This is the first election where rural voters actually matter

Last week, it was the ongoing failure by the Scottish Government to dual the A9 in a timely manner, with Nicola Sturgeon apologising in parliament for it.

A couple of weeks before that it was the state of rural health services, after a woman having an allergic reaction almost died because she struggled to access the emergency care she needed on Skye.

And barely a week goes by without a ferry breaking down or some revelation coming to light in the fiasco of the overbudget, overdue ferries MV Sannox and MV Glen Rosa.

Rural communities are becoming a major focus of all the parties’ efforts (Image: free)

The Scottish Government’s openness to scrapping the bodies that own and operate Scotland’s ferries, and creating a new organisation – reported yesterday in The Herald – is an indication of how deep these problems run. It shows, perhaps, that ministers understand a big gesture is required after years of intractable problems.

All in all, rural communities have had enough and politicians have noticed. With many hotly contested seats in countryside areas, rural communities – for once – are becoming a major focus of all the parties’ efforts. This election, believe it or not, is on one level a fight for the heart of rural Scotland.

We saw that on Monday in the first televised Scottish leaders’ debate. Rural poverty and health services, fishing policy and jobs in the north-east of Scotland all featured prominently.

You could argue, of course, that people everywhere feel everything’s broken, full stop. Country’s going to the dogs, folk say, from Sussex to Sumburgh, from big cities to tiny clachans.

But the feeling that it’s been bad for a while in rural Scotland, and isn’t getting better, has been growing. The Herald’s series on rural depopulation pointed to an existential risk to some communities. Good public services and transport links are critical to stop historic villages slowly turning into ghost towns.

Clearly, all this poses a particular problem for the SNP. This election may not be about their record in government, strictly speaking, but discontent with their approach will be punished by some voters at the ballot box in July anyway. Talk to island ferry or fishing campaigners and they describe feeling as if Holyrood is as distant from their lives and priorities as Westminster is. This doesn’t reflect terribly well on the SNP, given its endless taunts about the neglectful nature of the UK government towards Scotland.

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SNP serial rebel Fergus Ewing accused Nicola Sturgeon of shifting focus to the central belt when she took over from Alex Salmond.

The problems certainly started piling up under Sturgeon’s administration. SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes, MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, saw the danger. She even made her opposition to the Scottish Government’s plan for Highly Protected Marine Areas (hated by coastal communities) a dividing line with Humza Yousaf in the SNP leadership campaign last year. But she lost.

So this is fertile ground for the opposition parties and there’s much to play for. Around 20 Scottish Westminster seats currently held by the SNP could be called rural or semi-rural. The SNP’s current standing in the polls makes those seats more vulnerable.

The Scottish Tories hope that they will benefit, since in several key rural constituencies, they came second to the SNP in 2019. And they have been agile. Last year, they launched their own campaign, Standing Up for Rural Scotland.

But they have two problems. One is the buffoonery of the UK Tory government. Across the UK, farmers and rural communities generally are disillusioned by the Conservatives. Farmers, for instance, have been alarmed by post-Brexit trade deals with Australia and New Zealand which, though worth vanishingly little to the UK economy overall, could do serious damage to farmers. This is because they are set to allow meat and animal products into the UK in a few years’ time, produced to lower standards, that would undercut British farmers on price.

The other problem is that Labour is doing rather well in former Tory rural heartlands, for the first time pretty much ever. Labour is chipper about this and feels confident in what it’s offering, including its pledge to cut red tape making it easier for farmers to sell their produce on the continent. They are also benefiting from the desire for change among discontented voters who, like voters everywhere else, are scunnered by the cost-of-living crisis and poor public services.

In Scotland too, Labour are likely to see their vote rise in rural as well as their traditional urban constituencies.

Fishing is a key area for some voters (Image: free)

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, have a long-standing association with rural Scotland which they’ll be hoping to build on.

So the fight is on. People living in villages, farming communities and coastal towns around Scotland will no doubt be relieved occasionally to hear their concerns aired by politicians.

But they’ll also want to know whether this interest will be sustained. The feeling of being out of sight and out of mind has become grimly familiar to them. Politicians’ sudden fascination with them may be gratifying, but they’ll wonder whether it will it continue after all the votes have been counted in a month’s time.

They may actually find that it does. Scotland’s rural population may be diminishing, but it’s sizeable and politically important. The way people in rural Scotland vote might not determine who walks into Downing Street in July, but it could change the political story, helping determine who’s on the up and who’s going down. At the Scottish parliament election in two years’ time, those votes could be decisive in who wins power. So the message from rural Scotland to Scotland’s political classes is really this: ignore us at your peril.