With two senior Scottish Labour apparatchiks – EU elections campaign manager and Brexit spokesman Neil Findlay and shadow cabinet justice spokesman Daniel Johnson – resigning within a few hours of each other, the post-European election crisis of the legacy parties continues to take its toll north of the Border, as everywhere else. Findlay’s resignation was widely interpreted as leaping out of the balloon in the hope that Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard could avoid crashing and burning.
Of Scotland’s six EU parliamentary seats, three were won by the SNP on 37 per cent of the vote, one by the second-place Brexit Party with 15 per cent, one by the Liberal Democrats on 13 per cent and one by the Conservatives on 11 per cent. Labour lost both its seats and is now unrepresented at Strasbourg. One of its defeated MEPs, David Martin, was the longest serving UK politician in Europe.
This wipe-out marks the final outcome of the falling trajectory that Scottish Labour has been tumbling down since it committed hara-kiri by introducing devolution at the end of the last century.
