How Common is your manifesto?

May 6, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Every election is determined by the people who show up.” – Larry J. Sabato

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The elections are now just hours away and pretty soon we’ll all be scrambling into action to hold the parties in Parliament (particularly those who end up in Government) to get them to fulfil the promises they’ve made to you.

In this, my last post before the vote, I want to have a very brief look through some of the main manifestos to pull out the most and least ‘Common Weal’ policy in each them. Parties – even those constantly at loggerheads over the slightest ideological deviation and even those who appear to have almost no ideological overlap at all often agree with each other on a surprising number of policies (even if they get to them from wildly different positions and motivations – for example, a party might want a Universal Basic Income because it would allow them to eradicate poverty while another might want it because it would allow them to privatise public services and hand out vouchers for you to spend to buy those services instead).

None of this should be in any way construed as an endorsement of any of the parties mentioned though. Common Weal is party neutral and we lobby all parties to adopt our ideals (obviously this is an easier task with some than with others though).

I also can’t cover every party standing in this election. I’m sticking to the largest ones which, according to current polling, have a reasonable chance of winning seats after the election. I have a library of many of the manifestos for this election which includes some of the smaller parties, though even this is non-exhaustive. Apologies if the party you personally support isn’t covered here due to those caveats (though if your party’s manifesto isn’t yet in my library, please let me know and I’ll get it added!).

As a final caveat, do please go and read Nick Kempe’s article looking at mentions of care and care reform in the manifestos as this is also an area that Common Weal are heavily involved in. To avoid doubling our work, I’m steering a little away from care here and looking at Common Weal policies in other areas instead.

SNP

The SNP are almost certainly going to be the largest party in Parliament after next week and will have a good chance of being returned as the principle party of Government. The question in this election really seems to be more whether they’ll have an outright majority, will form another minority government and try to pass budgets etc with ad hoc alliances (likely with the Lib Dems and/or Greens) or whether they’ll form a more formal coalition or cooperation agreement with one or more other parties.

The difference from a lobbying standpoint for us is that minority governments may need to negotiate with other partners to get votes passed and therefore are more open to compromise or outside ideas whereas majority governments can just whip things through on party loyalty.

Most Common Policy

It’s only a single half-sentence in the manifesto but the announcement of a National Housing Agency isn’t just in alignment with Common Weal ideals but is an idea that comes directly from us. We’ve been campaigning for a decade now for such an agency to coordinate housebuilding in Scotland, strategically plan it, ensure adequate building standards and to help to train builders in the latest techniques (something that will be essential if we want to build houses to PassivHaus equivalent standards). None of that is in the half-sentence of course but we have been in contact with the Government and one of our projects for this year is to design the Agency that we think Scotland deserves.

Least Common Policy

The least Common Weal idea in the SNP manifesto as far as I can see is the continuation, and in fact doubling down, of adherence to conventional economic orthodoxy around the only measure of economic “success” being GDP growth and the only means by which Scotland could and should achieve that growth is by “foreign direct investment”. Gone from this manifesto compared to 2021 is any mention of Circular Economy, 15 minute neighbourhoods, Repair hubs (other than a fund for repairing bicycles) or other policies that promote sustainability through deconsumerism.

Reform UK

It goes without saying that Reform are almost entirely ideologically unaligned with Common Weal. Our very mantra “All of Us First” runs directly against their core belief that only some people matter and some matter more than others.

Most Common Policy

Reform are fighting this election based on flipping over the table of governance and pulling power away from the nationalists in Edinburgh and one of the results of that is that they are surprisingly supportive of plans for local government that wouldn’t look too far out of place coming from us with a demand to devolve more power to local authorities. They don’t end up in quite the same place though, as they also support merging Scotland’s already too-large Local Authorities and concentrating power into the hands of “city mayors”.

Least Common Policy

Pretty much everything they have to say about immigration, immigrants and people reliant on social security.

Labour

Labour are the pro-union party that Common Weal has the closest relationship with. We find a lot of common ground on many issues even where we quite happily and openly disagree on others. In the previous Parliament, for example, we collaborated constructively on substantial aspects of care reform (again, see Nick’s article) as well as Members’ Bills on Freedom of Information, Land Reform, what became the PassivHaus Bill and others.

