After a short campaign that somehow felt like it stretched on forever, Scotland has 57 new MPs: and “new” is indeed the correct term to describe most of our Westminster delegation. In a near reversal of their 2015 landslide that turned the map of Scotland nearly entirely yellow, the heart of Scotland is once again deep red. When the exit poll was initially published, the scale of defeat for the SNP looked astonishing, and for a brief period it sounded like even Professor John Curtice was walking it back a bit. You’d think we’d never been there before with mistrusting what turned out to be a solid exit poll…
As the night went on, it became clear that it was accurate in the aggregate if not necessarily in the detail. From the moment the first result in Kilmarnock and Loudoun showed a massive 22% swing to from the SNP to Labour, in a seat my pre-election model viewed as a tossup, it was clear they were set for Central Belt wipeout. When the second seat to declare was my homeland of West Dunbartonshire and it had the Greens pipping the Conservatives, under First Past the Post in an area they had no history in, it gave us the first taste of an evaporation in Conservative support that would see them pushed into fifth place in both of the big cities too.
The changes sweeping Scotland were so dramatic and I was so busy reporting on them as the results flooded in that I barely had time to look at what was going on elsewhere in the UK. I briefly saw senior Conservatives like Grant Shapps and Jacob Rees-Mogg being ejected, but I missed the defeat of Penny Mordaunt and barely glanced up to see Jeremy Hunt hold on. I did, as the flow of Scottish declarations dried up, watch as truly calamitous former Prime Minister Liz Truss got handed perhaps the most justified defeat of any candidate of any party.
Yet I missed the Alliance winning Lagan Valley but losing North Down and failing to pick up Belfast East. I saw the BBC Scotland feed cut to Lee Anderson’s re-election under the Reform UK banner, but didn’t realise at first that the Greens had indeed clinched Bristol Central. After two Scotland-only elections in the past couple of years, I’d forgotten what it was like to have the chaos and sweep of a UK-wide election happening around me at the same time as trying to keep on top of the detail in my corner.
As the dust finally settles on only the second change of government election of my voting lifetime – my first UK election having been 2010 – what is the picture we’ve been left with in Scotland?
Seats
Seats Won
Overall, I wouldn’t class this outcome as too much of a surprise, but it’s certainly dramatic. For the most part, parties have ended up within the (admittedly broad – I’m afraid that’s just how it is with First Past the Post) bands I had in the final prediction. Labour’s remarkable 37 seats brings them out at the upper end of their range, whilst with 5 seats the Conservatives are towards the middle. Where it pushes just outside those ranges is for the SNP and Lib Dems who end up one seat below their worst and above their best estimate, respectively. For the SNP that represents a catastrophically bad outcome, their 9 seats bringing them back into single digits for the first time since before the 2014 referendum.
A lot of my pre-election coverage in the usual Ballot Box Battlegrounds series was also pretty spot on. The very first constituency it covered was East Renfrewshire, a theoretically SNP-Conservative marginal with Labour a distant third, yet I raised the distinct possibility Labour could regain it, as they did. For the remaining SNP-Conservative seats my general feeling was incumbency would carry the day barring the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East seat’s special circumstances, and again that was correct. I was absolutely right to have my model be more bullish on Conservative chances up here than many others did.
However, there definitely are some other seats that I put my hands up and say I just couldn’t quite see going the way they did. Stirling and Strathallan I had as a Likely SNP seat, on the basis that given it had a stark urban-rural divide, a split in the vote between Labour and the Conservatives would help see the SNP across the line. As it stood, Labour managed to consolidate just enough of that vote to squeak ahead by a few points.
Similarly, I had the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat that had us all hanging on for an extra day as Likely SNP. Whilst I thought the Lib Dems would make progress towards gaining it at the next election, I didn’t think they’d convert it this time. I underestimated just how strong their local campaign would be, and how poorly the SNP would do.
