Are the Tories handing three north-east seats to the SNP on a silver plate?

In spite of the SNP landslide in 2019, in spite of the Tories losing more than half their Scottish seats, the SNP were nevertheless unable to regain three Tory seats in the north-east.  Two of those were former SNP heartlands which they used to win even when they were losing almost everywhere else in Scotland.  Banff & Buchan actually bucked the national trend in 2019 by showing a small swing from SNP to Tory. However, it's now possible that the fortunes will flip and the SNP could take the north-east seats back even if they have a grim result nationally.

Just as a rough guide, I had a look at the seats projection from YouGov's latest Scottish subsample, which is on the unfavourable side for the SNP, showing Labour five points ahead. That would see the SNP lose their majority and be reduced to 22 seats - but they would still gain the boundary-revised seats of Aberdeenshire North & Moray East, Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine and Gordon & Buchan from the Tories.  And that's before you take into account the effect of local factors.

A few weeks ago, I wondered if the SNP were getting into dangerous territory by opposing Labour's windfall tax proposals and thus giving Labour a free run to pose as Robin Hood.  But we started to see the upside of the SNP strategy with the now-famous P&J front page depicting senior Labour politicians as "Traitors" over the windfall tax, and the SNP painted in a more positive light.  And now Christmas has come early, with Douglas Ross helpfully identifying for voters that the Tory Budget is an attack on the north-east due to the windfall tax extension, and with Jeremy Hunt even more helpfully volunteering in a live BBC interview that the "Scottish oil and gas industry" is one of the two main losers from the Budget.

If Ross thinks the voters will give "the Scottish Tories" credit at the general election for standing up to their colleagues in London, he's mistaken.  Voters will not see any Scottish Tories on the ballot paper, merely candidates representing the UK Tory government.  If they want to hit out against the treatment of the north-east, they're obviously not going to vote Tory or Labour, and it's the SNP that leap out as the most likely beneficiaries.

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It's fair to say it's been a mixed few days for my own party Alba, with several high-profile departures balanced out by two high-profile new recruits.  And because the second of those new members is Karl Rosie, an elected local councillor in Highland who left the SNP three weeks ago, it's arguable that this week's balance sheet is now actually positive for Alba.  That said, Eva Comrie is still a big loss for the party, and I know several Alba members who think an absolute priority for the leadership should be to do whatever it takes to persuade her to rejoin.

Alba now have five elected representatives across the three tiers of government - two MPs (Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill), one MSP (Ash Regan) and two local councillors (Chris Cullen and Karl Rosie).  In that sense, Scottish politics has become a six-party system, at least for now, although obviously Alba will have to start making electoral breakthroughs if they're going to maintain that state of affairs.

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