SNP role in English affairs is invasive
April 23 was St George’s Day. So how stands England? Somewhat precariously, judging by the events of the past few days. Charles Moore wrote about the Scottish National Party (SNP) seeking to engineer a reverse take-over of the Labour Party. In reality, they are intent on staging the Scots’ first attempt to capture their bigger neighbour since Bonnie Prince Charlie led his Jacobite army as far as Derby in 1745. OK, that may be exaggerated, but only a touch.
The SNP’s determination to intervene in English affairs in order to extend their “progressive” politics south of the border is tantamount to an invasion. The failure of the last Parliament to deal with the issue of English votes for English laws means that we may well be about to see the West Lothian Question with tartan knobs on it. While it is one thing for Scottish Labour MPs to vote on English laws that do not affect their own constituents, at least everyone can have a say on their party’s programme at the ballot box. But that is not true about the SNP manifesto, unveiled in Edinburgh yesterday, which is why the argument that England will just have to put up with what Scotland has long endured is rubbish.
The Conservatives have always contested elections in Scotland, even if their fortunes have waned considerably since a time when they controlled half the seats. Even as recently as the 1980s there were more than 20 Tory MPs in Scotland, and at the last general election, the Conservatives polled 413,000 votes to the SNP’s 490,00.
In any case, it is a complete myth that Scotland never gets the government it votes for. Since 1945 the UK has been governed on two out of three occasions by the party that got the most votes in Scotland. That is the same proportion as England, which has 10 times the population. However, the collapse of Labour and the transfer of its vote to the SNP has utterly changed the political and constitutional landscape.
Issues of legitimacy and democratic accountability are now to the fore in a way that scarcely seemed possible just a year ago. In Whitehall, officials who may have to deal with an almighty political imbroglio after May 7 are gaming a variety of possible outcomes. No one knows what is going to happen and everyone fears the worst because our uncodified constitution (which works well enough when all its component parts are functioning in harmony) could become a millstone around our necks when something totally unexpected occurs. The history books are being scoured for precedents. Various commentators compared this coming election to 1992, when the Tories snatched victory from the flames of seemingly inevitable defeat; to 1918, when Sinn Fein destroyed the Irish Parliamentary Party and won 73 seats in Ireland, which they did not take up; to 1910 when the aforementioned Irish Parliamentary Party won 74 seats and propped up Asquith’s Liberal government in exchange for home rule legislation; and to 1892, when the Irish held the balance of power and used it to nationalist ends.
Forlorn hope
I want to enter a plea for January 1924, the last time the party that won the most seats and votes did not form the government. At the election the previous month, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives had 258 seats while Labour had 191 and the Liberals 158. An overall majority required 309 seats in the 616-seat Commons. Baldwin was prime minister and met the Commons in the ultimately forlorn hope that the Liberals might keep him in office, but lost a vote on the King’s Speech and resigned.
Conceivably, something similar could happen on May 7. As things stand there is every likelihood that the Conservatives will have more seats and votes than Labour — by piling them up in England — but not the 326 seats to control the Commons and little prospect of cobbling together a coalition to get over the line.
What does David Cameron do then? He remains Prime Minister until he stands down, just as Gordon Brown did in 2010 when he stayed put for five days with far fewer seats than the Tories. Cameron could challenge the Commons to vote him down when it next meets on May 27 or go to the Queen and tender his resignation (which would be curtains for him personally). If Cameron did decide to “do a Baldwin” there is much speculation about the Queen’s role.
If neither Cameron nor Miliband were able to put together a viable government, a second election would normally follow; but the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011 complicates matters. It provides for a dissolution of parliament only when there is a specific vote of no-confidence in the government or if two-thirds of all MPs vote for an election. Without a dissolution, Britain would have a legislature but no government, a bit like Belgium, where the prime minister resigned in April 2010 and no new parliamentary majority could be established for almost two years.
One thing is clear: A minority Labour government, with fewer seats than the Tories, running the country while in thrall to a nationalist party that has only 2 or 3 per cent of the total UK vote, would test Britain’s constitutional structures to breaking point, and maybe beyond. More than that, it could test its creaking, centuries-old Union to destruction. That is something to mull over.