Ever since the local elections in England – which now feel like a lot more than three weeks ago – we’ve been listening to English pundits talk about how the missing part of the puzzle is Scotland. If Labour’s vote also increases north of the border, they say, it’s all over for Rishi Sunak and his gang. But they could be dangerously wrong.
In England, for the most part, politics is a two-horse race. The Liberal Democrats will probably make a few gains in the 4 July General Election that Sunak just announced, but for the most part, it will be a straight-out fight between the reds and the blues. In a situation like that, most people will find it easy to choose a side and vote with their hearts. In Scotland, however, the situation is more complicated. Several constituencies are split three ways, while others have a two way split with a third party strong enough to act as kingmaker, intentionally or not. Voters who want to get the Conservatives out will have to be smarter about it, because in the end, it doesn’t matter if Labour and the SNP get 33% each – a clear majority for change – if the Conservatives get 34%.
Marginal constituencies
The picture in Scotland is complicated by the recent boundary changes, but if one drills down into data on the different wards from which these constituencies are comprised, it’s not hard to see where the marginals are – and Scotland has a lot of them.
Despite its increasingly poor showing in UK polls, the Conservative Party hasn’t simply given up, and it still has target seats of its own. One of the foremost of those is Perth and Kinross-shire, where it has strong roots in comfortably off rural communities and even in the city of Perth itself. The SNP currently has the strongest showing in the region, with Labour way down in third place, but a Labour surge could easily weaken its position and might be enough to make the difference even if the Conservative vote falls, rebalancing in the Conservatives’ favour.
Alister Jack has not exactly seen his popularity soar in the thankless role of Secretary of State for Scotland, but he still has a 3.5% lead in Dumfries and Galloway. The SNP, which took second place at the last election, could easily knock him off his pedestal if it weren’t for the risk of its own vote dropping. Labour held the constituency from 2010 to 2015 but it’s extremely unlikely that it could make up the 33.9 percentage points necessary to win it. What it could do is eat into the SNP’s vote and enable Jack to survive.
In other seats, such as the newly created Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, Labour is unlikely to make a strong showing, but as the margin is very tight (based on the wards from which it is comprised), just a small rise in support for Labour could be enough to disrupt any hopes of the SNP taking it, with Conservative support traditionally resilient in the region even when the party is struggling elsewhere.
Which matters most: Labour wins or Conservative losses?
Are there areas where Labour could try to take seats from the SNP without this risk? Certainly. Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, for instance, is highly unlikely to fall to the Conservatives, and if you were to seriously suggest that Glasgow North East could turn blue, well, I’ve a squinty bridge to sell you. But the point is that prospective Labour voters are going to have to do their homework and pay attention to local polling rather than being swayed by the rhetoric from down south. In some constituencies they are going to have to ask themselves which is more important: Labour getting bigger numbers, or the Conservatives being ousted from Downing Street. They may not be able to have both.
Of course, we still shouldn’t assume that the way Scotland votes will influence the outcome of the election at all. It’s nonsense that Labour depends on it. In fact, in most elections since 1945, Scotland hasn’t made a bit of difference. Scottish votes denied the victorious Conservatives an outright majority in 1964 and 1974, doing the same to Labour later in 1974. They required the Conservatives to get support from the Liberal Democrats in 2010, but that’s it. Although Scottish votes tend to lean left, Labour has not historically needed them to win. And if it did? Suggesting that Scots have a duty to elect Labour MPs for everybody else’s sake is not so different from the commonplace suggestion that African Americans who vote Republican are letting their whole country down, as if white Americans don’t have every bit as much responsibility when they cast their votes.
Don’t take Scotland for granted
Scotland’s swing to the SNP in 2007 came about not just because of an increase in support for independence but because of a feeling that Labour was taking it for granted. The SNP is now suffering from the same effect, and neither party can afford to get careless. Scottish voters are, in most regions, far less inclined towards blind party loyalty than their counterparts in England, and it’s likely that many won’t make up their minds about this election until the last minute – so nobody should be relying on what the polls have to say.
Ultimately, voters have to ask themselves this: if Scotland’s votes do make a difference this time, could Conservatives who have clung on or sneaked in due to bickering between two parties which are both firmly to the left of them, could we inadvertently find ourselves propping up a right-wing UK government? And if the government was ousted but Keir Starmer didn’t secure a majority, would it matter that some Scottish seats went SNP? The notion that the SNP might do a deal with the Conservatives is ridiculous. They know fine well that in that event they would never be elected again. So why take a risk? If you want the Conservatives out, vote, on a local basis, for the person most likely to defeat them. Let’s make this one Independence Day that the vast majority of Scots voters can celebrate together.
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