Most Common Policy

Labour are the only party in this list to explicitly mention the National Care Service as an endeavour that they want to bring back in the next Parliament and have explicitly adopted our phrasing that the NCS must be an institution “worthy of the name”. There aren’t a lot of details about what they want to do or what they’ll be able to do if they aren’t in Government, but this is an area that is high on our priority list for the next Parliament and so one that we will be pushing on for more information.

Least Common Policy

Labour’s energy policy doesn’t mention public ownership of energy (at community, Local Authority or Scotland level) beyond a bare mention of the existence of UK controlled GB Energy – which still doesn’t appear to have a clearly defined purpose or stated ambition of how much of Scotland’s energy it would bring into public ownership.

Scottish Greens

The Greens are another party that we’ve worked closely with over the course of the previous Parliament (My own political inclination leans environmentalist, and I was a member of the party for several years though I think my skills and services are much better applied in a cross-party sense these days) and they are in an interesting position in the upcoming election. A potential substantial increase in votes and seats beckons, though the shadow of the uncomfortable coalition with the SNP and its acrimonious collapse looms overhead too which may well limit their influence more than their number of seats suggests.

Most Common Policy

The Scottish Greens have campaigned for a replacement to Council Tax for almost as long as they’ve existed as a party so this isn’t exactly a policy they’ve taken from us in general, but the details of how to implement a proportional Property Tax are now pretty well defined as a result of our work and their policy here closely aligns with our own vision including in terms of its allocation of discounts and surcharges (particularly on ensuring that landlords can’t keep profiting from rent hikes).

Least Common Policy

While the Greens have included a carbon emission tax on land in their manifesto, they have dropped mention of an outright property tax on land. This is an error. Taxing the pollution created by the use of land is important but so is taxing the concept of ownership of excessive land ownership in principle – even managed appropriately, the accumulation of wealth via land ownership must have its limits. This said, the Greens have formally adopted the former Labour position (now missing from the latter’s manifesto) to place a cap on the maximum amount of Scotland that any person can own.

Conservatives

Like Reform, there is little cross-over between Conservative policy and Common Weal’s, though it has happened. We’ve worked constructively particularly at a local level on local democracy reform and it was Conservative voices that proved critical to campaigns we’ve supported in areas like rent controls and Covid policies. With that party looking like it’ll be largely devoured by Reform though, their influence in the next Parliament may be limited. On the other hand, that may force a reevaluation of their political positions and possibly lead to hands reaching out to unlikely allies.

Most Common Policy

If anything, there’s even less in the Conservative manifesto for Common Weal fans than in Reform’s. One of the few policies I’ve found where we’d be pointing in the same direction is in our opposition to the Building Safety Levy but we do so on very different grounds. We oppose it because it has effectively dumped the cost of cleaning up the mess of companies installing unsafe cladding onto house buyers where we believe that more should be done to recover the costs from the companies and their former owners if those companies have been wound up to avoid paying compensation, whereas the Conservatives merely want to make houses a fraction cheaper (they also want to scrap the PassivHaus legislation on up front cost grounds despite the fact that passive houses are cheaper to run and would eliminate fuel poverty).

Least Common Policy

Tax cuts. The Conservatives are quite simply mathematically wrong on their assertions that every devolved tax is on the far side of the peak of the Laffer Curve and that everything will get better if we just cut taxes in ways that benefit the already rich more than those too poor to pay tax as it is. If 40 years of trickle-down economics was going to work, we would have seen it by now.

Liberal Democrats

Along with the Greens, the Lib Dems may be the ones to watch in this election as they will also be vying to become Kingmakers if the SNP don’t win a majority. Indeed, wariness of the former from the SNP after the coalition collapsed along with a less environment and more business leaning FM Swinney may mean they’d prefer a partner wearing orange rather than green. For their own part, the Lib Dems have ruled out any formal coalition but would consider voting for SNP budgets – as they have done the last two times – if the price is right.

Most Common Policy

Although the Lib Dems are still ideologically against independence, they have quite a lot to say about other aspects of constitutional reform that Common Weal has advocated for. They are one of the few parties in Scotland still advocating for a fully Federal United Kingdom (though we caution that this must be framed as true democratic reform, not merely an alternative to independence or a barrier against it) and they have adopted our policies that Citizens Assemblies should be embedded at all levels of government from local to national and that Freedom of Information should apply to private companies that provide government services.

