Scotland

This week will see the biggest set of polls in UK history outside of a general election. Contests are under way in Wales, Scotland, London and in the various mayoral, local and PCC elections across Britain as part of a so-called ‘Super Thursday.’ But while past election nights have been met with the chimes of the BBC’s Arthur theme and a Dimbleby fronting hours of programmes, Covid means there will be no all-night television special. Whereas normally all results are in by midday Friday, this year it will take longer to verify and count the votes than it has done in previous elections. This is due to both reduced staff

Bad news for unionists in Westminster. A new Opinium poll on the Scottish parliament elections projects that the SNP are on course for a majority come 6 May. The party is polling at 53 per cent (44 per cent on the list vote) and on this would get a majority of around 13 seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on 21 per cent and Labour on 18 per cent.  The poll makes for disappointing reading for government ministers who had begun to hope that their Scotland problem might disappear of its own accord. After Nicola Sturgeon came under fire in the Salmond inquiry, support for the SNP fell, while several polls suggested support for independence was on

Although Alex Salmond and his Alba party have understandably been getting most of the attention, the separatists aren’t the only side riven with divisions over a new challenger. Unionist relations, especially between the Conservatives and partisans of George Galloway’s ‘All for Unity’ outfit, grow more rancorous by the day. To the former, the latter resemble little more than a band of egotists hell-bent on clawing their way into Holyrood even if the result is fewer pro-Union MSPs. The latter, having largely abandoned their original idea of ‘uniting to win’, are pitching themselves to angry Unionist voters as a chance to clear out the old guard and have a ‘real opposition’.

Two decades after devolution, the Scottish Parliament’s election system still confuses ordinary voters and seasoned political observers alike. Politicians on both the Unionist and Nationalist sides have capitalised on this complexity, putting forward new parties – most prominently George Galloway’s Alliance for Unity (A4U) and Alex Salmond’s Alba – that aim to game the system and maximise their side’s (on the matter of the constitution) number of MSPs by pulling regional list votes away from the major parties. But in fact, beneath its byzantine name and workings, Scotland’s modified d’Hondt Additional Member Electoral System translates to straightforward arithmetic, with a clear and inescapable conclusion: Galloway’s A4U gambit is likely to

There is a certain kind of critic of independence who hears the news that public funding for Scotland is 30 per cent higher than for England and sits back thinking: ‘Job done’. The latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies does indeed confirm that the Union is a bargain for Scotland. It finds that, while real-terms resource funding for the Scottish Government is two per cent lower per capita than in 2010 (the beginning of the Tories’ austerity experiment), the spending drop is lower north of the border than in England. Scotland gets more than £1.30 per person for public services for every £1 spent in England. Almost all

‘What, old monkey-face!’ said my husband with unnecessary lack of gallantry. He was referring to the 18th Duchess of Alba, who held 40 titles of nobility and died in 2014. She was a bit out of his league, but it is true that her bone structure came to give her face a simian air. As usual my husband had got it all wrong. Alex Salmond did not name his new party after the Spanish dukedom of Alba that gave the world the Dutch-clobbering 3rd Duke in the 16th century. That duke’s followers were called Albistas, which might come in handy as a label for the Salmond group. The new party’s

Alex Salmond’s reemergence on the Scottish political scene as leader of the Alba party had a pantomimic quality – some cheers, some boos, and a lively mix of interest and anxiety about where the plot would now go with the principal boy back centre stage. But working out how the appearance of Salmond’s new party affects what happens is a considerable challenge, thanks to Scotland’s infernally complex voting system. To paraphrase Lord Palmerston’s reference to the Schleswig-Holstein question, it may be that only around three people truly understand the D’Hondt voting system employed in Scottish parliamentary elections, though there are probably more, who like the fabled German professor, have gone