Skip to main content
The Morning Star 2026 Conference
Don’t mention the councils
The SNP's council election pitch had almost nothing to do with councils, saying little about education, housing or better pay for council workers — instead they are pushing ahead with the privatisation of social care, writes STEPHEN LOW

UNUSUALLY for me, unusually for almost anyone really, but when the party political broadcast came on I didn’t immediately change channels. Instead I watched the SNP’s pitch. It was, I have to say, highly informative, but not perhaps in the way its producers intended.

A man walks through a rural landscape intoning a long list of Tory failings and misdeeds, almost all of which are well known to everyone who hasn’t been in a coma. The bearded protagonist points to an elderly woman, Betty, further up the hill he is climbing.

She, a trifle incongruously, is sitting in an armchair knitting. A waxwork with a blue rosette is brought into frame. Betty attempts and fails to throw the waxwork. Cut to “Vote SNP.” Remaining viewers are then told that was a party election broadcast for the Scottish council elections on May 5.    

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
DIY POLITICS: Trade unionists, community activists, students and staff from the University of Dundee protest at job cuts to £35 million deficit, April 2025
Aw That / 17 January 2026
17 January 2026

It is time to stop tolerating the governing elites incompetence which makes our lives a daily misery, argues MATT KERR

A general view of staff on a NHS hospital ward
Scotland / 25 November 2025
25 November 2025
SOMETHING CHANGED: Nigel Farage, seen here chased through the streets of Edinburgh in 2013, now commands the support of some 10,000 Scots
Features / 29 April 2025
29 April 2025

COLL McCAIL rejects the Scottish Establishment’s attempt at an ‘elite lockout’ of Reform UK and says the unions should be wary of co-option by their class enemies in Holyrood just to keep one set of austerity-mongers in power instead of Reform UK

School support workers, who are members of Unison, Unite and GMB Scotland, on the picket line at Portobello High School in Edinburgh, September 26, 2023
Funding / 28 April 2025
28 April 2025

Tackling poverty in Scotland cannot happen without properly funded public services. Unison is leading the debate