By-elections show SNP's future in the city is bleak

Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Southside/Newington was pegged from the very beginning as a Labour-Green contest. Portobello/Craigmillar looked like a relatively simple SNP hold. To begin with. Both ended up remarkably tight contests, with Labour and the Greens emerging victorious in Southside and Portobello respectively. The headline stories are therefore as you'd expect – Labour's surprisingly resilient vote in both wards provides evidence that a 'Burnham Bounce' in the polls is possible in Scotland too, and the Greens have shown they could maybe carry over their successes on the Holyrood list to council level for the first time. However, it is the SNP who should be most concerned. They have now defended four by-elections in this term of the council – and lost every single one. Corstorphine, Colinton, Southside and Portobello – different corners of the city whose residents face different challenges, and in none of those areas do the people of Edinburgh seem to think the SNP have the answers. Huge drops in the SNP vote in both wards last week show a tide moving away from a party that has spent this council term arrogantly complaining about being locked out of power – given how these by-elections have gone, perhaps Edinburgh residents approve of that approach! The implications for the SNP are huge. They elected 19 councillors in 2022 and these results have delivered the stark possibility of losing a third of those or more. If I were an SNP councillor in Fountainbridge, Wester Hailes, Liberton or Sighthill right now, I would be more than concerned. The relationship between the SNP and the Greens may suit John Swinney's party when they are the larger partner, but what happens when the roles are reversed? Could the arrogance of Scotland's leading nationalist party survive being relegated to sidekick status? But why has it come to this? Well, there will as always be a few reasons but perhaps it might be that Edinburgh is finally done with the SNP. Perhaps, after 20 years of an SNP government that long ago strayed from disdain for Edinburgh into outright hostility for this city, the people of Edinburgh have run out of patience with them. Perhaps five years of disastrous administration, tackling the fallout of which has been the biggest challenge of the current council, and then years of sniping, carping and entitled self-pity have not endeared Edinburgh's SNP councillors to their residents. Perhaps their continual refusal to prioritise the bread-and-butter issues that residents of this city care about; road safety, school budgets, getting basic services right, is finally showing them to be out of touch with our city and its people. One thing is certain, if Labour and the Greens can share the claim to be the winners last week, the SNP's future in Edinburgh is bleak at best. The chickens of their failure are coming home to roost in City Chambers – and it's about time too