Votes
For all the drama of Labour sweeping the SNP out of dozens of seats, the vote shares aren’t all that far apart. Both of these were absolutely expected to be the case, and I even wrote a dedicated piece about Labour’s likely dominance of the Central Belt in the run up to the vote. It is still however the first election since 2010 where the SNP haven’t won the most votes. The Conservatives may have held onto third place, but their share is abysmal, the lowest it has been at Westminster and effectively undoing all of the progress made in their revival.
In addition to their seat performance, the Lib Dems will also be very happy with that vote share. A few polls had suggested Reform UK could just about equal or maybe even exceed their share, but that didn’t happen. Reform UK still did well though, capitalising on some of that anger with the Conservatives in a way UKIP never managed to. The Greens also made this the third election in a row, after the 2021 Holyrood and 2022 Locals, where they could say it’s the best result yet in the category.
If we look at it in terms of swing, you can see that Labour near enough doubled their vote relative to 2019. The SNP’s decline almost balanced out Labour’s gains, representing the loss of around one third of their vote share. That gives a net SNP to Labour swing of about 16%, which is absolutely massive. The Conservatives also had a remarkable decline, amounting to about half of their support deserting them, significantly but obviously not exclusively to Reform UK.
The Lib Dems ended up with a tiny little bit of upwards movement, against what was a general polling trend suggesting they would lose at least a little bit of their support. Reform UK’s figure is unreliable as they stood in so few places in 2019, but it represents a more than doubling of the combined share for them and UKIP where they did stand then. Similarly, the Green share grew far in excess of what it would simply from contesting more constituencies.
How did the polls compare?
Traditional Polls
In my final pre-election prediction, I’d included a final (simple) polling average drawn from the five polls I had in the BBS tracker from the last two weeks of the campaign. That gave us the baseline against which to compare the final outcome, and answer the perennial question about how accurate polling was.
Short answer: almost flawless overall (in Scotland – as with so much of this election, the story elsewhere is very different). Looking across the average of these polls, a real big win for Scottish polling in the round this election. The actual result fell within about 1% of the final average for every party. That compares to 2019, where polling underestimated the SNP by around 4%, and 2017 where it overestimated them by a similar amount. In statistical terms that’s near enough pinpoint accuracy.
Individual pollsters were a bit more hit and miss however. I had described Savanta’s final poll as “spicy”, given it was the only one to put the SNP in the lead and had Labour a good bit lower than average. I privately worried that it being the very last Scotland-only poll of the campaign would cast a pall over polling more generally if it was a miss, seeing as it was a clear outlier.
That has happened to a tiny degree as I’ve had a few folk pointing it out on Twitter, but it doesn’t seem to have created too much capital-D Discourse. Savanta themselves have put their hands up and said they need to figure out what went wrong, and it’s important to note these kind of misses do happen occasionally. That’s also exactly why we must never take individual polls as gospels and always look at trends and averages.
Note that Ipsos and Opinium aren’t in the average, because they only did one poll during the campaign, and it was about a month before polling day. They were both a bit out for the SNP especially, but they may have found narrower results closer to the time if they’d asked again. It’s impossible for us to tell, and given how much happened over the last few weeks of the campaign it just wouldn’t be as useful to add them to the average.
MRP Polls
Something I didn’t touch at all during the election were the MRP polls – “Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification” to give them their Sunday name. To a certain degree that was just because I had so much else going on that reporting on yet another thing would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But as the campaign went on, I became increasingly convinced that MRPs had become a net-negative for our political discourse.
If you’re reading BBS you’ve almost certainly seen an explanation of how these work, but the simple summary is they take a massive sample size, figure out how different groups of voters are voting, and then apply that demographically to every seat in the country to get an overall picture. When you combine this explanation with the very fancy sounding name, MRPs ended up with both a cachet that ordinary polls don’t and capturing a lot of attention with their promise of being able to give credible individual seat projections.
