Who's your MP?

[Emrys]

56. The Scottish Parliament will be a totally different contest

It'll be run under our version of PR, for one thing, with a different franchise that includes 16-18-year-olds and legal residents who aren't British subjects.

It will be after two years of Labour being in power, so the ball's in their court to start to deliver on what promises they've made and for the electorate to see what their representatives actually do in terms of representing Scotland. Past form for Labour when it held vast numbers of seats in Scotland don't give much grounds for optimism, and the new intake includes a few who were rejected by the electorate in past UK elections.

And on the ballot will be initiatives by Scottish Governments over the years to mitigate some of the worst aspects of Tory austerity through mitigating such things as the two-child cap on benefits and the "rape clause", free prescriptions for all, free tuition in Scottish universities for inhabitants of Scotland and a whole number of things that Labour may decide are "unaffordable". And if rumblings come to fruition, Holyrood's powers may be eroded. We'll see how the polls shift, but support for independence still ran at around 50% in the most recent polls, and a substantial percentage of Labour voters even before this election supported it. If the other parties have refused to accept that any sort of majority in Scotland was a mandate for a referendum, it will be awkward (but predictable) if they now argue that a lack of a majority means there is no mandate or appetite.

Part of the problem is that the media and Labour deliberately fudged what are devolved powers and what are reserved to Westminster. Let's not forget that Scottish media have always been Labour-friendly and all but one newspaper and all of the TV and radio stations are SNP-hostile, though that hasn't been enough to fend off SNP sucesses in the past. During this election, Labour's Scottish leader Anas Sarwar even castigated the Scottish Government for policies his party supported in Holyrood! He'll have to decide on which side his bread is buttered. Maybe the media will even focus on calling him out for his hypocrisy, which they did begin to do belatedly in the later stages of this election, and he floundered horribly.

The Greens' gains are one of the silver linings for me from election night. I hope it's a foot (or several feet) in the door, because that trend for Reform getting more media attention than it deserves is likely to continue.

And through it all, turnout was poor across the country, and the polling shows that by far the main reason for voting Labour was to get the Tories out rather than approval of any of their policies. That was Labour's message in Scotland, and it obviously cut through because it was glib and exhaustingly repeated.

I could touch on other issues like the election happening when Scottish schools have already broken up for the summer, meaning that quite a few people had holidays scheduled, and there were widespread reports of postal vote forms not arriving. I don't know whether that would have had a significant effect on any outcomes as presumably its effects were not restricted to one party, but the UK Government were warned last year that it was going to be a problem, and they did nothing to address it, nor did Sunak seem at all concerned when he was asked about it during the campaign. That sort of thing shouldn't be an issue in the Holyrood election.

All the reactions I've seen from the SNP so far have been suitably humble and avoiding blaming the voters or trotting out any rationalizations that might actually be valid, but better addressed at another time, which is undoubtedly the wisest course at the moment.