Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
Certainly, I look forward to Chris and his thoughts on the Scottish result.
A collapse in SNP votes - part turnout, part Labour up, Tories down and LDs narrowly down.
The proportional system* would save the SNP to some extent in Scottish elections but if they aren’t the largest party (and out of Government) it’d be unreasonable to expect a pro-independence argument to prevail on a single election victory at a later date.
It pushes the idea of a referendum into the mid-2030s and application of it a couple of years after that.
*There’s a potential for infighting over positions at the top of the regional lists too as ex-MPs and constituency MSPs on the brink seek refuge there.
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You’re not going to get much cogent analysis from me on less than 6 hours sleep
The result is very bad for the SNP because it makes them stink of failure. Especially awkward for Honest John because last time he led the SNP they were not known for winning either. That puts them on the back foot when we get to the election that really matters for the independence campaign, which is Holyrood 2026. By that point, Labour might be showing either a few early triumphs or failure to improve much at all, and that will feed through to the Scottish general election. That said, two ferries are still not in service and the bill is going up. Access to GPs, dentists and operations on the NHS is dreadful (and it makes no odds if it’s slightly less awful than England … people understand that the service is devolved and they know who’s making the decisions that are failing to improve things). We still have no deposit return scheme, highly questionable performance of Scottish schools in international league tables … the list goes on.
Add to all that the fact that an intellectual belief in Scotland as an independent country is no longer coupled to any particular political party* and we might actually have arrived at where Sturgeon and Salmond said we would be if they lost in 2014: independence as a project parked for a generation.
*It’s worth noting that Alba got fewer votes in Scotland than Reform UK yesterday, though I don’t know how many Scottish seats each party ran in so it’s hard to know exactly how irrelevant Salmond still is.