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Hope, change, progressive change, change with fairness at its heart – from a harbour north of Edinburgh to a hipster arts venue in Glasgow’s Barras Market, Scotland’s political parties spent the first official day of the Holyrood election campaign reaching for the phrase that best encapsulates what people will get if they vote for them on 7 May.
Only one of the main parties did not hold an event to set out their stall on Thursday: possibly Reform UK was too busy firefighting after another of their Scottish parliament candidates quit, bringing to four the number who have stepped down or been suspended since they stood with party leader Nigel Farage under a storm of turquoise confetti last week.
But despite the bright spring sunshine, Farage was a shadow presence at the other launches, with the SNP’s John Swinney and Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar in particular differentiated by their approach to him.
At the newly renovated Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, Swinney urged supporters to get out and campaign for a “historic” overall majority – as happened once before in 2011 under Alex Salmond – promising voters “a fresh start with independence”.
An SNP majority would not only force another independence referendum, but also “lock Nigel Farage out of any influence” in Scotland, he said, speaking from a lectern emblazoned with the word “hope” . Recent polling has put Reform , led in Scotland by the billionaire financier and former Tory peer Malcolm Offord, neck and neck with Scottish Labour for second place behind the SNP.
It’s certainly a gamble whether Swinney’s laser focus on independence – which backfired so spectacularly at the 2024 general election when the party plummeted from 38 to nine MPs – comes good this time round. Offering a “fresh start” is either canny strategy or sheer nerve after nearly two decades in power and diminishing public satisfaction with SNP-run public services.
Given the hostility between Reform and Scottish Labour at last year’s Hamilton byelection, when Farage repeatedly and personally attacked Sarwar on race, it was more than a stretch this morning when Swinney warned: “Depending on how the numbers stack up after the election, without an SNP majority there is always the potential for a grubby, backroom deal between Labour and Reform.”
At the Scottish Labour launch, a few miles across the city centre at Barras Art and Design, Sarwar responded that Swinney should be “ashamed of himself” for suggesting any association. This was a “trick”, said Sarwar, adding: “John Swinney wants to talk up Reform because he doesn’t want to talk about his record.”
“After 20 years of SNP government, Scotland needs change,” he told activists, standing in front of a “Scotland needs change” banner that echoed Labour’s 2024 general election imperative, a bold move, some observers suggested, given the extent of Keir Starmer’s unpopularity.
But while Swinney raised the spectre of Farage abolishing the Scottish parliament and selling off the NHS, Sarwar dismissed Reform as a “distraction” who “can’t win in Scotland and can’t beat the SNP”, promising voters he’d “get the basics right’ on health, crime and housing.
Across the central belt to Edinburgh, and in the face of abysmal polling, the Scottish Conservative leader, Russell Findlay, deployed that trusted Tory attack line on the constitution, telling voters to get behind his party to “stop Swinney and his push to break up the United Kingdom”. While this has served his predecessors well, it’s unlikely to stop the current haemorrhage of support to Reform, with the Tories – the second largest party at Holyrood – facing a scrabble for fourth place against the Scottish Greens and Lib Dems.
On a windy Calton Hill in Edinburgh, the Scottish Greens, who are a separate party north of the border but seeing a modest Zack Polanski bounce, presented themselves in contrast to their former governing partners the SNP, arguing that, with the post-Sturgeon Nationalists tacking to the centre: “No one else is representing that kind of progressive change any more.”
At the Lib Dem launch at Newhaven harbour, in the Edinburgh Northern and Leith seat they hope to win from the SNP, their leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, said his party had “a vision for change with fairness at its heart” and acknowledged as other leaders did before him that people across Scotland are “tired and frustrated – and they’re right to be”.
In doing so, Cole-Hamilton named one of the great unknowables of this election. With voters scunnered with politicians of all kinds, are they more likely to pick the disruptors, stay at home or vote tactically? According to Ipsos polling earlier this month, two in five voters say they may yet change their mind before polling day.
