After the Scottish Tories survived an election in 1992 that all proper-thinking Scots ‘knew’ would annihilate them north of the border, Scottish Labour decided to go large on a strategy they’d always liked: pour some nationalism into your socialism. Have all your media friends preach that it was unScottish to be Tory. It worked. Labour’s vote in Scotland, always efficient, both grew and delivered a lot of Westminster seats for its size. Greedily, Labour decided to gerrymander this productive vote: Scots would have two parliaments, so they could both vote for Labour to rule Scotland from the Scottish one in Edinburgh and vote for Labour to rule England from the British one in Westminster. And to keep the ball rolling, they kept pouring nationalism into their list of reasons for Scots to vote Labour.
The party of the future can never foresee it. The Scots parliament proved the perfect incubator for a Scottish National Party that could outdo Labour in nationalism and rival it in socialism. As soon as Labour lost power in Westminster, the nationalist end of their vote had no reason to stay with them. And precisely because Scotland’s political geography made Scottish Labour’s Westminster vote very efficient, losing enough of it to the SNP crossed a threshold and made it very inefficient (for Labour – very efficient for the SNP). All of which surprised Labour a lot as they went from 41 Scottish seats to 1 in five years.
South of the border, no-one could accuse Labour of English or British nationalism. (A different prejudice, pandering to a different set of voters, is what brings the word ‘national’ to mind when one thinks of Labour’s socialism down south.) But the SNP’s “blame the English for our failures” style of nationalism still gives Labour a problem. Before the SNP ate Labour’s lunch in Scotland, an English voter could vote Labour and get a Labour government that included Labour MPs from Scotland. Now, Labour can only hope for a Westminster government in alliance with SNP MPs owing no loyalty to Labour – the tail that will wag the dog. Some English voters will say they’d be better off without those Scottish SNP MPs giving Labour a chance. But the more they mean it, the less they’ll vote Labour – so the less they’ll cause it. The tail would try and cut itself off the dog – but would likely fail and would take years, so why would anyone south of the border vote for five years of Labour to attempt that?
So Labour have a difficult circle to square. Unless they can replace the SNP in Scotland, everyone can see that their hope of being a government in Westminster depends on allying with them. But until they look like they could be a government in Westminster without the SNP, they lack arguments why those Scots they ‘nationalised’ should vote for them instead of the SNP. And while they have the SNP-alliance albatross on their backs, they have a deservedly hard time persuading English voters.
The party of the future can never foresee it. The Scots parliament proved the perfect incubator for a Scottish National Party that could outdo Labour in nationalism and rival it in socialism. As soon as Labour lost power in Westminster, the nationalist end of their vote had no reason to stay with them.
If I have little to add to that, it is because you have already said it about as well as it could be said.
“Now, Labour can only hope for a Westminster government in alliance with SNP MPs owing no loyalty to Labour …”
The predicate there is that Labour’s loss of 20% of its voters this time is a permanent change. While that is possible, it is very far from being a foregone conclusion. It is also possible that 5 years of Boris will be the end of a Conservative Party which has gone so far to the Left to attract voters that Mrs. Thatcher’s body must be spinning in her grave.
Surely the real point is that the whole world is entering very uncertain times. If we notice how much China has changed in the last 30 years, it would be bold to predict how different the world will be 30 years from now. Will there Always be an England?
Western governments have created two insoluble problems for themselves — outsourcing so much of their former industrial capabilities to the East, and making financial promises to their populations on debts, pensions, & health care that they can never redeem. The world will survive the inevitable consequences of those insoluble problems — but it will be a different world.
Gavin Longmuir, there is a third problem – the wholesale importation of people who hate us and will not give their loyalty to our societies. (Of course, a great many non-Western immigrants from a variety of cultures have contributed to and given their loyalty to our societies.) It can only end in tears.
Don’t forget the tackling climate change crap. Unless western governments stop wasting colossal amounts of money and crippling their economies with this utterly pointless nonsense, we are doomed to be out-competed by China and India.
Stonyground: “Don’t forget the tackling climate change crap.”
Indeed! It must have warmed the cockles of a few Leftie hearts when Boris used his victory speech to commit his Conservative government to doing what it takes to make the UK “carbon neutral”.
For some Tories, Boris’s statement must have been an “Oh Shit!” moment.
Some suggest that Boris has been lying to the Lefties — who after all make up the majority of the UK voters. Some suspect he has been lying to the Conservatives. Some wonder if he has been lying to himself. But we will all have to wait and see.
Has Boris been a staunch climate change warrior historically? Or is this a new position for him to take?
Gavin Longmuir (20th December 2019 at 11:42 pm), I certainly was not meaning my post to imply that, because Labour have this problem, nothing whatever can now go wrong (click) go wrong (click) go wrong (click) … There are several messages in the fact that the seeds of Labour’s Scotland disaster were contained in Blair’s winning so many seats in 1997 that even losing all of his 56 Scottish Labour MPs would still have left him with a small but viable majority. One of the less prominent, but worth keeping in mind, is to beware of ‘victory disease’.
For now, keeping the far-from-complete realignment moving seems a more urgent concern.