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#sp11 under Sainte-Laguë.

May 11

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Holyrood | 64 Comments

A guest post from Richard Laird. Richard is a Politics graduate from the University of Dundee and past parliamentary candidate for the Scottish National Party who tweets as @Richard_Laird.

André Sainte-LaguëThose of you who saw last night’s Newsnight Scotland will have seen Professor John Curtice raise the possibility of altering the system used to elect the Scottish Parliament. Specifically, Professor Curtice suggested changing the way regional MSPs are elected by replacing the D’Hondt formula with the Sainte-Laguë equivalent.

Named after French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë (left), and used in numerous countries as a form of proportional representation, the Sainte-Laguë method uses the same process as D’Hondt with one change: the formula. In Scotland under D’Hondt, regional seats are allocated to parties (or Independents) by dividing their regional votes by one more than the number of seats they have already won. Under Sainte-Laguë, the process is the same except the regional votes are divided by one more than double the number of seats won. In practice, this means that instead of the vote being divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., it is divided by 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. Let’s look at a worked example.

Here is the (condensed) result from the West Scotland region in last week’s election:

Con Grn Lab LD SNP
Regional Votes 35,995 8,414 92,530 9,148 117,306
Constituencies 0 0 4 0 6

This result meant Labour won three regional seats, the Nationalists won two, and the Conservatives also won two. If Sainte-Laguë had been used, here is how the count would have played out:

Con Grn Lab LD SNP
First Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/1 8,414/1 92,530/9 9,148/1 117,306/13
New Total 35,995 8,414 10,281.11 9,148 9,023.54
Second Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/3 8,414/1 92,530/9 9,148/1 117,306/13
New Total 11,998.33 8,414 10,281.11 9,148 9,023.54
Third Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/5 8,414/1 92,530/9 9,148/1 117,306/13
New Total 7199 8,414 10,281.11 9,148 9,023.54
Fourth Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/5 8,414/1 92,530/11 9,148/1 117,306/13
New Total 7199 8,414 8,411.82 9,148 9,023.54
Fifth Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/5 8,414/1 92,530/11 9,148/3 117,306/13
New Total 7199 8,414 8,411.82 3,049.33 9,023.54
Sixth Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/5 8,414/1 92,530/11 9,148/3 117,306/15
New Total 7199 8,414 8,411.82 3,049.33 7,820.4
Seventh Regional Seat
Formula 35,995/5 8,414/3 92,530/11 9,148/3 117,306/15
New Total 7199 2,804.67 8,411.82 3,049.33 7,820.4

As you can see, the Conservatives retain two seats while the Greens and LibDems each win one seat with Labour and the SNP losing out accordingly. A similar story transpires across Scotland producing a Parliament which looks like this:

Region Constituency Regional Total Change
SNP 53 11 64 -5
Lab 15 19 34 -3
Con 3 12 15 ±0
LD 2 5 7 +2
Grn 0 7 7 +5
Oth 0 2 2 +1

Because it removes the bias towards larger parties, Sainte-Laguë would have seen the Greens and Lib Dems benefit at the expense of the SNP and Labour. It would also have seen George Galloway elected in Glasgow. The reason for this is that Sainte-Laguë makes it easier for a smaller party to win a first seat, but increasingly difficult to win additional ones. Only Central Scotland would be without a Green MSP with the SNP losing its top-up seats in Mid Scotland & Fife and North-East Scotland. Overall, the regions would now look like this:

Region Con Grn Lab LD SNP Oth
Central 1 0 3 0 3 0
Glasgow 1 1 2 0 2 1
H&I 2 1 2 0 2 0
Lothians 2 1 2 1 0 1
MS&F 2 1 3 1 0 0
North-East 2 1 3 1 0 0
South 0 1 2 1 3 0
West 2 1 2 1 1 0

Obviously, the changes in membership would have ramifications for the functioning of the Parliament. The increase in Green MSPs would see the party given with a seat on the Parliamentary Bureau (which determines what business the Parliament will conduct) and would likely see the Greens and LibDems posing questions to the First Minister on alternating weeks, as the Greens and SSP did between 2003 and 2006. Crucially, the SNP would be one seat short of a majority and would require the support of at least one other MSP to get motions and Bills through. However, the balance of pro- and anti-independence MSPs would remain the same with five Nationalists swapped for five Greens.

