Why Reform could help keep SNP in power indefinitely – and how unionists can fight back
If just a quarter of Reform voters in the Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine constituency had backed the Conservatives instead, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn would have lost
There was always an inevitability that, whatever the actual result of the election, the SNP would try and claim it as a mandate for another independence referendum. Throughout the campaign, party leader John Swinney was quite clear that it would take a majority of SNP seats at Holyrood to constitute that mandate.
However, as soon as the votes were counted, he changed his tune, claiming that a majority of pro-independence MSPs (lumping in the Greens with the SNP) meant that a referendum had to be delivered.
The details of the election results tell a somewhat different story. The actual turnout across the country was just 53 per cent, of which the SNP secured 38 per cent on a constituency vote, and just 27 per cent in the regional lists. The reality is that fewer than one in five of the Scottish population actually voted for the party with a commitment to an independence referendum in its manifesto.
This could hardly be classed as a mandate, and even this UK Government, in its current beleaguered state, surely will not countenance calls for another referendum which would thrust Scotland into yet more years of constitutional bickering and division.
Reform are Swinney’s best friends
The fact that the SNP, with 58 seats, are by far the largest party at Holyrood despite having a vote share below 40 per cent is explained by a number of different factors. Firstly, they benefitted enormously from a split opposition. In the vast majority of constituencies, the votes for parties other than the SNP were larger than the totals for the winning nationalist candidates.
I can remember warning in this column on many occasions prior to the election, as did many others, that the arrival of Reform on the Scottish political scene would aid the SNP. It gives me no satisfaction to say that that is exactly what happened last Thursday.
There are at least four constituency seats which the Scottish Conservatives could have won had it not been for the intervention of Reform, assuming that most of those backing that party might otherwise have cast a vote for the Tory candidate. Most strikingly, in the Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine constituency, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn won the seat with just 34.1 per cent of the votes cast, 1,244 votes ahead of my Conservative colleague Liam Kerr, whilst Reform’s Duncan Massey polled 6,113.
If just a quarter of those Reform voters had backed the Conservatives instead, we would have gained a major scalp in the shape of the SNP’s Westminster leader and a potential future First Minister. As we always warned, Reform were John Swinney’s best friends.
Nationalists gaming the voting system
The second factor helping the SNP was the party’s relationship with the Greens and how the additional member system used for electing MSPs was gamed. The Greens only fought a handful of constituencies, instead relying on those voting SNP in the constituency, then splitting their votes to give the alternative pro-independence party their list support. This helped maximise the number of pro-independence MSPs in parliament, effectively meaning that the votes of independence supporters counted double compared to most pro-Union voters.
The current Holyrood voting system and the practice of the Greens in not contesting more than a few constituencies provides an outcome that is far from proportional to the number of votes cast for each party. The system is clearly in need of reform, but I cannot imagine any party in government which benefits from it will be rushing to propose an alternative.
Thirdly, it was to the advantage of the SNP, once again, that pro-Union parties were judged not necessarily on their own performance at Holyrood, but on perceptions of their parties at Westminster. Two years ago, Anas Sarwar was regarded as a clear favourite to be the next First Minister, but instead led his party to Scottish Labour’s worst-ever performance in a Scottish election.
None of this is directly his fault. Like other pro-Union party leaders before him, whether in Labour, the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, he was suffering because of the actions of his Westminster colleagues.
Starting the fightback
With at least a third of the Scottish electorate firmly committed to independence, and apparently willing to forgive the SNP for every failure in government and remain loyal, this might lead us to the rather depressing conclusion that, unless something changes significantly, we might see the nationalists in power indefinitely.
If there is no change to the existing voting system, and the pro-Union opposition continues to be split four ways, it is hard to see how any single party is going to be able to dislodge the SNP from power. Their biggest asset on the opposition benches, Reform, are not going to go away, and so long as they are there, the SNP’s power base will simply be entrenched.
There is, however, an opportunity to fight back against the SNP almost immediately. With both Stephen Flynn and Stephen Gethins now being elected as MSPs, that will mean Westminster by-elections in their constituencies in Aberdeen and Angus respectively.
The Aberdeen by-election is likely to be interesting, particularly given the context of the result in the equivalent Aberdeen, Deeside and North Kincardine constituency. If all pro-Union voters can rally around the Conservative candidate in that by-election, and particularly those who voted Reform last week and in so doing saw themselves aid an SNP victory, then there is a real opportunity to deliver a blow to the nationalists so soon after John Swinney’s triumph. And that would be the first indication that the SNP are more vulnerable than it might at first appear.
Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife
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