Into the most uncertain general election any of us can remember, the Scottish electorate may be about to throw a wild card: a phalanx of Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs. If the polls are to be believed, they might be critical to forming the next government. The effects could, however, be paradoxical, and SNP voters might not get what they expect.
Labour has dominated Scottish politics for two generations. As late as 1979, the Conservatives got nearly one third of the votes and seats in Scotland. The Thatcher government put paid to that. As traditional Scottish heavy industry shut down on their watch, the Tories were painted as anti-Scottish—they now poll 17 per cent in Scotland. Labour played this Scottish card hard and was its main beneficiary, though the SNP and Liberals gratefully accepted rural Tory seats. In the 1997 general election, Labour polled 45 per cent. In 2010, 42 per cent of Scots still voted Labour, though 41 Scottish MPs weren’t enough to keep Gordon Brown in No 10.
Over the same period, Scottish nationalism grew from a fringe movement to a serious political force. It is now bidding to replace Labour as Scotland’s party of choice for all purposes. Both Labour and the SNP were ambivalent about Scottish devolution. Perhaps Labour had more to fear. After initial resistance, the SNP gratefully adopted the opposition role in Holyrood. In the way of things, oppositions become governments. In 2007, an SNP minority administration scraped in. In the devolved election of 2011, 45 per cent of the vote secured them a majority. Only a year previously, in the United Kingdom general election, they had 20 per cent and only six seats. Scots seemed happy to vote one way for Holyrood and another for Westminster.
The SNP’s 2011 Holyrood success led to the 2014 independence referendum. They did better than many expected: nearly 45 per cent of Scots voted Yes. The two-year campaign seems to have had a profound effect. Since then, polls have consistently suggested a shift in Westminster voting intentions. During the long campaign, many in the poorest parts of Scotland shifted to independence. Two thirds in Scotland’s poorest areas voted Yes. Yes gained a majority only in former industrial areas like Glasgow or North Lanarkshire. Since then, polls suggest 45 per cent of Scots continue to support the SNP—but this time for Westminster, as the below graph of voting intention since the referendum shows.
Forty-five per cent loses a referendum, but wins in a first-past-the-post election, as Labour used to know. Even this close, however, polls should be taken with a pinch of salt. Before the 2011 devolved election, Scots told pollsters they would vote Labour, as they had in 2010 for Westminster. But once they focused on the choice before them, intentions changed. Today, minds may still be on the referendum rather than the choice of UK government, but polling by the Conservative peer Michael Ashcroft of Labour constituencies that voted Yes does suggest a big shift: one third of voters there have switched to the SNP—but the polls say they want a Labour/SNP coalition at Westminster.
This support changes not just the scale but the nature of the SNP. Although it presents itself as a social democratic party, its strength has been in former Tory areas. Its policies in government have been populist rather than redistributive. (Making student tuition free is popular, but redistributes towards the middle classes.) Its membership—now said to be approaching 90,000—and its new candidates include people with quite different views. This conditions the stance of its new leader, Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP, she says, could consider an arrangement with Labour but not with the Conservatives. (There’s no gratitude in politics: from 2007 to 2011, the SNP in Holyrood worked closely with the Tories.)
In May’s general election, the SNP is aiming at the 11 Liberal Democrat seats in Scotland and Labour’s 41. Most Lib Dem seats look vulnerable, but if the SNP is to be relevant to the Westminster arithmetic, it needs to take Labour seats too. At the margin, each additional nationalist means one Labour MP fewer. One perfectly plausible forecast shows them in a powerful position, just enough with support from Plaid Cymru to squeeze Labour into government. (An overall majority requires 325, but if five Sinn Féin members do not take their seats, 323 is the magic number.)
On this forecast, Labour is barely the largest party. Just a little more SNP success creates the first real problem for a putative Labour/SNP grouping. One more seat for the SNP and Labour ceases to be in the driving seat. The Conservatives could easily be the largest party, but Labour plus SNP could still get to 323.
Maybe there’s no formal constitutional rule that the largest party gets to form the government, and maybe a Labour/SNP grouping could get over the arithmetical hurdle. But then territorial considerations come into play in a way not seen in UK politics since 1910. The role of Scottish MPs in Westminster is becoming more controversial as Scotland gains more devolved powers. A Labour government might rely not just on its own Welsh MPs but also on the SNP to govern England. Even if the Conservatives are the largest UK party, with an overall majority in England, we could end up with a Labour government, thanks to the SNP:
The SNP says it will not do business with the Tories. This stance reflects a party conference resolution, and also has an obvious electoral motivation. But a Conservative/SNP alliance is equally plausible arithmetically, as the tables show, and could claim legitimacy in governing Scotland and England (though not Wales). SNP members could even preserve their political purity by abstaining, letting a Tory/Lib Dem coalition remain in office in a scenario like this. But the SNP’s Westminster leader has gone out of his way to promise that his party will not even let the Tories in by default.
