It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a decent post-election shield in Scotland this weekend – unless you want to celebrate with members of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.
In 2016, a wave of Tories ran through the Scottish parliamentary elections. That spilled over into next year’s council vote and kept the Conservatives back in second place at last year’s Holyrood race. But now he is retiring after the party lost 63 councilors to be blocked behind Labor in third place.
The misery of the Tories is the pleasure of other parties, with the SNP, Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Greens making significant profits. For the eighth consecutive election, the SNP is set to be the decisive winner, winning 22 seats to reach its highest number of councilors to 453 – the biggest victory since the introduction of the single transferable vote system in 2007.
This system allows voters to prioritize the options, with the votes for the eliminated candidates and the “surplus” of the elected being transferred to the next best option until the seats for each council area are filled. If this sounds confusing, the Scots have a simple slogan for anyone struggling with their ballot: “Vote until you start.” (“Boak” rhyming with “poke” is the Scottish word for “vomiting.” Just keep ranking your options, in other words, until they get too ranked to rank.)
Judging by their collapse, the Scottish Tories have found the exact point at which bile begins to bubble. The party hastened to try to blame the British for their failure – another old Scottish trick – but Partygate’s plea only reminded voters that these people could not tell the difference between principles and excuses.
Despite the respectable result last year, when they remained stable in Holyrood, under the leadership of Douglas Ross, the Tories failed to restore the solar center-right sensitivity cultivated by Ruth Davidson, which was at the beginning of their recent renaissance. Instead, Ross delved into the paranoia and bitterness of his staunch unionist base, talking about the “extremist” influence of the Scottish Greens and showing the same targeted obsession with independence that the SNP denounces. His confusion about Johnson’s suitability to be prime minister – calling for his resignation before withdrawing the request – only heightened the sense of a man beyond his depth.
The main beneficiaries of the Tories were their Scottish Labor colleagues and the Liberal Democrats, who won 20 councilors each. While the Liberal Democrats focused on moderate unionists and local issues, Labor launched a populist campaign on the cost of living, promising to ease rising prices with an unforeseen tax on oil and gas. This is not only beyond the power of local authorities, but also of Holyrood, and shows that the party is counting on the prospect of a Labor government in Westminster to stand out.
Labor is regularly attacked as being too close to the Tories and too soft on nationalism at the same time, which his media-friendly leader Anas Sarwar has tried to oppose by ruling out coalitions with other council groups. However, after the results were published, a Labor source explained to me that this was simply Sarvar’s “preference” and that the Scottish Labor Executive Committee would approve coalitions on a case-by-case basis.
Despite Labor gains – one spot behind the victory over the SNP in Glasgow – the Scots are unlikely to give a majority to Keira Starmer soon. Sarwar made small breakthroughs in the softest and most dissatisfied parts of the SNP vote with a single transferable vote. But that is still not enough to divert the election first from the SNP, as long as independence hands over 40% of voters to the latter’s camp.
However, Labor could irritate the SNP simply by returning to the status of the main opposition and getting rid of the doomed aura that covered their maneuvers since 2015. The Tories are Nicolas Sturgeon’s ideal opponents because they give her first blows to the center-left. as well as the independence vote. Facing the opposition, which confidently shares the SNP’s “social democratic” measures, could force the SNP to work harder to match rhetoric to action. And by shifting the balance of the Unionist parties back to the center-left, Labor has the opportunity to transform the defense of the union with the wider values of the Scottish public after years of Tory leadership.
The biggest success of all, however, is the Scottish Greens. After winning a record eight seats in Holyrood last year, the Greens signed a co-operation agreement with the SNP, turning their allies into government ministers and giving them a number of concrete practical results for the campaign. Despite sales rumors, the party was rewarded with 16 new advisers, almost doubling its previous score to 35. In addition to expanding its Glasgow and Edinburgh groups to 10, the Greens found new footholds in eight councils across the country, from Shetland to the Scottish border. This, as well as their growing ability to win first-place votes, suggests that they are becoming a true national party and more than a second, “principled” choice for voters.
Although there was a reason to celebrate in all the major parties except one, it is worth remembering what they were elected for and by whom. Most Scots gave up before they could even vote, with just 44% turnout. The creation of the Scottish Parliament was helped by the support of local authorities in Scotland, who sought support against the hostility of the UK government, but despite his early promise, Holyrood increasingly opted for centralization over further decentralization. This was reinforced by austerity measures, which the SNP chose to pass on to the councils instead of implementing them on its own.
The electoral system rarely makes it possible for any party to have complete control over these cumbersome, difficult institutions – only Labor in West Dunbartonshire and the SNP in Dundee have a majority – and councilors must now begin negotiations with the knowledge that they must share a great responsibility. without much force. As the cost of living crisis bites and potentially evolves into a recession, the job of these new, expanded advisory groups will be to assert the importance of local government against central government – even in the case of the SNP and the Greens, when their own people are responsible for the latter.
If counselors can’t find ways to prove their independence and importance to people’s lives, they may be on the wrong side of the barrier next time. And the Tories can take advantage of the period aside.
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