Unionists are on the march – and it’s thanks to the SNP

By creating a binary divide and stoking it with grievance, Sturgeon’s party has helped rivals, writes Brian Monteith

Just as many of us expected, there have been two general election campaigns in Britain this time round; in England and Wales it was Theresa May and her Conservatives versus Jeremy Corbyn and Labour – but in Scotland it has been the nationalist SNP that has been put under examination by the unionist Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

The unfolding events of the latest London terrorist assault, following the Manchester atrocity, are unlikely to change this fact substantially.

If we take the United Kingdom as a whole we have had three debates, for Northern Ireland is already ahead of Scotland. For decades now it has been casting votes that are defined as unionist or nationalist, each with a myriad of parties, but weighed-in for either of the two piles. The point is that the revival of unionism in Scotland as a brand – a non-sectarian belief in Britain and remaining British – has been because of the SNP.

By creating a binary divide and continually stoking it with bitterness and grievance, the SNP has fed unionist solidarity. With three unionist parties, each claiming different approaches and varying degrees of devotion to the UK, there can be no Stalinist discipline as there is in the SNP, but there is a recognition that Scots want their failing public services rescued and that we already have the powers to do this – if only the Scottish Government would use them.

Thus in Scotland the general election question has focused not on Brexit, not on economic austerity, not even on social care. No, it has focused on independence and whether or not we should have a second referendum. It is not that the Unionist parties have been avoiding other issues – quite the contrary – but the snag for the SNP is that the funding and delivery of public services is devolved and has been under the SNP’S control for ten years.

When education or the NHS has taken centre stage in Scotland it has come about not through deft opposition campaigning but because of scandalous figures on falling literacy standards among our children or the SNP First Minister being taken to task by a nurse or teacher on live television.

Not only has this left Nicola Sturgeon struggling to find excuses, it has quickly rebounded on the SNP by exposing her and the government she leads for failing to do the day job. These episodes keep bringing the debate back to the SNP’S fixation on independence – where the SNP is clearly in retreat. Having had time to take stock of the general election momentum swinging to the Unionists, Ms Sturgeon is backtracking on the timing of a second referendum, but when she “wins”, as her party is likely to, she’ll then claim she has been right all along.

This will be disingenuous in the extreme. While the SNP can expect to be the largest party, both its number of MPS and vote share will fall. Despite erratic polling the total vote of the Unionist parties is regularly over 50 per cent and has even been over 60 per cent. That the first-past-the-post system can be expected to return more SNP MPS on this occasion will not mean the First Minister will have won a mandate. All eyes will instead be on the gains made at the SNP’S expense, not least those of the Conservatives who will add to Mrs May’s majority.

Ms Sturgeon’s will be a pyrrhic