As promised, here is my detailed response to the controversial "Stew" blogger's latest 'radical reimagining' of his arguments for tactically voting against the SNP on the Holyrood list ballot - and by goodness was a hurried reimagining required, because the result of the Hamilton by-election drove a coach and horses through his previous argument, which he presented to us only a few weeks ago and which hinged on the SNP being supposedly 'guaranteed' to win at least 65 constituency seats, of which Hamilton was one. In a similar way, his previous argument of last autumn that you should vote against the SNP on the list because there was supposedly "zero" chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood was blown apart within a matter of days by opinion polls showing that we were on course for, you've guessed it, a pro-independence majority at Holyrood. Whenever Stew makes a confident prediction and predicates his arguments on it, there's often good money to be made by betting on precisely the opposite outcome.
It won't surprise you to learn that there are yet again massive logical errors in the latest iteration of the Stew Tactical Voting Instruction Manual. But although I'm going to cover some of those errors in detail, I first of all want to make a couple of broader-brush points. It should be a statement of the obvious that Stew has been intellectually dishonest for months in claiming to be answering the question "how should independence supporters attempt to maximise the number of pro-independence MSPs?", because by his own admission his goal is not to maximise the number of pro-independence MSPs. In fact it's pretty much the reverse of that. He wants to destroy the SNP, and first went on record in the Wings comments section a few weeks ago by saying that his advice to his readers is going to be to vote for whichever party is best placed to defeat the SNP in any given constituency. That means by definition that he will be telling his readers to vote for unionist parties almost across the board, because there are only two constituencies in which it can even be plausibly argued that the main challenger to the SNP is a pro-independence party or candidate. And one of those two is Glasgow Kelvin, where the Greens are the potential challenger, so it seems phenomenally improbable that he will be urging a pro-indy vote there either.
So by banging the 'pro-indy tactical voting' drum so loudly for months, all he's actually been doing is presenting his back-up argument for those among his readers who understandably don't want to hear his primary message that the time has come for a Scottish Parliament that opposes Scottish independence ("to win independence we must first kill independence", etc, etc). He's effectively been asking those people to trust him to give an honest and dispassionate assessment of how to achieve the opposite outcome from the one he wants. And while I suppose it's technically possible that a man who has been demonstrably consumed by unreasoning hatred of the SNP for the best part of a decade might be capable of setting his agenda aside to give that type of honest advice, I'd gently suggest that it's also possible, and arguably far more likely, that he is in fact not doing so, and that he understands perfectly well that persuading his readers to throw their list votes away on no-hoper fringe parties can only increase the chances of a unionist majority at Holyrood - ie. precisely the outcome he craves.
The second broad-brush point is that if anyone is trying to 'hack' the Holyrood voting system, there are two sides to that equation - both the constituency ballot and the list ballot. Essentially the goal is to take the current state of public opinion, in which pro-independence parties have only a minority of the popular vote between them, and use the voting system to distort that and to produce a pro-independence majority in terms of Holyrood seats. To achieve that aim, by far the most important part of the equation is that the SNP must have a large enough lead in the popular vote on the constituency ballot to produce a massive 'winner's bonus' in terms of constituency seats. John Curtice made that very point at the Holyrood Sources event a couple of weeks ago.
So to the extent that tactical voting can play a role, it would have to primarily consist of iron discipline among independence supporters in voting tactically for the SNP on the constituency ballot. What happens on the list ballot is of much less importance, and by inviting you to fixate on the list, Stew is trying to get you to not see the wood for the trees. That's not to say the list doesn't matter at all - a pro-indy seats majority without a popular vote majority will probably also hinge on the Greens doing well enough on the list to retain their current handful of seats. But at the moment it seems highly likely that they will do at least that well, which means that if independence supporters get behind the SNP in big numbers on the constituency ballot, that should be enough to do the trick. List votes for Alba and Liberate Scotland, who have almost no chance of winning any seats, have literally zero role to play here. But no prizes for guessing why Stew doesn't want the penny to drop with people that SNP constituency votes are actually the really important bit.
All of that said, though, let's go through some of the detailed points in his latest 'psephologist cosplay' post. I do love it when he uses words like 'divisor' as if he knows what he's talking about.
"Because it’s #1 of very many straightforward, barefaced lies in The Lunatic’s piece. Wings has offered no “tactical voting advice” to anybody, in Highlands or elsewhere. Tactical voting on the list is, as we noted many years ago, almost impossible to do."
