Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
OB has it exactly right.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Result...ament_election
The Greens took NO constituency seats and obtained 8 Regional seats.
The SNP got 47.7% of the Constituency vote.
The Greens got 1.3% of the Constituency vote.
So, although there is a government supportive of independence, giving up the comforts that the Greens want to take away may well become a bigger issue than independence.
Sturgeon will want to put that difficult stuff into the background and the Greens will want that to be front & centre. Interesting times to come.
|
You need to be careful how you interpret votes in the Scottish parliament system. We have lived with it here for 20 odd years now and are (reasonably) familiar with it, unlike those in England.
For starters, the smaller parties often don’t stand any candidates in the constituencies. It is a waste of time because the constituency vote is FPTP so they know they can’t win. The regional list vote allocates seats proportionally, after allowing for any seats already won within each region’s constituencies. Most Green voters vote for a major party that best reflects their views in the constituency, and then they vote Green on the regional list - if they vote on the constituency ballot at all. The numbers don’t actually tally up so there are definitely people who only vote on one of the papers.
So if you want an accurate idea of how popular (or otherwise) the Greens are in Scotland, you need to look to the regional list vote, where they scored 8.1%. That may not sound a lot, but it put them in 4th place ahead of the Lib Dems and a country mile ahead of Alex Salmond’s Alba Party, which fought an explicitly list-vote-only campaign.
That said, I agree, pitting the Greens front and centre in Scottish politics might actually backfire. They have been careful in the past to keep the focus on Patrick Harvie because unlike most of them he doesn’t sound like a complete froot loop on TV. If they’re going to be sitting in the cabinet however, we are eventually going to end up with some of the other ones on the six o’clock news. As you say, interesting times are ahead.