Labour’s Scottish Bump

Get out your phone, open up your maps app, and find Scotland. Now, for a moment, zoom in on Edinburgh. In the North East of the city, you will see Portobello, a seaside suburb, famous for its long, sandy beach, where the locals swim all year round. That’s where I am.

On Tuesday night, the group Surfers against Sewage laid out four plastic chairs on the promenade above that beach and rigged up a sound system. Around 50 of us gathered round to quiz election candidates about one of many prominent issues in British politics now: the fact that unprocessed effluent is regularly flowing into our rivers and seas.

While Surfers against Sewage are travelling to coastal communities around the UK to highlight the problem, the nature of the debate on this beach is a little different to those in England. Indeed, Scottish politics have witnessed major shifts in the past two decades that will play a role in the upcoming election.

On Devolved Terrain

The SNP, a centre-left party and staunch advocate of Scottish independence, obviously does not exist in England. Until 1999, it was a relatively minor force, even in Scotland. When Labour swept to power under Tony Blair in 1997, the SNP went from three to six out of Scotland’s then 72 MPs. Soon thereafter, responding to a lengthy campaign and an overwhelming referendum result in 1997, Labour established the first Scottish parliament in 1999, giving it powers similar to those of a German federal state.

Unlike Westminster, Scottish parliament elections are run using a proportional system. In 1999, the SNP came second, behind Labour. In the 2007 Scottish elections, the party attacked Blair’s Labour from the Left with a campaign denouncing the Iraq war, promising to abolish university tuition fees, and opposing partial privatizations  — and narrowly gained control of the Scottish government. In 2011, the SNP consolidated this power, winning a parliamentary majority and persuading David Cameron’s government to allow them to hold a referendum on independence.

The far right gets much less traction in Scotland than in England or even Wales.

At the time, support for Scotland leaving the UK was running at around 30 percent. The SNP’s victories stemmed more from its popular centre-left policies than widespread support of its core constitutional proposal. Nevertheless, over the course of an energetic campaign strongly supported by a pro-independence Left largely outside the SNP, support for independence briefly exceeded 50 percent, with 45 percent ultimately voting in favour.

Ostensibly, the pro-independence SNP and Greens had lost the referendum, and the pro-union Labour and Conservatives had won. But it didn’t feel like it. In the days after the vote, SNP membership soared from around 25,000 to 120,000. The Greens grew from about 1,000 members to nearly 10,000. In the 2015 UK general election, the SNP went from six seats to 56, Labour from 41 to one and the Liberal Democrats from 11 to one.

For a century, Labour had dominated Scottish politics. In the nineteenth century, the Liberal Party won every single election in Scotland, and, until 2015, had managed to maintain proportionally more strongholds here than in England. In 2015, 200 years of voting habits changed.

Back on Portobello beach, there was no Conservative candidate. While the Tories can usually expect to come either first or second in the vast majority of English constituencies, this seat is expected to be a close race between the SNP and Labour. The party still in power at Westminster did not even bother to send its candidate to the debate – she has no hope of winning. While there are Scottish constituencies where Tories do well, the party of English–British nationalism has never had the level of support here that it could rely on in England from 1833 until, it seems, 2024.

Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK representative also failed to show up: the far right gets much less traction in Scotland than in England or even Wales.

Social Democracy in One Country

The second big difference between the sewage debate on Portobello beach and its equivalents in England is that, while the companies managing the water systems in England are all privatized and run for profit, Scotland’s is publicly owned – just one example of the broadly social-democratic way things are run here, which also includes higher taxes on the wealthy and a more generous social security system.

The third is that, as with many things voters care about, the water system here is a responsibility of the Scottish government, while the election is for members of the UK parliament. Largely, the relative popularity of both the SNP and Scottish independence (for which support usually rests just below 50 percent) comes from the sense that they are trying to protect us from the worst of Westminster’s radically neoliberal shit  — figuratively and literally.

Among those who oppose Scottish independence, there will be a large transfer of votes from Tory to Labour, in line with the swing in England.

On the makeshift stage, the main contenders try to explain why they are best placed to solve the sewage problem. In many ways, they are each trying to show they are more left-wing than the other.

At one point, Tommy Sheppard, who has been the area’s SNP MP since 2015, sets the faeces issue in a broader context, saying he yearns for a society where around 50 percent of GDP is managed socially, and that he believes this kind of transformation is much more likely in an independent Scotland. The Labour candidate talks up his party’s plans for a windfall tax on oil companies to boost investment in green infrastructure.

Labour’s Turnaround

Behind the politicians, yellow sand sloped down into the granite grey water of the Firth of Forth, the fjord on which we live. Across it to the north, you can see Fife. Bending round to the south is the coast of East Lothian. Both were, until a generation ago, famous for their coalfields  — indeed, lumps of the black rock still often wash up on the beach. Everywhere you can see was represented by a Labour MP until a decade ago. Since 2019, every one of these constituencies  — like most in Scotland  — has been represented by someone from the Scottish National Party.