Yet in Scotland, a lot of the MRPs were spitting out things completely at odds with the general state of polling. These included an early one with the SNP on 37 seats despite trailing Labour in ordinary polling by 5%; Labour winning Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk; and the SNP winning Orkney and Shetland. All of these were obviously wrong, but spread like wildfire across social media. In Scotland, most of the final MRPs overestimated the SNP and underestimated the Conservatives, with the notable exception of Survation who were almost spot on.
Compared to traditional and simple models (on BBS I effectively average out uniform and proportional swings), the problem with these is you can’t explain them easily. When my model gives something odd, we can all go “ah, that’s just because the model is giving too much/little swing there.” With MRPs being much cleverer, the individual predictions are given more credibility by a lot of people, yet when they get big misses like the examples above nobody outside the polling firm in question can explain why.
Given we have an FPTP system, an urge to find out what is happening locally is understandable. However, in meeting that urge, I think MRPs have ended up going too far towards giving people the illusion of certainty – as too did the exit poll’s individual seat predictions, which had the Scottish Conservatives on an absurd number of seats the party was then forced to spend the entire night expectation managing downwards.
No amount of careful caveating changes what happens with polling output when it gets in ordinary people’s hands, so we need to think about what goes out there. At the next election, I think MRPs need to get better at modelling Scotland, and to resist the siren call of clicks and media coverage they get from publishing individual seat breakdowns, just publish the headline seat figures.
What does the result mean for each party?
I’ll be getting into more detail about things like swings for each party in each seat in the coming days, but for the moment it feels worthwhile giving a very quick summary of how the results feel for each party.
Labour
Sensational. Superb. Incredible. Phenomenal. These are the kinds of words you have to reach for to describe Labour’s result in Scotland. Not only did the party nearly double their vote, but in so doing they almost entirely reversed their 2015 wipeout, coming up just 4 seats short of the 41 they’d won back in 2010. That’s an incredible turnaround for the party, especially when you consider that means vaulting from third to first place. The SNP may have achieved that in seat terms in 2015, but in raw votes they’d had a (narrow) lead over the Lib Dems.
It’s also easy to forget now that Anas Sarwar led his party to its worst ever Holyrood result in 2021, but now he stands absolutely triumphant. For a few years Labour were worried that they had been permanently shattered, with the SNP having eaten into their traditional voter base whilst monopolising the youth vote alongside the Greens, whilst the Conservatives had regained much of the support lost in 1997. Those fears have proven unfounded, and the party is back with a vengeance.
Labour’s result is so spectacular that honestly it doesn’t feel like there’s much more that needs said as a quick reaction. It almost speaks for itself, so there’s a lot less needing said than for the big losers of the election.
SNP
If I summed up Labour’s success with some simple words, what might the SNP equivalents be? Disastrous. Calamitous. Catastrophic. Devastating. The dominant force in Scottish politics for the past decade has been laid low – in part, yes, by the voting system, which I will obviously get onto later, but that was enabled by the loss of one-third of its vote. They have fallen back into single digits in seats, back where they were before the referendum, even if their vote is (that same proportion again) one-third higher than it had been at the 2010 election.
Just like that election, they have been reduced to a party largely of the rural centre and north of Scotland. They have maintained their hold on Aberdeen to give them a slightly more urban flavour than they ever had back in the day, but they’ve been ejected entirely from the Central Belt. Some have privately acknowledged there was already a massive disconnect between the MSP and MP groups, with complaints that the latter perhaps didn’t realise how difficult it is to actually be in government rather than the only thing you have to worry about each week being practicing your PMQs in front of the mirror.
A shift to an MP group dominated by voices outside the Central Belt may further add to an inability to empathise with the challenges facing the majority of SNP MSPs, who due to the PR system at Holyrood won’t simply be wiped out and will find their numbers much more dependent on overall vote share. That is, perhaps, an ironic reversal of the complaint many have made about the party in recent years, that it has been too Central Belt focussed, but the mathematical reality is that’s where the most seats are.
