You'd have hoped that Holyrood would have grown up by now. You'd be wrong |
Until this year, every Scottish and UK election I’ve covered has been characterised by one or two dominant themes. These are issues that have cut through to voters on all levels and which often emerge on doorsteps during the campaign trail.
In no particular order, since 2011 these have gathered around the constitutional debate, health and social care, the poverty gap (including educational attainment), the state of our public services and – after 2021 – post-Covid challenges.
At this year’s Holyrood election campaign something else became evident as I accompanied candidates from various parties on the stump and at the few hustings debates I attended. It spoke of something bleak, arising from a disconnection between ordinary voters and professional politicians whom voters now regard as members of an all-encompassing cartel.
“I probably won’t be voting this year as none of them deserve my vote,” I was told by a couple in Inverness. The same sentiment, or various versions thereof, was expressed on doorsteps in Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Argyll.
Underpinning this national state of listlessness was something much more alarming: an almost total breakdown in trust between communities (especially disadvantaged ones) and what they saw as an affluent, complacent and censorious political class who were commonly held to be “not very bright”. Or, in the words of one elderly woman in the east end of Glasgow: “You wouldnae trust any of them to go and get the messages.”
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