First minister Humza Yousaf urges Scots to vote SNP to ‘kick the Tories out’

Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, is expected to urge Scotland to vote for the Scottish National Party in order to “kick the Tories out”, as his party prepares to launch its 2024 general election campaign.

In a speech on Friday, Mr Yousaf will say that Rishi Sunak is “finished” and will implore voters across Scotland to “take the opportunity to kick them out of Scotland completely” as “the damage they have caused to Scotland is unforgiveable”.

He will call upon the Scottish electorate to vote for the SNP, explaining that his party is “best placed” to remove the Conservatives as the SNP is currently second in every Tory-held seat across Scotland.

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Mr Yousaf’s speech comes just days after a rival speech from the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, who opted for a similar message and urged supporters of Scottish independence to defect from the SNP and lend their vote to Labour in order to vote the Conservatives out, exhorting them to “unite to change the country”.

The last time Scotland saw a Conservative wipeout was during the 1997 election, when all of the Scottish Conservative MPs lost their seats to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP.

In 2005, the Conservatives managed to claw back one Scottish constituency when David Mundell won the seat of Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale and was made shadow secretary of state for Scotland by the then Conservative leader, David Cameron.

So low was the number of Scottish Conservatives in the early 2000s that in 2010, Mr Mundell became the butt of the infamous joke that there are “more pandas in Scotland than Scottish MPs” after Edinburgh Zoo gained two giant pandas.

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Now, some are predicting that the Conservatives could suffer a similar defeat in Scotland, following their poor performance in opinion polls and the resignation of both the leader of the Scottish Tories, Douglas Ross, and the current Scottish secretary Alister Jack, both of whom are set to stand down at the end of the current parliament.

Mr Sunak has, however, strongly rebuffed the suggestion that his party will see enormous losses in Scotland, and told journalists in December that he was “very confident” about his party’s prospects north of the Scottish border.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party may be quietly confident about its chances in Scotland, following the Labour gain of an SNP seat at the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election in October last year.

Labour saw a seismic 20 per cent swing in its vote share, which led polling guru Michael Thrasher to suggest that if the result were replicated in a 2024 general election, it could equate to a 42-seat gain by Labour in Scotland.

Scotland is expected to be a key battleground at the next election, with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer having remarked that “the route to a Labour election win at the next general election runs through Scotland”.