• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Scotland - Politics

The Scottish governmentsurvived a confidence vote 01 May 2024, giving the Scottish National Party (SNP) a chance to pick a new leader to replace outgoing First Minister Humza Yousaf. Yousaf’s decision to step down as first minister and SNP leader threw the party into chaos and boosted hopes in the United Kingdom’s opposition Labour Party that it can regain Scottish seats to win a national election later this year. Yousaf said he would resign after he ended a coalition with the Green Party. It means the SNP is seeking a third leader in little more than a year, undermining what had once seemed like its iron grip on power in the devolved Scottish government. While the Greens made Yousaf’s position untenable by withdrawing their confidence in him personally, they voted with the SNP against the vote of no confidence in the Scottish government. The no-confidence motion was defeated by 70 votes to 58.

Yousaf would remain in office until the SNP chose a new leader. Former SNP party leader John Swinney and Yousaf’s old leadership rival Kate Forbes both said they are considering running. Glasgow-born Yousaf, whose paternal grandparents and father emigrated to Scotland from Pakistan in the 1960s, had been hailed as a polished communicator who the SNP hoped would be able to unite the fractured SNP. Yousaf was the Muslim head of a major political party and Scotland’s youngest elected leader. He took over the party in March last year, after the resignation of longtime leader Nicola Sturgeon, who faced splits in the party over the best route to independence for Scotland and proposed transgender recognition legislation. Police have also probed the SNP’s finances, and Sturgeon’s husband has been charged with embezzling funds from the SNP. She has been arrested and questioned but not charged. Both deny wrongdoing.

Scottish political commentator Simon Pia, a former Scottish Labour press adviser at the Scottish Parliament, said Yousaf at 39 just “didn’t have the political savvy” to handle the rough and tumble of high office. Indeed, during his resignation speech at Bute House, the official residence of Scotland’s first minister in Edinburgh, Yousaf conceded that he had “clearly underestimated the level of hurt and upset I caused Green colleagues” who, after his decision to axe the emissions arrangement, signalled their intention to vote against him in a confidence motion.

Nicola Sturgeon turned the SNP into an election-winning machine at both a Scottish Parliament and London Westminster level during her eight years and four months as party leader and first minister. But after the British government repeatedly refused to facilitate her calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence and after long being buffeted by a series of personal and political setbacks, Sturgeon eventually fell on her sword after claiming that her years as Scotland’s most powerful politician had taken its toll. Independence remains the defining fault line of Scottish politics, even though 55 percent of Scots voted to remain part of the United Kingdomthe 2014 independence referendum.

The political jockeying around the Scottish independence referendumcreated a climate of political intrigue in Scotland, with facts and rumors generally intertwined. Since the Tories (historically weak in Scotland) allied themselves with the SNP in 2007 as part of the SNP-led minority government, SNP insiders and political pundits have suggested that the SNP struck a deal with the Tories whereby the Conservative Party would not obstruct a Scottish independence referendum vote in exchange for mutual support in Westminster and Holyrood elections.

A terrible by-election defeat in Scotland on 23 July 2008, in which a formerly rock-solid Labour seat with a 13,000 majority fell to the Scottish National Party left the Labour Party reeling and fueled fears among MPs that Gordon Brown's leadership of the party, and his premiership, may be beyond repair. For the first time in Labour's eleven-year reign, Labour MPs are experiencing what it is to be truly unpopular and fear they are facing meltdown at the next election, which must be held no later than June 2010.

Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie stated in November 2009: "While we are very opposed to Scotland leaving the Union, if the will of the Scottish people is for Independence, we won't stand in the way. But we believe that the will is not there." Although the Scottish Tories are fundamentally opposed to Scottish independence, they do not oppose a vote as a matter of policy.

For the SNP the transformation was profound. The party was founded in 1934 as the result of a merger between two minor parties, the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party. In the following year's UK general election, the new party contested eight seats and won none. For decades, the nationalists struggled to gain a toehold in Scottish politics. Then, in 1967, the SNP shocked the political establishment by winning a by-election in the nominally safe Labour seat of Hamilton.

During the 1970s, campaigning under a slogan of "It's Scotland's Oil," the SNP sought to exploit the newly discovered North Sea oil reserves as the basis for independence. But the party struggled to make sustained electoral inroads. The creation of a devolved Scottish parliament in 1997 proved a turning point in SNP fortunes. The party first won a minority administration in 2007 devolved elections. Then, in 2011, the nationalists achieved the seemingly impossible, an absolute majority in the Holyrood parliament, and, with it, the chance to realize the long-held dream of a vote on independence.

The Liberal Democrats (Lib Dem) have also moderated some of their statements on a referendum vote. According to Scottish Lib Dem Leader, Tavish Scott, the Lib Dems are not opposed to a referendum vote, "provided the question isn't rigged by the SNP." National Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said during a 2010 political rally in Scotland that there is an "unspoken affinity of interest" between Salmond and Cameron, alleging that the SNP and Tories share a "hostility for the Union."

In 2015 Scottish Nationalists received the most votes for the third election in a row. Labour was beaten into third place by Britain's once-toxic Conservatives. In May 2015 the Scottish National Party (SNP) swept the boards, winning 56 of the 59 Scottish seats available. Of the 41 Labour MPs returned in 2010, just one held on last year. The SNP topped 1 million votes for the first time, but ended the night on 63 seats, two shy of an absolute majority, owing to the vagaries of the devolved electoral system. The SNP's dominance was not reflected in the proportional regional system where the party lost 12 of its 16 seats despite picking up over 40 percent of the vote. Labour finished the night with 24 seats, 13 down from its result in 2011. After a campaign in which Labour tacked to the left in an effort to win back voters lost to the SNP, Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugale faced calls to consider her future.

Labour's vote collapsed, particularly in former industrial heartlands in Glasgow and the West of Scotland that voted "yes" in 2014. The main loser in the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh was the Labour Party, which was relegated to third place by the Scottish Conservatives. While Labour - who dominated Scottish politics for decades - only managed to clinch 24 seats, the Tories gained 31. Labour was not just under attack from the SNP in once-safe working-class areas. The Scottish Conservatives had, by some distance, their best election since the establishment of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999. Tory leader Ruth Davidson campaigned strongly against a second referendum on independence and in support of the union with England and was rewarded with 31 of the 129 seats on offer, almost doubling the Conservatives' representation in Edinburgh. Davidson hailed an "incredible result" after she unexpectedly took Edinburgh Central from the SNP by just 610 votes.

With Scotland's main competition now between broadly center-left nationalism and center-right unionism in the form of the Conservatives, Labour struggled for relevance. At least a third of the Labour's core support backed independence in 2014 and have switched en masse to the SNP. Some within Labour want the party to shift further to the left in an effort to coax these erstwhile voters back. Others believe that the party should become more explicitly pro-union to stem the flow of support to the Conservatives.

That the SNP was set to return to power after nine years in government was a remarkable achievement. The party governed as a minority administration, as it did successfully between 2007 and 2011. As then, the SNP relied on the support of the Scottish Greens. The pro-independence Greens had a good night on 06 May 2015, tripling their representation in parliament to six and pushing the Liberal Democrats, once a major force in Scottish politics, into fifth place. UKIP, who had hoped to poll well in Scotland amid breakthroughs in England and Wales, registered just 2 percent and won no seats.