Vote what to ensure we don't get SNP?

Welcome to my first Blog of 2015. For various reasons it is rather later than I had intended, but I hope that you all had an enjoyable Festive Season and belatedly wish you all the best for a peaceful and progressive year to come. May the beautiful poetry of the basking sharks always be with you in your journey through this abundant universe.

The topic of the moment being tactical voting, let me add my tuppenceworth to the debate. I should put my cards on the table at the outset and declare my Party allegiance – I am, and have been for many years, a fully paid up member of the Labour Party. There is little likelihood of that allegiance changing in the foreseeable future. I might waver if the result of the forthcoming General Election in May leads to Ed Miliband negotiating a coalition with the Scottish National Party. I am no fan of Ed as Party leader, but surely even he is not about to commit that act of political suicide.

Those who follow politics on TV will likely have seen Scottish Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, on last week’s Question Time from Glasgow, rather uneasily side-stepping the not so small matter of Miliband’s failure to rule out a post-Election pact with the SNP. Many voters (and not just Labour voters) were hoping that Ed would take the opportunity during his appearance at Scottish Labour's Edinburgh event last Saturday to rectify that failure. However both Ed and Scottish Leader Jim Murphy somehow managed to deliver speeches which barely mentioned the SNP, far less addressed the vexed question of a possible Lab-SNP coalition.

Last Thursday Kez had loyally stuck to the rather unconvincing Party line that Labour are

campaigning for an overall majority, so talk of deals was irrelevant. Saturday's event, or

Miliband and Murphy - avoiding the issue

more accurately non-event, left a stream of Labour figures struggling to defend the indefensible on the Sunday morning politics shows. Edinburgh South's Ian Murray in particular gamely stuck to the script on Andrew Neil's show while suffering a fair old Paxoing from Gordon Brewer.

It is now common knowledge that a majority of Scottish Labour MPs in particular want to see an SNP pact firmly off the agenda. Any electoral risks in that approach (and there are some) are outweighed by the advantages of shooting the SNP’s fox before it shreds any more Scottish Labour bin bags. But the current refusal to budge on the coalition issue comes, I understand, directly from Miliband himself.

Miliband is apparently intent on continuing to resist pressure both from within his Party and from external forces to shift his position. His political miscalculation seems certain to dog Labour throughout the remaining weeks of the General Election campaign. But more crucially, it does no favours at all to the majority of pro-UK voters who still hope against hope to see the SNP bandwagon if not derailed at least slowed in May 2015.
   

The revenge of the sore losers

Miliband's failure to understand why ruling out a pact with the SNP matters so much is all the more incomprehensible given the level of SNP support suggested by a succession of opinion polls. Let's be clear - the Scottish end of the 2015 General Election looks all set to be the revenge of the sore losers. However much the SNP leadership protest that the Party has moved on from last September's rejection of separation, that is not how a fairly large chunk of the SNP's potential voters see things.

There is no real evidence that the percentage of the Scottish electorate who would be willing to vote for separation in another yes/no Referendum has increased beyond the 37% mark we saw last September. If anything, it has declined slightly as the SNP's unconvincing response to the collapse of the oil market has put their fiscal competence under some serious scrutiny. But while the combined pro-UK Parties' vote is still by some margin the majority, that vote is split several ways and unlike the SNP is not a single-issue vote. The simple arithmetic is that those who voted Yes seem about to vote tactically en masse for the SNP. Thus, only a similar tactical vote, Constituency by Constituency, for the pro-UK Party best placed to defeat the SNP, can halt - or at least limit - a predicted SNP landslide.  

Perhaps unsurprisingly (political Parties are big vessels, and hard to turn around in choppy waters), the leaders of the big Parties have now spoken out against tactical voting. I understand that to an extent – although I'm not particularly active in the Labour Party these days, I remain enough of a tribal apparatchik to appreciate the old rule that you never lend your vote because that breaks the chain of Party loyalty and you won’t get it back.

Sore losers hell-bent on revenge

However that rule is for normal times. Up here in Scotland, we are not currently living in normal times. The significant majority of Scots who voted against separation last September face a veritable onslaught from a vocal minority of sore losers who are hell-bent on imposing that separation on their fellow Scots whether we want it or not. That onslaught ought to be resisted by all available democratic means, even if one of those means is organised tactical voting. Extreme circumstances require extreme remedies.

The Independence Referendum demonstrated that the big UK Parties can in difficult circumstances work (more or less) effectively together to see off a common threat. Unfortunately the threat of separation has not been fully seen off by last September’s vote. A minority of the Scottish electorate continue to foment grudge, grievance and blame against the UK Parliament in their apparently unshakeable belief that democracy means re-running a vote endlessly until they get the result which they think they deserve. Another helping of the unity of purpose which allowed the settled will of the majority of Scots to shine through last September is needed in May’s General Election vote.
  

