Union is a political philosophy. It is one whose value Scotland understands and with which, in its relative support for membership of the EU, it appears comfortable.
Scotland is, however, philosophically conflicted. It elects a nationalist government whose raison d’être is to achieve Scottish independence; although in reality its intention is less to make that a genuine reality than to put an apparent distance between the country and ‘England’.
This continuation of the muddle-headed, romance-driven focus on a contemporary defeat of the ‘auld enemy’ is resolvable, if the United Kingdom moves to design together a form of federalism to fit the nature and needs of the collective territory. [Tam Dalyell, the author of the 'West Lothian question' has made the best suggestion to date on how this might be done - a matter for another occasion.]
There is widespread support for such a constitutional development today. It can only happen, though, if the union itself remains in existence as the umbrella under which everyone will change their clothes and their relationships, while continuing to use the shared systems and positions which are its strength.
The first of these two political analyses, published on 26th September, on where Scotland stands in relation to the United Kingdom in the wake of the independence referendum, looked at the position of the SNP and showed a continuing and serious threat to this Union.
It could not be more unfortunate for the union that three of the most insubstantial and unconvincing leaders of major parties in the United Kingdom – David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg – should coincide in time, as they do today.
Two of them are in government and the third unable to provide any meaningful or coherent opposition. In each case, their personal priority is with image, presentation, personal and party power and control over their parties; not, as it ought to be, on together shaping a robust reform of the union which, whatever its deficiencies, serves small states well.
The threat to the survival and reforming of that union comes from Scotland. It has been far from put to bed by the pro-union result of the recent referendum – and could be said to be even more powerful now.
A thumbnail sketch of the SNP position
The first part of this analysis showed the SNP in the grip of its multitudinous new membership which is signing up wholesale. This was born in the recent referendum campaign and represents the young, the deprived and those now referred to as ‘the left behind’, whatever that is.
The sheer size of this new input is the SNP’s predicament.
The party cannot – no one could – realistically hope to deliver enough in independence to satisfy the needs and unfocused wants of this widely varied mass; but it cannot afford to lose the present electoral power their membership, support, recruitment capability and votes confer.
All the SNP can do is to keep them fully engaged until those votes can play their part again, enhanced by more adherents, to drive Scotland over the threshold to independence. This memberships is not of a waiting disposition. Their energies are in the now and will wane if not fed. The moment in 2016.
Take this scenario
The masses are mobilised again quickly to drive a campaign to take more SNP seats in the 2015 General Election. With ‘Westminster’ as it is, a split-focus, anomalous and anachronistic instrument of government which will now assuredly change, it is not the seats but the demonstration of power that matters.
The SNPs deployment of its current grassroots organisation – which has been awe inspiring – is now strengthened by the immediate force of a signed up new membership whose members can be specifically tasked to grow more of their like.
What the SNP can now bring to bear on the 2015 General Election campaign will leave each of the traditional main parties focused on their own defence.
That crisis-driven self-interest will easily deflect their attention from the real game – which is to break up or save the union.
With this SNP strategy, there are Labour seats that will fall to the SNP, certainly in the four heavily populated areas of deprivation where they achieved their only wins in the referendum – Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire and Dundee – but also in other areas where the constituency boundaries for the General Election give them traction.
The Conservatives have only one seat to lose in Scotland but that very position indicates the unlikelihood of their being able to shore up the union while the attention of Labour is on fighting a rearguard action to protect its own position.
The Liberal Democrats are in such a depleted position in Scotland today and with little manifest organisation, that they might conceivably be looking at maintaining a presence only in their northern fastness of Orkney and Shetland.
Scotland has never been riper for a full-on SNP assault for the last push to independence.
Such a project perfectly aligns with the condition of the SNP at this moment. The force in the party is the sheer number and aspiration of its new membership – which, in votes, now outweighs its pre-existing membership. The tigers in that new reserve need to be fed; and the traditional party, its members and supporters, need distraction from their recent loss of the 2014 referendum.
This scenario is virtually bound to take place.