In his remarks on Newsnight, Professor Curtice addressed the fact that the SNP won a majority of seats on a minority of the vote and how the Holyrood electoral system was supposed to prevent this. His suggestion of a switch from D’Hondt to Sainte-Laguë would indeed have prevented this (just!), but would not have stopped pro-independence parties winning a comfortable majority. A move to Sainte-Laguë would improve the proportionality of Holyrood, but what really distorts the outcome is the existence of constituencies electing by First-Past-the-Post and the fact that these constituencies elect a majority of MSPs. If you want a purely proportionate parliament, change that instead.

Sauce for two geese and one gander.

May 11

Posted by James in Elections, Holyrood | 7 Comments

Three geese, one brown two whiteDespite the crushing referendum result last week, there is one place AV will never be displaced – when politicians choose one of their own. It’s not just Labour – even the Tories do it. Sure – it’s often done differently, round by round, to allow some very sophisticated game-playing (although that doesn’t work when the membership get a say). When the Tories chose between IDS, Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo, the IDS crowd lent their first round votes to Clarke because they knew a) that their guy would make the next round and b) Ken Clarke couldn’t win.

And you can see why they use it. Candidates with a narrow support base (like Clarke in 2001) would come through the middle, especially if two similar candidates stand. You get to express all your preferences. You can vote sincerely throughout (although as above, spreading it out over several separate ballots allows a bit more gaming to come in).

Today Holyrood will use the same system to elect a Presiding Officer. We have three candidates who could almost have been designed to demonstrate this principle. Two fierce SNP women, Christine Grahame and Tricia Marwick, plus Hugh Henry, a dry but impressive former Labour minister. Christine declared first, and without iterated run-offs, that would surely have kept Tricia out. Instead she’s surely going to win.

Assuming for the sake of argument a degree of voting by party, which is unfortunately pretty likely even for a notionally non-partisan role, and assuming the rest of the tattered Yoonyonisht Conshpirashy back Hugh, it’s easy to see how he could win. Yet there can be few in the Chamber with a first preference for either of the SNP candidates and a second preference for Hugh.

The fact remains, as the AV campaign should have said, preferential voting remains the only sensible way to indicate opinion and count votes when electing a single candidate (fans of various obscure Condorcet mechanisms please take it up in the comments). And as should be obvious, there’s no good way to elect single candidates and achieve proportionality.

Why Labour Lost: a dissenting view.

May 11

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Holyrood, Parties | 67 Comments

Another wee guest post from Aidan Skinner, this time shorn of Python references.

Loot.There’s been a lot of chat about why the Scottish Labour Party lost the election on Thursday. A lot of what people are saying now in public are what was being said in private (and not so privately by some) during the campaign – too negative, few distinctive Labour policies, little discussion of any policy at all, the one we discussed most being a non-sensical and somewhat ephemeral one on non-mandatory mandatory minimum sentences for knife crime, matching the SNP’s regressive council tax freeze, failure to engage with Lib Dem voters, Iain Gray being a nice, thoughtful man who had presentational problems, lack of engagement with party membership, complacency at early poll leads. The wish list of high minded, hummus munching, social democratic, starting-to-buy-the-Guardian-again-after-last-years-Lib-Dem-endorsement, might-possibly-have-second-voted-Green lot is as long as the arms of their cardigans.

A lot of them are entirely accurate, and we absolutely have to address them. They’re why we lost badly. Why people like Andy Kerr and Pauline McNeill aren’t MSPs any more. They’re not why we lost though. They affected the scale of our defeat. They gave Alex Salmond his majority, which is why everybody’s working 5 days a week now instead of the 3 we were working previously. But we have fewer MSPs than the SNP because we were outspent.

The SNP had an almighty war chest thanks to Souter matching donations, likely to be 3 to 4 times the Scottish Labour Parties entire annual income. And, far more than any other factor, money wins elections. It’s not just the media buy, or the slick presentation or helicoptering the leader about. It pays for full time workers, for policy development, for media training and for set pieces which create the atmosphere and allow parties to create a media narrative. Something which we in the Labour party failed at, we let the SNP create the narrative around things like Subway-gate and Asda-gate. With money comes a professionalism which dedication alone can’t substitute for.

Of course, the process isn’t quite as simple as turning votes into money but there is a very strong correlation and, I would suggest, a causal relationship. The Scottish Labour Party must address our fund raising, and we had a particular problem with money having just fought the UK general election last year. A lot of the other things we need to do, particularly involving the party membership more and having a more coherent, positive approach will help. But you can’t win an election on intellect and spirit alone. Cash is king, unfortunately.

Big Daddy Salmond and the Giant Haystack – wrestling with independence

May 10

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 56 Comments

If establishing Scottish independence was a needle that Salmond has been carefully trying to thread these past four years, the 69 SNP MSPs that he has surprisingly won may now prove to be a haystack landing on top.

