Ruth Davidson may be getting ahead of herself to suggest Scotland has passed ‘peak nat’

Ruth Davidson, who still leads the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament, claimed yesterday: “We’ve passed ‘peak nat’ and, more and more, Scotland is saying ‘enough’.” She may be making the same mistake as Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish National Party leader.

Over the past year, Sturgeon made much of opinion polls suggesting that a majority of Scots were in favour of independence, with some of her colleagues even claiming that this was the “settled will” of the Scottish people.

Well, it wasn’t settled for long. A recent string of polls has suggested that supporters of independence are, narrowly, a minority again. It is widely assumed that the public breakdown of the relationship between Sturgeon and Alex Salmond has had an effect on support for the SNP and for its main policy.

That may be true, but I suspect the success of the vaccine programme is more important. It is not viewed in Scotland as a UK success story, which it ought to be, but it does reduce the “close down, close the borders, keep outsiders out” sentiment.

But the danger of relying on opinion polls to make the independence case is that, when they turn, the case for independence suddenly loses its momentum. The SNP’s march towards a big majority in the Scottish parliament elections in May now looks less certain. Sturgeon may well win a majority, and may no longer need the support of the pro-independence Green Party to govern, but anything less than a landslide is now going to seem like a setback.

All the same, Davidson may be making the equal and opposite mistake. The SNP’s opponents have often suggested that Scotland has passed “peak nat”, only for the nationalist cause to scale new heights. The defeat of independence in the 2014 referendum was, after all, supposed to have settled that question for a generation if not a lifetime.

Obviously, it is tempting for Davidson to portray her opponents as being in long-term decline, but it will only give the SNP more ammunition if they gain seats in May compared with the last election in 2016.

And the irony is that it draws attention to the possibility that Davidson’s leadership of the Scottish Conservatives could have represented “peak Tory” in Scotland. Her successor, Douglas Ross, is going to struggle to advance on the gains made under her leadership. The plain fact of Scottish politics is that, if the SNP is to lose, it must be primarily the Labour Party that gains. The soft SNP vote which could be detached from Sturgeon, if Scotland is indeed saying “enough” to 14 years of the SNP government, is much more likely to defect to Labour than to the Tories.

The key figure in these elections could be Anas Sarwar, Labour’s new leader in Scotland.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator