I have a pile of leaflets on my kitchen table. There is an SNP leaflet and a leaflet from each of the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour. Each of them is encouraging voters in Aberdeenshire to give both votes to that party. This strategy will lead to the SNP winning not only nearly every seat in Aberdeenshire, but nearly every seat in Scotland. This is the strategy we are up against.
All for Unity is now polling at 4%. We have been ignored for the past year. There has been hardly anything written about this new party since it was founded last summer, hardly any coverage on TV. Why should the Lib Dems (6%) and the Greens (2%) get to take part in a BBC Scotland debate while All for Unity is ignored? We may well get more votes than each of them.
The leaflets on my table show that the Lib Dems, Labour
and Conservatives have given up on winning a Pro UK majority for the Scottish
Parliament. They just wish to protect their share of the vote and keep their
MSPs in pleasant jobs with a large salary. It is for this reason that some
people from these parties are attacking All for Unity.
If you look at what happened in 2016 in North East
Scotland it becomes immediately clear that the Lib Lab Con tactic is indeed a
con. The SNP won nine out of the ten
constituencies, because in each constituency every voter got a stupid leaflet
from Labour the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives telling them that only
their party could win. But this isn’t true.
For instance, look at Aberdeen Central in 2016
SNP 10,269 45%.
Lab 5,381 23.6%
Con 6,466 28.3%
Lib 1,401 6.1%
But we will still have leaflets from the Lib Dems and
Labour telling voters in Aberdeen Central to vote for their party. But even if Labour
and the Lib Dems increased their share by twenty percent they would still lose.
The only way to defeat the SNP in Aberdeen Central is for there to be an
electoral pact so that only the Conservative candidate stands. But Labour and
the Lib Dems refuse. The Conservatives to their credit have tried to organise such
a pact but having failed the Conservatives will still stand in every constituency
even where they must know they have zero chance of winning. But it would be worth
standing down Conservatives in most of the Central Belt even without an
agreement with the other parties. It would show that the tactic works.
Neither Sarwar, Rennie, nor Ross has suggested that Pro
UK voters vote tactically in the absence of a pact. None of the leaflets admit
that it would be worth everyone backing the Pro UK party with the best chance
of winning. The only party that is advocating tactical voting in the
constituencies is Alliance for Unity. Yet we get attacked because the
established Pro UK parties fear losing list seats.
This is completely wrongheaded. If Sarwar, Rennie and
Ross were willing to work together each of their parties would win many more
constituency seats. The failure is not ours, but theirs.
The idea of having a list only party such as All for
Unity makes sense if you understand how the calculations for the list seats
work. It enabled the Scottish Greens (which stood in only a handful of
constituencies) to win 6 seats with 6.6% of the vote in 2016. The Lib Dems only
won 5 seats with 7.8% of the vote precisely because they won 2 constituencies. In
the regions where they won constituencies, they had less chance of winning list
seats and in fact failed to do so.
There are seven list seats in each region, which means
the number of votes each party gets goes through seven rounds of division
taking into account the number of constituencies they win. This means that
quite small numbers of votes will win a party a list seat.
We don’t know how many votes each party will get in
the list seats. Nor do we know how many constituencies each party will win. Small
numbers of votes may decide who wins what in each round of list seat
calculation. But we do know that small parties can win list seats. The Greens
do.
There are now going to be three small parties with a
chance of winning list seats, Alba, the Greens and All for Unity. Alba or the
Greens may deprive Labour, the Lib Dems or the Conservatives from winning a
list seat. But and this is the crucial point, All for Unity may equally deprive
Alba or the Greens from winning a list seat and it may have a greater chance of
doing so precisely because it is a list only party.
We don’t know the result. It is impossible to predict
exactly who will get what seats in the list because it depends not only on
share of the vote, but also on how many constituencies are won.
All we know is that with the SNP polling 49% in the
constituencies and 39% in the list vote, that the only way to get rid of Nicola
Sturgeon is for Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to stand only where
they have a chance of winning. The failure to do this guarantees that the SNP
will win. Tactical voting in the constituencies may limit the size of that
victory, but it cannot possibly work to the extent that it would stop the SNP
winning at all.
All for Unity is not splitting the Pro UK vote. The leaflets
sitting on your kitchen table show that it is already split. The list vote
cannot be split as it is calculated according to the number of votes each party
wins while taking into account the constituencies it wins. Talk of splitting only
makes sense in the context of constituencies and All for Unity is standing in zero
constituencies.
People like me got involved with All for Unity because
we didn’t think Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems were performing well enough
in the Scottish Parliament and because they were unwilling to work together to
stop the SNP.
Everyone who votes for All for Unity is sending a
message to the Sarwar, Rennie and Ross that we want you to put country before
party. The more of us who do this, the more likely they will listen. Their
failure to listen and their failure to put forward the arguments that might
defeat the SNP is the reason we are likely to have Sturgeon as First Minister
for the next five years.
There have been recent attacks on All for Unity including
personal attacks on Jamie Blackett. This is completely out of order. If you
value my articles, I suggest that you cease. I don’t have to put in the effort
that I do and nor does Jamie. Let’s concentrate our fire on the SNP and
independence supporters but be polite to them too. We are all Scots. Let us
disagree pleasantly.
We don’t know if the All for Unity strategy will work.
It depends on the voters. But we do know that delivering leaflets telling
voters in each constituency to vote for Labour, the Lib Dems and Conservatives
will not work. It guarantees defeat because we are dividing our forces in the
face of the enemy. Until Ross, Rennie and especially Sarwar change these
tactics and follow the advice of All for Unity we will have permanent SNP Government
no matter how badly they run Scotland.
There are two alternatives. We do what we did last
time in 2016, which is the tactic of Pro UK voters criticising All for Unity,
or we try to do something different which has a chance of winning. Let us at
least try to win.