Labour braced for rude awakening in Scotland

Nicola Sturgeon has ridden a wave of SNP support in the election campaign. Credit: PA

Unprecedented. Unpredictable. Historic. This election has been anything but underwritten by the columns of newspaper articles, blogs, tweets and posts it has dominated. And nowhere have the superlatives been used more generously than when describing the political story unfolding here in Scotland.

On Thursday the Scottish people are expected to signal Labour’s demise north of the border and in so doing herald in an army of SNP MPs who will be sent to Westminster to shout loudly for Scotland, or something to that effect.

The election campaign here in Scotland has centred on the battle between these two parties. On the surface, it has appeared to be about a score to be settled following last year's referendum on independence.

Losing that vote hardened the support of 45 percent of Scots who voted to leave the United Kingdom. It seems it also left some of the majority who voted against independence disillusioned about the way the Labour party went about winning: "in bed with the Tories."

But it would be too simple to frame what looks likely to happen on Thursday in terms of what happened last year. This goes much deeper.

“I’ve no left Labour, Labour left me,” is now the stock phrase of the thousands of voters in communities the length and breadth of Scotland who are now turning on a party who just five years ago was winning majorities of up to 23,000.

These are families who have voted Labour for generations, where ‘being’ a Labour man or woman is a tradition. But no more. With the SNP in (majority) power in Scotland and the Con-Lib coalition in charge in Westminster they say there's been nobody standing up for them. Nobody standing up for their Labour values, fighting for the working class.

Enter stage left the SNP, or New Old Labour as I’ve heard them described. A party seeking to out-social justice the party of social justice. A party that has given the people of Scotland free prescriptions, their children a free education, even scrapped road toll charges and parking fees at hospitals. In their day-to-day lives, there’s tangible evidence that the Nationalists are working to improve their standard of living.

The independence referendum revived political debate in Scotland. Credit: PA

Maybe this same lot could bring about that sort of change if given the chance to “shake up” Westminster. Their manifesto, for those who will have read it, reads pretty much the same as the Labour one. Perhaps it’s about time to ‘risk Grandad turning in his grave’ and vote for someone new.

It could be crudely described as a protest vote, and to some extent it is, but it’s much more than that. Whether you agree with their politics or not the SNP can be credited with reviving political debate here in Scotland.

In 2007 they formed their first, minority government. Instead of fighting back and learning from that defeat, the losing Labour party limped home so far behind four years later that Nationalists were able to form an historic majority government.

It is with that same momentum that the SNP go into this General Election, using their tried and tested Holyrood election success on Westminster. They have caught the traditional parties napping and on Thursday it looks like those parties will get a rude awakening.