The 2024 UK General Election Megapost
Alright then everyone, what the FUCK just happened in our general election? I don't know how much news penetrated the HFCS-rotted cerebellums of the Atlantically Challenged*, but we have had just about the weirdest election in living memory. Three years ago (shit it's really been that long) I wrote this cosmically retarded hostage to fortune:
*Americans. I'm talking about Americans.
the Tories look set to rule Britain for a very long time to come thanks to the total disarray of their rival parties
Five years after an election where Boris Johnson not only beat the Labour party, but ripped into its traditional heartlands in Northern England and seemed to set up the Conservative party (otherwise known as the Tories, from an Irish Gaelic word for a cattle rustler) for decades of uninterrupted power, they collapsed into the party's biggest electoral hiding since they were formed in the 18th Century, as Labour won over 400 of the 650 seats in Parliament, including places like Aldershot, a seat that has been continually occupied by a rotund Conservative backside since 1835. This result also seems to defy the current trend in the West, where the right is in the ascendant in places like France, Italy, the Netherlands, the USA and Canada.
You will notice that I am talking a lot about the Conservative party, who lost the election, and very little about the Labour party, who won it. This is because Labour, despite their crushing majority in the House of Commons, didn't really win this election at all. This election was lost by the Conservatives, who detonated in a spectacular self-inflicted explosion that flung monocles, tweed jackets and copies of the Daily Telegraph like harrumphing, wobbly-jowelled shrapnel all over the country.
To evidence this idea, let's look at the voting percentages. Labour "won" this election with just 33.7% of the national vote. That compares to 32.1% in their crushing defeat in 2019, less than a 2% increase (for reference, the Tories got 43.6 of the vote in that election). Let's make the ridiculousness of that statistic sink in -
Labour won a landslide win in 2024 with 10% less of the vote than the Conservatives thrashed them with in 2019. It's also less than they got in 2017, where they also lost despite having 40% of the vote. It's not just the Labour party either, the Liberal Democrats won a record 71 seats with just 12.2% of the vote, a meagre increase of just 0.6% on their 2019 result, where they won only 12 seats in a thoroughly embarrassing performance. This election also featured the lowest turnout since the Second World War, meaning that less than 20% of eligible voters actually voted for the winning party, despite the massive margin of their win, the lowest figure in the country's history.
The Conservatives, having thrashed Labour by more than 80 seats in 2019, lost over 2/3 of their MPs, going from 365 seats to just 121. A string of cabinet ministers lost their seats, and the Conservatives lost the seats occupied by Rishi Sunak's 3 predecessors - Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss, the first two of whom were smart enough to announce their retirement before the election. Liz Truss, though, narcissistic and stupid to the last, thought she was safe and ended up throwing away a gigantic 26,000 vote majority to lose by 650 votes. True to form, she threw a gigantic tantrum, delaying the announcement of the result for an hour by hiding in the toilets, emerging wearing a different pair of trousers to the one she had gone in with, ripping off her rosette, and slinking away without the traditional concession speech.
Lizzy peed her paaants, Lizzy peed her paaaants
And if if you thought the Conservatives had a bad night, the Scottish National Party, racked by corruption scandals and bitterly divided over gender policy, did even worse. The 2019 election returned 48 seats for them, they managed to lose 5 of them before the 2024 election even started, and by the end they had dropped to just 9, losing 81% of their seats in 5 years.
So what in the flying fuck just happened?
Here is Jacob Rees-Mogg in the process of losing his seat, standing next to a man dressed as baked beans calling himself "Barmy Brunch".
This doesn't even reach the top 100 strangest things that happened in this election.
This election isn't really about Labour, or about the Liberal Democrats, any more than the slaying of an antelope by a cheetah is about the vultures that nibble on the corpse when the big cat has had its fill. Except in this scenario, the antelope was killed by a retired stockbroker from Kent who barely got a bite in before being swarmed by scavengers. Also, the antelope deliberately tore off its own legs in the retarded belief that this would help in some way. It's not a very good analogy, really.
This election was not an endorsement of any of the winners This election was that rarest of things in the UK, a display of national unity. The whole nation, man and woman, white and black, gay and straight, Left and Right, Greggs people and M&S people, held hands and came together in the spirit of one-ness and unity, with a single clarity and unity of purpose - that being to fuck the Conservative party as hard as they possibly could with the rustiest, most serrated implement they could find. We Brits can't agree on anything we like, but we sure can gang up on something we hate, and by jove we really, really fucking hate the Conservative party.
