In England (and to a certain extent in Wales) the Conservatives were the obvious vehicle for voters wanting to express their dissatisfaction with the government. But in Scotland, where the SNP is in government and Labour the main opposition, the Tories made almost no progress at all. There the party that showed the biggest improvement in its vote share from 2005 was Labour. It’s true that the swing from SNP to Labour was negligible (around 0.1 per cent), but the mere fact that Labour was putting on votes in Scotland while shedding them by the bucketload elsewhere in the United Kingdom shows that there were two different elections being fought at the same time. Indeed, it’s just possible that there were three. The other place in the UK where the Labour vote held up much better than expected was London, and London is another place where Labour can claim to be in opposition, to Boris Johnson’s do-nothing, know-nothing mayoral administration. I wouldn’t want to make too many claims for the contribution this role reversal might have made to the final outcome. But it is clear that the public mood made this a difficult election for any government to fight. And Scotland and London are two places where Labour could pretend not to be in government at all.
This is a consequence of devolution, and seen from one perspective, devolution has now made the United Kingdom more or less ungovernable. It is very hard to imagine how a Conservative administration in Westminster, even with the support of the Liberal Democrats, will be able to impose painful spending cuts on Scotland and expect to survive there as a political force. Alex Salmond, the SNP first minister, is already cranking up the moral outrage at the mere thought of it. The Liberal Democrats do give the new government the ballast of some Scottish MPs (11 in all), but in reality it was the Lib Dems who suffered most in Scotland at the election ”“ it was the only major party that saw its share of the vote drop significantly. Even its traditional gripes about proportional representation don’t hold in Scotland ”“ there they get exactly what they deserve (just under 19 per cent of the votes, just under 19 per cent of the seats). However you juggle the numbers, in Scottish terms this new Westminster government really is a coalition of losers. But in the end it was even harder to see how that other possible coalition of losers ”“ a Labour/ Lib Dem alliance ”“ could have forced through tax rises in England, where the Tories have a clear majority of seats and had a margin of victory over Labour in the popular vote of more than 11 per cent. Politics in the UK is now comprehensively out of sync. If the public finances were in better shape, this might not matter so much. But with horribly difficult choices to be made by whoever is in power, the pressures are bound to build.
The Conservative Party, in theory, remains fully committed to the Union. David Cameron repeatedly and pointedly talks about having come into politics to serve ”˜our country’, and by that he doesn’t mean England ”“ he means the UK. Yet this election was meant to be the occasion when the Tories re-established themselves as a political presence in Scotland: the expectation among Scottish Tories until very recently was that they would win at least five seats and perhaps more. But they remain stuck on one. This may now be as good as it gets….
This points out why perhaps the most daring attempt at the formation of a government after the last election would have been for the Tories (a confused, not particularly conservative party except in part) to have attempted to form a coalition government with the Celtic nationalist parties, promising dissolution of the Union, giving the Scots their independence (doubtful that Wales could go it alone) – whether as a republic as as a separate kingdom, as the realms existed through most of the 17th century, yoked together only by the sovereign.
That would have deprived Labour of their base from which to govern England, and would have ensured Tory England (at least for the moment), with the result that the first post-Union Westminster Parliament would have a solid Tory majority.
Todd,
Aside from any other consideration, your solution would have created a bloc of only 315, exactly equal to the combined Labour-Lib Dem bloc – hardly a stable government. In any case, independence for Scotland and/or Wales was not in the Tory manifesto, so to push it through when the SNP accounts for only 20 percent of the Scottish parliamentary vote and Plaid Cymru just 11 percent of the Welsh parliamentary vote would hardly be an honest proceeding. The 2010 vote – though producing some odd results – confirmed that none of the three main parties had anything close to an unequivocal mandate and Cameron and Clegg’s decision makes the most sense. It’s interesting that most of the Lib-Dem cabinet members are from the Orange Book (fiscally conservative) wing of the party.
