Scotland is returning to its Labour roots which gives
the SNP a choice either it goes further left
than Labour which means it might as well merge with the Scottish Greens, or it
goes to the Centre Right. It has chosen the latter.
For historical reasons there is both a geographical
and a numerical limit to the support that the Scottish Conservatives can
achieve. It can’t do much better than it did in the General Election of 2017
when it won 28% of the vote and 12 seats. It is unimaginable that the Scottish
Conservatives could win a majority at Holyrood, because Holyrood was built
specifically to avoid Tories/Margaret Thatcher ruling in Scotland. There is
nothing the Scottish Conservatives can do to change this. It may take one
hundred years. It may take longer.
But while Scotland will not vote for Tories, it will
vote for Tartan Tories who are in every respect to the right of the Scottish
Conservatives. This is the direction in which the SNP is now going to travel.
It may initially appear absurd that a party that was
in a coalition with the ultra-leftwing Scottish Greens could so rapidly tack to
the right, but this is to misunderstand the nature of the SNP and Scottish nationalism
in general.
Both hard (SNP) and soft (Labour, Lib Dems) Scottish
nationalism built on the 1980s and the perceived horror of Margaret Cromwell’s destruction
of Scotland to argue first for a Scottish Parliament and then logically enough
for independence. If your Scottish nationalism is sufficient to argue that it
is unfair if one part of the UK is outvoted by another part because Scotland is
a country and not merely a region, then you don’t frankly have an argument when
the SNP make the point that countries ought to be independent. Soft nationalism
logically give rise to hard nationalism because it provides it with its premise.
Once you argue that Scotland is separate country and needs a separate parliament
with separate powers don’t be surprised when you get separatism.
The SNP reinvented itself as a specifically anti-Tory party
after the 2010 General Election when the Conservatives formed a coalition deal
with the Lib Dems. It’s no use the SNP said having only a devolved parliament
we Scots are still outnumbered by wicked Tories and look one of them is Prime
Minister again just like that awful Oliver Thatcher.
Being anti-Tory was the driving force of the independence
movement from 2010 to 2024. The most frequent insult from independence supporters
was that Pro UK people were Tories. But if Labour wins the General Election and
if Labour wins the most seats in Scotland and heaven forfend if Labour becomes
the majority party in Holyrood, it isn’t going to be any use to be the anti-Tory
party.
Humza Yousaf did not have the wit to realise that he
could not continue to present it as a battle between the SNP and the Tories. It
was senseless because the Scottish Conservatives are only competitive in the seats
they hold and a few others. Moreover, with Keir Starmer as Prime Minister and
Anas Sarwar as First Minister the SNP was always going to have to offer something
different.
I have long believed that if Scotland were ever to
achieve independence and indeed in order to prepare itself for this it would
require that it become a low tax, low public spending slightly larger
equivalent of Singapore. If Scotland undercut the former UK and the EU by being
much more competitive than either, it could perhaps overcome some of the
disadvantages of leaving the UK single market.
The better together argument always struck me as
foolish. It was saying Scotland is a country that can’t manage a fully
sovereign parliament and needs a permanent subsidy from the UK or else we would
be poorer than we are already. But if Scotland had become independent in 2014
it would have had to have managed. The likely result I believe is that the SNP
would have been extremely fiscally conservative, and we would have had brutal
spending cuts. It would not have been pleasant but lots of countries have gone
through such unpleasantness.
This was always the folly of the anti-Tory argument as
well as the argument that if only Scotland were independent, we would become
like Denmark. It is much more likely that Scotland would have had to go through
the sort of restructuring that Argentina is undergoing and just like with
Argentina in time it would have worked.
This was always the dishonesty behind the SNP’s
anti-Tory argument. Independence would have given us Margaret MacThatcher and the
whole direction of the Scottish economy would have been the opposite of free
tuition, free prescriptions and baby boxes. Instead, we would have been paying
to visit the doctor by means of health insurance. Scotland’s high public
spending at present is a feature of being a part of the UK and would not
survive leaving it.
The SNP is now going to oppose Labour by tacking to
the Centre Right, meanwhile the majority of SNP politicians and voters will still
think of themselves as being leftwing anti-Tories. The incoherence is resolved
by realising that the SNP does not care about left and right.
Some independence supporters kid themselves that they
are in politics to achieve socialism, or to be in some other way progressive.
But this is merely self-deception. The SNP is going to ditch all the woke crap,
because it hurt the independence cause. The SNP is going to gradually try to be
more fiscally conservative and less left-wing. It will do that as this now is
the only route to independence.
For a while it looked as if opposition to Brexit might
improve the SNP’s fortune, but it didn’t so expect in time the SNP to oppose joining
the EU. It makes much more sense for an independent Scotland to be closely aligned
with the former UK than the EU.
The SNP has only ever cared about independence. It
doesn’t want independence to achieve some other goal. It wants it for itself.
It is for this reason that the SNP can swing in a minute from the far left to
the centre right and no one seems to notice and why its supporters don’t really
care. If Karl Marx gets the SNP to independence that’s fine, if Margaret
Thatcher gets it to independence the SNP will adopt her policies while still
blaming her for everything.
The SNP is a single-issue party which is about to reinvent
itself again as the Tartan Tories, because that is the only way it can oppose
Labour. Doing so may be intellectually incoherent, but it also makes strategic
good sense.
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