Least Common Policy

Energy policy again. While the Lib Dems are anti-fracking, they are solidly pro-nuclear (despite it being the most expensive form of low-carbon energy generation) and they are pro-carbon capture (despite the inconvenient fact that it doesn’t work). This said, while the Lib Dems aren’t generally the first choice party when it comes to supporting public ownership of things like energy, their manifesto this year does discuss the government taking equity stakes, reforming ScotWind (adopting our own recommendations) and given Local Authorities the power to bring energy into public ownership if they choose.

Conclusion

As I say, none of this is an endorsement of any party nor are we going to state which part is the most Common Weal of them all – all of them have taken on policies that we could support but all of them have also made promises that we’re going to have to fight against. This is fine. It gives us plenty of scope to stay busy in the next Parliament. We’re certainly going to be stuck right in there to try and get as much as we can done and we’ll work with alliances where we can make and join them. If you’d like to support us as we try to pull all of the parties in a more Common Weal direction then please do so here. And I’ll be back on the topic in the next couple of weeks to break down what the results mean once we see what they actually are.

The Scottish Parliamentary Election 2026:- The Manifestos

March 19, 2026April 28, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

This post and the research underpinning it is undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this work, you can here.

It is that time again. Scotland faces another election for its devolved Parliament at Holyrood. As I have done in the previous several Scottish and UK General Elections, I want to collect here as many of the political party manifestos as I can so that you, the voter, can find them all in one place as they can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to find (they also tend to disappear from the internet after the elections which can make it difficult to hold parties to their promises later – but that’s for a future article.

The Scottish Elections tend to be quite vibrant in terms of the number of parties involved and this year promises to shake the main parties to a degree not seen in generations so I want to give voters the change to see as broad a set of candidates as I can.

Unfortunately, there are limits. It’s difficult in this format to present Independent candidates fairly as they often don’t present a traditional manifesto and even when they do, by definition, they can only stand for one seat in Scotland (constituency or regional).

That said, if you spot a political party manifesto out there in the wild that I haven’t yet listed below, please let me know. The criteria for entry are fairly simple:
1) The party must be registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission.
2) They must be standing at least two candidates across at least two constituencies and/or regions (the same single person standing in both a constituency and in a region doesn’t count).
3) They must have published a manifesto of election promises and commitments to voters. It needn’t be called a “manifesto”. Alternative names like “contract”, “election promise” or suchlike may be similar enough for inclusion.

This means that “manifestos” produced by trade unions, think tanks or third sector organisations who are seeking to influence politics but who aren’t standing candidates under their party banner won’t be included.

This is going to be live article for the next several weeks to follow me on social media or check back here regularly for updates.

Note:- Parties marked in square brackets are placeholders for now and the prospective list may change as manifestos are published, parties emerge or, indeed, parties drop out of the electoral race. If a party produces several focused manifestos (e.g. a Manifesto for the Islands, or a Manifesto for Young People) then I may link to them, but the main banner image shall point only to their primary manifesto.

Click on the party name to be taken to their current manifesto webpage which may include accessible or localised versions of their manifesto. Click on the thumbnail image to download a copy of their primary manifesto directly.

Incumbent Parties

The following parties were represented by at least one MSP at some point during the 2021-2026 Parliament and are standing at least two candidates in the upcoming election. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party

Scottish Greens

Scottish Labour Party

Scottish Liberal Democrats

Scottish National Party

Reform UK

Insurgent Parties

The following parties were not represented in the 2016-2021 Parliament. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Alliance to Liberate Scotland

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link. Archived version here.)

Communist Party of Britain

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link. Archived version here.)

Independence for Scotland Party

Scottish Common Party

Scottish Family Party

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link. Archived version here.)

UK Independence Party

Scottish Libertarian Party

Scottish Socialist Party

Workers Party of Britain

Edits and Updates

07/04/2026 – Added Scottish Conservatives.

