The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been a drastically reduced force in Westminster politics ever since they were all but wiped out (along with most of their UK colleagues) in the 2015 election. But there were still sizeable areas of the country where they retained a strong presence, even when they’d lost their seats.
That changed dramatically last Thursday.
NB The following article is the view of an SNP activist, not Wings Over Scotland. Although we do agree with large parts of it.
Let’s be clear on some things. In most of Scotland that unsatisfactory election result had little to do with Brexit, or with “we don’t want another referendum”. It had nothing to do with the potential merits or otherwise of independence.
What gave us the result were chiefly two things.
Simon Pia, former Scottish Labour spin doctor.
We’ve written in the past about how rarely the vote in Scotland has any meaningful impact on the formation of the UK government, but the (first?) election of 2017 was one of those few occasions. Indeed, it could reasonably be argued that Scotland is mainly responsible for the complete mess that UK politics now finds itself in.
Had the seven seats won by Labour in Scotland gone to the Tories, Theresa May would have a working majority today (324 seats – taking out the Speaker and Sinn Fein MPs who don’t participate, the true threshold of majority is 322).
Conversely, had the 13 seats won by the Tories in Scotland gone to Labour OR (more plausibly) stayed with the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn would have been able to assemble a progressive alliance and form a government.
(Labour+SNP+Lib Dem would have added up to the required 322, with a cushion of five extra seats available from Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Readers who are – quite rightly – wary of considering the Lib Dems part of a progressive alliance should note that they wouldn’t be required to back Corbyn in this scenario, just not oppose him.)
It seems at the first glance, then, that a successful “stop the SNP” tactical voting campaign in Scotland bizarrely ensured that NEITHER the Tories nor Labour could form a stable UK government. (The Tories’ slapstick courting of the DUP looks set to produce the weakest administration since 1974. We see no way that another election this year can be avoided.)
But it didn’t happen quite as straightforwardly as that.
This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:
On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.
In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.
(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)
Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.
Not 36 hours after a campaign which focused relentlessly on the idea that a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and the Liberal Democrats would be an unconscionable democratic outrage, the Prime Minister is as we write en route to 10 Downing Street to inform the Queen of her intention, despite having lost 13 seats and her majority, to form a minority government propped up by the most extremist party in the UK Parliament.
The DUP opposes equal marriage, opposes basic abortion rights, rejects the concept of evolution, wants the death penalty back and intends to demand as part of its price a rock-hard Brexit, including a hard border with Ireland that pretty much everyone on all sides agrees risks the return of widespread terrorist violence to the province.
(NB The party actually says that it doesn’t want a hard Brexit, but there’s no possible way that can be done without NI having special status, which the DUP flatly opposes.)
But what would have been “the worst crisis since abdication” had it been the SNP and Labour is apparently all just tickety-boo if it’s the DUP and Tories.
So that’s going to be fun for the next wee while.
As we write this at just gone 4am, there are 140 seats still to declare. But there are some things we can say already.
1. The SNP have won the election in Scotland. They currently have 32 seats with a handful to declare, so they know that they’ll have more than the three Unionist parties put together. Their total, whatever it is, will be the second-highest in the party’s history, streets ahead of the previous second-best of 11.
2. Labour will be crowing about getting more seats than anyone expected – it’s looking like six – but in fact they’ve barely clung on to their 2015 vote share and most were won by tiny majorities of under 1000. Jeremy Corbyn has, however, largely won back the votes that Kezia Dugdale – who bitterly opposed his leadership – lost in the two years since then.
3. At this stage it seems inconceivable that Theresa May can stay on as Prime Minister. It appears certain that she’s lost her majority in an election where she was at one point expected to have one of more than 200 seats.
4. Jeremy Corbyn, however, has no chance of forming a government without SNP votes. So despite losing 20-odd seats, the SNP may well find themselves in a more powerful position than they were before the election was called.
5. Corbyn has also repeatedly stated that he won’t block a second independence referendum. Independence has now for some time been more popular than the SNP in polls, and if Corbyn does grant a Section 30 order in return for the SNP putting him into power – giving them control of the timing inside a four-year window – the game is very much on.
6. The SNP will now have to pursue that referendum with more urgency, because they can no longer be at all certain of securing a pro-independence majority at the next Holyrood election in 2021. The long grass is no longer an option.
7. It looks highly possible that Labour and Lib Dem tactical votes for Tories in Scottish seats made the difference between the Tories being able to assemble a majority with DUP support and not.
8. Nevertheless, the Tories have lost their majority at Westminster while the SNP have achieved a majority of Scottish seats, although the Tories got a bigger UK vote share than the SNP’s Scottish one. The debate about “mandates” just got a lot more complicated.
9. What happens with Brexit now is absolutely anyone’s guess.
10. A second general election this year is a very real possibility. Sob.
The next few days should be fun.
There was a minor kerfuffle on the STV leaders debate tonight.
The revelation that Kezia Dugdale may once have changed her mind about a second referendum on independence won’t have come as a particularly great shock to Wings readers, who just a week ago read a detailed account of the party’s countless U-turns and contradictions on the issue.
And what was notable was that Dugdale didn’t deny it. To anyone’s face, at least.
Readers, we’d like you to meet Steven MacGregor. He’s the chap on the right of this pic, taken last Monday while campaigning for the Tories in Ochil & South Perthshire with party leader Ruth Davidson, just a foot or so away from him.
He likes the England rugby and football teams, Jeremy Clarkson, AC/DC, the British Natural Bodybuilding Federation, and Oliver Mundell. He seems a lovely chap.
Disclaimer first: as we always say in situations like this, BOOKMAKERS’ ODDS ARE NOT PREDICTIONS. They’re based in significant part on the level of wagers placed, which means that you could affect the odds simply by making a large bet, which of course wouldn’t actually change the likelihood of a particular candidate winning.
So with that proviso, we present the following information purely for interest.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
