Stephen Daisley

You know those elections where some cold comfort can be harvested by the losing side in gains made here and there? The Holyrood vote isn’t one of them. The full results won’t be in until tomorrow but based on what we’ve seen so far, the SNP is home clear and dry. An outright majority seems probable. Labour has already lost East Lothian to the Nationalists and in Dumbarton, Scotland’s most marginal seat, its majority is just 109. Tory-held Ayr has fallen to Nicola Sturgeon’s party while the Conservatives have failed to make gains elsewhere. (They did, however, come within 800 votes of winning Banffshire and Buchan Coast.) There was an eye-popping swing to the SNP in Shetland but the Lib Dems managed to hang on.

Scotland goes to the polls today to vote for 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. Polls forecast victory for the ruling SNP but there are a string of seats where the result last time was close enough to inject some unpredictability into proceedings. SNP targets Dumbarton Incumbent: Jackie Baillie (Labour)  Majority: 109 This is the seat the Nationalists want more than any other. Politically, it is a stubborn west-coast hold-out against the glories of nationalism. Symbolically, it is home to the Clyde Naval Base and the UK’s nuclear deterrent, which the SNP wants to scrap. But perhaps most important of all is the personal dimension.

Holyrood 2021 was supposed to be an election for the mavericks. Alex Salmond is back from the political dead with a new party promising to lead nationalists to independence where his former party has failed. George Galloway has turned his attention to Scotland and, despite his previous pronouncements on the matter, is heading up an outfit opposed to indyref2. While Salmond has had no trouble drumming up headlines, neither has made much of an impression on the polls. That might be because their respective parties appear to be all about one man. The opposite seems to be true of Andy Wightman, who actually is one man but his campaign is tapping into a grassroots movement for more rigour, integrity and free-thinking at Holyrood.

If there is more joy in Heaven over one devolutionist who repenteth, the celestial jubilations must be in full roar over a belated admission from Tony Blair. In an interview with ITV News, the former prime minister reflected: ‘I do think one of the weaknesses in the way we approached devolution was not to build real cultural ties and emphasise the enormous things that the different countries in the United Kingdom have in common.

Will Anas Sarwar lead Scottish Labour back into second place at Holyrood? On the strength of the campaign he has fought, he deserves to, for he has run the most positive, energetic and ideas-based offering in a dreary and rancorous election. Sarwar has been almost alone in trying to make the May 6 poll about something other than arid constitutionalism.  His proposals are all sound, social democratic measures: a jobs guarantee for young Scots; investing in cancer and mental health treatment; and extra funding for schools to recover from the educational setbacks of Covid-19. Against an increasingly stale-sounding Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Tories' angry-robot leader Douglas Ross, Sarwar has been a breath of fresh air.

Presented for whatever is the opposite of your edification, an exchange between the leaders of Scotland’s main political parties. The setting is Tuesday night’s Holyrood election hustings, hosted via Zoom by the National Union of Students. We begin with Nicola Sturgeon accusing Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross of being inconsistent on who gets credit for the Covid vaccination programme in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon: Make your mind up. Douglas Ross: No, I was saying your rollout was poor. Your rollout was poor. NS: But the point is, the UK chose to— DR: But answer the question— It’s like watching a very dressed-down remake of Mean Girls. Totally not fetch.

There isn’t much I agree with in the SNP’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections, so it seems peevish to cavil about the policies to which I am generally sympathetic. These are: a national care service, 100,000 new houses, abolition of dental charges, free school meals, investment in closing the attainment gap and more money for skills and training. I might quibble with the universalism of some measures because I would rather see resources redistributed from those with means to those without them. Even so, the Nationalists are making some of the right noises, if purely for their own electoral benefit rather than any late conversion to social democracy. The obvious question, then: How do they intend to pay for it?

This week's Holyrood election debate should not be allowed to pass without noting how it highlighted the dismal state of Unionism. Nicola Sturgeon revisited a point she has been underscoring heavily during this campaign: that a majority of nationalist MSPs returned after May 6 would represent a mandate for another referendum on Scotland seceding from the United Kingdom. Scottish nationalists have a curious relationship with popular sovereignty, seeing no contradiction in espousing this doctrine while harking back to the Declaration of Arbroath, a pledge of aristocratic fealty and an apologia for the divine right of kings. Among Sturgeon’s statements during the STV debate was: ‘The future of the country should be for the people in Scotland to decide. That is democracy.

There is a whiff of something in the current Scottish Parliament elections. It’s not quite strong enough to call it foul but nor is it faint enough to go undetected. What I can tell you is this: it doesn’t smell right. Yesterday, Alex Salmond’s new party, Alba, released a video depicting throngs of flag-waving nationalists with a voiceover delivered by an actor from the imagined perspective of Robert the Bruce. (If that seems like an odd idea for an election ad, welcome to Scotland.) ‘Bruce’ described the Battle of Bannockburn thus: ‘People power by the small folk of Scotland was the straw which broke the spine of English superiority’.

The death of the Duke of Edinburgh has paused campaigning in the Scottish Parliament election, which provides an opportunity to reflect on just how bizarre the election is proving to be. Naturally, the SNP is far ahead in the polls, on 53 per cent of the constituency vote in this week’s Ipsos-MORI research. SNP dominance is now as hard-wired into Scottish politics as Labour dominance once was and the new religion is just as unmoved as the old one by heresies about policy failings or poor governance. What is uncanny is that nationalists and Unionists have simultaneously gone into revolt against their own side weeks out from polling day.

There was a Scooby Doo moment in Alex Salmond’s campaign launch on Tuesday. Something that made me think: ‘Ruh-roh’. The new leader of the Alba party was setting out his stall ahead of the 6 May Holyrood election and concentrating mostly on tactics. Voting for the SNP in the constituencies and Alba on the proportional list ballot, he contended, could elect a Scottish parliament with a ‘supermajority’ for independence. Thereafter — in fact, in week one of that new parliament — he would expect the Scottish government to open negotiations with Whitehall for the dismantling of the United Kingdom.

When he was acquitted on sexual assault charges at the High Court in Edinburgh last March, I predicted: ‘Alex Salmond is back from the dead and he will have his revenge’. The past 12 months has seen a relentless onslaught against Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP establishment and anyone who thought that would culminate in the equivocal findings of two inquiries (one clearing Sturgeon, the other damning her) will have been disabused this afternoon. Salmond has announced his return to politics in time for May’s Holyrood elections, under the banner of an outfit calling itself the Alba Party. The party will stand only on the regional list and is pitching itself as an effort to help secure an ‘independence supermajority’.