Jamie Greene Square

Scots Tory analysis already repeating old mistakes

WHEN I wrote for ThinkScotland after Sturgeon’s resignation and Yousaf’s accession, I argued the SNP was a basket case with no prospect of a second independence referendum. Fourteen months have passed since then and we have observed a never-ending slow-motion train crash as the SNP has carried on regardless, blaming Westminster whenever criticised and trotting out the same old tired mantras about independence. All the while, public services have continued their inexorable decline.

This grand pretence that all is peachy for the nationalists received its rudest repudiation at Thursday’s general election when Scottish voters gave 38 SNP MPs their P45s, leaving a rump of only 9 at Westminster. The SNP lost half a million votes, their share falling 15 percentage points to 29.9%. Still, it would seem the scale and impact of this political earthquake, which Sturgeon’s resignation most visibly triggered, has failed to register with the SNP – or indeed, the Scottish Conservatives, who are (still) the official opposition at Holyrood. The Holyrood election in 2026 looks like a coming tsunami for the SNP.

Leading SNP voices, not least Nicola Sturgeon, have put the lost seats down to John Swinney’s failure to put independence “front and centre” in the election campaign, while Swinney himself has acknowledged the party “failed to convince people of the urgency of independence”. Nationalist voices outside the leadership cabal, who have been considerably more perspicacious as to why voters continue to turn away from the SNP, have been derided and dismissed.

The SNP has dominated Scottish politics overwhelmingly since 2007; it may be in government at Holyrood until May 2026, but thereafter it will be lucky if it can even claim to be the official opposition. Since the independence project is the SNP (much as Alba and other disaffected nationalists might wish otherwise), a second independence referendum is off the agenda for decades.

Last Thursday unionist parties commanded the biggest share of the Scottish vote in any election since 2011: 64.7% to 34.4% for the combined nationalist vote. With 48 unionist MPs to the nationalists’ nine, Sturgeon’s de facto referendum – as she characterised the 2024 general election – is well and truly lost. Whereas in 2014 1.6 million voters (38% of the Scottish electorate) voted for independence, last week the number voting for independence-supporting parties had fallen to 0.83 million (19.7% of the total electorate). It will take many years for a unified nationalist parliamentary force equal to the SNP in its heyday to emerge from the wreckage of the current party, the civil war with Alba and the dissension of other nationalists.

What this means is that at long last the constitutional question will stop being all-determining in Scotland: it will cease to be the be-all and end-all of Scottish politics and elections. I’m not saying that the SNP and others will give up clamouring for independence or using its supposed advantages as an all-purpose critique of unionist government, but that their arguments will have much less purchase: flogging the nationalist horse will increasingly become a quaint eccentricity, irrelevant to the day-to-day business of government.

Since at least 2014, Scottish Conservatives have been in a symbiotic – or mutually parasitic – relationship with the SNP, fighting elections on a “No to Indy Ref 2” platform as the SNP has sought to make every election about another referendum. At the general election, the efficacy of this tactic began to wane, energetic campaigns on and off social media to encourage tactical voting notwithstanding.

The Scottish Conservative vote share was almost halved, down 12.3 percentage points to 12.7%; with a total of 307,344 Scottish votes, these were the worst results in the party’s history. In all but one of the five out of six seats the Tories hung on to, their vote share went down significantly; in all six Glasgow seats their vote share was behind Reform. Although there was undoubtedly an anti-SNP vote, it didn’t automatically translate into Tory votes, as votes went to Labour (vote share: up 17 percentage points, to 35.7%) and, more significantly, Reform (overall vote share: 7%, with Aberdeenshire North & Moray East securing the highest percentage of the Reform vote share in Scotland at 14.6%). In terms of deposits, the Conservatives lost 16 – up from zero in 2019, and a worse total than Reform, who only lost ten.

The Reform result is all the more remarkable for the fact that there was next-to-no campaigning in Scotland, next-to-no media coverage of Reform candidates (certainly none that I saw that was neutral or positive) and an array of paper or otherwise unknown candidates. When polls began to show Reform as a threat to the Tory vote in Scotland, a vigorous campaign took off on Twitter/X and in the press to dissuade would-be Reform voters, furiously blaming them for SNP wins if they didn’t vote tactically. In the last days of the election campaign, some unionist Tweeters and Conservative MSPs went so far as to smear the deputy Chairman of Reform in Scotland as a nationalist to scare off voters. In the event, Reform was held responsible for Douglas Ross losing his seat (while the opprobrium that greeted Ross’s hijacking of the seat from incumbent David Duguid was conveniently blanked), and in four others (one Tory; three Labour) where the SNP won.

What all this suggests is that the “Stop the SNP at all costs by voting Tory” injunction is not putting off Reform voters. Once a compelling, blanket argument for voting Tory, it has, I think, passed its sell-by date (although that won’t of course stop the Tories rehashing it come future elections). Reform will emerge as a significant force in Scottish politics: current performance alone predicts 6 list seats at Holyrood in 2026. Reform’s success at the general election shows the realignment of Scottish politics away from constitutional politics is already well underway, and both will gain momentum as the SNP implodes.

There is considerable scope for Reform to pick up votes in Scotland. It is a mistake to imagine all Reform-voters are ex-Conservatives. I know several nationalists as well as Labour supporters who voted Reform in Scotland. If Starmer fails to deliver for Scotland by 2026, many disaffected Labour and ex-SNP voters who could never vote for the toxic Tories will turn to Reform. The spectre of Thatcher still hangs over the Scottish Conservatives, which an evolution into a CSU-type outfit would be unable to exorcise even now, 13 years after Murdo Fraser proposed in his failed leadership bid.

Apart from that, the Scottish Tories have long distinguished themselves as less Brexit-y and more liberal than the Westminster leadership. In The Times yesterday, Tory MSP and likely leadership contender Jamie Greene (pictured) asserted that “there is little appetite for a reactionary lurch to the right in Scotland” while being forced to add that “the status quo is equally unappetising”. Yet a million Scots voted for Brexit, many from a Scottish nationalist impulse. As Tory MSP Douglas Lumsden ruefully admitted, the party “had underestimated how many people would drift to Reform”, particularly in Brexit-voting areas. If the Scottish Conservatives stick to the Lib-Dem-lite route (as Jamie Greene implies they should), they will surrender the centre-right in Scotland to Reform.

If, as I have argued, the SNP is facing an existential crisis with the realignment of Scottish politics away from constitutional politics, so are the Scottish Conservatives. Jamie Greene warns that “continuity won’t cut it”, but this is likely to prove as empty a slogan for the Scottish Conservatives, as it has for Kate Forbes when she became the deputy to the SNP’s continuity supremo, John Swinney. The politics professor James Mitchell wrote recently that “The SNP leadership cannot address the problem because it is the problem”. Again, it is hard not to see this as applying equally to the crusty cabal who rule the Scottish Tory roost. To this extent, Reform as a nascent party in Scotland open to all-comers and hungry for policy development is also better placed to respond timeously to the changing political tide.

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