Not just brexit, but scexit, dominates the scottish election campaign | thearticle

Elections in Scotland aren’t a matter of who will win, but of how much the SNP will win by. For the opposition parties, the days remaining before December 12 will be an exercise in

minimising losses. The SNP is ideally placed to sweep the board. It is the foremost Remain party in a region that voted 62 per cent against Brexit. Its main rivals, the Scottish Tories, lost

their star turn when Ruth Davidson resigned as leader in August. Boris Johnson is hotly unpopular. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, could guarantee Scotland’s qualification for the next ten World

Cups and still be regarded with a lethal cocktail of contempt and pity. Nicola Sturgeon, no longer riding high in the popularity polls herself, is selling her party as the least worst of a

rotten bunch. Her pitch is that Scots can escape Brexit by embracing Scexit (Scotland’s exit from the UK), though under questioning from Andrew Neil it was clear the SNP has no more

plausible plans for its brand of constitutional upheaval than did the Vote Leave campaign. Polling shows the Nationalists taking 45-50 of Scotland’s 59 seats, which Sturgeon will argue is

another mandate for a second referendum on Scexit. If Labour finds itself the largest party in the Commons but without a majority, Sturgeon has made clear she would countenance support short

of a coalition in exchange for Westminster allowing her a do-over of the 2014 referendum plebiscite. Should she get a second referendum, polls indicate that Scots are split down the middle.

Without Davidson the Scottish Tories were expecting a catastrophic general election but have been pleasantly surprised by how well they are performing. YouGov’s MRP model points to them

holding onto 11 of 13 seats. If you had suggested half that number a month ago, they would have bitten your hand off. Under the temporary leadership of bon vivant Jackson Carlaw, the

Scottish party’s message is blunt and summed up in its slogan: “No to Indyref2”. The idea seems to be cutting through on the doorsteps, where there is serious fatigue with endless

constitutional division and uncertainty. Tactical voting by Lib Dems and disaffected Labour supporters could stave off disaster for Carlaw’s team. Certainly, Downing Street will be hoping

so. The tighter the polls get, the likelier Scottish Tory MPs could be, as they were in 2017, the difference between a Conservative government and a Jeremy Corbyn-led administration. If the

Tories have had a better campaign than expected, Scottish Labour has somehow managed to do worse than already low expectations. The top priority was to project a firm position on the Union.

Although Labour led the effort against Scexit in the 2014 referendum, it soon found itself torn between the pro-Union majority among its voter base and a large minority who had backed

secession. Unfortunately for Labour at Holyrood, Jeremy Corbyn has once again worked his particular brand of anti-magic, suggesting that he would allow the SNP a re-run referendum in the

later years of a UK Labour government. To make matters worse, Shadow Cabinet members like John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey have insisted Labour wouldn’t stand in the way if Sturgeon

tried to hold another vote. This is anathema to the very voters Labour is trying to convince of its Unionist credentials, and the Scottish party pushed back on these unhelpful noises coming

from Westminster. Then, last month, they threw in the towel. Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard conceded: “If the SNP or other parties put in their manifesto that they wanted to hold a

second independence referendum and they got a mandate for that, either in 2021 or at some future point, then of course what we are saying is that would not be blocked by a UK Labour

Westminster government.” You probably won’t have heard of Leonard, but he is the nominal leader of Labour in Scotland. He is a mild-mannered but ultimately forgettable figure. The former

union organiser is in step with the party’s march to the left but he lacks the presentational skills to break through. His predecessor, Kezia Dugdale, quit the party in October over its

ambivalence on Brexit and Leonard has failed to distinguish the more moderate Scottish party from the leftist ideologues in charge at the national level. Labour is defending seven seats but

is likely to hold on in only two. Every seat they fail to win in Scotland makes the party more dependent on the SNP to prop up a minority Corbyn government. This is more than a tactical

headache — if Labour is now too pro-Scexit to appeal to unionists, but still too unionist to claim votes from the SNP, the party’s raison d’etre is no longer clear. We keep hearing this is a

Brexit election, but in Scotland it is about both Brexit and Scexit: which should happen first, which should happen at all, and who will hold the balance of power that decides.