Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Inside the painful world of Scottish Tory logic

I was just having a look at the Scottish Tories' Twitter account, and they're making a series of rather 'interesting' claims.

Claim: "We stopped the SNP."  

Reality: Nicola Sturgeon will be re-elected as First Minister later today, and an SNP government will remain in office until May 2026 - unless of course an early election is engineered to secure an outright independence mandate.

Claim: "We stopped Indyref2."

Reality: It remains to be seen whether Indyref2 will happen, but if it doesn't, that will have nothing to do with the election result, which produced a large majority for parties with a manifesto commitment to a referendum.  The implication seems to be that the SNP falling one seat short of a single-party majority is somehow significant, but that makes no sense because the UK government said they wouldn't grant a Section 30 order no matter what the election result.  The Tories argued during the election that if the SNP had a majority they would hold a "wildcat" referendum - but what's to stop them doing that with a very comfortable SNP-Green majority?

Claim: "We had a record result, we increased our vote share."

Reality: The Conservative vote share dropped slightly on the constituency ballot.  Now, it's true that it increased slightly on the list ballot, and you can if you wish say that the list ballot is more important - but that would mean acknowledging that pro-independence parties won a clear majority of the popular vote on the list ballot.  Instead, the Tories are claiming the constituency ballot is more important when they want to dispute the mandate for an independence referendum, and that the list ballot is more important when they want to claim the Tory vote increased.  IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

4 comments:

  1. It makes sense to the patently dishonest and disrespects the electorate who they clearly think are " zipped up the back "...

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  2. https://www.thenational.scot/news/19310610.new-poll-english-voters-back-scotlands-right-referendum/

    ...a clear plurality – 46% –of voters in Scotland back the right to another vote, compared to 32% against.

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  3. It makes perfect sense to the members of a party whose "leader" is someone of the calibre of Dross.

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  4. I'd laugh but then I laughed at Trump until I, slack jawed, realised loads of people believed his alt truths. I now find the Torie's new approach to portraying falsehoods as truths quite sinister. Douglas Ross and God knows who else in that now toxic party seem to have studied Trump's tactics and are now deploying them systematically.Its as if they've had a training session from some alt right consultant.

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