When I stood down as political editor of The Scotsman five years ago, the country looked to be forever Labour – even if they called in Salmond for some Puck-style light relief. Not so now. The SNP seems to have pulled off a minor revolution. Scotland wakes to find Labour MSPs being toppled from former strongholds like Glasgow Shettleston – the city itself is now almost all SNP. The BBC say Alex Salmond is heading for a majority, and in a Holyrood which was designed to make it almost impossible for any party so to do. Salmond is already pledging that his next mission is an independence referendum.
The Lib Dems have taken what seems to be a punishment beating for coalition with the Tories in Westminster. They were Labour’s partners between 99-07 in Holyrood, and while they claim a federal structure and separate Scottish identity this seems not to have washed. Lib Dem activists in England will look at their own losses this morning, and those losses in Scotland, and think “this coalition is killing us”.
But Labour? They were in the lead, easily so, until a few weeks ago. The Labour meltdown in Scotland – to me the single most significant fact this morning – is to be understood in relation to their poll lead. The above graph explains this. They were cruising to victory until the campaign begun then: kaboom.
This matters for Cameron. First, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party is Ed Miliband – and he doesn’t seem to be very good at winning elections when there are no unions to swing the vote for him. And next: Labour has been punished in Scotland for the paucity of its message. All it said during the campaign was, “Stop the cuts! Evil Tories!” And that was it. Salmond said this better – with the added advantage of being able to string a sentence together. Miliband brought Ed Balls with him to try and “save” the Scottish campaign recently. It’s now clear how successful they were.
The idea of Scotland as Labour Territory is one that I grew up with. It’s not true now. But, still, Cameron should be ashamed at his own party’s failure to capitalise on Labour’s collapse. The Scottish Tories have gone native, cosying up to the SNP. They lost their identity. In 1979, Thatcher won 22 seats in Scotland and almost a third of the vote. John Major held 11 in 1992 and even during his 1997 wipeout – where the Tories lost every Scottish seat – he managed a larger share of the vote than the Tories seem to have mustered this morning.
Comments