But why?
First off, I am one of the most anti-SNP person you'll ever meet in your whole life, it's has if the things they support doing, I am against doing. As if Nicola Sturgeon is reading my mind and saying "Do the opposite."
But I'm not here to argue, I just feel confused on why the SNP's popularity has sky-rocketed. I suppose I can understand if they gained a small amount of popularity, but the fact is, it looks like all Scottish House of Commons seat will be filled with SNP members.
So why have they become so popular, especially after the dangerously massive oil price drop?
They've gained a huge number of voters from Labour, because the sight of the Labour party making common cause with the Conservatives during the Independence referendum campaign disgusted a lot of their supporters. SNP membership is now pushing 2% of the entire Scottish adult population - Labour or the Tories would sell their grannies for such high membership levels.
The SNP are a progressive, left-wing party, while the Labour and Conservative parties are seen as pretty much interchangeable as far as fiscal policy is concerned. Labour have also moved so far to the right to try to shore up their vote in England that they have moved too far away from their natural support up here.
Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour branch manager, is seen as an ultra-Blairite placeman, just a stooge of the national party, and isn't respected. What many people don't know is that he is a member of the Henry Jackson society, a pretty right-wing, hawkish and interventionist pressure group.
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/
Most of all, it's loathing of the Conservative party which is driving their membership up. You have to understand just how widely the Tories are despised in Scotland to understand the SNP surge, because we've lost faith in the ability of Labour to do anything worthwhile to counter them.
I can only agree. I can't make it out either, nor can I make any sense out of anything Nicola Sturgeon ever says (and that has nothing to do with her accent, which I understand perfectly well). I don't know what planet she lives on but it doesn't seem to be Earth.
I can only guess it's "a plague on both your houses", and a much larger SNP contingent in the House of Commons could conceivably be part of a coalition. SNP voters had better be careful though, as splitting the left-wing vote is likely to make it easier for the Conservatives to win overall.
Its not so much that the SNP have become more popular than the fact that Labour (the only other choice since the Tory party is nearly extinct up here) have become more Unpopular.
I have family in Sutherland. I noticed that before devolution, everybody cursed at the ignorant b*ggers in London. Since devolution, they curse at the ignorant b*ggers in Edinburgh. Politicians living in capital cities are ALWAYS out of touch with the needs and wants of country people, and it always seems that they don't care about the fact that they are out of touch.
The SNP are a specially bad case of this. It looks to me, half Scots, living south of the Border (so you can write me off as ignorant if you want) like every SNP person I ever see on telly is a grasping self-centered pompous know-it-all git wanting to climb to the top of the heap and don't care who they tread on to achieve that. The moment it looked like the SNP had got a sniff of power, all the nasty little cockroaches came out of the woodwork.
My hope for the future? The sound good sense and good education of the ordinary Scots people will see through the mask to the phonies underneath and kick their ar*ses from the Border to Cape Wrath, and then kick them off the cliff.
Update: and then elect some politicians that actually care about Scotland more than their own career
Maybe it's because they can't drag Scotland into a disastrous independence but might get some extra perks for Scotland from Westminster.
What is missed by SNP is that it's not just Scotland that feels that Westminster is remote. Everywhere in UK that is a fair distance from London has similar views.
Pweople like to dissent - it shows independence of mind AND there is a lot of pressure.
The vote was against so it is now safe to say you dissent.
The SNP is becoming the tory party in Scotland.
Because the SNP is the only progressive humanistic political party in Scotland concerned with the environment, ridding Scotland of those terrible Trident nuclear submarines, investing in healthcare and
not burdoning university students with huge debts. You only have to look at the other answers written by English people (I am too) to see how out of touch Westminster is with the needs and views of Scottish people
Scotland has always been on the political left, and now a lot of people feel betrayed by Labour as they were campaigning alongside the Tories against independence. It's not that their views have changed , it's that Labour has .
The Labour party made the mistake of taking Scotland for granted
It's not because they're FOR anything particularly popular; it's because they're AGAINST "the English", whom they equate with "the Tories".
There is nothing rational about it.
