Not because the SNP winning a fourth term in office will, in itself, be an amazing feat. No other social democratic party in Europe has had such consistent success of late. In two years, there will be people old enough to vote in Scotland who have only ever known SNP governments at Holyrood. We’ve grown used to that, we’ve watched it happen.
But rather, because a significant majority of voters will believe there is a mandate for a referendum on independence and that means confrontation is coming.
The results won’t be clear until Saturday evening though, and so in the meantime, our eyes flicker to results in England: first the Hartlepool by-election, where my main thoughts are of Craig, with whom I spent a few hours in the town before the 2019 election.
Sitting in a shop doorway as the cold night set in, the former fisherman told me how he lost his job when he had to care for his dying mum, and then his home, because Universal Credit didn’t cover the rent. Then he lost his legs, because sleeping rough gave him soars which got infected, leading to amputation. In 2019, Craig was following the election closely, desperate to see the back of the Conservatives and their social security system. Did he vote this time? I suspect not.
During my time with Craig, I also met two teenage boys who he told me regularly ‘torture’ him, and who swung by on their bikes to menace him. “We clean filth like that off the streets,” they told me as I stood between them and their victim. Using bigoted terms for homeless, Black and British Asian people, they said: “It’s because of people like him that Hartlepool is a shit-hole”.
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