Scott Sliter’s first twinges of anxiety about the election came when he knocked on some doors last month. His colleagues in the Scottish National party had warned him the contest in Moray was going to be tight, but the first hints of defeat came when he met three or four middle-aged voters.
There shouldn’t have been a problem. This, after all, was the seat of Angus Robertson, an SNP heavyweight and the party’s Westminster leader. But when Sliter was canvassing in Lhanbryde, a village near Elgin, something worrying happened. “I had hit a series of three or four doors in row, of people maybe in their 60s who were all: ‘No. No thanks, don’t even waste your time’,” he recalled“I would knock on another door and it was a younger person, and it was ‘yes, of course you’ve got my vote.’ But those three or four in a row? I thought ‘what’s wrong?’ There was something much more visceral about it.”
Sliter, a New Yorker who moved to the small coastal village of Portgordon overlooking the Moray Firth seven years ago with his husband Mike, a local from nearby Lossiemouth, had
soon become a committed SNP activist and independence supporter. “It just seemed so logical for me: self-determination was such a logical pursuit,” he said.
There is a weather-beaten sign on their front wall which proclaims “We’re still Yes – 45%”. Out of sight behind the wall is another pro-independence, blue and white Yes sign and with it a folding sign board promoting Robertson, who had held Moray for 16 years. Beneath his portrait, the board said: “Stop the Tories. Vote SNP”.
Robertson’s dramatic defeat at the hands of the Scottish Conservatives on 8 June underlined the significance of that plea. After successfully defending Moray at three elections, Robertson lost to a Tory who had failed to unseat him in 2015, a local MSP and former councillor called Douglas Ross, by more than 4,000 votes.
News of his defeat in the early hours of Friday 9 June signalled a near rout of the SNP in north-east Scotland as the Tories seized five of the region’s six Westminster seats from the SNP. Across Scotland, the Tories had 13 seats – their best result since 1983, and the one bright spot for them in a hugely disappointing UK picture.
The most unexpected casualty of this surge was Alex Salmond, twice leader of the SNP and twice first minister of Scotland. Salmond had been in Westminter and Holyrood for 30 years, representing three north-east constituencies in that time, and masterminded the SNP’s landslide victory in the 2011 Holyrood election that led to the 2014 independence referendum. His defeat rocked the SNP. To Sliter and Low, that seemed “so disrespectful”. “How could local people do that to him?” Low said.
Robertson’s political history was formidable, too. He had hoped his reputation as one of Westminster’s most effective operators, often outperforming Jeremy Corbyn at prime minister’s questions, would have galvanised an anti-Tory vote in Moray, saving his seat. An entire page of the SNP’s general election manifesto was devoted to gushing media endorsements of Robertson as “leader of the real opposition”, including prominent Tory journalists.
Yet talking to voters around Moray, a straggling constituency of farmland, market towns and forests that stretches from the Moray Firth coast southwards through the whisky country of Speyside before it dwindles into a point on the highest plateau of the Cairngorm mountains, the antipathy towards the SNP was palpable.
There are former SNP voters who have moved to the Tories; Labour voters who took a tactical decision to back the Conservatives – unthinkable south of the border – and floating voters too. They talk critically about the SNP’s mixed track record on schools and the NHS; they cite the case for a strong, unified British stance on Europe after last year’s Brexit vote. But above all, the unifying issue in their minds is Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second independence referendum.
Moray had been an SNP seat for 30 years but for these voters, using Brexit as the basis for a second independence vote so soon after 2014 crystallised an irritation with the party brewing for several years. The Tory cry that Sturgeon needed “to get on with the day job” resonated.
“Individuals that I encountered in my canvassing were less than enthusiastic compared to conversations from years ago, before and during the Scottish independence referendum,” Sliter said. “Everybody I had spoken to was so [pro-] SNP, independence, things are going to be good, to now ‘I’m sick of hearing about the referendum’.”
In Buckie, Moray’s last surviving fishing port which sits a few miles east of Portgordon, Gordon Paterson was securing his small fishing boat against the quayside. A lobster, crab and shellfish specialist, Paterson’s focus was entirely on the opportunity to leave the common fisheries policy (CFP).
