SNP crisis stretches loyalty of independence supporters

Good morning. Rishi Sunak has a big decision to make today: whether or not to fire Dominic Raab over bullying allegations. An official report into the claims, which Raab denies, could be passed to the prime minister as soon as today.

The expectation in Westminster is that Raab’s career at the top of Conservative politics is nearing its end. If Sunak does, as expected, dismiss him as secretary of state for justice, it may be that Raab’s scheme to have the UK stay in the European Convention of Human Rights goes with him. Certainly, whoever replaces him faces a difficult balancing act between the Conservatives’ treaty obligations in Northern Ireland and in the EU-UK trade deal, as well as the promises the Conservatives have made on small boats.

But that’s all a matter for another time. Some thoughts on one of your repeated questions in today’s note.

Thank you very much for submitting many thought-provoking questions ahead of our first Inside Politics webinar yesterday, and thank you to those who joined us. You can watch it back by registering here. (Please note that, while the form asks for job information, you can still receive the link if you are retired or not currently employed — please just write your personal status in the job title field, and select “N/A” for seniority and industry, or a previous industry if you wish).

Broken link

A question a lot of you have asked me over recent weeks is this:

OK, so the SNP is facing a scandal. But isn’t it guaranteed to retain the support of, at least, the third of Scottish voters who are totally committed to Scottish independence?

Well, perhaps not!

I talk a lot in this email about “salience”: not just what voters think about an issue, or which party they think is the best placed to tackle an issue, but how much they care about something.

For a long time before the 2015 general election, a large number of Labour voters in Scotland backed Scottish independence. A large number of traditionally Labour voters in Scotland had even backed the SNP in elections to the Scottish parliament in 2007 and 2011. But in both the UK general election of 2010 and the European parliamentary elections in May 2014, those same voters backed the Labour party in large numbers.

In May 2015, the Scottish Labour party went down to a shattering defeat, losing all but one of its 41 seats in Scotland. What happened in between May 2014 and May 2015, of course, was the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014.

That acted as a “salience shock”, if you will: an issue that many Scottish voters had been willing to put to one side in many elections became one of great importance in deciding their party choice. That really benefited the SNP (and to a lesser extent the Conservatives) but really hurt the Labour party.

Ultimately we don’t really know what, if anything, might cause that salience shock to unwind. But the fear for some SNP politicians and the hope for some in Scottish Labour is that some event — a scandal in the SNP, a high-profile public policy failure, the SNP visibly running out of routes to another referendum — might turn out to be a second salience shock of its own.

That’s one reason why the SNP’s difficulties might have a bigger impact than we expect. Yes, no one expects that it will dent support for independence significantly or that the 30 per cent of Scottish voters who have backed independence for a long time will change their minds.

But it is certainly possible, at least, that events in Scotland lead to an unwinding of 2014’s salience shock and a very different political battle in Scotland to the one we all expected not so long ago. A big part of the SNP’s success is that there isn’t really any such thing as a “core” SNP voter: anyone can be one. But its big vulnerability, always, has been that some kind of event or scandal might reverse more than a decade’s worth of political advance.

Now try this

I saw Renfield. It’s an eminently disposable B-Movie, but it’s hard for any film starring at least one of Nicolas Cage, Nicholas Hoult or Awkwafina to be anything other than a good time. It’s a load of old nothing (and Danny Leigh was less sold on Awkwafina than I was) but entertaining enough for that.

Top stories today

• Sunak in hot water over wife’s finances | Rishi Sunak did not disclose details of his wife’s stakes in a number of companies, according to the government’s updated register of ministerial interests.

• Beattie ‘steps back’ | Colin Beattie, the treasurer of Scotland’s governing Scottish National party, announced yesterday he was “stepping back” from the role after being questioned by police investigating SNP finances.

• Pension funds wary of Hunt’s consolidation plan | Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been urged by the UK pensions industry not to force retirement schemes to invest in riskier and complex assets including fast-growing young British companies, and infrastructure.

• ‘Northern Ireland has an awful lot to offer’ | US businesses want to invest in Northern Ireland due to its unique access to both the UK and EU single markets, but they first want to see stable government restored, said Washington’s special trade envoy to the region.

• Judges set to lose power to block deportations | The government has agreed to amend its Illegal Migration Bill to allow ministers to ignore interim injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights that attempt to stop a deportation flight, after Sunak caved in to rightwing Tory MPs who had threatened to rebel, the Times reports.