The most northerly and easterly part of Scotland, Shetland has a special place in the cartographer’s heart… or, perhaps, a pained place in their head. Showing Shetland in its true-to-life position requires the inclusion of a vast expanse of uninhabited sea and a smaller scale that can make reading data difficult. Yet pop it in a repositioned box somewhere beyond the Moray Firth, and Shetlanders will surely make their displeasure known whether through jest or insult. At the risk of further stoking their ire, sometimes the box simply is the best solution. Only a small minority of maps are actually exclusively intended to show where things are in relation to one another, and data legibility matters more in most others. If in doubt, I always advise not to use any Ballot Box Scotland-or-adjacent maps for navigation purposes.

Extended Shetland Box gags aside, Shetland has quite a lot of similarities to Orkney, right down to its own ancient monuments and a modern status as an energy hub, albeit primarily for the North Sea oil and gas that can be found in its vicinity. Like Orkney, Shetland was long its own county under the name “Zetland”, from which the ZE postcode derives. There’s a fun linguistic point there about how the written influences the spoken, because like many Scottish Z’s (think Menzies) that spelling arose from the old letter Yogh, which very much did not represent a Z or Sh sound, but which looked kind of Z-like and so that was the substitute when Yogh wasn’t available for printing. Beyond the Mainland (again, simply named here), other islands include Bressay just across the water from Lerwick; West and East Burra off the southern Mainland; the Fair Isle halfway to Orkney; Foula and Papa Stour of the western Mainland; Whalsay off the eastern Mainland; and Yell, Fetlar and Unst in the northern cluster.

Despite its geographic location, Shetland is actually something of a middle ground between Orkney and Na h-Eileanan an Iar politically. At national level it has seen nothing but Lib Dem representation for decades, but unlike Orkney popular myth has it leaning SNP in 2015, and indeed in 2021 the Holyrood seat became a Lib Dem-SNP marginal for the first time. It’s also had more party presence than Orkney, with an SNP councillor since 2017 and a Green and Labour joining in 2022, though none of those are as strong as the SNP are in the Comhairle.

Shetland had two uncontested wards in 2022 which complicate our election projections here in two ways, firstly obviously by lack of votes locally, and secondly by the fact one of the councillors elected unopposed was Labour’s Tom Morton. He’s since resigned his seat, indicating that he’d never really expected to be elected in the first place and only really stood as a favour. Similar to Comhairle nan Eilean Siar then, I just assumed some flat vote shares across the wards parties didn’t contest: 5% for the Greens (who beat the SNP in both wards they faced off in), 4% for the SNP, and the bare-minimum 3% for Labour. That’s almost certainly an underestimate but I didn’t want to exaggerate, and it gives a trio of Greens, pair of SNP, and solo Labour councillor alongside 21 Independents. Here that includes 5 councillors either from uncontested wards or elected at the subsequent vacancy-filling by-election, and 16 councillors down as far as John Leask and his 135 first preference votes.