The SNP are going to have to reckon with two things sooner rather than later. The first is the simple reality that they have been in government for 17 years. It is extremely hard for any governing party to maintain support for that long, and voters may just be tired of them – prosaic, I know. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing they can do to make any future defeats less painful, but it does need to be understood rather than acting like you can just entirely ignore political gravity.
The second is that the call is coming from inside the house for why things have been so bad for the SNP lately. A lot of desperate internal dissidents have attempted to lay the blame for defeat at the Greens’ door, with the Bute House Agreement having collapsed just two months before the election. Yet whilst you can fairly argue about Green-associated policies adding to the SNP’s problems (how convincing you find such claims will depend on your own partisan persuasion), to consider them the primary contributor is a laughably bad political bubble take that could prove fatal for the SNP if it took root.
The Greens did not make Nicola Sturgeon resign; nor did they run a chaotic and embarrassing leadership campaign to replace her; nor did they arrest her, Peter Murrell and Colin Beattie in the Operation Branchform investigation into the party’s finances; nor did they run up Michael Matheson’s iPad bill; nor did they delete WhatsApps requested by the COVID-19 Inquiry; nor did they fail to get ferries floated on time and budget; nor were they even in cabinet holding any major portfolios for areas people want improvement in like healthcare or education.
The SNP won’t thank me for the comparison, but there’s a similarity to the Conservatives here. In government for a long time. A popular and election-winning leader departing (more willingly in Sturgeon’s case than Johnson). The successor proving disastrous and short lived (less so in Yousaf’s case than Truss’). The general feeling of chaos and instability generated by internal conflicts. All of that is entirely on the SNP, and it’s up to them to address it.
One final note on that front: just like the Conservatives, a lot of people might console themselves with the idea that just one more change of leader will revive their government. Just like the Conservatives, that’s probably desperately wishful thinking. Yet, the most obvious future leader may be looking at the Westminster result in their constituency and the defeat of Penny Mordaunt down south, an obvious Conservative challenger for leadership otherwise, and worrying just a little bit.
Conservatives
Speaking of the Conservatives, this was both an absolute disaster for them yet somehow not as bad as it could have been. They have plummeted to their worst ever vote share at a UK general election in Scotland, lost 16 deposits, and have been forced into fifth place in both of the country’s biggest cities. Yet they managed to hold all but one of their seats, benefitting from the fact Labour weren’t in contention in most of them and couldn’t quite make up the difference in the others. By that measure, they managed far better than their colleagues down south.
With hindsight, Douglas Ross must surely accept that standing in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East was an absolutely astonishing error of judgement. I don’t think it’s at all a coincidence that after brutally removing the hospitalised David Duguid at the last minute to stand himself, breaking his pledge to stand down from Westminster, this was the only seat the Conservatives lost. His own colleagues were outraged and forced him to pre-announce his resignation as leader, and voters were clearly also appalled by this behaviour.
During his BBC Scotland interview after losing his seat, I detected what I thought was frankly a hint of voter blaming from Ross. He’d been telling voters all election that if they voted Reform UK they’d let the SNP in, and that’s exactly what happened he said. The possibility that those voters had heard those warnings, and still decided to vote Reform UK because they simply refused to vote for him and were willing to accept an SNP MP as a natural consequence doesn’t seem to have been publicly acknowledged.
This feeds into a sense that the Scottish Conservative campaign, a bit like those SNP dissidents, was trying to lay the blame anywhere but themselves. The party were almost presenting this election as a referendum on the SNP’s Scottish Government that had absolutely nothing to do with their own UK Government. That was a laughable approach to take in an election for the UK Parliament, but also one that showed contempt for voters. They may indeed have been scunnered with the SNP, but it wasn’t that government this vote would decide.
