SEVENTEEN PAGES OF UNRIVALLED ELECTION NEWS, COMMENT AND ANALYSIS INSIDE
A wonderful outbreak of rationality at the ballot box brought the SNP’s runaway hubris to a grinding halt, gave a huge vote of confidence to the Tories... and put the pollsters and pundits firmly in their place
NICOLA failed. Two stark words which, in the light of a third successive SNP election win and the certainty that she will be reconfirmed as First Minister, might appear odd. But the bar had been set: no lower than an overall majority.
Her less-admired predecessor managed it (and you can imagine the self-satisfaction that ego-on-legs feels today); the continued forward momentum of the independence cause required it; the strutting regality of her election campaign predicted it.
She fell just short – and that small gap between success and failure could in the end make all the difference. It may have killed the independence dream. Don’t think for a second she won’t be feeling it. Nicola failed. Who’d have thought it?
The most boring election campaign in Holyrood’s history has produced perhaps its most interesting result. The electorate has developed a charming habit of putting commentators and pollsters in their place in recent years – prediction has become a mug’s game. And whatever the result, the voters are always right.
Let’s look at Thursday’s outcome rationally. Nicola Sturgeon is popular and liked – more so, surely, than any of those to hold the job before her. Her reputation rests on her undeniable charisma, her combative performance in debate, those ‘I believe the children are the future’ Princess Dianastyle photoshoots and her feisty commitment to the tremendously modish idea of breaking up the United Kingdom.
Yet when it comes to the hard yards of governing, she emits an air of competence and sureness that is not supported by her timid, risk-averse performance in office so far. She is a key architect of the policy of grievance that is pursued by the SNP in place of action and responsibility.
On the question of a second independence referendum she has attempted to ride two horses – promising wearied mainstream Scotland that there’s nothing lurking in the offing, while delivering a stage wink to the clamouring faithful.
And so the voters, in the round, made their choice. You’ll be First Minister, Nicola, but no overall majority: you haven’t earned it, so you can’t have it. Sixty-three seats, not Alex’s 69, or even the minimum 65. We don’t want another divisive plebiscite or a parliament dominated by tedious Nats droning on about how awful Westminster is. Sort our schools and hospitals, then maybe we’ll talk.
THEY cast their eye over Labour, at poor Kezia Dugdale’s desperate, unconvincing leap to the Left. They looked at her plan to hike taxes and at her wobbling inconsistencies on the constitutional question. They observed her blatant unreadiness for power, the weakness of those around her and winced at the party’s painful and unresolved identity crisis.
They looked south, to the self-harm being inflicted by Jeremy Corbyn and his clowns, and wanted no part of it. They wondered what the point of it all was. And so they decided to reward Labour accordingly, by taking 13 seats from the party and relegating it to third spot.
Then there’s the true surprise of the election, the true proof of Scottish rationality: the revival of the Tories. The unlikeliness of this should not be underplayed. The Tories were dead north of the Border; their brand was junk; they were told to cede from the London mothership, to change their name, to give up.
This has been the received wisdom for years. Even though it was rumoured they had a chance of finishing second, few really thought it possible – after all, who would vote for them? Well, lots of people, it turned out. Ruth Davidson, through a titanic effort and force of will, changed the art of the possible.
The voters looked at Davidson and liked what they saw – authenticity, spunk, vibrancy and decency. She wasn’t playing footsie with SNP voters over the constitution. She wasn’t talking nonsense about replacing Sturgeon as First Minister. She wasn’t howling at the moon with an offer of radical Rightwing policies that had no connection to the national mood or discourse.
She was pro-EU, sensible on taxation, realistic about the role of the state and delivered a common-sense critique of the Left’s moon-beams-and-unicorns extremes. Thirty-one seats, up 16, the party’s bestever performance at Holyrood. Seven seats more than Labour – in the end it wasn’t even particularly close.
If you don’t think it was deserved, you’re either a blinkered Kool Aid-botherer or you haven’t been paying attention. And so the terms of engagement are set for this next, crucial parliament – the one in which the SNP must build support for another independence referendum before it forfeits its dominance and the zeitgeist moves on, as it always eventually does.
It seems the party may have
now hit the ceiling of its maximum support – those Labour supporters who felt unable to switch to the Nats this time, with Sturgeon at her zenith and their own party at its nadir, are surely unlikely to do so in 2020, by which point the SNP Government will be a raggedy thing that has been in power for 13 years, longer than Blair or Thatcher.
