I LIKE RUSSELL FINDLAY, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. He comes across as amiable and warm, intelligent and with a sense of humour; he’s got a lot of the right ideas and he’s laid more than a few enjoyable punches on John Swinney at First Minister’s Questions. I suspect many on the right in Scotland share my opinion, even if, like me, they no longer vote for his party.
So it was disappointing and disheartening to read Findlay’s cri de coeur in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday about the Tories’ miserable election performance. They lost nineteen MSPs, reducing their tally to twelve – their worst Holyrood result on record. Having been the opposition at Holyrood, they have now slipped behind Reform, Labour and the Greens – only the LibDems have fewer MSPs.
“Sore loser” does not begin to describe Findlay’s desperate response. He blames Reform – which won seventeen seats to become the opposition jointly with Labour – one hundred per cent for the Tory losses, and insists that his “dynamic dozen MSPs are the only real opposition to stop SNP’s drive to break up Britain”. Both these claims are misleading, if not downright false.
No party is entitled to people’s votes. Which is not to say that parties, particularly incumbent ones, don’t end up feeling that they are – it is notoriously what happened to Scottish Labour until they were finally trounced by the SNP in the 2007 Holyrood election. The key, however, is not to reveal that sense of entitlement – nothing is a bigger turn-off – and, more crucially, not revel in it, allowing it to displace the notion that every vote needs to be worked for anew in every election.
Read the full article at The Reformer