On a different note, it irks me that the major parties are steering clear of the Single-Transferable Vote, which – though complicated – has been used quite successfully in Ireland and has produced numerous single-party governments. It preserves the constituency system (though constituencies – being multi-member – are larger) but opens the way for people to favor one party candidate over another, such as choosing between Conservative nominees who are Eurofederalist and Euroskeptic. In the present system that choice is made by the party selection committee and the voter has no equivalent of an American primary.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
It is certainly true that it is only with overweighted support in Scotland and Wales that we have had Labour governments in the UK, but the pattern is more complicated.
In Scotland, one has to remember that Conservatives were a significant force with Parliamentary seats, then it all changed. Against all advice, Lady Thatcher used Scotland as a test bed for financing local authority spending by introducing a poll tax. The Scots objected, including the Scots Conservatives. There were riots against this regressive and unfair way of taxing. The Conservative MP’s in Scotland were punished by losing their seats and the trauma and distrust from that period still marks the electorate in Scotland’s attitude to the Conservatives.
There is still a significant Conservative vote in Scotland, but nothing like what it was, and insufficient to elect any MPs in the first past the post system. It will probably take a generation and some good behaviour by the Cameron-led government to change this.
For Labour one has to remember that the support in Wales and Scotland has been for socialist old Labour, not for the rather smoother and more centrist New Labour of the last few governments. Some of those who would have voted for them have gone to the nationalist parties.
As for the push for independence from the nationalist parties it has been very interesting. They have achieved regional power in Wales and Scotland albeit in coalition, and people have had a chance to see them in action. It has not been impressive: socialist, argumentative, squabbling and high tax and high spend has been what the voters have seen and a significant part of their support has drained away.
Runciman is clearly in favor of electoral reform, but I am not sure that he accurately predicts where things are going in Scotland and Wales, and on England I think he is wrong. The English have the sense to see that the only way we remain a player is in a United Kingdom, even if it means putting up with the whining Scots and Welsh, and having them vote on our affairs in what is termed the West Lothian Question. Most of us believe that whatever the strains, we are better off and richer for sticking together and it looks as if an increasing number of Scots and Welsh agree.
PM, you are not strictly correct in saying that the first past the post system cannot at present produce Conservative MPs in Scotland. For the last two elections the constituency of Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale has been won by the Scottish Tories. They came second in the constuencies of Argyll and Bute and Angus. Certainly, you are right about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. In the rest of the UK she was seen as a mover and a shaker who could recruit aspirant working class people to her cause. In Scotland by contrast she is remembered as a hectoring bully. Rightly or wrongly, the Scots felt treated with contempt by her. It will take a long time to live down. BTW I live in London. It is true that the swing to the Conservatives was less here than in the rest of England. Despite the comment above, I doubt that this is attributable to Boris Johnson. It is more likely to reflect the comparative isolation of the capital, so far, from the harsh economic winds that are felt more keenly elsewhere in the country. A centre of government is always to some degree insulated. Ask the folks up in DC if you doubt me.
The odd thing about Margaret was that at heart she was much more a 19th Century Liberal than a Tory. Remember the [url=http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm]famous 1987 quote[/url]: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Now, admittedly, if one considers the context of that quote one sees the indictment of the entitlement culture and the assertion of the limitations of government, but I think that particular clause indicates something much more fundamental. It’s certainly not a catholic understanding of social organization.
During the 1980s the Conservatives promoted the sale of council housing, proclaimed as the means by which council tenants could achieve a greater degree of personal independence by becoming property owners. A laudable goal. What was interesting was that the Westminster government proscribed local councils from using the money raised from sales to build new council homes. In other words, for all its talk of restoring power to local communities, it was prepared to abrogate local democracy in order to achieve a form of reverse social engineering: ending the phenomenon of council housing.
Of course, in more recent years, many Labour local authorities are trying to strongarm council tenants into accepting oversight by privately run housing management companies, so it’s by no means a phenomenon confined to the Right. Nevertheless, the Iron Lady was only willing to devolve power to those who agreed with her, rather than unequivocally committing to the devolutionary principle as one would expect a Neo-Liberal to do.