Thoughts after Beckett – Part 4: the SNP threat

This week I’ve blogged on Labour’s challenges around leadership, economic trust and immigration & welfare, all of which were identified as core factors in Labour’s 2015 election defeat in the Beckett Report. Today I write a final blog on how to tackle the SNP’s stranglehold in Scotland.

The rise of the SNP in Scotland delivered a double-blow to Labour. The direct cost was the loss of all but one of our Commons seats there to the SNP, owing to the fact that we “somehow came to represent continuity rather than change” as Beckett said. But the thing that likely secured the Tories’ unexpected majority was their ruthless scaremongering about the likelihood of some sort of Labour-SNP deal in a hung parliament, which convinced UKIP leaners and 2010 Labour and Lib Dem voters to switch to the Tories to eliminate any possibility of this occurring. Nicola Sturgeon was of course complicit in this, as a Tory government in Westminster is a better foil for the SNP - she knew she was twisting the knife into Ed Miliband on both sides of the border when she told debate audiences “even if the Tories are the biggest party we will work with Labour to keep David Cameron out of Downing Street."

This harsh reality leaves Labour in a quandary, because as long as the new status quo in Scottish politics persists, the Tories and the SNP will deploy the same attack on Labour at every general election, with the same outcome. However, in 2015 the party was blindsided by this unprecedented situation – we at least now have four years to plan, provided we are willing to use them.

We need to start by confronting common assumptions held in Labour, particularly by those of us in England. In the leadership election Andy Burnham said “it's clear that the road to Downing Street goes through Glasgow” - while widely believed, this is arguably wrong on multiple counts. First off, we lost 40 seats in Scotland to the SNP, and there are a grand total of 59 in Scotland, but we are 94 seats from a Commons majority (pre-boundary changes) and 113 seats behind the Tories in England, where 533 of the seats are. Further, on all five occasions when Labour has won a solid working majority (1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005) Labour’s majority would have been large even without its Scottish seats. Scotland has only ever been decisive in the sense of securing Labour razor-thin Commons majorities when England and Wales were already fought close (1964, Oct 1974), in tipping a hung parliament towards Labour (Feb 1974) or forcing the Conservatives into a hung parliament (2010).

Secondly, SNP majorities in some previously Labour seats now outstrip the margins the Tories have in some longstanding English safe seats – on paper, it is now slightly easier for Labour to defeat Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford than to regain Gordon’s Brown’s former home ground  of Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath. 27 of the 56 SNP MPs have majorities over 10,000, and in 2020, an MP like Mhairi Black who took out shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander by a ‘mere’ 5,684 votes will also have the benefit of incumbency. These numbers arguably reflect a vital difference between the nature of the Tories’ election win in England and the SNP’s in Scotland.

In Scotland, Sturgeon and the SNP inspire the genuine loyalty of at least half the population, with their brand now fused with feel-good populist ‘Scottishness’ in the eyes of ‘the 45%’ and some of softer 2014 No voters alike. In England, meanwhile, the Tories were elected by default. They successfully presented themselves as a steady hand on the tiller, and therefore good enough to warrant a small majority against a troubled Labour with an unconvincing leader – no more, no less. Since the election, the Tories have sent clear signals that even they realise this, in the unsubtle attempts to steal Labour’s ‘worker’s party’ clothes and the draconian, multi-pronged gerrymandering of the British political system. The conventional wisdom that tells us that Scotland is easier to win back than traditionally Tory England is dead.

Linked to this, the left must stop assuming that we were simply ‘out-lefted’ by the SNP, and must do the same to them in turn to get Scotland back. Sturgeon’s anti-austerity rhetoric and usage of symbolic issues like Trident disguised well that the SNP’s spending plans were arguably more conservative than Labour’s in the election, and in Holyrood she runs an administration that can at times appear Blairite (the CBI has described them as “very pro-business” and Sturgeon has said that “what matters is what works” in education reform). It might be inferred that the SNP know their electorate well, and position accordingly – Scotland thinks of itself as more progressive than England, when some evidence suggests the differences in attitudes are subtle. I wrote about the 'myth of left-wing Scotland’ in 2014:

In Scotland itself, 2011 research commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation exploring attitudes to inequality, redistribution and "tax-and-spend" commented that "although Scotland is more social democratic in outlook than England, the differences are modest at best" and that support for the welfare state had declined over time in both countries. Further, a poll this year claimed that though Scots appear less hostile to immigration, they are not "massively" different (58% are still opposed, compared to 75% south of the border). And hard as it is to remember now, there was also a time in the 1950s when the One Nation Tories of that era were actually competitive in Scotland, winning as many or more seats and votes as Labour there.

Moreover, Jeremy Corbyn’s election has provided a clear test of the Labour left’s theory, and the results are not optimistic. It is still possible Labour will lose all of its constituency MSPs, rather than seeing even the first green shoots of a recovery. It is absolutely true that it would have been unreasonable to expect him (or any leadership candidate) to reverse Scottish Labour’s misfortunes, which started long before he was leader, but it cannot be ignored that Corbyn himself is polling as badly in Scotland as in England. This challenges even the previous predictions that a Corbyn-led Westminster Labour itself might be popular in Scotland, even if it didn’t help the dysfunctional Scottish Labour party down-ballot.

Instead, evidence suggests independence versus unionism increasingly defines Scottish politics, not left and right – the British Election Study (BES) “found that Yes to Independence voters were likely to move from Labour to SNP regardless of their views on austerity”. In this climate, Labour finds itself sharing the pool of unionist votes with the Scottish Tories and whatever remains of the Lib Dems, a dynamic which handed nearly every Westminster seat to the plurality SNP under FPTP.

For English Labourites like me powerlessly watching all this unfold, it means two things. First, we must stop projecting our assumptions onto Scotland and guessing what will work (I must admit, I originally figured that losing the referendum would break the SNP, and I’ve heard others say the same). Kezia Dugdale and Scottish Labour must instead be given our unequivocal support and a wide berth to do whatever they think is best, including differentiating themselves from the national party where necessary (both the left and the right of Labour in England should be weary of how our views in the upcoming Trident debate will knock on in Scotland, for example). We should also be patient - we are being warned that rebuilding may take a generation.

Second, we must seize control of our destiny south of the border, engaging with our own electorate in England to break the (comparatively) weaker Tory hold down here. As I said, Scotland has only ever been decisive as a tie-break when rest of Britain was already close, but even this is no longer sufficient. 2015 showed that a significant SNP presence in Scotland means we need to do what we did five times before and put ourselves on course for a majority even without Scottish seats, in order to prevent the Tories making Labour-SNP deals a last-minute wedge issue in England. This may plausibly relieve pressure on Scottish Labour in turn, as it could stop the SNP offering independence as an escape hatch from Tory rule (when Jeremy Corbyn’s victory was announced, Nicola Sturgeon immediately sent a tweet warning “If Lab can't quickly show that they have credible chance of winning UK election, many will conclude that Indy only alternative to Tory gov”):

What I’ve just described is a tall order for Labour in our present circumstances, to put it lightly - it will demand audacity of us. But it is time we acknowledged that the interplay between the two countries is more complex than the discussion within Labour often recognises. It is at least possible that England may be the key to unlocking Scotland, not the other way around.