Beneath the red brick chimney at Lady Victoria Colliery in Newtongrange, Midlothian, the Tuesday morning tour is under way. Now home to the National Mining Museum Scotland, this was one of seven pits that employed thousands of men until the industry’s bitter demise. Miners and their families voted one way, the tour guide explains. “Everybody voted Labour back then. A ham sandwich could get voted in as a Labour MP.” But as communities across Scotland’s central belt sank into post-industrial decline, so their relationship with the Labour party frayed, until the independence referendum of 2014 persuaded voters of a progressive alternative. Midlothian added to the wash of SNP yellow that painted Scotland in the 2015 general election, electing its first nationalist MP. Now, after 18 months of SNP turmoil and with a second referendum a seemingly distant prospect, the seat is high on Labour’s target list. The sense of momentum was palpable as the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, bounded into the museum’s cafe for a private meeting with canvassers. “I know how hard it’s been for you over the past 10 years,” he told them. “People have questioned your values, questioned your commitment to your country … but people are listening again.” Polling suggests the SNP will lose a swathe of seats like this one to Labour on 4 July. Have people in Midlothian stopped listening to the SNP, and what does that mean for the longer-term prospects of Scottish independence?
The canvassing team heads south to a new housing estate in Gorebridge, doling out sunscreen and clipboards. Midlothian is the fastest-growing council area in Scotland, and the Labour candidate Kirsty McNeill, a former adviser to Gordon Brown and most recently executive director of Save the Children UK, jokes that some addresses are so new they don’t appear on Google Maps yet. “Midlothian is Scotland in microcosm,” says McNeil: a mix of professional Edinburgh commuters – the constituency lies to the south-east of Scotland’s capital – and aspirational families in estates like this one, former mining villages where that industrial heritage is still a source of pride, alongside the rural farming community. “A really typical doorstep conservation involves someone saying: ‘I’m completely scunnered, can you do what you can to get them out?’ Then I have to clarify: ‘Do you mean them up the road [the SNP in Holyrood] or them down the road [the Tories in Westminster]?’”
McNeil’s theory is that Midlothian voters – many of whom work in the public sector and were already dispirited by “SNP policy failures turning up in their classroom, on their ward, on their beats” – were offered an “off-ramp” by Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as first minister early in 2023. “It allowed people to say to themselves: ‘I was a Nicola voter rather than an SNP voter and I don’t want anything to do with the chaos that followed.’”
The turmoil that has engulfed the SNP since Sturgeon stepped down is brought up in almost every conversation as the Guardian traversed the constituency – most frequently the embezzlement charges brought against its former chief executive Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband. Colin Beattie, a former party treasurer who was also arrested as part of the police investigation into SNP finances, is MSP for the area. The former health secretary Michael Matheson, who was suspended as an MSP last month after wrongly claiming £11,000 in expenses for streaming football matches on holiday, is also referenced repeatedly.
“The state of the party – infighting, leadership battles, one faction looking to pull it to the right – makes it very difficult to vote for,” says Thomas Black, a 39-year-old single father who is waiting to pick up his daughter. Black, who works in early years education, plans to vote Labour after a lifetime of supporting the SNP. “They’ve failed to deliver on their main pledges in terms of closing the attainment gap in education and reducing child poverty,” he says, and are “way too distracted by independence – as much as I’m in favour of it, they still have to run the country”. Black is not the only person basing his decision on how to vote in a Westminster election on the SNP’s record at Holyrood, where they have been in government since 2007. Joe Harley, 51, who is working from his family home in the pretty village of Roslin last Wednesday afternoon, is likewise planning to switch to Labour. “The SNP’s ineffectiveness at the Scottish level has leaked into my thinking about them in terms of how I’ll vote at UK level,” he says.
With an additional tier of government and experience of two major referendums in the last decade, the Scottish electorate is often described as highly sophisticated. Both Black and Harley are part of a sea change in Scottish politics shown by polling over the past 18 months, where constitutional preference has been decoupled from party preference for the first time since 2014. Both men continue to support independence but, as the Scottish Election Study confirms, are more focused on removing Sunak from Downing Street. But Harley suggests his future support for independence is not guaranteed: “If we’d had many, many years of a good Labour government who knows – part of the attraction of independence is not having a Tory government ever again.”