Before I explain why that is, I need to address the grinning, milkshake-stained elephant in the room - Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party. Farage has long been a disruptive kingmaker in British politics despite never achieving significant electoral success as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), intervening decisively in the Brexit referendum campaign to push Leave into its shock victory, something that not only reshaped the political landscape on its own but also brought down Prime Minister David Cameron, and in so doing started the downward descent of the Conservative party into the smouldering ruin it now finds itself as the Tories failed four successive times to find an adequate replacement. Reform UK only won 5 seats itself, but took an astonishing 14.3% of the vote, more than the Liberal Democrats, as disaffected right-wing voters finally had an alternative party to which to turn to express their disgust with the Conservative Party, losing the Tories seat after seat as their voters defected in droves, leaving other parties to clean up in the first-past-the-post voting system that awards the seat to whichever candidate has the most votes, regardless of how low a percentage that might be. This is how Labour and the Liberal Democrats were able to win hundreds of seats, with the right-wing vote split between Reform and the walking corpses still voting Conservative, despite barely increasing their overall share of the vote.
Rishi Sunak just about managed to hold onto his own seat.
The man on the right is called "Count Binface". He got over 300 votes, came 6th, and beat 6 other serious candidates.
This election also saw significant levels of "tactical voting", whereby voters manipulate the electoral system by voting for parties they do not support. In constituencies where, for example, the Labour party were the nearest challengers to the Tories, supporters of the Liberal Democrats and other parties that stood no chance of winning would vote Labour in order to ensure the Conservative candidate lost - repeat this with Labour supporters voting Lib Dem where that would stand the best chance of disposing of the local Tory, combined with the right-wing vote being split between the Tories and Reform, this explains how Labour and the Lib Dems were able to win huge numbers of seats without significantly increasing their share of the vote.
With the boring electoral maths out of the way, let's do the fun bit and look at exactly why the Conservatives, a party that looked invincible half a decade ago, became so detested that people whose usual idea of political activism was to complain about
Greggs selling vegan sausage rolls were suddenly performing complex electoral research and arithmetic to work out how to eject them from office as efficiently as possible.
I've thought of a few different ways to structure my coverage of the chaos of the last decade, but I've decided to go leader by leader, to show the collapse of the Tory party since 2015. Since David Cameron resigned in the aftermath of losing the Brexit referendum, the Tories tried four times in five years to replace him. Historically, one of the Conservative Party's greatest strengths has been their willingness to defenestrate leaders who were not performing adequately, even those who has previously led with great success - the Party's 1990 coup against a declining Margaret Thatcher, for example, was instrumental in their winning the 1992 general election in the face of seemingly impossible odds. But this system began to glitch out after Cameron's resignation, because Cameron wasn't really the problem, and as such they had no idea how to replace him. The party's general membership had also shrunk considerably since Thatcher's day, and consisted of senile old pantaloons thoroughly disconnected from what the country wanted from its leaders, electing thoroughly unsuitable candidates until the party's MPs decided to stop listening to them entirely by 2022 (which did not solve the problem).
The British electoral system, like the American one, requires big political parties who have to cover a lot of ideological ground if they want to win an election, and just as in America this leads to factionalism as people are forced to rub shoulders with people whose ideas they despise in a way they wouldn't in, say, most European systems where multiple small parties will form coalitions. The Conservatives have long been divided on the issue of the EU, and many in the party hoped that the Brexit vote would settle those matters for good and let people move on. But no, it just made things worse, as the pro-Remain faction of the party (Cameron's faction), the right-wing "Headbangers", and the more moderate "Soft Brexit" faction entered into a three-way civil war that persisted right up until the 2024 election. As well as ideology, the frequent backstabbings and changes of leader led to many prominent members of the party despising each other, and most Conservative MPs spent more time plotting against each other than they did trying to govern the country.
So, here's a potted history of Tory leaders post-Brexit referendum.
Theresa May
"Here, you dropped your dignity."
