Don’t believe Sturgeon’s hype – the SNP went from 63 to 64 seats

Forget Hartlepool, with its 16 per cent swing from Labour, embedded there since Neolithic times, to a governing party; or Tory Ben Houchen, re-elected as mayor of Tees Valley with 73 per cent of the vote; forget, in fact, the Conservatives taking so many English council seats. If you want to see electoral history spectacularly made, look at the seismic result in Scotland.

The SNP went into the election as a minority government with 63 Holyrood seats; now it has emerged triumphantly, as a minority government with 64 seats. No wonder Nicola Sturgeon is doing her version of Margaret Thatcher’s “Rejoice! Rejoice!” It is not every day you see an election result as sensational as that. It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence that this transforms the whole constitutional situation and makes a second independence referendum inevitable.

Nicola Sturgeon is drawing upon her deepest reserves of rhetorical hyperbole to trumpet her awesome victory: “historic and extraordinary” is the most modest encomium she has lavished on this electoral triumph. She said: “Absolutely no one would have predicted the scale and the record-breaking nature of our victory at this election.”

The scale? One additional parliamentary seat, to be precise. Record-breaking nature? That would be the 1 per cent increase in the SNP share of the vote. The SNP leader at Westminster, Ian Blackford, one of those congenitally gurning Scots from whom someone stole his scone at birth, engendering a grievance complex for life, joined Sturgeon in uncharacteristically celebratory mood, describing the outcome as a “fantastic result” for the SNP. He warned they would be demanding a second referendum from Boris Johnson: “The people of Scotland have spoken. Westminster now has to listen.”

Many people must be asking themselves if Sturgeon and her coterie have been watching the same election results as the rest of the country. In the real world, so far from a sensational electoral surge in favour of independence, practically nothing has occurred. This is the most immobile, non-event election since Holyrood opened its doors. The SNP entered the contest with 63 seats and emerged with 64, still short of a majority. So static was the outcome that the runner-up Conservatives secured exactly the same number of seats as before: 31. All that has happened is that there is one more SNP member and two extra Green loons in the Scottish parliament.

Yet this exceptionally static election is being represented by the strident Nats as some kind of historic sea change, providing a mandate for another “once in a generation” independence referendum, with all its destabilising consequences. Their problem is that they are extending the inflated pre-election hype about “super-majorities” and “transformational” moments into the post-election period. The difference is that whereas, before voting occurs, an extravagant scenario may be spun with some plausibility, once the public has seen the actual results of the election, its absurdity cannot be disguised.

The SNP is insulting the intelligence of the Scottish public. Sturgeon is reading out the speeches she would have delivered if her extravagant dreams had come true. Having failed even to secure a bare majority, she continues to behave as if her hubristic predictions had been fulfilled. She bet the farm on winning a majority and failed. Instead of accepting that reality, putting IndyRef2 on the back burner and attempting to craft policies that might repair some of the damage she has inflicted on education and other vital services, she is trying to pretend she has achieved some kind of “transformational” (in her own term) breakthrough.

That is delusional behaviour. Some kindly person needs to tell her: Nicola, you have not won an “historic and extraordinary” victory, you are stuck in the same rut as before, relying on the Greens to sustain your disastrous mismanagement of Scotland’s public services; you have not the slightest excuse to demand another referendum, when you could not even win a majority. You are making yourself ridiculous.

If Sturgeon wants to understand what historic victory looks like, she should study Hartlepool and the still crumbling former Red Wall where Boris Johnson has achieved a truly transformational change, with the continuing liquidation of a major political culture. That is victory: an 86-seat majority in 2019, followed by the sweeping Conservative gains of the past 48 hours in a large variety of electoral contests, still producing results.

The contrast with Nicola Sturgeon could not be more extreme. She inherited an overall parliamentary majority from Alex Salmond, lost it in 2016, and has now again failed to retrieve it. If Sturgeon presents herself at Westminster, boasting of having gained one additional seat, and citing that achievement plus two extra Green MSPs as an historic mandate for a second independence referendum, people will wonder if she is the full shilling. She will embarrass Scotland by touting such a naive expectation.

The SNP has a secure hold, for the moment, on devolved government. But it is also on the cusp of a potentially catastrophic new development. If it continues on its present course, it will become ridiculous. There is nothing more dangerous in politics. Being loathed does not damage politicians, unless the sentiment extends to a majority; being laughed at is fatal. The expectation is that Holyrood will pass a referendum bill and Westminster will reject it. What then? Mounting frustration and division in SNP ranks, a dawning realisation that independence is not a practical proposition and consequent demoralisation.

The SNP may yet come to regret its patronage of the Greens, the likeliest destination for younger disillusioned separatist voters when the referendum bubble has burst. When the mightiest effort the SNP can mount results in the gain of just one seat and still no majority, it signals that, after years of constitutional turbulence since 2007, we have reached Peak Nat. Separatism has finally hit the buffers.

Sturgeon’s ravings about the “scale” of her victory are the kind of demented spin with which the SNP has tried to persuade the Scottish public that it is some kind of irresistible force. Unfortunately, among those who have succumbed to this propaganda are many so-called Unionists. The Union’s worst enemies are not the SNP, now clamped in the parking place of minority government, but defeatist Unionists, spreading alarm and despondency, lending credibility to the separatist myth of historical inevitability: the “We’re a’ doomed” brigade. It is time those masochists dusted themselves down, took a long, hard look at their newly contained enemy, and resumed the fight for the Union with renewed confidence.

Despite the seriousness of any threat to the Union, now, for the first time, it is possible to laugh at the SNP, celebrating their Pyrrhic “victory”. Wee Krankie’s delusional referendum agitation will increasingly make her look comical. She and her party are now inhabiting a fantasy world. The public will tire of the constant hectoring, like the screeching of a raucous parrot drowning out rational conversation. Always remember, though, that her party’s surge from 63 seats to 64 was “historic and extraordinary”. Of course it was…