“And it’s disaster for Scotland!” – or, more accurately, for the diminishing minority of authoritarian xenophobes who, for the past 17 years, have ruled Scotland with an iron hand, reducing its horizons and impoverishing its people. Last night, in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the voters finally served notice that the institutionalised abuse of power that is SNP governance is about to be ended.
With a swing of more than 20 per cent from SNP to Labour and a separatist majority of 5,240 converted into a unionist (for that is Labour’s significance in this context) majority of 9,446, this was no fluke or narrow squeak. To put the SNP’s disaster in perspective, as recently as 2015 the disgraced Margaret Ferrier won the seat for the nationalists with 52 per cent of the vote and a swing of 31 per cent from Labour to SNP.
Historically, Rutherglen is no stranger to sensational elections. In 1831 it featured the last lavishly corrupt election to the unreformed Parliament. The electorate consisted of the 18 town councillors, all but four of whom supported Reform; but the anti-Reform candidate bribed their wives and daughters with offers of silk gowns in the latest fashion. To escape their importunate womenfolk, the 14 Reform councillors embarked on a two-day pub crawl, ending on Ben Lomond, at whose summit they formally resolved to vote for the Reform Bill.
The only surprising thing about last night’s revolt by the Scottish electorate is that it did not happen sooner. The SNP’s relentless obsession with a second independence referendum, despite repeated polling showing the public did not want another plebiscite in the foreseeable future, made it evident that the SNP administration had different priorities and concerns from those they governed.
While the SNP obsessed over a constitutional question that the electorate had already answered, government neglect inflicted major damage on Scotland. On the SNP’s watch, in the OSCE international league tables for schools (PISA), Scotland declined from 10th for proficiency in Science to 27th and from 11th in Maths to 30th. The SNP boasts that Scotland is the only country in the world where the Maths curriculum is taught from an LGBT perspective.
Healthcare in Scotland similarly declined. Infrastructure neglect, formerly due to plain negligence, is now ideologically motivated, with the Greens, on whom the SNP relies to remain in government, interdicting necessary road improvements. Freedom, famously the slogan of William Wallace/Mel Gibson is no longer a daily reality in Scotland, where an SNP law threatens imprisonment for “inappropriate” views expressed in what was formerly the privacy of one’s own home.
This madness culminated in the Gender Recognition Bill, which a majority of Scots opposed and the UK government vetoed, though Humza Yousaf, elected SNP leader on the Continuity Krankie ticket, is still resisting. Add to that ferries with painted-on windows still not in service, the £600,000 funding for Indy Ref2 still unaccounted for, rumours surrounding an iconic camper van and it is unsurprising the SNP got a bloody nose last night.
What is the long-term significance of the SNP meltdown? It seems certain the party will lose power at Holyrood, in view of the precarious mathematics already existing. Even a very small swing could remove the SNP from power and it really looks as if that is the least misfortune that could befall them at the next Scottish election. The Rutherglen result will embolden his opponents to try to remove Humza Yousaf – whom Time magazine, with an extravagantly perverse sense of timing is featuring on the cover of its current edition – to improve their chances of electoral survival.
It should be borne in mind, however, that the peculiar electoral system in force at Holyrood bizarrely compensates parties that lose constituency seats with “list” seats, so that only an exceptional landslide could reduce the SNP to a rump in the Scottish parliament. In Westminster elections, which is what Sir Keir Starmer cares about, Labour is celebrating, in the belief that the Rutherglen result will be duplicated in dozens of other Scottish constituencies. That could be, but there is a caveat.
Scots have developed a split-screen, differential voting habit between Westminster and Holyrood elections. Many Scots, after two decades of SNP-generated paranoia, regard Westminster with acute suspicion and, on the calculation that anything affecting their daily lives will not be decided there, cynically send the most militant possible representatives south, “to defend Scotland’s interests”.
If Labour formed the UK government, such voters might well view Scottish MPs as just the tail of the UK Labour dog and, safe in the knowledge that they could not impose their separatist/authoritarian will on Scots, send SNP representatives to Westminster, to ensure they would not go native, as they will regard Scottish Labour MPs as doing. In the SNP’s current state of disarray and lack of political credibility, that will probably not be a problem for Labour at the next general election; but it could lead to problems at subsequent contests.
The worst legacy of former first ministers Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon is an artificially created and exploited mistrust of the rest of Britain, fostered under SNP rule. It is difficult for people south of the border to realise how culturally divorced Scotland has become from the rest of the Union, at every level of society. This was strikingly exposed during last night’s by-election coverage when Martin Geissler, the co-anchor for BBC Scotland News, interrupted commentator John McTernan to ask: “Who is Lee Anderson?”
Caution warns us that, in this climate, the demise of the SNP cannot be taken for granted. Certainly, even if only as an opposition force, it will be with us for a long time. The antidote that must be applied by Unionists is to respect the traditions and aspirations of Scots, to try to enhance their freedoms which the SNP so ruthlessly eroded, to facilitate free market initiative in the land of Adam Smith where, despite a hostile statist environment, Scottish entrepreneurs are still emerging and growing.
Hubris would be out of place and dangerous; likewise complacency. But we can legitimately take great comfort from the irreducible reality that the result in Rutherglen and Hamilton West signals: Scotland is no longer a one-party state.
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