After another epoch making campaign and more political scalps to impale on the railings around Calton Hill, there is one more year to the Scottish Elections of 2016.
The other parties and their candidates will then be looking only to their respective survival. This is what mainstream politics is about. However myopic, the protection of the union will be of peripheral concern.
The SNP manifesto for its 2016 campaign will, of course, carry a pledge for another referendum. It could not do anything else. To omit it would appear an acceptance of defeat when this is genuinely the best chance they will ever have to force independence upon an unwilling but passive and unled majority.
With the momentum of this membership, increasing recruitment and electoral success in 2015 behind them, the SNP will be elected again in 2016 to an overall majority at Holyrood.
They will have been elected with a manifesto pledge for an independence referendum, then mandated – and they will implement that pledge quickly, with the debates from the current one still fresh and with little need for more material and another and better prospectus in what is a hybrid campaign of altruism, emotive and racist tribalism and retro-hippiedom.
The only immediate potential brakes on this momentum are external. They arise from the now increased rather than lessened uncertainty over the future of Scotland in the union. This spooks the financial institutions on which much of Scotland’s tax revenues, employment and GDP depend. It could see some of them implement their contingency pans and shift non-Scottish business south across the border and under the certain continuing shelter of the Bank of England.
That would be a wake up call which could not be dismissed as scaremongering. It would be fact. Lloyds/HBOS and Standard Life have said that their contingency plans remain in view.
This uncertainty might also continue to impact on the property market. That too would slow the momentum of the SNP bandwagon.
Nevertheless, in our view, without concerted and urgent action of the sort we suggest below, the SNP are a probability to win in 2016.
That sees Scotland out of the union; Northern Ireland subject to strong repeated calls for a border referendum; Wales left wondering if it should actually make its own move; UKIP the triumphant inheritor of England.
Endgame.
Can this be overcome?
Yes. It can. There is a strategy capable, in theory, of achieving it.
There are scant grounds, though, in the current political capability of the union, to hope it might be done.
But here is the strategy.
The single aim must be defeating the SNP in the 2016 Scottish Election – whatever it takes. Nothing else will secure the union for the future.
So how can that be done?
Objective 1: Get whatever legislation or amendment is necessary through Westminster to ensure that any referendum with constitutional consequences run in any part of the United Kingdom must cross a threshold of two thirds of the vote – or 67% – to succeed. This can and must be done.
Just over a week ago, Scotland could have been taken into an economically disastrous independence on a first past the post basis; and with 16 and 17 year olds voting for the first time in history and in their lives, in the most important vote in the annal’s of the nation.
Objective 2: Obstruct the SNP from settling in to their purpose for the 2015 election campaign.
First mount an authoritative, weighty and sustained attack on the SNPs competence in government from within Holyrood – now – before the 2015 General Election.
Do this by getting some of the right first division politicians into Holyrood fast – whatever it takes to do that.
The dispossessed third division members currently in place must accept that they’ve had an unmerited good run and can count their good fortune; and that the union itself will not survive unless they move willingly aside. That is the bald fact.
Their replacements must be the right first division players, not just the willing and possibly self-interested. ‘Right’ means the right people for the necessary specific jobs of the moment – people who may not necessarily be ‘right’ for the landscape when this job is done and the SNP are beaten in 2016. This understanding of ‘horses for courses’ must be understood and accepted from the outset to prevent future disappointments, bitterness and squabbling .
Objective 3: [This is part of the overall focus of Objective 2.] Quickly establish a long-stay campaign on the streets and in the communities, providing the SNP with multiple distractions and multiple challenges. By finding out from people on the ground what a reformed union might best be, creative thinking will be tuned to what is desirable and acceptable. This gives the people an alternative ground-breaking common cause and facilitates its delivery through communal action on the ground.
Objective 4: Then stand the best possible candidates for Holyrood seats in 2016 and campaign with argument, purpose, focus and drive to succeed. Spare nothing; and win. No other outcome can be contemplated.
The territory for battle and the battle orders
There are notions of an electoral pact between the unionist parties in circulation at the moment.
If that means the unionist parties not opposing each other in strategic constituencies – that’s fine and necessary.
