A Line Has Been Crossed

There is an element of elections I enjoy and look forward too. With this referendum though there has been a growing sense of dread as, firstly the Remain campaign had lost the plot, and secondly the Leave campaign lost it's sense of decency. I was planning on writing about how this referendum was a very poor fourth rate version of the Independence referendum two years ago.

That was before the events of Thursday, which saw the Labour MP Jo Cox attacked and killed.

Truth be told, I hadn't really heard of her. A year into her first term as MP, she will have been expected to have been just making her way in politics. The fulsome tributes tell a different story though. A story of someone that could have gone far. If the tributes are even half true, our tragedy is the one of not knowing just what she could have achieved. Possible future leader? Possibly the first woman to be a Labour Prime Minister? The left wing version of Blair/Thatcher that us lefties have been craving. That's the thing about the death of someone young and pretty much at the start of their time, it all looking at what has been done already and extrapolating things from there.

The murder of Cox will have serious repercussions.  There have been five MP’s murdered in the past 40 years – all at the hands of the IRA.  The Tory MP's Airey Neave (just before the 1979 General Election) & Iain Gow (in 1990) were assassinated by car bombs, Anthony Berry was the only MP to perish in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Tories party conference in 1984, while the Ulster Unionist MP's Robert Bradford & Edgar Graham were shot by IRA gunmen in 1981 & 1983 respectively.  Those attacks and others led to a tightening of security which began the process of politicians becoming ever so slightly removed from the general population, the gates at the bottom of Downing Street being the first sign.

You do hope that this attack doesn’t create a bigger gap between our politicians and the electorate.  The minority of politicians that allow themselves to become insulated from the general public brings down the public perception of every politician.  With more security, it will further exacerbate the divide between politicians and the public.  By all accounts, this was something Cox was very keen on avoiding – the pictures of her with a local cricket team shows that she was keen on being an integral part of her community.

The most immediate reaction to her death though is being felt on the EU referendum campaign.  Cox was a campaigner to improve the lives of refugees and spoke in favour of more refugees fleeing Daesh coming to this country.  Views like those, perfectly sane and rational to a great many people in this country, would be seen as vile & treasonous to a minority.  Principally the minority that have been roused by UKIP’s distastefully poisonous and duplicitous campaign during this referendum.

There is a suspect, and the police are currently investigating the assassination.  There are however some ‘facts’ that have come out into the public domain.  There are also things that have appeared on social media.  While investigations are ongoing, we should be wary of straying into sub judice territory.  If the rumors/information proves to be correct and the suspect is charged and convicted, then both UKIP and the right wing fringe group Britain First will find itself at the centre of a storm of epic proportions.

Let us suppose that the suspect was involved with Britain First, there is photographic evidence that he did appear at demonstrations though his involvement further than this has not been correctly ascertained at this point - his claim in court this morning being the first confirmation that those rumours are true but no confirmation of the extent of his beliefs in the aims of, or involvement with, Britain First.  If this plays out the way things look like going, a group previously seen as right wing rabble-rousers will now be seen in the eyes of the British public as a terrorist organization.  For Britain First, and possibly for UKIP as well, a Rubicon has been crossed and while they were never given very favourable coverage.  If they are found to have played any part in this assassination, then there will be outright hostility to them from the authorities and the public at large. In effect they will be very much persona non grata.

Regrettably though it also looks as if some people will be intent in blaming, not just the official Leave campaign – which is deserving of the criticism for the UKIP-esque lowest common denominator campaign they have ran – but Brexiteers as a whole.  This attempt to shut down a part of the debate smacks of censorship at it’s very worst.  I completely disagree with the strain of Euroscepticism which is rooted in a fear of foreigners, but it’s not my fault the ‘remain’ side have proven to be completely impotent in the face of Johnson, Gove & Farage’s dissembling.  Look, I did point out the flaws in their deliberate conflation of free movement and immigration – it’s not my fault nobody thought about using the flaws as a basis to debunk these arguments.

Like the Independence referendum nearly 2 years ago, things will not be the same again in the aftermath of this referendum.  Even before Referendum Day, the political landscape has been altered by the killing of Jo Cox.  Something has perceptively changed in UK politics, where violence against politicians is now acceptable to some people.  There is now the real prospect of something dark happening to this country in the aftermath of next Thursday’s vote.  The show will go on, the victor will take the spoils, but something has been lost in the battle that we will never ever regain.

A Brexiteer Writes...

I don’t know whether this is a symptom of entering Curmudgeon-hood but I’ve noticed more and more going to vote and participating in the phenomenon of ‘voting while holding your nose’.  Essentially voting for the least worst option, even if you don’t agree with that least worst option.  So far, I’ve done this twice – the Independence Referendum and the 2010 General Election.  Judging by the utter clusterfeck that is the current ‘Leave’ campaign in the ongoing European Referendum those two choices pale into insignificance compared to voting with the most overtly racist and correct fact-less campaign…  well, since the Tories & UKIP battled to reach the lowest common denominator last year.

