Palindrome wrote:
I also counted Labour voters as being left wing and the Labour party is almost as right wing as the Tories, there are no real left wing parties in British politics with any kind of significant presence. The
SNP is a lot further to the left than Labour is.
If that's the case, then that's a self-defeating argument. You're essentially saying that they're all right wing(including Labour), in which case, the Scots who cast their votes for them and their policies are also right wing. Either you accept that the parties and their voterbases can be split into the left wing/right wing camps accordingly (in which case the data clearly points to a rough equivalency between Scotland and the rest of the
UK), or you postulate that none of the mainstream parties are left wing anyway (and thus the votes tallied is irrelevant), in which case you have no data to back up your claim that Scottish people think differently bar purely anecdotal evidence.
Either way, you have absolutely no evidence or proof for the views expressed.
SNP would probably win a post independence election for 2 reasons. Firstly they would have just won independence and secondly it would no longer be a protest vote. Labour or SNP, it doesn't really matter as I can say with 100% certainty that it will not be Tory.
Those 500,000 Tory voters wouldn't just vanish. And neither would that 1,000,000 Labour voters, or those 500,000 Liberal Democrat voters. Assuming Scotland would be based along lines of proportional representation (as has been suggested by the
SNP so far), those 500,000
SNP votes are a drop in the ocean. Even if we assume that their voter base doubles with half made up of people voting for the first time and half drawn from other parties, they could still easily be defeated by a Lib/Lab coalition in terms of vote quantity. If you're claiming that they'll
more than double their voter base, which is in itself an exceedingly unlikely event, then we're entering into the realms of pure speculation outside any inferences backed up data.
I couldn't find specific voter numbers for England but UK general elections show that the Tories consistently gain a far higher percentage of votes cast than they have managed in Scotland and the other right wing parties have barely a presence.
Allow me to cast out the figures for you a second time. Out of 2.500,000 votes in Scotland in the 2010 elections, 500,000 or 1/5th or 20% of the vote was claimed by the Conservatives. Out of roughly about 24,500,000 votes cast across the rest of the United Kingdom, about 10,000,000 of them, or roughly 40% of the votes were Conservative. So on the surface, or at a casual glance, the data does bear our your idea that the rest of Britain votes more right wing than Scotland. But only at first glance, and nothing more, because it's not just 'Conservatives versus everyone else'. Let's dig a little deeper.
Your specific claim was that Scottish peopleare politically more left-wing inclined than the rest of Britain. Not that the Conservatives do better in Britain, but that the actual average voter is more inclined to the right than the average Scottish voter. Hence the need for a divide between the areas. Correct?
Proceeding along that premise, you can't just split it into 'Tory v everyone else'. As I've already said, the
SNP tends to sit right in the middle and pull in some left wing policies, and some right wing ones. They have a habit of espousing whatever they think will win them votes (like most parties), only they're not restricted by the idea that they have to conform to left/right wing ideologies. Which leads me to take half their voterbase, and distribute it to sit neatly alongside the Tories, bringing up the 'right wing vote' to 30%. Now purely based on the last election, that's still a 30% right wing vote in Scotland compared to a 40% right wing vote in the rest of Britain. Right?
Wrong. Because as I keep saying we were at the end of a Labour cycle, so all those floating voters started turning Tory. But if we backtrack to 1997, at the end of a Tory administration, you see the number of those left wing votes take off a bit. Between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, they manage to pull in a whopping.....61%! With the Tories managing a meagre 30%. Surely this must prove out your original hypothesis? That's a Tory increase in popularity of 10% between 1997 and 2010! Right?
Wrong again I'm afraid. You see, the voter turnout dropped substantially between the 1997 elections and the 2010 elections. Where the Conservative voterbase has remained relatively static, only going up a million or so heads between 1997 and 2010, the Labour voterbase dropped horrifically. They lost no less than 5,000,000 voters! Now of that 5,000,000 roughly a million of them turned Tory, and a million of them turned Lib Dem. But the other three million? They just stopped voting. Disillusionment with the Labour party hit an all time high in 2010, and whilst a good chunk of their central voter base didn't want to vote for them anymore, they couldn't stomach voting for the Tories. At all.
She won't be voting Labour again
The result being that there's still around 3,000,000 ex Labour voters, or roughly an equivalent number of people to that remaining 10% British/Scottish difference in right wing votes in the 2010 General Election floating around out there not voting anymore. In other words, I can safely speculate that out of the general population of Great Britain, an equivalent number to that 10% difference is left wing inclined. The second you insert that figure, all the earlier presumptions start crumbling in reverse. That 10% difference between Scotland and the rest of Britain in terms of left wing/right wing inclination is pared to being at best a matter of a few percent.
The truth is, to a very minor extent, I do believe that the average Scottish voter is ever so slightly more inclined to stick with the left wing on an average day(with no exhaustion for left or right wing). But we're talking about a very minor extent, a case of a percentage point or two. And when the mood takes them(or exhaustion with the government), the population of the rest of the United Kingdom easily falls into line with Scottish voters.
As I have already stated the Tories would not even have been in power since the '60s based purely on Scottish votes and in the last few elections they would have polled 4th overall. These extra votes must come from somewhere and by far the obvious answer is England. I wold regard my view as being backed up by actual data, because it is, rather than some flight of fancy.
You are correct here (ignoring that it's the Tories & the Lib Dems in power right now, not just the Tories). Regardless, this is not what you said that I took issue with. You said that:-
Its not about democracy, its not about some slavish devotion to the SNP but it is about the politics of the average Scottish voter being markedly different to the average English voter
They are not markedly different. As I think I have now proved over and over again. At an absolute worst, ignoring cause and effect for data, you can scrape a 10% difference in left wing leaning. But when you look into the data available for floating voters and voters lost to Labour who just stopped voting, that 10% difference is reduced to nothing.
Ergo, this statement:-
Its not about democracy, its not about some slavish devotion to the SNP but it is about the politics of the average Scottish voter being markedly different to the average English voter
is demonstrably incorrect and inaccurate. And no more a reason to break off Scotland, than it is a reason to break off London.
