One flop election doesn’t make Nats a dying breed
WHAT’S the SNP got in common with the Bornean orangutan and the Giant Otter?
Well, if you believe some accounts, all three are practically extinct.
Unionists are gleeful over claims from pollsters Populus that Nicola Sturgeon’s party are on the “brink of collapse” after a decade of dominance.
In a breathless account of the party’s electoral problems in a London newspaper, the organisation’s “head of analytics” arrives at a brutal verdict.
“It is difficult to overstate how poor the SNP’s performance was in June’s general election,” says James Kanagasooriam.
He concludes: “As UKIP – another nationalist party – would attest to, a meteoric rise can be followed by a fall which is almost as dramatic.”
Pundits have predicted the imminent collapse of the SNP more times than Alex Salmond has been on a diet.
But this time there does seem compelling evidence that the laws of political gravity are finally taking affect.
As Kanagasooriam points out, the 37 per cent the Nationalists received in June was down 13 per cent from 2015 – and meant they’d misplaced half a millon voters.
More worryingly for Sturgeon, the loss of 21 MPs was only possible because of the twin challenge from both the left and the right.
The unionist-inspired Tory revival was expected.
But the Jeremy Corbyn bounce – which saw Labour take six Scottish seats from the SNP – was a major surprise.
If the Nats continue to leak votes to both parties, it could well be an existential crisis. But will they? Such an analysis fails to account for
If Brexit turns out to be another disaster, the SNP will be the beneficiaries
a perfect storm of circumstances that hurt the SNP last month.
Firstly, Ruth Davidson’s anti-indyref2 rhetoric was only possible because Sturgeon had called for a second vote a few months previously.
The SNP leader would almost certainly have played a more cautious game on the constitution if she had known an election was looming.
Secondly, Sturgeon’s pro-EU position has caused real difficulties with the third of her supporters who backed Brexit.
That issue will have been put to bed one way or another before the next election. If Brexit turns out to be a disaster, the SNP will be the beneficiaries. If it isn’t, they’ll quietly ditch their EU support.
Thirdly, the failure of most UK-wide polling to predict a hung parliament hurt the SNP more than anybody.
Sturgeon dominated the UK stage in the 2015 election, largely thanks to talk of her doing a “progressive alliance” deal to put Ed Miliband into Downing Street.
This time the pollsters insisted Theresa May was comfortably heading for a majority.
That left Sturgeon languishing on the sidelines looking largely irrelevant to a Westminster election.
It’s likely many Yes voters who loaned their vote to Corbyn as an alternative to May will return to the Nats when the next Holyrood election rolls round.
So rumours of the SNP’s imminent demise are exaggerated.
They hold a majority of Scottish seats at Westminster, are in government at Holyrood and control more councils than any other party.
We probably don’t need to add them to the endangered species list just yet.