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Ex snp leader Gordon Wilson passed away

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Ex snp leader gorden Wilson has passed away aged 79 .

Could a mod edit title to say Gordon

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he only became leader of the SNP because he was one of only two of the 11 SNP MP's to survive the 1979 self-inflicted 'turkeys voting for Christmas' slaughter - the SNP voted no confidence in the Labour government, result being they lost nearly all their MP's.

 

it was a low point for the SDP because not only did they lose in the '79 election so badly, but when they held the devolution referendum as few months earlier, almost nobody in Scotland, although marginally more than in Wales, wanted to know. The Scottish voters put the rods up and told them to stuff a Scottish assembly/parliament. It took 18 years of Tory rule and a new London Labour government, for that to happen.

 

after becoming SNP leader, kind of surprisingly, he served for over a decade, despite not doing anything to advance the party and even after losing his seat in the 1987 election.

 

he will I think go down in history as the last leader of the SNP who was actually a bit conservative, a kind of 'Tartan Tory' that wasn't a Unionist, and who did not want to sound like he was a left-wing rabble rouser of the kind that Salmond and now Sturgeon have become.

 

maybe Wilson's choice of what looked like a Tory cloak in the 1980s, while it seemed a bit silly at the time when the Scottish Tory vote was collapsing even when the Tories were winning nationwide elections with ease, they were up against a monolithic Scottish Labour vote, was not such a bad idea in the long run. He lived just long enough to see the Unionist Tories make major electoral advances in Scotland for the first time in 60 years, with 12 of the 13 gains in Scotland they made in the 2017 election coming at the expense of his own party, the SNP.

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