What's the difference?
There used to be two big parties in Scotland, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. There are now two big parties in Scotland, the Labour Party and the SNP. It could not be more obvious where the SNP's support has come from.
It has come from the longstanding electoral coalition made up of moderate Keynesians, mild social conservatives, those who cherish shortbread tin Scottishness, posh people and those who aspire to be so considered, visceral enemies of municipal Labour and the trade unions, and a fringe of white Protestant supremacists.
That coalition's newer vehicle won the last Holyrood Election outright, giving Scotland the Tory majority government that England does not have. But that coalition's older vehicle has spotted the potential there: people like that are manifestly numerous enough to deliver such a victory, and their old party wants them back to that end. All that it has to do is force the newcomers out of the way.
The newcomers' failure to hold the referendum for which their party exists should do it. Their failure to win that referendum should do it. Quite plausibly, their failure to lose that referendum should do it, since after independence, what, exactly, would be the remaining point of the SNP, its many Hard Left activists having no sympathy whatever with the common or garden domestic policies that both its leaders and its voters would seek to pursue once the constitutional question was out of the way?
Alex Salmond is a remarkably skillful politician. He is going to need to be.
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I agree that Scottish politics seem to divide naturally into the Labor Party and the not-Labor Party. But Conservative strength in Scotland was also somewhat artificial, being at least partially a product of Liberal Unionism.
ReplyDeleteBut I disagree on some other points. If Scotland somehow actually became independent, the political history of other countries indicate that the SNP would do fine, as the party that brought the country to independence, and become the natural party of government. Looking at other countries, it seems it takes a generation or two for voters to grow tired of these sorts of parties.
Otherwise, they have obvious problems, but the Catalan nationalists have done fine electorally with Catalonia half in and half out of the Spanish kingdom. That seems to be the model the SNP is following. The Parti Quebebcois nearly pulled this off in Quebec, and a large reason they didn't was due to their policies vs. the rest of Canada (except independence itself) being co-opted by their provincial and federal rivals.
On the Liberal Unionist point, so what? That there are many Conservatives in any of the English cities goes back to the National Liberals, and the Birmingham Chamberlains would not use the C-word, never mind the T-word, for electioneering purposes even when one of their number was Leader of that party, as two of them were at various times.
ReplyDeleteThe Conservative Party as a whole is very much a product of Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals as one of whom Michael Heseltine first sought election to Parliament, Alfred Roberts’s daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs (although its founders and its founding backer, like Roberts, never actually joined), and now the Liberal Democrats. The followers of David Owen, another who never formally signed up, were in a very similar position, although Owen himself is now close to Ed Miliband.
You might be right about the SNP after independence. Then again, its Hard Left activists would want all sorts of things to be done which its traditional Tory voters and its more or less neoliberal leaders would never countenance. In which case, as a party, how could it survive? In any case, there is really no comparison between the political culture of Scotland today and that of Ireland in 1922 or that of an African country in the 1960s.