A brief blog on my Cowdenbeath sweep

There were four categories of Labour seat at the 2011 Scottish Parliament Elections.

Firstly the "We're not at home here so we need to work for every vote" seats. That's why we bizarrely held on in Eastwood and Dumfrieshshire.

Secondly the "Well, that's the swing, seats". They include my current home, Cumbernauld & Kilsyth. The Nats were always about. In a good year for them, it was no surprise they might win.

Thirdly, the "For fuck sake we didn't see that coming" seats. Paisley, Clydebank, Dunfermline and the like. Places it never crossed our mind we would actually lose.

And finally the "Jeez, that was close" seats. Cowdenbeath is in this final category. A 42% SNP vote in Cowdenbeath is the sort of momentary result that convinced the Nats that they might have a remote chance in an Independence Referendum. Even though, amidst the utter chaos and incompetence of Labour's 2011 campaign, and even with the benefit of a significant differential turnout, it required from them a willful blindness to the fact that they still didn't hadn't secured a majority for independence.

Anyway, tomorrow, there will be a by-election in Cowdenbeath. Where, to have any chance of winning a referendum the Nationalists would need to have advanced on 2011. To have got more than the 42% they secured then.

So, as a bit of fun I thought I might tonight have a sweep on twitter on the Nationalist vote tomorrow. No fractions and first come first served. No prize except glory and, I accept, no true believers among the voluntary participants.

But

I'd have set out the results in full except that twitter seems to have, temporarily I hope, deleted some of them. Suffice to say that excepting @biscuit_ersed with 13% at one end and @anthoCu86 (I suspect in the pay of Blair McDougall) promoting 40% at the other, everyone was broadly in a 25-33% spread. I'll recover the lost tweets and announce the result tomorrow.

But don't lose sight of the fact that any result in that band, even near the top, would signal that the referendum is already over.

p.s. Alright Blair. THERE IS NO ROOM FOR COMPLACENCY!