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The Herald Scotland
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
We're set for a pro-indy parliament despite a pro-Union vote
Under more proportional electoral systems, the Commons would much more closely reflect how Britain actually voted in July. The single transferable vote system used in Scottish local elections would have seen Labour win 35% of seats, much closer to their actual vote share. An Additional Member System, like the one we use at Holyrood, would have had Labour winning 43% of seats. But it's not just the Westminster electoral system that's creaking under the strain of our fragmented party system. With the rise of Reform UK north of the Border as well as south of it, we are poised to have the most disproportionate Holyrood election ever next year. Currently, the SNP is on course to win around 60 of the Scottish Parliament's 129 seats, a 47% seat share on a constituency vote share of around 35% and a list vote share of around 30%. Reform, Labour and the Conservatives are set to win around 15 seats each, with the Liberal Democrats and Greens on course for around 10 seats each. Every party except the SNP is set to win a lower proportion of seats than its vote share, particularly Reform and Labour. The result would be a majority pro-independence parliament despite the majority of Scots voting for a unionist party. Read more by Mark McGeoghegan The Gallagher Index for the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections is currently set to be 9.3 if we use the constituency vote and 13 if we use the regional list vote – 11.2 on average. That doesn't sound too bad compared to the 2024 UK General Election, but it's higher than 77% of recent national elections globally. It blows the average Gallagher Index of 7.1 at the 2011 election, considered by many to have "broken" the Holyrood electoral system by handing the SNP a majority, out of the water. This disproportionality is almost entirely a result of the first past the post component of Holyrood's electoral system. Seventy-three of the 129 MSPs are elected by first past the post to represent constituencies, and the SNP is set to win just short of 60 of them – 82% of the seats on a 35% vote share. If we just look at the constituency vote and seat shares, the 2026 election would have a Gallagher Index of 27.3, the third highest in the world. If the SNP remains in power after next May, which it is likely to do, it will be thanks to the constituency vote. It is set to lose just four seats compared to the 2021 election, despite their vote share falling by around a third. There's something grimly ironic about this. Like much of how the parliament functions, Holyrood's electoral system is a creature of Labour's creation. The lopsided Additional Member System, skewed towards constituency MSPs, was a compromise intended to keep power in Labour's hands. But with the constitutional cleavage still so prominent in Scottish politics, and the unionist vote split between four parties up against a single pro-independence party in most constituencies, it now functions to keep power in the SNP's hands instead. Barring another seismic realignment in Scottish politics – and we've seen enough of them in the devolution era not to rule one out in the near future – the electoral system now functions to keep the SNP in government and dominant in the parliament despite record low levels of satisfaction with the Scottish Government. It further functions to all but ensure a pro-independence majority in parliament, whether that reflects how the country votes or not. Supporters of independence or the SNP might wonder what the big deal is. Isn't this just an argument for shifting the goalposts? The reality is that a disproportionate parliament is unhealthy for democracy and militates against good government and compromise in politics. A parliament in which one party is dominant and almost embedded in government encourages complacency among governing politicians and discourages responsiveness to the concerns of voters. If the governing party can lose a third of its voters but barely suffer any loss of seats, it is not being incentivised to govern in the public interest. That isn't to say that the SNP Government necessarily is ignoring voters' concerns or failing to respond to the public's priorities, but a system that fails to incentivise responsiveness and good governance is doomed to end in a complacent and unresponsive government. Keir Starmer's Labour Party won 63% of MPs on just 34% of the vote in last year's General Election (Image: PA) Of course, I doubt any of our parties will champion electoral reform to correct these issues on the basis of the merit of such reform. Electoral reform is hardly a rallying cry for voters and is, itself, not one of those public priorities. But I do wonder if the way in which disproportionality in the Scottish Parliament systematically advantages the SNP might lead to some opposition parties taking up the cause of electoral reform in their own interests. Fourteen years after the Alternative Vote referendum, electoral reform is back on the agenda. The Welsh Senedd elections next year will use a new voting system, and support for reform at Westminster is growing both among the public and among political party members across parties. There is a broad acknowledgement that our electoral systems are failing to keep up with our politics and no longer serve voters as they should. Disproportionality at Holyrood is nowhere near as bad as it is at Westminster, but is still a deepening problem, and electoral reform in Edinburgh should be part of the wider discussion of how we improve our politics in general. Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @
The Herald Scotland
02-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Doubling down on Reform could be Labour's biggest mistake
The difference, in short, is Reform UK. Reform was a nonentity in 2021 polling at around 2% nationally. In comparison, the Conservatives were on 43% and Labour were on 34%. By last year's General Election the Conservative vote had collapsed to 24% and Reform's had grown to 14%. Today, the three parties are neck-and-neck in the polls. Taking the average of polls conducted in the past week, Reform leads Labour by 26% to 24%, with the Conservatives on 21%. Read more by Mark McGeoghegan At the time of writing, I don't know the exact results of these elections. Voters are going to the polls as I write. But we have a clear idea of the direction the results will likely point in. In the areas with council elections, More in Common estimates that Reform and the Conservatives are neck-and-neck on 26% and 25% of the vote respectively, to Labour's 18%, just one point ahead of the Liberal Democrats on 17%. Forecasts by Electoral Calculus for the Daily Telegraph suggest that, including the elections due to be held yesterday but which have been delayed, the Conservatives and Reform will win around 700 councillors each, to Labour's roughly 300, representing a collapse in Conservative support but also backwards movement for Labour against that already low 2021 benchmark. There were also six mayoral elections held yesterday, four of which were won by Labour last time round. One of these was expected to be won by the Conservatives, one was a tight contest between Labour and the Greens, one should have been hotly contested by Reform, and the fourth likely ended up a three-way contest between Labour, Reform, and the Conservatives. The other two mayoral elections were for new mayoralties, and going into yesterday's elections Reform were favourites for both. Then there was the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. The incumbent MP, Mike Amesbury, was elected for Labour last July but resigned following his conviction for assault. Both polls conducted in the constituency point to a narrow Reform lead, despite Labour having won the seat with a 14,696 majority in July. If Reform has overturned that majority, Runcorn and Helsby will now provide the focal point for stories revolving around the rise of Reform and the breaking of Britain's two-party politics. And you can bet that, regardless of how well or badly last night went for Labour, that will be the story this weekend. There's a real danger that Labour learn the wrong lessons from a part of the country that is hardly representative of the United Kingdom as a whole. Labour's strategy for combatting the rise of Reform has been to amplify Reform's strongest issues and spend time aping Reform's rhetoric instead of focusing on their own strengths and reform agenda. This is a Number 10 operation that seems to have fully bought into the socially conservative Blue Labour programme – what the Oxford University Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions, Dr Ben Ansell, has called the "Glasmanification" of Labour. This in reference to Blue Labour's founder, Baron Glasman, who recently called progressives 'the enemy' on far-right provocateur and MAGA linchpin Steve Bannon's podcast, having been introduced to Mr Bannon by one Nigel Farage. In a classic case of confirmation bias, the Morgan McSweeney-led Number 10 operation will likely jump at the opportunity to use these local election results to double down on their strategy, even though that strategy has not worked here, nor has it worked across Western Europe. Take a look at the same polls that predicted Reform's gains yesterday, and you'll find Labour losing voters on both its flanks and in the centre-ground, not just to Reform. More 2024 Labour voters now intend to vote Liberal Democrat or Green than intend to vote for Reform, and more are now undecided than intend to vote for any other single party. Not only will continuing to ape Reform drive voters open to that kind of politics into Nigel Farage's arms, it will also alienate Labour's left flank and more liberal voters. Trying to ape Nigel