Winds Of Change

The Scottish election results on Friday have potentially heralded a new era in Scotland.If you don't know, the SNP won the election by one seat from Labour. In fact you could say they won by 50 votes as that was the winning margin in one of their seats. It was certainly very close but I think the SNP did deserve to win based on all of the campaigns and overall they did get the highest number of votes. For the first time I actually quite enjoyed watching the results come in during the day. Labour had the lead for most of the day but the SNP started to gain and then pulled ahead right at the very end. We needed a change from Labour so that the ruling party is different from the party in charge at Westminster so I was pleased the SNP managed to clinch it. I appreciate the fact that the SNP have a lot to prove, many people have doubts on whether they can actually run the country but there is really only one way to find out. Labour have ruled in Scotland for the last 8 years and that wasn't really much of a success so it was time for a change.
However this being Scotland, the election didn't really go according to plan with over 100,000 spoiled ballot papers being discounted. This equates to roughly 1 in 20 votes not being used which is a farce. When voting in an election you would expect to put one cross against one name before putting the vote into the ballot box. However this would have been too easy so the Parliament decided to needlessly complicate matters by having 3 different votes on 2 different papers, some of which required X's and some which required numbers. Whilst it wasn't rocket science, the spoiled papers showed that people did have problems understanding the system and this could lead to challenges over results in court. In 10 seats, the majority was exceeded by the number of spoiled papers which could have had a massive effect.
The next problem is how the Parliament is going to be run. As the SNP won they have the moral right to lead but in order to have a majority, they need to form a coalition with the Lib Dems & the Greens. This isn't going to be easy to achieve as the Lib Dems have already stated they won't even hold talks if the SNP intend to hold a referendum on Scottish Independence. This seems to be stalemate as I can't see either party willing to compromise on this point. If this is the case then the SNP would have to try and rule with a minority government which is unlikely to go well.
In my opinion, for Scotland to move forward we need to have a Parliament with majority rule. Both the SNP and Lib Dems have a number of policies which are very similar so from that point of view it would make sense for them to form a coalition. The danger of minority rule is that no policies will ever get passed due to the fact that all the parties will bicker and vote against each other. This would turn Holyrood into a joke and alienate the electorate even more, bearing in mind voter turn out was only 50% on Friday. Let's hope for the sake of Scotland that talks for the coalition prove successful.