Many trawlermen believe Salmond betrayed their industry: he championed their cause in opposition but then, like Sturgeon since, has committed Scotland to remaining members of the EU and the hated CFP. In one of the most significant changes brought on by Brexit, the SNP has ceded its status as being Scotland’s party to the Tories in these voters’ eyes.
The Conservatives are their new champions, Paterson said, by pledging the UK will leave the CFP. “They seem to be doing something about it and look after Scotland a little bit better than the SNP. They seem to be listening a bit more to the fishing side of it.
“We’ve had Alex Salmond for 25 years and he’s been full of promises but he doesn’t do nothing about it. The fishing fraternity are up in arms about it,” Paterson said. “Alex Salmond has got booed out of places. Everybody is very, very disappointed with Alex Salmond.”
Fishing ports such as Buckie were the epicentre of the anti-SNP backlash in north-east Scotland, with trawlermen in Peterhead and Fraserburgh the most vocal campaigners for a leave vote in the EU referendum. Some sailed down to the Thames to lead the pro-Brexit flotilla commandeered by Nigel Farage, the then Ukip leader, in protest at EU controls on British fisheries.
Moray came closest of any of Scotland’s 32 council areas to voting leave: it voted remain by just 122 votes. But the fishing industry’s influence here was relatively minor. There are also English, Welsh and Northern Irish Royal Air Force personnel at RAF Lossiemouth, the last fighter base in Scotland. And there are farmers, distillery workers, and production line workers at the Baxters soup factory or Walkers biscuit plants.
There are builders too such as Ian Gardiner, working in the sun on a backyard wall on the outskirts of Buckie. He voted out in the EU referendum and Tory on 8 June. He once considered voting SNP, he said, and he thought long and hard before voting leave. His concern then was not quarrels over fishing rights, which he thinks can be managed, but the dominance of Germany and France in EU affairs.
“I thought maybe the SNP was taking us for granted and it was more the emphasis put on separation as opposed to united we stand,” he said. “I’m more for pulling together because we going to be coming through a lot of problems and things are, like as not, going to get worse before it gets better – in all aspects really.”
He admited his vote was partly a protest against the quest for Scottish independence, but primarily, he wanted the Tories to show some strength on Brexit. “There’s bit of rigidness, in standing up, not being soft, because I don’t think being soft works.”
In Keith, a market town close to the border with Banff and Buchan, the seat once represented by Salmond, a woman said she too had voted Tory. Asked why, she said briskly: “Fed up with the SNP, simple as.”
A few hours earlier, Kathleen and Bert Martin, farmers who run an arable croft outside Elgin, said they too had both voted Conservative. “I’m fed up hearing about the SNP wanting a second referendum because we voted no [to independence]. That’s the main reason,” said Kathleen Martin.
“Put it like this: Nicola Sturgeon thinks if she gets everyone on her side [by supporting independence], we would get back into Europe. We would rather be part of the world but if we had to choose [between the UK or independence] we would rather remain with England.”
Bert Martin, who recalled voting SNP in the 1970s, said he had “just one answer” to the question about why the SNP lost so heavily in Moray: “Nickie Sturgeon. She’s always going on and on about an independence referendum. That’s the biggest thing. The people of Scotland were all fed up with that.”
Alan Riddoch, a wedding photographer in his early 30s, suggested there was another reason the SNP lost: many younger people like him did not vote. He enthusiastically voted yes in the independence referendum, as did many of his friends, and backed the SNP in 2015 but this time, he felt no urge to do so.
Donald Trump’s election as US president changed the way many of his friends follow and understand politics. They now follow US television comedians such as John Oliver. It is now a spectator sport, comic and unreal.
“A lot of my friends are more political now but they don’t know what they’re looking for. I don’t know whether I’m Liberal, Labour or SNP because no one party hits every one of my buttons,” Riddoch said. And the SNP had failed to make clear what they offered to Scottish voters, he added. For him, they had lost their relevance.
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