This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
The SNP finds itself in a curious and unsettling position this weekend as the party stages its ‘national campaign council’ in Perth.
The event should be about the SNP energetically and enthusiastically readying itself for a general election the entire nation seems to be chomping at the bit for these days.
But the SNP is in no state to fight a general election. Polls show the party losing 28 seats at the next ballot.
The SNP and Scottish Labour are on the same vote share – 34% – but electoral geography means those figures will probably translate into the SNP returning 20 MPs and Labour 27.
That’s no way to go into a ‘campaign council’. The mood music is misery and despair, not hope and joy.
The SNP should be making hay out of the chaos around the Tories and extremism. Traditionally, when the Tories are in trouble, the SNP’s vote rises. But that’s not happening.
Read more:
Unspun | Neil Mackay: Scottish Police have been broken by politicians just like the NHS
Labour keeps incrementally catching the SNP, despite the problems and divisions Keir Starmer faces around the war in Gaza.
It’s hard to find anyone today who isn’t gagging for an election to bring the current Tory shambles to a speedy end. Well, apart from the Tories themselves and the SNP, of course. Both will be the big losers.
Rishi Sunak couldn’t have made a bigger mess of the issue of extremism if he tried. Early this month, the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street pontificating about extremists “trying to tear us apart”.
And the backdrop to that speech? The Prime Minister finding himself incapable of calling remarks by the MP Lee Anderson Islamophobic.
Anderson – who’s now defected to the hard-right Reform Party – said “Islamists” controlled London, and mayor Sadiq Khan had “given our capital away to his mates”.
This week we had the astonishing spectacle of Michael Gove telling us which organisations we should consider extremist, while the Tory Party’s biggest donor was found to have said Diane Abbott “should be shot”.
Frank Hester said “you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and… you just want to hate all black women”.
Little wonder many joke the best working definition of an extremist should be ‘a member of the Tory Party’.
Read more:
Unspun | Neil Mackay: Scottish Tories must split from extremist UK party to survive
Sunak refused to hand back the £10 million Hester donated to the party, and because Hester apologised Sunak said his “remorse should be accepted”. Gove said Hester’s remarks weren’t extremist and warranted “Christian forgiveness”.
Against this mayhem, the SNP’s polling should be clicking upwards as its auld enemy, the Conservative Party, shows there are yet more bottoms of more barrels left to scrape.
Conservatives have never been lower in the polls. By some estimates they’re heading for their biggest defeat.
But, frankly, the SNP is suffering from the same malaise as Conservatives. They’ve been in power too long and done far too little. Evidently, the order of magnitude when it comes to SNP failure versus Tory failure is night and day.
Tories have often been a malevolent force, whilst the SNP seems simply too inept and unimaginative to govern well. Nevertheless, voters are tiring of nationalists.
Read Neil Mackay every Friday in the Unspun newsletter.
The cost-of-living crisis – that’s breaking many families – has put both governments in the firing line.
The UK government may indeed have created the circumstances that are causing so much pain for so many, but political decision-making by the SNP in response to Tory austerity simply hasn’t been good enough.
Both will pay the price. It seems entirely unlikely, that the SNP, as it mulls the future at its ‘campaign council’, can find a way to arrest decline. It feels fate has been sealed for the governments in London and Edinburgh.
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