Farage's Reform will alienate Liberal voters (Image: PA) That problem is even more acute in Scotland ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections. Scottish Labour has lost a tenth of its 2024 vote to Reform UK, but the same share to the SNP and one in seven of its voters to a mix of the SNP, Scottish Greens, and Liberal Democrats. A further 13% are undecided. Ten months of rightwards drift have seen Labour's Holyrood vote shares collapse roughly in half, from 30-35% at the time of the General Election to 15-20% today. If UK Labour double down on their anti-Reform strategy, recovery for Scottish Labour will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. As multitudinous analysts and commentators have noted, Anas Sarwar has a Keir Starmer problem and Scottish Labour has a UK Labour problem. Ahead of last year's General Election, Professor Sir John Curtice noted that Sir Keir had appeared to choose England over Scotland in his political strategy. It could be put differently that he has chosen the right over the left, Brexiters over Remainers, and conservatism over progressivism. None of these choices aid Anas Sarwar's dimming hopes of becoming First Minister in a nation where Labour's primary contests are in the Central Belt with the urban SNP, and doubling down on them in the wake of local elections in some of the most conservative parts of the UK will likely be the final nail in the coffin for those hopes. Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @
The National
26-04-2025
- Politics
- The National
Scotland's 'independence cohort' have a lot of work to do
Keep all that in mind, dear National reader, as you luxuriate in the notion reported this week by Edinburgh University's Centre for Constitutional Change – that we have an 'independence cohort', inexorably moving towards an indy majority. This is cohort as social scientists have recently defined it. These are people born around the same time who internalise shared formative experiences. This shapes stable attitudes and behaviours that persist throughout their lives. A cohort defies what sociologists would call 'lifecycle' factors. Which is that, as you grow older, bearing more responsibilities (career, home, family), you become ever more deeply invested in the status quo – much more conservative/less radical. READ MORE: Scotland shouldn't aim for independence without a currency plan, expert says So you may be hot to trot for something as disruptive as indy in your teens to early 30s, but that will fade away with age. However, the 'lifecycle' doesn't seem to be turning. The 'cohort' for indy is pushing through the age barriers, maintaining positivity towards the idea of a Scottish nation-state, no matter their life contingencies. Academic Mark McGeoghegan has studied 23 years' worth of data on constitutional opinions. He finds 'strong support for a 'cohort' effect, but no evidence that younger voters become less pro-independence as they age'. Indeed, 'not a single cohort has become less likely to support independence as they have aged'. The polite term for this is 'actuarial'. Or: it's comin' yet for a' that – as the miserable oldies die off. But I'm more interested as to when the indy cohort first began to kick in. Lindsay Paterson's 2023 paper, Independence Is Not Going Away: The Importance Of Education And Birth Cohorts, hazarded an answer. University of Edinburgh academic Lindsay PatersonIn his analysis of the social attitude stats, the turning point was those people born since the 1970s, particularly from cohorts born 1977-1986. Independence support here averages 40-57% between 2014 and 2023. Current youth cohorts (born 1999-2007) show support levels around 66%. The most recent poll found that a thumping 75% of 16-29-year-olds would vote Yes, compared to just 34% of those over 75. But Paterson also notes that there are earlier signs: in cohorts born 1957-66 (that's me!), indy support robustly increases – from 27% in their 30s (early 1990s) to 38% in their 50s (2014). That earlier shift hints at Paterson's explanation. The key factor is the expansion of education. Graduates rose from 9% of the Scottish population in 1979 to more than 40% by 2014. With higher education tends to come a commitment to liberal, civic and European values. Scottish nationalism has leant strongly in that direction (recent hiccups notwithstanding), becoming a vehicle whereby that cohort can explore its interests. Before we break out the unicorn bunting, let me take a pause here, and ask some obvious questions. If being liberal and well-educated constantly strengthens the indy cohort through the generations, and assuming aspirations to FHE are consistent … then is it a matter of waiting till we're smart enough? Cohort theory seems to explain why support for the SNP (as a party and government) spikes and troughs, according to its behaviour and prospectus – while support for independence slowly but steadily advances. It would be nice to think that 