Scotland’s future a burning question as Britain votes on ‘Super Thursday’
Britain goes to the polls in a bumper set of local elections today including a vote in Scotland that could hasten the break-up of the UK.
With the mayoralty of London, the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and seats in more than 100 local councils at stake, the results on “Super Thursday” will be regarded as a verdict on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government in the first UK elections since the onset of the pandemic.
But the most consequential race is in Scotland, where an outright victory for the Scottish National Party would pile pressure on Mr Johnson to agree to a second independence referendum.
The SNP was leading in the polls ahead of the Conservatives and Labour, but whether it will win an absolute majority to press its case for a referendum is less clear.
“Scotland is the one that matters,” Prof Jonathan Tonge, a political expert at the University of Liverpool, told The National.
“I think it dwarfs all others, to be quite honest, because the aftermath of it will probably dominate politics for some time afterwards.”
Mr Johnson said yesterday that a second referendum would be reckless as the country gets back on its feet after the pandemic.
“I think that most people in Scotland, most people around the whole of the UK, feel that … as we’re coming forwards out of a pandemic together, this is not the time to have a reckless, and I think irresponsible, second referendum,” he said.
Across the UK, Mr Johnson’s Conservatives experienced a revival in the polls as the country’s rapid vaccination programme led the country out of lockdown. However, Mr Johnson also faces immorality allegations that dominated headlines in the final weeks of the election campaign.
The Labour opposition led by Sir Keir Starmer is hoping for signs of recovery 18 months after it suffered a historic thrashing at the last general election in 2019.
But it faces a potential setback at a closely watched by-election in Hartlepool, a pro-Brexit, working-class town typical of the former Labour heartlands that defected to the Conservatives in 2019.
A Conservative victory in Hartlepool “would imply that the Labour party has an extremely high mountain to climb” ahead of the next general election in 2024, said Prof Tony Travers of the London School of Economics.
“Hartlepool is enormously important as an indicator of the Conservatives’ capacity to change and to become relevant to people who, until very recently, were hardcore Labour voters,” he said.
In London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan is expected to win a second term as mayor with little difficulty against his Conservative challenger Shaun Bailey.
Mr Khan is running for re-election five years after he became the first Muslim mayor of a major western capital.
But Labour faces a struggle to make significant gains outside London, where a series of further mayoral elections are taking place.
Late polls showed Conservative mayors on course for re-election in the Tees Valley and West Midlands areas where they scored landmark victories in 2017.
“Even doing well in London carries with it this slightly awkward implication for Labour that they’re increasingly just a party of big cities,” said Prof Travers.
The Hartlepool result is expected early tomorrow morning, but the picture in Scotland will not become fully clear until Saturday. The result in London is not expected before Saturday evening.
Results from the local council elections will keep trickling in until at least Sunday, with one YouGov model projecting that Labour would lose further ground in its former heartlands.
“You would expect, at this stage of the electoral cycle, the opposition party to be making significant headway,” said Prof Tonge.
“The fact that they are not expected to make a huge amount of gains speaks volumes about the parlous state of the party.”