Desperate and laughable: Why inquests into Scottish Tory and Labour campaigns will be brutal

If this was the scunner election, then be prepared for the scunner parliament. Many readers will be entitled to think they’ve had one of those since 1999, but here is the news folks, it’s going to get much, much worse.

However, the voters have spoken and the system has returned a group of MSPs so ill-prepared for the challenge they face that disappointment will be the mildest of reactions as the brutal truth of dealing with a £5 billion deficit sinks in against a background of SNP manifesto pledges which cannot possibly be delivered.

Price caps on supermarket food, £2 bus fares which promise to wreck the nationalised train services, and the free school bag of goodies for Primary One kids are just three items in a shopping basket of SNP bribes designed to get the party as close to an overall majority as possible. Although they fell just short, it contributed to a background in which few parties felt able to come clean with the electorate that the days of throwing public money at voters and taxing the eyeballs out of the diminishing number of private sector workers are over.

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Russell Findlay's plea to voters didn't impress John McLellan (Picture: Jane Barlow) | PA

The number of SNP MSPs doesn’t tell the full story of a governing party with which an overwhelming proportion of the electorate are tired – their vote share well down from five years ago, but still the dominant force, and still determined to press on with their independence priority while having no practical policies to tackle immediate concerns like the cost of living, hospital waiting times and the housing shortage.

Even so, the left-wing consensus has, if anything, hardened with the predicted surge in support for the extremist Greens and an SNP which gives lip service to economic growth, combining to smash Scottish Labour into one of its worst ever performances only two years since it seemed their revival was unstoppable.

The Greens’ socialist circus at the Edinburgh count in Ingliston yesterday whooped and cheered as it became clear that thousands of voters stuck their crosses in a box against candidates who want to abolish prisons, defund the police, and strip more tax money from people with relatively modest means to pump even more cash into welfare and giveaways. The clear message is that to win in Scotland requires a strategy which bolsters dependency culture and leaves wealth generation to luck and very good neighbours.

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The Lib Dems remain a party of localism without an identifiable core philosophy, so as of yesterday, the only party capable of offering a viable alternative has been cut off at the knees. The Scottish Conservatives endured a torrid day, possibly even more catastrophic than the 1997 wipe-out, because the road to recovery has been cratered by the Reform party. In the North East, the Conservatives lost seats to the SNP they would have won had it not been for Reform.

As early as 2pm, it was clear it would be carnage for the Conservatives in Edinburgh, and although readers will be entitled to wonder why they should care, given most will have voted for a different party, it matters because balance, whatever that’s worth, is now much more difficult to find.

The silver lining in very dark clouds for Conservatives is that the blue wall across the Borders bucked the trends, with Finlay Carson, Craig Hoy and Rachel Hamilton all holding their seats, the latter with an impressive 45 per cent of the vote. The group may be small but at least it has common sense and experience, and they will be in the front line on Tuesday when parliament reconvenes and the first thing on the agenda is an independence referendum.

They will also be in the trenches fighting against the advance of state intervention, and while it is undeniable that Reform’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord implicitly believes in economic growth, he has hitched his horse to a wagon with which others will have difficulty finding common cause. Crucially, it has far less chance of a significant breakthrough to smash the consensus than the Conservatives had. Offord certainly ain’t no Ruth Davidson, and the paradox of Reform’s rise is the possibly irreversible damage to the centre-right cause in Scotland.

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The gains of ten years ago were very hard won and the Scottish Conservatives were never complacent, not even in what now seems like the heady days of 2017 when the party returned 13 MPs, and 18 councillors in Edinburgh – I was one of them − with 29 per cent of the vote, and Ruth Davidson led a 31-strong group of MSPs. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss didn’t help, but thanks largely to Reform the reward of that struggle is the number of Tory MSPs is barely out of single figures.

That Reform did not win any constituencies and failed to make a breakthrough on the ground, relying entirely on the regional lists, was a minor consolation, and might even encourage MSPs to replace a dreadful system with the Single Transferrable Vote process used in council elections.

It may be that amidst the chaos, both Tory leader Russell Findlay and Labour’s Anas Sarwar carry on as party leaders, but hard questions need to be asked about both their strategies, and it will not be good enough just to blame atmospheric conditions beyond their control. Vote Labour for change was always laughable and the Conservatives’ “Peach ballot to stop an SNP majority” just sounded desperate, at least to those who bothered to work out what it was trying to say.

There is only a year to sort out a new approach before the council elections, and who knows, a snap general election might be round the corner. And if it’s accompanied by an economic crash, we’ll be a lot more than scunnered.