Refreshingly, a fair number of traditional Labour supporters have clearly managed finally to break free of the tired ‘I’ll never vote Tory’ trope, which has been strangling Scotland’s political debate for three decades. For many, at last, there’s nothing wrong with voting Scottish Conservative – in fact, the national interest requires that you do, even if just with your second vote. ‘Tory’ is no longer an insult, just an option like all the others. And it’s not just about Unionist vs Nationalist: we now have a valid debate between Right and Left, where policy ideas can be contested by competing ideologies. This is more than healthy. It should make for better government and better outcomes.
This is only the start. The next five years will not be the same as the last five. There will now be no second independence referendum, barring the unlikely event of Brexit. The Government will not be able to do whatever it wishes, cheered on by a zombie army of Nat MSPs for whom independence of thought is not just unthinkable but unconstitutional.
The committees at Holyrood will be more combative, inquisitorial instruments – and let’s see the opposition parties band together to make sure this is so, after the disgraceful, anti-democratic kow-towing of the past five years. Nicola has her mandate, but it is limited, and she must be held accountable. That is what the voters have asked for.
A punchy parliament is all the more important because, as of next year, Sturgeon’s government will take full control of income tax. This has had a transformative impact in advance. It allowed Dugdale to suggest a 50p top rate during the campaign and forced Sturgeon, that former firebrand leftie, to publicly reject the plan.
When I interviewed the First Minister in early April, I put it to her that were she in opposition she’d also be demanding a 50p rate. Her long silence acknowledged as much, before she responded: ‘Em… I’m not in opposition, I’m in government… I’ve taken a pragmatic view at the moment.’ She then delivered a line that could have come straight from the mouth of the hated George Osborne: ‘This is 17,000 [top-rate taxpayers] we’re talking about. I have independent analysis from the civil service saying “This could actually lose you money”. When you’re in government and you actually have to worry about the money to fund your public services, you can’t ignore that. You’ve got to have pragmatism as well as principle.’
Well, yes, I wanted to say to her, that’s what some of us have been arguing all along, for which, with the SNP’s tacit encouragement, the cybernats have labelled us ‘Uncle Tams’ or anti-Scottish or Rightwing nutjobs. It’s my belief that this, and not independence, will be the story of Scottish politics over the coming years. The more powerful Holyrood is – and, for a devolved institution, it’s about to become very powerful indeed – the more incumbent it will be upon whoever is in government to take responsible decisions.
Grandstanding and pointing the finger south is hard to maintain when you’ve set the tax rate for richest and poorest alike, and when those decisions have measurable consequences. You might be able to hide from educational failure or rubbish health statistics but people check their wallets.
The SNP may now have to forge informal ties with the pro-indy Greens, who are as bonkers a bunch of ragtag cranks as politics has seen.
How will Sturgeon the centrist manage this relationship? What does a big mainstream government have in common with a fringe movement that is to the wellbeing of the economy what the Campbells were to the MacDonalds in the settlements of Glencoe?
What if Sturgeon needs Tory votes to pass her Budget? How will that play with the middle-class socialists who are the driving force behind the Yes coalition?
And given she has stated that education reform will be her central priority, and that the vague outline we have seen of her plan so far more closely resembles a New Labour/ Gove take than anything Scotland has seen till now, can she rely on the Greens to support such meaningful change?
HOLYROOD remains a parliament stuffed with politicians in hock to the producer interest, who bend to vested interests and the big state, who follow rather than lead, who define themselves against what happens in that other place over the Border. Sturgeon has been showing dangerous signs of challenging this lazy mindset recently, but she may need Tory support to deliver.
She should do what’s needed. She said she would, in our interview. ‘When you’re talking about children and what gives them the ability to get on in life, my ideology or my political beliefs are secondary to doing that. If anybody decides to be a block to making sure we’ve got the best education system, then they should be moved out of the way. I’ll be confrontational with anybody if it’s about improving the educational experience of kids that come from the kinds of communities that I grew up in. I don’t want it to be a lottery in life as to whether you get the chances to do what I did or not.’
These are powerful words but they are only words. Election campaigns are all about words and photo opportunities and polls. Campaigns allow for excuses – ‘I need my own mandate from the voters’, ‘I’ll be more radical once the election’s out of the way’, ‘I need to maximise my vote’.
Sturgeon put herself before the voters, heart and soul, for every hour she could, in every place she could visit. She can be in no doubt that people paid attention, thought hard and then decided. Their judgment is the right one, as it always is.
So: a load of seats but no overall majority; the requirement to collaborate with other parties rather than seek to divide; that this parliament must be about more than hustling us like sheep towards another referendum; that we’re asking Ruth to keep an eye on you, because we like the cut of her jib; that you show us what Holyrood, properly led, can do.
It might not be exactly what she wanted but it is what it is. And it’s a hell of an opportunity, both for Nicola Sturgeon and for Scotland.