All I needed was the love you gave, all I needed for another day, and all I ever knew, only Stew

Tragically, the controversial Somerset-based "Stew" blogger stopped updating his little shrine to me a few months ago, but I no longer need to feel neglected because he's been properly going off on one about me since the election.  He made a rather optimistic effort to accuse me of contradicting myself on the interminable subject of "tactical voting on the list", because on Thursday morning I urged people to vote Both Votes SNP, while on Saturday I pointed out that the reason the pro-indy majority at Holyrood had increased was because a significant proportion of SNP supporters had tactically switched to the Greens on the list.  But unfortunately for him, the screenshots he used demonstrated rather helpfully that there was no contradiction, because they clearly showed that I went on to say that the tactical voters had been taking a hell of a risk that could easily have backfired if their assumptions about how the constituency results would pan out had been proved wrong.  In other words, the tactical voting produced a good outcome simply because of luck - and one of the main reasons for my Both Votes SNP advice was because I didn't think (and still don't think) that people should be relying on luck.

However, all of this begs a question that I genuinely don't have an answer to.  One thing that is beyond dispute is that the tactical voting only worked because the recipients of the tactical votes were the Greens.  No other pro-independence party was remotely strong enough to win seats - by Stew's own admission Atlas were a "shambles", while all of the other pro-indy fringe parties were even less popular.  And yet we know he categorically did not want people to vote Green - he hates the Greens with every fibre of his being, and wanted everyone to vote against them on principle.  So when he says that people like me who voted SNP on the list were stupid because we were "helping to get unionists elected", who does he actually think we should have been voting for instead?  Who is actually left once you exclude the SNP, the Greens and the "shambolic" fringe parties like Atlas?  

OK, we kind of know the answer in the sense that he was obviously gagging for people to vote Reform.  But that wasn't his official advice, because he kept saying that SNP list voters were helping to elect Reform MSPs, as if that was a bad thing.  So who was he officially telling people to vote for on the list?  Can anyone fathom it?

Actually, if anyone is still on good terms with him, please do ask him, I'd be genuinely fascinated to find out the answer.  It'll be like cracking the code of an unsolvable equation.

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