Stretching

An Eider duck at Portobello beach. Perhaps he'd been there for a while and just fancied a stretch. After a brief wing flap he sat back down again.
Talking of flapping, Theresa May's cynical attempt to boost her majority backfired spectacularly as she went from a slender overall majority to needing the help of the DUP (presumably) to break the hung parliament. Corbyn led Labour to a much better result in the polls than anyone had predicted when the campaign started. In Scotland the SNP lost seats to Conservatives, Labour and the LibDems and it seems that Scottish politicians want to claim this as a verdict on IndyRef2. You can see why Ruth and the Tories would want that to be the case as they had precious little else to say in their campaign, Likewise Kez and Scottish Labour who spent a lot of time saying 'SNP bad'. And probably even Nicola would rather it was so, even if it appears to have knocked back the prospects of a second Independence referendum. If it was 'a different election' in Scotland then it continues the idea that Scotland is completely different from the rest of the UK. However I think you can make a case that it was an election very much driven by a UK-agenda. The SNP losses to the Tories, despite the claims that it was a unionist alliance, was largely a result of the SNP vote falling and both Tory and Labour increasing. Considering the conversation we had with a SNP supporter on Wednesday night who said he was likely to vote Tory this time because of Brexit I think it's possible that a significant number of SNP Leave voters, who are probably more likely to be on the right of the SNP, voted Tory this time round. Maybe they see a Nicola-led SNP as just too left-wing for them, and the SNP's all-things-to-all-people isn't working as well as it once did. Likewise the rise in Labour's votes may well have been a product of Corbyn's UK manifesto and campaign rather than anything Scottish Labour did. Of course, it's almost impossible to know what has actually happened - raw numbers can hide more complicated patterns when a quarter or a third of people don't vote. Rather than SNP voters switching to the Tories, perhaps some people who voted SNP last time didn't bother at all this time and a whole load of other people, who didn't vote in the last election, came out for the Tories, either for a Hard Brexit, or to stop IndyRef2. I wonder...