Like a faded starlet spurned by the spotlight, Scotland is struggling to pull in the crowds this election season. We got used to being the centre of attention in the 2014 independence referendum and again in 2015 when it looked like Britain was heading for a hung parliament with the SNP as kingmakers.
Last May, political hacks again decamped north of the border to witness the improbable Tory surge that installed Ruth Davidson as the leader of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament and consigned Labour to third place.
Now Brexit, largely an English phenomenon, has top billing and Scotland can hardly get a look in. Yet, the plotline developing in Edinburgh is no less gripping than in previous votes.
The SNP in 2017 is no longer the electoral behemoth that won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Commons seats in 2015.
Polls indicate it will retain most of them but the party suddenly has a fight on its hands. Scotland’s 62 per cent Remain vote was expected to renew calls for a second referendum on splitting from England, yet when SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon tried to capitalise on anti-Brexit feeling her efforts fell flat. Worse, support for independence began to slip below 2014 levels.
Instrumental in this was Theresa May’s arrival in Downing Street. The Nationalists assumed they could easily demagogue the Tory Prime Minister as another Margaret Thatcher; in fact, Scots decided they rather liked the vicar’s daughter and her brand of common sense.
They weren’t happy about Brexit but they were resigned to it and wanted Ms Sturgeon to get on with the day job of running Scotland’s crisis-ridden schools and health service.
Finally, Ms Sturgeon gambled that formally demanding “Indyref 2” would swing national sentiment behind her.
Humiliatingly, Mrs May said no and most Scots backed her stance. Ms Sturgeon still inspires evangelical fervour in her flag-waving followers, but in the minds of floating voters she has become yet another politician.
Ruth Davidson has undergone the reverse phenomenon. The Tory leader is a happy warrior for Scotland’s Unionists — a clip of her snapping “sit down” at Ms Sturgeon during a heated debate in March went viral — and she has won over swathes of Labour voters.
Symbolic is the seat of East Renfrewshire, the Glasgow constituency that is home to much of Scotland’s Jewish population. The Scottish Tories’ deputy leader Jackson Carlaw took the Scottish Parliament seat there from Labour in the 2016 Holyrood election, held amid Ken Livingstone’s outbursts on Hitler and Zionism. Mr Carlaw is a long-standing supporter of Israel and is respected for defending the Jewish state in the face of a hostile Scottish establishment.
While the Tories are the most consistently pro-Israel party in Scotland, their efforts to take East Renfrewshire in June will require the toppling of incumbent Kirsten Oswald.
A moderate within the SNP, she was part of a 2016 SNP delegation to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the first official visit by the party.
Senior figures have started to reach out to the Jewish community and hope to temper the party’s reputation as a home for cranks and conspiracy theorists. Paul Monaghan, an SNP MP, accused the “proud Jewish people” of “persecuting the people of Gaza” in a tweet during Operation Pillar of Defence. In 2015, MSP Sandra White was forced to apologise after retweeting an antisemitic cartoon. During Operation Protective Edge, and trailing the No campaign in the final weeks of the Scottish referendum, the SNP called for an arms embargo on Israel.
Attempts to set up a pro-Israel group to counter the powerful SNP Friends of Palestine were met with animosity. Alex Salmond headed an SNP delegation to Iran in 2015 and urged closer ties between Scotland and a regime notorious for its human rights abuses.
East Renfrewshire will be a test of whether Jewish voters trust recent warmer words, such as those from deputy leader Angus Robertson.
It will also measure what, if any, future Scottish Labour has. They lost 40 of 41 seats in 2015 and have been squeezed out by Scotland’s shift from left-right politics to nationalism versus unionism. Kezia Dugdale, Labour leader, is bright and hard-working but her efforts to rebuild Labour have been undermined by Jeremy Corbyn, who is as toxic in Midlothian as he is in the Midlands.
Scotland may not be political box office these days but the election could see a star turn from Ruth Davidson.
The plucky Fifer looks set to do the hitherto impossible: humble the SNP and send Theresa May a clutch of new Scottish Tory MPs.
Stephen Daisley is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
