Campaign begins

A different kind of campaign

Candidates battle for votes while Scotland battles the pandemic

The 2021 Scottish Parliament election will be dominated by the pandemic both in the messages and how they are delivered. COVID hit the Green’s election campaign first. Patrick Harvie was forced to front the party’s launch without his co-leader, after Lorna Slater received a notification from the Protect Scotland app. For 15 minutes, she had at some point – she doesn’t know when or where – been within two metres of someone who later tested positive for coronavirus.

“I feel fine, I don’t have any symptoms,” she told Holyrood on her last day of isolation. “Just a weird thing to happen.” It’s going to a be weird campaign. Slater’s enforced absence could be the first of many. Candidates hitting the trail this year may need to hit it from home if they’re unlucky enough to be contact traced.

Under the campaigning guidance issued by the government, the Holyrood hopefuls and their activists have been allowed to put leaflets through your door for the last two weeks.

From 5 April, they’ll be allowed to ring your bell. But canvassing will only be allowed if the constituency is in a local authority where the COVID infection rate is below 50 per 100,000 or less – the number which the WHO considers as evidence that the pandemic is sufficiently under control. As soon as it goes up above 100 per 100,000, the doorto-door and the face-to-face needs to stop.

The travel ban stays in place, obviously, though it won’t apply to candidates, agents and party leaders.

That’s welcome news for election photo op fans. Is it even a Scottish election campaign until a Willie Rennie policy announcement on vocational education is upstaged by copulating pigs?

But of course, it’s not just candidates who need to turn out for the election. There’s a real anxiety among the parties about what exactly might happen on polling day.

It’s promising perhaps that more Americans than at any other point in the country’s history voted in the US elections last November at the height of the pandemic.

And earlier this month, the Dutch election had a turnout of 82.6 per cent, up slightly on the previous vote.

However, voting took place over three days. The plan here is to get it all done on 6 May, though the count will almost certainly last the weekend as the need for social distancing will mean fewer people in the Scotland’s exhibition centres and public halls where the tallying of votes normally takes place.

It’s expected we’ll see a rise in the number of Scots opting to post their vote. The Electoral Commission believes it could be as many of 40 per cent of the electorate, up from 17 per cent.

And if someone in the rest of 60 per cent falls sick or ends up selfisolating, they can apply for a proxy vote up until 5pm on the day of the poll.

On the frontline, the candidates so far seem, if not relaxed, then not overly worried.

Slater – who’s standing for the Greens in Edinburgh Northern and Leith and is currently placed at number two on the party’s Lothian list, said she wasn’t too worried about the impact of the virus on the ability to reach voters.

“It’s a really different kind of campaign this time around. The world is more digital now though and certainly young people – Green voters are overwhelmingly young – I think we’ll still be able to connect to our voters.”

In Aberdeenshire West, Lib Dem candidate Rosemary Bruce was looking forward to speaking to people, but said the pandemic’s impact on the campaign wasn’t just about the weeks ahead, but all the events missed last year.

“It’s not just the campaigning side of it, it’s all the usual community events that didn’t happen last year and still aren’t happening, in terms of coffee mornings, in terms of fairs.”

She added: “Given Aberdeenshire West is such a vast rural area there are an awful lot of these events, whether it’s crafting or coffee mornings, the big shows, those didn’t happen, the Braemar gathering and so on. The whole backdrop has been different.”

Euan Blockley, the Conservative candidate for Glasgow Cathcart, said he was desperate to see voters in real life: “The last couple of months we’ve been doing telephone canvassing, but as any candidate will tell you, it’s not the same as a face-to-face conversation with someone. Nothing beats that in politics.”

The Tory hopeful said his activists were raring to go. He said that during a recent by-election in the city’s West End – held after the restrictions on leafleting were lifted – huge numbers turned up to help spread the party’s message.

“I think it was, number one, exercise, and number two, just what’s happening in politics at the moment. On our side they are very enthused and keen to get out there.”

What’s undoubtedly enthusing the Tories is the fallout from the Scottish Government’s botched handling of harassment complaints against Alex Salmond, and the increasingly bitter civil war in the SNP.

Sturgeon, exonerated by James Hamilton and castigated by the Holyrood committee, will be at the centre of their campaign almost as much as she’ll be at the centre of the SNP’S.

“It’s evident that Henry Mcleish, Wendy Alexander and David Mcletchie resigned for far less than the charge sheet facing Nicola Sturgeon,” Douglas Ross said earlier this month.

The Tory attacks on Sturgeon’s character and leadership are clearly inspiring their base, but they’re also sparking a recruitment boost for the SNP. According to the depute leader Keith Brown, 12,500 people joined in March.

If the polls have told us anything about this election, then it’s that the SNP are going to win.

The question is the scale of the victory. Will they secure a majority? Or will they fall short?

