Alex Massie Alex Massie

Caledonian Blues

Ochone, ochone! The plight of the Scottish Tories has been receiving attention again this week. As Pete pointed out, the latest Tartan poll puts the Tories at just 18% north of the Tweed. This means, 12 years on from the 1997 disaster, that, in Iain Martin’s words, “They’re getting absolutely nowhere, slowly.”  True.

In 1979, Scottish Conservatives won 22 seats and comprised 6.5% of the UK parliamentary party. It’s fair to say they’ll get nowhere near that next year. But look at this list of some of the seats the Tories won thirty years ago: Aberdeenshire East, Angus South, Argyll, Banff, Galloway, Moray &Nairn, Perth & East Perthshire. Most were taken from the SNP, whose own representation slumped from 11 to just 2 MPs.

Indeed, expectations of a Tory revival in Scotland might usefully be considered in the light of the SNP’s own performance in Westminster elections, for the Tories are now where the SNP was thirty years ago when they won 17% of the Scottish vote. Thirty years on, and despite having been the principle alternative to Labour for more than a decade, the Nationalists still only have six seats in London. As recently as 1992, when they took 21% of the vote, the SNP only sent three MPs to Westminster.

And here’s the thing: most of those SNP seats are constituencies that, if they were in southern England, would be reliably Tory votes. The Mark of Thatcher, fairly or not, still stains the Tories in Scotland. Or, put differently, the SNP have leveraged a cultural, rather than a political, sensibility to great effect, displacing the Conservatives as the alternative to Labour and as a bulwark, at Holyrood, against Glasgow and the post-industrial counties of Renfrew and Lanark.

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