For the people of Hamilton: a choice of two futures

There has been much discussion over the last 24 hours about the straight two-way choice of futures that the people of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse face a week from today, and I'd like to set it out for you in stark pictorial form.

Option A, as seen below, depicts the scene in Somerset next Friday morning if you do as Stew wants you to by electing a Reform MSP.

Option A: Happy Stew

As you can see, in this scenario Stew is happy, relaxed and carefree, and is in harmonious communion with the universe that surrounds him.

In complete contrast is Option B, seen below, in which you have thwarted Stew's desires by electing another SNP MSP.

Option B: Angry Stew

In this scenario the mood in Somerset has darkened considerably.  A stormy Friday lies ahead.  Crockery WILL be smashed.

Just personally, if I was making the choice, I'd undoubtedly go with Option B for sheer entertainment value, but in this case, people of Hamilton, the power lies entirely in your hands.

As it happens, Stew himself has been writing about that choice this morning, branding John Swinney and his advisers as "pathetic" and "mind-numbingly stupid" (these are among the blander of the standard Stew pleasantries) for having coaxed the Daily Record into giving what looks remarkably like a tacit front-page endorsement to the SNP in Hamilton, on the basis that there is no other way of stopping Reform from winning.  Stew argues that this shows Record readers that the SNP are "frightened" and reveals which party they are frightened of, and will make the SNP more likely to lose the by-election because voters who want to give them a kicking will now know who to vote for.

Hmmm.  Those of you who are familiar with Stew's approach and have wised up to the fact that he's an agenda-driven propagandist (let's call you "alert readers" for shorthand) will know not to take any of this at face value.  The reality is that he was probably quite shocked and angered when he saw the Record front page, because he wouldn't have seen the tacit endorsement for the SNP coming.  He probably fears that it will succeed in galvanising the anti-Reform vote behind the SNP, which is the last thing he wants to happen, and is now trying to make the best of a bad job by frantically accentuating the potential negatives for Swinney.  Do those negatives exist?  Maybe, it remains to be seen, but for my money the SNP have actually got quite a promising each-way bet going here.

In an ideal world, the Record front page will achieve its primary objective and the SNP will win the by-election.  But even if that doesn't happen, there are likely to be side-benefits.  Don't get me wrong, a Reform win would initially be a monumental setback for the SNP, and the newspaper headlines would be horrendous.  But there would then be a counter-reaction.  There wouldn't be a Rutherglen-style anti-SNP snowball effect, if anything it would be the opposite, because there is a hard ceiling on Reform support, and the majority of people would be frightened by the sudden prospect of Faragist rule in Scotland and would be highly motivated to stop it.  And the SNP will have handily positioned themselves as the only possible alternative to a Reform-led government.  They've even set a golden precedent of the Record backing them if it's necessary to stop Farage.  I suspect that once the 2026 Holyrood campaign properly gets underway, and the SNP are able to remind voters that they are a homegrown movement and Reform are interlopers without Scottish roots and are merely puppets of Farage who want to wreck our NHS, there could be quite a rapid 2011-style swing to the SNP and we could end up with a fantastic result that will exceed all expectations.  That is the potential benefit of being seen to be in a two-horse race with a highly undesirable party.

Stew concludes his piece by saying this - 

"We’ll find out in a week whether the SNP has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of what looked like a comfortable victory. But even if they don’t, it’ll have been more through blind luck than judgement. The SNP is a shambles of imbeciles and it needs putting out of its own, and everyone else’s, misery."

Can alert readers actually square those words with the situation in the real world?  The SNP don't look much like a "shambles" at the moment, they've actually steadied the ship pretty effectively over the last year and have re-established themselves as the leading party in Scotland. Polls usually show that John Swinney is the most popular (or least unpopular) leader in the country.  The SNP are certainly under no threat whatsoever from any of the small pro-indy parties - the failed Alba experiment seems to be drawing to a close, albeit slowly and painfully, while it looks very unlikely that 'Liberate Scotland' will ever get off the ground.

So if Stew thinks there is any chance at all of the SNP being "put out of its misery", who does he think is going to do it?  He must mean a unionist party.  Specifically he must mean Reform UK.  It's impossible to escape the conclusion that he's trying to nudge any of his readers who live in Hamilton towards voting Reform.  He was probably gagging to bring his explicit endorsement of Reform forward by a year, but the voice in his head will have said: "No, my son, it is far too soon to show our hand!  All of our meticulous preparations would be wasted!"