Tactical voting
This week we heard increasingly shrill exhortations from Messrs Hosie, Salmond, Roberston and Sturgeon for the Scottish electorate to vote SNP so that there will be a Labour government dependant on their support, and the Tories will be locked out of government. I believe this will be the first time in British or Scottish history that a party has openly advocated tactical voting for a national election.
For people who find this abhorrent it seems the only way to counter this is to vote in your constituency for the candidate most likely to succeed.
This would be the non-SNP incumbent, the candidate from the party that was second last time, or the bookies’ or pollsters’ favourite.
There are analyses of this circulating which show that, if this was done perfectly, Labour would win 42 seats, the Tories ten and the Liberal Democrats seven.
Even if half of this was achieved it would be a huge message to an increasingly arrogant and undemocratic Nationalist movement that the majority of Scots want a fair electoral process and not people hell bent on distorting hundreds of years of democracy in order to impose their will on us.
Allan Sutherland
Willow Row
Stonehaven