'advance' was cognitive. Anyone active in 2012-2014 knew that Project Fear was aiming at the worried, panicky and anxious parts of our brains – aiming to deep-freeze our imaginative, projecting and future-oriented faculties. Setting up a currency, establishing a tax base, transitioning pensions, removing nuclear missiles: these weren't challenges to be embraced, but framed as disasters waiting to happen. So are our capacities burgeoning so much (according to the sociologists) that the next Project Fear will just bounce off us? The citizenry's sanguine intellectual calm about establishing indy becoming an impervious shield? I'm not entirely convinced. READ MORE: Reform UK 'Scotland's third largest party with 10,000 members' There's that obstinate 15% of Scots poll support for Farage's Reform – already outstretching the Scottish Greens, with not a representative yet in sight or place. It's at least an indicator that new Project Fears are always possible. Paterson's liberal-left graduate cohort now faces a significant chunk of recalcitrant fellow Scots. They're turning their face against an overly demanding future – on race and migration, on the urgencies of the climate crisis, on gender/sex culture wars. John Swinney's post-partisan summit this week – exploring ways to maintain social peace and plurality in Scottish life, as far-right populism rises – had Paterson's 'indy cohort' in its sights. The Scottish General Election campaign wheels are already turning, and the threat of Faragist advance (another Project Fear?) looks like it might benefit the SNP in terms of Holyrood seats. Yet the cohort research – explaining the varying fortunes of indy parties, separating that from the solid advance of indy preferences – also points us to more deeply embedded forces of change, beneath the Punch and Judy of electoral politics. First Minister John Swinney (Image: Andrew Milligan) Does independence mean the same old types of political classes, technocrats and corporate interests, operating in unaccountable (or under-accountable) realms of policy and resource-spending, on the people's behalf? If that's how it looks, then who can expect even a second SNP-Green coalition to ride out the storms of popular scepticism and contempt? But the challenges to any nation-state, seeking consent from its electors to keep them secure – as wars rage, AI transforms, living costs rise, the world's populations move – are almost too mighty to imagine them meeting. An 'indy cohort' can't be expected to just focus on the macro-agenda – the next indyref, the next coalition party deal, the geopolitics of Europe. What about the micro-level and the mesa-level, the local empowerments that can strengthen and make larger the lives of Scottish communities? One of the things that makes the community energy movement in Scotland so interesting is that it implies, indeed requires, energetic communities. Ones that can find – either within themselves, or intelligently procured – the expertise (engineering, legal, commercial, deliberative) to pull together their bid. READ MORE: What we can learn from the SNP's massive Fife by-election win And the outcomes are rich. They can be about hard cash. As Lesley Riddoch noted in these pages recently, potentially hundreds of millions can come directly to Scottish communities if they set up their own electricity-producing windfarms, solar arrays and hydro schemes (rather than leave it to corporates, who distribute their pittances of compensation funding). But they can also be civic outcomes, a building of capacity to solve complex problems in your locality. This desire for competence can be extended beyond electricity generation – to local food production, or repair practices, or housing and transport provision. Many leading environmental experts – like the Climate Majority's Rupert Reed – urge that communities must try to prepare themselves in advance for ecological buckles and shocks to our global systems. Reed urges us to develop alternatives and supplements to the services and goods we currently rely on. So there's a Scottish sweet spot here, soft and wide, for whatever bright-eyed political player can touch it. Turns out that doing resilience and true local empowerment is to learn the craft of nationhood – one turbine, one solar panel, one co-op meeting at a time. Who can start to act on this, at the appropriate and effective level? We have precedents. The Scottish Government's Community and Renewable Energy Scheme is a one-stop shop for ambitious localities that want to be capable of making their own electricity. But can land law, and regulation, make it even more possible for such extensions of confidence and competence in Scottish life? And what are those requests 'for forgiveness, not permission' that need to come from below – self-determining instances so authentic they have the state scrabbling after them? Can the 'indy cohort', in short, be comprised of more than merely occasional, super-informed voters?
