The Referendum Shaped Elephant In The Room

With the general election gone and now a memory, this autumn’s party conferences will feed into the ongoing fallout from the said Westminster Election.  That next year sees the biggest electoral test out with those elections seems to have bypassed most people.

Now that Labour have elected it’s new leader in Scotland, they can now get on with trying to plan for failure.  In sharp contrast, the SNP are heavy, heavy favorites to win a third term and to return Nicola Sturgeon for a first full term as First Minister.  The problem of course is not so much whether they will win but what they should run on next spring.

Nicola Sturgeon at her election as SNP leader
(with her predecessor, Alex Salmond, in the background)

The ongoing performance of Scottish education, the Scottish NHS and Police Scotland has taken the gloss off of a party that had previously had a record for solid, if not unspectacular, governance.   The phrase I’d used at the end of Salmond’s first term as First Minister was ‘steady hand on the tiller’.  On the other hand, during the second term the Scottish Government have been on autopilot while they’ve been on referendum alert.  And that’s probably why the performances in the public services have suffered.

As I’ve said previously, the SNP should be looking at their place in history now with their policies.  Dewar could point at Section 28 and Jack McConnell can point to the smoking ban as legacies.  Even Henry McLeish can point to Free Care for the Elderly as a legacy.  Currently Salmond’s legacy is the lost referendum.  Sturgeon should be looking for that policy that will make her remembered beyond being Scotland’s first female First Minister.  Those troubles with public services provide ideal policy pickings for the SNP.

With regard to health, I’d think that the health boards would be ripe for modernisation with some sort of democratic element introduced.  A really radical policy would be tackling the management at the RAH, quite possibly the worst hospital in the west of Scotland.  Education has seen some modernisation with the introduction of the new National 4 and National 5 qualifications.  However literacy and numeracy rates have suffered over the past couple of years, therefore policies tackling primary education could be introduced.  Given that education has suffered from the PFI bill, extra money will likely need to be found.

Unrelated, but along the same lines as reform of public services.  I’d like to see some sort of easily accessible standards body for Local Authorities.  For too long our local authorities have existed in a land where they can do what they want without answering to anyone.  Recent school closures in Renfrewshire, Glasgow as well as the recent scandal in Edinburgh regarding the overpricing of council works have all shown that our local authorities still behave as they please.  It is time for our local authorities to be more transparent and I’d suspect that this would be a policy more likely to appear in an SNP manifesto than a Labour one.

Public sector reform should be at the focus of any SNP manifesto given how much they have taken their eye off the ball over the past 4 years and also how much some sort of defining policy would be desirable.  Yet most speculation about the SNP’s manifesto for next years Holyrood election is about the inclusion of a pledge to have a second independence referendum.  I can perfectly understand the motives for keeping a second referendum up the sleeves – something to use as leverage to gain more concessions from Westminster.  However a quick second referendum is madness.

Firstly, the circumstances that will lead to a second referendum needs time to ferment and to come to fruition.  Cameron’s speech at 7am on the morning of 19th September last year, tying further devolution to English Votes to English laws, has only started something – maybe Osborne’s visit to the Holy Loch adds to that.  Who knows when this will come to fruition?  Secondly nothing has really changed in the past year.  If there was a second referendum around the corner, the chances are that the result would be the same, maybe with percentage points movement either way.  True, there has been a recent STV poll giving a lead to independence for the first time since…  well the last outlier a year ago.  The big reason for that being the third reason why a quick second referendum would be sheer madness – that the SNP and the wider Yes movement have never quite talked about or held any meaningful post mortem about why they lost.

Of course there are existing theories as to why the referendum was lost by the Yes movement.  The former first minister, Alex Salmond seems to favour two reasons – blaming the so called “Vow” and the perceived media bias.  Most hard-line independence supporters buy into these theories… and are wrong to do so.  The “Vow” did not win the referendum for “Better Together” or sway yes voters back towards the no camp.  What it did do was provide soft no voters with something to keep them in the no camp – effectively stopping the flow of no voters moving across to yes.  On the other hand the print media were no more biased against Independence than they were in 2011, so should really have been something the Yes camp should have factored into their campaigning.  The poor campaign that the broadcast media had is another matter.  Suffice to say that it’s something that certainly the BBC should be looking at, though away from the heat and gaze of anti-BBC protestors claiming bias.

Nope, the real reason that Scotland vote against Independence is the same reason the wheels come off of a losing election campaign – that of economic reasons.  Put simply the SNP simply did not win the big economic arguments.  We never got concise economic reasons why Scotland could go it alone and we never got a chance to see Business for Scotland’s workings.  Say what you like about Kevin Hague, but at least he shows you how he got to his conclusions – even if you ignore the blizzard of graphs and charts.  Business For Scotland never ever came close to providing that level of proof…  and people saw through it.

One word though could be used to sum up all of the SNP’s economic woes, Sterlingzone.   I’ve previously banged my head…  er… pinpointed the huge flaws in Sterlingzone here…  and here…  and here.  A lot of Scottish people could see through the false claim that the pound was ours and that we can use it if we want without any drawbacks.  Signing away power over monetary policy ran counter to the SNP’s power in your hands argument, while the SNP’s intransigence over the prospect of no Sterlingzone deal cost them.  A more serious issue, which never got discussed, was the prospect of a punishing fiscal straightjacket as part of any accompanying fiscal pact. 

Yet the more that Better Together brought up Sterlingzone, the more Salmond, Sturgeon and Swinney stuck their heads in the sand and refused to budge.  Egged on of course by the legions of one-eyed nationalists convinced that handing over hard won powers to the Bank of England was ‘a good thing’.  All of which brings into question the consensus that those members of the SNP hierarchy had ‘good’ referendums.  Sturgeon had the best campaign of the three thanks mainly to her demolition jobs on Michael Moore, Alistair Carmichael and Anas Sarwar.  In sharp contrast, Salmond badly lost the first big set piece debate with Darling and could not recover sufficiently to convince more of ‘commuter-belt Scotland’ of his arguments.  For all that the so called ‘Project Fear’ was clearly a dastardly notorious piece of political campaigning, it worked.

I’ve previously said that I think that there will be a second referendum within the next ten years or so, you can already see Westminster not understanding that last year the union was effectively given a qualified and heavily caveated thumbs up – the Union has effectively been put on trial.  Yet the SNP have not talked about why they lost.  If there is another referendum, say in 2023, then the SNP will almost certainly lose if they go into that referendum offering the same prospectus that they lost with last year.  After all, the maxim that Scotland will remain in the Union for as long as the SNP persist with Sterlingzone still remains.

That referendum though remains somewhere in the future.  Of a more pressing concern will be the ticket the SNP will run with for next year’s Holyrood election.  Scotland is ready for new ideas on how our public services are run and the direction of those services.  Of course, with a (nearly) new First Minister, this gives the SNP an opportunity to evolve from Salmond’s brand of MacNewLabour.  The question is whether the SNP hierarchy will be happy at the referendum shaped elephant overshadowing the serious business of government when there is an election to be won.