ANGUS Robertson’s defeat in Edinburgh Central is a sign of wider changes in Scottish and British politics. Upon the downfall of the external affairs secretary, one cause stood out – his August 2024 photo-op with Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK.
It wasn’t an edifying scene; Robertson posing with the smiling dignitary of a state currently engaged in genocide.
The meeting led to a backlash in the SNP and wider independence movement and prompted the Scottish Government to suspend all meetings with the Israeli government.
The better part of two years later, anger enough remained to cost Robertson his job. Local independence activists had pointedly refused to campaign for him. His seat went to the Greens, who have made a far more forthright defence of the Palestinian cause.
Across the UK last week, our new era of war made itself felt. Sometimes this is hard to gauge – how much of Labour’s collapse is attributable to anger over their complicity in the genocide?
It’s worth remembering that the Palestine movement gave Britain an early premonition of our now thoroughly fragmented party system at the 2024 General Election.
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Even as Labour swept to power with their huge majority, supposed party strongholds were shaken, and some toppled, by pop-up campaigns dubbed Gaza independents. It was a sign that the party’s coalition was vulnerable to its foreign policy, which has played such a role in reducing Keir Starmer to his sorry state.
As then and in the recent Gorton and Denton victory of Hannah Spencer, so in 2026, the right-wing press has screamed bloody murder at the insolence of Muslims voting.
One post of the night from the Spectator magazine sums up the vibe: “Allahu Akbar, one and all. It’s been a big night for Green and independent candidates standing in the Gaza – sorry, British – local elections.”
The people of Palestine, the magazine continued, “now find themselves represented in town hall decision-making about bin collections and potholes nationwide. As if they hadn’t suffered enough, eh?”
That’s a cute joke about the killing of 70,000 Gazans, 20,000 of them children. In coverage of this kind, contempt for democracy is matched only by the absence of civilisation.
It’s precisely because of the enormous symbolic power of Gaza and everything it exposes about our cosy, disastrous, morally deformed establishment that they banded together to attack the Palestine movement in the lead-up to last Thursday’s elections.
Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and the Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley, among other state functionaries, were reading from the same script, a sign of how emaciated British democracy is becoming.
Of course, a much wider array of issues was at stake in these elections. But they are difficult to untangle from our new era of war. Top of the bill in Scotland was the “cost of living crisis” – a phrase which is increasingly a euphemism for war inflation.
From the US-enforced blockade on Russia to the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, the growth of inter-state competition and predatory war has broken up supply lines, disrupted energy systems and spiked the cost of vital goods.
It was on growing public disquiet over runaway prices, yawning inequality and sagging living standards that the SNP, Plaid and the Greens staked much of their electoral fortunes. But we shouldn’t forget that many Reform votes also reflect these concerns.
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It would be complacent to deny the salience of immigration as an issue, yet it is so often a distorted mirror for a generalised sense of precarity and stagnation.
Without economic growth and with the political establishment bent on hacking away at public provision, it is easy for demagogues to pursue a zero-sum battle of the have-littles against the have-nothings.
And against this backdrop, a feeling of helplessness prevails. Every party was beaten by abstention in these elections, most often by the working class, who feel shut out from any representation of their growing needs.
Just as disdain for warmongering and its consequences is not a simple left-vs-right story among the electorate, nor is opposition to it the preserve of any electoral force.
If there is a single coherent attitude running through the British party system today, it is that the public sector and widely used services and benefits will have to be slashed to fund rearmament.
Unfortunately, Holyrood is no exception.
The SNP have set themselves the task of gutting the public sector of jobs. Meanwhile, British state plans to boost armament production in Scotland have support across the supposedly polarised parliament.
There remains a disjuncture between the scale of the dangers that now face us, threats of war, of attacks on our standard of living and to our basic democratic rights, and what the electoral sphere can deliver.
All the threats to the political establishment discussed were only viable because of the political room created for them by the failures of the British state in the last quarter-century, and the anti-war movement that was the largest extra-parliamentary political force throughout that time.
In the coming years, it will continue to be politics beyond parliaments that plays the most important role in channelling anti-war feeling. But for now, at least, we can take heart that sometimes the most egregious offences against that public good sense carry a price, just as it did in Edinburgh Central.
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