Cutting loose: the only way for Scottish Labour

Cutting Loose: Scottish Labour and the SNP

David Purdy writes:

As recently as last September, a poll for the Scottish Mail on Sunday on Westminster voting intentions gave Scottish Labour a six-point lead over the SNP, with Labour on 39%, the SNP 33%, the Conservatives 18% and the Lib Dems 3%. Since the referendum, Labour has lost one third of its support in Scotland, while the SNP has climbed to 45-47%, a lead of around 20 points. On a uniform national swing, Scottish Labour would be annihilated, losing all but a handful of its 41 Westminster seats. Even if the party were to claw back to 35%, while the SNP slipped to 38%, Labour and the SNP would each win 28 seats, an outcome that could still put paid to Labour’s chances of forming the next UK government.

 So far, despite the best efforts of its newly elected leader, Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour has yet to reach base camp. A seat-by-seat survey of 16,000 Scottish voters conducted by Michael Ashcroft’s polling organisation and reported in the press on 5^th February confirmed the bad news for Labour. The poll, covering 16 constituencies – 14 held by Labour, two by the Lib Dems and all areas where there was strong support for Yes in the independence referendum – showed an average 21-point swing from Labour to the SNP. If these results were replicated across Scotland, Labour would lose 35 of its seats. Among voters under 44, support for the SNP is nearly double that of Labour. Indeed, the SNP leads across all age groups, except among those aged 65 and over. Even allowing that the swing against Labour might be lower in areas where the Yes vote was lower, the party’s prospects look bleak.

 

In what follows, after tracing the forward march of the SNP from protest to power, I examine the impact of the referendum and its aftermath on Scotland’s political landscape, explore the implications for May’s election and suggest that Scottish Labour’s best – and perhaps only – hope of recovering from defeat is to cut loose from its sister parties south of the border, embrace the cause of Home Rule and challenge the SNP’s lingering attachment to neo-liberal “common sense”.

 

The rise and rise of the SNP

Table 1 UK election results in Scotland 1970-2010

 

                                                            % vote

Con                 Lab                  Liberal/            SNP                 Other

                                                                        Lib Dem

1970                38.0                 44.5                   5.5                 11.4                 0.6

1974 (Feb)       32.9                 36.6                   7.9                 21.9                 0.6

1974 (Oct)       24.7                 36.3                   8.3                 30.4                 0.3

1979                31.4                 41.5                   9.0                 17.3                 0.8

1983                28.4                 35.1                 24.5                 11.8                 0.3

1987                24.0                 42.4                 19.2                 14.0                 0.3

1992                25.6                 39.0                 13.1                 21.5                 0.8

1997                17.5                 45.6                 13.0                 22.1                 1.9

2001                15.6                 43.3                 16.3                 20.1                 4.7

2005                15.8                 38.9                 22.6                 17.7                 5.1

2010                16.7                 42.0                 18.9                 19.9                 2.0

 

The SNP’s initial electoral breakthrough came at the Hamilton by-election in 1967. Thereafter it fielded candidates in more or less every Scottish constituency in UK general elections. The party’s share of the vote peaked at 30% in the October 1974 election, when it pushed the Conservatives into third place, yet it won only 11 (15%) of the 71 Scottish seats then in existence. After a lean spell in the 1980s, the SNP averaged around 20% of the votes, but even its best result, in 1997, yielded only 6 seats.

 This discrepancy between votes and seats is easily explained: the SNP’s support is spread evenly across Scotland, both geographically and socially. Unless a party is in the lead across the piece, an even geographical spread is always a disadvantage under first-past-the-post elections. And the SNP’s vote varies little by occupational class or type of housing tenure, making it difficult to break into Labour’s heartlands in the Central Belt, where most of the population lives.

Thus, prior to devolution, the SNP struggled to make headway in Westminster elections. With the new Scottish parliament, however, came a new electoral system. Under the Additional Member System (AMS), the 72 existing first-past-the-post constituencies (with Orkney and Shetland divided into two) were supplemented by 56 party list seats, allocated within each of eight regions so as to ensure that the overall distribution of seats in each region, both constituency and list, would reflect, as closely as possible, the division of votes among parties. This system, agreed after protracted negotiation between Labour and the Lib Dems, the senior partners within the Scottish Constitutional Convention that campaigned for devolution during the 1990s, offered a compromise between the Lib Dems’ preference for PR and Labour’s need for reassurance that should the SNP start coming first in votes, it would still fail to achieve an overall majority of seats.