If it means any suggestion of actually working together – forget it. The shockingly unfocused and unable pro-union ‘campaign’ for the referendum proved that the parties lack the political intelligence and the largeness to do this. In such a scenario, they will each do very little themselves and blame the others for the failure.
While the SNP is hoping to distract its membership, new and old, from the true awfulness of defeat by driving a campaign for the 2015 General Election – and by getting back at once to the appearance of government: distract them by a concerted, genuinely powerful and unrelenting attack on that government in Holyrood.
The SNP government and the proselytised Scottish Civil Service are not, between them, competent proposers and framers of legislation. Nor are they honest brokers.
The arming of Scotland’s police was effected without even the knowledge of the Scottish Parliament never mind any public consultation.
The appointment of state guardians [with the helplessly unfocused title of 'named persons'] for every child from birth to 18 and, in many cases well beyond that, was implemented prematurely and against express government assurances that there would first be consultation. This matter is also currently under legal challenge.
Where Scottish education used to be the gold standard, primary and secondary education is now failing and is progressively delivering less capable students to the universities. Many of these have had to introduce remedial classes for first year students, to try to bridge a gap that ought not to exist.
University research funding in specific areas of expertise in the sciences, engineering and IT is of incalculable value to Scotland which, as an independent country, it simply could not hope to fund and resource as the highest level of such work requires.
Another impact of the political uncertainty over Scotland’s coonstitutional future that relates to education and to the NHS is difficulty in recruitment and particularly of recruitment of the best. It is telling that Aberdeen Royal Informary [ARI], arguably in the wealthiest well-found part of Scotland, is understaffed at consultant level to the point where experts see the situation as a threat to public safety.
Only today there are media reports that NHS Highland has had to address this specific problem by spending a fortune hiring a locum consultant from India – because there was no weekend A&E cover at ARI. This situation could not be of greater concern nor more indicative of trouble.
NHS Scotland is, in fact, no more robust and no more secure in its direction, organisation and funding than it is anywhere else in the United Kingdom.
Shetland is not connected to the National Grid. Serious renewable energy technologies are in their infancy and wind farms are everywhere. Scotland is not in a position to supply its own baseload energy supply, hence the urgent focus on the need to license fracking – which, like it or not, is now a necessity.
There is so much of real substance on which to drive on to the back foot a government that is far less capable than the utter lack of competent opposition at Holyrood has enabled it to appear.
And that is the key.
Holyrood must become a parliament whose operation and performance is worthy of the name and which delivers the highest level of thought, strategic policy creation, management and implementation.
That means replacing as many of the third-division place holders as possible. But there is no time to wait until the 2016 Scottish election to do so. It has to be started now and completed in 2016.
A resurgent and reformed Labour – that starts looking around it and listening more than it has done for a long time – and recovers the ability to speak like human beings, abandoning all trace of its tedious and empty sound bites, is irreplaceable in any possible success in this or any strategy to save the union.
The SNP has been stealing Labour’s clothes on social justice – for want of a strong voice in Holyrood; and it has been openly robbing it of its voters in the streets.
The vanguard at Holyrood
Some of the ‘right’ politicians have made it clear that their personal focus is no longer on Westminster. There is no reason therefore why they should not now stand in Holyrood by-elections. Triggering three or four, say, simultaneous Holyrood by-elections might be a naked device – but no more naked than what the SNP will do in 2016. This is no time for the gavottes of disguise.
Gordon Brown is one such politician – and he is just the man for the current job, if not necessarily for a longer term leadership. He has the knowledge, the experience, the authority, the voice, the persona and the respect to expose the SNPs inadequacies in the key area of the economy and its management.
Jim Murphy has hinted that he would be prepared to focus his energies on Holyrood – and might stand for Holyrood in 2016. That is too late. If he is serious, he needs to make an absolute commitment now, and get cracking. For any supporter of the imperative of unionism, there could be no more politically urgent situation than the one in which Scotland sits today.
