The general election next week will put Scotland’s dominant political force, the Scottish National Party, to the test at a time when the stakes are high for the nation’s future.
Still smarting from losing a 2014 referendum on independence from Britain, the SNP bounced back to win 56 out of Scotland’s 59 available seats in the Westminster parliament the next year.
It is Britain’s departure from the EU, however, that has thrown the cards up in the air once again.
Across Britain, 52 per cent of voters opted to leave the European Union in the June 2016 referendum. But in Scotland, a comfortable majority of 62 per cent voted the opposite way, prompting the SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to come out swinging against the British government’s Brexit course.
“The Scottish government realised pretty quickly they were going to get very little from the UK over Brexit,” said Peter Lynch, a senior politics lecturer at the University of Stirling.
Sturgeon in March announced plans to seek a second independence referendum “before it is too late to decide our own path”, a crucial point in the two-year Brexit negotiating process that would fall in autumn 2018.
However, that timeline for a so-called IndyRef2 was almost immediately quashed when Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May said her government would not back the plan.
Now Sturgeon has switched focus to what she’s termed “a phased approach by necessity,” reluctantly accepting that Scotland will leave the EU, but seeking to slowly push the country back into the European single market post-Brexit.
If the SNP’s polling support has dropped since the 2015 general election, it’s because the party has a lot of support to lose. The SNP is still the favourite for Scots in the June 8 election.
However, key shifts in the polls and a recent revival for the Scottish Conservative have shown that Scotland may not be as united against Brexit — and the SNP — as once thought.
In Moray, a fisheries hub on the north-east coast, the Remain camp won by just 122 votes, the smallest margin in Scotland — a result that surely rattled the confidence of the constituency’s member of parliament, SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson.
Jo Strachan is a 55-year-old Conservative voter in that area. “Not such a rare breed in Scotland, I hope,” she quips — who voted against independence in 2014 and for Brexit in 2016.
She saw her vote to leave the EU as a vote against Sturgeon — but she didn’t expect to be on the winning side.
“It’s completely polarised,” she says, describing the political mood in Scotland. “I am now labelled a unionist. But I am just a Scot who thinks independence would not be in the best interest of the country.”
According to polling company YouGov, support for Brexit across Britain has risen since the referendum to 68 per cent, as people who wanted to remain in June 2016 nonetheless accept that the referendum result should be respected. It is these so-called “re-leavers” that point towards a significant Conservative victory nationwide.
Meanwhile, Conservatives in Scotland are catching up with their party colleagues elsewhere in Britain. The party has almost doubled its support among Scottish voters to 28 per cent, according to YouGov,and a surge in May local elections also boosted the party’s outlook.
“The idea of unionism, and the prospect of another independence referendum, seems to have given them a renewed sense of purpose and a new issue that the party unambiguously ‘owns,’” said Alan Convery of Edinburgh University, whose research focuses on the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives campaigned vehemently against Scottish independence. On Brexit, they are the one party that has committed itself to delivering on the referendum result without wincing.
But for Jo in Moray, the Brexit vote was a leap of faith upon whichthe Conservatives must deliver if re-elected.
“Time will tell if it’s right or wrong,” she says. “Too early to say.” — DPA
By Rachel More
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