Wings Over Scotland

This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for my personal blog way back in April 2011. Scottish Vote Compass no longer appears to be live, but the data is still extremely pertinent, as Labour continue to propagate the lie that left-of-centre social democrats can realise their goals by voting No to independence and electing Labour into power at Westminster.

It was called the “me-too” election. The Scottish media was (and still is) full of the widely-repeated wisdom that three of the four main parties contesting Holyrood seats (the other being the Tories, who nobody votes for in Scotland anyway) have triangulated (ie stolen each other’s policies) to such an extent that there’s almost nothing left to choose between them on ideology, and elections are now just a personality contest. But is it true?

Labour politicians and activists are fond of labelling the SNP with the tag “Tartan Tories“. This is because Labour’s primary strategy in most Scottish elections (whether for Westminster or Holyrood) is to paint themselves as the ideological opposite of the Conservatives, and therefore Scotland’s best protection against them.

It’s a message that plays well in Labour’s heartlands in and around Glasgow, because the Scottish electorate still has a visceral hatred of the Tories – especially if it’s framed around memories of Margaret Thatcher, a figure of near-mythical dread and evil in Scotland even though over 20 years have passed since she last held political office.

But even Labour’s most fervent supporters in the media grew tired of the party’s attempts to keep fighting decades-old battles, amid signs that the Scottish voters want the Scottish Government to decide what happens in Scotland rather than have them be used as an ineffectual stick to beat the Westminster coalition with.

Despite all the coverage about the SNP and Labour having near-identical policies (after the latter experienced sudden road-to-Damascus U-turns on long-standing policies about freezing the council tax and university funding), though, nobody seems to have done any actual research on whether it’s true or not – and if it isn’t, who’s actually closest to who. As ever, then, it was left to Wings over Scotland to apply some journalistic skills and discover the reality.

The now-defunct Scottish Vote Compass used to feature one of those handy polls where you could enter your own personal views on a range of issues and it’d tell you which party most closely mirrored your opinions overall. The interesting thing about SVC in particular, though, was that it provided the data on which that judgement was made – ie, it listed the answers of the various parties to all the questions.

So what would happen, I wondered, if I entered each party’s answers into the questionnaire? The results were quite enlightening.

(Before we start, it’s worth noting an odd quirk of the questionnaire, namely that none of the parties are shown as 100% in agreement with their own listed policy positions. It looks like that’s a result of the policies that are shared with others “diluting” the effect to varying degrees – the Conservatives and Greens are the outliers on the political spectrum in Scotland, so they “compromise” the least in terms of common ground with the others, and therefore get higher marks for self-agreement.)

Scottish National Party

(Click all images to enlarge.)

The SNP, WingsLand viewers won’t be all that surprised to note, are most similar to the Greens, and also fairly close to the Lib Dems, which is no shock as both of those parties are broadly social-democratic and left-of-centre. But in direct contradiction of the media line, they rank as a 0% match for Labour (the policies they do agree on cancelled out by the ones they don’t), and are most strongly at odds with the Tories.

Labour

Feed Labour’s answers into the poll and you discover that for all the party’s anti-Tory rhetoric, they’re the only party in Scotland who score a net positive match with the Conservatives, at a sizeable 15%. Labour’s ideological nemesis is not David Cameron, but the Greens. In line with the SNP result, Labour’s policies show just 1% alignment with the Nationalists.

Conservatives

Sure enough, the numbers generated by entering the Tory manifesto policies into the questionnaire shows that by far their closest political bedfellows in Scotland are Labour (a 16% positive match), they have a neutral relationship with their Westminster coalition partners the Lib Dems, and they’re at the opposite end of the spectrum to the SNP and Greens.

Liberal Democrats

The Lib Dem results back up the others – they’re closest to the SNP and the Greens, neutral with the Tories and Labour.

Greens

And finally, running the Green manifesto through the machine confirms the other results – they’re most aligned with the SNP, fairly amenable to the Lib Dems, mostly in conflict with Labour and violently at odds with the Tories.

In short, then? Don’t believe the hype. Contrary to the impression being portrayed in the media, the independence referendum offers voters a real ideological choice – Labour and the Tories on one side, the SNP and the Greens on the other, and the Lib Dems desperately trying to shake off the baggage of the London coalition to join the latter’s broad-church left-of-centre team.

As for the matter of who the real “Tartan Tories” are (other than the actual Tories, of course), the numbers seem to speak fairly clearly for themselves.