Well, this is brazen. I've pasted the above in plain text, which means that you can't see that he's linked to one of his posts from the run-up to the 2016 election, in which his position on tactical voting on the list was the polar opposite of what it is today. Back then, he was on exactly the same page as me in saying that it was a mug's game, whereas now he's arguing that it's somehow possible to know in advance, before a single vote is cast, that the SNP will perform so well on the constituency ballot and so poorly on the list ballot that they will win no list seats at all, and therefore that any SNP list votes will be wasted, and you must vote for another party. That, Stew, is advocacy for tactical voting on the list. It is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether you admit to that or whether you call it by some Orwellian name to attempt to obscure its nature. I'm interested in what the thing is, and not in what you claim it to be.
I suspect that Stew's contortions and contradictions on this issue have now been pointed out often enough that he feels the only option he has left is to try to hide his hypocrisy in plain sight, ie. to indignantly insist that there is a seamless join between his commendable anti-tactical voting stance in 2016, and his pro-tactical voting stance of today.
"so votes for either Unionist parties OR the SNP will have the same result: lots of Unionist MSPs."
If this is intended to disprove the notion of a Plan A / Plan B approach, ie. Plan A being "vote against the SNP on the list because a unionist majority is desirable", and Plan B being "but if you're stupid enough to want a pro-indy majority, you should vote tactically against the SNP anyway", then it's not doing a very good job, is it? If you thought Plan A was sufficient, Stew, you would dispense with the lie that voting SNP on the list produces unionist seats. Why are you psychologically incapable of dropping the crutch of that lie, Stew? Because you are an advocate of tactical voting on the list, while farcically claiming not to be.
"FALSEHOOD #2. Wings has at no juncture “talked up” the likelihood of Fergus Ewing holding Inverness & Nairn. A few days ago we said it was unlikely."
The operative words there are "a few days ago", which was before Ewing announced he was standing as an independent. After that announcement, Stew could barely contain his excitement and repeatedly tweeted about the supposedly good chances of Ewing defeating the SNP. For the purposes of Stew's rant, it seems, those tweets must be condemned to disappear down the ever-trusty Wings memory hole.
"FALSEHOOD #3. Wings has never said any such thing."
He's claiming here that he never said that the SNP were definitely not going to win any list seats at all - something he has in fact said on multiple occasions, most notably in his blogpost "The Blindness of Hatred" (surely the most un-self-aware title in history). That blogpost was published on 11th May 2025 - exactly two months ago. So not so much a "falsehood", Stew, as well, y'know, the other thing.
It was also in the same blogpost that you claimed the SNP were assured of winning at least 65 constituency seats - ie. that they would have a single-party overall majority in the parliament without requiring even one list seat. You also supplied maps showing Hamilton and East Lothian as being among those 65 nailed-on certain constituency wins for the SNP. Embarrassing, I know, but the internet never forgets.
"More to the point, though, the actual argument we’ve made is that they’ll win fewer list seats than would be won if their list vote was redirected to other indy parties – something The Lunatic has never actually attempted to refute."
I've not only "attempted" to refute it, I have refuted it on umpteen occasions. The most succinct way of putting it is that the SNP have an established track record of winning list seats in every single Holyrood election they've ever fought, and with their constituency vote seemingly having dropped sharply since the 2021 election, it's unlikely that track record will change - because of course the fewer constituency seats a party wins, the more scope it has to pick up compensatory list seats. By contrast, Alba would need to at least double their current list vote share to have an outside chance of winning even a single list seat, and Liberate Scotland would probably need to multiply their current support, which at the moment is so microscopic that it cannot even be measured, by several hundred times. Neither of those possibilities are credible, meaning that even if it was somehow possible to "redirect" some SNP list votes to "other indy parties" (he's talking about those votes as if they were pieces on a chessboard), it would most likely have the effect of reducing the overall number of pro-indy seats and increasing the number of unionist seats - the polar opposite of his claim.
The only exception to that would be if he is referring to a 'redirection' of SNP votes to the Greens - because unlike Alba and Liberate Scotland, the Greens will almost certainly have enough list votes to win seats. But if the Greens are what Stew means (and let's face it, they're not - he hates them), he should spell that out and make clear that 'redirecting' SNP list votes to any indy party other than the Greens would have a counterproductive effect. The reason he doesn't spell that out is that he's deceiving you. Intentionally.
