Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset.

The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a vote,’ she said without irony. A straw poll of my neighbours reveals that the rest of my street have become nationalists too.

The fact that the local SNP candidate was apparently caught

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