SNP - standing up for cheap populism

The SNP are in effect running a policy-free General Election campaign designed to appeal emotionally to the 37% who voted for separation last September. Their campaign is aimed not just at SNP voters, but at the disparate Yes alliances of last year. They want the votes of the hard left Radical Independence Campaign, of Trotskyist Tommy Sheridan’s Hope over Fear camp followers, and of the ragbag of other Indieniers who will accept neither the fact that they lost the Referendum nor the reasons why they lost it. Give us your votes, the SNP’s broad argument runs, and we’ll go down to Westminster to give the English oppressors, your colonial masters, a good kicking.

Of course that is risible gutter populism. Scotland is not an oppressed or deprived country, and we are not a colony of England. In any case, none of the UK Parties will be keen to deal with separatist MPs at Westminster. The SNP’s group of MPs will, regardless of its size, be little more than a noisy, faintly ridiculous irritation. But that will suit the SNP just fine. It will give them an ideal 5-year platform to advance their grudge and grievance agenda, to blame Westminster (ie the English) for all of Scotland’s problems and to agitate for another shot at separation.

IndyRef 2 is off the menu

On separation - my assessment for what it is worth is that for the foreseeable future, the SNP’s Independence Project is dead. Doubtless, those on the more colourful fringes of the 45er cult will still rattle their imaginary chains of oppression, blame all of Scotland’s woes on the Evil Satan Westminster, and make a racket out of proportion to their size and importance. But as both Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond (one of these people is leader of the SNP) have implicitly conceded, there will be no IndyRef 2 any time soon. The volatility of the global oil market has brought into sharp focus the fact that the SNP’s fiscal plan for an independent Scotland as set out in their White Paper was an undeliverable fantasy.

SNP landslide - will it materialise?

On the SNP’s fiscal projections, Scotland would have resembled not so much the sick man of Europe, but one on life support. This is not Westminster scaremongering or Project Fear 2, but simple common sense. It’s the economy, stupid. It’s always the economy, stupid.

However this does not mean that Scots voters can afford to write off the widely predicted SNP landslide in May, nor indeed another four years of unscrutinised one-Party Government at Holyrood after the 2016 Election, as a blip in the electoral cycle. After 8 years of an SNP Government campaigning for separation, Scotland really needs a competent Government at Holyrood to exercise their extensive powers in running the services which affect our everyday lives. Key, and fully devolved, services like education and the NHS are areas in which the SNP administration at Holyrood has conspicuously failed to shine during the past eight years.

The last thing which Scotland needs in the wake of last year’s destructive and divisive Referendum is another five years or more of Quebec-style Neverendum uncertainty, with all of its negative economic effects. Quebec eventually saw off the separatist threat, but its economy still struggles to recover from the years of fiscal stagnation which resulted.

All of the above factors would, you might think, have concentrated the minds of the big UK Parties on the importance of seeing off, or at least minimising, the threat to Scotland of a big SNP win in May 2015. The SNP are openly campaigning to garner a tactical vote from the separatists who voted Yes last September. It would make sense therefore for the UK parties at least to give a nod and a wink to similar collaboration by those who voted so decisively for the retention of the UK. But apparently not.

On Twitter, where active #SNPout campaigns are starting to show results and to gain attention from Scotland’s mainstream media, the big Parties’ attitude has been derided as putting Party before country. It also appears to me as putting tribalism before survival. In the rough business of politics, loyalty is a commendable virtue. There are times for being marched behind the shed to be shot alongside your Comrades, because the alternative is worse. This is not one of those times.
 

The tsunami facing Scottish Labour

The Scottish Labour Party in particular, who really should know better given the scale of the disaster which they face if an SNP landslide actually materialises in May, continue to argue the line that the General Election vote is not a re-run of the Independence Referendum. Although they are technically correct, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that the return of a strong cohort of SNP MPs to Westminster will probably keep Labour out of No 10 for at least the next five years. It will also allow the SNP at Holyrood to continue deflecting attention from the social issues and affairs of Government which they ought to be addressing, while Scots suffer another five years of fruitless balancing of constitutional angels on the head of the Nationalist pin.

For all their bluster, the SNP leadership know that they are unlikely to play a significant role in the next Government, whichever Party forms it. Indeed, they are counting on that – they have ruled themselves out of a coalition with the Tories (though Hell conspicuously failed to freeze over when Alex Salmond stood shoulder to shoulder with Annabel Goldie from 2007 until 2011 at Holyrood), and are equally aware that there is no political advantage in the SNP being the junior partner in a Labour Government, especially a successful one.

Trident - SNP's red-ish line in the sand

The SNP have drawn red lines in the sand over Trident renewal and an additional anti-austerity £180bn for Scotland – red lines from which neither themselves nor Labour could afford to retreat without it being seen as capitulation. (While Nicola Sturgeon's recent comments to the Guardian indicate a bit of a u-turn on Trident - not so much Bairns, not Bombs, more Bairns AND Bombs - that is more positioning and mischief-making than anything else.)

