The art of tactical surrender: Why anti-SNP voting won’t work

THERE IS A PARTICULAR KIND OF POLITICAL GENIUS on display in Scotland right now. Not the kind that wins arguments or builds things or runs ferries on time. The other kind. The kind that asks you, the voter, to abandon every preference you’ve ever held, every party you’ve ever trusted, every instinct you’ve ever developed over a lifetime of paying attention, and lend your vote to someone you don’t believe in, don’t like, and frankly wouldn’t trust to run a bath. All in the service of stopping something that, by most credible measures, isn’t actually going to happen anyway.

Tactical voting: the democratic equivalent of eating food you hate because the alternative might be slightly worse food. Bravo. What a movement.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s being sold here. The pitch, stripped of its breathless urgency, is this: vote Labour, or the Conservatives, or whoever the leaflet instructs you to back this week, because the SNP might win your seat, and if the SNP wins enough seats, it might call for another independence referendum. And nobody wants that.

It’s worth pausing on that last assumption for a moment. Because the people most loudly warning about IndyRef2 are also the people who, if you listen carefully, know it isn’t coming. The Supreme Court already told us in 2022 that Holyrood can’t legislate for a referendum without Westminster’s consent. Wes Streeting sat down on LBC in April and said the UK Government would never grant such powers. Never. It’s a funny word to use if you’re genuinely worried about it happening next week.

The independence referendum question, as a matter of practical politics, is over for the foreseeable future. The SNP knows it. The polls reflect it. The question of independence has been quietly demoted from existential national destiny to vague aspiration, somewhere between “learn Gaelic” and “get a better broadband connection.” It will not define this parliament, or the next one, or probably the one after that.

And the latest polling doesn’t rescue the tactical argument – it dismantles it. A More in Common MRP reported in today’s Scotsman finds eighteen per cent of voters still undecided days before polling. Nearly one in five people haven’t even chosen a party, let alone agreed to participate in a finely tuned tactical voting pact.

Worse for the theory, the same research describes an electorate that is, in the pollster’s own words, essentially “meh” about the choices in front of them. Tactical voting requires urgency, discipline, and a shared objective. What it has is indifference.

Yet here we are. Encouraged to vote in a way we don’t believe in, for parties we’ve rejected, to stop a thing that isn’t happening, on behalf of an alliance that can’t agree on anything except their mutual dislike of Salmond’s old party. This is what passes for strategy.

The SNP, of course, is perfectly capable of being opposed on grounds that have nothing to do with flags. Eighteen years in government leaves marks. The ferries alone would have finished most administrations. Two vessels, commissioned in 2015, both years late, both catastrophically over budget, one still barely operational, built at Ferguson Marine against expert advice and amid questions that have never received satisfactory answers. The Glen Sannox, which took the best part of a decade to build, is already back off its route with faults. The Glen Rosa arrived so far past its 2019 delivery date that the delay itself has become a kind of running national comedy, except that islanders who can’t reach the mainland on time don’t seem to find it very funny.

in 2025 alone 871 patients died during prolonged A&E waits

Then there’s the health service. January 2026 was the worst month on record for A&E waiting times in Scotland. Just 65% of patients were seen within the four-hour target. Over 10,000 people in a single month waited more than twelve hours. The Scottish Liberal Democrats, using Public Health Scotland data, estimated that in 2025 alone around 871 patients died during prolonged A&E waits. When the SNP first took power in 2008, the number of people waiting more than twelve hours before hospital admission was 465 for the entire year. In 2025, it was 62,749.

Cancer waiting time targets missed for thirteen consecutive years; drug death rates the highest in Europe; a children’s hospital that opened nine years late; a maintenance backlog in NHS Scotland of over a billion pounds. These aren’t invented grievances from opposition researchers. They are the ordinary, documented output of a government that has held power for nearly two decades while being largely insulated from accountability because the opposition has spent most of that time in internal chaos or arguing about the wrong thing entirely.

And the response from tactical voting advocates is: vote Labour. The same Labour whose own polling has collapsed so dramatically that, according to the April 2026 Electoral Calculus MRP, they would be reduced to a single constituency seat – Edinburgh Southern. Almost half of people who voted Labour in 2024 are now backing someone else.

