The question I want to talk about today is “how did we get here?” although I realise we may not agree on where “here” is. But bear with me because I want to have a stab at an explanation. And a conversation I had recently with an SNP MP has made me think, I hope, a little more deeply about the subject.

But first: where is “here”? Some might say “here” is a Scotland dominated by the constitutional question and politically controlled by the SNP. Others might say we’re still dominated by Tories we didn’t vote for, but whatever your view, we can probably agree that Labour has collapsed in Scotland and the SNP has filled the gap they left behind as the main force against the Tories. So the question is: why did it happen and is it forever?

One of the traditional explanations for it all is that many Scots finally lost patience with being ignored or shafted by Westminster Tories and you can see by the way in which the SNP leadership behave that they still feel the power of this argument – the word “Tory” is number one in their armoury of angry words. But I suspect, having talked to lots of people who’ve moved to the SNP, that Westminster wasn’t necessarily the main motivating factor. It’s much closer to home than that, more personal, more local.

In a way, the MP I spoke to – Hannah Bardell, SNP MP for Livingston – is a classic example. One of the places we went to when I met her was the street in Livingston where she grew up in the 80s and it was obvious that Margaret Thatcher loomed large. Ms Bardell told me that the only time she saw her granny, a demure and quietly spoken woman, really furious was when Mrs Thatcher called the miners the enemy within.

Ms Bardell’s mum felt pretty much the same way. Having gone to university – the first in her family to do so – she trained as a social worker and was working on the frontline of Edinburgh’s heroin explosion of the 80s and 90s. Living on the Craigshill council estate in Livingston, she also saw poverty first hand and money was tight. “My mum had a good job,” Ms Bardell told me, “but this was before proper child benefit. We struggled.”

The response of the Bardells to the situation was the traditional one of families in similar circumstances across Scotland – they supported Labour. But the details of what changed it for them are interesting because both Ms Bardell and her mother are now supporters of, and activists for, the SNP. In that sense, they are typical of hundreds of thousands of working class Scots who – for want of a better phrase – “switched sides”.

What seems to have swung things for them is the kind of hyper-local issues that Labour, and the SNP, ignore at their peril. By the early 90s, Hannah’s local school, Craigshill High, was under threat of closure and even though Hannah’s mother and many others in the community fought the decision, the Labour council eventually pushed it through and that was that. The locals also felt that the council weren’t providing many of the services and facilities the community really needed.

For Ms Bardell and others, years and years of the same kind of thing left its mark. Her mother fighting the Craigshill school decision is her earliest political memory – the late nights of planning, powered by fags and wine, and the protests and the placards – but it also left her with the feeling that Scottish communities were being taken for granted by Labour. This is something many, many people have told me in traditionally Labour-supporting communities and sometimes the reason many, many people say something is because it’s true.

But if people like Hannah Bardell and communities like Craigshill partly or mainly swung to Labour because of what they saw happening in their streets (or not happening in their streets) under Labour councils, then the question you have to ask is whether it’s a lasting effect, whether Labour can recover and, more importantly, whether the SNP could become subject to the same kind of effects that brought Labour down? In other words, could a similar kind of disappointment and disillusion start to erode SNP support?

The answer is probably “yes but not yet”. Hannah Bardell told me about an interesting encounter she had with a voter in Livingston recently in which the voter made a remark about lockdown parties and how “all MPs are the same”; it was an encounter, said Ms Bardell, that left her feeling upset that some people might put her in with the Boris Johnsons of this world. It also took her aback because she’s proud of the work she’s doing in her town and had just been involved in the talks to save the Valneva vaccine plant.

In the end, though, it would seem to me that this kind of general cynicism that exists about politicians – the “all the same” argument – is much more likely to affect the Tories than the SNP even though the nationalists have had their own fair share of scandals. Much more concerning for the SNP, I would have thought, is the risk that the kind of feeling Hannah and her mum had about Labour taking them for granted in Craigshill may be repeated in time with the SNP in other communities like it. It’s this – the low-key, low-level, local effect – that may carry the greatest danger for the nationalists.

In some ways, it’s already happening. I’ve heard it in Shettleston from people concerned about drugs. I’ve heard it too from people in Kinning Park about litter. And I’ve heard from people in Govanhill about crime. Some of those people blame the Tories, some still blame Labour, but increasingly I hear anger about SNP politicians and councils taking them for granted or not giving them the help they need and often they say that it’s happening, and they’re being ignored, because they live in deprived communities.

What’s interesting is that this is exactly what Hannah Bardell said to me about Craigshill and Labour. “People felt under attack,” she said, “and it was the poorest communities who were attacked because they thought we wouldn’t fight back”. In Hannah’s case obviously, they very much did fight back and, in the long run, it led to many voters abandoning Labour and going over to the SNP. The problem for the nationalists is that there are some people in Scotland’s poorest communities who are starting to feel the same way about the SNP. They haven’t changed their allegiance yet – or least not in significant numbers – but in time the drugs and the litter and the crime might change that.

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