One senior figure in the party said they thought Nicola Sturgeon was on course for a result not a million years away from what the party achieved in 2016.

“Unless there’s some sort of cataclysmic event I think it’ll end up much the same as it currently is.

“I can’t see us getting over 70. And equally, I don’t see it dropping much, if any. Although there’ll be some casualties.”

In a bid to try and address the diversity of their almost all white Holyrood group, the party’s governing NEC placed a BAME or disabled candidate at the top of each of the eight regional lists.

That’s seen some weel-kent faces pushed down a space or two, including Nicola Sturgeon who now sits second on the Glasgow list behind one of the former ‘Glasgow Girls’ Roza Salih, although Sturgeon is unlikely to lose her Glasgow Southside seat where she holds a majority of almost 15,000.

Our insider, having crunched the numbers and done his own d’hondt calculations, thought cabinet minister Paul Wheelhouse, contesting the relatively safe Tory seat of Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire and ranked third on the South of Scotland list, could be one of those list casualties.

Another great unknown of the 2021 election is the impact the list-only parties will have on the votes for the SNP and the Tories.

For the SNP, the threat comes on two fronts: from Action for Independence and from the Independence for Scotland Party.

The ISP is led by Colette Walker, a former SNP activist who left the party over Scottish Government’s plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act.

Currently a trans person requires medical evidence and a two-year period of living as that gender before they’re eligible to be legally recognised as that gender. But if the government proposal passes they can obtain a certificate through self-declaration after six months. The policy has created a huge rift in the SNP in recent years, with a number of activists quitting the party, or joining with the Women’s Pledge group which is opposed to some of the proposed reforms to the GRA, to make their protest. They say the plans, if passed, will put women and girls at increased risk of harm from predatory men who could take advantage of the lack of any checks to gain access to single-sex spaces like women’s toilets, hospital wards, refuges, hostels and prisons.

“The last couple of months we’ve been doing telephone canvassing, but as any candidate will tell you, it’s not the same as a face-to-face conversation with someone. Nothing beats that in politics”

Meanwhile, AFI, established by EX-SNP MSP Dave Thompson, doesn’t really have any policies, apart from “#Maxtheyes”.

They want as many pro-independence campaigners in the parliament as possible and they don’t really care what someone thinks about the GRA reform or the equally divisive hate crime legislation. Their campaign slogan is simply, “Scotland before party”.

They’ve secured a number of high profile Yessers to stand as candidates, including EX-SSP MSP Tommy Sheridan.

Journalist Yvonne Ridley is also standing for the pro-indy group. Ridley was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 while working for the Sunday Express and held captive for 11 days. She later converted to Islam. She was a chair of the left-wing Respect party and stood unsuccessfully a number of times for them in various elections.

She is joined in the election campaign, although on different sides, by the only person to have ever been elected as a Respect MP, George Galloway.

In many ways, his pro-union All for Unity is a sort of mirror image of AFI.

Their goal is to simply to deprive the SNP of a majority.

“We have come together from across political and class boundaries for the good of Scotland for one aim, and one aim only: to stop Scottish separatism and stand up for the Union,” Galloway says.

In less than a year, he and his party have gone from fringe figures of fun to wielding real influence with the unionists of social media.

All of these list parties share a belief that they can game the d’hondt system.

Quick reminder, d’hondt, in its most basic and crudest sense, aims to return a proportional number of MSPS. If a party win 40 per cent of the vote, they should get 40 per cent of the MSPS.

It works by dividing the number of regional votes cast for a party by the number of seats already won in that region, plus one. The party with the highest total after this calculation gains one additional member.

In 2016, the SNP won six of the constituency seats in the Lothian region. Their list vote was divided by seven. Despite winning 36.2 per cent of the list vote – more than all the other parties – they didn’t win any list MSPS.

The argument Thompson and Galloway make for their respective parties is that a strong showing on the constituency for the SNP and Tories means votes for the SNP and Tories on the list are wasted.

But that’s obviously a high-risk strategy because if a party does poorly on the constituency vote and poorly on the list vote, then they do not gain anywhere.

It’s probably fair to say that a year ago, the main parties didn’t really see these groups as much of a threat. They were making noise on Twitter but not in real life. That seems to have changed in recent weeks. Tory candidates have been hammering the need for their voters not to be tempted to give away their list votes.

“Just 2,000 votes separated a strong pro-uk MSP from another Green who will do Nicola’s bidding. Voting for a minor party will let the Greens or even SNP in. It could be the seat that gives them a majority,” Stephen Kerr, the party’s candidate in Stirling, tweeted earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the SNP has been holding workshops for members on how to encourage supporters to give both votes to the party.

They fear that many of those who joined up in the wake of the 2014 referendum, frustrated at the lack of indyref2, could be tempted to send the party a message which ironically could be the one that deprives the parliament of an independence majority and dilutes the argument for a second referendum. •