Scotland

Oh dear. The SNP faced a gruelling general election result this week, losing 38 seats to end up on just nine as voters north of the border overwhelmingly backed Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot. A number of parliamentarians lost their seats in nationalist exodus and some of the party’s failed candidates aren’t taking things well. In Falkirk, SNP hopeful Toni Giugliano – who recorded a rather, um, bizarre song for his election campaign – lost to Labour’s Euan Stainbank in a constituency that hasn’t voted red since 2010. Taking to Facebook to blast the outcome, Giugliano hit out at his party’s poor result and, er, the nationalist MSP for his

The exit poll puts the SNP on ten seats. That is very much at the low end of the spectrum of expectations among the Nationalists. The party won 48 out of 59 Scottish seats in 2019. There are 57 constituencies north of the border, and if John Swinney has managed to win only ten of those, he and his rank and file will be bitterly disappointed. On the ITV results programme, Nicola Sturgeon stuck the boot in, describing the exit poll as ‘the grimmer end of expectations for the SNP’ and said the party’s campaign failed to put forward a ‘unique selling point’.  Swinney, formerly Sturgeon’s number two, stepped forward

South of the border, a Labour majority is a foregone conclusion. Yet in Scotland, in almost all 57 seats, contests are predicted to be tight. ‘Knife-edge,’ is the phrase heard on repeat, most recently from First Minister John Swinney. While the Scottish central belt has drawn intense interest – given polls have consistently suggested there will be a Labour resurgence with even Glasgow looking to turn red – rural Scotland has received a little less attention. Sir Keir Starmer’s party is less a player, with key battlegrounds here a race between the SNP and the Tories. There is a long held Scottish narrative that boasts Scotland is more left-leaning than the

Another day, another drama. This time Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney is in the spotlight, after he conducted a rather odd radio interview with BBC Five Live on the trans debate. With three days to go until the general election and some polls predicting Swinney’s nationalists could lose more than half of their Westminster seats, the FM is under pressure to persuade more voters to back the SNP on the big day. The Nats are no strangers to being out of touch with the general public and one issue that exemplifies this rather well is the party’s stance on self-identification. Swinney’s former boss Nicola Sturgeon was determined to pass the

John Swinney and his colleagues continuously claim Scotland ‘rejoining’ the EU is possible, and that by voting SNP we can make it happen. In this general election the SNP manifesto commits to ‘an independent Scotland in the EU.’ This is a perfect example of the way a comforting lie becomes more popular than an unpleasant truth. Why deal with reality and its messy trade-offs when off-the-shelf utopia is available instead?  An independent Scotland in the EU is a myth for the simple reason that the act of separating from the UK would create a new Scottish state structurally prohibited from entering the EU, certainly within any reasonable timeframe. At the

It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear. While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP – so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light