09/04/2026 – Added Independence for Scotland Party and Scottish Common Party

13/04/2026 – Added Scottish Labour Party

14/04/2026 – Added Scottish Greens

16/04/2026 – Added Alliance to Liberate Scotland, Communist Party, Scottish National Party, UK Independence Party, Scottish Family Party, Workers Party of Britain

17/04/2026 – Added Scottish Liberal Democrats

19/04/2026 – Added Scottish Libertarian Party and Scottish Socialist Party

28/04/2026 – Added Archive.org links to the web-only manifesto pages. Thanks to LonM.

What is the point of a party manifesto these days?

February 22, 2026February 22, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.” – Aristophanes

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

human hand forming heart shape

Election time is almost upon us in Scotland and we’re already starting to see the various parties start to make their pitches to voters. Even though the official “campaign period” hasn’t yet started various parties – including the party of Government – have already started caveating their promises with “if we are elected”.

Some of this is certainly for the good, such as news that if the SNP are re-elected then they’ve promised to adopt Common Weal’s plan for a National Housing Agency. We’re already gearing up to hold their feet to the fire on that one and to try to ensure that they don’t water our plans down to homeopathic levels as they did with the Scottish National Investment Bank nor that they mess the thing up so badly that it ends up like the National Care Service.

Promises are just words though and we’re entering an electoral campaign where it feels like those words are going to mean less and less to fewer and fewer people. The electorate has fragmented into camps with very little crossover. Politicians are focusing more tightly on the little crossover that does occur. Advertising becomes ever more focused and targeted (to the point that I might be explicitly excluded by the online algorithms from seeing the advert that you have been targeted to see). And we have new threats rising in the form of AI that will mindlessly lie to you by design.

Amid all of that, it might be worth asking what is the point of a mainstay of election campaigning for decades now: the party election manifesto?

Every election, parties are expected to produce a document outlining their plans, priorities and policies should they get into office post-election or even should they merely get into Parliament and be in a position to influence government policy.

It’s important to note that these are not legally required documents nor are they binding contracts. The state of UK electoral law is that, barring very, very narrow circumstances, there is no requirement for a prospective politician to even tell you, the voter, the truth about their intentions in office. The only real legal requirement is that they do not misrepresent the character of themselves or another candidate for political gain (in 2015, Alistair Carmichael won a court case over his lying during an election campaign on the grounds that he never represented himself to voters as an honest person – perhaps this is a question to ask candidates in your next hustings).

And so in a similar vein, there’s no actual legal recourse if a party of Government starts throwing out the promises they made in order to win power – just look at the manifesto of Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign compared to what he’s actually done in office…

Party Manifestos can be tricky to track down sometimes. Over the last few elections, I’ve tried to collect them on this blog but as you’ll see if you try to download some of them on the most recent list, the parties often chuck them in the digital bin shortly after the election which means if you want to track down historical copies, it can mean having to trawl through digital archives like the Wayback Machine.

“Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast…This should be ethically unacceptable”

What they are though is a statement of intent, a business plan and a means of accountability. Just because we don’t have some kind of legal redress mechanism if politicians fail to live up to their policies, we do have a social means of redress. The largest is, of course, the election itself as parties can and should be judged not just on the manifesto they put forward to voters but the ones they put forward prior to this. They can and should be judged based on their previous performance on promises fulfilled and promises broken, especially if their excuses for the latter are lacking.

Another aspect of the importance of a manifesto is open transparency. It’s not enough for you, a party loyalist, to see what the party you’re loyal to is promising you. Everyone else has to be able to see it too. We live now in an area where political ideological bubbles can be digitally enforced.

You could well be on a list to be targeted by a political advert from some party or another. It might well be that I am on a list to not be targeted by that same advert. This means that if we meet and start discussing the politics that we’ve seen that week, we could be facing entirely different realities of what we think is important or not.

This problem is made even worse with the rise of AI and other forms of fake news and radicalising politics (see, for example, the trend of people putting out fake news about rising lawlessness in London specifically because they were being rewarded in advertising money for doing so).

By giving people some level of an equal baseline in terms of our political understanding then we can become more and better engaged with the politics and politicians courting our votes (especially when they are the ones lying to us). See Bill Johnston’s recent article on informed citizens here for more about how you can become a more deliberative democrat.

