Scotland’s three-dimensional election

COWIE, A VILLAGE in the coal belt just south of Stirling, used to be a Labour stronghold. But all the 15 or so men in the bar-room of the Cowie Tavern (there are no women) will be voting for the Scottish National Party (SNP) on December 12th. The only remaining Labour supporters are the twin barmen, Steve and John Sneddon, and their father James, a former shop-steward in the brickworks who sits in the lounge area with a rug over his knees. Not even they are enthusiastic about the current state of the party. “Corbyn’s too left-wing and too indecisive,” says Steve. “The only good thing that will come out of this election is that he’s going to go.”

Bannockburn, another former mining village and the site of the decisive battle in the 14th century in which Robert the Bruce rubbed the nose of the English King Edward II in Scottish dirt, is four miles away. But the two dozen drinkers in the Empire pub, all former Labour supporters, will to a man (and a woman—aside from the barmaid there is one) vote Conservative. “My father was a miner. He’d turn in his grave,” says Stewart Thomson, a retired electrician. But the vote is a tactical one: “I’m voting Tory to keep the SNP out.”

The difference between the two villages, according to one of the drinkers in the Empire, is that “in Cowie, they’re Catholics”. Immigration in the 19th...