The Scottish leaders debate won’t have changed voters’ minds

When Alex Salmond was leader of the SNP he used to complain bitterly to the broadcasters that it was unfair to stage TV debates with three unionist party leaders – Labour, Conservatives and the Lib Dems – against the one nationalist. In last night’s Scottish leaders debate though, the unionist imbalance hardly figured. That is because independence hardly figured.

Anas Sarwar arguably won by sheer persistence, though his robotic delivery might have alienated some voters.

The Tory leader, Douglas Ross got in his customary line about the SNP’s ‘obsession’ with separatism and the SNP leader, John Swinney, agreed that independence remained ‘line one, page one’ of the SNP manifesto, but that was about it.

If this was a rather tame and uneventful leader’s debate it was largely because of the relative absence of the issue that has dominated Scottish politics for two decades. For once it actually was about who runs Westminster.

The soundbite of the night was John Swinney saying Labour was going to ‘walk it’ on 4 July.