Maximising the Vote

Whoever wins the current season of Loathe Island... sorry, the Tory leadership contest, will no doubt be asked by Nicola Sturgeon if they will authorise a Section 30 order for a second independence referendum. They will, just as inevitably, say "no". Later this year, the Supreme Court are going to rule on whether the Scottish Parliament can hold such a referendum without such an order (and, in effect, whether Scotland is a voluntary member of a union, or an imprisoned colony in the English Empire). The expectation is that they will also say "no".

At which point the next General Election becomes a de facto referendum.

Now, in order to 'win' such a contest, the pro-independence side will require two things:

• A majority of the votes cast.
• The overwhelming majority of Scotland's seats - ideally, all 59, but certainly more than the 48 currently held.

In order to achieve these, the best approach is for the "yes" camp to get behind a single candidate in every seat, to maximise the vote for that candidate. And, since they enjoy by far the strongest name recognition (and since this will, rightly or wrongly, be perceived as their initiative), that candidate should be SNP.

Which is absolutely fine in 56 of the constituencies, where the SNP are either the incumbent or the strongest pro-independence opposition. But there are 2 seats currently held by Alba and one by a (formerly-SNP) independent.

Now, in a normal election, what would happen is that they'd stand for re-election, the SNP would put up candidates, the SNP would win the seats, and the three individuals would be out of politics for a while. No big deal.

But in a de facto referendum, that represents a big risk. Firstly, it's just possible that the split vote will allow a unionist to sneak in, cutting the number of seats down a tad. More importantly, the votes that go to the losing Alba/independent candidate will inevitably not be added to the SNP total, and so will be 'lost' to the pro-independence cause.

Which kind of sucks for the individuals involved, but they're going to have to ask themselves: just how much do they really value independence? Will they stand down for the good of the cause?