Thursday’s multifarious elections changed the UK’s political map in various ways, some of them unexpected. One hesitates to use a phrase like “seismic shift” but the reverberations will go on for months and may yet have further, unimagined consequences. Already three party leaders in Scotland have said they will step down. The balance of the coalition in Westminster and Whitehall has been significantly altered. Something may have been set in train that leads to departures from the government, perhaps the collapse of the coalition, maybe even an early general election, certainly now (anyway, sooner or later but within five years) a referendum on the dissolution of the Union.
Let’s begin with Scotland. Not in its wildest dreams did the SNP – or at least anyone except its permanently chipper leader Alex Salmond – expect to emerge with an overall majority of nine in the Holyrood parliament. Proverbially, the complex voting system set up by Labour for Scottish elections was designed to obviate just such an eventuality. But opinion polls just before the ballot suggested that the SNP had overhauled Labour’s earlier projected lead so, given that polls are always a few days behind the momentum, we all ought to have read the signs better.
The data is interesting, however, and as always tells a more complex story than do media headlines. What it shows is that the two parties opposed to the government in London both did well. It was the coalition partners, the Conservatives and – disastrously – the Liberal Democrats, who saw their support haemorrhage.
Members of the Scottish parliament come in two kinds. More than half emerge as winners of a First-Past-the-Post system as used at Westminster (and confirmed last Thursday in the nationwide referendum). The rest prevail through a Proportional Representation scheme operated on a regional basis. These are informally referred to as List MSPs. Retiring Tory leader in Scotland Annabel Goldie stands as one of these List MSPs, perhaps because it gives her a better chance of retaining her seat.
The Conservatives lost a quarter of their Holyrood seats and, in the constituencies, are almost entirely confined to the Borders. They shed one-and-a-half percent of their regional support but getting on for three percent among the more critical FPTP constituency MPs. The Lib Dem vote fell by six percent among List MSPs and more than eight percent in the constituencies. They lost more than two-thirds of their MSPs and were pushed back to the constituencies of Orkney and Shetland.
Labour lost much the same among List MSPs as the Tories in the constituencies, but only 0.45 percent in the FPTP vote. Indeed, Labour took more Scottish seats from the Tories than did the SNP and as many from the SNP as from the Tories. But the way the maths panned out, the SNP had a net gain from Labour of 21 seats, even though the most significant transfer of votes was from the other parties to the Nationalists. In that sense the result flattered to deceive.
Nonetheless, Salmond’s Cheshire Cat grin will remain long after the astonishment of the election has faded. Most of the cards appear to be in his hands. As I argued in a letter to The Guardian today, the Nationalists have a distinct natural advantage. All their leading lights want to sit at Holyrood. The most accomplished Scots in all the other parties seek to make their careers at Westminster. Consequently, since the estimable Donald Dewar, the Scottish Labour Party has been led by nonentities and time-servers who attract few votes. Indeed, two of Dewar’s successors were obliged to stand down because of dubious practice.
If Gordon Brown had led Scottish Labour instead, he might now be on his fourth term as first minister in Edinburgh and David Miliband might be on his second as prime minister in London. But unless Ed Miliband can persuade the brightest and best of Labour politicians – Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy, Anne Begg, Tom Harris, Alistair Darling – to go home and stand for Holyrood, the SNP will surely continue to win overall majorities.
As to the referendum on Scottish independence, Salmond is playing it long and cautiously. Conventional wisdom says that support for the SNP does not transfer wholesale into support for UDI. In any case, referendums are what is called indicative only; that is to say that they put no obligation under law on the governments that call them. They are weaker than a plebiscite, weaker still than a direct election, the results of which are binding. Salmond could summon the Scots to a referendum and still follow a course opposite to that preferred by his people. But for someone who evidently hugely relishes being much the largest fish in a relatively small pond, he is not likely to want to risk his Holyrood majority by alienating his electorate.
