This general election will be fought in quite different ways across the UK’s four nations – the Scottish National party dominates in Scotland and Labour in Wales. Yet those contests will be defined by Labour’s resurgence just as in England. In Northern Ireland, increasingly isolated unionist parties are pitted against republican Sinn Féin.
Scotland
A July election will unnerve the SNP. Its new leader, John Swinney, has only just taken office, its cash reserves are badly depleted and Swinney’s attempts to reset the Scottish government have barely begun.
Swinney had hoped to begin the slow task of rescuing the SNP government from its malaise with a major policy speech in early June. Instead, public attention will be taken up by the battle for Westminster. In Scotland that will be a three-way contest between the SNP, which has 43 seats, the Conservatives, now on seven, and Labour, which has two.
The campaign will be dominated by one story: can Swinney save the SNP from being badly defeated?
He will hope the election will help the SNP re-engage with Scottish voters. The latest opinion polls suggest Labour leads the SNP in Scotland for the first time since before the 2014 independence referendum. The latest from YouGov on Monday suggested Labour was 10 points ahead.
After the SNP’s recent turmoil, with the arrests of its former leader Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell, who has since been charged with embezzling party funds, its crisis over Humza Yousaf’s botched firing of the Scottish Greens, and policy failures at Holyrood, the party is close to being broke.
Donors have deserted the party; it had a loss of £800,000 last year and is now heavily reliant on membership fees and state money for its parliamentary operations.
In contrast, Scottish Labour under its centrist leader, Anas Sarwar, is better funded than ever. After emphatically defeating the SNP in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection with a 20% swing, Labour could win up to 30 of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats.
If it does, Labour believes it will be poised to defeat the SNP at the next Holyrood election due in 2026, for the first time in nearly 20 years.
Wales
Labour is anticipating making substantial gains in Wales at the general election while the Conservatives face almost total wipeout.
Though Labour has long been the dominant party in Wales, it won only 22 of the 40 seats in 2019, with the Tories returning a healthy 14 MPs. For this election, the number of seats has been reduced to 32 and Labour will be expected to take the vast majority of them.
However, Welsh Labour has faced a difficult couple of months since the election of Vaughan Gething as its leader and Welsh first minister.
Gething has been strongly criticised for taking a £200,000 donation for his leadership campaign from a company whose owner has been convicted of environmental crimes. He also sacked a member of his new government after an exchange of Welsh Labour Senedd phone messages was leaked. The election campaign will be a stern test of his authority.
Though the Conservatives are the second biggest party in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, they are bracing for losses of seats they won at the last general election, such as a raft of constituencies across north Wales. High-profile Tories such as the chief whip, Simon Hart, who is contesting the new Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen) seat, could face defeat.
Labour’s opponents will campaign on issues such as the ailing Welsh health service, which the Cardiff government is in charge of, and the controversial 20mph scheme. Agriculture is another huge issue in Wales, as shown by the eye-catching farmers’ protests at the Senedd over new farm subsidy plans earlier this year.
Plaid Cymru won four seats in 2019 but may struggle to return that many MPs this time. It too has faced internal problems, with Adam Price resigning as leader after a review said his party had failed to “detoxify” its culture and found evidence of misogyny, harassment and bullying.
None of the main Welsh parties are without their problems but Labour’s powerful party machine in Wales is likely to triumph.
Northern Ireland
The general election will destabilise Northern Ireland’s government just as it was beginning to offer a sense of political normality. The campaign could decapitate the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and undermine its delicate truce with Sinn Féin at Stormont, putting fresh pressure on the region’s brand of power sharing.
The executive was still finding equilibrium after being revived in February after a two-year hiatus. It briefly wobbled last month when Jeffrey Donaldson resigned as leader of the DUP in the wake of sex abuse charges spanning 21 years, but Sinn Féin’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill, and the DUP’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, steered it through the crisis. The election will present a sterner challenge.
The DUP may field Little-Pengelly to run for Donaldson’s Lagan Valley seat, which he is vacating and which the party risks losing to Alliance. That would remove her from Stormont.
The DUP’s interim leader, Gavin Robinson, risks losing his East Belfast seat to Alliance, especially if Naomi Long, Alliance’s leader and the justice minister, runs. Even if Robinson holds on, a hardline DUP faction that seethes at post-Brexit trading arrangements and has little love for Stormont may try to seize the leadership after the election.
Robin Swann, the Ulster Unionist health minister, is to step down to try to become MP for South Antrim, leaving the executive’s most important and problematic portfolio in disarray.
The political climate will probably harshen as nationalist and unionist candidates vie to rally their grassroots with wedge issues such as the Irish language and the legacy of the Troubles.
Few if any parties will mourn the departure of Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, who is stepping down as a Tory MP.
