Scottish Daily Mail

Wave of indifferen­ce

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THE local elections are over and the voters have spoken. That much is clear... although less clear is what they intended to say.

The SNP was rewarded with gains despite its woeful record. Labour finished in second place for the first time in six years, but its success came at the expense of the Tories rather than the Nationalis­ts.

The Lib Dems barely registered on the campaign trail. Yet they too picked up a raft of seats. Most troubling were advances made by the Greens, an extremist outfit boasting every flavour of crank imaginable.

This seems to have been the election of the anti-vote – electors who voted against, rather than for, someone and those who stayed home altogether. As great exercises in democracy go, this was neither a landslide nor a wave, but a shrug of the shoulders.

Douglas Ross in particular will be bitterly disappoint­ed. The Tory leader gave it his all. But in the end he could not escape from the shadow of Partygate.

However, one poor election result does not define his tenure in the Tory top seat. Ross gave the most resolute defence of the Union during the campaign and has shown himself to be a formidable foe for Nicola Sturgeon.

Remarkably, Unionist parties polled 50 per cent of the vote, compared with 40 per cent for independen­ce-supporting parties.

Sturgeon did not get things all her own way. SNP seats fell to Labour and the Greens. Her Holyrood coalition stitch-up, a self-serving piece of Nationalis­t politickin­g, may in fact have handed Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater a larger platform from which to campaign.

If the parties want to ‘learn lessons’ from these results, here is the most urgent one: families are struggling.

All they want is to see these problems tackled head-on and soon.

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