May was a "One Nation" moderate who was believed to be in favour of a "soft Brexit" that included remaining in the Free Market and the EEA, and was elected as a unity candidate on a platform called "Get Brexit Done". May, it turns out, did not "Get Brexit Done", and her time in office was notable for constant infighting and catastrophic failure to pass any Brexit legislation at all. In fact, her first attempt at passing the deal she had negotiated with the EU resulted in the largest ever parliamentary defeat by a sitting government, as all the opposition parties and most of her own party all voted against her.
May decided to tilt the parliamentary arithmetic in her favour by calling a snap general election, hoping to seize on the unpopularity of the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed beardy Trotskyist who had been propelled to the party leadership by Communist entryism. Yet somehow she nearly managed to lose the 2017 election to a man who openly supported the IRA, losing her majority and being forced into an unofficial coalition with the Ulster Unionist Party, hardline Brexiteers who now effectively held her hostage. With no parliamentary majority and a resurgent opposition, May's chances of passing Brexit legislation was now basically zero, and she resigned in 2019 having completely and utterly failed to achieve a single thing that she set out to do.
Boris Johnson
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or Boriszebub the Infernal Lord of Lies and Slimy Maggot of the Stinking Pit to give him his formal title, was a former journalist who rose to prominence in the Conservative party due to his lifetime alliance with his schoolfriend David Cameron, his charisma, and his complete and utter lack of morals. Boris had already been fired FOUR TIMES from journalism jobs for fabricating stories and had a string of lovechildren all over London, but his (entirely fake) "bumbling posho" persona gave him charisma and the kind of seeming immunity to scandal that fans of Donald Trump will be familiar with. Boris' solution to the parliament problem was to attempt to break the law* by illegally calling a parliamentary holiday to prevent the Brexit legislation from being debated - when this was rejected by the Supreme Court, Boris called an election and this time won comfortably, using his new majority to ram through the Brexit legislation after two years of Tory infighting.
*in the business, we call this foreshadowing
Boris had little time to be smug, though, as Covid-19 hit the UK almost immediately afterwards. Boris ordered a national lockdown, including draconian legislation making it illegal to leave your house for more than an hour a day, and banning social gatherings. Covid itself provided a brief moment of levity, however, as it landed Boris in the ICU. The lockdowns were of course unpopular, but massive scandals were brewing.
The first major scandal of the Covid era was the gigantic levels of corruption that plagued the government's response, especially the "VIP Lane" procurement process for supplying equipment to the NHS. Billions were spent on Personal Protective Equipment for the NHS with no tendering process, resulting in billion-pound orders being given to people who, by huge coincidence, were personal friends of senior Conservatives or large-scale donors to the party. Much of the PPE was never used, much of it not being of the required quality or simply massively over-ordered. To this day, there is £1.4bn of masks and gowns, past its expiry date,
rotting in a field in Hampshire where it was dumped by the NHS.
£1.4 billion! If only they'd used it to bet on the election instead, we'd have solved the economy!
But the biggest scandal was yet to come, when it turned out that both Boris' government and the Conservative Party itself had thrown wild parties at the height of Covid, with Boris personally attending several of them. Boris' response, of course, was to lie and say he didn't attend any such parties, until photos of him doing so emerged. This put Boris in breach of his own Covid laws, the ones that his Police forces took so much joy in enforcing for everyone else. The Metropolitan Police, led by the corrupt and incompetent Cressida Dick, refused to investigate, despite their previous zeal in persecuting the peasantry for having picnics or holding hands in public, until a Labour MP brought a legal challenge and the Met reluctantly investigated their benefactors. Boris, and several others (including Rishi Sunak), were fined, making Boris the first ever sitting Prime Minister to be convicted of a crime while in office.
They don't seem very worried about spreading a deadly disease. It's almost as if they knew something we didn't.
For the voting public, the message was clear: The Elites in general, and the Conservatives in particular, don't think the rules apply to them and are only in government for their own personal gain. Future events would go even further to confirm this.