As can be seen from Table 2 below, until 2011 the SNP found it difficult to win constituency seats and depended for its heft within the Scottish Parliament on the top-up regional list seats. Even in 2007 when, for the first time, the party won the largest share of the constituency vote, Labour still had a majority of constituency seats (37 out of 73) as against 21 for the SNP. Nevertheless, because the allocation of list seats gave it one more than Labour overall, it won the election and went on to form a minority government, with the support of the Scottish Greens. In 2011, the SNP managed to achieve what AMS was designed to prevent: a single-party majority in the Scottish Parliament, coming first in 53 constituencies and winning 69 seats overall, compared with 15 and 37, respectively, for Labour.

 The referendum and after: how Scotland has changed

 There was now no parliamentary barrier to holding a referendum on independence, but the legal position was still unclear. After nine months of negotiation, in October 2012 a deal was struck: the UK government agreed to a temporary transfer of the requisite legal powers on condition that the referendum was confined to a single question offering a straight Yes-No choice. The Scottish government had been open to the possibility of two questions, offering voters three options – the status quo, “devo max” (or Home Rule within the Union) and full independence – but the pro-Union parties ruled this out, anticipating that a clear majority for remaining in the UK would “settle the issue for a generation.”

Table 2: Scottish Parliament election results in votes and seats, 1999-2011

 

% constituency vote (no of seats)

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

                            1999                2003                2007                2011

 

SNP                 28.7   (  7)        23.8   (  9)        32.9     (21)      45.4   (53)

Lab                  38.8   (53)        34.6   (46)        32.2     (37)      31.7   (15)

Cons                15.6   (  0)        16.6   (  3)        16.6     (  4)      13.9   (  3)

Lib Dem          14.2   (12)        15.4   (13)        16.2     (11)        7.9   (  2)

Greens                –       –            0.1   (  0)          0.1     (  0)         –       –

SSP                   1.0   (  0)          6.2   (  0)          0.0     (  0)         –       –

Others               1.7   (  1)          3.5   (  2)          2.0     (  0)        1.1   (  0)

 

% regional list vote (no of seats)

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

                            1999                2003                2007                2011

 

SNP                 27.3   (28)        20.9   (18)        31.0   (26)        44.0   (16)

Lab                  33.6   (  3)        29.3   (  4)        29.2   (  9)        26.3   (22)

Cons                15.4   (18)        15.5   (15)        13.9   (13)        12.4   (12)

Lib Dem          12.4   (  5)        11.8   (  4)        11.3   (  5)          5.2   (  3)

Greens               3.6   (  1)          6.9   (  7)          4.0   (  2)          5.2   (  2)

SSP                   2.0   (  1)          6.7   (  6)          0.6   (  0)          0.4   (  0)

Others               5.7   (  0)          8.9   (  2)        10.0   (  1)          6.5   (  1)

 

What they had not reckoned with was the transforming impact of a long referendum campaign. For the next two years, the SNP combined incumbency with insurgency, continuing to govern Scotland while holding out the vision of Scotland as a new self-governing nation. In a bid to quell voters’ anxieties about “separating” from the UK, the party limited its ambition to “independence lite”, offering assurances that in the event of a Yes vote, Scotland would cease to be represented at Westminster, but would retain a shared monarch as ceremonial head of state, along with the pound sterling, the Bank of England, membership of NATO and membership of the EU.

 

In the event, this attempt to secure the repeal the 1707 Act of Union, while preserving a common currency, crown and geo-political alignment, came to grief. Yet despite losing the referendum by a wider margin than polls taken in the last six weeks of the campaign had suggested, Yes Scotland did well to secure 45% of the vote (on a remarkable 85% turnout). 1.6 million Scots had voted to leave the UK, the highest level of support for independence ever recorded at the ballot box. According to polls conducted at the outset of the campaign, in a three-way choice between the status quo, more devolved powers and full independence, 35-36% of the Scottish public favoured more powers, while 32-33% supported each of the other options. With the referendum reduced to a binary choice, the rival camps had to win over the middle ground, now reclassified as undecided voters. On this reckoning, support for independence grew by 12-13 percentage points over the course of the campaign, though by the same arithmetic, two thirds of those who wanted more devolution short of independence ended up voting No.

What no one expected was the sequence of events that unfolded after the referendum. Within minutes of the result being announced, a relieved David Cameron issued a “Counter-Vow”: if returned to office at the next election, he declared, the Conservatives proposed to tackle the West Lothian question by amending the procedures of the House of Commons so as to secure “English Votes for English Laws”. In the weeks and months that followed, Scotland’s political landscape was transformed as supporters of other parties who had voted Yes in the referendum, together with some who had voted No, defected in droves to the SNP.