Arithmetic is only part of the picture, and nationalist leaders have been testing out potential policy demands. Naturally, these are tailored to the views of actual and potential electoral support, but they point in contradictory directions.
First out of the trap was not replacing the Trident nuclear weapons programme, playing to core support: Scottish public opinion overall is surprisingly evenly divided, but SNP supporters are strongly against keeping Britain’s nuclear deterrent. A UK administration short of money might welcome pushing such major expenditure to the right, but neither big party is going to go unilateralist to get SNP support, especially given Vladimir Putin’s current bellicosity. So Sturgeon has recently altered the party’s stance: they won’t vote for Trident, but won’t let that stand in the way of an accommodation on other issues. By contrast, demands for a relaxation of austerity might be more comfortable territory for Labour. Despite the rhetoric, Sturgeon’s ambitions are modest: they amount to little more than a call for no further cuts in departmental budgets, and extra annual spending of perhaps £10bn or £20bn more than Labour. Big sums, perhaps, but negotiable, especially if change were focused more on Scotland.
In the end, however, constitutional demands, not public spending, are where the SNP’s heart lies. One dog is not barking: early hints that the SNP might demand the power to hold a further referendum have come to nothing. Their route to an independence vote now lies through a European Union referendum, with the SNP arguing that all four parts of the UK have to assent to any change. This sounds federal: in Australia, for example, a referendum to change the constitution needs to win a majority overall and in a majority of states. But although the UK resembles a federal state, it isn’t one—the SNP’s purpose here is not federalism but to legitimise a call for a further independence referendum if the UK votes to leave the EU, and Scotland doesn’t. A distinctly unpalatable choice, if it ever came to it.
And of course the talk is of more powers—not just those recommended by the Smith Commission in November, which would make Holyrood arguably the most powerful devolved institution in the world (and for which there is a guaranteed Westminster majority), but more still. Alex Salmond, hoping to return to Westminster, announced his aim of securing “devo max,” devolving everything except foreign affairs and defence. Sturgeon agrees: the Scottish government recently set out claims that keeping all Scotland’s tax revenues would boost growth. So devo max is worth exploring.
In survey responses, Scottish voters respond positively to the suggestion that Westminster deals with foreign affairs and defence, and Holyrood all domestic matters. They support a common currency too, so on the face of it this package sounds like a winner. It goes beyond the Smith Commission in that all welfare would be devolved, including pensions, and all taxation too (except VAT). The Scottish government would collect the revenue, and send a payment to the UK to cover common services, and a share of inherited debt, probably calculated per capita. It would borrow on the markets to cover its deficit.
Despite its common-sense appeal, devo max has significant fiscal and constitutional consequences. The fiscal consequences are the most striking. Scottish public spending is over 10 per cent higher per head than the UK average. Scottish tax income—especially now that oil revenues have collapsed—is nothing like high enough to support it. Cuts in public spending or increases in taxation of £6.5bn a year would be needed, on top of the fiscal consolidation built into the UK plans. Cuts of this size would have to be spread over services and welfare. No rational Scottish government would seek additional fiscal consolidation on this scale.
Maybe cutting Scottish public spending at the SNP’s request would not trouble a UK party with few Scottish seats. But the constitutional consequences of devo max count much more. The role of Scottish MPs is already being challenged, now income tax is to be devolved. But it is inconceivable they could vote on all of England’s taxes and spending, but virtually none of Scotland’s. The position of Scotland under devo max would be like that of the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, which run their domestic affairs (with currencies very like Scottish banknotes) while the UK looks after their defence and foreign relations. But they send no MPs to Westminster: they are not part of the UK at all. That is the inevitable logic of devo max: not a form of devolution, but diluted independence. No principled UK government could support it.
Not all politics is rational and principled. Partisan interests come into play. Labour’s principles and partisan interest are aligned: arguments of social solidarity point in the same direction as keeping Scottish Labour seats. So no devo max there. The SNP’s interest might be to create the conditions for independence through the instability of devo max, despite the immediate effect on Scotland. The Tory party might be pulled in two different directions. It signed up to the Smith Commission plans. But the arithmetic of an SNP/Tory grouping delivers an apparently legitimate UK and English government in the short run and, if the deal of devo max and cutting Scottish influence in Westminster is on the table, in the long run the Tories can only gain from it. David Cameron might once again face the dilemma of choosing whether to be a Conservative or a Unionist.
The political risks to Labour if it were in office thanks only to nationalists are very real. Labour might conclude that it can manage without such a toxic partner. Ed Miliband has ruled out coalition, and the party has spotted that the SNP has given away its negotiating leverage by so ferociously ruling out a Tory deal. The SNP and the Conservatives have much more in common than either would like to admit, but any deal between them could only be at the price of significant constitutional risk to the UK.
