Why the Scottish election could be closer than it looks

Scotland-based readers, now is the time to register to vote!

Correction - I read that the two men in the Kenmure Street movie were deported and I said that in the original piece, but on further investigation, that seems to be wrong, as far as I can see they are still in the appeals process. Apologies for not checking that more throughly than I did. My AI research assistant has now been fired.

Polling for the May 7 Holyrood election shows SNP support falling to around 35%, from 48% last time. They are still likely to be the largest party and John Swinney will probably remain First Minister. But these national numbers hide a more nuanced - and more interesting - picture on the ground.

One voter, two votes

Holyrood’s voting system is a mixture of Westminster-style winner-takes-all and a proportional system. Each voter gets two polling papers. One is for a constituency seat fought by named candidates on a first-past-the-post basis.

The second, different-coloured slip, is for a regional proportional representation seat, where you put your cross against a party. Each region has several of these ‘List’ seats, which are handed out according to vote share, starting with the parties that didn’t win any constituency seats.

There are 73 first-past-the-post seats, and the SNP currently holds 61 of them. The 56 List seats are very hard to predict because the way they are allocated depends very much on who wins the first-past-the-post seats.

The arithmetic on the second group can’t start until the first-past-the-post ones are all sorted, which is why Holyrood election results don’t get announced on election night.

The Greens are riding high

The Greens are standing in six constituency seats and are hoping to take one and perhaps two from the SNP. This would be a historic breakthrough.

Former joint leader, Canadian-born engineer Lorna Slater, is standing in Edinburgh Central against SNP Culture Secretary Angus Robertson.

And Holly Bruce hopes to take the seat which Nicola Sturgeon represents. (Sturgeon is standing down). That is in Glasgow Southside, the trendy, boho extension of the West End.

The Greens are just behind Labour in the List polling and they will be fighting it out to be the second-largest party. Winning a couple of constituency seats would really strengthen their position.

If they were to become the second largest group - an outside chance - that would mean that both the ruling party and the official opposition at Holyrood would support independence.

Reform is the wild card

The deadline for announcing constituency candidates is the end of March, so we don’t yet know exactly where Reform are standing - although they have suggested it will be in many seats. After losing the Gorton and Denton by-election, they will want to win constituency seats in Scotland to demonstrate momentum.

Other Unionist parties are concerned that Reform candidates could potentially split the Unionist vote and create opportunities for the SNP to come through the middle. But if Reform manages to capture a big enough vote share, it could win seats from the SNP, the Conservatives and Labour.

One target will be Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, which Labour narrowly won in a by-election last year. Another might be Aberdeenshire West, currently Conservative, as Reform are polling well in that area.

Last week, the Scottish party leader, millionaire businessman Malcolm Offord announced that he is standing in the area where he grew up, Inverclyde, which is currently held by the SNP.

Thomas Kerr, councillor for Shettleston, has said he will stand there, currently an SNP hold. Kerr has an interesting personal story - both his parents were heroin addicts. His father died of an overdose. Kerr was a carer for his mother at six. He was largely reared by his grandparents and attributes his values to them - perhaps that is how he ended up with a picture of Margaret Thatcher on the wall of his teenage bedroom, though he was born in 1996, years after she left office. Cllrtkerr has more TikTok followers than any of the Scottish party leaders - though that may not turn into votes.

Everybody to the polling booth

Immigration has definitely become more of an issue in Glasgow. The Glasgow Film Festival opened with the heart-warming documentary Everyone to Kenmure Street, which tells the story of the mass community resistance to an attempted deportation in 2021. Kenmure Street is in the Southside and the movie shows the Green version of Glasgow.

CORRECTION The two men released that day, Indian national Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh, were eventually deported after exhausting the appeals process. A note at the end of the film says that one of them at least was granted residency in the UK

Tensions are real

Glasgow hosts more asylum seekers per head than any other council area in the UK. The city currently accommodates almost 4,000 asylum seekers; Birmingham, by comparison, has fewer than 3,000. The situation is affected by Scottish Parliament legislation requiring councils to house the homeless, adding to pressure on an already cash-strapped local authority.

Glasgow is building more affordable housing per head than almost any other council in the UK and is also bringing disused flats back into use. Even so, housing supply remains tight. Asylum seekers are placed in the lowest-quality accommodation available - which also tends to be in the poorest areas of the city. These are where tensions are rising.

TikTok is full of videos from the stairheid or the close discussing concerns over women’s safety. There is a perception that many asylum seekers are single young men, living in enforced idleness, isolation and poverty while their cases are processed. A small minority - on the basis of gender not race - are likely to pose risks. The number may be tiny but people who don’t live in these areas dismissing the issue out of hand only helps Reform’s narrative that legitimate concerns are being ignored and suppressed.

Two tribes

Apart from the constitutional question, Labour has very little difference in policy terms with the SNP. Both parties are signed up in principle to the same broadly progressive, centre-left goals. So Sarwar’s pitch for the First Minister role is based on the contention that he and his party would be more competent than John Swinney and his. When Anas Sarwar took the risky decision to call for his own party leader Keir Starmer to resign just a few weeks ago, he presumably calculated that this would help his case.

Labour holds only two constituency seats at the moment, that by-election win Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, and Daniel Johnson in Edinburgh Southern, and they will be fighting to save both. But they came second to the SNP in half a dozen seats in the Glasgow area last time and their polling may show that with the SNP vote lower, they have a shout of gaining seats there, especially if they can harness pro-Union or anti-Reform tactical voting, Anas Sarwar released a video recently in which he argued: “Glasgow is the best city in the world, it is time we had a First Minister from Glasgow”.

Sarwar has personally had to fight some poisonous attacks from Reform, who last year ran a social‑media advert claiming Sarwar had said he would “prioritise the Pakistani community” – even though he never said anything of the kind. Both Scottish Labour and the SNP branded the video racist and asked Meta to remove it, and Reform later admitted the advert was a mistake.

Is the system working?

Pundits are criticising the Holyrood system - for example, Kenny Farquharson in The Times and the team at the Holyrood Sources podcast - because a party that sweeps the board with the FPTP seats can still just about win a majority with less than half the vote.

Critics argue that the remedy would be to increase the number of List seats which would also increase the size of the Parliament. They argue that is also merited because the Scottish Parliament is supposed to use committees to scrutinise legislation but the 129 members are overstretched.

The Westminster system, which is FPTP only, delivers a much more skewed result - the current Labour government got about two-thirds of the seats with a third of the votes. But one of the defences of that system is that it is more likely to deliver a clear winner than pure PR. That is also - just - true of Holyrood as it is currently constituted.

The Holyrood List vote is poorly understood and opaque. You don’t really know who you are electing. One suggestion is that the parties should hold US-style primaries so that voters have an opportunity to assess the individuals before they send them to Holyrood. Without a change like that, giving the balance of power to the List would be problematic.

Is the system working? The real test of a democratic system is that it preserves voter engagement and the sense that elections can genuinely change things. The turnout will be the real test of that.