Scotland for the past decade has been dominated by the
SNP. It would oddly I think benefit the SNP if it were decisively defeated at
the election, because then it would have to address its failure of the past
decade. If the SNP wins a few seats less than Labour, it will continue as
before. If it by some mischance wins one more seat than Labour, it will demand
negotiations on independence with Keir Starmer beginning the day after the
election and we will be back to where we started on the day after the
referendum in 2014.
The fundamental problem with Scottish nationalism is that while it has an emotional case for Scottish independence it does not have an intellectual case. It did not have it in 2014, for which reason it lost, and it has it still less now because it has not adapted to the changed circumstances of the past ten years.
The SNP had a much better argument in 2014 because the
UK was a member of the European Union. The SNP have argued since 2016 that Brexit
was a reason for voting for the independence because most Scots voted for
Remain. But it has never honestly faced up to the downside of Brexit for the
Scottish nationalist argument.
It's all very well claiming that the UK isn’t a country,
and that Scotland subsidises the other parts of the UK or that Scotland will
have an open border after independence just like Ireland does or that there
will be no issue at all using the pound while trying to join the EU. This sort
of stuff convinces those who are already emotionally convinced by the argument
for independence, but you need an intellectual argument to persuade everyone
else. It is this that the SNP has lacked.
It may be that if Nicola Sturgeon were still leader of
the SNP, it would still be winning nearly all of the seats in Scotland. But the
SNP project had in fact already failed prior to her departure. It was stuck
forever promising a referendum next year that then didn’t happen.
But because it kept winning the SNP felt no need to
think about how to make the intellectual case for leaving the UK and it was
this stagnation of thought as much as its general incompetence in government that
has seen so many Scots turn to Labour.
Independence may be an emotional ideal for many Scots
who generally feel much more Scottish than British, but even if I felt the same
way I would vote against the SNP for the reason that post Brexit independence means
a hard border with England. It also means uncertainty with regard to my house
price and my savings as Scotland would have to go through the experiment of
using the pound unofficially, then setting up a Scottish currency and then
perhaps joining the Euro.
It would mean the loss of the subsidy that Scotland
receives from the UK Treasury. Mr Swinney admits that he needs it, otherwise he
would not ask for health spending in the UK to increase so that it might
increase in Scotland too.
In order to join the EU Scotland would need to impose tariffs
on trade with England but would still require nearly all of its goods to go
through England in order to reach the continent.
If you are a certain sort of Scot who insists that
Scotland is a country just like France or Germany because we play them at football,
then the emotional pull of voting for the SNP may be strong. Most if not all
countries are independent, why not Scotland? This argument is very good but it’s
not enough. If it were enough Scotland would have won independence already.
The reason it has not is because of these questions. Do
you really want to be poorer? Do you really want to go through the turmoil of
trying to break up the UK with no real idea what consequences it would have
either here or elsewhere? Do you really want to break up the British armed forces
and make its nuclear deterrent homeless while Putin threatens? It is these questions
that the SNP has to answer and which it does not even address. It will not begin
to address them unless it is decisively defeated.
The same goes for the Conservative Party. I remember
people saying 2019 that Boris Johnson could remain Prime Minister for a decade
and more because Labour could not overcome an eighty majority in five years.
The failure of the Conservative Party is not merely
that like the SNP it has ruled incompetently, the failure is that it has failed
to produce an intellectual argument for right wing free market economics. More importantly more than half the
electorate voted for Brexit because they wanted Parliament to take control of
our borders and for our government to be genuinely sovereign rather than subordinate
to international bodies like the EU.
We are still just as subordinate as we were. We cannot
stop illegal migrants crossing the Channel without visas. But when we go on holiday
to Spain, we have to give our fingerprints and have our faces photographed and
if we stay too long, we can be deported. British tourists have fewer rights
than illegal migrants in dinghies.
Worse still the Conservative Party has allowed
millions to arrive legally. We have simply swapped free movement from the EU
with free movement from the rest of the world. No wonder Brexiteers feel
cheated.
If the defeat of the Conservative Party is decisive
enough it may learn its lesson kick out the wets and there may in time be a
rebuilding on the right that produces genuinely conservative thinking.
Everything else is to “abandon all hope you who enter
here.” If we don’t limit migration in the coming decades Britain will cease to
be the country, we grew up in. It will be somewhere else, changed beyond all
recognition with only the landscape staying the same.
If we don’t start making a profit, grow the economy
and lower public spending and reduce the size of the state we will every year
become poorer until at some point we wake up to find that managed decline has
managed to turn us into Romania and we can no longer afford the triple lock on
pensions and you can no longer afford to run a car or buy a nice bottle of wine.
We will achieve net zero by having carts pulled by donkeys and call it
progress.
The best we can hope for from the Labour Party is that
it will be competent. The worst is that it continues to increase public spending,
does nothing to fix the NHS, pays ever more benefits to incentivise people not
working and makes it still easier for both legal and illegal migrants.
So, I hope for the best from Labour, but fear the
worst. I hope that the SNP is decisively defeated for which reason I have voted
Conservative in my seat as it has the best chance of defeating the SNP.
But Conservatives generally and Scottish Conservatives
in particular have to learn that the only root to electoral success is to make
the argument for free markets, low migration and a smaller state. You have to
distinguish yourself from your political opponents by putting forward different
ideas that work better than theirs do.
The failure of Conservatism in the past five years is
that it has become social democracy. People think they want social democracy,
but actually they prefer to be better off and only right-wing economics can
give them that.
So let us try one more time. We will have another
experiment with socialism, discover that it doesn’t work and then just maybe have
another chance of doing what we ought to have done in 2019. There will be another
day.
But in Scotland our main task is to put the SNP out of
its misery. This will enable all of us to move on to new thinking and to
rediscover those Scottish virtues that once gave us the great thinkers that we
now lack.
Whatever you do don’t wake up next Friday to find Mr
Swinney promising us a second referendum in 2025. If we miss our chance to
defeat the SNP this time, we will deserve everything that follows.
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