Earth: Mostly Harmless

The Unravelling of Labour Britain

May 13, 2008 on 2:01 pm | No Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Alex Salmond, Conservatives, devolution, Gerry Hassan, Gordon Brown, independence, labour, politics, scotland, Scottish Government, Scottish Labour Party, scottish-national-party, snp, tory, Wendy Alexander

Significant changes are underway in British politics, and Scotland has a crucial role.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Scottish politics is changing, and that it is having important implications for the assumptions that UK politics is based on.

The incumbent UK Prime Minister is Scottish and in a spot of bother* over the 10p rate of income tax, a poor showing in the local elections and a general impression of being out of touch (and other trivial matters**). As a traditionally strong source of support for the Labour party, the current troubles of the Scottish Labour Party are causing severe worries for the UK party.

In the past few weeks, the issue of a referendum on Scottish independence has come to the fore oncemore. The Scottish National Party, the largest party in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and a minority administration, is committed to introducing a referendum in 2010. The Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander attempted to outmanoeuvre the SNP by declaring support for an immediate referendum (her mind, it is said, was changed during an interview on a BBC show). The threat was empty: Scottish Parliament legislative rules prevent private members’ Bills being introduced if the government of the day is planning to legislate on the same issue, so the SNP referendum bill would take trumps. Alexander’s move spectacularly backfired, leaving UK PM Gordon Brown having misled the UK Parliament about her views and the two sections of the party dramatically out of step, with the UK party opposed and the Scottish party committed.

And Alex Salmond (SNP First Minister of Scotland) looking even more smug than usual.

What can we say for sure? There will be a referendum on independence in 2010, after Salmond’s National Conversation finishes up. It is unimaginable that Labour could go back on that now. But the devil will be in the detail - wording matters greatly to the result, as does the selection of options present.

And the result? Anyone’s guess. Polls show anywhere between 25% and 75% support, depending on the questions asked. But an option is likely to be included offering greater powers for Holyrood - an option which would have overwhelming support. The presence of a Tory government in the UK Parliament might be enough to tip the scales toward independence.

Gerry Hassan from Demos provides an excellent summary of the issues leading up to the events of the past two weeks:

 

Gerry Hassan on The Unravelling of Labour Britain   (via Scottish Futures)

The advent of devolution created two different political systems in Scotland: the Scottish Parliament and Westminster. In the later Labour dominance still continues – the only part of Scotland still elected now by First Past The Post and the only part where Labour have a majority of the seats on their customary minority of the vote.

The Scottish Parliament is elected by a broadly proportionally system which means that all political parties are parliamentary minorities. From the first elections in 1999 which Labour finished as the leading party, the SNP established themselves as the clear challengers and opposition to Labour.

Thus, from the onset of the Parliament the dynamics of the two institutions and the parties within them have beat to a different pulse. The party sits in Holyrood in a Parliament where its main opponents sit to the left of them and unashamedly stress their Scottish credentials. At Westminster Labour have most often had to worry about losing votes and winning them from the right and a party emphasising its British qualities. Scottish Labour and British Labour have also had very different internal cultures and external strategies.

 Scottish Labour has had to emphasise its ‘bridge building’ qualities – stressing its Scottish qualities at Holyrood and its British at Westminster. It has had to do this with nuance and a deft touch: while being Scottish at Holyrood also emphasising the merits of the British union and at Westminster using its British agenda to sometimes stress the need for greater sensitivity to Scottish concerns. Pre-devolution the Scottish party under such titans as Thomas Johnston and Willie Ross managed this ‘bridge building’ strategy with great aplomb; it is the dynamics of the Scottish Parliament and devolution which have created the circumstances which have made this more difficult.

 

* Diplomatic license utilised

** And again

SNP executive: what now?

May 4, 2007 on 10:03 pm | 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: citizenship, election, eu, european union, schengen-agreement, scottish-national-party, scottish-parliament, snp

On the week of the 300th anniversary of the Union of the Parliaments, an explicitly separatist party came into a position of government in the mainland United Kingdom for the first time (Welsh parties are crap and don’t count).

Still, it wasn’t a clean victory for the Scottish National Party. My good friend C.B. Buckland was working as a canvasser for the SNP, and also as an electoral assistant at a polling place last night. He has this to say of the much criticised voting arrangements:

The BBC are massively overstating the problems with [the electronic counting] machines. As expected I suppose.

The management of the election was at fault for the lack of information, the poor ballots, the lack of knowledge amongst the polling clerks (some were telling people to fold them, contrary to the guidelines) and the general mess of the forms. The DRS company were at fault for their poorly tested and expensive machines (£4.3 million this is costing you, by the way). The public were at fault for simply not making an effort to understand their democracy. The media were at fault for misinforming once the disaster had had happened. Blokes with golf clubs didn’t help either.
Full post

As for the result, it remains to be seen how the SNP will take the independence argument forward, if at all, in the next few years. The election contest was very noticeably fought on issues other than independence, yet the SNP manifesto contains a commitment to hold a referendum on the issue in the lifetime of this Parliament (probably in 2010). The polls show a fairly clear trend against separation at the moment, but all that could change if Westminster and Edinburgh antagonise each other enough in the meantime.

The subject of independence poses numerous intractable questions about the modern state, citizenship and political obligation. The matter of establishing the citizenship of each person at such time as a separation should occur offers myriad challenges in itself, but could perhaps offer a unique opportunity to change the nature of citizenship itself. For example, it’s impossible to imagine any kind of border controls between Scotland and England, so why not use the opportunity to build upon the freedom of movement and cross-border working that this and EU citizenship in general imply. This could mean both countries joining Schengen. Or they could go even further, and establish transferrable or pooled citizenship.

Why? Because interdependence is going so far as to render the concept of national independence almost moot, and indeed independence is often now more of a contingent effect of peoples’ general desires for closer and more multi-level governance than anything autarkic or Westphalian.

The reality is that ‘independence’ in the contemporary world, and especially in the EU, means little more than more control over issues of ‘hard politics’. Not absolute control, but certainly enough to keep from being dragged into offensive wars with which the minority nation disagrees. I think it’s significant that it’s taken an issue exactly like that (Iraq) - among other things - to bring an independence party to the fore.

But if independence really did become something the people of Scotland wanted strongly, the trump card played by Westminster will be exactly that played three-hundred years ago - a good old-fashioned buy-off.

Or they might just let us go.