A bit like the UK-wide result, but even more so, the result in Scotland was very static. In fact, in many ways, the outcome was totally predictable, and no seats changed hands.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any stories though. Indeed, it was historic because it is the first time the SNP have got the most votes in Scotland in a UK-wide election. And unlike the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary election, it wasn’t a narrow result either.

Indeed, the fact that Labour got the most votes in only three council areas underlines just how much Scotland has fallen out of love with Labour, something that seemed an impossibility just a few years ago. That bodes very well for the SNP in terms of future FPTP elections, which have always acted to keep SNP representation artificially low.

A couple of weeks ago I teased Jeff about recent opinion polls. In the rest of the UK — in a three-party system — Labour was well and truly in the doldrums, fighting for third in the high teens in opinion polls. But in Scotland’s four-party system, Labour were still a comfortable 2nd in the mid-20s.

In the end though, the SNP delivered a comprehensive drubbing to Labour in the European elections. The gap between the SNP and Labour is now over twice as large as the gap between Labour and the Conservatives. And that’s not as a result of how well the Conservatives are doing — their share of the vote went down.

While the UK-wide picture was largely about Labour losing votes and not much else, Scotland’s results were only partly about the Labour collapse. The SNP gained a lot more than Labour lost, so that can be seen as a sign that the Scottish voters are quite happy with the mid-term Scottish Government.

I’m tempted to suggest that the Lib Dems’ drop in support is partly due to the electorate’s perception of their performance in the Scottish Parliament. That would be me projecting my views on the entire electorate. I had gone off the Lib Dems a bit because of their poor performance in the Scottish Parliament, and it was only after investigating each of the parties that I realised they are probably the only party I could bring myself to vote for. If I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have voted.

The Greens didn’t come close to getting a Scottish seat, which must be massively disappointing for them. A near miss might have been tolerable, but according to the d’Hondt calculator I used, Scotland would have needed nine seats if the Greens were to take one.

Ukip suffered a noticeable dip in an already low level of support. Mind you, last time they were snapping at the Greens’ heels. This year they were far behind. They remain sixth, but are increasingly irrelevant in Scotland.

Meanwhile the BNP gained, but to a quite distant 7th. The BNP had just 2.5% of the vote, compared to a 6.2% share UK-wide. They were 9th in Scotland in 2004, so they have made a bit of a stride in Scotland. But they only gained around 8,000 extra votes. Much of the BNP’s advance can be attributed to the collapse of the SSP and the disappearance of Operation Christian Vote (which entered as part of the Christian People’s Alliance — a move that didn’t do them much good).

Scotland’s socialist titans continue their journey to obscurity. The SSP scraped together just 10,000 votes — six times fewer than the number of votes they got in 2004. Even the Socialist Labour Party, Arthur Scargill’s vanity project, got over twice as many votes as the SSP. The Socialist Labour Party didn’t even bother to enter the last European election. By beating the SSP so comfortably, they have certainly shown just how irrelevant the SSP have become. Those heady days when the SSP had six MSPs feels like so long ago now.

Tommy Sheridan threw his lot in with No2EU, which got even fewer votes. In fact, No2EU got even fewer votes than mystery man Duncan Robertson. That is no mean feat considering I had a struggle finding out anything about Mr Robertson at all prior to the election.

Right at the bottom of the heap was Jury Team, a candidate with which I sympathised a bit. Perhaps it goes to show that, despite the current crisis of confidence in mainstream politics, people still like the principle of party politics rather than taking a risk on an independent candidate.

The Europe-wide picture

The consensus seems to be that, Europe-wide, it was a good election for the centre-right. It certainly seems as though the governing centre-left parties have taken a bit of a battering, while voters seem content with centre-right governments.

Those of a socialist persuasion may well feel disgruntled. In the midst of an economic crisis which they say was caused by the excesses of capitalism, voters seem to have lost faith in socialist parties’ ability to deal with it. The far left also took a knock. On the other hand, the Green grouping is the one grouping (aside from non-aligned) to have increased its representation in the European Parliament.

Interestingly, despite the fact that apathy was the clear winner of the election across the EU, the main Eurosceptic grouping was almost totally wiped off the map, with the exception of Ukip. Perhaps domestic issues are the cause of this. But if 2004 was the breakthrough year for Eurosceptic parties (which led to the formation of the Independence / Democracy group), 2009 was the bump back to earth. As thing stand (and no doubt they will try to woo more MEPs on board), Ukip alone now account for almost two thirds of the grouping.

