Dr Michael Higgins
Research Co-Lead for Culture, Communications and Creative Practice at the University of Strathclyde. His books include Media and Their Publics, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture and Belligerent Broadcasting.
Email: Michael.higgins@strath.ac.uk
Dr Maike Dinger
Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-/DFG-funded project “Voices from the Periphery: (De-)Constructing and Contesting Public Narratives about Post-Industrial Marginalization” with Bournemouth and Stirling University. Recently completed her PhD on representations and discourses of political participation in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Email: m.v.dinger@stir.ac.uk
X: @may_dinger
UK Election 2024
Section 3: The nations and regions
25. Have voters fallen out of love with the SNP? (Dr Lynn Bennie)
26. The spectre of Sturgeon still looms large in gendered coverage in Scotland (Melody House, Dr Fiona McKay)
27. The personalisation of Scottish politics in a UK General Election (Dr Michael Higgins, Dr Maike Dinger)
28. Competence, change and continuity: a tale of two nations (Dr Will Kitson)
29. Election success, but problems remain for Labour in Wales (Dr Nye Davies)
30. Four ways in which Northern Ireland’s own seismic results will affect the new Parliament (Prof Katy Hayward)
31. Bringing People together or pulling them apart? What Facebook ads say about the NI campaign (Dr Paul Reilly)
32. A New Dawn For Levelling Up? (Prof Arianna Giovannini)
33. Who defines Britain? National identity at the heart of the 2024 UK General Election (Dr Tabitha Baker)
Labour could not have been less dependent in the vote in Scotland than in this election. Polls suggested well in advance of the vote that Keir Starmer’s procession to Downing Street would take place with or without Scottish assistance. While Labour leaflets persisted in the ‘make sure we get the Tories out’ line, most political arguments against voting for the SNP focused on removing Scottish independence from the political agenda, engaging “Scotland’s real priorities” (as the Conservative campaign literature had it). Allied to this, much of the recent intrigue of the Scottish political scene has been around the decline of the SNP, on their second First Minister in 15 months since Nicola Sturgeon resigned in 2023 and mired in allegations of internal financial impropriety. What jeopardy there was in this election was on the extent and portrayal of the SNP’s fall from dominance.
How did this play out in media coverage? We saw an argument over policy and potential government replaced by a contest of Scottish party fortunes. In this, the parties were routinely manifest in the figures of their leaders. In terms that have dominated research in political communications, the coverage of the General Election in Scotland exemplified the personalisation of politics, with a glimpse of the tactical choices and irrationalities this entails.
Across the UK, rise in personalisation was at its most apparent in the televised leaders’ debates; a US innovation that has become an expected part of UK general elections. Those politicians invited to appear in the debates sit within a hierarchy of individual political prestige. The most elevated gathered for the BBC and Sky leaders’ debates, limited to the only feasible candidates for Prime Minister: UK Conservative leader Rishi Sunak and his Labour counterpart Keir Starmer. A parallel debate between Holyrood-based Scottish leaders was hosted by BBC Scotland, including Scottish First Minister John Swinney, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, Scottish Green leader Lorna Slater and Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross. Swinney also joined UK PM hopefuls Sunak and Starmer, along with UK Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, on a BBC Question Time special. Revealingly, all of these Scottish leaders are based at Holyrood and, with the exception of Ross, were non-participants in the election.
Hosting the less exalted were the BBC Seven Leader and the ITV Multi-Party debates. These included the Deputy leaders of the UK parties, the leaders of the more marginal Green and Reform party, along with Plaid Cymru. Representing the SNP in these two debates was Westminster leader and General Election candidate Stephen Flynn.
The greater stress on Holyrood-based Scottish leaders with no formal involvement in the election continued in the Scottish press. A larger and on-going content analysis undertaken at the University of Strathclyde showed that in the four weeks leading up to the election Scotland’s best-selling newspaper, the Scottish Sun, quoted Holyrood leaders Sarwar and Cole-Hamilton in more articles than PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer or Ed Davey. The only Scottish party leader to stand as a candidate in the election, the Conservatives’ Douglas Ross, appeared in more election stories than then-UK PM Sunak. However, the starkest difference in the Sun’s coverage is between SNP Holyrood leader John Swinney and ‘SNP Commons leader’ the aforementioned Stephen Flynn, where non-candidate Swinney appears in more than fifty articles to Westminster-bound Flynn’s five. Factors in this may include broadcast and print media’s hostility to the SNP and independence in general: Flynn is the more accomplished media performer than Swinney, which, through a combination of party communications strategy and a preference to cast the SNP in a weaker light, adds a partisan dimension to the choice of leaders to bring to dominance. Flynn, as a member of a prickly small-party opposition (along with the Reform party and Plaid Cymru) was perceived to have done well in the debates and garnered notable support among an – interestingly – British rather than purely Scottish audience.
In common with recent general elections, much of the stake in Scotland has been the diminishing prospect of a further independence referendum. Constituency and Commons reputations pale alongside a party’s constitutional position. In practical terms, Sarwar, Slater, Swinney and Cole-Hamilton are also local and available to talk, and Ross’s candidature at the expense of a sickly colleague gilded his profile with a gloss of villainy. Within the Scottish media, the debate remained with the locally recognisable cast at Holyrood, where the news value of “proximity” favours a Scotland-based politician. In addition, this proximity adds to and plays into a contemporary preoccupation with authenticity in mediated communication. In a context in which information is superfluous and has nonetheless been declared “relative” and “fake”, authenticity and personalisation seem to gain more traction politically. Yet, it is inescapable that the cost of this exercise in personalisation is that the main focus is on Scottish leaders that are not candidates in the election, with no accountability to a Westminster ballot. In this case, personalisation assuredly dilutes and adds confusion to the mediation of the democratic process.
