Sturgeon has no majority and therefore no mandate

NICOLA Sturgeon is naturally proud that the SNP won the Scottish parliament election. It is another term in office after 14 years in government and it was a campaign fought in difficult circumstances: Covid, verbal blows from her estranged predecessor and the defence of so many seats where SNP incumbents had stood down.

But the Scottish National Party did not secure an overall majority and, accordingly, has no mandate for a second independence referendum and cannot demand one.

In any event, Sturgeon gave that issue little prominence – especially in the final days of the campaign.

The one party that did unambiguously holler for one was Alex Salmond’s Alba. Which, when the regional list votes were finally counted, came nowhere, not even in North East Scotland, the former First Minister’s historic stomping ground and where he was the top candidate.

People turned away from him, embarrassed by the shell of their former hero. Anyway, as Nicola Sturgeon weeks ago crisply pointed out, the Alba strategy was ‘trying to gamble with the system, game the system, take a chance on the outcome of the election... if you want to see an SNP government elected that then has the ability to deliver an independence referendum, then you don’t get that by voting for somebody else. You only get that by voting SNP.’ Which most who turned out in the end didn’t.

STURGEON’S dismissal of Alba’s approach also, in turn, precludes her from claiming the election of eight Green MSPs as a majority for independence.

All were returned on the regional list and, in most real live constituencies, there was no Scottish Green candidate. The Greens, too, are essentially identified as a party of climate-change catastrophism, Marxist-Lentillist economics and the wilder shores of sexual politics: not a franchise that puts independence first and foremost.

Why did the SNP fail to win an overall majority? First and foremost, because the Scottish parliament electoral system is engineered to prevent one. It was cooked up by Labour and the

Liberal Democrats to favour parties whose support was strongly concentrated in given regions – by coincidence, these were Labour and the Liberal Democrats – and to disadvantage those of diluted support across the country.

In 2011, when the Nationalists did out of nowhere win a supermajority, all three Westminster parties had campaigned extremely badly, the Nationalists had polled in exceptional strength on the regional list and a new Tory Prime Minister had failed to connect with most Scottish voters.

Such circumstances have not since been repeated. Although we kept hearing Boris Johnson was an electoral liability, where is the evidence for this? The Scottish Tories’ performance at the last Westminster election was, after all, their second best since 1992.

There was also, undoubtedly, significant tactical voting on this occasion against the Nationalists. This should not be oversold. In the end, the Nationalists shed no seats and stumbled in just two key targeted constituencies, Dumbarton and Eastwood. Either of those two Strathclyde seats would have won the SNP a majority.

In Edinburgh Central, where the Green vote visibly slumped, antiTory tactical voting probably gave Angus Robertson that youthful, bohemian seat for the SNP.

In the likes of affluent Edinburgh Western and Edinburgh Southern, supporters of the Union have been voting tactically for years; and lairdly West Aberdeenshire is not naturally an SNP fiefdom.

Ironically, the party that banged on about independence more than anyone else was the Scottish Tories, and their leader Douglas Ross can take just pride in hanging on to all the seats garnered under Ruth Davidson in 2016.

His campaign wasn’t pretty. The Conservatives did shed two constituencies and Mr Ross proved a stumbling television performer.

But it is hard to argue with the results. From Westminster, though, the Scottish outcome will be widely viewed through the prism of Labour’s disaster in Hartlepool – and to some degree for the same reasons. The SNP now dominates Scottish politics because it has all but dismantled Scottish Labour, the heat shield that for so long stood in the Nationalists’ way and which could always promise that, at least now and then, Labour could govern Britain.

It is now difficult to see Labour ever again as a party bidding for government, even in Edinburgh.

In the end, the affable and engaging Anas Sarwar had arguably the best campaign of any Scottish party leader and that it ended with the net loss of two seats is another reminder that there is no justice in politics.

But Sarwar could do little, perhaps, to reverse the growing perception that Labour, increasingly a metropolitan party of woke and not very successful graduates, no longer speaks for ordinary working people – and has far too many activists happy to ridicule them and their values.

THERE are three other points of note. One is that the SNP continues to amass constituency seats. If this trend cannot be reversed, that raises serious questions for their opponents and especially for the Union.

The second is the arrival of Angus Robertson in Holyrood. He is an assured and ebullient politician of great experience and not in the least beholden to Nicola Sturgeon. The role she in due course finds for him may give us some clue as to the degree she perceives him as a threat. Though the younger by a year, many wonder if the First Minister will have the appetite – or the standing – to lead her party into a third Holyrood contest.

Lastly, and above all, we are divided. Riven. Sundered. The country is split from top to bottom on independence – and the SNP is split between those who want a plebiscite as soon as possible and sager souls merely interested in a referendum they could actually win.

On the latest electoral evidence they do not deserve one. With honeyed words and some Whitehall guile, they must be denied.