Wings Over Scotland

An alert reader emails with a talking point:

Interesting idea, no?

The SNP were there for the taking in last week’s general election. Across the country they typically lost something around 10,000 votes per seat compared to the 2015 tsunami, and the vast majority of those seats formerly belonged to Scottish Labour.

Yet while Labour did take back six seats of the 41 they lost two years ago (most of them by wafer-thin margins), they fell short in dozens of others despite the huge scale of the SNP’s losses.

And the reason is that, even riding the coat-tails of the Jeremy Corbyn bounce, Kezia Dugdale’s northern regional branch office delivered a showing that was at best barely any better than the 2015 catastrophe, and in many cases actually worse.

We’re still on a break, really, but it’s a rotten dreich day today and we’re waiting in for a parcel, and we completed all our domestic administrative tasks yesterday, so just to kill a bit of time we number-crunched all the seats where Labour came second.

The results, if you’re Kezia Dugdale, should be dismally sobering.

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From just under two years ago.

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We know that people like to chat generally about issues of the day (and more) in the comments, so while we’re taking a break we’ll probably put up stuff like this now and again just so that we don’t end up with a single post with thousands of comments in it. (And so you know we haven’t been killed by bears.)

They probably won’t all be about politics. Call them conversation starters.

We’re going to take our own advice, chill out for a few days and enjoy the show as the No Surrender Tories desperately try to Frankenstein some sort of hilarious government together. There’s nothing much anyone can do to advance the cause of independence right now, there’s no urgent crisis in need of addressing, everybody’s pretty frazzled and crotchety, and a wee bit of downtime is probably the best thing for everyone.

It seems a better plan, at any rate, than running around panicking, screaming that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! or that nothing must be done ever again, that we must either declare UDI or give up on what many of us have believed in our whole lives and settle meekly for 2017’s feeble equivalent of The Vow – a shoddy, snivelling “soft Brexit” that’s not going to happen and would be awful even if it did.

Independence will still be here next week, folks. It’s not going anyplace. Obviously if anything dramatic should happen we’ll be on it, but otherwise we’ve got some movies and books and games and stuff to catch up on, and we recommend that you all do the same. Recharge your batteries. Smell the flowers. It’s been a long five years, frankly.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been a drastically reduced force in Westminster politics ever since they were all but wiped out (along with most of their UK colleagues) in the 2015 election. But there were still sizeable areas of the country where they retained a strong presence, even when they’d lost their seats.

That changed dramatically last Thursday.

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NB The following article is the view of an SNP activist, not Wings Over Scotland. Although we do agree with large parts of it.

Let’s be clear on some things. In most of Scotland that unsatisfactory election result had little to do with Brexit, or with “we don’t want another referendum”. It had nothing to do with the potential merits or otherwise of independence.

What gave us the result were chiefly two things.

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Simon Pia, former Scottish Labour spin doctor.

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We’ve written in the past about how rarely the vote in Scotland has any meaningful impact on the formation of the UK government, but the (first?) election of 2017 was one of those few occasions. Indeed, it could reasonably be argued that Scotland is mainly responsible for the complete mess that UK politics now finds itself in.

Had the seven seats won by Labour in Scotland gone to the Tories, Theresa May would have a working majority today (324 seats – taking out the Speaker and Sinn Fein MPs who don’t participate, the true threshold of majority is 322).

Conversely, had the 13 seats won by the Tories in Scotland gone to Labour OR (more plausibly) stayed with the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn would have been able to assemble a progressive alliance and form a government.

(Labour+SNP+Lib Dem would have added up to the required 322, with a cushion of five extra seats available from Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Readers who are – quite rightly – wary of considering the Lib Dems part of a progressive alliance should note that they wouldn’t be required to back Corbyn in this scenario, just not oppose him.)

It seems at the first glance, then, that a successful “stop the SNP” tactical voting campaign in Scotland bizarrely ensured that NEITHER the Tories nor Labour could form a stable UK government. (The Tories’ slapstick courting of the DUP looks set to produce the weakest administration since 1974. We see no way that another election this year can be avoided.)

But it didn’t happen quite as straightforwardly as that.

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This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:

On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.

In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.

(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)

Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.

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