The idea though that since the 1830s most people in Scotland have voted for the opponents of the Tories isn’t actually correct! For long periods it was basically a two way slog. It isn’t even actually correct to talk about it as the ‘Conservative Party’ in Scotland prior to the 1960s as it was actually several parties working together with the main partner being the Unionist Party! To keep things simple though we’ll call these parties the Tories.

Just going back to the 30s and 40s and Scotland was by then pretty evenly balanced between Labour and Tory voters. Throughout the 1950s the Tories tended to gain slightly more votes than Labour and in 1955 they even had a slight majority of total votes cast! Even more than the 50% of total votes the SNP managed in 2015.

Labour started to push consistently and clearly ahead from the 1960s but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the Tory vote started to go down to the low 30%s late 20%s.   

The Tory vote only went through the floor to well below 20% from 1997 onwards after a decade and more of Thatcherism. At least a part of that was down to their hardened opposition to devolution.

If someone is starting from a viewpoint that Scotland has always been anti-Tory though then it is a wrong starting point. It is kind of hard even to compare now as of course we now have three main parties plus the Lib Dems and Greens so voting patterns are not really there for a straight country to country comparison between Scotland and England. Plus there are different issues affecting things with the most obvious being the independence question. Plus on devolved elections we have a completely different voting system. At Westminster elections for Scottish constituency seats the SNP (as Labour did from the 1970s until quite recently) gain far more seats than their vote warrants. The difference being though that they support a change to the UK voting system – whereas Labour were happy to have a huge majority of Scottish seats on a minority of the vote.

People do though often suppose current trends mean it has always been so! You get the same with my constituency here in the Borders. Other Scots will say “oh you lot always vote Tory” when in fact the current Tory MP is the first Tory MP I have known here. Prior to John Lamont and since David Steel won the constituency in the mid 60s it was always Lib Dem apart from one SNP win – yet folk insist it has always been Tory.