The current Pro UK electoral strategy amounts to the
Scottish Conservatives continually banging on about independence to scare the
Pro UK vote into voting for them. Labour meanwhile tries to ignore independence
in the hope that former Labour voters forget that it is still officially a Pro
UK party. The Lib Dems hang on in the North, but are now a dismal fifth, with
no prospect of that changing. Everyone else is nowhere.
The key lesson we learned after the Scottish
Parliament Election is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for
a new party to win any seats. The Liberal Democrats won 137,152 (5.06%) of the
list votes, but did not win a seat. No one else was close.
There were twenty other parties plus a number of
independents, but even Alba with Alex Salmond was 100,000 votes short of
winning a seat. The highest placed Pro UK list party All for Unity had the
advantage of George Galloway who is regularly on Television. It had Jamie
Blackett who worked extremely hard and who writes regularly for the Daily
Telegraph. It had others like me working behind the scenes. But still it only
got 23,299 votes (0.86%).
There were a variety of reasons for this, but the
primary one is that lack of media exposure. Unless a new party takes part in
the TV debates it might as well not exist. The BBC and STV create a closed shop
which no one can break into so long as coverage is limited to the five parties
that already have seats. The justification for doing so is that Alba and All
for Unity didn’t merit a place at the debates because they got so few votes.
But how is a party to ever begin if it is strangled at birth by lack of TV
oxygen.
What media coverage All for Unity got was relentlessly
negative with certain journalists just following orders to protect Conservative
list seats. Fair enough. Politics is brutal and every party has the right to
defend its seats. But if our task is to protect the territorial integrity of
the UK, something like the All for Unity strategy will have to be adopted
eventually. We cannot simply repeat the Lib Lab Con strategy that guarantees
defeat because each of them campaigns for both votes everywhere.
The Conservatives argued that if the SNP won an
overall majority, it would have a mandate for indyref2. It was an effective
vote winning strategy. But it was also extremely short sighted and stupid. The
SNP might have won an overall majority. Only marginal changes would have given
them one. An overall majority with our voting system is difficult to achieve,
but it is not impossible. Next time the SNP may succeed.
The Conservatives, by allowing the possibility of the
SNP gaining a mandate for independence, were risking the future of our country
in order to gain a few extra list seats in the Scottish Parliament. But having
gained a reprieve Mr Ross proposes five years of the same strategy. He will
campaign for the Conservatives to form the next Scottish Government while
knowing in his heart that it is simply impossible that sufficient Scots will
vote Conservative to defeat the SNP. Even if per impossibile the Conservatives
won all of the Labour votes in Scotland, they still would still not beat the
SNP.
There are two ways to defeat Scottish nationalism.
Firstly, we must unite as much as possible. Secondly, we must take over the
Scottish Greens.
If there is to be a list only Pro UK party (and this
is up for debate) then there has to be only one. It may seem good fun setting
up your own party and playing at politics, but it is simply stupid that there
were so many Pro UK list parties. If all of the Pro UK list parties had merged
and pooled their efforts there just might have been the chance for us to get
some media coverage and we would have been in touching distance of winning a
seat.
All for Unity is the best placed, so it would make
sense for it to be the Pro UK list party. But let’s get all of the leaders
together to fight it out, decide who has the best chance and let’s all back
that one party.
So too it makes zero sense for people to stand as
independents. The number of votes for all of the independents combined was not
enough to win a single seat. Unless you are someone very famous and with a lot
of money that is not going to change.
With a single Pro UK list party, we might be able to
influence the Lib Dems, Labour and Conservatives to at least stand down in
those seats where they cannot win. Ideally in my view these three parties
should merge to become a single Pro UK centre party. They are not ideologically
that different anyway. Mr Anwar and Mr Ross are both centrists, the only thing
that stops them being in the same party is tribalism. If there were no Tories
in Scotland there would be nothing left for the SNP to hate and much of the
motivation for independence would be gone. With a different Pro UK list party
we would have good chance of maximising the Pro UK vote, which might just
defeat the SNP and make Ross or Anwar First Minister.
Unless the SNP wins an overall majority, it will
depend on the Scottish Greens. The Greens are a Scottish nationalist party
masquerading as an environmentalist party. There is no logical reason why
environmentalism should require Scottish independence. Green politicians in
Europe and other parts of the world are not arguing for the break up of their
countries. Moreover, many Green voters in Scotland do not support independence.
If enough Pro UK Greens could get involved with the Scottish Greens it might be
possible to change party policy on independence. If that proves impossible a Pro UK Green Party
could split the Green vote and give Pro UK environmentalists a party to vote
for. The Scottish Greens are the soft underbelly of Scottish nationalism and
are perhaps the best chance we have of depriving independence supporters of a
majority.
If there are going to continue to be numerous Pro UK
list parties splitting the vote and making it impossible for a list only party
to win even one seat, then it would be better if we all just voted Labour Lib
Dem or Conservative. But that is to concede defeat for the next election and
the one after that. Only a united Pro UK vote can defeat the SNP. We need an alternative Pro UK voice that can
put pressure the established parties, because this is the only strategy that
can win. But the last thing we need is yet another new Pro UK list party, we
need them all to be disbanded except one. It’s time we were not selfish about
this.
The party best placed to become the Pro UK list party
is All for Unity. We need money, famous faces, media coverage and above all we
need unity.
If there continue to be multiple Pro UK list parties and continual squabbles with Conservatives over the scraps of list seats it will be hard to motivate people to campaign for anyone over the next five years. All Pro UK people need to find a common strategy that has a chance of winning. If we don’t we might as well concede defeat now. We might as well conclude that we do not even want to defeat Nicola Sturgeon.