More scandals racked the Johnson administration. A key ally, Owen Paterson, was found to have been paid by lobbyists for a company that went on to win a £300m PPE contract with no tendering process, resulting in his constituents issuing a recall petition and a defeat in the subsequent by-election. Boris promoted another ally, the aptly named Chris Pincher, even though he was under investigation for sexual assault. This last scandal was the one that finally convinced his enemies to break cover and try to unseat him, and half his cabinet resigned in protest, notably including his own Chancellor (finance minister), Rishi Sunak. Rather than accept that the game was up, Boris tried to cling on, even as his own party tried to force him out of office. As soon as he appointed a minister, they would resign in protest. At one point the country had three Education ministers in one day. This went on for nearly two weeks until he literally ran out of MPs to promote and finally resigned. Afterwards, he would devote his time to supporting the governmenthahahaha no he devoted it to seething and plotting against the people he believed had betrayed him - chief among whom was Rishi Sunak.
Liz Truss
Spoiler: No she couldn't
Having lost three leaders in five years, what the Conservatives needed now was stability and calmness. Instead they got Liz Truss. The leadership process for the Conservative party gives the final say to the party's general membership once the party's MPs have reduced the field to two. On this occasion, they were given the less-than-enviable choice between Boris' former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and his Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss. Sunak, tainted by also being fined during Partygate, and, in the view of the membership, far too centrist and brown-skinned for high office, lost out to Truss, who presented herself as the heir apparent to Margaret Thatcher.
Liz Truss was no Margaret Thatcher. As vain and arrogant as she was intellectually limited, in a sane system a woman like Liz Truss would have found her niche as a barely-competent HR manager in some huge company, cluelessly lording her power and influence over luckless employees whose jobs she couldn't do to save her life. Sadly, her family connections in the oil and gas industry pushed her to politics and then to high office, and the overconfidence and refusal to ever admit error that had got her that far would end up bringing her down in the most spectacular flame-out in British political history. So obvious was it that Truss was a dreadful candidate that the Daily Star newspaper bought a lettuce and livestreamed it every day of her premiership, betting the paper's reputation on the cabbage lasting longer than the Prime Minister.
Truss appointed her close friend and fellow dunce Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, and announced a catastrophic "mini-budget" of wild and untested economic ideas that nobody asked for or wanted. In particular, the pair announced £80bn of tax cuts, to be funded entirely by government borrowing. Now I'm for low taxes as much as the next three-buttcheeked Right Wing Death Squad, but the government's coffers had been thoroughly emptied by Boris and Rishi Sunak during Covid, the government was up to its neck in debt and the country's infrastructure was crumbling and desperately in need of new investment. Piling up more debt without plugging any of the many, many leaks in the public finances was deranged.
The financial markets panicked, and S&P threatened to downgrade its rating for UK government bonds, reflecting the markets' belief that the British state could no longer pay its debts and risked an interest/debt spiral and fiscal crisis. These were the same government bonds in which most Brits' pensions were invested, and a run on them would have cost the entire country their retirement savings. This represented a 1929-level disaster in the making, the kind of disaster that tends to end in guillotines in the streets and angry men with moustaches taking power and invading Poland. The Bank of England frantically tried to restore confidence, selling off currency reserves and surging interest rates to prevent the Pound from collapsing - the resulting hikes in mortgage payments cost households much more than they ever would have gained from the tax cuts, and hundreds of thousands of homes were foreclosed.
Truss begrudgingly admitted that the tax cuts were "too much, too fast" and rowed back on some of them, but by then the knives were out. She had a new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, forced on her by the party after Kwarteng's resignation - it was widely accepted that Hunt was now effectively the Prime Minister, with Truss sidelined and not trusted to make any decisions. That humiliation was too much for her malignant narcissism to bear, as were the Conservatives' plunging poll numbers, and she resigned after just 44 days in office. Total Lettuce Win.
Rishi Sunak
After the Truss debacle, the party's MPs decided that the membership simply couldn't be trusted to make decisions (true) and decided that they could do better (false). They therefore appointed the man Truss had defeated the previous time, Rishi Sunak, without any formal leadership contest.
Rishi Sunak may be brown, but oppressed he most certainly is not. An alumnus of Winchester College, (fees of £50,000 per year), Oxford and Stanford, Sunak's work history included the likes of Goldman Sachs and being a partner at two hedge funds, TCI and Theleme. He married the daughter of Indian IT billionaire Naryana Murthy, estimated to be worth over $800m in her own right. Sunak is in every way a member of the new global elite and is of a generally pod/bug persuasion, though so poor was his grip on his party and the country that he made very little headway. Not only was Sunak hated by Liz Truss and her supporters, he was hated by Boris and his friends for his role in bringing down the Johnson administration, hated by the broader Conservative membership for being too brown and hated by the left of the party for being pro-Brexit. Sunak's administration was one of constantly evading yet more attempts on his career by Conservative MPs, who had clearly got addicted to sacking their leaders and wanted to continue to do so in order to advance their own careers, the country be damned.
