RUTH Davidson will today tell the Scottish Conservative conference that Scotland has “passed peak Nat” and that support for the SNP is on the decline, just as she said in 2016.
The outgoing MSP, who will be joining the House of Lords after May’s Holyrood election, will make the comments in a speech to her party’s conference when it opens this afternoon.
The conference will run until Monday March 15 and will also feature Boris Johnson.
Davidson, who currently leads the Scottish Tories Holyrood group, will claim that “something in Scotland has changed” in recent weeks.
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She’ll say: “We’ve passed peak Nat and, more and more, Scotland is saying, ‘enough’.
“An SNP majority government – once seen as a nailed-on near-certainty, and for so long the outcome almost universally forecast amongst the pundits – now looks much less sure.
“It’s vital that majority is stopped because it’s the only way to be certain that Scotland isn’t dragged back into another independence referendum when we all need to be focusing on building a recovery from the pandemic.”
Davidson claimed “peak Nat has passed” five years ago, after she took the Tories from 15 Holyrood seats to 31 in the 2016 elections.
In contrast to Davidson’s conference speech, the Prime Minister will say on Sunday that his government plans to refuse to allow an independence referendum regardless of whether the SNP wins a majority.
Davidson will also say: “At the last election in 2016 the SNP fell just two seats short of an overall majority.
“That derailed their drive for another independence referendum five years ago.
“And it was achieved because people right across Scotland who wanted to stop the SNP gave their party votes to the Scottish Conservatives.
“We did it together, and we can do it again.”
An SNP spokesperson said Davidson had been repeating the same line for years and “hoping it turns out to be true”.
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They said: "Ruth Davidson has been using that same punch-line for years - hoping it turns out to be true and then realising it isn’t in when the people of Scotland have given their answer in election after election.
“If it was true, perhaps Baroness Davidson wouldn't be running off to the House of Lords to avoid democratic scrutiny."
Since Davidson first claimed that Scotland had “passed peak Nat” five years ago, polls have seen support for Scottish independence surge to as high as 58%.
In more recent data, support for independence has been wavering around 50%.
However, those same polls have all predicted the SNP will return a majority in May’s elections, only differing on how large that majority will be.
It is extremely difficult to secure a majority under the Additional Member System of voting used in the Holyrood elections. It has only been done once in devolution’s history, when Alex Salmond’s SNP returned 69 MSPs in 2011.
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