Scotland 2011 - Results Thread

[afleitch]

Elaine Murray back in for Labour in Dumfriesshire.

[Foucaulf]

Some dude on BBC, a statistician, says the SNP will inevitably win a majority of constituency seats...but many of Labour's constituency candidates aren't on the list.  So a bunch of new Labour list MSPs on tap...

Makes no sense to me.

Scotland's voting system is essentially Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), where proportional lists are used to balance out disproportionate FPTP landslides.

Let's say a region has an overall vote of 40% SNP to 30% Labour. The region covers the same area as ten constituencies. The SNP wins every constituency, so the SNP sends 10 MSPs to Holyrood on the first vote. The SNP, however, has won such a disproportionate amount of seats that it will not gain any seats in the regional vote, even if it wins 40% of the vote there. Labour, winning 30% of the regional vote, gains 4 seats out of 7 available, because it received 50% of all the non-SNP votes.

Of course a Labour candidate running in a constituency can be placed on the list, but they can't be placed too high up - what if the candidate is eligible for both? Instead, they'll placed near the back end of the list, just in case. But Scottish Labour has even failed to do that, and when Labour gets its inevitable compensation you're going to see unknowns get elected, because the party never expected getting that many regional seats (or losing that many constituencies)

[afleitch]

SNP win Glasgow Kelvin. The SNP now hold half the consituency seats in Glasgow.

[afleitch]

SNP likely to have gained Edinburgh Central.

[afleitch]

SNP likely to have gained Cunninghame South
SNP just gained Edinburgh Western

[afleitch]

SNP gain Linlithgow
SNP apparently have gained Paisley

[afleitch]

[afleitch]

SNP gain Edinburgh Southern.

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

WTF is going on with the SNP gaining all of these seats?

[Meeker]

Not directly related to Scotland, but Diane Abbott is my favorite.

[bullmoose88]

WTF is going on with the SNP gaining all of these seats?

Lib Dem vote appears to have collapsed...for what reason I'm sure you can speculate...but it seems that vote has moved to the SNP for the most part.

[afleitch]

-Old joke-

Jackie Baillie has won her seat in Dumbarton. If she wins one more she'll be able to sit down.

[minionofmidas]

WTF is going on with the SNP gaining all of these seats?

Lib Dem vote appears to have collapsed...for what reason I'm sure you can speculate...but it seems that vote has moved to the SNP for the most part.

Simple really.
Leftish LD voters voted LD rather than Labour for a reason. Now they can't vote LD anymore, in Scotland there was another party available to drift to. In England (and even Wales, Plaid being out for many anglophones) there was only one place to go.

Besides, the SNP has governed well, and Labour didn't exactly provide many positive reasons to vote for them.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour really cocked up the two or three months in the run-up to the election; massive error as that's the period when the media narrative gets formed.

---

Wrt to the LibDem thing, note also that much of the LibDem vote in South Wales (an on and off phenomenon that dates back to the birth of the SDP and no earlier) was actually made up of disaffected Labour-ish types. Look at the results in the all the cities and big towns in South Wales.

[afleitch]

John Curtice forecasts an SNP majority of 2.

In North East Scotland, the SNP won every constituency and still managed to get another MSP elected on the List. Greens will be lucky to break 3 seats.

[afleitch]

SNP have gained both Caithness, Sutherland and Ross and Skye Lochaber and Badenoch from the Lib Dems.

Seats still to declare.

Argyll & Bute - Expected SNP Hold
Clackmannanshire & Dunblane - Expected SNP Hold
Cowdenbeath - Expected Labour Hold
Dunfermline - Too close to call (see Edinburgh Southern)
Fife Mid & Glenrothes - Expected SNP Hold
Fife North East - Expected SNP Gain
Inverness & Nairn - Expected SNP Hold
Kirkcaldy - Too close to call
Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Western Isles) Expected SNP Hold
Stirling - Expected SNP Hold

[minionofmidas]

I have an issue with this set of figures...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/election2011/region/html/36139.stm

either the vote totals are wrong, or the seat distribution is. SNP should have one more list seat, Labour one fewer.

[afleitch]

I have an issue with this set of figures...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/election2011/region/html/36139.stm

either the vote totals are wrong, or the seat distribution is. SNP should have one more list seat, Labour one fewer.

Yeah, I worked through the figures (remembering the plus one rule) and got;
LAB, SNP, GRN, CON, LAB, SNP, SNP.

Strange.

EDIT: Glasgow Herald have different regional figures.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/election-2011/results/glasgow

LAB: 34,99%
SNP: 39.82%
LIBDEM: 2.55%
CON: 6.11%
GREEN: 5.97%
RESPECT: 3.34%

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, that slight swing is just about what it takes to flip the last seat to Labour.

[afleitch]

SNP GAIN Dunfermline, Fife North East and 'gain' Stirling.

Worth noting that in Inverness, the Lib Dems are now fourth.

[minionofmidas]

Kind of odd list of Labour seats... some of it is core heartland, but some that you'd call core heartland is gone, and meanwhile they still hold Dumbarton, Eastwood, and half of Dumfries - two of these because the race was seen as Labour vs Tory, with the SNP having no chance. Dumbarton is more mysterious - personal vote?

[afleitch]

Kind of odd list of Labour seats... some of it is core heartland, but some that you'd call core heartland is gone, and meanwhile they still hold Dumbarton, Eastwood, and half of Dumfries - two of these because the race was seen as Labour vs Tory, with the SNP having no chance. Dumbarton is more mysterious - personal vote?

It's a very odd scenario; Dumbarton has stayed Labour but Clydebank and Milngavie has flipped to the SNP. I don't think it's a personal vote (unlike Elaine Murray or Ken McIntosh) but I am still genuinely suprised she held on.

Note some of the smaller swings in the more obvious marginals but massive swings in seats Labour genuinely didn't think would be a problem for them. Same as in 2007, but to a greater extent.

Labour have a problem; Holyrood was certainly the home of their second rate (or perhaps more kindly, B team) politicians. Most of them have now gone. Labour's new intake include many list MSP's who never thought they would win. More interestingly, it includes in some cases list MSP's who were assured that they would not win It's a blessing and a curse for Labour.

What the party needs is a greater degree of independence and UK Labour need to give them it. They should not be tempted to parachute in people from Westminster (no guarantee they would win in a by-election)

It has to understand what went wrong; not only to lose the election but to loose their core vote.

It's unfortunate these elections were not electronically counted; we could have had Polling District results released next year

[Verily]

SNP got their majority just now, gaining Kirkcaldy.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It has to understand what went wrong; not only to lose the election but to loose their core vote.

Let's no exaggerate; a significant part of the core vote. Which is bad enough (and was enough, combined with other factors, to cost them core constituencies). But there's half a precedent for that; remember the 1999 elections in Wales? I write half because what happened in parts of the Valleys that year was a short-term protest vote, while this clearly isn't (and of course the general context has nothing in common). The main lesson is that Holyrood elections aren't merely part of the usual Westminster-driven electoral cycle, but more like those in Canadian provinces or Australian states. I don't think Scottish Labour took that on board (as I wrongly assumed until about two months ago) and that's why they stood still in support and lost seats.

[minionofmidas]

SNP got their majority just now, gaining Kirkcaldy.

Yeah, that officially confirmed it. Not that it was in serious doubt before, of course.