And the country really was damned. The public finances, cleaned out by Covid and then by Liz Truss, were in a desperate state. The NHS had collapsed, inflation was at 11%, roads weren't repaired, there were widespread brownouts, everything was on strike, housing was unaffordable, fuel was unaffordable, hundreds of thousands of people (many of whom were employed) were dependent on food banks to survive, many more had to choose between heating their houses and paying their mortgages, and net migration into the country hit an unsustainable 750,000 annually.
So what did Sunak do? Well he decided that what we needed to do was deport a few hundred asylum seekers to Rwanda. No, that isn't satire. He wanted to send a few planeloads of asylum seekers to Rwanda of all fucking places to "send a message". I almost can't believe I'm typing this, but it gets worse. Even his own immigration minister, the hard-right Robert Jenrick, resigned in protest at what an obviously useless stunt this policy was. The usual lefty types decided to fight this already idiotic idea in the courts, and Sunak decided this needed to be the hill he wanted to die on, spending nearly £300,000,000 in legal costs and weeks of parliamentary time, all of which could have been spent on doing literally anything else, trying to make it happen. In the end one (1) person left the country, and they had to be bribed £5000 to do so.
To say that this hyper-moneyed son of privilege lacked the common touch was the understatement of the century. His gaffes were legendary, such as the time he asked a homeless man in a soup kitchen whether he wanted to work in finance - "I'm just trying to find somewhere to sleep tonight" was the response.
This was the man chosen to lead the Conservatives to the general election.
A Catastrophic Campaign
The Conservative Party's 2024 election campaign will be long studied by political scientists, much the same way that nuclear scientists study Chernobyl or that dieticians study your mom. There has never been a more incompetent campaign fought by an incumbent government. And even what is regarded as the most incompetent election campaign in British history, Labour's catastrophic attempt to dethrone Margaret Thatcher in 1983, didn't result in as big a defeat as Sunak's feeble attempt here. And it went disastrously wrong from the very start.
On the 22nd May 2024, Rishi Sunak held a press conference to announce a surprise general election for the 4th July. It being the British Spring, it was pouring with rain. For some reason Sunak decided not to procure the services of an umbrella, nor did he decide to use the perfectly good press room within 10 Downing Street. So Rishi stood there, drenched to the skin, reading out his own political suicide note on live TV as someone nearby used a boom box to blast Tony Blair's old election anthem, D:Ream's "Things Can Only Get Better". But things did not get better, not for Sunak anyway.
More like "Things can only get wetter, amirite?!"
The timing of the election came as a shock to everyone. He could have left it as late as December to call it, and most Conservative MPs believed that was what he would do, in the hope that the economy would improve by then. Sunak consulted almost nobody and even his own party were completely unprepared, having no manifesto or any policy platform, and with many MPs having already booked their summer holidays.
That's not to say that nobody knew when the date would be. A number of bookmakers reported suspicious betting patterns on the date of the election, with a surge of bets on the 4th July date in the 48 hours leading up to the 22nd May announcement. It then turned out that those bets had been placed by members of Sunak's inner circle, including by several Metropolitan Police officers assigned to guarding the PM. Betting on something with insider information is illegal, with penalties of up to 2 years in prison. One of the Police officers was arrested on suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office. But Sunak refused to take action against the members of his team, clearly hoping the whole thing would go away. But it didn't, and Sunak had totally underestimated the effect that the growing scandal would have. For the British, the fact that people trusted with the secret information at the heart of Government had used to to try to enrich themselves proved to them what they already knew - that the most senior people in the British State in general and the Conservative Party in particular were in it entirely for their own personal gain, and had taken the opportunity to jam their fat, greasy fingers into the till one more fucking time before they lost the election. Sunak's failure to take any decisive action allowed public fury to overtake him, and the story, and what it said about the Tories, would go on to dominate the election.
