Yousaf has it wrong: the SNP's real fight is with Labour

And not because the outcry coming from the Scottish right was justified. Characterisations of such a line as amounting essentially to a hate crime, directly or through performatively chin-stroking comparisons to the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act, were just crass. Particularly coming at the end of a week in which the man bankrolling the Conservative Party’s election campaign to the tune of £15 million was exposed as a racist who stated that Britain’s most prominent black MP should be shot.

No, the problem is the irrelevance of this message to the ground on which the coming General Election will be fought.

Now, if one squints one can see the reason why the SNP is going down this route. Most Scots harbour significant antipathy towards the Conservative Party, and so it isn't necessarily wrong to identify that as a lever it can pull to build and shore up its support in an election. Indeed, it is a lever it has pulled to significant effect in past elections in which the Conservatives were overwhelming favourites to win, arguing that the best way to stand up for Scottish interests at Westminster against a Conservative government would be to send a large cohort of nationalist MPs.

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Secondly, this election will be defined by the mood for change across the UK. An Ipsos UK poll at the end of January found that 69% of the British public believe it is time for a change at the next election, including 72% of its respondents in Scotland. That change means kicking the Conservatives out of office at Westminster, and so the SNP needs to find messaging relevant to that context.

Thirdly, Scottish Labour has found a convincing way to retake the anti-Conservative position from the SNP. With Labour on the verge of government, it has begun characterising the SNP’s messaging on standing up for Scotland as "sending a message" in contrast to its ambition to "send a government". The message is clear: where SNP MPs would remonstrate and grandstand on Scotland’s behalf, Scottish Labour MPs would govern. The SNP needs to find a way to neutralise that message.

So why is the Tory-free Scotland line not the solution here? Foremost, it is impossible to paint the election as a straight-up contest between the SNP and the Conservatives because it isn’t true, and voters can see that.

The SNP’s National Campaign Council took place in the Westminster seat of Perth and Kinross-shire, and the First Minister used my home seat as a token example of the supposed SNP-Conservative two-horse race.

The implied results for the new Perth and Kinross-shire seat, had it been fought at the 2019 election, do suggest a two-way SNP-Conservative contest. The SNP’s Pete Wishart MP would have won with around 47% of the vote to the Conservatives' 39%, with Labour languishing on 5%.

But with the significant shifts in Scottish polling over the past year and a half, current polls would suggest a tighter, three-way race. The SNP would probably hold the seat, down 11 points on 36%, with the Conservatives also down 11 points on 28%. Labour would be up 18 points, on 23%.

That’s not quite tight enough to qualify as a three-way marginal, but it is much closer than would have been expected in 2019, and the same pattern repeats across formerly SNP-Conservative contests. SNP Westminster Leader Stephen Flynn’s Aberdeen South seat, for example, is projected to become an SNP-Labour marginal; it would have been a comfortable win for the SNP in 2019, with Labour coming fourth.

And this is before we get to the key contests in the upcoming election, those between the SNP and Labour across the Central Belt and Scotland’s urban centres, where the Conservatives will, with a couple of exceptions, be an electoral afterthought.

The fact is that this election will not be a straight fight between the SNP and the Conservatives. It will be a straight fight between the SNP and Labour.

Stephen Flynn’s Aberdeen South seat is projected to become an SNP-Labour marginal (Image: PA)

And in that fight, the "Tory-free Scotland" line is completely meaningless. Mr Yousaf’s argument against Labour appears to boil down to the accusation that they are merely "Red Tories". And that’s where his call to reject Tory ideas, policies, and values comes in: voters are supposed to link Labour to the Conservatives.

The problem is that they won’t. The voters the SNP need to win back from Labour to have a chance of winning the General election in Scotland have already decided that Labour is worth taking a chance on again. The key to winning them back is giving them a better vision of life in the UK than that on offer from Labour.

And given that these voters are to the left of the middle English voter Labour is geared towards appealing to, there is space for that kind of message to work. Indeed, there were glimpses of it in the First Minister’s speech on Saturday. Labour is vulnerable to accusations that it will not properly invest in the just transition and will not truly reverse the decade-plus of austerity the entire UK is struggling to overcome.

There are dividing lines to be drawn here between Labour and the SNP, lines the SNP can win on and lines the SNP must establish and hammer home from now until the election if they are to succeed.

The key is finding the right framing and campaign strategy to draw these lines and achieve the cut-through necessary to persuade voters. This latest Tory-free Scotland wheeze does not inspire much confidence that the SNP’s leadership have the skills necessary to do so, though only time will tell.