Crossing the floor of the Scottish Parliament – moving around the arc is perhaps a better description – is highly unusual. Several MSPs have become independents, for one reason or another, but swapping one party for another had only been done by Alba’s Ash Regan, formerly of the SNP, until yesterday.
Jamie Greene is a one-time Scottish Tory leadership contender who resigned the Conservative whip with an excoriating letter to his leader Russell Findlay on Thursday. The very next day, the ex-Tory turned up at the Scottish Liberal Democrat annual conference in Inverness to announce he would be joining the party. It was a genuinely significant Holyrood moment.
More importantly, though, it looks to be a genuinely significant moment in the fortunes of the Scottish Tory party. Even before Greene’s departure, Findlay had a tough gig. He took over a party last autumn whose UK counterparts had polled less than 13 per cent at the general election. It was quite the change in fortune from previous elections the party had contested north and south of the border. The last time there was a Holyrood election, for example, Douglas Ross recorded the party’s best ever result in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, with 31 seats and 24 per cent of the vote.
It is against this watermark that Findlay will be judged – and the situation isn’t looking promising for the new Scottish Conservative leader. Since the general election, the Tories’ best outcome in any Scottish parliament poll is 16 per cent, while a recent Survation poll suggested the Conservative party could almost halve in size next year – and come away with just three more MSPs than Reform UK.
Nigel Farage’s Reform party is now pretty much neck-and-neck with the Conservatives and polling suggest it will split the unionist vote north of the border – to the detriment of both the Tories and Anas Sarwar’s Labour party. There have been several councillor defections already, most prominently Glasgow’s Tory pin-up Thomas Kerr. But as well as losing people on the right, the Tories are at risk of losing people on the centre ground too.
Despite the new leadership of the SNP being a more centrist, more pro-economy outfit, there remains a gap in Scottish politics for a party which embraces free-market liberalism and can also claim to put Scotland first. Findlay will inevitably feel compelled to follow his UK leader Kemi Badenoch to a more populist right position in an attempt to win back voters leaking to Reform, which leaves this soft-right liberal territory wide open for the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
The sort of Tory who is more interested in lower taxes, infrastructure and using net zero as an economic opportunity might feel quite at home in Alex Cole-Hamilton’s party. And with half the Tory MSPs at risk of losing their seats – while the polls suggest the Lib Dems will win a seat in every Holyrood region – it might not be the worst career move for those keen to stay in Holyrood. We’ve all been watching for Tory MSPs to defect to Reform – but the Scottish Liberal Democrats may be the more significant threat.
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