How Scottish Labour's Kezia Dugdale may have handed the election to the Tories

[Denzil_DC]

22. A bit more analysis of some of the dynamics in Scotland (including my Argyll & Bute constituency)

from a blog I've mentioned before, Wings Over Scotland, which paints a picture of a Lib Dem death wish in favour of the Tories with no reciprocality.

This ignores any Labour-Tory tactical voting. One significant seat where there's evidence of Tory-Labour tactical voting is Labour MP (and rabid anti-Blairite, unless he's changed his tune suddenly) Ian Murray's seat, Edinburgh South, where the evidence is that Tories lent him their support in droves in 2015 to give Labour its only seat, and this was consolidated in 2017:

The cannon fodder

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been a drastically reduced force in Westminster politics ever since they were all but wiped out (along with most of their UK colleagues) in the 2015 election. But there were still sizeable areas of the country where they retained a strong presence, even when they’d lost their seats.

That changed dramatically last Thursday.

Because across Scotland, from John O’Groats to Berwick, Lib Dems simply hurled their bodies in front of the SNP’s guns and allowed the Tories to climb up their fallen bodies to attack the Nat battlements – sometimes successfully, sometimes falling just short as their Lib Dem patsies died in vain.

Of 11 seats won by the Lib Dems in 2010, four are now back in their hands, although the only one where they substantially increased their vote on 2015 was (dismayingly) Orkney & Shetland. We looked at the other seven to see if there was any sign of a Lib Dem revival in the wake of the SNP’s decline, and the results were startling.

https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-cannon-fodder/