Why the decade of SNP dominance is now over

The Queen was not amused. Nor was her guest. He felt as if he had been punched in the solar plexus.

Over breakfast at Balmoral, the Sovereign and her prime minister were digesting that morning’s Sunday Times. With eleven days to go to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, it reported a YouGov poll showing that, for the first time, the “yes” campaign had taken a narrow lead. Queen Elizabeth feared that the United Kingdom could be about to break up. David Cameron was terrified that his premiership would collapse.

In the event, the poll marked the moment of peak nationalism. As voting day approached, the “yes” campaign lost momentum. It lost the referendum by 55-45 per cent. However, though few saw it at the time, the result cast a spell over Scotland’s body politic. Support for the Scottish National Party surged.  In 2015 it won 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the House of Commons – 50 more than in 2010.

Next month’s election could break the spell. The party would do well to hold 30 and may even struggle to reach 20.

The impact of the spell was to transform the way many Scots decided their vote. Before the referendum, Scotland’s place in the UK was one issue among many. In 2010, many pro-nationalists voted for Gordon Brown to stay in Downing Street, even though they were happy for Alex Salmond to take charge in Edinburgh.

After the referendum, the independence cause was virtually all that mattered. Nationalists voted for the SNP, unionists for Labour, the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats. SNP support jumped from 20 to 50 per cent. In 20 seats, a majority still voted for a unionist party. But while the pro-independence vote went almost entirely to the SNP, the unionist vote was divided among its three rivals. This allowed the SNP to win all but three of those 20 seats.

The SNP stumbled to 35 seats in 2017 but recovered most of its lost ground in 2019 when it won 48 seats. For the third time it was easily Scotland’s biggest party at Westminster.

Its dominance continued until March last year, with its support remaining close to the 45 per cent it had won in 2109.

Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation last year as First Minister was the moment the spell broke and the SNP started to slide. Her successor, Hamza Yousef, never enjoyed the same appeal.  In June, by which point Sturgeon and her husband had been arrested over SNP finances (he has since been charged), the Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times showed that the party’s support was down to 34 per cent, and Labour had drawn level.

By this spring Labour had moved ahead, aided by the troubles that led to Yousaf’s resignation. His party hoped that the appointment of the experienced John Swinney would revive its fortunes. Four weeks later, there is no sign of this. Four polls in the past ten days have shown Labour on average six points ahead.

This is not because independence has lost its appeal. YouGov’s latest poll reports precisely the same figures as in the 2014 referendum – a 55-45 per cent preference for remaining in the UK.

The fundamental reason that the spell has broken is not because fewer people say “yes” but because the SNP is losing their votes. As many as 89 per cent of them voted SNP in 2015. It’s now just 52 per cent.

Labour’s support has grown among this group from 6 to 24 per cent. Voters north of the border are gradually returning to the days when general elections are more about than who governs Britain than whether Britain should break up. The issue of independence now comes well down voters’ list of concerns, way behind health, the economy, education and housing.

The SNP’s problem is that while Westminster’s first past the post voting system rewarded the SNP in its glory days, the system is cruel to parties whose votes slide – as Labour discovered in 2015 when its support it Scotland fell from 42 to 24 per cent, and its tally of MPs crashed from 42 to just one.

What, then, are the prospects for next month? The polls agree there has been a marked swing from SNP to Labour, but they disagree by how much. Here are seat estimates for five scenarios.

• The SNP regains some of the ground it has lost and ends up ten points ahead of Labour. Its 37 MPs will clearly outnumber Labour’s 11. One of the new Labour MPs will be Douglas Alexander in East Lothian. The former Cabinet minister should be able to overturn the SNP’s majority of 2,207 on the new boundaries.

• The SNP’s lead is down to five points. It will now have 28 MPs. For the first time since 2010 it could have fewer than half of Scotland’s MPs. Labour’s 18 would include gaining all six of Glasgow’s six seats from the SNP.

• SNP and Labour are level-pegging. This is where first past the post starts to bite. Instead of narrowly holding on to a clutch of seats, the SNP just loses them. Labour, with far fewer wasted votes where it is weak, has 26 seats, overtaking the SNP’s 20.

• Labour leads by five per cent. SNP has 18 seats, Labour 28. Labour could win Bathgate and Linlithgow from third place, defeating Martyn Day, until recently the SNP’s Health Spokesman at Westminster.

• Labour leads by ten per cent. This is at the top end of recent polls. The SNP is down to 10 MPs, compared with Labour’s 34. The spell is not just broken; it is obliterated.

The SNP could do even worse if, as some polling suggests, unionist voters are willing to vote tactically to defeat the SNP. Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, is defending a majority of 5,463 over the Conservatives in Aberdeen South. At the last election, Labour and the Liberal Democrats together won almost 10,000 votes.

If enough of them line up behind John Wheeler, the Conservative candidate, then Flynn will be out. This would add to the six seats that they can expect to hold on their current poll rating and two or three others that they might gain if the SNP does really badly. Scotland could be the one British nation where the Tories end up with more MPs than last time.

This analysis was first published by the Sunday Times