The party are now in an incredibly vulnerable position where if this kind of result was replicated at Holyrood, they could find themselves losing half of their seats. What’s worse, if the genie is out of the bottle with Reform UK, that may become a near-permanent chunk taken out of their vote. They’ll also have to go through concurrent leadership elections at UK and Scottish level that, as is common after shattering defeats, may see the party going for the more self-indulgent choices that channel grief and anger at losing over more reasoned heads that will actually be able to re-connect with voters.
Lib Dems
Another party with a lot to celebrate, across the UK the Lib Dems have just managed to win their best result since the old Liberal Party heyday at the turn of the century… by which I mean the 19th into 20th, obviously. In Scotland, a quirk of the boundary changes means that although they only have 2 new MPs, that reflects a trebling of their notional 2019 tally. They are rightly thrilled by this, though with apologies to Alex Cole-Hamilton (I say that a lot, sorry Alex) I do hope I’ve heard the “after the birth of my child and my wedding day, this was the best day of my life” line for the last time after hearing it on multiple platforms yesterday – it’s a bit overly-earnest for my tastes!
As touched on earlier, that gives them one seat more than I had thought possible, as they worked the Inverness-inclusive seat incredibly hard and picked up a shock gain. I wouldn’t therefore write off their chances of doing so elsewhere at the next election, but it would take a lot of work. If you look across their other pre-2015 seats, they either continued to decline (as in the Borders) or had only very modest gains (think Argyll and the Aberdeenshire seats). Basically, they should pick one rather than get carried away.
Underneath that headline though, some caution for the Lib Dems. Once again a near-static national share is built on big gains in key seats and losses elsewhere. They lost 30 deposits and remain incredibly weak across Glasgow and Central Scotland, which confirms my sense they just are not in a position to regain a list seat there at Holyrood.
In constituencies covering the South and West they likewise did very poorly, with the obvious exception of Mid Dunbartonshire. Their Westminster support in that area has never translated to Holyrood backing however, so it remains entirely credible to suggest the Lib Dems could be confined to four of Scotland’s eight regions at Holyrood even with some growth in 2026. If that includes them getting an overhang inducing 4 Highlands and Islands constituencies though, they might not be too fussed to be posted missing elsewhere.
Reform UK
Moving onto the parties that didn’t win seats, Reform UK nonetheless had a very creditable result in Scotland. They placed fifth in vote share overall, and hammered the Conservatives in constituencies across the country, beating them in 23. For a party that as I keep pointing out has almost zero actual infrastructure in Scotland, to the extent 8 of their candidates had to be shipped in from England, that’s pretty good going, even if their vote share was half what it was UK-wide.
The question though is whether this is a short-lived reaction at this election, benefitting from a combination of wall-to-wall media coverage and anger at the Conservatives, or if it will become something more long lived. At this point it’s very hard to say. In the past, parties to the right of the Conservatives have amounted to very little in Scotland – for example, when UKIP won a very similar share down south in 2015 as Reform UK have this year, in Scotland it only amounted to 2.3% of the vote in the seats they contested. That they have already massively exceeded that may be a sign that they are here to stay.
Greens
Although the Scottish Greens didn’t have the level of success that propelled their English counterparts to a record-breaking 4 MPs, this was still a very good result for them. Westminster has long been their worst election, with it being an outlier of basically negligible support compared to pretty consistent levels across proportional elections for Holyrood, Councils and, previously, Europe. Whilst we have to read their overall vote share increase in the context of them standing in twice as many seats this time, they near enough doubled their vote across the seats they did contest, on 4.9% of the vote.
That’s still quite a modest share, to be sure, but it’s much better than ever before and the closest they’ve come to matching a recent Holyrood performance. They also saw record results across Glasgow and Edinburgh, where they beat the Conservatives and Reform UK overall, including four which broke into double digits, the first time they have ever achieved that. Indeed, they placed third in every Glasgow constituency, exactly the kind of surge that Glasgow’s current crop of SNP MSPs would be sensible to fear seeing in 2026. After losing every deposit in 2019, they held 12 this time, including 2 outside the two big cities.
