In U.K. politics, all eyes turn to Scotland – again
GLASGOW, Scotland — The Scottish National Party may have lost last year’s referendum on independence, but it is about to score the biggest victory in its 80-year history.
Opinion polls indicate that the SNP will win the vast majority of Scottish constituencies in the British general election Thursday. One poll even suggested the Nationalists would sweep up all 59 seats in Scotland, where they currently hold just six.
That takes even battle-hardened SNP activists by surprise.
“The referendum really set politics alight,” said John McNaughtan, an SNP campaign organizer in Paisley, 7 miles west of Glasgow. This constituency has
long been a Labour Party stronghold. Labour’s candidate, Douglas Alexander, won in 2010 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.
But Mr. Alexander, a former Cabinet minister and Labour’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs, is now fighting for his political life. His opponent is the SNP’s Mhairi Black, a 20year-old politics student juggling campaigning with her final-year exams.
“The referendum brought new people into politics,” said Mr. McNaughtan, sitting among boxes of leaflets in the SNP’s Paisley headquarters. Every day, people make their way up the winding stone staircase to his office to offer their support. “And lots of them are people who have never voted SNP, including former Labour folk.”
In the center of town, where once-grand Victorian buildings recall Paisley’s past as a weaving and textiles hub, cheerful SNP volunteers hand out leaflets, buttons, balloons and flags.
One of them, local SNP councilor Lorraine Cameron, calls the support from passers-by “phenomenal.” But she acknowledges that after the fierce referendum fight last year, “it’s hard not to be in independence mode.”
Independence is not on the ballot Thursday. The new Nationalist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has made that very clear. Ms. Sturgeon took over the SNP leadership after the referendum and is now one of the most popular politicians in Britain. She has been widely praised for running a positive campaign.
As first minister in the Scottish Parliament, Ms. Sturgeon is not a candidate for a seat in Westminster, the home of Britain’s Parliament. But giant billboards on the main roads into Glasgow feature her beside the slogan “My vow is to make Scotland stronger at Westminster.”
Putting Scottish independence on the back burner and concentrating instead on rising economic inequality have been crucial to the SNP’s recent meteoric rise. With the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all talking about reducing the budget deficit, the SNP has focused on fighting “austerity,” as the program of public-sector spending cuts is known.
That is why Brian McGuire is switching his vote from Labour. “I’m exarmy, so I’m a British unionist,” says Mr. McGuire, in town to take pictures for his website Paisley.org.uk. He stayed out of the referendum campaign, but now, “I feel quite strongly that things need to change.” Accusing Labour of complacency, he mentions the many boarded-up shops on the main street and deprivation on some of the area’s public housing units.
Half a mile away at Labour’s storefront headquarters, campaign manager Evan Williams is supervising teams of mostly older voters preparing for the next mail drop.
“It’s a difficult election,” Mr. Williams acknowledged with a sigh. Unlike some of Labour’s national leaders, Mr. Williams makes no attempt to hide fears about his party’s potential fate in Scotland. He attributes it partly to rising nationalist sentiment across Europe but adds, “The [Scottish] nationalists have been tactically astute. They’ve spent the last few years telling everyone that everything wrong is the fault of Labour and the Tories [the colloquial name for the Conservative Party]. It’s been very effective.”
The Labour Party’s promise to balance the budget, albeit more slowly than the Conservatives, has helped the SNP portray it as little different from the Tories.
Putting Scottish independence on the back burner and concentrating instead on rising economic inequality have been crucial to the SNP’s recent meteoric rise.
And the fact that Labour worked so closely with the Conservatives in the referendum has bolstered a growing perception in Scotland that there’s little difference between the major parties.
At the SNP offices in Glasgow South West, campaign manager Jonathan Mackie said Labour should have run their own “No” campaign for the referendum. But, he said, “They were with the Tories, hand in hand.”
As a teenager, Mr. Mackie spent a year in Pennsylvania town of Lock Haven when his mother was on an academic exchange. Sipping on a can of Irn Bru, a soda often referred to as Scotland’s other national drink, he laughingly describes the contrast between leafy Clinton County in Central Pennsylvania and the gritty Scottish city where he grew up.
Now he hopes to unseat Labour’s MP in one of the grittiest parts of all: the constituency that includes Govan, once home to Glasgow’s great shipbuilding industry.
That Labour is in trouble in Glasgow says a lot about the decline of heavy industry and the unions that once bound workers to the party. But Mr. Mackie believes it also reflects a more general anti-establishment feeling in the west of Scotland, where Labour still controls many local councils.
The Conservatives may have led the government in London for the past five years, but in Glasgow, he says, “Labour is the establishment, so voters are looking at them and saying it’s time for a change.”
If that change is as sweeping as polls suggest, Labour’s 30-year dominance of Scottish politics will be over, and the SNP will become the third-largest party in the U.K. Parliament.
In an election in which no single party is expected to win a majority, the SNP could be the kingmakers. The question is what price the nationalists will demand for their support.