The 5th of May 2011 is likely to go down in Scottish political history – and not just because it marked the first Holyrood election in which your humble correspondent was eligible to cast a vote, writes Peter Geoghegan. That Alex Salmond won an overall majority in a system purposely designed to militate against that very possibility was a testament to the strength of the SNP campaign, albeit helped by the paucity of Labour’s vision and the collapse in the Lib-Dem vote.
Here in Broughton, the national – and regional – swing towards the Nats was largely repeated: in Edinburgh Central, the SNP, in the form of Marco Biagi, surged from third place in 2007 to snatch the constituency seat from Labour’s Sarah Boyack by more than 200 votes. Boyack, who still has a visible presence in the constituency (at the time of writing a couple of her election posters are still swinging off a lamppost on Bellevue), did squeeze back into Holyrood, picking up a Lothians list seat.
Paradoxically, the SNP’s success in Edinburgh – it claimed five of the six constituency seats – spelt heartbreak for one of the party’s most familiar faces in this part of the city. Shirley-Anne Somerville missed out on the Edinburgh North and Leith seat by 595 votes, while the Nats’ remarkable performance in the constituency vote left no room for the hard-working MSP on the top-up list.
Labour’s Malcolm Chisholm was rewarded for running a positive campaign – at odds with his party’s broader, essentially pessimistic message – that consciously shied away from tribal politics. There is a salutary lesson in this. The Scottish public voted en masse for the SNP but that is not to say they want whipped-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life one-party government.
Of course, whether we get consensual, independent-minded politics in Holyrood’s fourth term is another matter entirely.