Let me explain…

One of the main reasons for the SNP’s victory last week was the long-term intransigence (perception or otherwise) of the opposing parties to work with Salmond’s Government in a constructive manner. Will the Lib Dems turn down coalitions in 2011-16? Will Labour vote against its own budget proposals as they did not once but twice last term? Will the Greens pull the rug from under the SNP by holding firm on an insulation policy? Put simply, no. Despite the mollifying tone that Salmond has cleverly adopted this past week, there will be only one party calling the shots over the next five years.

That is a good thing from an SNP perspective in that it gets to follow its agenda but the down side is that the buck can only stop with Salmond and the public is free to imagine the powerless other parties at their ideal best rather than their practical substandard.

Labour wouldn’t cut jobs the LOLITSP will coo, the Greens would have delivered that 100% renewables promise Harvie will protest, free tuition isn’t sensible Goldie’s heir will despair and the Lib Dems will wring their hands at policing being so centralised. It will be a four-pronged attack and the SNP, as bullet-proof as it appears now (albeit against the backdrop of a Labour leader that runs into a Subway shop and could hardly have run a worse campaign) cannot hold firm against that given the economic pain they have no choice but to deliver at some point in the next few years.

Pain delayed is not pain denied and, now, the SNP has all those cuts that it has put off to call their very own. The more the Conservatives and Lib Dems cut at Westminster, and cut they will if the deficit is to be wiped out by 2015, then the more difficulty the Finance Secretary (let’s just say John Swinney) will have in preparing budgets that ensure current popularity for the SNP will remain.

The election might have been won with a runaway victory that suggests that the SNP is all kinds of popular and independence is just around the corner but (1) they did not win a majority of the votes so how that points to a majority for independence and/or against devolution is beyond me, (2) polling showed that a significant majority of the public were unimpressed with numerous specific policy areas from the 2007-11 Government, (3) the SNP spent pretty much all of the past year behind in the polls so one purple patch in early May may be an exception rather than the rule and (4) there is a creeping triumphalism on display, not necessarily within the SNP, but within the Nationalist bandwagon at large, a triumphalism that I suspect will make way for complacency and, ultimately, a backlash..

If even a lacklustre Ed Miliband can pull together a commanding lead over the Tories, occasionally beating the polling figures of the coalition parties combined, then whoever takes over the LOLITSP position at Holyrood can surely relatively quickly pull ahead in Holyrood polling once the jobs start to go and the services start to get scaled back.

Alex Salmond is clearly hoping to spend the popularity of his Government in the Scottish Parliament on the potentially politically costly gamble of his party’s cherished independence referendum but, ironically, that popularity being pushed too far in a dramatic final week of an election campaign could result in said strategy being about to fall off a cliff.

Brits love to build people up just to knock them down and, as will be frustrating for the SNP in more ways than one, Scots can be every bit as British as our friends down South in that regard. The SNP could not have been built up much higher but this victory does not come with the prolonged honeymoon period of 2007 when tolls scrapped here and an A&E saved there was the low hanging fruit that enabled popularity to come easily. We’re still in a period of deep economic uncertainty and the depressing reality is that the farther you are from London, the bleaker your economic prospects tend to be.

There is a misguided notion that oppressive Conservative policies, a declining economy and a ‘UK’s not working’ campaign may aid the Nationalists’ chances of pulling off a Yes result in a 2015 referendum but a nation can surely only find the confidence to move to independence from a position of strength, not from perceived weakness. Furthermore, if anyone is in any doubt that Scots lean towards the status quo, you need only look to the surprising AV result where only Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Kelvin voted ‘Yes’ to know what a challenge the SNP faces. If Scots won’t vote Yes to a lousy little change to AV, how can they be moved to cast off the bowlines and grasp a future as uncertain as an independent Scotland.

It’s all very well Nats criticising (quite rightly) certain unionists for peddling the ‘we’re too wee, we’re too poor’ argument against independence but if normal Scots feel that way, right to their very core, you’re not going to convince them otherwise by compounding that belief. And that is where the SNP will come unstuck – if we are currently doing well in Scotland then why change the system and if we are not currently doing well then not only are we (as most seem to believe) not up to the task but it must surely be those 69 SNP MSPs fault for not improving Scotland as they promised.

Finding an independence-winning strategy with a majority Holyrood Government? It could be like looking for a needle in a haystack…

The New Scottish Government?

