What the Hell is Happening in Scotland?!

as a Scottish person, i’m never getting over how horrifically ugly the Scottish Parliament building is.

Isn’t it concerning just how incompetent leadership and governance across the UK is regardless of who is in charge? The SNP are bad in Scotland, the tories are bad in England, labour are bad in wales and nobody can achieve anything in Northern Ireland? How did we end up with the people in charge being so universally bad?

It’s worth saying the Scottish Parliament system was designed so that no party would ever reach a majority. It was designed to be a coalition structure. The fact SNP ever managed to get a majority was exceptional.

Everything falls into Starmers lap. Tories implode, SNP implode, Liz Truss, Partygate. The guy has had such an easy run

Hamza is as much as an elected leader as Rishi. We need elections.

We have too many unelected foreigners in office.

Such a poor political miscalculation to ditch the greens rather than letting them leave (or makung a joint anouncement). Now the greens would look like fools if they propped him up.

The PR system in Scotland is designed to produce a coalition - not to prduce a single party with an overall majority.

"Damn Scots! They ruined Scotland!" - Groundskeeper Willy

The most interesting thing about all of this is there seems to be no attempt at fixing some of the fundamental problems. Neither of the parties in Scotland seem to be talking about the lack economic growth, the lack of affordable housing, and the dire mess that is healthcare and education. Instead, they squabble about things that don’t really matter

Someone's going to have to look into what supernatural entity Keir Starmer has done deals with because absolutely everything is falling into place perfectly for him to become the next prime minister lmao

@6:48 - "If she decides to vote with her own party..." - or should that be "her OLD party"?

Humza wouldn’t have to resign if the Tory motion passes, it’s non binding. But he would be under considerable pressure to and realistically he would have no prospect of getting anything done in Government.

One thing I'm really interested to see is how this affects the Green Party next electoral cycle. Apologies, everyone, I'm a massive psephology nerd and this is quite a long comment on the oddities of the Holyrood voting system. For a while now, but particularly in 2021, the Scottish Greens were in a strange place politically, in that much of the electorate saw them as "bonus SNP". This is a weird-sounding description, but let me explain. The voting system for the Scottish Parliament divides seats into two kinds: constituency seats and list seats; each set of seats has a separate vote, and there is nothing compelling you to vote for the same party with both votes. The constituency seats are exactly like Westminster, elected by first past the post; but the list seats are interesting. Lists cover a wider area covering eight to ten constituencies each, and they allocate seats on a proportional basis; but, crucially, they do so only after taking the constituency results in that region into account. What this means in practice is that if a party sweeps up all the constituency seats in a region, then they aren't going to get many (or any) list seats, because they are already well overrepresented in the region relative to their list vote. In the context of an SNP-dominated parliament in 2011, 2016 and 2021, this meant that the SNP won the vast majority of constituency seats. This meant that voters who voted SNP in both the constituency and the list were effectively wasting the second vote - because the SNP was so overrepresented in constituencies and the list is meant to undo the unfairness of the constituency vote, that meant that list votes for the SNP were effectively wasted because they didn't elect any additional MSPs. This is where the Greens came in. They worked out a clever strategy - the SNP is very popular, lots of people would love to be able to vote for the SNP with both ballot papers if they could, but the voting system means that if they do that then one of those votes is going to be wasted. But, if only another party could stand there with essentially the same politics, then as long as it's officially a different party, people could vote for it instead with their list vote (while still voting SNP at the constituency level), and those votes are no longer wasted. In other words, the SNP could unofficially have a sister party that enabled it to get round the features of the voting system which attempted to make it proportional. (Of course, the issue is far worse at Westminster, since there's no list voting there at all, it's just dumb FPTP voting for everything.) This explained how in 2016 and 2021, with voting going down almost entirely along constitutional lines, and voters being essentially 50-50 split on the national question, nationalist MSPs were able to win fairly comfortable (around 55-45) majorities of seats at Holyrood. Indeed, the Greens didn't even stand in most constituencies, tacitly advocating SNP + Green vote-splitting to maximise the overall seat totals for nationalist parties. But since 2021, the national question, while remaining 50-50, has plummeted in terms of salience, and Scottish politics has depolarised from this one issue. Indeed, it was this that allowed the SNP-Green deal to break down, since that one thing held them together no matter what else they bickered about behind closed doors. Now that independence is off the agenda anyway, there is much less glue tying the parties together. Obviously this has resulted in the breakdown of the Bute House Agreement; but I'm curious to see ehat impact it has on electoral politics in Scotland. It is clear that, unlike 2021, the Greens are no longer "SNP bonus seats"; they also support independence but that is no longer the be-all-and-end-all; and they have notable differences in many policy areas. Does this mean that there previous strategy of riding on the SNP's coattails isn't going to work for them any more? An unusual thing about the party is that they haven't really had their campaigning muscles flexed, since their method of winning voters has historically not been to go out and sell their policies to the electorate, but mkre just to exploit a quirk of the voting system. Which raises the question - are the Greens actually popular? How are they going to persuade people to vote for them, now that persuasion is actually important (which in politics it always should be)?

Last time I was this early, the SNP was popular

when ash reagon defected to alba, hamza said that it was no great loss. wonder if he still thinks that now

Thank you for this VERY CLEAR explanation. I tried a dozen other videos to explain this and was left more confused!

This is an excellent explainer, great video 👍

Love her or hate her, Sturgeon was sort of a powerhouse in UK Politics. Scotland does not have anyone ready or able to fill the vaccum she left behind

One interesting (and quite funny) factor with Ash Regan too is that when Humza won the race to be leader of the party and Regan left to join Alba, Humza said something along the lines of "nothing of value has been lost". I'd have bit my tongue if I were you Humza