The Scottish Tories need a better election strategy

It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear.

Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light football bonhomie around Scotland’s disastrous Euro’s effort, Douglas Ross – who recently made history as the first party leader to announce his resignation during an election campaign – quickly segued to the heart of his general election pitch: SNP out. While First Minister John Swinney promised his party’s manifesto would put independence ‘page one, line one’, written at the top of the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto are the words: ‘Beat the SNP.’ In fact, across the manifesto’s 76 pages, the SNP is mentioned 88 times.

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour has been all but forgotten. In Scotland, the main rival to the SNP in the central belt is Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party, while the Tories have always done better with rural constituents and in the borders. To retain their seats north of the border, the Conservatives know that their key battlegrounds are across the north and north east, where there will be straight fights with the nationalists. As such, Rishi Sunak made a real show of how the Scottish Tories would project jobs in the north east – as his is the only party openly in favour of new oil and gas licences.

But what else was front and centre of the manifesto? Beat the SNP, runs the Tory slogan, to get the focus on Scotland’s priorities. This should be an easy message for the Conservatives to push: polling consistently demonstrates that, at this election, the electorate in Scotland is less interested in independence as a live issue than it has ever been – despite just under 50 per cent of the nation saying they are still in favour of secession. Yet in their manifesto, the Scottish Conservatives have framed voter priorities at this election as: education (devolved), policing (devolved), tax cuts (devolved), road repairs (a council issue) and cutting NHS waiting lists (devolved). Are the Scottish Tories already preparing for the 2026 Holyrood election? Is this a sign they’ve almost entirely written off their party’s fate in the upcoming national poll?

Sunak didn’t do much to expel those theories. In what could be taken as an unconscious concession of defeat, the PM is already speaking in the past tense: ‘My most important job I had when I was prime minister,’ he told a huddle of the Scottish media, ‘was to restore economic stability back to our country’. And what about individual candidates, campaigning hard across Scotland while chaos continues to engulf the Westminster party? ‘The ambition now is to secure enough votes that our candidates move from fourth place to third,’ one wannabe MP said. Was that their ambition? ‘Oh no’, they said. ‘I expect to lose my deposit.’

While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP to put independence front and centre of its campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight on behalf of voters. Yet independence is not so much a bogeyman as a monster under the bed: it may cause sleepless nights but it is not really there. There is currently no mechanism by which Scotland may have a second independence referendum and no sense that a Labour government might move on the issue. And there the Nats and the Tories share a further problem: as they each generate sound and fury over the constitutional question, Labour swerves the issue to go merrily about its business – its ‘change’ message cutting through to disillusioned voters on both sides. Meanwhile the SNP shouts loudly about independence and the Scottish Tories shout loudly about stopping independence – neither group fully understanding nor acknowledging their own symbiotic relationship.

If today’s manifesto launch revealed anything, it’s that the Scottish Conservatives need a better strategy. At the moment they are, just like the SNP, nothing without the constitutional question.