SNP paid price for its love-in with the EU and hatred of Brexit

SUCH was the scale of the SNP triumph at the 2015 General Election – mincing its opponents and winning all but three of Scotland’s 59 constituencies – that no one expected the party to shed more than half a dozen seats when Theresa May went to the country in June.

The shock on the night, then, was all the greater. Voters deserted the Nationalists in droves – 21 MPs fell, including such grandees as Alex Salmond, Angus Robertson and George Kerevan.

Of the 35 survivors, all had greatly reduced majorities. Several hung on by fewer than a hundred votes. In North East Fife, Stephen Gethins survived by a princely two. Nowhere did the Nationalists win 50 per cent of the poll and, though they nevertheless still had a comfortable majority of Scottish seats, the election felt like a disaster.

That was partly because of the sheer shock of the results: not just the breakout of the revived Scottish Tories, which had been widely foreseen, but the wholly unexpected – if limited – local resurgence of Scottish Labour. The party snatched six SNP seats despite further decline in national vote share.

But it was also – as perspiring Nationalist MPs acknowledge off the record – because they came so close to doing a great deal worse.

Their 37 per cent of the poll in June, heavily down from the 49.9 per cent in 2015, was close to the ‘PR floor’.

SNP support is not heavily concentrated in one Scottish region. It therefore needs a high national vote to win a lot of seats, in the order of 35 per cent or so. The margin between 30-odd seats and, say, six is perilously thin. Off the record, a senior figure believes only three Nationalist MPs are safe.

Academics at Manchester University have studied Scotland’s election results and confirm what most of us suspected: the Nationalists lost, by the tens of thousands, most of those who had voted Yes in 2014, and SNP a few months later but, in June last year, voted to leave the European Union.

Around 30 per cent of habitual SNP voters backed Brexit last year – and four out of ten of them deserted the Nationalists two months ago, repelled by its pro-EU message.

By contrast, only one in ten Yes/Remain voters abandoned the SNP. And the impact of all this was perhaps especially grievous because Yes/Leave voters are concentrated in the traditional Nationalist shires of North-East Scotland, where Tory slaughter, in June, proved spectacular.

It was all finally compounded by Ruth Davidson and her party winning over many older Unionist voters from Labour and, granted the handful of Liberal Democrat gains too, the whiff of tactical voting. (In Edinburgh, particularly, collusion between Unionist parties was most evident.)

The General Election should have been fought over Brexit. In the end, granted Theresa May’s dreadful manifesto and her hopelessness as a campaigner, it became – in the wider UK – about her. But in Scotland we ended up with a referendum on the SNP – executed by an increasingly exasperated Scottish public – and more than six out of ten of us rejected the Nationalists.

To a degree this should be put in context. The 2015 result was unprecedented and faintly freaky. Because of the independence referendum, months earlier, the number of Scots registered to vote was unusually high and the turnout in that plebiscite had been extraordinarily so – 87 per cent of the electorate.

Nicola Sturgeon, the new First Minister, was then basking in high popularity and a vague ‘stand up for Scotland’ message went down well, especially as none of the Westminster party leaders had the least Scottish connection and all were unpopular.

But the SNP had hitherto struggled in Westminster contests. It is not, after all, a party contending for London government and, with devolution established, it is not easy to explain why we need Nationalist MPs at Westminster.

In 2010 – less than a year before we happily endorsed the Nationalists at Holyrood with an overall majority – we sent only six Nationalist MPs to the House of Commons.

And they are all but impotent when the government of the day has an effective working majority. We need not delineate the accomplishments of the 56 Nationalists in the last Parliament: there are none. And that the survivors are led by someone as pedestrian as Ian Blackford suggests little significant talent.

Errors

But elections are about far more than trends and forces and, whatever spin you might put on those SNP reverses, you cannot ignore the strategic errors of Nicola Sturgeon.

The most obvious was her aggressive decision, in February, to announce her pursuit of another referendum on independence.

It should not need to be pointed out that if opinion polls show most Scots do not want independence, then most will not want a referendum on it; or that, amid all the uncertainties of Brexit and the clock rapidly ticking towards 2019, most ordinary Scots would like just one existential constitutional crisis at a time, thank you very much.

But one can never underestimate the vanity of the First Minister or the Nationalist arrogance that has prevented her party ever properly coming to terms with the 2014 result and asking themselves, candidly, why they lost.

The SNP does not believe it was defeated in 2014. It thinks it was robbed. It has, accordingly, demonised the newspapers, the BBC, the ‘Establishment’ and even the Queen. It has refused to engage with the majority of Scots who voted No and it has not even tried to address the issues that hampered it most: the currency of an independent Scotland and a ‘lender of last resort’.

Miss Sturgeon and the tiny coterie around her who command the SNP believe they came heartbreakingly close to 2014 victory and that, not least by dint of her sheer charisma, the First Minister could well pull off a Yes victory in a second attempt.

But they had not, of course, foreseen a General Election months later and, inevitably, Indyref 2 became its central Scottish issue. Indeed, Ruth Davidson spoke joyously of nothing else, as SNP candidates tried desperately to talk about anything but, and Miss Sturgeon admits privately it was a calamitous liability.

The Manchester analysis, though, shows a still bigger mistake – and one executed within scarcely an hour by Nicola Sturgeon, very early on a Friday morning rather suddenly last summer, as millions woke to learn we had voted to leave the European Union.

The First Minister looked at the numbers, saw only a substantial Scottish majority for Remain and decided to focus on converting as many No voters among them as possible to the cause of independence.

But she ignored the many Yes and SNP voters who had backed Leave and, in the end, fatally strained our patience.

Muddle

If a third of your supporters want to leave the European Union, it is not a great idea to campaign intemperately to remain in it, forbid anyone in your party from campaigning for Leave and bang on about the EU for month after month after the great majority of us accepted the decision had been made, that it was time to move on and that we would somehow muddle through.

There are deeper matters too. The SNP is historically a Eurosceptic party. Almost alone it noisily campaigned to reject the Common Market in the 1970s and, as late as 1983, it stood on a manifesto of leaving it.

It may have since moved on – thanks largely to Winnie Ewing and Jim Sillars – but much of its traditional support never has and, in June, those men and women were provoked beyond endurance by a party that seemed to ooze contempt for them and whose faltering grasp of little luxuries such as roads and schools has grown incontestable.

Miss Sturgeon remains in command – for now – of an SNP that has always been pathetically loyal to its leadership. But she is no longer an electoral asset. And dissent does not long hold its tongue once a winner starts losing.