The main UK parties

The UK-only picture was rosier for Ukip, but only slightly. This year will be remembered for the fact that they finished 2nd ahead of Labour. But they would be deluding themselves if they believed this was because of a rise in support. Their increase in the share of the vote was a pretty titchy 0.3 percentage points. Indeed, they gained fewer votes than in 2004, and got just one extra MEP despite the huge collapse in trust of the major Westminster parties.

In a lot of ways, the UK picture as a whole is surprisingly static. Yes, there was a massive drop in support for Labour. But none of the major parties were in a position to capitalise, so everyone apart from Labour just shuffled up a bit. In the circumstances, the Conservatives ought to be pretty miffed that they lost votes and increased their vote share by just 1 percentage point. It doesn’t exactly look like a party with the momentum to take a Westminster landslide.

The Lib Dems, who arguably weren’t hurt nearly as much as Labour and the Tories by the expenses scandal, managed to reduce their share of the vote, which almost no other party did. Of course Labour’s share decreased. Plaid Cymru’s UK-wide share decreased, but their Wales-only share went up. The only other party to reduce its share of the vote was the Scottish Socialist Party, which has cemented its place in history by being consigned to it.

The BNP

The BNP made a different kind of history by winning two seats, which became the story of the election. It was probably inevitable that people would “blame” proportional representation for this. But the simple fact is that PR doesn’t vote fascists in — fascist voters do.

6.8% is not an inconsiderable share. Almost a million voters decided to put their cross next to the BNP on the ballot paper, and they didn’t do so by accident. Gerrymandering them out of existence will only exacerbate the problem.

That’s not to say that the closed party list system used for European Elections isn’t flawed, because it is — deeply so. But the corrupt First Past the Post system would only further increase the anger that people feel at being disenfranchised by the political system.

In a lot of ways, the BNP’s “success” is pretty unremarkable. In 2004 they were the sixth most successful party. This year, they were still the sixth most successful party. In the region where Nick Griffin won his seat, the North West, the BNP actually got fewer votes than in 2004.

The BNP only got seats because Labour’s collapse was so dramatic, and those former Labour votes went to a large variety of smaller parties. 11.3% of votes went to parties that weren’t among the top eight, compared to 8.3% that went to other parties in 2004 (and that was in the days of a relatively strong Respect party).

The BNP didn’t gain seats because they caught up with those in front. They gained seats because others joined the queue behind them. Despite still having five people in front of them, the BNP effectively moved closer to the front in relation to the entire queue — just because more people joined behind them.

Nonetheless, any attempts to ignore or belittle the BNP’s success, or to gerrymander it away, should be condemned. It is important to understand why people would come to vote for a fascist party, because that is the best way of defeating the ideology.

Luckily, YouGov have done a good job at finding out (more detail here). And — surprise surprise — it seems that BNP voters are mostly racist. That rather undermines the idea that people voted for the BNP just as a protest vote. With so many potential protest parties, why choose BNP? I guess they were at the top of many ballot papers, but that oughtn’t gain them so many votes. No, people vote for the BNP mostly because they are racists.

In difficult economic circumstances, people often turn to fascism. It is totally misguided to do so though. One potential plus side of the BNP gaining a couple of MEPs is the fact that the spotlight will now be shone on them, and people will see just how rotten their ideology is.

I will look at the Scottish results in a separate article

And it couldn’t have been tighter. I’m still digesting this, but the only feasible coalition is SNP + Lib Dem + Green, and only by a bawhair.

Okay, here are my more in-depth thoughts. Firstly about the results themselves, then about the counting problems.

The bottom line is clearly the fact that the SNP have won the election. For the first time in fifty years, Labour are not the largest party in Scotland. In a sense, this isn’t a surprise. Even though Labour have always been electorally popular in Scotland, they have not always been in power. Now they have been for ten uninterrupted years. It was only natural that the main opposition would get in sometime, and they have.

The anti-Labour backlash wasn’t quite as large as I had hoped for, and the result really could not have been any closer. And exciting result in a way, and also quite an odd one. I think anyone expecting an independence referendum on the basis of this result had better not hold their breath.

Where I live, in Fife, Labour had a terrible night. Often they could expect to have Fife ringfenced, apart from that Lib Dem stronghold in North East Fife. But the SNP upsurge has seen a spectacular victory in Central Fife.

Meanwhile West Dunfermline has been taken by the Liberal Democrats, where they had that amazing Westminster by-election victory before. There were a lot of people who were disgruntled about the Lib Dem’s Westminster victory there, accusing them of hypocrisy over the Forth Road Bridge tolls. I think this cements once and for all how the actual voters feel about the Lib Dems in West Dunfermline.

In the other two Fife seats, Labour hang on, but with substantial swings towards the SNP. In these true monkey-in-a-red-rosette areas, hopefully the Labour candidates have been given a bit of a shock. The upshot is that out of the five Fife constituency seats, Labour now only have two of them where they would normally count on having four.