The Herald Scotland
24-04-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Is indy inevitable? The signs are looking good for Yessers
Nevertheless, there are arguments worth having here, for both sides of the constitutional debate, not to mention for those who want to understand the state of and long-term trends in Scottish political opinion. The key question is one of demography. We have known since 2014 that the younger a voter is, the more likely they are to support independence. The most recent poll found that 75% of 16-29-year-olds would vote Yes, compared to just 34% of those over 75. This gap is regularly deployed in arguments over whether Scottish independence is only a matter of time. Independence supporters often make what has been euphemistically called the "actuarial" argument: as older, more unionist voters pass away, and as younger, more pro-independence voters come of age, the level of overall support for secession will rise until a persistent majority are in favour of Scottish secession. Between the 2014 referendum and the end of last year, there were around 620,000 deaths in Scotland, and just under 550,000 teenagers turned 16 and became eligible to vote, equivalent to around one-eighth of the Scottish electorate. Read more by Mark McGeoghegan The obvious counterargument to this, made predominantly by supporters of the Union, is that as younger people get older, they become more risk-averse. They accumulate assets, like savings and pensions. They become increasingly likely to own their own home. They are more likely to have children. In other words, they become more inclined to conserve what they have accumulated and less likely to support radical policies in general and secession from the United Kingdom in particular. The problem for supporters of the Union is that this argument doesn't appear to be supported by empirical evidence. My analysis of 23 years' worth of data collected by the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, published last week by Edinburgh University's Centre on Constitutional Change, found strong support for a "cohort" effect, but no evidence that younger voters become less pro-independence as they age. Rather than look at age groups over time, I looked at birth cohorts – the oldest were those born before 1958, and the youngest after 1999 – to track what happens to their support for or opposition to independence as they get older. I found a clear difference between birth cohorts over time, with each successive cohort increasingly likely to support independence. These gaps persist over time, and not a single cohort has become less likely to support independence as they have aged. There are many caveats to attach to these findings, which I went into in depth in my essay for the Centre on Constitutional Change, but the long and short of it is that the data appears to support the "actuarial" argument made by independence supporters. Indeed, headline support for independence in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey has grown since 2014 from 33% to 48% in 2023, overtaking devolution as the most popular first-choice constitutional arrangement in 2016. It is crucial to understand that these findings don't mean that independence is a matter of when, not if. Public opinion is malleable, not set in stone, as these data demonstrate. External events, as well as political campaigns, can shape opinion and shift politics in unpredictable directions. But the trend, thus far, is clear. These findings raise a range of questions. For pollsters and researchers, it appears time to interrogate how we measure support for independence. Opinion polls continue to use the binary, Yes-or-No referendum question and many then weigh their samples to the 2014 result. Given the evidence for a cohort effect and the changes in the electorate since 2014, we should question the wisdom of weighting polling to reflect an electorate that no longer exists. This isn't just an esoteric question of polling methodology, it is a substantial question with real political consequences. Opinion polling has been repeatedly deployed since 2014 to demonstrate that nothing has changed, there is no demand for independence, and there is no demand for a second referendum. Polling measures today's public opinion, but also shapes tomorrow's politics. We must get those measurements right. But the biggest questions posed are for unionists. The "actuarial" argument was described by now Labour MP Blair McDougall, who ran the Better Together campaign, as 'intellectual laziness'. When Nicola Sturgeon alluded to demographic shifts a few years ago, unionist figures characterised her comments as 'crass', 'distasteful' and showing a 'chilling lack of empathy'. Empirical reality doesn't care whether the facts are distasteful, crass, unempathetic, or in support of lazy arguments. Blair McDougall (Image: PA) There is a malaise at the heart of British politics that has driven successive generations to become less and less supportive of the Union. Most voters under 55 support independence, and there is no suggestion that this will change. Unionists need to engage with that reality. Some already are doing so, seeking a position beyond the Yes/No divide that a majority of Scots can rally behind. Jim Gallagher, a former Better Together strategist and senior civil servant, posed exactly that question in response to my analysis, telling the Sunday Times that 'we have the space to think more creatively about how Scotland best relates to the rest of Britain'. They have willing interlocutors on the pro-independence side who also recognise that, given the current constitutional deadlock, finding a middle ground will be more productive than continuing to hammer away at the 2014-era independence debate. Last year's Centre for Public Policy report co-authored by Kezia Dugdale, former Scottish Labour leader, and Stephen Noon, former Yes Scotland strategist, was one such effort. Scots' perceptions of our place in the world, and preferences for what that place should be, are gradually changing with each generation, with the potential for huge political shifts in the coming decades. Bad news for those hoping for a return to quiet normality after the past decade of constitutional upheaval. We are cursed – or blessed, depending on your point of view – to live in interesting times. Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @
