With the Scottish Parliament elections now less than 22 months away, it is true that the SNP needs to find a way to get on the front foot, and rapidly. But a leadership contest is hardly the way to achieve that.
Yesterday was the first election in my life that I went into the polling station entirely unsure of who I was going to vote for. Since 2010, I’ve voted in 12 elections and referendums and in each case, I knew well ahead of the vote which box (or boxes) my cross (or preferences) were going into. I’ve voted SNP and Labour and given preferences to all the main parties apart from the Conservatives, and in each case, I’ve voted positively for something.
From day one, Scottish Labour’s campaign has been fought on two fronts, at once against the Conservative UK Government and the SNP Scottish Government. Their manifesto mentions the Conservatives 53 times, and the SNP 40 times. Anas Sarwar has consistently deployed the refrain that Scotland is being failed by “two bad governments”.
With just under two weeks to go, we are on course for a ground-shaking general election result. Labour are on course to win the popular vote by around 20 points, blowing Margaret Thatcher’s record 1983 winning margin of 14.8 points out of the water. Most projections have them winning the most seats since Stanley Baldwin’s victory in 1931 – some project Labour winning more seats than any single party in the United Kingdom’s 317-year history.
The response across European political and media classes when the French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced the dissolution of the French Parliament to hold snap elections at the end of this month verged on hysterical.
We have to ask what secessionist politics in Scotland will look like with a newly vulnerable SNP and a Labour government in London
A spectre is haunting Scottish politics – the spectre of secessionism. This election is not about Scottish independence, and the issue is nowhere near the top of voters’ agendas, yet the aftereffects and implications of a decade of constitutional obsession loom large.
In six weeks, we will have an incoming Labour government at Westminster. Labour will pour cold water on that sentiment. The Conservatives will big up the chances of the polls being wrong or missing some dynamic that will turn the election in their favour. But make no mistake, our drenched and embattled Prime Minister announced on Wednesday that he was crashing his Conservative government into the ground in a blaze of ignominy rather than allowing it to glide to an unceremonious end later in the year.
When attempting to secede from a state, as the Scottish independence movement seeks to do, or to defeat a secessionist movement, as the UK’s governing political parties seek to do, it is natural to look abroad to similar movements and similar states to learn lessons from them.
To govern is to choose, and Mr Swinney will have to choose carefully to maintain party unity long enough for his strategy to pay off. But unlike his predecessor, Mr Swinney at least has a strategy, and his Cabinet reshuffle was the first big indicator of what that strategy is.