Murphy is a credible potential First Minister – when the battle is won. If he came to that position then, with the achievement of having established the sort of generative grassroots presence we describe below – an urgent project in which he should centrally be involved, he would unquestionably carry the day.
The persona to lead the fight in Holyrood now, however, has to be Gordon Brown’s – powerful, dominant, combative, highly informed on the sine qua non of the economy – and with an inbuilt personal authority from his long chancellorship.
Margaret Curran is eminently a straight-up, no-nonsense fighter, never afraid to engage, capable of motivating those the SNP has swept out of Labour’s pocket and into their own. She needs to be in Holyrood now and returning there, bringing the benefit of wider and much more complex experience at Westminster.
At Holyrood before moving to Westminster in answer to Labour’s need to find a candidate to defeat the SNP’s MP at Glasgow East [which they had taken in a by-election and which Curran successfully took back], Curran had held the ministerial posts of Parliamentary Business, Social Justice and Communities. This spectrum of experience will stand well to her impact in today’s chamber.
There are said to be frissons of incompatibiilty between Brown and Murphy. If this is so and if two adult men, in a fundamental constitutional crisis, cannot get over this then neither is in a position to argue the case for union of any kind. Union above all things is teamwork. And Holyrood is in serious need of grown ups,
Assuming that of course they can overcome any personal rivalry, the presence of these two with Margaret Curran, alongside Jackie Baillie, Ken Mackintosh, Johann Lamont, Kezia Dugdale and Humza Yousaf would be a formidable spine around which to focus, task and motivate the Labour parliamentary group.
Others members of the first division would be needed to join them by standing for election in 2016 – like Alastair Darling, currently considering his future; and the Liberal politicians identified below.
The Liberals in waiting
The Liberals with only two constituency MSPs- in Orkey and Shetland, cannot feasibly propel any of their most effective first team players into Holyrood through a by-election.
But they must mobilise and task them at once to be part of the cross-party Labour-Liberal team to get to the country’s grassroots and communities; and they must prepare these key politicians to stand for Holyrood in 2016.
Charles Kennedy has always needed a proper job to flex his very real abilities – and this would be a job and a half. In its immediacy, its creativity and the level of public attention which would be paid to it. He would enjoy and rise to the galvanic of this immense challenge. Kennedy has a personal ease in company and in public, which increases the reach of his capabilities. An MP at 23, he has lived most of his adult life in public.
Michael Moore, a conveniently underestimated recent Scottish Secretary might be willing to head for Edinburgh; and would flourish there. An independent thinker, a cool head, no machine made politician, a conciliator and with experience of serious political responsibility, he has a lot to bring to Holyrood – and to the resurgence of the liberal voice in Scotland.
Alistair Carmichael, the current Scottish Secretary who replaced Moore and was equally too much of a gentleman to bawl down Nicola Sturgeon in what are tiresomely gladiatorial television debates, has also expressed his willingness to focus on Holyrood. He too would be the right kind of asset to the project and to the Liberals’ necessary renaissance in Scotland. Carmichael has been Deputy Chief Whip at Westminster so he also knows a thing or two about organising the infantry.
In standing for Holyrood in 2016, these three together would bring experience in representing the length and nature of Scotland – from the Northern Isles to the great welter of Ross, Skye and Lochaber and to the Scottish Borders.
What Scotland would be looking at would be a likely return to a Labour/Liberal coalition – which will require a regeneration of both parties and the revival from near death experience of the liberal partner in that relationship.
It is important for the calibre of political debate in Scotland that genuine liberalism has a contribution to make and makes it. The polarisation of the tribal independence campaign we have just been through has starved the country of the oxygen of plurality of thought and has made it intellectually inbred.
Charles Kennedy, Michael Moore and Alistair Carmichael should have the job of rebuilding the party in Scotland – and of considering a brand resuscitation in reviving the identity of liberalism in the return of its name. Nothing could more clearly make this a Scottish party.
