How the SNP could hand Keir Starmer the keys to Downing Street

The timing of the Scottish Nationalists’ latest crisis once again proves that the Labour leader is a lucky general, writes John Rentoul

Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf admitted this week his party had a ‘credibility issue’ over its record (PA)

The collapse of support for the Scottish National Party makes a majority Labour government of the UK more likely. SNP delegates, as they gather for their annual conference in Aberdeen this weekend, know that this is yet more bad news for their party.

This is, of course, the one part that they cannot say out loud. Nicola Sturgeon may have let it slip in conversation with the French ambassador once, although she denies it, but everyone knows it to be true: the best recruiter for the cause of independence is a Conservative UK government.

But first things first: the immediate significance of the SNP’s troubles for the whole country is that it moves the winning post for a Labour majority at the general election closer. No one can be quite sure where that winning post is, but if Labour wins about 20 seats in Scotland – rather than the one seat it won last time – this makes it easier for Keir Starmer to win a Commons majority.

Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, calculates that Labour’s share of the vote across Great Britain needs to be about five percentage points ahead of the Conservatives to ensure a majority for Starmer. It may be more like eight points if you use a uniform swing model rather than one based on proportional swing. Either way, the Labour lead required for a majority is lower than it would be if Labour continued to have just one MP in Scotland. And it is a lot less than Labour’s current average lead in the opinion polls, of 17 points.

This is important, although the further good news for Starmer is that he doesn’t need a majority in order to form a government. In a hung parliament, he could form a reasonably stable minority administration without having to do any deals with the SNP, the Liberal Democrats or any of the other minor parties. It would be unthinkable for any of them, except possibly the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, to keep the Conservatives in power after an inconclusive election – or to bring down a minority Labour government within its first year or so.

The relative powerlessness of the minor parties in a possible hung parliament after the election is yet more good news for Starmer before the election. The Conservatives may yet make a poster of Starmer in Humza Yousaf’s pocket, but what English voter is going to make sense of that?

It was different in 2015, when the Tories put Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket: then the SNP was at the height of its support in Scotland; Salmond was a national figure about to return to the Commons as leader of the SNP contingent there, and the mechanics of a hung parliament were poorly understood.

That last may still be true, but the “coalition of chaos” argument that David Cameron used against Miliband simply won’t have the same power this time.

Once again, Starmer has proved to be a lucky, lucky general. Even the defection of Lisa Cameron, the MP for East Kilbride, from the SNP to the Tories, which might have been a coup for Rishi Sunak, has turned out brilliantly for Labour. As Ian Murray, Labour’s sole Scottish MP, put it, it suggests that if you “vote SNP, you get Tory”. Cameron’s defection is one of those rare cases where it helps Labour to have someone defect to another party.

To put it more generously to Starmer, he has ruthlessly exploited the problems that have afflicted his opponents, the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland. One of the under-appreciated qualities of an effective leader is the avoidance of mistakes, and Starmer makes few of them and, when he does, he U-turns out of them quickly and without fuss.

In the medium term, Starmer as prime minister only adds to Yousaf’s problems. The next Scottish parliament election is not due until 2026, but the first minister knows that if a Labour government of the UK is regarded by Scottish voters as reasonably successful, the implications for the SNP are ominous.

The identity-driven motor of soft SNP support in Scotland is hostility to English Toryism – take that away, and replace it with a Labour government in London that appears to be delivering for Scotland, and the SNP will be in even more trouble.

That will be hard for a Starmer government in straitened fiscal times. But Labour need make only a token effort to be respectful of Scotland to hope for some goodwill towards a new administration in its first 18 months.

In the longer term, of course, the SNP might hope to build back. One of Yousaf’s strengths is that he has disowned the gimmicky fixes of the Salmond-Sturgeon era designed to secure a fleeting “50 per cent plus one” mandate for independence, and he recognises that the only way to break up the UK is for a substantial and sustained majority of Scottish residents to demand it. The long haul, in other words.

The SNP believes that demography is destiny, because younger Scots overwhelmingly support independence. But in the meantime, those of us who identify as Scottish and who want to keep our country together cannot believe Starmer’s luck.