General election: Will Holyrood 2021 election drag politics out of the sewer? – Gina Davidson

This general election campaign – which saw politics descend to new lows – was just an amuse-bouche for the next Holyrood election in 2021, writes Gina Davidson.

The Liberal Democrats were strongly criticised for feeding misleading election material to unsuspecting voters (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

It was George Bernard Shaw who described elections as “a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it”. I don’t know how you’re feeling the morning after the night before, but taking a long shower feels somewhat appropriate after an election campaign which has dragged the body politic from the gutter into the sewer.

At the heart of the campaign was trust, or at least the search by the electorate to find a reason to trust in anything they were being told. It was at times, in vain: misleading election material was pushed through people’s letterboxes – much with a Liberal Democrat stamp on it; the Tory party was happy to pose as an independent fact-check service on Twitter while the Prime Minister dodged interviews, hid in fridges, and when faced with an image of a sick child, preferred to pocket the reporter’s phone rather than address the issue; SNP campaign material failed to mention the party’s raison d’etre and some candidates even stated a vote for them was, emphatically, not a vote for independence; and Labour tried and failed to convince anyone that the party had lanced its antisemitism boil.

But it’s done now. The votes are in and so we can all move on, right? Wrong. Sadly this political rollercoaster shows no signs of stopping or even slowing. Brexit is not going away and neither is the running sore of Scottish independence. What’s more, the general election campaign in Scotland was just an amuse-bouche for the main course: the Holyrood 2021 elections.

‘Concentrate on day job’

Bute House is the prize many Scottish politicians had their eyes on over the last few weeks. In a UK-wide election, the focus on the SNP’s domestic record proved that beyond a doubt – and Scottish Conservative interim leader Jackson Carlaw said as much earlier this week, knowing that the wooing of the Labour unionist vote now, on the subject of a second independence referendum, could likely pay dividends for his party a few months down the line.

First Minister’s Questions has also seen opposition parties refocus their attentions on health and education and the SNP’s handling of both. The “concentrate on the day job” rhetoric which challenged the SNP at the 2017 general election did have an impact, with Labour and the Tories gaining seats and the SNP losing half a million voters and 21 seats.

So you can be assured that from here on in, that will be where the opposition parties will look to trade blows over the next 15 months.

The falling Pisa education results, the stagnant attainment gap, the Glasgow hospital contamination scandal and the failure to have the new Sick Kids hospital in Edinburgh open, may well be enough to shift people’s minds from the constitution.

Not that the SNP will allow such matters to derail them from their goal. The Referendums Bill will finally be approved in Holyrood next week, so the framework for another vote on independence will be waiting to be fleshed out.

The sticking point, of course, is the lack of a Section 30 Order from the UK Government, but the SNP will step up its search for other legal ways to hold a referendum.

So we face another year of constitutional wrangling. There may well be another Brexit referendum depending on the outcome of yesterday’s votes. There may not. But the demand for a second independence from the SNP will only grow as the battle for Holyrood 2021 intensifies.