Scott Macnab: Labour revival is biggest worry for SNP

The SNPs biggest threat could still be a Scottish Labour revival which propels Kezia Dugdale into Bute House. Picture: PA

The sight of former First Minister Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson, the SNP’s ex-leader at Westminster, being turfed out by voters infused last week’s election with the sense that this was more than just a bad night for the SNP.

The volatility of Scottish politics over the past decade seemed to have produced another seismic shift. The Nationalists still won the election, no question of that, with 35 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

But their share of the vote had plummeted to just 37 per cent – down from half in the 2015 election. And in an election dominated by the prospect of a second referendum north of the Border, it was the pro-union parties who took almost two-thirds of the popular vote.

Opposition pressure is now growing on Ms Sturgeon to ditch her plans for a quickfire second referendum in the aftermath of the Brexit vote which saw a majority of Scots vote to remain in the EU. The First Minister has played down claims that the outcome in Scotland last week was a rejection of “indyref2”, insisting this is an “overly simplistic analysis”.

Many Yes voters, she argues, were attracted by Jeremy Corbyn’s programme. But the other dynamic at play in the election north of the Border, overlooked amid all the constitutional navel gazing, has been the growing agitation over the SNP’s ability to govern devolved Scotland. After a decade in power, their record in running vital services like education and the NHS suddenly seems to be provoking mounting public anger.

A major difference in this campaign was the hostility which Nicola Sturgeon faced from the Scottish public when confronted by voters in the live TV arena. Ms Sturgeon is a veteran of these events, having been through the first referendum campaign in 2014, before facing the TV spotlight as SNP leader in the Westminster election two years ago along with last year’s Scottish Parliament vote.

But never has she faced such obvious discomfort in front of the cameras as she did when nurse Claire Austin tore into the First Minsiter over low pay in NHS which she said had forced her to use foodbanks.

A separate Question Time special saw the First Minister told she ought to resign over her record in running Scotland’s schools amid declining standards.

The broad thrust of public anger was clear and marked a twin-pronged assault on her referendum plans. The SNP was “obsessing” about the constitution while schools, hospitals and the economy were being neglected. It co-incides with the First Minister’s own surprising slump in popularity. Polling emerged during the campaign which indicates she is now the most unpopular party leader in Scotland, with almost two-thirds believing that her “defining mission” was to achieve Scottish independence. This compares with just 3 per cent who saw it as education, while 6 per cent believed it was the NHS, according to the YouGov survey commissioned by Labour. This is a major source of concern for senior Nationalists.

The rise of the party from 2007 onwards in Scotland has been built on the foundation of the success it has made of running its devolved responsibilities from Holyrood. There was a certain novelty effect when Mr Salmond pulled off the narrowest of election victories in 2007 to become First Minister.

To see that the sky didn’t fall in with a Nationalist administration at the helm, instead of the old Labour establishment, was almost a breath of fresh air. As the party introduced the council tax freeze, free prescriptions and scrapped the graduate endowment, allied to the bombast of Salmond, it gave the minority government the benefit of the doubt among Scots.

The Yes campaign in the 2014 referendum was largely built on the record of the SNP in government, along with the emergence of Holyrood as the centre of political debate in Scotland. It was this which lay behind the pro-independence conversion of Yes Scotland chairman Dennis Canavan, a socialist Labour MP and hitherto unionist.

The Scottish Parliament had shown it was capable of governing competently in keys areas like health, education and justice. Why not make that final leap and run everything? Of course the Nationalist movement remains strong in Scotland, but the Tory claim that “peak Nat” has passed and the SNP is on the wane will jar with Ms Sturgeon’s strategists.

The striking thing about the outcome in Scotland last week is how tight the battle was in most constituencies. Even where the SNP won, the massive majorities of 2015 have gone. The traditional Tory vote in large swathes of rural, North-east and southern Scotland has returned after a generation in hibernation.

And in the post-industrial urban heartlands of Glasgow, Lanarkshire and west, support for Labour surged again after near wipeout two years ago.

It is the prospect of a Labour revival in Scotland which is the biggest worry for SNP strategists after the “Corbyn effect” saw the party double its poll standings over the course of the campaign. It was this which prompted Ms Sturgeon to issue a dramatic eve-of-poll appeal to Labour supporters to back the SNP – on the basis that Nationalist MPs at Westminster would be more supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s programme than Scottish Labour.

For despite Ruth Davidson’s star being on the rise, conventional wisdom is that there is a ceiling to the Tories’ potential vote in Scotland – and they aren’t far off it now. Labour, on the other hand, can win big in those densely populated Central Belt heartlands which could just propel Kezia Dugdale into Bute House.

But if Scottish politics has been characterised by anything over the past decade, it’s been the volatile and mercurial nature of the voters. All the old loyalties have gone.

Nicola Sturgeon’s own political awakening may have been shaped in 1980s, but many young voters today won’t know anything about Margaret Thatcher or Ravenscraig.

It remains to be seen if Ruth Davidson can achieve her goal of becoming First Minister in 2021 but if Ms Sturgeon thinks she can’t win in Scotland simply because she’s a Tory, the evidence at the ballot box of the past ten years suggests voters will make up their own minds.