For the Tories in London, the calculations are very different. David Cameron’s immediate reaction to the SNP’s success and the prospect of a Scottish referendum was to say that Holyrood could of course have its vote but that he would fight for the Union “with every fibre of my being”. Well, he’s got to say that. Many Tory MPs, on the contrary, would be perfectly happy to kiss goodbye to Scotland. After all, the country delivered just one Tory MP to Westminster last year, as against 41 for Labour. They picture a House of Commons without members from the independent nation of Scotland – or indeed from Wales where Labour also dominates – but with a big advantage for the Tories in the remaining English seats, especially after the shake-up of boundaries being proposed by the government that – would you credit it? – favours Conservatives still further.
Such a development at Westminster would finally lay to rest Tam Dalyell’s legendary West Lothian Question, wherein the then Labour backbencher asked how it could be proper for the MP for West Lothian (himself) to be permitted to vote on an issue peculiar to the citizens of Blackburn, Lancashire but not on an issue peculiar to the burghers of Blackburn, West Lothian; under the terms of the devolution bill then going through the house, Westminster MPs would lose executive jurisdiction over domestic Scottish affairs. Meanwhile, the formal agreement that launched the Westminster coalition includes an undertaking to have a commission examine the West Lothian Question.
Another school of Tory thought argues that a referendum on Scottish independence ought to be put before the whole of the UK because unionists in each constituent country have a view on the matter, whether they be Scottish or no. This notion might appeal to Cameron but of course would be rejected outright by Salmond.
Cheerleader for the Thatcherite wing of the Tories, Siphon Effluent of The Daily Telegraph, repeats a familiar cry: “why [should] the English taxpayer … send £23billion a year to Scotland to pay for it to have free prescriptions, free tuition and frozen council tax?” The answer of course is that Holyrood has not been granted tax-raising powers and if it were obliged to disburse the funds it receives from Westminster as the coalition dictates, its very existence would be negated. The same applies to local councils across Britain. It suits the government to have devolved authorities being blamed for the cuts they perforce have to impose. That the SNP is smart enough to disburse its funds in a way that attracts voters sticks in the craw of Tories.
Effluent is also one of the loudest voices telling the PM to call a snap election: “there simply won’t be a better chance of a Conservative victory than now”. It’s easy to see why Tory backbenchers and commentators fume at the notion that the Lib Dems should be somehow “rewarded” for their catastrophic showing in the election and the comprehensive rejection of the voting method referendum that seemed to many to be their raison d’être, rewarded by having their role in government bolstered and, as Tories would see it, being offered concessions over such matters as the selling off of the NHS. Doesn’t electoral rejection weaken rather than strengthen the grip that politicians exert on power and policy?
Again, Cameron says publicly what he has to, that the coalition is the thing and must go on and that the Lib Dems still have a central role. “No crowing” he has told those party workers who enjoyed watching Lib Dem councillors tumble, quite a few of them to Tories. But equally he may not feel as triumphal as do those who long for a Tory administration governing alone.
There was a single parliamentary by-election last Thursday, at Leicester South. You can argue that, given the nature of the poll, this was perhaps the purest and most accurate gauge of opinion about the national government taken on the day. It has been little reported but the result was striking. After all, it was an “unnecessary” election in that the sitting MP decided instead to run as local mayor. Historically, the electorate has generally punished parties that call elections purely for the benefit of the sitting party. But here the Labour majority rose by over 3,000 votes and by 12 percent of the total. The Tory candidate’s vote was halved and fell by more than that of the Lib Dem (who came second).
Analysis of the voting figures in the council elections reveals little to support the theory that the Tory vote “held up” and that, because many more Lib Dem seats are vulnerable to a Tory swing than to a Labour one, Cameron’s crew would do well at a general election.
I am not privy to how the voting is projected but those who reckon to know how to do it say that a UK-wide general election that replicated the voting patterns in the local elections would give Labour 318 seats (up 60), Tories 270 (down 37). Lib Dems 26 (down 31) and others 36 (up eight). So Labour would be the largest party and could govern by concluding what Ed Miliband put forward some weeks ago, a deal with the Lib Dems. And this is before the full impact of the cuts is felt. Effluent is right, from the Tories’ point of view, to urge Cameron not to wait. For Labour, things can only get better.
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