And there's way too much of this... chap... too.

My own reasons were outlined a couple of months ago – essentially the EU has become less transparent, less accountable and is in danger of becoming this century’s League of Nations.  It should be easy to fashion a campaign around the EU’s failures and around the tagline “Who do you want to govern the UK?”.  Instead, the Leave campaign has descended into a grim campaign where only one issue is only really relevant. Immigration.

As has been pointed out before, UKIP’s deliberate conflation of Immigration (which we still control for people coming from non-EU countries) and Freedom of Movement (within EU countries) is disingenuous and outright racist – painting Bulgarians and Romanians as thieves and gangsters.  How dare those people come across here, we’ve got plenty of home grown crims…  For the Leave campaign to adopt the same UKIP styling’s after working so hard to marginalize the pound shop Mosley shows a form of desperation and a lack of imagination.

It is not just those Eastern European countries that are already within the EU that have attracted the focus of the less imaginative of the Brexiteers.  The application of Turkey to join the club has become a lightning rod for those looking to stir the pot.  We would, if those Brexiteers are to be believed, be at the mercy of more criminal and terrorist gangs.  There is one small problem with their argument, apart from the most obvious one about not all Turks being villains straight out of Hollywood casting.  Their leader Erdogan is not…  shall we say… exactly on the same page as the west & the EU in terms of their dealings with Daesh.  It is therefore not that likely…  at the moment… that that application from Turkey to join the EU will be successful.

Alongside the constant mention of the £350m figure, which has been shown to be false, immigration is the issue which is providing the most self inflicted wounds on the Leave campaign, certainly up here in Scotland.  It is somewhat timely perhaps that the Government have shot themselves in the foot over the handling of the Brain family.  The reaction, certainly in the media has shown a sharp dividing line between a community orientated Scottish sensibility and Westminster’s own denial act about the existence of ‘Society’.  If our public services are stretched to breaking point, and there is a crisis in housing, then who’s fault is that then that we have had governments committed to either providing public services on the cheap or have cut back on those services.

One of the things I’ve always said about UKIP is pertinent here, that to win votes here in Scotland they’d have to change their message.  The Leave campaigners, to pick up votes here, really need to dial down the racist rhetoric and push the undemocratic nature of the EU.  If elections are seen to be referendums on parties and individuals, then why isn’t this referendum seeing the figures of Jean Claude Junker, Donald Tusk and Martin Schultz at the front and centre of its campaign, especially from the Leave camp?

These are the figures that lead the main European institutions, yet we’ve never voted for them.  We’ve never voted for their policies or direction of travel. Yet these figures are largely anonymous throughout a campaign where we should be asked to judge their performances.

Arguably the pro-Independence campaign two years ago was undermined by their arguments being over complicated.  A campaign built around the simple idea of Scottish People running Scotland should have been much more the centrepiece.  Like that campaign, the Brexiteers are falling into the trap of fighting the status quo with a campaign designed to fight (and fail) on ‘Remains’ favoured battleground.  The thinking that Immigration is the trump card to win them the referendum is a flawed idea.  Immigration is not the issue here that it is in parts of England and as a result the referendum could be decided here in Scotland.

Mac-New Labour

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.

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.

Holyrood 2016: The Tale of the Tape

Just before 9am yesterday morning the last of the list seats were allocated in the North East Scotland Region.  This confirmed the final outcome that had always been the highly likely outcome of this election - that of a first full term for the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon which will only be fully confirmed once the new Parliament convenes.

Nicola Sturgeon on the steps of Bute House, Friday afternoon.

That final result did not look as good as it looked as if it would be when the SNP took the seat of Rutherglen at about 1:30am this morning.  The swing that removed Labours James Kelly was 9% from Labour to the SNP – that uniform swing across Scotland would be enough to wipe out Labour in the constituency vote.  However, as constituency results started to come from the east and rural areas, a different picture emerged.  If Glasgow and the west of Scotland was a picture of the SNP laying waste to Scottish Labour’s heartlands, then the east & Edinburgh was a picture of the SNP advance being checked and, in some instances, being pushed back by resurgent Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. 

