Five years ago, Scotland’s local elections took place a month before the 2017 snap general election. It was one year since Ruth Davidson’s dark-money funded Conservatives had replaced Labour as the opposition at Holyrood, and 11 months on from the Brexit vote.
Independence supporters, renewed by Brexit, shot out to back the Scottish National Party (SNP), whose total vote rose from 500,000 in 2012 to 610,000. Afraid that the national mood was shifting, Unionists came out in droves to support Davidson’s supposedly moderate Conservatives, the biggest anti-independence party.
As overall turnout increased by 7%, the Tories’ vote more than doubled, to 408,000. This cancelled out the SNP surge and left Nicola Sturgeon’s party with the same 32.3% vote share it had received five years earlier.
