In Glasgow, and across Scotland, Labour is in steep decline. In the 2015 U.K. general election, the party lost all but one of its 41 Scottish seats to the Scottish National Party (SNP), including all seven in Glasgow. In 2016, the SNP won elections to the Scottish parliament for the third successive time, also claiming all the directly elected seats in Glasgow. And now Labour faces a double-drubbing — in local council elections this coming Thursday and again in Britain’s snap general election on June 8. [...]
The immediate — and most obvious — cause of Labour’s precipitous demise is the rise of Scottish nationalism. Three years ago, Glasgow voted Yes to independence despite Labour campaigning to maintain the three-centuries-old union with England and the rest of the United Kingdom. [...]
The independence campaign accelerated a shift from Labour to the SNP that began with Scottish devolution in the late 1990s but gathered pace after Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. “Iraq was a big moment for me because I realized that what our government was telling us was a load of rubbish,” says Feargal Dalton, an Irish-born Royal Navy veteran elected as Glasgow SNP councillor in 2012. [...]
Recent polls have put support for the Scottish Tories as high as a third, raising the possibility of the Conservatives taking a number of the record 56 Scottish seats won by the SNP. Even in Glasgow, where the Tories hold only a single council seat, there are hopes of a breakthrough in a city identified as “the least Conservative place in Britain” based on previous election results.
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