence) only stands on the regional lists at Holyrood, so it could be seen as vulnerable to vote poaching by the Alba Party, but polls have shown a very poor standing for Salmond among Green supporters, even worse than among the general population.

The Alba Party has peeled off a couple of SNP MPs so far, but they're not seen as a great loss to the SNP.

One is Kenny MacAskill, who returned to Westminster in the last election having served under Salmond as Justice Secretary, when his major claim to fame was the botched release of alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Despite persistent evidence that's still being explored in the courts that Megrahi was framed, MacAskill insisted he was guilty but released him on compassionate grounds, maintaining that his terminal cancer was sufficient punishment for his "deeds". Having returned to Westminster, MacAskill has been a loose cannon, collaborating with anti-SNP Scottish bloggers and publishing a number of hyper-critical newspaper columns.

The other is Neale Hanvey, who entered Westminster at the last election as an independent candidate after the SNP suspended him late in the election campaign for allegations of anti-Semitism. After six months, he regained the SNP whip, but has always been a bit of an awkward fit for the party.

So far, both of them have joined the Alba Party but indicated their intention to remain as MPs and caucus with the SNP at Westminster. How long the SNP will tolerate this is anybody's guess, but with the elections less than six weeks away, there's not much time to address it now. One of the MPs, MacAskill, has used SNP member mailing lists to canvass for list votes for the Alba Party, which is probably a contravention of data protection laws and hasn't gone down well with a number of his constituents, let alone the SNP.

A few more defections may be expected to trickle out in the next couple of days before the deadline for candidate registration. Some had suspected that Joanna Cherry MP might be one of them, but last week she announced that she was withdrawing from public life for a while for unspecified health reasons, and she's since indicated she won't be leaving the SNP.

So the effect of the Alba Party on the elections' outcome makes the D'Hondt system even more unpredictable than it already is, but may threaten the unionist parties much more than the SNP.

To vote tactically at the regional list level successfully means gambling on whether your favoured party will win at constituency level. In my own constituency, Labour's Jackie Baillie had a very small majority at the last election and has a strong SNP opponent, but she could prove hard to displace because of unionist anti-SNP tactical voting, so I'll be hedging my bets by voting SNP on the regional list, on the basis that if the SNP don't win the constituency, they'll have a marginally better chance of gaining a list seat in our area. Similar calculations will need to be made by others for every constituency and region.