When Somerset's controversial "Stew" blogger started talking up Fergus Ewing's chances of holding his constituency seat as an independent, it struck me that he (ie. Stew) was setting himself up for a bit of a problem. It's become extremely important to him to hold the line, patently absurd though it is, that the SNP are definitely not going to win any list seats at all at next year's Holyrood election. I think he's banking on the simplicity of that (totally fraudulent) message to convince people to abandon the SNP on the list when they simply haven't done so in past elections - including in 2016, of course, which was before Stew's Damascene conversion on the subject and when he was still on the same page as me in pointing out that "tactical voting on the list" is a mug's game and essentially impossible to pull off successfully.
But by arguing that Ewing has a real chance of beating the SNP in Inverness & Nairn, Stew is by definition reducing his "projected number of guaranteed SNP constituency seats" in the Highlands & Islands and thus making it even more likely that the SNP will win at least one compensatory list seat in the region - which is one of the two regions where they already have a list seat, of course. So if Stew concedes that inescapable point in an effort to maintain at least a semblance of logical coherence, it basically pulverises the simplicity of his "definitely no list seats at all for the SNP" messaging and means he'll have to revert to a more complex and probably less persuasive sales-pitch that factors in the real possibility that in some places SNP list votes will translate into SNP list seats.
I was curious to see how he would handle the dilemma, but I wasn't quite expecting this -
Wow. So in the blink of an eye he's gone from "every single SNP list vote in Scotland will definitely be wasted" to "SNP list votes in the Highlands & Islands will not be wasted and that's a good thing because it means you can vote for Fergus Ewing safely". But the most important part of this new tactical voting advice is the bit he doesn't want to spell out, for very obvious reasons. The logic only holds true if the SNP don't fall short of the percentage vote on the list that Stew is expecting - in other words he's tacitly saying you can only vote for Fergus Ewing safely on the constituency ballot if you also vote for the SNP on the list. And by implication that has to be what he's advising you to do.
Stew telling people to vote tactically in favour of the SNP on the list - now that was a plot twist I didn't see coming.
By the way, if I lived in Inverness & Nairn I would be voting for the official SNP candidate Emma Roddick and not for Fergus Ewing - and that would be the case even if I hadn't rejoined the SNP a few months ago. It's no secret that I'm closer to Mr Ewing's views on identity politics issues than I am to Ms Roddick's, but Mr Ewing's call for the SNP to abandon independence for the next ten years makes it next to impossible, I would suggest, for independence supporters to vote for him. He's now become a short-term and medium-term unionist.