Farther north in Mayfield, near Dalkeith, one of Midlothian’s most deprived communities, Sharon Hill is blunt about the area’s biggest concern before the general election: “Money. People don’t have enough. June is a five-week month – if the money you’re getting isn’t enough to stretch to a four-week month then a five-week month can kill people.” The community development trust that Hill runs, which includes a membership pantry, cafe and garden, is part of a thriving third sector across the constituency, with volunteers organising summer gala days and guerrilla gardening. Behind the pantry, Phil Morris, a development worker, surveys the wide walled garden – populated with raised beds and a bike repair project – which volunteers have transformed from a disused bowling green.
“There’s a lot of anger and mistrust of politicians, especially after what happened during Covid,” says Morris. “People are eager for change, but I’m not sure whether they actually believe it’s going to come.” Both the SNP and Labour are “like salesmen”, says Kelly Leighton, 36, visiting the garden with her two-year-old son Leo while her older child is at school. “Very good at saying the right things. “What I’m hearing from a lot of friends is how the cost of living is going up so much,” says the part-time kitchen designer. “It’s not just food but everything has to be cut back. I just hope that more people will vote, but especially younger people I talk to [who] don’t think it matters to vote.” The Ageing Well walking group – for people between 75 and 91 – are tucking into soup and scones after a circuit of the local park, and all complain about the impact of Midlothian’s rapid expansion of infrastructure: “They think it’s great to build these huge housing estates, but where’s the shops, the schools, the doctor’s surgeries? It’s already hard enough to get a GP appointment.”
Farther south in the village of Pathhead, Neil Heydon-Dumbleton has been campaigning to see a vital local bus route reinstated after the service was cut by more than half after the pandemic. The 60-year-old charity organiser lives in a stone cottage with two friendly white cats directly opposite the bus stop, where he regularly observes people sheltering in the rain as they wait in vain for a ride towards Dalkeith and Edinburgh. More broadly, says Heydon-Dumbleton, “people are fed up with the state of public services and aware they have declined dramatically over the past 10 years”. Yet in the local cafe, he struggles to find “mass enthusiasm” for the coming vote. “For the first time in my life, I don’t know how to vote.” He has never voted Tory, voted for the SNP after Brexit, “but the impact of ‘motorhomegate’ has dented people’s confidence – if a party couldn’t manage its own finances there’s a concern about what it could manage.”
Back into the centre of the constituency, the SNP candidate Owen Thompson is brandishing a bright yellow umbrella on an afternoon of squally showers. “All political parties should be doing what we can to restore trust,” he says, “but week after week something else comes out of Westminster that makes people question: ‘What’s the point?’ I’ve been in frontline elected politics for 20 years and I’ve never seen politicians held in lower esteem.” As for the questions lingering around his own party, he says there’s “no question that a sanction was necessary” for Matheson and voices “frustration” at the amount of time the police investigation – which began in July 2021 – is taking. Many Midlothian voters will mention their concerns about SNP transparency and their “good feeling” about its new leader, John Swinney, in the same breath. Thompson is hopeful that the respected party veteran will restore some of that eroded trust. “He has a wealth of experience and credibility and that helps in giving electors confidence in the people running the country.”
But even while pledging his vote to Thompson, David Brown, 50, notes a political shift in Scotland. “I was recently away with my friends, they come and go as to whether they’re on my side or not,” laughs the postal worker, who is on a career break to care for his sick mother, “and this time two of them are definitely Labour.” For Thomson, a vote for the SNP is a vote for independence and, further round another new estate, Neil Johnston, 57, agrees. With support for his cause still about 50%, he believes that the normalising of independence among the younger generation makes it an eventual inevitability. “They talk round here about families of Labour supporters,” says Johnston, a lab manager, “but there are families of independence supporters as well – my 17-year-old can’t understand why we’re not independent already. To her it’s normal and she doesn’t even conceive of Westminster being a thing.”