🧵I'll also be adding each part of the #BBSLE22 Wards Worth Watching series to this thread here. As the series goes on, you'll be able to find the full pieces on the website too under this tag: ballotbox.scot/tag/wards-wort…
East Renfrewshire: 18 Councillors
Wards Worth Watching: 1 of 5
🧵THREAD: UK #GE24 UNDER PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
This was the least representative election in the UK's democratic history. Millions of votes didn't count. "What if we had PR?" is talked about, but mostly in simple X% votes = X% seats terms. This is a detailed model.
PRINCIPLES: Partly inspired by Norway, uses Sainte-Laguë to allocate seats within districts. Final seat in each is "levelling seat" allocated to give proportionality between parties w/ at least 3% of the regional vote. Districts Lego-bricked from FPTP seats for simplicity.
Returning to this once again given recent events; BBS being BBS, I'll be talking about PR a lot during this campaign anyway, but once again as a partial outsider I have been struck by the attitude of those at the heart of the Westminster bubble to representation of diverse views.
So many people, including senior people, people who should know better, are so absorbed in elections as a sport, where the parties are teams, that they forget what they are actually about is voters. Voters are electing people and parties to represent them, to give voice to them!
But at best, when voters are remembered at all, it's not in all their glorious, bizarre, chaotic, contradictory, messy diversity, it's a flattened median voter, who rarely exists in any real individual, whose views are presented as an acceptable norm everyone else must align to.
One for the nerds: I've often made reference to Germany's similar-but-not-identical voting system to what we use for Holyrood (e.g. often talk about the concept of Overhang, as here: ballotbox.scot/the-overhang-o…), and it looks like they are set to tweak how it works.
You'd be best reading the thread for detail, but the long and short of it is "parties can't overhang via constituencies anymore; if they win 'too many' constituencies, they don't actually win the weakest ones".
Thought it'd be interesting to imagine how that would go down in Scotland, but allowing for fact we do regional rather than national proportionality. In 2021, Scotland had an overhang of 4 seats (ballotbox.scot/sp21-hypotheti…), so who'd have lost out per possible new German approach?
Right my ferry is very delayed so a short thread about Scottish Politics being very silly.
Firstly, party membership numbers: In my view these should be a required part of a party's annual, public accounts. They are not, which is weird! Why are we so bad at this stuff?
However, parties being secretive about membership figures is not new. To this day, two years on, we only know the % share that Anas Sarwar and Monica Lennon got in Scottish Labour's 2021 leadership election. But was that 9,284 Sarwar votes? Or 3,691? Who knows! Not the public!
Secondly, the assumption that all parties follow the same internal election procedures is daft. It appears Labour give wide access to member contact details for internal elections. The SNP, and Greens, don't. If looked at rationally, there are obvious competing issues doing so.
I'd seen a few of these pop up, but having been specifically asked it's worth picking up on.
These predictions are based entirely on Uniform National Swing - i.e. if a party is up 5% in national polls, it will be up 5% in every seat. As such, be very cautious with them.
Historically UNS was "fine-ish" because places it got wrong in one direction were broadly balanced by those it got wrong in the other. Since 2015 however it has been completely and utterly useless for Scotland, given the SNP's generally large leads.
Applying UK-level swings to Scottish seats can give daft results. Though we haven't had Scotland-only polls for weeks, we did get some at height of the Truss meltdown. Lab were up and Con down to milder degrees than in UK-level polling. I'd advise against trusting these.
I appreciate this will be a somewhat controversial set of Tweets - and a somewhat ironic one, being, as it is, a set of Tweets, but:
It is very clear a large section of Scottish Politics is just utterly Twitter-poisoned and cannot parse politics outside of that sphere.
Whatever your view on a future referendum, the reason Scotland is still having this constitutional debate is because *the people of Scotland* have consistently voted since 2014 in such a way as to keep the issue live. Nobody has to LIKE that, but we do have to UNDERSTAND it.
Far, far too many Pro-Union partisans on here, blinded by their own side and the driving Twitter desire to "get one over the Nats", are willing to pretend that their side of the debate has no part, no role, and no responsibility for the current situation. I'm afraid it does.