We don’t yet know when the party manifestos for the upcoming Scottish election will be published. There has been a somewhat disturbing trend in recent elections where the larger parties especially seem to be trying to be the last to publish their manifesto – possibly in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and accountability and possibly so that they can make last minute edits to outbid their rivals (or avoid a pitfall that their rivals have fallen into).

Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast which should be a major alarm sign for our democracy as this means that it’s possible that parties may not be solidifying their promises until after people have started casting their votes. This should be ethically unacceptable.

As the Scottish election campaign lands on us over the next 11 weeks, I’ll be once again collecting as many of the manifestos as I can so that they can be read in one place. I also plan to follow this article up specifically with a look at some of the major party manifestos to see what they actually managed to accomplish over this current Parliament compared to what they promised to do.

This isn’t just an exercise in helping you vote better (though it’ll certainly do that) but when politicians know that we can see right through them maybe they’ll stop acting like they have something to hide. And maybe then, we’ll start to see a few more of those promises actually turn into policy.

Vote Dalȝell for Lord Provost! (Please Don’t!)

July 28, 2024October 5, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” – Gene Sharp

This blog post is an extended edition of an article that previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

image_2024-07-17_140638770-1

How would you feel if I, personally, had total control over the strategic direction of several key areas of public services that affect you? The odds of me being able to make a successful bid to win election as a Scottish “metro mayor” if they are introduced up here are not zero. I’ve been in politics long enough to have become well known at least in political circles, I have a few friends and hopefully not many more enemies. And though I’m not a member of a political party, I do get asked by several of them if I’d be willing to join and even if I didn’t, a run as an independent candidate wouldn’t be impossible. It’s even possible that you’d like some of my policies.

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The Election That Everyone Lost

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

It is almost unnecessary to observe that the British Government had for more than a century been and could only be a Whig Government; and that the present administration is, as every administration in this country must necessarily be, a Whig administration. – UK Government Ministerial Memorandum to the Prince Regent, 1812

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

image_2024-07-11_103309275-1

Who were the winners in the General Election? I can tell you who won power for the next few years, but it’s harder to find who actually “Won” rather than just who lost less hard than everyone else. This is a major problem for democracy in the UK and one that needs to be fixed before the next election or we’re going to be put in a potentially very dangerous situation. The low turnout and catastrophically unfair First Past The Post voting system we have has resulted in a government with massive power, almost no possible accountability but simultaneously the most brittle mandate for that power possible.

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Democratic Mandate

July 3, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” – E.B. White

image_2024-07-03_181437509

It’s time to do a democracy.

Between 7am and 10pm on the 4th of July 2024, the people of the UK (well, those who are allowed to vote) will choose the next government of the UK. If polls are to believed, this could be the most significant election in almost a decade and a half though whether that is a good or a bad thing will be a subject best answered between you and the pencil in the Polling Station.

Even if no-one in your constituency has won your vote, I would still ask you to turn out and spoil your ballot if that is the best option you can think of. As someone said to me recently, not voting says that you are happy with the result regardless of what it is while spoiling the ballot tells the politicians that you’re not happy with any of the choices given to you.

If, however, you have made up your mind, remember that your chosen candidate won’t get your vote if you don’t cast it so please make every effort to do so.

If you’re still not sure how your vote translates into seats and power, read my guide here.

And if you’re still not sure who to vote for, then check out my manifesto library which might help you come to a decision.

I’ll be back after the results come out to let you know what I think and where Scotland may be going from there.

And to all of the candidates brave enough to subject themselves to this contest, Be true to the reasons you’re standing, and good luck!

The UK’s Democracy Is Broken – Why Does No-One Want To Fix It?

June 29, 2024June 29, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker

(This is an extended version of an article that previously appeared in The National. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

image_2024-06-29_095223677

Given the audience likely to read this column, the statement “UK democracy is broken” isn’t going to feel uncontroversial or even particularly objectionable, but it is one that is being forced into sharp relief by the ongoing UK General Election campaign. We’re are all, regardless of our political leanings, being ill served by it.

This column started with a thought around the claims that the UK Labour Party are eyeing the potential of winning a “supermajority” after next Thursday with the loudest complainants of such a result being those in conservative circles. Understandably so as it would mean Labour winning a majority so large that they can’t possibly be challenged by the Opposition and so large that they don’t even need to worry about a rebellion on the back benches or the inevitable trickle of by-elections triggered by scandal, illness and the march of time threatening to flip the balance of power.

