STURGEON MAY CROW, BUT FEWER VOTED FOR SNP THAN FOR BREXIT

IT was the election that was never supposed to happen, with results few would have predicted a few years ago. Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party sweeping through Tory and Labour heartlands. A Lib Dem resurgence on a loud and uncompromising proEuropean ticket.

The Conservatives all but wiped out and Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn to a historic European election low on a platform that was, depending on the hour of the day, Europhile, Eurosceptic, both and neither.

The results in Scotland were no less striking. The SNP galloped into first place and, with three seats, has just one MEP fewer than the Tories do across the whole of the country.

With almost 38 per cent of ballots cast, the Nationalists enjoyed their best ever night in Europe. Before they get too fizzed on the bubbly, however, here are some numbers they won’t like quite as much. The SNP’s 594,553 votes are far fewer than the 1,018,322 Scots who voted Leave in 2016.

The SNP claimed 1,454,436 votes in the 2015 General Election, 1,059,897 constituency votes in the Holyrood 2016 poll and 977,569 ballots in the 2017 snap election. Every national election the SNP fights under Nicola Sturgeon, the fewer votes they come away with each time.

Between the high water mark of 2015 and last Thursday’s vote, the Nationalists misplaced more than 850,000 votes. Moreover, the real landslide winner was apathy, with only 39.9 per cent of voters turning out to vote. That was up on five years ago but struggling to get four in ten Scots to pop to the polling station does not suggest a nation in fury over Brexit and ready to turn to the SNP.

This was an exceptional election in exceptional circumstances and mining deeper meaning is fraught with hazards, as is attempting to translate election votes into hypothetical referendum votes. Even so, with pro-independence parties taking 46 per cent of the vote this time around, Nicola Sturgeon is not winning enough support to be confident of victory in another independence plebiscite.

Nationalists tell themselves a Boris Johnson win in the Tory leadership contest will do much of the work for them, but they underestimate his facility for selfdetonation and perhaps overestimate the appetite for a Brexitstyle gamble with Scotland’s political and economic future.

The stubborn fact remains: Scotland may be for Europe but it’s still not for independence. Voters are backing the Nationalists for Strasbourg, Westminster, Holyrood and local government but standing firm against separation and the SNP running an independent Scotland.

THE new second party of Scottish politics – when it comes to European matters, at least – is a mysterious creature. The Brexit Party polled higher than Ukip did in 2014, perhaps hinting at a marginally broader appeal. Louis Stedman-Bryce, its new MEP, becomes the only black politician to represent Scotland at Strasbourg, Holyrood or Westminster.

Whatever one might think of his party’s policies, that is surely a welcome move forward. The length of his political career will depend on whether MPs vote through a withdrawal deal and get on with delivering on the 2016 referendum result.

Scotland’s one million ignored Leave voters, if unsatisfied by the eventual resolution of Brexit, could well hand his party seats at the next Holyrood poll. Go on disregarding these people at your peril. That would be very bad news for Ruth Davidson. Her

party didn’t have as cataclysmic a night as its southern brethren but it was far from pleasant. The Scottish Tory vote fell almost 6 per cent. She is weighted down by the Brexit millstone the UK party chiselled for her. If it adorns her with Johnson as leader, she may sink altogether.

The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, are high as a kite. They have successfully rebranded themselves as the Party of Remain, Britain-wide. In Scotland, they came third because of the SNP’s rival claim to that mantle but it is still a very strong result for them.

One way Scotland diverged from the overall European picture was in the absence of a surge for the Greens. Lead candidate Maggie Chapman, the party’s coconvener, put 0.1 per cent on their 2014 performance.

What went wrong? At the risk of sounding uncharitable, Chapman was not made for national campaigns, which call for commanding oratory and a stomach for political rough-and-tumble.

The party under Patrick Harvie also behaves less like a separate entity and more like a semiautonomous faction of the SNP. For its target demographic, antiBrexit Labour voters, the knowledge they would be lending their vote to a Mini-Me SNP may have been off-putting.

There it is: the L-word. Labour. This was its very worst result, wiped out altogether, coming fifth for the first time. This election may prove to be Scottish Labour’s ELE, the term scientists use to describe an extinction-level event. The party managed 9 per cent of ballots, its worst Scottish showing in a national vote since the General Election of December 1910.

Its Brexit messaging was confused and elections to Westminster and Holyrood are fought on different issues, but this is just the latest dismal result for a party that no longer seems to know what it is, what it stands for or where it’s going.

RICHARD Leonard’s platform is currently polling below 20 per cent on Westminster voting intention and four in ten say Leonard himself is doing a bad job. Worse, more than half have no opinion of him at all. He has been Scottish Labour leader for 18 months and gone unnoticed by everyone but his closest allies. That is a level of anonymity even the witness protection programme cannot offer.

Labour’s troubles are many but three stand out. The first is Jeremy Corbyn, who is even more unpopular in Scotland than elsewhere in the nation. Next, the strides towards autonomy under Kezia Dugdale’s leadership have been reversed, rendering the Scottish branch office a marionette of Corbyn Labour at Westminster. Third, Leonard’s party lacks an identity, a purpose and ultimately a place in the Holyrood landscape.

There is no longer any point to the Labour Party and, if Thursday’s election presages its disappearance from Scottish politics, the only question is: will anyone notice it has gone?