By: Simon Brooke :: 17 February 2016
The SNP — including the normally-sensible Nicola Sturgeon — have been banging on incessantly for weeks for everyone to vote BothVotesSNP. This is utter madness, if what you care about is Scotland and our future as a nation. On the current polling, we get the following:
That is to say, pro-independence parties — SNP and Greens — would have a total of only 79 seats at Holyrood, against 50 pro-union seats. That is a majority, but it isn't overwhelming. The unionists will still get plenty of air-time, plenty of coverage, and, most importantly of all, plenty of tax-payers money in the form or salaries for MSPs, researchers and associated staff. With that money they'll be able to campaign.
And notice that seven of those pro-union MSPs are UKIP.
If everyone planning to vote SNP on their first vote also votes SNP on their second (the pure BothVotesSNP which the party are currently so keen to promote), we get this:
No Greens at all, only 74 pro-independence MSPs (all SNP), and now we're up to 55 pro-union MSPs including now 8 UKIP. The Tories also gain one, and Labour gain three.
By contrast, if all SNP voters give their second vote to the Greens, we get a very different pattern:
This time there are one hundred and eleven pro-independence MSPs, and only eighteen unionists. And all I've done is move SNP second votes to the Greens.
So the clear outcome of this analysis is this: every list vote the SNP gets robs us of pro-independence MSPs, and sets the cause of independence back — badly. BothVotesSNP is, quite simply, stupid, partisan, tribal politics, psephologically illiterate. It's a vote for the union.
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