From the shared futures of the UK & Scottish Labour to the RISE flop, 12 lessons from Scotland's plodding election

Labour should have stuck to plan A, but probably would have collapsed anyway. RISE sank. The SNP were dull but solid. The Greens managed to hold it together. And Scotland is still on the road to independence.

By Adam Ramsay

Published: May 14, 2016, 10:05 am

Scottish party leaders, image, Adam Ramsay, CC2.0

I spent the Scottish election campaigning for the Greens, mostly talking to voters in Edinburgh and Dundee. With just over a week to digest the results, here are my thoughts.

1) Support for independence is a product of the collapse of Labour more than the collapse of Labour is the product of support for independence.

People often seem to forget that Scottish Labour lost the 2007 election, and lost the 2011 election badly before the independence referendum took place. In both of these elections, it was the Labour party, not the SNP, who talked about independence. Labour’s message was “don’t vote SNP, it means costly divorce”. The SNP talked about the centre-left programme from which they proposed to run Holyrood.

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