Labour are equally well aware, one hopes, that any formal coalition with a parochial Party whose very raison d’etre is the destruction of the UK would not only kill off the Scottish Labour Party – Scottish members would be queueing up to resign - but would significantly impact upon its voter base (and membership) in the rest of the UK.

No time for naïve politics

Given all of the above, it is unclear why Labour has taken such a firm public stand against the tactical voting now being promoted by some significant figures on the Scottish political scene. At the very least, it is naïve politics. Given Labour’s current dominance of Scottish seats at Westminster, the Party would not be required to sacrifice a single Labour-held seat to tactical voting. Indeed, most of the tactical votes, if they materialise, would be one way traffic towards Labour from Tory and Lib Dem voters in seats where the SNP pose a genuine threat but where, given the rude health of most of Labour’s Westminster majorities, a quite modest transfer of votes would likely be enough to prevent the seat changing hands. The Labour Party leadership seems to be doing its damnedest to discourage such cross-Party co-operation, where the sane course of action might be to sit quietly on their hands and to leave their local activists to work under the radar. Let us not pretend that has never happened before.

Likewise, Tory Leader Ruth Davidson’s normally sure touch seems to have deserted her over this one. Currently holding just one Scottish Westminster seat, the only way for the Scottish Tories is up. And for the first time in a long while, there is the prospect of a Scottish resurgence, particularly in those traditionally tartan Tory areas where some post-Thatcher Tories tactically lend their votes to the SNP or Lib Dems to keep Labour out. The Scottish Tories have potentially 7 seats within their grasp. That is possibly over-optimistic, but they are certainly capable of bagging a few more MPs to share David Mundell’s lonely taxi. The SNP may have been an acceptable tactical vote (nothing new about this tactical voting business) for some Tories while separation remained a pipe dream, but I cannot believe that any Tories relish the prospect of a commercially toxic Quebec Neverendum here, far less an actual break-up of the UK.

So far as the other big Party is concerned, one doesn’t like to kick a dog when it’s down, and the Scottish Lib Dems are undoubtedly down at the moment. They find themselves victims (willing victims, it has to be said) of their collusion with the Tories in the current Government, and also pig in the middle of the fight between SNP and Labour. In most of their seats they are vulnerable to the SNP and even with tactical votes are not in a good place. Without strong tactical voting, they are surely doomed to lose a clutch of seats.

Can Lib Dems see off Salmond?

Danny Alexander in particular looks to be in a bit of trouble, caught between the SNP machine and an energetic Labour campaign which although it has no chance of taking the seat, can still take his votes. The other big struggle of course is Gordon, where Salmond is trying to carpetbag the retiring Malcolm Bruce’s seat. The Lib Dems’ Christine Jardine is a good candidate, but unless the anti-Salmond vote (which should not be underestimated) coalesces round her, it will be very difficult for her to derail the Salmond bandwagon. She deserves better.

Rules – there to be broken?

I admitted at the start of this piece to being a Labour Party member. I am well aware of what the Party’s rule book says regarding promoting or supporting other Parties. If I leave the Labour Party, I would prefer it to be of my own volition rather than by expulsion, so you will understand that the views which I am expressing here are theoretical and hypothetical. My feeling is that whatever the Party leaderships are saying on the matter, many ordinary Party members will make up their own minds as to how their votes on this occasion can best advance the causes in which they believe.

In any case, and the SNP’s cut-price fashion accessory memberships aside, few Scottish voters are actually paid-up members of any political Party. Since 1999, ordinary Scottish voters have become pretty clued-up as to how to use their votes to maximum effect. They understand the mechanics and quirks of the three different voting systems currently in use for Council, Holyrood and Westminster elections. They know that votes can be used to keep unwanted candidates out as well as to put wanted candidates in.

I suspect that whatever the Party leaders may be saying, many voters still regard the coming election to some extent as a continuation of last September, and will use their votes with that in mind. I believe in Parliamentary democracy and the sanctity of the secret vote at the ballot box. UK democracy is not perfect (what system is?) but one only has to cast around this troubled world to realise that it is still more effective, more fair and less corrupt than most other countries.

Referendum, not Neverendum

I was one of 2.1m Scots who voted No last September because I believed then that there was nothing which as a proud Scot I was prevented from doing by being part of the UK family. Nor could I see anything which I would be able to do, politically, culturally or socially, in an independent Scotland which is currently denied to me as a UK citizen. I still firmly believe that. I also believe that Scotland dodged a fiscal bullet by voting No. And while of course there is more to independence than money, no‑one ever knowingly votes to be poor. One can’t feed the kids on empty dreams.

Taking all of that into account, I firmly believe that the important vote in May is a vote which will keep the SNP at bay. Everyone out there has the freedom to decide what the vote might be. I am sure that sensible Scots will use it wisely.