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Can An Economy Be ‘Big Enough’?

June 17, 2024June 17, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth E. Boulding

(This blog post previously appeared in The Morning Star. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

image_2024-06-16_094808259

Those of us on the left have rarely been truly excited by the prospect of the Establishment crowning their next temporary placeholder, though I don’t know about you but this upcoming general election seems to offer even less in the way of actual choice or a chance for change than usual.

The Conservatives are in freefall, ejecting ballast as fast as they can (personnel as well as policies), Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party” seems to be trying to do as little as it can to uphold the traditions of the middle word in that catchphrase and even in Scotland, where for the last several elections, the SNP provided some sense of counterpoint (either as a credible voting option or at least as an anchor against rightwards triangulation), that party seems to have hit the end of its road in terms of ideas.

This time around, all of those parties (and several others) have congregated on a single line when it comes to how to manage the economy. Growth at all costs, no matter who profits from it or how much damage is done to the planet in the process.

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UK General Election 2024:- The Manifestos

June 8, 2024June 29, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 5 Comments

“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

(This post and the research underpinning it is undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this work, you can here.)

Vote

The campaign for the 2024 UK General Election is underway and parties are now laying out their positions and are courting your votes. As I have with every other election since I started this blog, I’ll continue keeping a place here for party neutral information, including a post aimed at first time voters on how to vote in the elections and how that vote is translated into seats. I have written a guide on how to vote in the upcoming election and how your vote is translated into MSPs’ seats. You can read that guide here.

As a voter, it can be difficult to find information on what each of the parties are promising you – their websites can be confusing and there may be a lot of them. In this post I intend to gather as many of the political party manifestos as I can as they are published so that you can find them in one place. Unfortunately, I can’t cover independent candidates fairly and whilst I would like to be as inclusive as possible I may miss a few of the smaller parties or they may not be publishing a full manifesto (particularly if they are a single issue party). As this is a Scotland-focused blog my general rule is that for inclusion the manifesto must from from a registered political party that is standing at least two candidates across at least two constituencies in Scotland. However, I shall try to include manifestos from parties campaigning outwith Scotland but elsewhere in the UK. If parties release a distinctly Scottish version of their manifesto in addition to their UK version, I shall link to both. If you spot the publication of a manifesto before I do, please let me know and I’ll add it. I shall also welcome advance notice from party representatives themselves of when they plan to publish their manifesto.

All of the manifestos below are presented for your information and the presence or absence of any of them should not be taken as an endorsement or otherwise of any of the parties or of any of the policies that they may be promoting.

Note:- Parties marked in square brackets are placeholders for now and the prospective list may change as manifestos are published, parties emerge or, indeed, parties drop out of the electoral race.

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How Scotland Votes: A Guide to the 2024 UK General Election

June 6, 2024June 6, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” – Terry Pratchett

(This post and the research underpinning it was undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support that work, you can here.)

Vote

Disclosure and Disclaimer: Although I am politically active – albeit not a member of any political party – this guide is intended to be objective and politically neutral. This is a guide on how to vote and is written with a first time voter in mind. It is not a blog to try to convince you to vote for or against any particular person or party but to help you cast your vote and to understand how that vote translates and contributes to the final result.

For the first time since 2015, the UK has managed to complete a relatively normal length of time between General Elections, though since the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, a “normal” period of time is no longer the fixed period of five years but may be called at any time by the incumbent Prime Minister so long as not more than five years has passed. The absolute deadline for the current term was January 2025 but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pulled the trigger a little earlier than that (and a little earlier than most commentators expected as many thought we’d see an election around September or October). Whatever his reasons – and he doesn’t strictly need any – Parliament has been dissolved, all of our MPs have lost their jobs and many of them – as well as a slew of other potential candidates – are now courting your vote to try to win a seat in the House of Commons. This vote will take place on Thursday 4^th July 2024.

If you want to take part in this election, and particularly if it’s your first time ever doing so or if it’s not but you’d like to know how your vote translates into seats and MPs, then this guide is for you. If you’re looking for someone to tell you who to vote for, then I won’t do that here but please do check out my list of all of the published party manifestos which may help guide your vote.

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“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” – Terry Pratchett

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