The campaign on the ground
This should be the job of Jim Murphy and Margaret Curran for Labour, arguably with help from former Labour Minister and co-founder of the West Highland Free Press, Brian Wilson; and Charles Kennedy, Michael Moore and Alastair Carmichael for the Liberals. They should have the assistance of the team on Labour’s ‘red indyref bus’ – who were largely young, motivated, and communicative. This project needs to be well conceived, with a purpose given to those recruited; reaching right down to and rooting in communities – as the SNP campaign showed is possible.
Each of these six are plausible human beings and each has a nationwide presence. Together they represent the span and spectrum of Scotland from its southernmost to its northernmost point, from its biggest city to jewels in its island necklace. Each of them has to be in Holyrood at the earliest opportunity.
The allocation of immediate responsibilities we suggest here is driven by the ‘horses for courses’ imperative. And we are, perhaps characteristically, not bothering to assume respect for rank and party influence – a stance we recommend to all of the parties in what is no less than a national emergency. For example, politicos like Douglas Alexander are not only pointless in their primary focus on self interest but damaging in the personal and factional scheming they are endemically unable to resist.
The challenge the union faces in Scotland now is no time for niceties of any kind. There is a job to be done and there is little time to do it; but it is a job on which the existence of the union depends – and with it the future of the Labour party.
The incentive for Labour
Whatever the stats and the ratings may indicate now, we do not believe that Labour will win the 2015 General Election.
There was not one single winning moment in the party conference. Their leader is not a winner but a clear negative. The Labour front bench is particularly unappealing, from the hard faced apparatchiks like Caroline Flint, to the new totty of both genders – the plastic fantastics, Gloria de Piero [suggested by Tony Blair] and Tristram Hunt.
And UKIP threatens Labour stronghold constituencies on the English east coast.
The party is led by a millipede who couldn’t see the blindingly obvious – that, following the offer of more devolved powers to Scotland made at the end of the referendum campaign and with UKIP on the prowl, ‘English votes for English matters’ was absolutely going to be the single big question from the media at the party conference in Manchester.
If the best Labour can do is offer an economic policy which is a continuation of the austerity Chancellor George Osborne has been successfully implementing – against their incessant opposition – why would voters not prefer the party that is actually delivering the version the world has seen to work?
The Conservatives’ record of successfully bringing the United Kingdom economy out of the serious recession following the financial collapses in 2008 [which were the Labour government's direct responsibility] and into growth, will be the unarguable ace in the pack when it comes down to basics at the vote next May. On the evidence, Labour has nothing with which to trump that mighty card.
Labour’s plagiarised core economic policy of austerity was accompanied by a second plank which was also stolen from elsewhere – Lib Dem Vince Cable’s ‘mansion tax’. The ‘mansion tax’ gesture [which expert analysis indicates will raise very little] is supposed to fund the throwing of more money at the NHS instead of reforming it by, for a start, defining the types of procedure for which the state will not pay.
Finally, as was the case in the recent referendum, unrealised until very late and quite probably forgotten already – if Scotland is lost, Labour is lost. If the Union is lost, Labour is finished for the foreseeable future as a party of national government.
It behoves Labour to commit priority to Scotland now.
Labour, however, is showing no more than a limited political, as opposed to theoretical, understanding of the nature, impact, risks and opportunities of the current constitutional situation. That is a matter to which For Argyll will shortly return, but the party’s general lack of nous and focus is not encouraging.
Is the union likely to survive?
In short – no; unless the understanding, priorities, strategies and commitment of the Westminster government and the Labour and Liberal parties sharpen up to a level they show no sign of attaining.
If they drive forcefully, with no equivocation, with maximum effort and a single focus – to attack and distract the SNP in its home base of Holyrood as soon as possible and with a first rate team of the right politicians for this job; if they limit the SNP’s impact in 2015; and if they defeat it in the 2016 Scottish Election, the union will get through to be radically reformed by collective determination and consensus.
At that point all concerned, including Scotland, is home and dry in the best possible shape.
If Labour can’t and won’t do all of what it must do -and start now, there will be a phone call to Her Majesty in 2016 where she will simply put the phone down and pour a stiff Gin.
Note: The first and companion analysis to this one is here: Situation analysis 1: Scotland now – the SNP predicament
