Ruth Wishart: No reason to delay Scottish election, unless you’re a Unionist...

We are none of us in the market for folks chapping the door and inquiring whether their red/blue/green/yellow/orange candidate might expect the favour of our vote in a Scottish General election.

Neither are most of us panting for the postie to shove unsolicited literature through the letter box explaining, with far too many selfies, why Mr X or Mrs Y has been fair knocking their pan in on our ­behalf since 2015.

All, so very, very yesterday. The ­campaigns 2021 style will instead be ­clogging our ­Twitter accounts, infesting our Facebook pages, and Instagramming us to death with happy snaps of their awfy lovely families. And that will be so whether or not we are vaccinated and relatively virus free.

Yet, let us suppose for one gloomy ­moment, that May does not bring us the freedoms which once we took for granted. Let’s suppose that Covid, in all its many new incarnations, still stalks the land and ever fancier face masks are distributed by ever more entrepreneurial suppliers.

READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon hopes and expects Scottish Parliament election to go ahead as planned

For that is what those charged with ­looking at a pandemic-laden poll have been doing these many months; pondering on an all-party basis how and whether you could hold a Scottish election amidst the current restrictions. The result was the passing of the Scottish General Election (Coronavirus) Bill last month.

Party representatives, the Electoral Management Board, and Scottish Parliamentary officers tried to identify and address all the obvious barriers to holding free and fair elections in these very strange times.

And they came up with a variety of wheezes to preserve the integrity of the poll, whilst soothing the understandable fears of the lieges. They knew from their own polling that having purely postal ­voting would be a non starter, and settled instead on what they hope will be an ­acceptable hybrid.

Those who want to vote by post could register to do so earlier. Those who want to nominate a proxy would also have more time. In person voting could be spread over extra days to avoid overcrowding, with ­extra ballot boxes available for the same reason.

A one-way system inside the ­polling ­station has already been used in by-elections, which served as a de facto trial for the big event.

Meanwhile parliament would only be dissolved the day before the poll, in case there needed to be emergency legislation to postpone the whole shooting match till any time up to November, which power would be given to the Presiding Officer.

READ MORE: Wee Ginger Dug: The one reason Unionists want to delay the Holyrood election

Have they thought of everything? ­Probably not. But they’ve made a decent fist of trying to anticipate both objections to the election going ahead at all, and any avenues for obvious fraud. There will, of course be a knock on effect on the count and on all the other post election rituals. Though nothing insoluble, I should have thought.

WHICH makes me wonder at the result of a new SavantaComRes poll, apparently showing that almost half of those asked would prefer May’s election to be postponed.

This I don’t get. Voting in person is a lot more user friendly in May than mid winter. And voting by post has no seasonal implications. Plenty of time to find that odd dry half hour in a Scottish summer to hit a letter box.

I suspect the result of this poll says ­rather more about the political leanings of the respondents than it does about ­personal inclination.

According to the report of the ­findings I read, Labour declined to comment. ­Unsurprising, since that party is still scrambling to find yet another new leader. Honestly, you’d be safer managing a footy team than looking after the people’s party these days.

You won’t find many people with a bad word to say about Richard Leonard, the man. Or many who think he is one of life’s natural front-of-house men. He should probably have thrown in the towel at the time of his attempted defenestration four months back.

When, in the immortal words of the late Julian Critchley, your real opponents sit behind you, it’s maybe time to wave goodbye to all that.

In terms of Labour’s chances of ­building back better in May, I don’t think it much matters which hand grasps the poisoned chalice until the party admits to itself that opposing another referendum is shoving huge tranches of its natural support out the door.

And let us not forget the Tories. How their Scottish troops must be lusting for a general election when so many of their constituents have just been well and truly shafted by Brexit. That might have ­mattered less, had their shilpit crew at Westminster made even the slightest ­effort to have the backs of fishing and farming concerns being thrown under a bus.

Maybe just as well the next election will offer few opportunities for face-to-face encounters with the voters. You wouldn’t want to run into someone whose precious cargo of live seafood was dead by the time the haulier hacked through the forest of red tape in this brave new “frictionless” trading world.

Their cause was hardly helped by ­fisheries minister Victoria Prentis, ­representing that kenspeckle fishing port of North Oxfordshire, admitting that she hadn’t had time to look at the Brexit deal as she was busy organising a local ­nativity trail.

Considering that fishing had long been flagged up as one of two major stumbling blocks to a deal, you might think it would have swum further up her in-tray than where to locate the local manger.

The Greens too might be considered the architects of any of their own electoral misfortunes, having carelessly lost ­arguably their biggest hitter to a row over an ­issue which is a hot topic with absolutely no voter outside the fevered world of the trans debate.

They were crazy to lose Andy ­Wightman over GRA, and Holyrood would be much the poorer without his being elected as the independent mind he is.

As for the LibDems? Best not to ­intrude too deeply into private grief ­really. Once the Scottish party provided really big beasts. Now it doesn’t.

Which leaves us with the current party of government. It is not an administration without mistakes and failures. None such exists. It has been fortunate in facing opposition parties which would be hard pushed to assemble alternative cabinets who would be household names outside their own households.

It does of course have to contend with the only partially exploded bomb of the Salmond/Sturgeon saga. That two such once interdependent halves of a winning team should now be at public loggerheads is a matter for profound regret with all indy-supporting people in neither camp.

Time will tell if this unsavoury ­business will gain damaging traction outside of the transfixed voyeurs in the fourth ­estate. The stark fact is that we are in a situation where the legal requirement for ­anonymity is at odds with the normal ­requirement for transparency.

At the moment all the polling suggests that there could be a clear majority in ­Holyrood of independence supporting members, though with four long months to go before a May 6 election, which itself is not guaranteed, I would urge all indy minded folk to regard complacency as the real enemy within.

All being well, I anticipate casting an in person vote as usual in my local village hall. Who could resist deciding the future of their nation with a pencil anchored to a piece of string?

Not this elector, for sure.