The Endless Campaign: Scotland after the May 6 Elections - With David Leask

Breaking Britain: A Podcast about the Politics of a Disunited Kingdom

After months of campaigning, voters in Scotland, Wales and parts of England went to the polls on 6 May 2021. While local elections and a byelection signalled that the Conservative Party is still dominant in England, strong results for the Scottish National Party in Scotland and the Labour Party in Wales indicate a very different picture for two other member nations of the United Kingdom. In Scotland, initial analysis in the Scottish Election Study set out how the outcomes of elections to the Scottish Parliament reflect the culmination of a widespread shift in party loyalties that has been opening up since the beginning of devolution in the late 1990s.
This week we have been joined once again by David Leask to examine what these election results can tell us about the state of the UK Union. Through a long career in Scottish journalism as Chief Reporter at the Herald and now as a columnist for a wide range of other publications including the Herald and the Times, he has covered the remarkable transformation of Scottish political culture over the past two decades. David is ideally placed to reflect on how these trends are changing Scotland's relations with the rest of the UK and the wider world.
The background music is by Through the City by Crowander, and the production for this podcast was by Daniel Mansfield.