[SCOT goes POP!] The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it

[ALBA-Bot]

The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it

I received a Reform leaflet through the door this morning, emblazened with photos of Malcolm Offord.  And because I'm interested in polls, I immediately noticed the rather amusing error in the Lib Dem-style bar chart.  It's obvious that the idea was to use percentage changes from the 2021 Holyrood election, rather than from the most recent poll, to maximise the sense of Reform momentum and to make it look like the SNP are collapsing.  And in seven out of eight cases they've done that, but some unfortunate minion seems to have made an almighty blunder on the SNP's list vote - it should read SNP 29% (-11), but instead they've used the most recent poll as the baseline and given it as SNP 29% (+1).

Thanks, Malc, for that remarkably helpful piece of pro-SNP spin!

On the reverse side of the leaflet are four policy priorities which are obviously calibrated to appeal to socially conservative working-class voters.  The fourth is about improving the NHS, which I presume is intended as a key point of reassurance for the target electorate, who really do care about the health system.  And I think above all else this is where Reform are getting away with absolute murder, because if other parties, including the SNP, hammered them over their plans to semi-privatise the NHS, a lot of working-class voters would recoil in horror and not even the most hysterical immigrant-bashing messaging would be able to offset the impact.

Offord's personal message also makes a point of saying that he's a state-school Greenock lad who went to Edinburgh University on a full grant.  Er, are Reform planning to reintroduce maintenance grants?  Are they going to abolish tuition fees in England?  If not, what is the point of making that comment except as a form of brazen hypocrisy?

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I had a brief but telling exchange this morning with Craig Murray, who after his time in the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Norwich Independents, the SNP, Action for Independence, the Alba Party, the Workers Party of Great Britain and Your Party, is now standing for Barrhead Boy's "Greater Prism" party at the Holyrood election (they call themselves "Atlas", I believe).  I had been making the point to someone else that the reasons "both votes SNP" makes sense are: a) that the SNP will desperately need list votes and seats if they underperform in the constituency ballot, and b) that the SNP can win several list seats even if they don't underperform in the constituencies as long as their list vote is high enough.  Imagining himself to be making a killer point, Craig popped up and claimed that this meant I was saying SNP list votes could only be useful if the polls are wrong.

Golly, who could ever imagine such a thing as the polls turning out to be wrong?!  But here's the thing: Craig's entire case hinges on the polls being wrong, because Atlas are not registering in the polls at all.  They are on zero.  Their chances of winning any seats at all are non-existent.  To believe that Craig is making a valid point about list votes for Atlas being of more use than list votes for the SNP, you would first have to believe that the polls are light-years out on the question of Atlas support, but cannot possibly be even slightly wrong about the SNP.  That would, with respect, be a galactically stupid thing to believe.

Source: The NHS is Reform's Achilles heel, and they should be hammered on it