Ignore the silly partisan propaganda from Green-supporting Ballot Box Scotland: in fact, Alba took a respectable 2% of the vote in the local elections

So first of all, I'd like to deal with some of the more colourful 'feedback' that my analysis piece received yesterday.  There were attacks from completely opposite directions, which means that if I was the BBC, I would just shrug and say "well, if both sides are criticising me, that must mean I'm getting it just about right". However, I won't stoop to such a lazy approach, and I'll try to engage specifically with the points that have been made.

Firstly, an Alba supporter said that I wasn't being honest in my assessment that the local elections produced a good outcome for independence parties - he reckoned that no result without an Alba breakthrough could possibly be good for independence, because the SNP and Greens aren't serious about holding a referendum.  Now, let's be clear: I was as disappointed as anyone that Alba didn't manage to win any councillors, but a breakthrough for Alba would have meant perhaps five, ten or twenty seats.  The bulk of pro-indy representation was always going to have to come from the SNP, so yes, it absolutely does matter that the SNP made gains in this election.  I said exactly the same thing after the Holyrood election last year - I'm always going to celebrate a win for a pro-independence party, because if unionist parties were to suddenly move into the ascendancy, all hope for independence would be extinguished for the foreseeable future.  Even if the current SNP leadership don't intend to honour their promise of a referendum (and I firmly believe they don't), what a good result for the SNP and Greens does is keep the flame burning.  For as long as pro-indy parties run the Scottish Government with electoral momentum behind them, there's always the hope that something will turn up.  Nicola Sturgeon could take that UN job she's been auditioning for over the last decade, leaving space for a more radical leader of the SNP to emerge.  Or the current leadership themselves could actually change course if pressure from the rank-and-file starts to build.

On the other end of the spectrum, an SNP leadership loyalist complained about me referring to the SNP's progress in the election as "modest".  He/she argued that the results must in fact be stellar because they exceeded what the Britain Elects model said would be a good outcome.  Hmmm.  I'm not speaking with hindsight when I say that the Britain Elects model was total mince as far as Scotland was concerned - I made that point rather robustly on the night before the election, and if you don't believe me you can check.  It's there in black and white at the bottom of this blogpost.  Britain Elects were pumping nonsense in and getting nonsense back out.  Their central forecast was that the SNP would actually lose seats, which was ludicrous given the party's continued dominance in the opinion polls, and particularly given that their underperformance in 2017 left them with plenty of scope for gains.  The claim that a net gain of just three seats was the best-case scenario was even more laughable, and has actually been comprehensively disproved by the results - the notion of 'outperforming a best-case scenario' is a contradiction in terms.  

The reality is that there were three opinion polls that specifically asked for local election voting intentions - the Panelbase poll that I commissioned myself towards the end of last year, and two more recent polls from Survation.  All three polls suggested that the SNP would take a first preference vote share of over 40%.  Few commentators believed that was likely due to past precedent, but nevertheless it was thought perfectly possible that the SNP would reach the high 30s, and indeed the highly respected polling expert Mark Diffley predicted they would take around 40%.  If that had been the case, they would have made dozens and dozens of seat gains.  Instead, they finished with 34% of the vote and made just over twenty gains.  So I think it's more than fair to point out that the gains were "modest" compared to what some of the pre-election expectations had been.  Nevertheless, as I noted in my article, what really mattered is that those gains were sufficient to take the SNP to their all-time best result in a local election.

Someone also took issue with my point that Alba's vote share was generally creditable in the wards where they stood.  The individual prayed in aid a piece from Ballot Box Scotland claiming that Alba received 0.7% of the national vote, and suggested that meant Alex Salmond's party was on the "lunatic fringe".  Now, I fully appreciate that some people find Ballot Box Scotland to be a very useful service, in spite of the comical pomposity of the Green party member who runs it and his extreme touchiness about even the most minor criticisms of his "project", which he seems to regard as having the sanctity of a holy temple.  I myself found myself turning in desperation to BBS at times on Friday, because he was doing the bread-and-butter stuff (actually posting the election results) that our public service broadcaster should have been doing but neglected to do.  But that doesn't change the fact that BBS is not politically neutral - it pretends to be, and a tantrum will generally ensue if anyone dares to point out that it isn't, but the mask well and truly slipped during this campaign with a naked anti-Alba agenda.  I defy anyone to read the comments BBS has made about Alba's results since Friday and conclude that they're coming from a place of studied objectivity.

As far as the 0.7% figure is concerned, that's pretty much meaningless, because it's calculated across all the wards in Scotland, of which Alba only actually stood in approximately one-third.  In other words, BBS is regarding the Alba vote as zero in two-thirds of the wards in Scotland, which can be justified on a technical basis but is bound to result in some pretty silly analysis if you make the mistake of taking it remotely seriously.  It's impossible to exactly say what Alba's share of the national vote would have been if they had stood everywhere, because we don't know if they'd have done quite as well in the wards which they sat out.  But it seems entirely reasonable to suspect that they would probably have been somewhere close to the 2% mark, in other words very similar to their result on the Holyrood list vote last year.  And 2% is roughly the average figure they got in the wards where they did stand.  So it looks like the pre-election opinion polls that showed Alba firmly registering on 2% or 3% were broadly right - in spite of the bizarre eagerness of BBS to rubbish those polls.

(By the way, even if the 0.7% figure hadn't been totally meaningless, I'd still strongly take issue with any notion that a low share of the vote demonstrates that any given party is on the 'lunatic fringe'.  It might show that they're a 'fringe' party, but 'lunatic'?  There have been any number of moderate, centrist parties over the years, for example the SDP, that have polled poorly.)

With the benefit of hindsight, ie. if we'd had a crystal ball handy and had known that Alba were going to fall short of winning seats, there would have been a strong case for putting up candidates almost everywhere in Scotland to demonstrate beyond all dispute that the respectable national vote share was there - in other words, we could have treated the national vote share rather than seats as the real 'prize'.  OK, the number of candidates who stood reflected the natural limit of the number of people who actually put themselves forward (with the caveat that there was a vetting process), but the shortfall could probably have been made up by encouraging people to stand as 'paper candidates'.  But, there again, hindsight is always a wonderful thing.

It's really important to bear in mind that, although the local election voting system is a form of proportional representation, the proportionality is actually pretty weak compared to other PR systems.  That's because there are only three or four councillors elected in each ward, meaning you need a really strong performance in specific geographical areas to have any chance of getting any seats at all.  That makes the system surprisingly similar to first-past-the-post, and completely different from the Holyrood system, where you can win seats even if your vote share on the list is modest and thinly spread.  With approximately 2% of the national vote at present, it's not hard to see the path towards Alba becoming a party with representation in the Scottish Parliament in 2026.  If they could climb up to 4% they might well win the odd seat here or there, and if they get up to 6% or higher they'd win a really strong haul of seats.  And where will those extra votes come from, you might ask?  Well, it's not rocket-science.  Either the SNP will honour their solemn promise to hold an independence referendum in 2023, or they won't.  And if they don't, there are going to be an awful lot of disgruntled SNP members and voters looking for a new political home long before the 2026 election comes around.

I have lots more to say about the local election results and what they mean for both the SNP and Alba, but for now I'm going to pause for breath!  There'll be another blogpost along soon, probably tonight.