Who's your MP?

[Emrys]

50. I haven't posted much about Scotland in the upcoming election,

and maybe this sort of story will partially explain why:

Scottish Labour MP candidate: We helped Tory campaign in 2019
...
The stunning admission was captured on footage caught by a Ring doorbell, when Labour’s Tauqeer Malik told a voter the party secretly supported the Tories in Aberdeen South in 2019.

The voter, who said he would back the Conservatives’ John Wheeler, was told that Labour deliberately fumbled their 2019 campaign when the party was led by Jeremy Corbyn so as to give the Tory bid a boost.

Malik also fondly reminisced about working with Wheeler while they were in coalition with the Tories on Aberdeen City Council. That arrangement led to the then-Scottish Labour leader suspending Malik along with other colleagues dubbed the Aberdeen Nine.

In the footage, Malik called the Conservative candidate Wheeler “my friend” but urged the voter to back him [i.e. Malik] to stop the SNP winning the seat.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24413563.labour-mp-hopeful-admits-helped-tory-campaign-last-election/

I've written elsewhere on DU about how I feel this is the most difficult of elections to predict in Scotland, and this is another example of why. Such polls as there've been have varied wildly, but on top of that is blatant candidate-encouraged tactical voting like this on a scale the rest of the UK is unlikely to see.

The fact that this isn't just one "rogue" candidate mouthing off and spilling the beans on the doorstep, nor something new in Scottish politics, is borne out by this footage from 2022 of then MP (now Dame since January this year) Siobhain McDonagh boasting about how Labour and the Tories systematically connive up here:

It doesn't really chime with Labour's main message in Scotland that voters have to vote Labour to get the Tories out. In reality, the SNP was the runner-up to the Tories in all six currently held Tory Westminster seats in Scotland.