Here's how the SNP have a 15% to 25% chance of securing an independence referendum within the next few years - but only if SNP supporters are ready for the opportunity and put enormous pressure on their leadership to face down the Tom Bradbys of this world

Last week, I tried to look up what the leading betting exchange was showing about the Hamilton by-election - only to find that it wasn't showing anything at all, because of course it's far too Anglocentric to even bother with Holyrood by-elections.  So instead I browsed through some of the other political markets, and this is the one that caught my eye...

Who will win an overall majority at the next UK general election?

No overall majority: 1.93

Labour: 3.75

Reform UK: 5

Conservatives: 27

Liberal Democrats: 130

What that means is that punters are saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of a hung parliament after the next election - which is pretty startling, given that first-past-the-post is a majoritarian voting system that can and does produce overall single-party majorities on extremely low vote shares.  Since the Second World War, there have been twenty-two general elections, and only three have produced hung parliaments: February 1974, 2010 and 2017.  Additionally, seats projections from many recent polls have shown Reform winning an absolute majority despite only being in the high 20s or low 30s in terms of vote share.

As long-term readers will recall from my exchanges with Neil "Alligators" Lovatt, I don't believe the betting markets are any kind of predictive God.  But nevertheless, many punters on the markets are statistically minded, and they must at least have some sort of logic (even if that logic turns out to be wrong) for thinking there is a 50%+ chance of no party winning a majority.  Presumably the theory is that with the UK now in an era of seven-party politics, there are a lot of permutations in which the parties would be too bunched together to produce a clear winner.

Additionally, barring a dramatic improvement in Tory or Labour fortunes, there are a lot of seats which will go to (or stay with) the Lib Dems and the SNP by default, which effectively takes dozens of seats out of the game completely as far as Reform, Labour or the Tories reaching the target figure for a majority is concerned.

So let's just assume for the sake of argument that the market is right and there is a slightly better than even chance of a hung parliament.  Let's also assume (and this is another big assumption) that the SNP can return to their previous position of holding the majority of Scottish seats.  That might open up the possibility of the SNP holding the balance of power and being able to secure an independence referendum.

Now, to be clear, they would not have a 50% chance of being able to do that, because in spite of what the fantastical ravings of the controversial "Stew" blogger would have you believe, the existence of a hung parliament is not in itself enough to produce the necessary leverage for the SNP.  The arithmetic within the hung parliament still has to be favourable for them, by which I mean that they need to have the numbers to be able to offer a stable governing majority to a potential centre-left government.  That was categorically not the case in the 2017-19 hung parliament, when the SNP did not hold the balance of power.  So that consideration reduces the chances significantly, probably to somewhere between 15% and 25%.

I've been the first to say over the years that relying on a hung parliament at Westminster to get us to independence is in the realms of desperation, because the odds will always be against it and there's nothing we can do to influence whether it happens or not.  But in the context where we have an SNP leadership which has taken all the other credible options for delivering independence off the table, you have to look at what's left, and a 15% to 25% chance of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster within three or four years may actually be the most promising avenue remaining.

That being the case, SNP members and supporters need to be ready for that opportunity to come up - by which I mean they need to be ready to put overwhelming pressure on the SNP leadership to settle for nothing less than an independence referendum in return for what would presumably be some sort of confidence-and-supply deal with the Labour party.  That pressure will be desperately needed for two reasons.  Firstly, as a counterweight to John Swinney's innate caution and small 'c' conservatism (assuming Swinney is still leader by then).  And secondly, because an opposite type of pressure will be applied to the SNP from a different direction.

It always used to be assumed that proportional representation would be introduced in the UK once the Liberal Democrats held the balance of power at Westminster and were able to negotiate a coalition deal.  And yet in 2010, the Lib Dems did hold the balance of power and did negotiate a coalition - but settled for something that fell far short of proportional representation, namely a referendum on the non-proportional AV system.  Why did they do that?  Partly because they were psyched into it by establishment figures in the media, most notably the political editor of ITV News, Tom Bradby, who disgracefully abused his position to pretty much openly campaign for a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that did not feature proportional representation, or indeed that did not even discuss proportional representation in the coalition negotiations.  It was, he insisted, inappropriate to bring items like PR to the table when the country faced a crisis situation.  When the Lib Dems eventually did start negotiating on PR, Bradby blew his top, and put huge pressure on them to backtrack by angrily telling his viewers that it had been one of the grubbiest days in British politics he could remember.  ("Grubby" being code for a party trying to implement the policies it had been elected to implement.)

The thing is, no matter what the circumstances, the likes of Bradby will always be able to cynically frame coalition negotiations as a "national emergency" in which the participants have to set aside their normal preoccupations in the "national interest".  In fact the opposite is true - that's the very moment of opportunity at which preoccupations like PR or Scottish independence have to come to the fore and be argued for tenaciously and relentlessly.  The SNP membership will have to steel their own leadership to face down Bradby, or whoever the Bradby equivalent is in 2028 or 2029.  In that scenario, what Bradby says on News at Ten doesn't matter, what the next day's headlines say doesn't matter.  You have a one-off opportunity to win independence for your country, and that opportunity may never come your way again.  You damn well grab it, any way that you can.