Well the dust has settled and the posters have been taken down, for the second time in my case, having made a reappearance on my windows when news came through of John Mason’s staggering victory. The Sunday papers have been read and digested, and not just online for once – I wanted to get my hands on that pull out election map and devour the statistics hands-on so to speak – so I actually bought the printed versions.
As a teenager back in the heady days after the two 1974 elections I developed a fascination for electoral statistics which remains with me to this day. I could have told you the swing required to win East Kilbride or Cumbernauld without a moment’s hesitation, despite having little notion of where they were, and I recall sitting for what seemed like hours on end working out how many seats the SNP would win if the swing was x% from Labour and y% from the Tories. It probably was hours on end!
Of course swings are never quite uniform as Thursday demonstrated. Lots of factors come into play which confuse the issue no end. But having introduced my Dutch friend to the humour that is Jackie Baillie only a few days before the election it was actually with something approaching a perverse sense of relief that I discovered she’d still be around for him to enjoy for the next 5 years. I feel she will provide him a foil for his distaste (and I’m being reserved here) for Sarah Palin.
But back to the swings and my own version of Peter Snow’s gadget in the mid 1970s demonstrated that at a certain level of swing a huge sea-change would take place, and the political map, then overwhelmingly red and blue, would turn yellow from north to south and east to west.
So the events of Friday morning brought many memories flooding back of all those lists of constituencies, many now long gone, turning yellow on my own hand-drawn maps.
Turning to the statistics I dare say others more qualified than I will have their say but one or two interesting nuggets of information to digest before moving on to what happens next.
#BothVotesSNP as it appeared on Twitter (the discovery of the wonders of which I made about half way through the campaign) worked. And it worked spectacularly well. Transfers of votes are never as simple as they appear on paper. I’m pretty sure the SNP picked up a larger chunk of the Labour support than appears the case for instance. But the SNP only dropped 1% between constituency and list votes.
But one third of the LibDem support did not vote LibDem on the list vote. And one sixth of the Labour vote didn’t keep the faith either. Between them these two parties, in government together for the first 8 years of the Parliament, didn’t total one third of the list votes. And that is the scale of the crisis they find themselves in.
Where did these votes go? Well the Green vote had to come from somewhere, but it wasn’t as large as the polls at the end had suggested it might be, and they ended up with only 2 MSPs. That having been said they were within 300 votes of beating the Tories into third place on the Glasgow list, which saw the LibDems trailing in 6th behind Gorgeous George, who himself secured only perhaps half as many votes as some had thought he might.
However accurate he was about Glasgow’s potholed roads looking like they’d been bombed, he didn’t strike any significant cords with this electorate. Neither did the SSP who secured only 1362 votes on the list and were so far down the list of parties that I feel they will need to do some reflection themselves. I have a lot of time for them and their idealism, and the poster on my window in 2003, though yellow, had a lot of red in it also. The Parliament could do with the colour and vitality that they brought to it for those 4 years when they and the Greens mustered 13 MSPs between them.
So where now? Well others will write, and indeed the “Burd” amongst others, has already written, about Presiding Officers and the like. There has been much analysis of Labour’s campaign, and Gray and Tavish Scott have bowed to the inevitable. Annabel is thus far holding on but I fear her head is in the proverbial sand, and a campaign which saw the Tories drop from a notional 20 seats to 15 cannot be classed as anything to boast about.
But I want to glance forward a whole year to the Council elections, postponed, and quite rightly so to May of next year. To me they now assume monumental importance as they provide the SNP and indeed the electorate a chance to strike a fatal blow at the institutionalised cronyism that pervades a lot of what still struggles to pass as democratic local government in Scotland. The STV voting system makes it harder to extrapolate results from one election to another but if the shares of the votes remain similar the political map of Scotland will truly have changed and possibly permanently so.
John Swinney announced before the elections his plans to legislate against the practice of paying councillors sitting on ALEOsLibDems on this matter if it makes it to a vote anytime before legislation is passed.
And another electoral victory on the same scale as this one would undoubtedly mean that CoSLA would take on a different hue and this could well be crucial as we move towards that referendum.
A lot will depend on whether the feel-good factor about the SNP administration is translated into support at council level but I see no reason why it shouldn’t, as if nothing else proportional representation has allowed communities to be served by SNP as well as Unionist members. And in many cases the difference between the two is of a striking nature!
Returning to Glasgow, last time round the SNP pitched their campaign and indeed number of candidates just right, and unless I’m mistaken every one got elected. Next year I suspect their ambition will be of an altogether higher level!
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