After The Storm
Posted on July 5th, 2024
by Rab Bruce’s Spider
Mastodon: @RabBrucesSpider1@Mastodon.Scot
X / Twitter: @RabBrucesSpider
With the dust settling after the UK General Election, there’s quite a lot to reflect on. Labour gained their expected majority although, quite frankly, this has little to do with their policies or politicians; it’s more that everyone was fed up of the Tories.
In Scotland, the hammering taken by the SNP must surely act as a wake up call, although I’m already having doubts about that. No less a person than Nicola Sturgeon went on TV to announce that the cause of independence was gone for the immediate future. In my view, that is an appalling comment for her to make, even if it is probably true. Nicola Sturgeon is still an MSP representing the SNP and you’d expect her to try to spin things a little. She could have said that, despite the results, support for independence remains high and that the SNP will need to garner that support from now on. Instead, she told the UK media what they wanted to hear. It seems she has learned nothing from her time as First Minister when it comes to promoting the cause of Scotland becoming a normal, self-governing country.
Labour’s victory in Scotland will not prove to be a good thing for our country. Sadly, the SNP’s many woes did not help, and the Unionist tactic of confusing voters by mixing up devolved issues with retained issues didn’t help either. But I am convinced that voters will soon see the danger of voting Labour in Scotland because all those new MPs will very quickly step into line behind Keir Starmer and will vote for English policies which may be entirely inappropriate in Scotland. Just watch and see.
As for where the SNP go now, I doubt we will see much change. No matter how competent in office John Swinney might be, he doesn’t have the charisma to push the cause the way it needs to be promoted.
One silver lining is that, with the loss of so many MPs, there are some very capable politicians who could stand in the next Holyrood elections. Between now and then, the SNP really need to be galvanised into action, but it is, I’m afraid, hard to see how they will achieve that after so many years of keeping independence on the back burner. Some might say they didn’t even keep it as warm as that.
Of course, Holyrood provides a chance to elect pro-Indy politicians from a range of parties. The only fly in the ointment there is that, if the SNP suffer the same level of losses in the Constituency vote, then voting SNP 1 & 2 might actually help them. Personally, I’d rather people used their List vote for another pro-Indy party. Let us not forget that the first IndyRef came about not because of Westminster elections but because of an SNP victory at Holyrood. We really need to see that repeated, and I do wish that the SNP and Alba would try to work together as far as they can instead of sniping at each other.
That is for the future, though. Looking at my own Westminster constituency, it has switched to Labour from the SNP. The turnout was a disappointing 58% which seems to be around average for this UK election. However, what really struck me about the results is that Reform got more votes than the Tories, nearly twice as many as the Greens, and nearly 4 times that of Alba. If that isn’t a warning to encourage higher turnouts in future, I don’t know what is. These people walk among us, and they will always vote because that’s what Right Wing extremists do.
Speaking of extremists, I notice that some very prominent Unionists are now Labour MPs. If those voters who switched from the SNP to Labour think they were doing little more than displaying their disillusionment with the SNP, I fear they may live to regret their choice. Labour will do their very best to kill the cause of independence, and we need to hope Holyrood will survive the coming storm of anti-Devolution moves.
All in all, it’s not been a good day for Scotland. But electoral losses due to poor leadership don’t mean the cause is dead, despite some of the gleeful headlines in the UK media. Let’s keep going.