Don’t get me wrong, I will probably cave at the last minute and vote SNP again for a number of reasons. Mostly, being supportive of a number of their progressive policies that I have benefited from over the years, and also because my constituency is a two horse race between them and the Tories who I will never vote for. Though the SNP are probably now at their lowest point in years since they finally managed to oust Sturgeon.
I will also never vote Labour, they have no identity here and during the 2019 election they were campaigning for the Tories to oust SNP here, so 100% fuck them too.
I once voted for Lib Dem and we ended up with the catastrophic Clegg/Cameron coalition (though due to FPTP my vote didn’t matter there.)
I would like to vote for Green, but it would be a wasted vote here.
It’s just bizarre to me that Westminster’s voting system is such that a vast majority of votes in the UK are binned, how is this considered normal?
Sorry for the rant, but I am just so incredibly disillusioned with politics in this shitehole of a country but absolutely refuse to be passive about it since that is what they want us to be.
I appreciate you taking the time to write all this up, though I am aware of all of it. I will vote SNP in a futile attempt to remove the Tories from my constituency, but Labour in Scotland are not the same as the rest of the Labour party. Their only identity here is “anti-SNP at all costs.” Hell, a bunch of their councillors were suspended for creating a coalition council with the the Tories as well.
They will always be the same party in Scotland, until they change their tact and start supporting progressive policies as opposed to “SNP are the devil and nothing else matters.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disillusioned to the fact that the SNP have many faults within their party. But they gave me free education, free prescriptions, and mitigate a lot of damage the Tories in Westminster try to force on the public. (Bedroom tax, as an example).
Labour are just tory lite. And 2019 may seem like a long time ago, but bare in mind this was still 3 years post-brexit referendum. There was still a lot of anger, and openly trying to convince your own constituents to support the Tories (the party they are supposed to be the main opposition to) in that time is still a massive breach of trust, in my opinion.
Hopefully a Labour Westminster government will happen, and will make positive changes, but considering Scotland only returned 6 of 59 seats as Tories in 2019, its not up here that needs convincing.
The one thing that might be worth thinking about though is that labour have said that they are willing to look into an alternate voting system. I don’t know if they’ve actually made it a commitment but they’ve made a lot of noises that sound like they really mean it.
Although like you said they’re basically guaranteed to get in anyway so you probably should just do what makes you feel good.
Realistically though the only way we’re going to get from where we are now to something approaching what everybody actually wants is if we change the voting system and if the only way to get that is with a labour government then I’m voting for them.