It was far from the only disaster. Sunak decided to duck out early from the commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, walking out on dignitaries including Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron in order to give an interview with ITN - an interview that was not live and could easily have been done a few hours later. ITN compounded his embarrassment by releasing footage of him arriving at the interview, apologising for being late and lying that the event "ran over" (it didn't), apparently unable to plan his own diary around an event that had been in it for literally 80 years. Not only did this call into question his honesty and his judgment, it also directly insulted the two groups of people who most reliably voted Conservative - military veterans and old people. It was no coincidence that Reform picked up 3 of its 5 seats in seaside towns known for their large populations of retirees and that the Tories lost military towns like Aldershot and Yeovil to Labour.
It seemed that the weird and awkward Sunak couldn't do anything without screwing it up and looking stupid, and nothing brought that tendency on more than his attempts to be "a man of the people", where his WEF elitism and privileged upbringing made him trip up over and over. In one interview he tried to claim that he understood poverty because he didn't have Sky TV (Britain's first satellite TV service) as a child. Firstly, he went to a £50,000 a year private school, and secondly, Sky didn't even exist until he was 10. Then there was his catastrophic appearance on "This Morning", ITV's lowest-common-denominator daytime TV slopfest for unemployed council flat ditchpigs, where he was made to wait at the back while they interviewed Britain's most tattooed woman, with Sunak awkwardly sitting on a chair at the back of the room like a misbehaving schoolboy awaiting the headmaster's judgment. Things went no better when it was his turn to be interviewed, on being asked what his favourite food was he replied that it was a sandwich.
Come up with your own funny caption for this one, it's almost beyond parody.
And that's all before we got to the Conservative manifesto, which contained some truly bizarre policies that smacked of either extreme desperation or total insanity.
Question: You're leading the Conservative party into a general election they're almost certain to lose. Your biggest problem is that nobody under the age of 103 wants to vote for you. Young people in particular hate you and are pissed off that your government denied them freedom during two of their formative teenage years. Your state is bankrupt and short of tax revenue. What do you promise them?
If your answer to the above was "conscription", congratulations, you're Rishi Sunak! Absolutely nobody wanted or was proposing National Service, and the policy went down like a bowl of cold sick, with many pointing out that a man who couldn't even be bothered to honour the military for a whole afternoon was planning to force people into it. Other less-than-enthusiastically received policies included suspending people's driving licences for littering, giving the police unrestrictive use of facial recognition cameras, and of course spending hundreds of millions of pounds to send some planes of asylum seekers to Rwanda in the face of nearly a million immigrants a year.
During a televised debate, Sunak claimed that the Treasury (part of the government) had calculated that Labour's tax plans would cost people £2000 per year. The Treasury released a formal statement saying that they had done no such thing and effectively called their own boss a liar. Sunak, apparently suffering from brain damage, continued to insist that it was a government figure for the rest of the campaign.
Two days before the election, things were so bad that the Tories used their secret weapon* - Boris Johnson. Just in time to remind us that he existed and the things that he did (that he was not in the least bit sorry for), Boris was called in to give a speech just after Sunak. Boris, still bitter over what he saw as Sunak's betrayal for resigning on him three years earlier, refused to shake his hand as he went onstage.
*The kind of secret weapon that just blows up on the launchpad and kills everyone
When the people delivered their verdict on all this, Sunak resigned, at the same lectern where he had soggily destroyed his political career 6 weeks earlier. Beside him was his near-billionaire wife, who had clearly paid more attention to the D-Day commemorations than her husband, as she cannily wore WWII dazzle camouflage to prevent anyone aiming torpedoes at her.
Just like her husband, nobody knows what direction she's heading in
McMeltdown
The other big story of the election was the total dismantling of the Scottish National Party's presence in parliament, with the Nats losing over 80% of their seats. This included a complete wipe-out in the Glasgow area, and the loss of their true heartlands in the far North. So what happened there?
The seeds of disaster were sown when their leader, Nicola Sturgeon, very suddenly resigned in March 2023 without any clear reason at all. It soon became very obvious why, as the Police descended on her home and arrested both her and her husband Peter Murrell, who was also the party chairman, on allegations of corruption and campaign finance fraud. It appeared that £100,000 of campaign donations had gone missing, swiftly followed by the couple acquiring a new luxury RV. At the time of writing, Murrell has been charged with illegally lending his own money to the party and falsifying its accounts to cover his tracks, as well as manipulating the party's membership numbers to make them look higher than they really were.