Building on my brief reference to the exaggerated impact of the Greens on SNP losses in their section, a best-ever result hardly speaks to the idea that the voting public are unutterably furious at the Greens over BHA. Certainly the party remain a smaller one, but at a level that is perfectly comparable to many of their counterparts across Europe, especially at proportional elections. The political bubble is at some point going to have to get comfortable both with the fact the Greens are here to stay, and that public reaction to the party doesn’t mirror the often intense views of internet partisans. Some of those internet partisans will also have to get comfortable with me pointing this stuff out without descending into shrieking fury about me being biased just because they’d rather it wasn’t true, he says in hope rather than expectation.
Alba et al
Parties and candidates outside the six discussed individually above did win significantly more votes at this election than in 2019, mostly reflecting the much higher number of such alternative options on people’s ballots this time.
Alba’s 0.5% accounts for about a third of this figure. However, that was still just 1.5% of the total in the seats they contested. They failed to hold a single deposit, the best performing of their two MPs only got just over halfway to doing so, the other was beaten by a party dissident who had left and stood as an Independent, and there wasn’t a single seat they beat any of the parties above. In an election where Labour and the Greens clearly benefitted from dissatisfaction with the SNP, Alba continued to go absolutely nowhere.
The only other party to stand in an appreciable number of seats, three fewer than Alba, was the Scottish Family Party. They tallied up just 0.2% of the national vote and 0.8% of the vote where they stood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best result for both an Independent candidate and for any of the micro-parties was in Na h-Eileanan an Iar, where former SNP MP Angus MacNeil won just over 10% of the vote and where the Scottish Christian Party achieved 3.7%. Looking beyond the islands, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition’s 1.5% in Dundee Central was the best result for a micro-party on the mainland.
Final Reflections
This isn't reflective of Scotland...
As has consistently been the case, the key takeaway from this election is that it just isn’t reflective of how people actually voted. That’s the fundamental, root problem with the FPTP voting system, which we absolutely have to get rid of. I know some people will already be bristling at that on a partisan basis, and in fact at one point in the campaign I had someone trying to suggest I was only complaining about FPTP now the SNP were on track to lose.
That was extremely funny given I’m the last person in Scotland you could accuse of being quiet on Proportional Representation until now! One of the categories on the website includes my musings on PR, such as a complete rundown of a PR model for the 2019 election published just afterwards. Every single poll analysis article I write concludes with a section on what more proportional electoral systems would have delivered, as in for example literally the first poll after the 2021 Scottish Parliament election!
My longstanding pro-PR credentials firmly established, for Labour to have ended up with four times as many seats as the SNP on less than 6% more of the vote is democratically absurd. Just as it was completely unrepresentative for my home city of Glasgow to have nothing but SNP MPs elected in 2019, it just doesn’t reflect our votes to have nothing but Labour MPs now. By the same token, Labour shouldn’t be totally absent in the north of the Scottish mainland, which has become the preserve of the SNP, Lib Dems and Conservatives.
These results just don’t look like the Scottish electorate, and if we’d had a PR system in place rather than a yawning 28 seat chasm, Labour’s advantage over the SNP would have been a little 3 seat gap. Again some folk may find their temper rising at this point – “but it’s not a PR election, so this isn’t relevant!” It is in fact highly relevant, because whilst the UK Parliament isn’t proportional, the Scottish Parliament is. AMS has a history of benefitting Labour more than the SNP (peaking at 7 undue Labour seats in 1999, versus 4 undue SNP in 2021), but it’s still proportional enough that the SNP will still have plenty of MSPs across the Central Belt and Labour will fall far short of a majority with a result like this in 2026.
