Unionists need to show unity to stop Sturgeon’s referendum rerun

There’s not a great deal of mystery about today’s Scottish election. All that voters need to do if they don’t want a second independence referendum is to stop Nicola Sturgeon getting a decent majority by voting for one of the Unionist parties. And the best one of these is Douglas Ross’s Conservatives.

With the SNP having a lead in the polls, they’re bound to win the lion’s share of seats, but to gain an overall majority they need 65 out of the Holyrood total of 129, which is what La Sturgeon reckons would be enough to demand that Boris Johnson allows her to hold indyref2.

She says she’d wait until 2023 to stage a rerun of her 2014 defeat but if you accept that you probably still believe in the Tooth Fairy. And if she doesn’t hit the 65 mark on her own she will call on other “Natters” in the Greens and in Alex Salmond’s Alba to get her over the line. A combination of the SNP, the Greens, aka the “Iron Age Appreciation Society”, and possibly Wee Eck himself, running Scotland is a truly appalling prospect.

Any deal between Sturgeon and Salmond, who after years as partners now hate each other, is especially intriguing. Lord Ashcroft’s recent survey found that focus group members likened her to a Scottie dog, whilst him to a warthog, adding of Salmond that despite being cleared of sexual assault charges in court, most felt his reputation would not recover.

Said one: “His defence in court wasn’t that he’d been a completely upstanding guy. I think it was that he’d done some really creepy things that were unacceptable but not against the law. So he’s not been found guilty, but his reputation is completely down the drain.” Personally, I couldn’t agree more with that verdict.

All of which brings us back to Douglas Ross. The stern visage and one-track mind of this farm labourer’s son to do down Sturgeon has been unfairly contrasted in this campaign with Anas Sarwar’s happy-go-lucky persona, which at times has made the Labour leader look more like a Strictly contestant than a serious politician. However, it’s the Tory who has stuck rigidly to the basic “bash the Nats” mantra throughout.

In a desperate late bid to ignite its lacklustre campaign Labour drafted in Alistair Darling, the ex-labour chancellor and leader of the successful all-party Better Together campaign in 2014, to launch a fierce attack on the SNP. Forty-eight hours before the polls opened he appealed to Tories to cast their second, regional list, votes for Labour.

And in another 11th hour intervention former prime minister Gordon Brown slammed the SNP’S obsession with “waging a war against the Union” at a rally in Sturgeon’s and Sarwar’s Glasgow Southside constituency.

What I find especially infuriating is the way that Scottish Labour’s big guns – especially Brown – continually concentrate their fire against their traditional Tory enemies when it’s the nationalists who are their main threat. It’s the SNP that has taken all their seats in Glasgow and the West of Scotland and the SNP that poses the biggest threat to Labour ever winning enough Scottish seats to ever again form a UK government.

Yet time and time again it’s the Conservatives who are lambasted by Labour’s big guns until, as in the last few days, they come to their senses when it’s almost certainly too late.

Still, we should not despair. The opinion polls are all over the place, with one predicting a narrow SNP overall majority today and another suggesting bad news for Sturgeon.

Moreover, although the SNP will win most seats there are close fights taking place all over Scotland aimed at preventing them getting the big majority they think they deserve. And although its leadership refused to join a Unionist alliance against the separatists, ordinary Labour voters are happy to vote tactically against the SNP by putting their cross against Tory candidates. This should keep the three huge constituency seats along the border with England safe in Conservative hands and may help the Tories’ Liz Smith wrest South Perthshire from the nationalists.

And traditional Tory voters are expected to return the compliment by making sure Labour’s staunchest Unionist, Jackie Bailie, holds her Dumbarton marginal, which has a majority of only 109.

All of this means that as we head for the polling stations today I’m left asking why couldn’t we have had this cross-party Unionist unity at the start of this campaign, instead of the very end. One day, perhaps.

‘Lord Ashcroft’s survey found people likened Sturgeon to a Scottie dog while Salmond was seen as a warthog’

‘I find it infuriating that the Labour big guns concentrate their fire on the Tories when the SNP is their main threat’