Stuck in the middle with Ruth

FERGUSLIE Park has one claim to fame and one claim to infamy. The Paisley housing estate inspired the title of Stealers Wheel’s second album; Gerry rafferty and Joe egan, the folk-rock band’s founders, were born and raised in the town.

Ferguslie Park is also the poorest place in Scotland. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation consistently ranks the renfrewshire scheme as the most deprived in the country. Those who call it home have some of the worst health and education outcomes as well as the lowest employment and highest crime rates in Scotland.

Ferguslie Park now has another claim, but whether to fame or infamy is a matter of political inclination. It has elected a Conservative councillor for what is believed to be the first time in its history.

John McIntyre is the unlikeliest Tory winner of the local elections, a proxy battle, as is so much of Scotland’s politics, for the independence wars.

SNP strategists will pore over results such as these and might be tempted to echo the lyrics of Stealers Wheel’s biggest hit, Stuck in the Middle with You: ‘Trying to make some sense of it all/ But I can see it makes no sense at all.’

It makes perfect sense. The SNP has triumphed in three holyrood elections by appealing to Middle Scotland but relies on a hardcore Nationalist support that will always vote to advance independence.

The Tories have tapped into a hitherto dormant grassroots – the long-suffering, oft-ignored and newly angry unionist, exasperated by the threat of independence and willing to back whoever can stop it.

Scotland is now divided as much by identity as by economics. The dimmer stars in the SNP firmament will try to characterise this as a re-emergence of the pre-1960s ‘Orange vote’ that sustained the unionists, the forerunner to the Scottish Tories.

Of course, that unionist party inherited its name from dissident Liberals who balked at Irish home rule, but Scottish nationalism has never shown much interest in history after 1707.

People in Glasgow’s Baillieston, Shettleston and Calton have not voted Tory out of imperial dreams but because of the social and economic nightmare they see.

These are decent men and women let down by a Government indecently obsessed with independence. The Nationalists should ponder that. They should cast their grey matter over something else. After decades of decline and an ideological schism first with working and then middleclass Scotland, the Tories were wiped out 20 years ago almost to the day.

Most of the credit for their rebirth goes to ruth Davidson, a leader whose achievements have been single-handed.

But there is another party chief due kudos for her labours to restore the Tory brand north of the Border, one who would not be seen dead wearing a blue rosette. With poll tax, Margaret Thatcher oversaw the demise of Tory Scotland; with Indyref 2, Nicola Sturgeon has overseen its revival.

THERE are observers who will score these results a win for the SNP, not simply in overall seat tally but in the Tory surge that would appear to confound the Nationalists. These analysts will advance three contentions.

First, that the SNP now has a handy map of Tory gains and can direct money and footsoldiers to Westminster constituencies that look under threat in June. Second, that soft Nationalist and soft Left voters who stayed at home on Thursday will be spooked and flock to the polls next month to stop the wicked Tories. There is a mirror effect, too – floating voters, scunnered with the SNP but wary of voting Tory, will see the momentum is with Miss Davidson.

Third, and this is the big one, that a politics of SNP versus Tory makes independence all but inevitable. The theory runs thus: working-class voters who stuck with the union in 2014, when Labour governments were plausible and not yet a matter only for historians, will embrace nationalism as their only escape route. The answer to this we cannot know, but the General election will offer some threads to tug on.

The Conservatives are not going to deliver an upset in Motherwell – despite 23-year-old Nathan Wilson winning ravenscraig (ravenscraig!) on Thursday – but they will be looking to drive up their vote share across the country. A Tory resurgence in seats, and a landslide for Theresa May across the uK, might convince some that the time has come for independence.

however, a sizeable increase in vote share could be an indication that the Tories are no longer the monsters under the bed of Labour lore and SNP scare tactics.

That would pose a perception problem for nationalism. Tories cannot be your oppressors at Westminster when they are your neighbours in Wishaw. Independence has lost the economic argument and could be losing the political one, too.

Only a fool would take these new Tory voters for granted and ruth Davidson is no fool. She understands that people abandoned by Labour and now the SNP are all out of goodwill for politicians.

They want their hopes and struggles alike to take priority – where they should have been all along. Their votes on Thursday will have been for naught if they have simply replaced one phalanx of constitutional obsessives with another. The Tories need a fresh policy platform detailing how they will give everyone a better life.

There is a month until Scotland returns to the polls. Towering majorities mean the SNP will win the most seats, but Miss Davidson has a chance to establish her Tories as the new centre ground, a party that puts fairness and prosperity ahead of arid nationalism.

The electorate is flanked on either side by an SNP that wants to take Scotland back to 2014 and a Labour Party that wants to take the uK back to the 1970s.

As Stealers Wheel didn’t quite sing, Scotland’s moderate majority are stuck in the middle with ruth.