My over all impressions about the election, though, are that this was more about SNP gains than Labour losses. I’ve not studied the figures carefully, but during the night I got the impression that the Labour vote was actually holding solid — and indeed in some cases increasing — in a lot of areas.

The Lib Dems and the Conservatives were broadly unchanged in most areas. The SNP’s gains seem to mostly come from the collapse in the smaller parties. I noticed that many constituencies had only candidates from the four main parties, while last time round the SSP contested many areas. The absence of the SSP, combined with the general collapse of the left as a whole, seems to have contributed the most to the SNP’s upsurge.

What I cannot quite get my head around is the dire performance of all the minor parties. The problems with the SSP and Solidarity are understandable. They’ve spent the past year or so ripping chunks out of each other. Alister at Perspective has noted that a united left was credible, and greater than the sum of its parts. Last night was a disaster for both parties.

But what I really don’t understand is the collapse in support for small parties as a whole. It has been a distinguishing feature of the Scottish Parliament ever since the beginning — the variety of voices represented. Almost all of them have gone.

The Greens are down to just two seats, which is incredibly disappointing for them. I got the impression that they were hopeful of getting three MSPs in the Lothian region. So a massive shock for them, I think.

John Swinburne is also waving goodbye to Holyrood. I was impressed with his interview on BBC Scotland last night. He was very gracious in defeat, and he even said he thought the country was in good hands!

So, besides the Greens, there is only one person occupying the “other” box — Margo MacDonald. Socialism has been wiped out totally. No sign of any other different voices. Extraordinary.

Given all of this, I wonder if the SSP / Solidarity split has reflected badly on small parties as a whole. Perhaps the small parties have been hurt the most by this spoilt ballots problem. But over all, I’m scratching my head about that.

As I said above, I think a lot of the SNP’s upsurge is down to the poor performance of the small parties more than a collapse in Labour support. It is worth remembering that the SSP and Solidarity both support independence. It is very possible that, with a strong SNP campaign, a lot of these socialist supporters were tempted to vote SNP so that they could kick Labour out.

I think it was a good night for the Conservatives. They are down one seat overall, but they made a FPTP gain, which is good going for them. Remember, with the same constituency boundaries, the Tories were wiped out in 1997. Over the past decade, the Conservatives have been gaining FPTP seats back one-by-one.

And the Conservatives are also ahead of the Lib Dems over all. People always talk about the Conservatives being dead in Scotland. I’ve never bought that, and this result lays that myth to rest.

The Lib Dems are fourth, and it’s difficult to see much good news for them. Yes, a good result in West Dunfermline, where they were pushing hard for victory. But nothing too impressive elsewhere. And a huge swing away from Nicol Stephen in his own seat. A bit of a hairy one.

In a bit of amateur psephology on Twitter last night, I suggested that the SNP upsurge was happening across Scotland — apart from in the west. I was shocked when they didn’t win Cumbernauld and Kilsyth. It’s difficult to imagine how, with this great nationwide result for the SNP, how they lost that particular seat so spectacularly.

But then Nicola Sturgeon won Govan — at last. And then, as the list results came in, they won an astonishing four seats. The SNP performed quite well on the list in most regions. So it was a double-whammy, with the SNP doing well in both votes.

The exceptional region was, I think, Mid-Scotland and Fife, where Labour got three top-up seats. That is partly a reflection of the losses they made in Fife. In essence, the three constituency seats they lost were gained back in the top-up by default. Disappointments here for the Greens and the Lib Dems.

And the final over all result? Astonishingly close! And so close that it looks difficult for anyone to form a coalition. The only real feasible solution is SNP–Lib Dem–Green, but even that would have a majority of just one, which is not enough. Maybe Margo MacDonald could be brought on board, but it is still hairy. It could hinge partly on who becomes Presiding Officer.

Otherwise, Alex Salmond for First Minister? Almost certainly, as his party has the most seats. But it could effectively be a minority administration. Who knows, we might even have another election on our hands. What a thought!

Given all of the problems there were last night, there is probably not much appetite for another election. But a re-run would probably work okay. It wouldn’t be running at the same time as the local elections, and presumably (hopefully!) people are a bit more well-educated about how the voting system works.

The problems are causing a stink. I sympathise a bit with the idea that if you are too stupid to vote properly — and it’s not that complicated a system — then what right have you got to decide who runs the country?

On the other hand, there were a lot of things that could have been done to limit this. Most importantly, holding the local elections at the same time has undoubtedly been a huge mistake.

