The 2024 General Election in Scotland

Will it be SNP wipeout?

When I teach Higher Politics Political Parties and Elections, one of the elections I pick is the SNP in Scotland in the 2015 General Election. It was a remarkable, historic performance. Labour, hegemonic in Scotland for so long, was almost entirely wiped out, winning just one seat. The Tories, with no AMS to bail them out, only won one too. Same with the Lib Dems. The SNP won 56/59 constituencies with almost 50% of the vote.

It’s got it all for my class. The theme ‘Stronger for Scotland’ is the dominant idea candidates are asked to write about. Who could argue against ‘Stronger for Scotland’? Do you want Scotland to be weaker? It was classic New Labour triangulation! Everyone wants Scotland to be stronger and in the aftermath of 2014 there was no mention of independence anywhere. Stronger for Scotland could mean anything to anyone and a nice big tent could be pitched up.

Nice idea.

Exam questions ask for other factors to be taken into account. Leadership was definitely one. Nicola Sturgeon was on all the SNP election materials. The affable, positive Nicola Sturgeon could be compared with Labour’s then Scottish leader, Jim Murphy, who even Labour’s own voters disowned due to his association with the Tories in Better Together.

The air war was great too. A shiny faced Martin Compston (he’s still shiny faced!) delivered the Stronger for Scotland patter to erstwhile Labour strongholds. On the ground the SNP’s yellow jacketed young team took to the doorsteps supported by the kind of software that could fly a rocket never mind locate a Stronger for Scotland inclined voter.

The backdrop, of course, was 2014. It took only the last gasp intervention of Gordon Brown and ‘The Vow’ to stop YES from winning. The Tories and the Lib Dems couldn’t beat the YES side. It took Labour and big beast Labour at that to sway the undecideds. It was a close thing. The 45% who voted YES a year previously, many of whom had joined the SNP, were clearly going to vote SNP. But so too were many NO voters. They’d decided to play safe (as they saw it, Better Together told them a YES vote would take Scotland out of the EU!) but wanted to send Westminster a message not to take Scotland for granted. That was ‘the zeitgeist’.

It all seems so long ago now. Alex Salmond and Nicola were pals. No one had heard of Covid. Boris Johnson wasn’t on the menu. Brexit hadn’t been invented. The SNP’s 56 MPs took their seats and most of them must have thought that was them for quite some time. Labour was routed and in disarray, north and south (although Corbyn did much better in 2017 than anyone thought he would). The Tories were in power and much as the SNP would deny it, it always suits them to have the Tories in power at Westminster than Labour.

Fast forward eight years and my take is that 2024 may well be the opposite of 2015. This time the SNP may well get routed. The remaining 48 SNP MPs’ jaikets are on shoogly nails.

Why? Loads of reasons.

The furore over Andrew Graham/Isla Bryson/the individual has been a tipping point.

It calls into question Nicola Sturgeon’s judgement, shines a light on her record as First Minister and lays bare the divisions within the SNP/YES camp.

• Education: continued inequalities and scrapping with teachers

• Health: the lambasted care strategy and funding gaps

• Ferries: Possibly £500m doon the watter and questions over procurement

• Forgotten party loans and missing funds

• The Deposit Return Scheme which is threatening hospitality industries already on the brink

• The lack of progress, nay, thinking of how independence could come about

Quite a rap sheet.

There looks like there won’t be a General Election till December 2024 and the usual caveats about a week being a long time etc apply.

But… the Tories look gubbed. Surely the only question is how big is the Labour win going to be? The Government is currently 29 points behind Labour in the polls and has been at least 20 points behind for some time. The economy, while not heading for the recession many feared, is hardly likely to enter boom time before December 2024. Keir Starmer may not be the radical many on the Left want but he doesn’t frighten the Southern horses and the Red Wall, this time, doesn’t have anywhere else to go. A record number of Tory MPs have presumably seen the future and don’t fancy it very much. They’re standing down.

By contrast, prospective Scottish Labour MPs are standing up! Scottish Labour is announcing all of its prospective parliamentary candidates and it was interesting to see Douglas Alexander throwing his hat in the ring in East Lothian. Opposition didn’t appeal to Mr Alexander.

If Scottish voters want to send the SNP a message, the Westminster election would be the place to do it. It’s hard to point to any convincing reason for all but the committed to vote SNP. The SNP laid a good glove on Labour in the past with it’s ‘feeble 50’ taunt but it’s hard to point to anything of substance the 56 SNP MPs achieved.

It now looks likely that the SNP plan to turn the 2024 election into a referendum will be shelved.

Nicola Sturgeon herself may well decide she’s had enough. Or the men in grey kilts will come for her. Given the divisions over the GRA and independence strategy any leadership contest would, in all likelihood, be a bruising and bloody one. Not a great look to voters.

The SNP can’t win a General Election but Labour can. That surely will be Scottish Labour’s message and one, I suspect, which will be a popular one.