The Labour Party has “no moral authority left to govern Scotland, Scotland has chosen a new political path,” said Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond after the final results from last Thursday’s Scottish Parliament elections had been announced.
The SNP, on the other hand, is obviously brimming over with the “moral authority” needed to govern Scotland, and to lead it along “a new political path.” The “moral authority” which it exhibited, for example, when it ditched its policy of re-regulating bus services in Scotland.
The SNP’s gains in terms of seats held did not come from a collapse in the Labour vote. Their main source lay in the collapse of the votes for independent candidates and the candidates of the smaller parties. And none of them fared worse in the elections than did the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).
Having won six seats in the 2003 elections, although two of its MSPs subsequently split to form “Solidarity” after Sheridan’s court case last year, the SSP not only lost its four remaining MSPs but also – with just one exception – failed to win any council seats (despite a form of proportional representation being used for last Thursday’s council elections).
In 1999 the SSP picked up 46,635 votes for the regional list seats. In 2003 its vote leapt to over 128,000. This year it slumped to a total of 12,731. In what it once considered to be its bastion – ‘Red Clydeside’ Glasgow – the SSP vote slumped from over 31,000 in 2003 to just over 2,500 this year.
To add insult to injury, in every region of Scotland the SSP picked up less votes than Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (which has no presence in Scotland, so the vast majority of its votes must have been cast mistakenly), less votes than the BNP, and less votes than the Sheridan-SWP-CWI “Solidarity” lash-up (latterly endorsed by Respect MP George Galloway).
In Scotland as a whole the “Solidarity” vote was about 130% higher then the SSP’s. In every region of Scotland “Solidarity” picked up about twice as many votes as the SSP. In every council ward in Glasgow “Solidarity” likewise picked up twice as many votes as the SSP. And while long-standing SSP councillor Keith Baldassara lost his seat in Glasgow, “Solidarity” candidate Ruth Black won a seat on the city council.
The SSP vote appears to have collapsed in three directions: the Sheridan cultists went to “Solidarity”, the Labour voters went back to Labour to stop the SNP, and the rest (perhaps the majority) went to the SNP.
As Alf Young put it in the Glasgow “Herald”: “The far left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair, and Iraq, by backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in bringing the pillars of modern capitalism crashing down.”
The SNP election manifesto in the 2003 elections contained a commitment to re-regulate bus services. The same policy was backed – unanimously – at the SNP’s last conference.
Then, in March of this year, Brian Souter, who has made a multi-million pound fortune from the deregulation of bus services, donated £500,000 to the SNP. When the SNP’s manifesto was published the following month, the re-regulation policy had disappeared. What a coincidence!
That’s the same Brian Souter who condemns “quick divorces” for “legitimising illegitimacy” and threatening “traditional values.” When the Executive of the first Scottish Parliament decided to scrap the Scottish equivalent of the anti-gay section 28, Souter funded the pro-section-28 campaign to the tune of £500,000.
That’s also the same Brian Souter whose business activities have been described by the Monopolies Commission as “predatory, deplorable, and against the public interest.” Such is the stature of the “moral authority” from which the SNP takes its money.
And then there’s the “moral authority” which the SNP derives from its role in local government – such as last year’s decision by SNP-led Falkirk Council to walk out of negotiations with the trade unions, terminate the contracts of the bulk of the council workforce, and then re-employ them on inferior contracts.
But is such behaviour particularly surprising when the SNP’s finance spokesperson, John Swinney, describes the Scottish public sector as “bloated”?
Nor did the SNP allow its concerns about “moral authority” to get in the way of some pretty questionable tactics in order to maximise its vote last Thursday.
In the regional list elections the SNP stood under the name “Alex Salmond for First Minister.” This allowed the SNP to grab top position on the alphabetically listed ballot paper, and also suggest that the regional list elections were simply a ‘beauty contest’ between Salmond and Labour’s Jack McConnell.
In the course of the election camapigning, even the SNP’s commitment to independence for Scotland (which, on closer inspection, sometimes looks more like a radical form of federalism than what is normally understood by independence) became no more than a distant aspiration (no referendum until 2011) and, particularly ludicrous, something which could be ‘reversed’ in another referendum if people did not like it.
In other words: vote SNP to win independence for Scotland. And if you don’t want independence for Scotland – you can still vote for the SNP anyway, because, in the real world, it’s not very high up the SNP agenda.
Despite having won more seats in the Scottish Parliament than any other party last Thursday – and having done so in the face of a virulently anti-SNP campaign in most of the Scottish press – Salmond’s invocations of “moral authority” were hardly backed up by the election results themselves, at least as far as the SNP’s own performance was concerned.
Only 16% of the Scottish electorate voted in favour of the “new political path” promised by the SNP. Overall turnout in the elections was less than 52%. In the first-past-the-post seats the SNP won 33% of the votes, and in the regional-list seats it won 31% of the votes.
The SNP has just one more seat at Holyrood than does the Labour Party: 47, compared to the latter’s 46. (And in one of those seats its majority amounts to just 48. If just 25 of those people had voted Labour …. ) Even if the SNP were to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, it would still be a minority government.
The SNP failed to achieve its target of winning an extra 20 constituency seats. (It did win 20 new seats in the Parliament, but eight of these were regional list seats.) And the Labour vote certainly did not collapse in the face of the SNP advances: it fell by 2.5% in the constituency seats, and by 0.1% in the regional list seats. Overall, Labour has four less seats in this Parliament than it had in the previous session.
That the SNP failed to make greater inroads into the Labour vote than it did is all the more striking when one bears in mind the record which Labour was saddled with defending in the elections: Blair, Iraq, privatisation, ‘cash for honours’, PFIs, hospital closures, school closures, renewal of Trident … …
By the end of the election campaign Labour had virtually given up trying to call for a vote for Labour. Instead, it called for anyone opposed to independence to express their opposition by voting Labour – as the best way to stop the SNP independence ‘bandwagon’.
The prospect of an independent Scotland was portrayed by Labour in the most lurid terms: mass unemployment, homelessness, and a collapse in living standards to 1707 levels. Not so much a case of “Scotland Free or a Desert”, as the Strathaven radicals put it in 1820, but rather: “Scotland Free and a Desert”. Labour’s scaremongering, however spurious it may have been, probably worked.