And just as bad a mistake was the decision to count those local election votes overnight. That could well have been what threw the e-counting systems into problems. If they had just conentrated on the Scottish Parliament overnight, it could have been okay.

There is no harm in waiting until the afternoon to start counting the local election results. Indeed, the way things turned out, that might have been quicker!

As for the e-counting systems, there were some rumblings about them in the run-up to the election, particularly from Fitaloon at MicroShaft. It looks a bit prescient now, but when I wrote the Scottish Roundup before polling ended, I wrote about it saying, “It would be a travesty if democracy failed this evening.” It did. So in that sense, these issues were entirely predictable, and predicted.

The e-counting systems were deemed necessary for the single transferable vote system and I can see why. As such, I don’t have a problem with the e-counting systems themselves. But what would have been the harm in just counting the Scottish Parliament votes by hand? That would have avoided this whole mess.

Electoral reform doom-mongers should be made aware that there is not a great deal to suggest that STV per se has caused the problems with spoilt papers. The number of spoilt papers in the local council elections has been much smaller than in the Scottish Parliament election.

That suggests that people understand STV well. But for whatever reason, they were thrown by the Scottish Parliament ballot paper. I admit to finding the huge list of parties rather overwhelming, though that should hardly lead to people filling in the form incorrectly.

One theory is that the ambiguous wording of the ballot paper, “You have TWO votes”, confused some people. Instead of putting one vote in each column, seemingly people have been putting two votes in one column. You still have to be thick as mince to manage to do that though. There are arrows pointing to each column, and it clearly says “mark ONE box only” above each column.

The biggest problem for me is that in Scotland we now have four different electoral systems for four different types of election:

• First Past the Post for Westminster
• Additional Member System (FPTP + D’Hondt-style top-up party lists) for Holyrood
• D’Hondt-style party list for European Parliament
• Single Transferable Vote for local councils

With so many different systems, it is no wonder some voters are getting confused, especially when two of them are being used on the same day. There are two answers — one radical, one not so radical.

The not so radical one is to simply hold local elections on a separate day. Tommy Sheridan made a number of good points talking on the television last night about it. There was undoubtedly some confusion, and the local elections were overshadowed and absorbed by the big national debate.

It would be sensible to simply hold different elections on different days. It might decrease turnout, but on the other hand if it means fewer spoilt ballots then more valid votes might be counted!

The more radical solution would be to stick to one voting system, namely single transferable vote. This is, on balance, the best system. The fact that there were actually relatively few spoilt ballots means that people have no bother understanding how to vote in an STV system.

The other systems are unfair for a variety of other reasons, but this post is long enough so I won’t go into them just now. No doubt long-time readers of this blog will be aware of what I think.

It would be a struggle to get all of the elections onto an STV system, particularly Westminster. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it?

As for who is to blame, obviously it is the Scotland Office because they are the ones who decided that the two elections should be held on the same day, and they are the ones who decided that the e-counting machines should be used. They have responsibility for the operation for the Scottish Parliament elections.

It is not a devolved matter, as the cowardly No. 10 statement claimed. Westminster has tried to pass the buck, but it is a Westminster department — Douglas Alexander’s Scotland Office — that is ultimately responsible.

Some people wonder what the Scotland Office is for these days. Obviously they are looking for stuff to do, so have been busybodying with this e-counting stuff. The e-counting systems might have been desirable for the local councils, but they did not need to be used for the Scottish Parliament elections.

Iain Dale has written a post about PR (via MMVC). He’s not in favour. His reasons?

Whatever system emerged would be bound to ruin the link between MPs and their constituencies.

Oh really?

Just look at the system for electing MEPs. I suspect only a small proportion of the people reading this could name their own MEPs.

The system for electing MEPs is shit (I think you will find that most people calling for PR would much prefer STV to the ridiculous party list system). But that’s not why people can’t name their MEPs. People couldn’t even name their MEPs when they were elected via FPTP. The reason people don’t know who their MEPs are is the woeful, almost non-existent coverage of EU-level politics — not the electoral system.

If we had PR I think you’d find a plethora of new political parties being formed.

I never really understood this ‘argument’ ‘against’ PR. It’s coming up to a decade since PR came to Scotland. So where are all the new political parties in Scotland, eh? I hardly think Solidarity counts, especially since most think that it just reduces the chances of any socialists getting elected next year.

The first commenter on Iain Dale’s post, tapestry, actually puts forward a good case for FPTP actually benefiting new / small parties more.

I do wonder why there are so many myths about electoral reform, especially since they are all so patently, demonstrably untrue. Oh, actually I know why. It’s because Labour and the Conservatives will tell every fib under the sun to maximise their chances of staying in power. If they were to tell the truth about electoral reform, that pesky democracy malarkey would just get in their way.