By the way, Stew, claiming that 'redirecting' SNP list votes would produce a greater number of pro-indy seats is not really consistent, is it, with your claim not to have changed your view that tactical voting on the list is "almost impossible to do". In fact, let's be blunt: it drives a coach and horses through that claim. It means, yet again, that you are saying the complete opposite of what you were saying ten years ago. You were right ten years ago, and you are wrong now.
"FALSEHOOD #4. As noted above, Wings remains of the view that TACTICAL voting on the list is all but impossible. What we want is not voting SNP on the list, which is something very different. And the point about that is that it doesn’t change whether or not you care about how many pro-indy MSPs are elected on the list."
What does he mean by "it doesn't change"? He means that if you share his view that there should be a unionist majority ("to win independence we must first kill independence", etc, etc) you should vote against the SNP on the list because the SNP are baaaaaaad, but if you want a pro-indy majority you should still vote against the SNP on the list because doing so will supposedly produce a greater number of pro-indy seats (spoiler alert: it won't). In other words he's saying that tactical voting on the list is possible, despite only a couple of sentences earlier insisting it was impossible, and he's advocating that you should do it, in spite of angrily denying that he's a tactical voting advocate.
Make. It. Make. Sense. Stew.
"Any and every SNP list vote will therefore, as a simple measurable empirical fact, be worth less – at least 50% less and up to 91% less, in fact – than a list vote for a party with no constituency seats."
Oooh, "up to 91%" sounds impressive, Stew. I can't remember being so impressed by a number since Tony Blair claimed Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction "within 45 minutes". I take it that, just like Blair, you've got a "dossier" to back up this claim? Answer: yes you do, you've got a little table, and it's full of numbers that you've thrillingly rounded to two decimal places to make them look as if they must be important.
But I must admit I'm far more interested in the fundamental principles than in the decimal fractions. Why does Stew insist that the supposed low value of an SNP list vote, and the precision of his claims about how low that value is, constitute "a simple measurable empirical fact"? Why, that'll be for one of two reasons:
Option A: Opinion polls are pinpoint accurate. There is no history in this country of significant opinion poll error, and late swings of public opinion never occur after the final polls of an election campaign are conducted.
Option B: Time does not progress in a linear fashion, and it's possible to have foreknowledge on polling day of the election results that will be announced the following day. In other words, when you cast your vote, you already know how everyone else will vote on both the constituency ballot and the list ballot.
Now, you may think both of these options are self-evidently nonsensical. But think again, because Stew says this stuff is EMPIRICAL FACT, so it looks like the known laws of science are about to be revised radically.
Back in the real world, of course, opinion polls do have a history of significant inaccuracy, late swings do frequently happen, and foreknowledge of election results on polling day is not possible. At the moment you cast your vote, you won't have a sodding clue how many constituency seats the SNP are going to win, you won't have a sodding clue how many people are voting SNP on the list, and you therefore won't have a sodding clue what the likelihood is of an SNP list vote translating into SNP list seats. Your chances of not having a sodding clue on any of these points is not "up to 91%" but are in fact an extremely round 100%.
The whole point of giving you two votes is, of course, this very lack of foreknowledge. Two votes provides you with a crucial back-up. If your first-choice party wins your constituency seat, then great, but if it doesn't, you still have a chance of winning representation for that party as long as you voted for it on the list. If you instead voted "tactically" on the list for your second-choice party, the d'Hondt formula will ignore your constituency vote and will regard your second-choice party as your first-choice party - it's as simple as that. The seats distribution will be calculated on exactly that basis. That's why tactical voting on the list is a mug's game, that's why it has such a high risk of backfiring catastrophically, and that's why it can produce such perverse outcomes. The much more sensible Stew of 2015/16 (the man who had not yet become twisted with bitterness because Nicola Sturgeon refused to back him in his vanity court case against Dugdale) told you exactly that.
"If you want the maximum number of “pro-indy” MSPs elected on the list, and if you consider the SNP “pro-indy”...then you’d be an idiot to give the SNP your list vote, because you’ll definitely get fewer pro-indy MSPs that way, whether it’s actually 0 or just close to 0."
I'll tell you who the only "idiots" are here, and that's the people who can read the above without recognising it as crystal-clear, unambiguous advice to vote tactically on the list - something which Stew has only just said is impossible to do and which he has only just angrily insisted he would never advocate.
Stew thinks his readers are idiots, doesn't he? He literally thinks they are idiots.
