In May 2015, as part of my newspaper’s general election coverage, I went out with Labour campaigners as they canvassed in one of the party’s heartlands: Airdrie and Shotts. The campaigners were in denial, but the signs of collapse were everywhere: in the many saltires, the “red Tories” graffiti, and the “I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me” line repeated in every vox pop. A few days later, Airdrie and Shotts was taken by the now Scottish secretary for health and social care, Neil Gray (one of 56 seats won by the SNP), and the party that had kept an iron grip on central Scotland was consigned to the political wilderness.
What goes around comes around, they say. Less than a decade on, the SNP are heading for, if not quite the wipeout Scottish Labour experienced, then an electoral humiliation on a scale that would have been unthinkable 18 months ago. More humiliating still is that the decline comes against a backdrop of sustained support for independence. Not only do polls suggest the party will lose 27 seats (with Labour gaining 28), they suggest two-fifths of 2019 SNP voters will back Labour, despite its continued stance on the union.
