by Kyle Renton
This group of newly elected MSPs did not march into Holyrood because Scottish communities overwhelmingly chose them.
They were put there through a proportional top-up system after the real constituency elections had already taken place.
They did not go town by town defeating opponents and winning local mandates across Scotland.
They were mathematically assigned seats through a party list mechanism.
And yes – that is technically how the system works.
But people are absolutely entitled to point out how ridiculous it looks when a party with just 16.8% of the regional list vote suddenly ends up with 17 MSPs, and headlines begin acting as though Scotland has politically transformed overnight.
It hasn’t.
Around 84% of Scots did not vote for Reform on the list.
Meanwhile, the SNP received around 28% of the regional list vote and gained just 1 additional list MSP – because they had already overwhelmingly won constituencies outright across Scotland.
That is how the system works.
The more constituencies you win, the less the list system benefits you. It exists largely to compensate parties that fail to win constituency battles directly.
There is a massive difference between:
earning the trust of constituencies across the country, and
being allocated seats through a regional balancing formula.
And people are perfectly entitled to point that out.
And let’s also stop pretending this system was created in a vacuum.
The proportional system used for Holyrood was deliberately designed to make outright nationalist majorities far more difficult. Which is why Westminster uses first-past-the-post (FPTP), and we don’t.
Because Westminster understood from the very beginning that if Scotland consistently returned strong pro-independence majorities under a straight constituency system, pressure for independence would become impossible to contain.