Chickens coming home...?

There's an interesting letter in today's Herald. It's from a Mr Walker of Dundee. It's very short, and it can be found

here

It goes:

First Trump, now pylons. I voted SNP for the first time at the previous election. I fear it will be the last time, too.

That's all, but it is significant IMO.

The SNP has made a habit of harvesting any protest at any level with explicit or implicit promises that they would take the protesters side, if only they could.

It wasn't a problem for them before, because they never got elected before. But 2007 changed all that. The SNP is now the "government" in Scotland, and they find that the protesters are sometimes wrong, or the decision isn't quite as black and white as they pretended in opposition.

The big one is the abolition of student debt. How many students and ex-students voted for the nationalists in the belief that their debt would be abolished, only to have their hopes dashed by reality? And thousands opposed the Beauly-Denny line: a few will have switched to the SNP as a protest.

The SNP is losing these votes. Even their own supporters are not happy with some of their decisions. Given the closeness of the vote in 2007 in a number of constituencies, even a few hundred switchers or stay-at-homes could prove fatal to the SNP's hopes of being the biggest party in 2011.