The SNP is having a very normal election: its first really normal one in a long time. It’s just short of a decade since the party nearly swept away all traces of other political parties in the 2015 election, leaving just three non-nationalist MPs in place. Many of the candidates who won back then are now in the fight of their lives to hold on.
In Scotland’s Central Belt, most seats are on what the candidates themselves describe as a ‘knife edge’. The various MRP polls are predicting Labour wins in many SNP constituencies, including my local ones of Livingston, currently held by Hannah Bardell, and Linlithgow and Bathgate, where Martyn Day is the MP. Both were first elected as SNP MPs in 2015. Both use the words ‘knife edge’ a lot when talking about how they see the result.
These two constituencies in West Lothian include former mining communities, and the landscape is dominated by huge, pink, ‘bings’ – big spoil heaps of shale from the oil mining industry which have largely been left to nature. Some of the towns, like Linlithgow, are affluent, with artisan bakeries and a surprising number of upmarket farm shops. Livingston is a post-war new town, with the requisite many, many roundabouts and large shopping precincts. Other areas are struggling, and residents complain they are left behind and forgotten by the councils, which are too interested in the new homes springing up across the area. Leisure centres (many of which had very old and expensive-to-run swimming pools) have been closing. ‘I’m still cross about the recreation centre closing’, is as common a moan on the doorstep as anything about the national political picture.
The first woman who opens her door to Day, on a new build housing estate in Bo’ness, is very, very annoyed. She’s not voting, she explains, as the candidate proffers her a leaflet. She’s fed up with the SNP, who she normally votes for, even though she isn’t in favour of independence, and the way things have gone over the past few years, and she’s angry with the Tories – oh, and she doesn’t like Labour either. In the end, she agrees to take some campaign literature, and we move on. Day says this is not unusual: ‘We are dealing with the scunnerisation of politics,’ he chuckles. Bardell agrees on her leafleting round. ‘Folk are scunnered,’ she says. Everyone is fed up with politicians and politics intruding on their lives more than they feel it should do. Even though there hasn’t actually been an election for nearly five years, voters feel as though they’ve been asked to go out to vote too often.
What’s particularly striking about the scunnerisation is that it applies equally to the SNP, who would previously feed off that sentiment towards other parties. Day says that of those who are irritated by the SNP, some are annoyed that it isn’t doing enough on independence, others are annoyed about the recent turmoil in the party including the scandal around former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, while others still are unimpressed with the party’s record on independence.
Most of the voters who open the doors to Day say they are ‘undecided’. I’ve been on enough doorsteps now to know that when they’re talking to the incumbent MP, that word roughly translates to about 50 per cent of people meaning they really are undecided, and the rest meaning that they like the MP personally and don’t want to tell them to their face that they’re backing another party. Most doors, though, go unanswered.
Now, the laws of political gravity apply to the SNP too
Bo’ness residents were more likely to be around when I followed Day around on the knock: the town was preparing for its famous gala (look it up: this is no ordinary gala day with just bunting and a few folk in fancy dress). But both he and Bardell say that there are fewer people around than normal: Scottish school holidays began this weekend and even before then, people without school age children were heading off for some sun. No one really knows how this is going to affect turnout (there have been some real problems with people not receiving their postal votes before going on holiday), and how that will affect each party in turn.
When I followed Scottish Labour campaigners and MPs around on the campaign trail in 2015, they visibly radiated sadness and panic. Neither Bardell nor Day seem so desperate: they argue that this is because they have been out on the knock for years, whereas some of the Scottish Labour MPs who lost in the SNP landslide nearly a decade ago had become rather complacent about the shoe leather work.
Scottish Labour today is a very different beast. Day’s Labour opponent, Kirsteen Sullivan, is well-known as a local councillor in Linlithgow, while Bardell’s, Gregor Poynton, is a longstanding Labour Party worker and activist from nearby Falkirk. Both have enjoyed high-profile campaign visits from senior party figures including Angela Rayner, Anas Sarwar, shadow defence secretary John Healey and others, which suggests that Labour is hopeful of a win. The messaging on their local leaflets is about the NHS, with a picture of a doctor who is criticising the SNP’s record on the health service. Their leaflets urge voters to ‘send a government, not just a message’, adding: ‘The SNP want Scotland to send Westminster a message but we think your vote is worth more than that. Labour has more ambition for Scotland. We want to send a government to Westminster.’
The message from the SNP candidates is that a Labour win is inevitable, so Scottish voters need to vote SNP in order to ‘protect Scotland’. The level of independence messaging that they give those voters varies. Day points out – as does First Minister John Swinney – that independence is the first line of the party’s manifesto.
One of the leaflets that Day hands to undecided voters is a long fold-out document called ‘100 ways we’re already improving everyday life’. This includes free prescriptions, free bus travel, the baby boxes, ‘the fairest and most progressive income tax system in the UK’, and green jobs. That document talks about independence on its first page, arguing: ‘Imagine how much better things would be if Scotland could make all the decisions that affect us, instead of Westminster?’ Bardell’s leaflet, which is gloriously brightly-coloured, emphasises how local she is (she drives me past her childhood home on the way back from her leafleting round in Craigshill), and argues that ‘Scotland needs SNP MPs like Hannah to make sure that we are not ignored, and that Scotland’s voice is heard’. It is very similar to the message that both MPs used when they were candidates back in 2015, and they won.
Back then, Scotland was full of posters of Sturgeon promising a ‘stronger voice for Scotland’ after the 2014 referendum. Now, the laws of political gravity apply to the SNP too, and it’s a much harder sell.
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