Hello, my name is David Dronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to try and make sense of a very interesting set of election results in England, in Wales and in Scotland.

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Listeners can subscribe at a special rate of just £1 an issue by using urlllb.me slash talk. It's a pleasure to welcome back the historian Colin Kid and Helen and I spoke with Colin in the first episode of our series about the union and we were talking then about the history of the UK.

We're going to bring the story back up to date until a little bit about the future too. As we said we would, I think when we discussed it we hoped we could get you back after the Hollywood election.

So we'll start with Scotland and then we'll move to the rest of the UK a bit later.

What's your sense coming out of these elections? It's sort of a cliche I think to say that the forces of pro independence and pro union look as evenly divided as ever.

It's slightly more votes maybe for the union side more seats in the sense of the SMP plus the Greens for the at least pro second referendum side.

But Gordon Brown is trying to argue is arguing it today that we should really think about Scotland as a 30 30 40 nation 30 on each side again 40% of people in the middle what equals middle Scotland who are both pro devolution and pro union do you think that's a better way of saying it.

Yes, I do I mean it looks as though Scotland's pretty evenly divided in terms of pro and anti union forces but what the election results don't quite measure is the depth or shallowness of commitment either to independence or to the union.

So I think Gordon's calculation is more in line with my own view of the situation the SMP are wonderful at doing politics and at positioning themselves and here they did a marvelous job positioning themselves as incumbents yet also anti Westminster insurgents as a social democratic party and I'll say more about the manifesto later as well as being a pro independence.

So I think that's a different way of saying that we should not have a referendum party but it's an odd situation because basically I don't think the electorate has changed from the old days when we had a dominant Scottish Labour party but what we have now are an effect to Scottish Labour parties the Labour party proper but also Nicholas surgeons make over of the SMP as effectively Scottish Labour Mark to

just going to ask Colin what you think about the idea that there was very obviously at least two different elections going on in Scotland.

One in which actually the conservative party were the ones who were doing most of the running which was to turn it into an election about whether there would be another referendum on independence and a more skillful one that the SMP were running which was simultaneously to make it about an independence referendum for those of its supporters who are in that 30% that you're describing but simultaneously saying that it's actually also about ours as the most competent party in this devolved.

So I think that's the structure the one that are most capable of standing up to Westminster so that moment when Nicholas surgeon answers the voter who says what do I do if I want you to be first minister for dealing with the head of government for dealing with the pandemic but I don't want to referendum and she says well you vote for the SMP that kind of catches it and the ability of the SMP at the moment to go both ways is to their advantage.

I mean that's certainly the case and I say it was a very bizarre SMP manifesto there was an awful lot of mention of social welfare provision think things like free NHS dental care a pilot scheme to pioneer a four day week a moves towards some guaranteed basic income additional money for the NHS and what puzzled me was that this was not a manifesto of a party that was

gurdling its fiscal loins to move to independence within the lifetime of the parliament it looked very much like more of the same social democratic model and

Nicholas surgeon has become I mean she's incredibly cautious especially in recent years and I think her her biggest problem is how she manages to manage the expectations of of those in her party who want independence very soon.

Arguably in fact although he was the big loser of the referendum Alex Salman with his alba party Alex Salman's party put forward a much more coherent set of policies for an independent Scotland and its relations with Europe than the SMP managed.

So if as you both say the SMP is facing two ways and we talked about this when we discussed the history of the union and also the history of the SMP and back then I suppose we were it was sort of in the early days of the sturgeon salmon rift which seems to have gone sturgeon way when there was a question then about whether it would divide the party but there's always a question with the SMP you know it's the dog that never quite seems to bark when will the divisions inside the party come to the surface.

Presumably in the course of this parliament as we move towards the question of a referendum and how Westminster resistance to that is dealt with these divisions can't stay buried forever means something's got to give doesn't it.

Well I think what the electorate's repudiation of Alex Salman does and the fact that Alex Salman's alba party siphoned off fundamentalist members from the SMP is I think it gave Nicholas sturgeon a renewed mandate to run things her own way in other words advance gradually towards greater autonomy but without the absolutely no.

The only massive upheaval that independence would bring in the wake of Brexit.

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