Labour to blame in Scotland?

Submitted by Matthew on 21 June, 2017 - 12:50

Scottish Labour and/or its leader Kezia Dugdale bear the blame for the re-election of a Tory government on 8 June. That’s the line currently being systematically promoted by cybernats. And it’s not confined to the fringe elements of cybernattery.

SNP MP Angus McNeil and SNP MSP and Scottish Government minister Mike Russell have both tweeted about how Scottish Labour supposedly backed a vote for Tory candidates in the general election. The cybernat argument runs as follows: • If the Tories had not won 12 new seats in Scotland, then Tory MPs plus DUP MPs would be a minority in Westminster. • The Tories were able to win 12 new seats in Scotland because Scottish Labour and/or Kezia Dugdale backed Tory candidates. • Scottish Labour and/or Kezia Dugdale are therefore to blame for Theresa May being back in Downing Street.

Scottish Labour’s vote increased by 10,000. The Scottish Tory vote increased by over 300,000. Scottish Labour could therefore persuade only an extra 10,000 voters to vote Labour. But it supposedly managed to convince more than 30 times that number to vote Tory. The only “evidence” that Labour did anything like encouraging Tory votes is a brief televised interview with Kezia Dugdale in which she said that with the exception of a few constituencies in the north east of Scotland, Labour was best placed to beat the SNP. The problem with this statement was not that Dugdale was calling for a vote for the Tories. She wasn’t. She was merely stating a fact. The problem with the statement was that it summed up the weakness of the Scottish Labour election campaign: it identified the SNP as “the enemy” to be beaten, instead of offering a positive alternative (a Corbyn-led Labour government) to win back ex-Labour voters who had switched to the SNP.

The cybernat campaign to blame Scottish Labour for the election of a Tory government signals a further lurch by the SNP activist base into fantasy politics. It also diverts attention away from the helping hand which the SNP has repeatedly given to the Tories (and vice versa).

In 1979, the SNP voted with the Tories in Westminster to bring down a Labour government. Without support from SNP MPs, the Tories would not have succeeded in winning their motion of “no confidence”. Between 2007 and 2011 the SNP minority government in Holyrood relied on support from Tory MSPs to get its annual budget through Holyrood. As the then Scottish Tory leader Annabelle Goldie later explained: “When the chips were down, he (Alex Salmond) had to find support for his budget … he took those Tory votes and was glad to get them. Our position was very clear. In return for supporting their budget, the SNP would include Conservative policies in their budget. It was as simple as that.”

From 2014 onwards the SNP deliberately polarised Scottish politics around national identities. In opposition to the SNP proclaiming itself the champion of Scottish-identity-politics, the Tories were able to rebuild support by playing the same role in relation to British-identity-politics. In the 2015 election campaign the upsurge in support for the SNP was exploited by the Tories – as their election strategists subsequently boasted – as an opportunity to whip up English and British nationalism in opposition to Scottish nationalism, thereby garnering more Tory votes.

In the 2017 election campaign SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon claimed that Kezia Dugdale had offered – in a private conversation after the EU referendum – to ditch Scottish Labour’s opposition to a second referendum on Scottish independence. This revelation — irrespective of whether or not it was true – was a boost to Scottish Tory efforts to portray themselves as the only reliable opponents of Scottish independence. It was a cynical ploy by Sturgeon to undermine support for Scottish Labour, even though it meant boosting the Scottish Tories’ electoral prospects And the Tories certainly made a point of exploiting Sturgeon’s revelation to the hilt.

There is no political party in Britain as fake as the SNP. There is no “social democracy” as fake as that of the SNP. There is no “anti-Toryism” as fake as that of the SNP. And there is no election analysis as fake as the cybernat version which blames Scottish Labour for the Frankenstein monster of a Scottish Tory revival created by the SNP’s own tunnel-vision, flag-waving nationalism.

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