The Tories have a golden opportunity in Scotland

News of an early general election has received an immediate and significant welcome from the Scottish Conservatives. They have been arguing for such an audacious gamble for several months, fearing that the longer an election is delayed, the better are Labour’s prospects of creating a tsunami of victories against the fast-disappearing SNP. This would surely put Sir Keir Starmer into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.

In the Tony Blair landslide of 1997, the massive gains achieved by Labour in England also crossed the border and saw the Scottish Tories completely wiped out – losing all of their seats north of the border.

That remains a live danger given that the latest poll predicts big gains for Labour at the expense of the SNP, which has run Scotland for seventeen years. The nationalists could lose as many as half of their 47 Commons seats in Scotland – with the bulk of them going to Labour, enabling it to recapture its traditional heartlands in West Central Scotland around Glasgow.

But senior Tory campaign managers believe that a July 4 contest is their best chance of not only holding the six seats they already have in Scotland, but capturing several others, possibly as many as six more.

In most of these seats they will be fighting the SNP – not Labour. One senior election planner commented on hearing the news: “This is what we have been waiting for and we are very confident of doing well against the nationalists whose unpopularity is growing all the time.”

As well as counting on the huge voter unhappiness with the SNP over their broken promises on education and the economy, the Scottish Tories are pinning their hopes on maintaining government support for the North Sea oil and gas industries.

Both the SNP and Labour are pledged to shut down Scotland’s “black gold” which has brought prosperity to the North East of Scotland but whose closure threatens the tens of thousands of well-paid jobs that depend on the rigs continuing to operate.

There is little doubt that the decision for an early poll is the last thing that the SNP would have wished for. Their standing in the polls has plummeted and took another nose-dive recently when Humza Yousaf, who succeeded Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister last year, was forced to resign to head off an embarrassing defeat in a no confidence motion tabled by Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tories’ leader.

The nationalists have gone from being seen as Scotland’s natural party of government to a shadow of its former self, with the last year seeing it staggering from crisis to crisis. Nicola Sturgeon said she gave up being First Minister because she had become such a controversial figure with the voters.

But it was the result of a series of self-inflicted wounds as she insisted that her way was always best. She forged a hugely unpopular coalition with the extreme Left Scottish Greens which led to her losing crucial battles with both the Supreme Court, over independence, and the UK government, over her hugely controversial gender reform bill.

And hanging over the SNP – as it has been for the last year – is the dark cloud of the £600,000 that is allegedly missing from SNP coffers. Sturgeon and her husband, as well as the party treasurer, were all arrested but then freed pending further inquiries in the massive police investigation. However, Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, a former chief executive of the party, has now been charged as the investigation continues.

Independence and breaking up Britain – the very essence of the SNP’s policy agenda for decades – are now on a backburner as new party leader, John Swinney, tries desperately to win back support by getting the party back to voter-friendly policies on education and health. However, the polls are suggesting that he is no more popular as party leader than his predecessors.

And nor is independence, the only policy his party cares about.