Look back at your map, and you will see that Scotland’s other main city, Glasgow, is only 80 kilometres to the West. Draw a band from coast to coast encompassing the two cities  — roughly across the country’s waist. This is the area known as the Central Belt, where more than 3 million of Scotland’s 5.5 million people live and most of its MPs come from. Almost every seat in this stretch was represented by Labour for decades until 2015, but has had an SNP MP since. In almost every case, the Labour Party is hoping to take it back this year. In many, it will.

There are a number of reasons for this.

First, among those who oppose Scottish independence, there will be a large transfer of votes from Tory to Labour, in line with the swing in England. While the Conservatives are the third-placed party in almost all these seats, that will often be enough to take Labour over the top in itself. Ironically, the same first past-the-post system that granted the SNP vast majorities among Scotland’s Westminster delegation could well accentuate the swing against them.

Second, the SNP has led the Scottish government since 2007, and malaise is beginning to set in, particularly since Nicola Sturgeon stepped down as first minister. Just weeks before the election was called, the SNP pulled the plug on what was in effect a coalition deal with the Greens, ultimately forcing Sturgeon’s successor and the first Muslim to lead a Western country, Humza Yousaf, to stand down as first minister, replaced by the former finance minister and deputy first minister John Swinney, who had declared his retirement from government just a year earlier.

Third, one of the underlying causes of that malaise is that every path to independence has been blocked by the British state. Because the 2014 independence referendum unleashed remarkable enthusiasm and the result was closer than most expected, because Scotland voted overwhelmingly against Brexit less than two years later but was then dragged out of the EU anyway, and because there have been consistent pro-independence majorities both in Scotland’s Westminster delegation and (through both the SNP and Greens) at Holyrood, there was a sense among voters that one more heave was all that was needed. A decade since the referendum, with UK governments repeatedly vetoing a new vote despite clear majorities of Scottish MPs and MSPs being elected on manifestos demanding precisely that, many have grown weary.

I know people who still support independence, but will vote Labour this time because they see it as the easiest way to boot out the terrible Tory government (although, in reality, they usually live in constituencies where the Tories have never had a chance).

Don’t Underestimate the SNP

The SNP’s response has been to try and shore-up this vote by attacking Starmer’s Labour from the Left  — or, rather, by pointing out how far it’s run to the right in pursuit of Tory voters in England. Before launching his party’s manifesto, Swinney declared it would be “the most left-wing” of the major parties. The document itself argues for more public spending, against privatizations, for decriminalization of drug use and in favour of migrants’ rights. His colleagues have been much more consistent in speaking against Israeli war crimes in Gaza than Labour.

Speaking to one woman on the Portobello promenade, not much about the election had cut through. But the sense that Keir Starmer had transformed Labour into a paler shade of Tory had. That might be popular in some places, but it isn’t with her – or here.

The Central Belt runs through a broader region, the Lowlands, which are bounded by two lines running diagonally from South West to North East: the border with England to the south, and the Highland line to the north. If your phone map shows topography, you should be able to make out the latter, which marks the southern boundary of the mountainous Highlands.

The SNP is probably the most successful centre-left party in modern Europe.

South of the Central Belt, down to the border with England, and north of it up to the Highland line is a set of constituencies where this is a race between the Conservatives and the SNP. Most of these seats have gone back and forth between the two parties over the past 20 years. In most cases, given the enormous Tory collapse in the polls, you’d expect the SNP to win this time.

North of the Highland Line are the Highlands and Islands: which make up about half of the land but 10 percent of the population. In most of these seats, this is a competition between the Liberal Democrat’s  — whose strength in these areas goes back to land reform movements in the 19th century  — and the SNP. Given the SNP’s fall in the polls since last time (and the likelihood of Tory votes going to the pro-union Lib Dems), the liberals may well make gains here this time.

Despite being the fourth party in the proportionally elected Scottish parliament (ahead of the Liberal Democrats), the Greens will not win any seats in Scotland in this election. While Scottish voters have settled into a five party system for both Scottish Parliament and local government elections, Westminster’s first past the post system encourages people to vote against the most hated option, rather than for what they actually want.

The SNP is probably the most successful centre-left party in modern Europe. It has been in government  — either on its own or in alliance with the further left Scottish Greens  — since 2007. It is running in this election on a broadly pro-tax and spend, pro-immigration, pro-EU manifesto.

Most profoundly, it has done this by running against a Westminster political system that barely hides the ways in which it bends power back to the powerful. It may well struggle in this election, dealing a blow to the cause of independence. However, Scottish and English politics are more different than they have been in centuries. It is hard to see a Prime Minister Starmer maintaining support here for long.