In the end the RV saw even less of Europe than the Scottish football team
Sturgeon endorsed her health minister, Humza Yousaf, as her successor. Yousaf had been responsible for the most draconian Covid lockdown anywhere in Europe, and was also the man responsible for Scotland's notorious Hate Crime legislation, which, among other things, made it illegal to be racist in your own house, made "unintentionally stirring up hate" an offence and was retrospective, allowing prosecutions to be brought against people over things they said years ago that were perfectly legal at the time*. Yousaf scraped home in the leadership election with just 52.1% of the vote**.
Yousaf was a divisive and unpopular leader with an uncanny ability to alienate everyone around him. The party was torn in two by a dispute about gender recognition, with Sturgeon and Yousaf ramming a bill through the Scottish parliament that would allow people to self-certify their own gender at age 16. Rishi Sunak employed the very rarely-used provision of the Scottish Devolution Act that allowed him to veto Scottish legislation, on the grounds that it would make some people one gender in one part of the country and another gender in the rest of it. Yousaf launched a legal appeal against this, despite a poll showing that he had the support of only 18% of the Scottish people for doing so, eventually giving up but not before spending millions of pounds on legal fees.
*When this came into effect, the Scottish Police were overwhelmed with phone calls complaining about things Yousaf himself had said, including comments about there being "too many white people" in prominent positions in Scotland - Scotland itself being 93% white.
**Yousaf had repeatedly demanded that the 2015 Scottish Independence referendum be re-run because the "no" vote wasn't decisive enough at 55.3%. After winning his own position with just 52.1% of the vote, he went very quiet about this.
Yousaf's end came after a catastrophic meeting with the leaders of his coalition partners in the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Green Party. After a blazing row about energy policy, the Greens announced that they were withdrawing support for his government, and Labour called a Vote of No Confidence that Yousaf was certain to lose, and he fell on his sword, taking down the governing coalition with him. His successor, John Swinney, had the impossible task of sorting out this mess, alongside the ongoing corruption scandal, with just a few months to go before the election. He also faced a splinter party, Alba, led by Alex Salmond, Sturgeon's predecessor as leader of the SNP. Sturgeon had trumped up false rape charges against him in an attempt to purge his faction of the party (altering the statute of limitations on sex crimes in Scotland specifically to do it), so Salmond, on being found not guilty, formed his own party with McBlackjack and McHookers to leech votes from them.
Why did the SNP collapse so badly? Well aside from the obvious damage a serious corruption and embezzlement scandal would cause to any party, the SNP's leadership and elite became very alienated from the party's voter base. Sturgeon and Yousaf were urban neoliberals, devoted to wokery, DEI and troonery in every form possible, but that never represented the party's voters in their core areas of Glasgow and the far North.
Glasgow is a big, poor, dirty city with high crime and unemployment and a failing school system. Most voters there are hardcore socialists, who want jobs, not immigrants and definitely not poofters and hate crime legislation. They wanted independence out of old-fashioned nationalism, they hated the English as foreign invaders, but found their supposed advocates trying to foist hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, Nigerians and Albanians on them instead.
There's a reason this place is in Scotland
I have family connections in the Far North, and I have spent a lot of time there. The people there are very, very socially conservative and very protective of their culture. They want independence because they want to preserve their way of life, including the Scots Gaelic language and its associated music, poetry and traditional crafts. Again, they don't want foreign invaders, be they English or anyone else. They are hyper-protestant "Wee Free" Presbyterians, a religion focused on the individual and the right to freely commune with the divine in the way that suits you. They hate being governed by people that don't understand them, and they certainly don't want pride parades, brown people or troonery. The Covid lockdowns devastated their way of life, ending the social events that they depended on and driving the region's already sky-high alcoholism and suicide rates to record levels that have not come down since they ended*. Like the Glaswegians, they felt betrayed by the party that they themselves founded to preserve what was left of one of the few old Celtic communities left in the world, seeing it taken over by woke Edinburgh liberals who decried them as racist. And they met that betrayal with ruthless vengeance.
*If you fly in to Inverness airport, the first thing that greets you as you get off the plane is a poster urging you not to kill yourself. You'll see another one before you even get to the baggage claim, as well as others telling you not to drink yourself to death. It's one hell of a welcome.
