After years of Yes-No politics dividing Scotland, is this a return to left-right?

Scotland did it differently—again. But this time not in the manner of the SNP’s liking. England and Wales turned back to a two-party politics not seen there in 35 years. In Scotland, we’ve produced the most pluralist election result in half a century. In 2010, Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 seats; in 2015, the SNP won 56 of the 59, scoring an astonishing 50% of votes cast. Yesterday the Nationalists were cut down to size, their vote-share falling to 37%, losing 21 seats. The Tories gained 12, Labour 6 and the Lib Dems 5. The Conservatives won 29% of the vote and Labour 27%.

What the results in England and Scotland have in common is that voters on both sides of the border struck out against the incumbents. But these were not protest votes. Rather, they were firm verdicts against the style and substance of the Prime Minister and First Minister respectively.

Like it or not, the dominant question in Scottish politics remains the constitution. This is emphatically Nicola Sturgeon’s doing. It was the First Minister who said on 24 June last year that the EU referendum result made a second Scottish independence referendum “highly likely.” And it was the First Minister who demanded on 13 March this year that Indyref2 should be held between the autumn of 2018 and the spring of 2019, a unilateral declaration that triggered Theresa May’s brisk retort that “now is not the time.”

That line was not shot from the hip. We knew that the First Minister was going to make some sort of play for a second independence referendum. So we set up focus groups and we did polling and we tested and tested whether Scotland would welcome—or would reel in horror at—the Tories saying a polite but firm “no” to Nicola. When Mrs May said “now is not the time” we knew that she was not speaking for herself, but for a clear majority of Scots. Even some folk who want to see an independent Scotland thought that Ms Sturgeon was “at it,” as Glaswegians like to say, in seeking a second bite at the cherry so soon.

By making her demands the First Minister was not acting in the best interests of Scottish voters, but in what she perceived to be the narrow interests of her party. And my—was she punished for this at the polls yesterday.

The general election has revealed three shifts in Scottish public opinion, each of which has significant electoral salience and all of which hurt the SNP. The first is a shift from Labour to Scottish Conservative in opposition to Indyref2. Ruth Davidson’s candidates beat Nicola Sturgeon’s in seats like East Renfrewshire, Ayr and Aberdeen South because the “no” vote is coalescing around the committed unionism of the Scottish Tories rather than around the weak and wobbly, conditional unionism of Kezia Dugdale’s Scottish Labour party.

The second is the shift from the SNP to Conservative over Brexit. Angus Robertson lost his seat because of his party leader’s persistent belligerence over Brexit. More than 49% of voters in Moray voted to leave the EU (the highest proportion in any Scottish constituency)—not least because of the havoc wreaked by the Common Fisheries Policy in that part of the world.

The fact that the Scottish Conservatives were the only party north of the border to embrace Brexit after the EU referendum meant we hoovered up votes not only in Moray, but in next-door Banff and Buchan, where we overturned a 14,000 SNP majority, in Angus and, most famously, in Gordon, where we unseated Alex Salmond himself. Alex Salmond losing to a Tory! Oh, how he will blame his successor for that. The fallout could be spectacular.

The third shift is from SNP to Labour because of socialism. The 45% of voters who supported independence in the September 2014 referendum is not a single block, but a coalition of two main parts. About 30% of the Scottish electorate supports independence as a matter of principle. The additional 15% that took the Yes movement so close to victory in 2014 voted for independence because they were sold a story that England is right-wing, Scotland is left-wing, and the only way Scotland can have the socialist government of its desires is by breaking free of its southern neighbour.

And then Jeremy Corbyn comes along to bury New Labour, to take Tony Blair’s party away from the centre-ground and back to its socialist roots, while Nicola Sturgeon and her ministerial colleagues fail to hike income tax rates and pass on spending cuts to local authorities across the country. If you want socialism, it’s Corbyn’s Labour party, not the SNP government, that offers it.

The astonishing thing about this—which no-one saw coming, least of all the leadership of the Scottish Labour party—is that Labour has somehow managed to pick itself up off the floor without having a coherent or convincing answer to the constitutional question. This, said every commentator in the Scottish political bubble, was an impossible feat. There will be much for all the main parties to chew over on this front. Perhaps left-right politics is returning to the fore in Scotland, after years of the yes-no question dominating?

Meanwhile, one thing is clear. The combination of the three shifts in Scottish public opinion exposed by yesterday’s transformative election result in Scotland means that, as Ruth Davidson put it on BBC television at 4 o’clock in the morning, “indyref2 is dead”. The threat of independence has been lifted. Alex Salmond’s “dream”, which he said “shall never die”, perished last night, and it was the Scottish electorate who killed it. As UK Conservatives pick over the pieces of an election result that was never meant to be, Ruth Davidson’s party could scarcely be happier. The era of the Nationalists having it their own way is over.