Why Scotland’s election result is unlikely to hasten a referendum
Opinion polls for most of the past three years have shown Scotland to be evenly divided between supporters of union and independence. The Scottish parliament election result confirms this again. While the Scottish National party narrowly failed to gain an overall majority, independence supporters (the SNP and the Greens) have 72 of the 129 seats. Scottish electors cast two votes. The first is for a constituency MSP, elected by first-past-the-post as in Westminster elections. The second is for a regional party list, with seats distributed proportionally to ensure that the overall balance in the parliament is close to the regional list vote. Pro-independence parties won 49% of the constituency vote and 50.1% of the vote in the regional lists.
The polarisation of Scottish politics around the constitutional issue is exacerbated by Brexit. While unionists and nationalists backed remain by substantial majorities in 2016, since then there has been a move of remainers towards independence, while a smaller number of leavers have moved in the opposite direction. This polarisation has benefited the SNP and the Conservatives, while Labour has been squeezed.
The middle ground, on which the largest section of Scottish opinion was previously camped – more devolution but short of independence – has shrunk.
There is strong evidence of tactical voting in the constituencies, as unionists plump for whichever candidate appears more likely to the beat the nationalists. So many unionists in Edinburgh Southern and Dumbarton go for Labour. In Edinburgh Western and North East Fife they go for the Liberal Democrats. In southern Scotland and Aberdeenshire they are attracted to the Conservatives. Scots have a long history of tactical voting, which from the 1970s to the 1990s was used mainly against the Conservatives. This time it is another indication of the polarisation of Scottish politics around the constitutional question.
The SNP and Greens take the result as a clear mandate for a second independence referendum. Unionists cannot, as in other countries, claim that this is impossible because the state is indivisible. Successive prime ministers have conceded that Scotland does have the right to self-determination and there was an independence referendum in 2014. Some have suggested that only an SNP majority should count or that the constituency popular vote is what matters but that risks conceding the principle that a Scottish election can provide such a mandate. Some unionists have argued that the election was not about independence but it was the Scottish Conservatives who