You know, until
recently I hadn’t realised that I hadn’t blogged about the SNP’s New Labour
tendencies. Even though it’s a phrase
that I’d used before, possibly in the comments section of either the Better Nation or Planet Politics blogs. With
the SNP having won three elections in a row, now looks like the perfect time to
look at the similarities between the current SNP and the New Labour project.
I had coined the
phrase to describe the SNP under Alex Salmond.
Their canny (and successful) attempt to marry centre left policies with
right wing pro-business and economic policies was the catalyst for this
phrase. However, the longer the SNP hold
the keys to government, the more I suspect that this isn’t just simply an
attempt at big tent politics, that both Salmond and Sturgeon are at the head of
a party putting into practice it’s own New Labour-esque project.
New Labour itself
was a conscious attempt to redefine big tent centre ground politics. Yet for all that there was a groundswell of
believers who occupied the right wing of Labour, the bright young things from
Scottish Labour like Dewar, Robertson, Cook & Brown were all rooted in a
social democratic version of the party, it was the Roy Jenkins influenced Blair
who would become the figurehead of that movement. Indeed the influence of the ill fated SDP
wouldn’t stop with Jenkins as the likes of Andrew Adonis and Roger Liddell
found new homes back in the Labour party as influential policymakers.
Where New Labour…
failed… is that it did not offer a true balance of left and right
policies. The genuinely left wing
policies came at the start of Blair’s time in office and were not nearly as
ambitious as trailed, for example the minimum wage. These left wing policies
gradually dried up as well as New Labour became a byword for centre right
policymaking. That policymaking, whether
the rightward drift was intended or not, was itself driven by ideals and values
of something dubbed “The Third Way”.
This thinking came from the advisors and political minds surrounding the
American President, Bill Clinton. “The
Third Way” of thinking no doubt influenced Blair and Brown when they visited
Washington in 1993.
What no doubt
helped New Labour in the early years was being led by the most pragmatic and
politically attuned politician… probably
since Harold Wilson. Peak Blair, it
could be argued, would be between his election as Labour leader in July 1994 to
his run in with the Woman’s Institute and the Road Haulage industry in
September 2000. In that time, he was unsurpassed
in his political acumen and tactical nous.
I say that as someone who always thought of him as the best leader the
Tories never had. What isn’t in doubt is
that the way they, as a nominally centre left government, operated provides a
template for other centre left parties around Europe. By accident or by design, the SNP look as if
they’ve been at least taking notes.
Where Labour have
always been a left wing (to varying degrees) party, the SNP have always been a
broad church, unified by an aim to make Scotland Independent. They have always had a left wing element and
a right wing element, though the right haven’t been in the ascendency since
John Swinney ran a Holyrood campaign based on trickle down economics in 2003. Therefore it is theoretically easier for an
already broad church party to formulate a balanced policy prospectus. Hence the pledges for funding for hospitals
and the various other polices which reference Scandinavian thinking and values
married to tax policies which reference Anglo-American thinking and a devotion
to the cult of the Laffer Curve.
This form of
policymaking has organically grown from within the SNP themselves and cannot be
attributed to outside influences or overseas political fads. The SNP themselves would baulk at the “Third
Way” comparisons. Though one or two
members have, in the past, made comments which reference classic Clintonian
Third Way-isims. I can’t remember
exactly who said it, but it was certainly in one of the Better Nation blogposts
from the 2011 Holyrood elections where a member of the SNP claimed that in the
modern Scottish political landscape, there was no such a thing as left wing and
right wing politics. This came back to
me recently when the Business for Scotland chief Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp claimed
that it was “Time to abandon the old constructs of Left and Right”. If the comments from four years ago were
Clinton-esque in tone, MacIntyre-Kemp’s piece is very Blairite in tone.
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| Blair & Brown in 1994 |
With the slow car
crash that is the implosion within the Labour party still going on, there are
opportunities for the SNP to stop taking notes and to learn lessons. The biggest lesson perhaps has been in the
handover of power from one leader to another.
Nicola Sturgeon is no Gordon Brown in the respect that she has never
agitated for power in the manner Brown did.
However there is one aspect where Sturgeon is, rather remarkably, the
heir to Brown - the ability to talk left and act right. This ability was seen in evidence during the
recent Holyrood elections where Sturgeon’s self styled ‘Application to become
First Minister’ was all rather small c-conservative in nature.
That fiscal shift
rightwards hints that maybe the SNP haven’t quite learned every lesson from the
New Labour years. That Labour lost popularity
when they shifted from the centre ground and drifted to the right should
provide a warning to the SNP. Yet the
populist left sounding campaigning has had an effect, losing them votes in the
old SNP heartlands. Both Swinney &
Lochhead saw their majorities slashed while the SNP lost seats in Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire
and the East coast – all pre devolution SNP heartlands. There is of course another possible reason
for the loss of those seats, that ‘no’ voters in the recent independence
referendum have voted for other parties because of the SNP’s pro-Independence
stance and not for any other policy reasons.
Whatever the reason for the SNP’s loss of support in those areas, it is
true to say that any political project will be beginning to see wear and tear
creep in.
The warning that
both New Labour and the Conservatives can provide for the SNP is that the third
term can be the most difficult of the lot.
With Labour & Blair, a reduced majority and an impatient Chancellor
saw Blair only see out 2 and a quarter years of his third term – a term that
was dogged by questions over Iraq and his obsession with increased
security. Thatcher also faced questions
relating to how long she can go on for, and fared better than Blair – though she
was forced out after several questionable policy decisions led to a loss in
popularity. Already, though clearly the largest party, there are issues ahead
that may cause trouble for the SNP – Labour & the Tories plan to scrap the
Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (though this might be the subject of a
diplomatic retreat in light of events at the Scottish Cup Final), The Greens
plan for beefed up land reform and the Greens teaming up with Labour for
tougher stance on fracking. That’s
before we mention the behaviour of certain SNP MP’s.
While both New
Labour and the current phase of the SNP had different aims and different
backgrounds, their attitude towards policy-making was similar and they had a
similar thought process regarding left and right wing politics. Policywise though, the SNP remain grounded in
the Scottish centre ground. I’d coined
Mac-New Labour because the SNP had created a Scottish version of New Labour that
was much more successful than the original.
9 years on from the election of Alex Salmond as First Minister, this is
a model that still works, for how much longer though is anyone’s guess. We might not have passed ‘peak Nat’ as some
wag put it, but history suggests that this is the high-water mark of the SNP.
