As you may have seen, the SNP won a local council by-election in Falkirk overnight. It’s being reported as an ‘SNP gain from Labour’, although as is often the case with STV by-elections, things are not quite as they seem – the SNP won the popular vote in the ward last time around, and the real battle was with the Tories, who came very close to topping the first preference vote. Nevertheless, there has been a very real and substantial swing from Labour to SNP.
Falkirk South by-election result (first preference votes):
SNP 39.2% (+3.5)
Conservatives 38.9% (+6.8)
Labour 15.7% (-11.4)
Greens 6.2% (+1.1)
Our regular commenter ‘Independence for Scotland’ made an intelligent point about the reaction of SNP leadership loyalists to this result – they’ve said Alba have demonstrated themselves to be an irrelevance because they didn’t stand a candidate. But the same people would undoubtedly have slammed Alba for splitting the vote if they had stood a candidate, which suggests that somewhere along the line the criticisms are intellectually dishonest.
The reality is, of course, that local elections (including by-elections) are conducted by a preferential voting system, which means Alba can stand without doing any harm whatsoever to other pro-independence parties, as long as they urge their voters to give lower preferences to the SNP and the Greens. The much trickier issue is first-past-the-post contests – ie. Westminster general elections, Westminster by-elections and Holyrood by-elections. In those cases, the vote can genuinely be split and in the worst-case scenario a unionist might end up winning unnecessarily. My own personal view is that Alba should sit out first-past-the-post elections unless there’s an exceptionally good reason – with an example of an exceptionally good reason being that there are sitting Alba MPs in two Westminster constituencies. If there’s a snap general election at any point, I think it would make strategic sense for Alba to pour all its resources into defending East Lothian and Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, and not actually stand anywhere else (unless there are other defectors, of course).