This pushback, among other factors, led to the SNP falling two seats short of another majority government with the final result of:

	Votes – FPTP - % - Seats			Votes – List - Seats		Total seats
SNP	1,059,897	46.5% (+ 1.1%)	59 (+6)	953,587	4 (-12)	63
Conservatives	501,844	22.0% (+ 8.1%)	7 (+4)	524,222	24 (+12)	31
Labour	514,261	22.6% (- 7.8%)	3 (-12)	435,919	21 (-1)	24
Scot Greens	13,172	0.6%	0	150,426	6 (+4)	6
Lib Dems	178,238	7.8% (- 0.1%)	4 (+2)	119,284	1 (-2)	5

The collapse in Labour’s vote was most apparent when the first tranche of results were coming in, when the SNP were taking seats from Labour in the West and around Glasgow.  I mentioned Rutherglen earlier, but that was only the first.  Previously rock solid Labour seats like Provan, Maryhill & Springburn, Greenock & Inverclyde and Coatbridge & Cryston fell to the SNP on swings of 15.6%, 15%, 13.9% and 12.6% respectively.  Those swings were not confined to SNP gains either.  Glasgow Anniesland was the most vulnerable SNP seat going into this election with a majority of 7.  Bill Kidd’s majority, after a swing of 12% is now 6,153.  Similarly, George Adam’s majority has been transformed from 248 to 5,199 via a swing of a mere 8.1%. 

The shift from Labour to the pro-Independence SNP is a huge problem for Labour and has serious implications for Corbyn’s attempt to unseat Cameron in four years time.  If Labour’s problems only stem from being pro-Union, you can understand calls for Labour to soften their line regarding the constitution.  However what the second half of the constituency votes showed is that there is still a large pro-Union constituency in Scotland – a voting bloc now empowered to use their votes tactically to thwart Indyref 2.  Those people who have switched rightwards from Labour will be, as I’d mused earlier, soft right voters attracted to Labour through Social Democratic values rather than out and out Socialism. Professional people who may, in a previous age, have been so called ‘Tory Wets’.  Think fellow bloggers Ian Smart and Kevin Hague.

More than Rutherglen, perhaps Eastwood was the real harbinger result of this election.  A three way marginal, where the SNP didn’t quite do enough to overtake both Labour and the Conservatives to win.  The Tories Jackson Carlaw only needing a swing of 5.7% to unseat Labours Ken McIntosh.  It was after that result that the shock results started to come in.  Those results hinted at pro-Union tactical voting.  The SNP lost North East Fife to the Lib Dem’s Willie Rennie and then Edinburgh Western.  Both seats were not exactly vulnerable – requiring swings over 4% for the Lib Dems to take the seat yet the Lib Dems produced swings of 9.5% and 7.8% to take these seats.  The biggest shocks came with the Tories constituency wins.

Davidson’s win in Edinburgh Central came from out of the blue, given the Tories were third in this constituency in 2011.  A swing of 9.7% to the Tories saw them home with a majority of 610.  A bigger swing came in the Tory win in Aberdeenshire West, when they took the seat on a 12% swing.

There was some relief for Scottish Labour when they took Edinburgh Southern from the SNP, coupled with holding on to East Lothian and Jackie Baillie’s…  ah… ‘popular’ win in Dumbarton.  Bearing in mind that Labour has traditionally gained far fewer votes on the list vote than the constituency vote, this left Labour with too much ground to make up on the Tories going into the list seats.  So, as a result of both the Tories aggressive re-positioning as defenders of the union and Labour’s continuing impersonation of Stretch Armstrong culminating in their two stools approach to the constitutional question, the Tories had their best share of vote in Scotland since the 1992 General Election and Labour finished third for the first time in an election in Scotland since 1910.

The SNP though serenely moved towards a third consecutive term.  Except that, in spite of their highest constituency vote in a Holyrood election and the highest list vote ever in a Holyrood vote, due to the vagaries of the list vote the SNP fell short of a second overall majority.  The gains in the constituency vote had a negative effect on their list vote, only 4 seats were picked up on the list system.  So much for the #bothvotesSNP effect and the architects claims that only both votes would guarantee a majority SNP government that craves an Independent Scotland.

Sturgeon has already said that the SNP will govern as a minority, as they did during their first term.  While the SNP would ideally have wanted a majority, the new parliament gives them options.  Funnily enough, I suspect that there won’t be that much love lost between the two pro-Independence parties in Holyrood given the SNP’s aggressive #bothvotesSNP campaign and their attempt to run the Scottish Green’s off the road (as they did with RISE).  One by-product of this election will be that I think that Indyref 2 will not happen in this parliament.  Not that this is a bad thing, when the SNP have still to come to terms with their own failure or to hold any sort of post mortem into how they failed.  Patrick Harvie’s sober but realistic view on Indyref 2 is certainly not what the hard line pro-Indy supporters want to hear, but they are views that should be listened to if people are to be convinced about Independence.

While Nicola Sturgeon is comfortably back in Bute House and no doubt planning for the next weeks and months of SNP government, the other big winners are the Conservatives.  Ruth Davidson’s tactic of running as the out and proud pro-Union party clearly paid dividends and made things much more difficult for Scottish Labour by targeting their indecisiveness over the constitutional issue.  Scottish Labour’s meltdown has also made things clear down south that there is now a Scotland shaped roadblock to their route back to government.  Sturgeon might have won, but in the longer term the spoils will go to David Cameron’s successor.