Hitherto, as a comparison of Tables 1 and 2 shows, the SNP had won a higher share of the constituency vote in elections to the Scottish Parliament than it achieved in the preceding Westminster election. Indeed, the gap widened from 4 percentage points in 2003 to 15 in 2007 and to 25 in 2011. In part, this pattern can be explained as a mid-term protest vote. But surveys suggest that, regardless of the state of the Westminster election cycle, voters were more willing back the SNP in elections to the Scottish Parliament than in elections to the UK House of Commons. In the former, people focus on who is best fitted to govern Scotland; in the latter, on who will provide good government for the UK as a whole. The SNP does not aspire to govern the UK, but it is a serious contender in Scotland, offering an attractive alternative to a dysfunctional Scottish Labour Party, which those who vote Labour or Lib Dem in Westminster elections can safely back for Holyrood.

 

Since the referendum, however, Holyrood voting intentions have been translated into Westminster voting intentions. According to the Ashcroft polls cited earlier, 35% of Scots who voted Labour in 2010 and almost half Scots who voted Lib Dem intend to back the SNP this time.  And two thirds of Labour voters who have switched to the SNP say they do not intend to switch back. Fear of letting the Tories back in has been overridden by the intense focus on Scottish politics that built up during the referendum and will almost certainly persist up to and beyond the next Holyrood election in May 2016 until a new constitutional settlement is reached, whether this involves some form of Home Rule or, indeed, another referendum on independence.

 Parliamentary arithmetic, constitutional reform and political renewal

 

“Red Nats” sense the prospect of a landslide victory that leaves the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster, possibly as the third-largest party. This, they hope, will enable it to conclude a parliamentary pact with a minority Labour government whereby in return for confidence and supply support, the SNP secures concessions ranging from Home Rule with full fiscal autonomy to the cancellation of Trident and the removal of nuclear weapons from the Clyde.

The trouble is that in a situation where neither Labour nor the Tories are likely to achieve an overall majority, every seat that Labour loses in Scotland makes it more likely that the Tories will end up as the largest party at Westminster. At the very least, that would give the Tories first shot at forming a government, though of course, whether they succeed depends on the parliamentary arithmetic, and more specifically on the number of seats won by the DUP, UKIP and, perhaps, the Lib Dems. If the numbers stack up, the Tories will move heaven and earth to stay in office. And even if they fail, there is no guarantee that the numbers will stack up for Labour or that if they do, Labour will accede to the demands of the SNP, whether acting alone or in concert with Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Other outcomes are possible: there could, for example, be a second election and if that failed to resolve the deadlock, Labour and the Conservatives could form a grand coalition to take charge of constitutional reform, starting with a reform of the voting system.

 

At present it looks as if, whatever happens, the SNP cannot lose. If it routs Labour in Scotland without letting the Tories back in, a minority Labour government at Westminster would have to pay a price to win its backing. If the Tories form a minority government and, with Lib Dem support, proceed to give English and – on matters not devolved to Cardiff – Welsh MPs a veto over legislation that does not apply to Scotland, pressure would mount north of the border for a second referendum, especially if the Tories simultaneously refuse to countenance a “Celtic” veto in any referendum on UK membership of the EU. And even the hint of a grand coalition between Labour and the Tories would make Labour even more unpopular in Scotland than it already is, confirming the nationalist argument that the two establishment parties are essentially interchangeable and will do anything to preserve the Union.

If Scottish Labour suffers a heavy defeat in May, its condition, already critical, could become terminal. If it is to avoid internal strife, stop haemorrhaging support, mount a credible electoral challenge to the SNP in 2016 and, in the longer term, prevent its old rival from becoming Scotland’s Fianna Fail, its best hope is to sever organisational ties with its sister parties in England and Wales, rename itself the Independent Scottish Labour Party and embrace the cause of Home Rule, an aspiration shared by both Labour and the Liberals in the early twentieth century before two world wars, the Great Depression and the post-war Labour Government turned the UK into one of the most centralised states in Europe.

 
Undoubtedly, cutting loose would be painful. But by splitting along the line of the border rather than along a left-right axis, as happened when the ILP broke away in 1932 and the SDP was formed in 1981, Labour would be better placed to adapt to an era of multi-party politics that takes different forms in different parts of the UK. In Scotland, the SNP needs to be challenged from the left. For far too long it has been allowed to get away with advocating Scandinavian social policies on the basis of US tax levels. With a fresh lease of life and a new sense of purpose, an Independent Scottish Labour Party could put the SNP under pressure to jettison its neo-liberal baggage and sign up to the project of working towards a new social settlement and a better kind of capitalism within the framework of a federal state.