With 42% of the Scottish vote, Labour won 41 out of a total of 59 seats in Scotland that year. Nine years later, in this month’s general election, it won one seat, with 18.6 % of the vote. Labour had been 13 years in power, but its vote in Scotland actually went up by 2.5 percentage points. In 2011, the SNP won an outright majority at Holyrood for the first time with a manifesto that, among other things, recommitted the party to a referendum on independence. The feeling of Britishness began to wither in many of us during this decade, though unionism, its constitutional cousin, should never be written off.

Source: The Guardian December 27, 2019 16:30 UTC