A certain independence blog has written FIFTEEN articles in the last month-and-a-bit about Wings, with a steadily-increasing tone of purple-faced rage, since we passingly suggested the idea of setting up a 2021 Holyrood list party if and only if the SNP had failed to deliver a second independence referendum by then.
Now, we do understand and empathise. There’s really not a lot to talk about in Scottish politics at the moment, with the political scene having been utterly consumed by Brexit for the last two years, and trying to attribute significance to some piddly meaningless subsamples of UK-wide polls can only take you so far.
But since over the past few days we’ve been starting to fear that they might have some sort of aneurysm if they get any more wound up, we suppose we ought to finally reveal the results from the first of a series of polling questions we’re intending to ask on the subject of the notional party.
And let’s be clear from the outset – we started with a soft one, couched in deliberately general terms because all we were really interested in at this point was finding out how many SNP voters are absolutely implacably opposed to the idea of giving their regional list vote to someone other than the SNP.
And given that the SNP has spent most of the last decade banging a big “Both Votes SNP” drum, that number turned out to be much, much lower than we expected.
Only 14% of people who said they planned to give the SNP their constituency vote in 2021 responded that they would definitely comply with the party’s demands to also give it their regional vote. (We were anticipating something more like 50%.) Everyone else – 86% – was at least open to the idea to some degree.
That doesn’t even remotely mean they actually WOULD vote for another party, nor that they would specifically vote for a Wings one, but we were quite taken aback that six out of every seven SNP voters was at least willing to think about using their list vote for someone else if it might deliver more pro-indy MSPs, with a massive 56% saying that it depended what the new party’s other policies were.
One in five, meanwhile – or 19%, to be precise – were prepared to go further, saying that they’d DEFINITELY consider it, with no qualifiers.
Which is an interesting number, because particularly alert readers may recall Gavin Barrie’s detailed expert analysis from last month which found that the “tipping point” at which SNP voters voting for a Wings list party would likely produce a sharp increase in pro-indy seats was a mere 12%.
So there we go. It’s only the first question of several, it doesn’t even mention Wings by name (although given the vast media coverage of the suggestion it seems likely that a significant proportion of the sample would have known who it was talking about), and it only asked people what they might consider, not what they would definitely do. It is, by design, a question it was easy to say yes to.
But nevertheless, these are figures some distance beyond our wildest expectations of what that specific question might generate. It’s an extremely encouraging start. The answers to the future ones will be very interesting indeed.
It’s worth saying once again that we hope this is an idea that never comes to fruition. This site will be the happiest on Earth if the SNP do deliver a second indyref before 2021 and we can stick to the vastly preferable task of trying to win that. Independence is going to be a much easier thing to get people to vote for than a snarky website run by a sweary man, and we can’t think of a more miserable job than being an MSP.
But, y’know, these are odd times, folks. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