The More in Common poll goes further. It suggests Labour may not win a single constituency anywhere in Scotland, relying entirely on the list for a projected thirteen seats – potentially its worst result since devolution. Even in seats where Labour is supposedly the “tactical” vehicle to stop the SNP, the pollsters explicitly note that unionist voters are not rallying behind them.

why should anyone trust Labour after its government’s performance down south?

Labour picked Keir Starmer as their great hope and he has delivered, in Scotland at least, roughly what you’d expect from a government that announced cuts to winter fuel payments and disability benefits within its first year in office. Anas Sarwar tried to neutralise the Starmer effect by denouncing his leader early on in the campaign, but he ended up being the only soldier, brave or foolish enough to go over the top. He failed to garner support in the Westminster cabinet or wider party, but more importantly, made no consistent dent on the Scottish polls. The Scottish Labour manifesto does not break with the economically destructive left-wing agenda pursued either by Labour in Westminster or the SNP at Holyrood; by and large Sarwar simply promises more competence than Swinney, but why should anyone trust Labour after its government’s performance down south?

The polling picture going into May 7th is striking, not because it shows SNP dominance, but because it shows something more interesting. The SNP is on around 36 per cent in constituency polling. Down seven points from 2021, it’s hardly a juggernaut. Labour and Reform are tied at roughly eighteen per cent each. The Conservatives, who held 31 seats at the last election, are projected to win somewhere between seven and fifteen depending on which model you believe. The vote is scattered, fractured, distributed across parties that disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the SNP.

The More in Common seat projection sharpens that picture rather than resolving it: the SNP remains dominant on around sixty seats but short of a majority, Reform surges into second place, and the rest of the field fragments behind them. This is not a two-bloc system waiting to be tactically optimised. It is a five-party system pulling in different directions.

In this landscape, tactical voting is not a precision instrument. It’s a suggestion shouted at a crowd moving in different directions. The idea that Tory voters in Perth will dutifully switch to Labour, that Labour voters in Moray will dutifully back the Lib Dems, that everyone will read the same leaflet, accept the same logic, and vote in unified tactical formation – this requires a level of voter compliance that Scottish politics has never actually produced.

tactical voting flatters the parties who benefit from it without requiring them to deserve it

More to the point: what is the actual end state here? Suppose it works. Suppose enough people hold their noses and vote in a carefully coordinated pattern and the SNP is denied a majority. Then what? A minority SNP government, probably propped up by the Greens, doing broadly what it was going to do anyway, without a mandate anyone feels very good about. Or a chaotic Labour-led coalition with Reform breathing down their necks and the Conservatives wondering where their voters went. A parliament of competing tactical calculations, held together by mutual opposition to something, rather than any shared vision for Scotland’s hospitals, schools, roads, or the ferries that still aren’t running.

Governing requires a mandate. A mandate requires votes. Votes should mean something.

The deeper problem with tactical voting as a doctrine is that it flatters the parties who benefit from it without requiring them to deserve it. Labour gets votes from people who don’t support them. The Conservatives get votes from people who’ve already left them. The Lib Dems get votes from people who can’t quite remember why they stopped. Nobody has to be good. Nobody has to offer anything. They just have to be the least-bad option in a particular seat, as assessed by a campaign group whose model may or may not reflect how anyone actually votes.

This is how you end up with a parliament full of people who weren’t elected for anything, only against something. And then, when they prove useless – and some of them will, because they were selected for tactical convenience rather than competence – you’ve burned through your political capital defending the indefensible, and the thing you were trying to stop is back, possibly stronger, and certainly angrier.

The idea that any of the legacy parties – battered, polling in the teens, still doing internal post-mortems on the last five years – is going to save Scotland from itself through tactical arithmetic is a fantasy with a very well-designed leaflet.

Reform UK may be the new kid on the block, but it is the only party that presents a genuinely fresh and radical prospectus for an economically successful Scotland.

Or vote tactically. Watch it not work. Do it again in five years.

There’s a word for that too, but Einstein used it first.