May 9

Posted by Malc in Governance, Holyrood | 45 Comments

As ever at Better Nation, we like to be ahead of the curve.  (What do you mean we never lead and always follow?!  What do you mean our predictions were ridiculously poor for the election?!!  Show us someone who had an SNP majority!)

Anyway, maybe we’re jumping the gun a little (especially since there’s no PO in place yet) but we’ve started casting our thoughts to the personnel who might make up Scotland’s first single-party majority Cabinet.  Malc up first here, and I think that consistency will be key.  I doubt that we’ll see many (if any) changes to the major players in the Cabinet, though we may see some changes at Ministerial level.  Indeed, we’ll definitely have one, since Jim Mather retired.  I think also that Alex Salmond might take the opportunity to slightly change his ministerial portfolios – just marginally.  That said, I hadn’t considered some of this until a post-election email from a councillor friend, so I’m kind of going along with his idea here.

So – here’s what I think the Cabinet will look like:

First Minister – Alex Salmond
Deputy FM & Health Secretary – Nicola Sturgeon
Finance Secretary – John Swinney
Education Secretary – Mike Russell
Justice Secretary - Kenny MacAskill
Rural Affairs & Environment Secretary – Richard Lochhead

Sub-Cabinet level:

Office of FM:
Minister for Parliamentary Business – Bruce Crawford
Minister for Europe & External Affairs – Aileen McLeod
Minister for Constitution & Culture –  Alex Neil

Health:
Minister for Public Health – Shona Robison
Minister for Housing, Communities & Sport – Michael Matheson

Finance:
Minister for Enterprise – Joe FitzPatrick
Minister for Transport – Keith Brown
Minister for Local Government –  Derek MacKay

Education:
Minister for Children & Early Years – Adam Ingram
Minister for Schools & Skills – Angela Constance
Minister for Universities, Colleges & Apprenticeships – Fiona Hyslop

Justice:
Minister for Community Safety – Fergus Ewing

Rural Affairs/ Environment:
Minister for the Environment & Climate Change – Linda Fabiani

I’ve gone for a few new job titles which may not happen.  I think the Constitution brief might stay separate from Europe etc, and I think the SNP will want a “big hitter” in the brief.  I’m not sure Salmond would trust Alex Neil not to be too… fundamentalist(!) with the job, but he’s the guy I’d expect in the role (assuming Mike Russell stays on in the Cabinet).  I’ve added Sport to Housing & Communities since there are issues with funding and reconstruction, particularly in football and rugby which will probably be political issues as well.  I’ve also added the role of Minister for Local Government because with a “permanent” Council Tax freeze (well, for five years), we’re looking at a relationship between councils and Holyrood which might need a proper go-between at ministerial level.  Finally, I’ve also added a Minister for “tertiary education”, including apprenticeships – which will help to show both commitment to job creation (a key Labour concern in the election) and university funding (likely to be a key issue in the next five years).

As to the personnel.  Couple of caveats.  I’m expecting Roseanna Cunningham to be in line for one of the PO jobs – whether it is PO or one of the DPO slots will depend on who other candidates are/ how much the SNP want the job I suspect – but if she isn’t elected there, I suspect she’ll be named back in her Environment brief from the previous session, with Linda Fabiani back on the back benches.  There are a couple of new faces in parliament straight into my ministerial team – but consider them more and they make a bit of sense.  Aileen McLeod has a PhD in Europe – she knows it inside out – and she’s worked in the European Parliament as well, and you want someone in the Europe brief who understands it.  Equally, Derek MacKay at Local Government.  He was the youngest council leader in Scotland for a time – and ran his council effectively.  He’ll have contacts at COSLA and relationships with councillors across Scotland – something required for the role.

I’ve also promoted a few names from the backbenches as well.  Michael Matheson is, for me, long overdue a position in the ministerial team, so he’d be my choice at Housing, Communities and Sport.  He has a background in being spokesperson for sport so I think that fits.  Joe FitzPatrick is another I was impressed with last term, and he spent a spell as Parliamentary Liaison for John Swinney, so I think a job in his department fits.  There are also a couple of other names I considered – and I think are also due promotion – Alasdair Allan, Jamie Hepburn and Aileen Campbell would be shouts here I think, but there are only so many jobs.  I suspect Brian Adam (former Chief Whip) and Tricia Marwick (formerly SNP presence on SPCB) will get Committee Convenorships, as perhaps will Stewart Maxwell and Dave Thompson.

So there we go – my “team for Scotland”.  What do we think?  Given how right my election predictions were, I can’t possibly be wrong… can I?!