... and especially unreflective of the UK
The complete failure of FPTP to actually represent voters is even more apparent when we look across the UK. Whilst in Scotland Labour had a genuine and dramatic boost to their vote share, that accounts for the overwhelming majority of the party’s +1.6% overall. In England they couldn’t even increase their support by a whole 1%, whilst they lost nearly 4% in Wales. And yet they more than doubled their total number of MPs, as the Conservatives collapsed around them.
Democratically speaking that is simply perverse. Roughly the same amount of support at two elections should give roughly the same number of seats. It also jars enormously with Labour’s narrative that a “changed” Labour party has brought voters flocking back that had been lost under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, seeing as Starmer hasn’t actually done meaningfully better in vote terms than Corbyn did in 2019.
It’s already becoming apparent the party’s outriders are concerned by this complete disconnect between election narrative and result, as they shift towards pointing out that Starmer achieved a much better efficiency of the vote than Corbyn did. That’s a perfectly sound argument by itself, and it’s absolutely the game you have to play with FPTP, and one Labour and the Lib Dems played extremely well this year. That does not however resolve that fundamental mismatch between the rhetoric (and polling) of a massive surge in support and the reality of no major advance, not does it do anything at all to counter the mismatch between votes and seats.
You are especially ill-served if you voted for either Reform UK or the Greens. Whilst both have groups of MPs, a remarkable achievement under FPTP, they collectively only have 9 seats (1.4%) for over a fifth (21.1%) of the vote. That simply isn’t representative, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t democratic. As in 2019, I’ll be doing a full UK PR model over the coming days that will give a realistic (rather than simplistic) vision of what the votes as-cast should have given those parties in a proper democracy. Even that has the caveat though that for the Greens especially, YouGov estimated that around half of their potential voters were going to vote tactically, largely to Labour’s benefit.
I am very well aware that the chances of Labour doing anything about a voting system it has just benefitted enormously from are basically zero. Yet, I am going to remind you all of my reddest of red lines: you are not a democrat if you don’t support PR. You simply aren’t. You can spout of all the rubbish defences you like; about people voting for individual candidates (nonsense, and you know it, not least given the success of last-minute Labour candidates parachuted in by the party’s NEC); the system giving stable majority governments (this is my fifth general election yet the first where that has any chance of being true); or keeping out extremists (the last government was living the European far-right’s dream of leaving the EU and breaching the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers).
None of that is really why anyone supports FPTP. It’s naked partisan advantage and nothing else. There is not one single shred of principle behind anyone’s backing for that miserable system. The voters of the UK deserve better than to be ignored in their millions, and they certainly deserve better than being sneeringly patronised by politicians and commentators who would have us all believe it is somehow for our own good that most of us will never have proper representation in parliament.
What Next?
I don’t want to leave this piece on an entirely angry note, no matter how justified I think that anger is. Reporting on the election itself was heaps of fun, as it always is on Ballot Box Scotland. It’s very stressful at the same time of course, but having loads of data piling up and sifting through it and getting it out there for folk to see and share is genuinely fulfilling and I enjoyed count night immensely!
Beyond this piece there’s still boatloads of analysis to come for this result. Over the next few days I’ll be aiming to complete pieces on the distribution of each party’s vote; what Scotland’s new marginal constituencies are; and of course that long piece about a proportional UK-wide result. I’ll also aim to have the complete results collated and available beyond just the map-with-percentages above next weekend, though I’m on a wee holiday the following week and obviously have my day job to do in between.
As ever, whilst BBS is a completely free service, I do just want to remind people it takes up vast amounts of my time. I effectively haven’t done anything except compile results and write analysis for the past 36 hours. I’ve barely slept in that time due to the overnight and my body being completely thrown. If you value my work and the effort put into it, and you can afford to do so, please do consider chipping in a donation below.
If you find this or other Ballot Box Scotland output useful and/or interesting, and you can afford to do so, please consider donating to support my work. I love doing this, but it’s a one-man project and takes a lot of time and effort. All donations, no matter how small, are greatly appreciated and extremely helpful.
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