Sturgeon’s losing streak

To The Independent

So Nicola Sturgeon says the local election results are “an emphatic victory” for the SNP. Really? On one level, indeed they are. The SNP has more or less repeated its 2012 local election result in terms of seat numbers, with more councillors than any other party in Scotland. Plus most Tory gains came from Labour, not the nationalists.

While local control is important to the SNP, Sturgeon has her sights on the bigger Westminster prize – and it’s here she faces losses, rather than simply maintaining a steady position. The 2012 local election was way before the massive surge in SNP support in late 2014 and 2015. Merely matching her party’s 2012 performance starkly demonstrates how much ground the SNP has lost since the 2015 Westminster election. The SNP secured significantly less than 40% of the local

election “first preference” vote – that’s more than 10% less than achieved in 2015. Plus, last week the Tories secured a high ratio of “first preference” votes in their key target Westminster seats. Sturgeon is set to end up with more MPS than any other party north of the border in June. That’s beyond doubt – and of course, that’ll be hailed as “an emphatic victory” too.

But the much more crucial question is: how many additional seats will she lose compared to 2015? And, importantly, what impact would, say, another sub-40% SNP vote tally have on the validity of Sturgeon’s ongoing Indyref2 demands? As a barometer for the June vote, the local election result, far from being “an emphatic victory”, is an unmitigated disaster for the SNP. And whatever Sturgeon says for the benefit of TV audiences, she knows it. Martin Redfern, Edinburgh