[ published in The National on 12th January 2026]
On Thursday it will be seventeen weeks until the Scottish general election. Seventeen weeks until the country decides whether to continue the argument for self-government or retreat from it.
Given the imminence of the ballot, you’d think parties would be putting the finishing touches to their campaigns. And yet the party of government, Scotland’s largest, has yet to select nearly 40% of its candidates.
In a letter sent to members the day before Christmas Eve the party’s national secretary announced the start of the selection process for list candidates. Nominations close two weeks on Friday.
Now, a lot can happen in 17 weeks of course. Nonetheless, the SNP look as if they are cutting it a bit fine.
Why so? Officials will tell you they had to agree a selection process which embraces mechanisms to get a more diverse set of candidates, particularly aiming for gender balance. That only explains why it takes a bit longer to decide, not why the party has left it so late to get started.
I suspect the truth is that it’s just not been that much of a priority, either for the elected members of the NEC or party full timers. It’s been like this since the party became the unrivalled victor in the first past the post constituency contests.
Few of those in charge of the campaign would put money on winning list seats outside of the Highlands and Southern Scotland. So, there’s no need to get animated about promoting additional candidates. Concentrate resources in the constituencies where they’ll provide the best return. Besides, the already selected candidates can just double up as the team on the list.
Looking at today’s polls this absence of a strategy for the list contests makes sense. The problem is that it does not square with the party’s stated ambition of winning a majority in the parliament. To do that the SNP would need to win additional seats in areas where it does well in constituency votes.
It is time to get an election strategy which understands and makes the best of a very user-unfriendly voting system.
A large part of any strategy will be the message, and we’ll be discussing hat in the weeks to come. But as well as convincing people to vote for you, you also need to persuade your actual supporters to do so first.
Last week’s poll showed a welcome drop in the gap between SNP support on the list and in the constituencies. But it is still there. Given that it is only the list choice that matters in allocating extra seats, the party’s number one priority ought to be to boost support on the list.
In part this means approaching the election with a new narrative about how to vote. Stop talking about two votes. There is one election, one vote, but it has two parts.
And we need to say that the most important choice is the one you make on the list, the peach ballot paper. Do that first. That is where you decide which party you want to lead the government, that is where you decide to back independence or not. That is where you should vote SNP.
The system encourages confusion amongst the electorate, many thinking having a second ballot paper is an invitation to state a second preference. That is why many people currently will vote SNP in their constituency but think they can support that choice by putting in other pro-independence candidates on the list.
We know it doesn’t work like that. If Alba get 3% as last week’s poll suggests they will not get anyone elected, but if that 3% were otherwise to vote SNP it could see an additional pro-independence candidate win.
If we can firm up existing supporters behind the SNP team on the regional lists it will have the added effect of dragging up support in constituencies. This is simply because once a person has voted SNP on the peach ballot, they will have fewer choices to seduce them on the lilac one. To be clear, this process most definitely does not work the other way around.
It will of course help enormously if the party can present at least some candidates for the regional list who are different and additional to their constituency team. That way it will at least look as if we are trying the get extra people elected.
The list cannot just be a second chance for constituency candidates to get elected. If it is it will put people off voting for them. After all, if you’ve already decided to vote for a high-profile SNP candidate in your constituency, why would vote for them somewhere else. Electors know the same person can only be elected once, and if they don’t have another SNP candidate to support in the list it will be an invitation look elsewhere.
With teams in place, the campaign must spend money on promoting them, using voter communication to promote the list first, and a social media campaign to educate and mobilise our support. That’s how we win a majority.