The Herald

Scotland needs to learn from US election

- REBECCA MCQUILLAN

STOP the count!” they yelled outside a Detroit convention centre, when Republican­s thought they were going to lose Michigan. “Count the vote!” they shouted in Arizona, when they thought Donald Trump could win.

It’s outrageous of course, but it’s hard to suppress a smile at the chutzpah of the Trump campaign. What a bunch of chancers. If anyone’s trying to steal the election it’s Donald Trump – obviously. But win or lose, Mr Trump already has a substantia­l legacy: he’s changed the way democratic politics is conducted.

And it’s made democracy less stable for all of us.

Prior to Trump, there was an unspoken bipartisan consensus on where the boundaries lay in political campaignin­g. Trump smashed through those boundaries and has conducted his presidency from the fringes. Focusing on his base, firing up division, attacking experts, trying to undermine public trust in democratic institutio­ns which do not do his bidding: this was all searingly new four years ago. Now it’s intimately familiar, a strangely normal part of politics, and not just for Americans.

During the pandemic, while the Democrats have prioritise­d safety in their campaignin­g, Mr Trump’s held close-packed rallies and ridiculed mask-wearing. Fearing the size of the Democrats’ mail-in vote, he threatened to block funding for the US postal system and sought to discredit an avalanche of postal ballots.

With votes still being counted, on Wednesday, he claimed to have won and said a fraud had been committed on the American public.

Many a prayer of thanks has been offered up for the US constituti­on during the Trump presidency, but he’s never looked more like a would-be tyrant than during the last few days.

All this is somewhat removed from politics in Scotland, with its modern Parliament, proportion­al voting system and current love affair with a cautious left-wing lawyer.

Even so, with an election just months away, to keep the Trump effect from taking hold, the parties need to commit themselves to higher standards and stick to them. Trump isn’t popular in the motherland and there’s scant appetite in Scotland for his way of doing business, but let’s not kid ourselves that Scottish politics is immune to his quite extraordin­ary influence.

The US has enormous cultural reach and none of us escape it. Boris Johnson has borrowed liberally from the Trump menu. On being elected as Tory leader last August, he committed an act of Trumpian iconoclasm, going to war with Parliament and unlawfully proroguing it. It appalled moderates, fuelled the vicious hounding of Remain-inclined MPS and sent his supporters into ecstasy.

During December’s election campaign, the Conservati­ves tried their hand at sowing misinforma­tion, promoting a doctored video of Sir Keir Starmer and having Tory central office pose as a fact-checking organisati­on on social media.

Mr Johnson stuck two fingers up at the media, refusing to submit to the scrutiny of a one-to-one interview with

Andrew Neil. He made overblown claims for his supposedly “oven-ready” EU deal, only to push through a highly controvers­ial law eight months later empowering the UK Government to escape bits of the deal, breaking internatio­nal law in the process.

Voters in Scotland have as much contempt for the Prime Minister as they do for the President, polls have shown, but we still need some ground rules if we want to keep at bay unscrupulo­us campaignin­g, from any quarter, during the Holyrood election.

Those unspoken boundaries need to be explicitly reasserted.

Political campaignin­g should be robust, but it should also be truthful. Impartial expert opinion should be respected even when it’s unhelpful.

The way the election is conducted must command cross-party support. And campaignin­g during a pandemic should not put anyone at risk of getting sick.

One option is for all the parties in Scotland to sign a public charter at the outset of the campaign, pledging to stick to certain standards: to reject misinforma­tion and call it out when they see it, even from their own supporters; to uphold the integrity of the democratic process and respect the election result; not to accuse the media of bias without good cause; to adhere to common safety rules for campaignin­g during the pandemic.

That shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it?

The chief executive of the Liberal Democrats, Mike Dixon, noted on Wednesday in a letter to supporters that many people had hoped this election would mark a rejection of a “divisive, fake news approach to campaignin­g” but that it hadn’t turned out that way. Looking ahead to elections in May (including for the Welsh Assembly and English council and mayoral positions) Mr Dixon expressed concern that Mr Trump’s tactics could be adopted more aggressive­ly by some.

It’s certainly possible. Again, Scotland isn’t America, we do things differentl­y here, but that said, a lot is at stake in the May election and feelings will be running high. The parties have been in talks over how and when to run the election given the ongoing pandemic. There are concerns about whether it’s safe to campaign or to open polling stations. Contingenc­y plans have been drawn up. The Government has discussed with other parties and the Electoral Commission the possibilit­y both of postponing the election or running it differentl­y (we can expect a higher proportion of postal votes at the very least).

It will probably go ahead in May, but what matters most is that these elections command the full confidence of the public and all parties. These are fraught times. Given the stakes – a potential pro-independen­ce majority which would make a second independen­ce referendum a racing certainty – it’s in no-one’s interests to see the process descend into anything like the acrimony we’ve witnessed across the Atlantic.

American presidenti­al elections are exciting. Watching one is like watching the Olympics, with added nausea. Our day jobs continue, but struggle to compete with CNN. Three days in, we all now know our MiamiDades from our Muscogees, our Kalamazoos from our Chattahooc­hees. Some of the adrenaline has drained away but we’re still on edge, pumped for those Key Race Alerts that could indicate how this thing will end.

Whatever the result, Donald Trump’s style of politics will endure. It’s said that when America sneezes, the world catches cold: if we don’t want to endure a pandemic of the political sort, then we’d better take steps to guard against it.

Trump isn’t popular in the motherland… but let’s not kid ourselves that Scottish politics is immune to his quite extraordin­ary influence

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