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Why Labour doesn’t need Scotland

Posted on January 10, 2012 by

One of Labour’s sneakier tricks in opposing Scottish independence is to appeal to Scottish voters’ sense of social responsibility. The former party of socialist internationalism begs the Scots to show Unionist solidarity with their poor comrades in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, who would – the story runs – be abandoned permanently to the mercies of the evil Tories if the Westminster Parliament was deprived of its traditional sizeable block of Labour MPs from Scotland.

This narrative is regularly propagated by Labour’s friends in the media (and sometimes by gleeful Tories too). Only today, for example, the Scotsman carries the line in a piece which asserts that an independent Scotland would leave David Cameron “with an inbuilt Tory majority for his party in the rest of the UK”.

There are, of course, innumerable things wrong with this argument – for one, the dubious morality of using Scottish MPs to impose a Labour government on English voters who may have rejected one, when Scotland has its own Parliament and England doesn’t. (An offshoot of the timeless West Lothian Question.) And for another, the highly questionable premise that the modern-day Labour Party is ideologically significantly different from the Tories anyway.

But the biggest problem with the notion is simply that it’s completely untrue.

Much of the reason is careless pundits who focus on the fact that Scotland habitually returns 40+ Labour MPs, but who forget that it also sends members to Westminster from the other parties to offset them. In October 1974, for example – which we’ll discover shortly is a significant date – Labour won 41 Scottish seats. That sounds impressive, until you realise that Scotland also voted in 30 non-Labour MPs (16 Tory, 11 SNP, 3 Liberal), meaning that the net contribution of Scotland towards a Labour majority was just 11. So let’s take a look at the whole historical picture.

Labour didn’t become a significant electoral force at all until the 1920s, with Ramsey MacDonald its first ever Prime Minister in 1923, albeit leading an extremely shaky minority government which only lasted 10 months. Universal suffrage for all men and women over 21 finally arrived in 1928, but the modern political era starts with Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour landslide, and particularly with the Representation Of The People Act 1948, which abolished multiple voting, multi-member constituencies and other anachronisms to create the framework which still essentially, with a few tweaks around the edges (eg lowering the voting age to 18 in 1969), governs British elections.

The 67 years since the end of World War 2 have seen 18 General Elections to the Westminster Parliament, with the following outcomes (sources below):


1945 Labour govt (Attlee)
————————————

Labour majority: 146
Labour majority without any Scottish MPs in Parliament: 143
NO CHANGE WITHOUT SCOTTISH MPS


1950 Labour govt (Attlee)
————————————

Labour majority: 5
Without Scottish MPs: 2
NO CHANGE


1951 Conservative govt (Churchill/Eden)
——————————————————–

Conservative majority: 17
Without Scottish MPs: 16
NO CHANGE


1955 Conservative govt (Eden/Macmillan)
——————————————————–

Conservative majority: 60
Without Scottish MPs: 61
NO CHANGE


1959 Conservative govt (Macmillan/Douglas-Home)
————————————————————————

Conservative majority: 100
Without Scottish MPs: 109
NO CHANGE


1964 Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————

Labour majority: 4
Without Scottish MPs: -11
CHANGE: LABOUR MAJORITY TO CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY OF 1
(Con 280, Lab 274, Lib 5)


1966 Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————

Labour majority: 98
Without Scottish MPs: 77
NO CHANGE


1970 Conservative govt (Heath)
——————————————–

Conservative majority: 30
Without Scottish MPs: 55
NO CHANGE


1974 Minority Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————————

Labour majority: -33
Without Scottish MPs: -42
POSSIBLE CHANGE – LABOUR MINORITY TO CONSERVATIVE MINORITY
(Without Scots: Con 276, Lab 261, Lib 11, Others 16)


1974b Labour govt (Wilson/Callaghan)
—————————————————–

Labour majority: 3
Without Scottish MPs: -8
CHANGE: LABOUR MAJORITY TO LABOUR MINORITY
(Lab 278 Con 261 Lib 10 others 15)


1979 Conservative govt (Thatcher)
————————————————

Conservative majority: 43
Without Scottish MPs: 70
NO CHANGE


1983 Conservative govt (Thatcher)
————————————————

Conservative majority: 144
Without Scottish MPs: 174
NO CHANGE


1987 Conservative govt (Thatcher/Major)
——————————————————

Conservative majority: 102
Without Scottish MPs: 154
NO CHANGE


1992 Conservative govt (Major)
———————————————

Conservative majority: 21
Without Scottish MPs: 71
NO CHANGE


1997 Labour govt (Blair)
———————————–

Labour majority: 179
Without Scottish MPs: 139
NO CHANGE


2001 Labour govt (Blair)
———————————–

Labour majority: 167
Without Scottish MPs: 129
NO CHANGE


2005 Labour govt (Blair/Brown)
——————————————–

Labour majority: 66
Without Scottish MPs:  43
NO CHANGE


2010 Coalition govt (Cameron)
——————————————

Conservative majority: -38
Without Scottish MPs: 19
CHANGE: CON-LIB COALITION TO CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY

.

Sources:
All UK general election results
General election results in Scotland 1918-2010 (Table 1e, p.11)

samaritans

So in summary we can see the following:

– on ONE occasion (1964) Scottish MPs have turned what would have been a Conservative government into a Labour one. The Tory majority without Scottish votes would have been just one MP (280 vs 279), and as such useless in practice. The Labour government, with an almost equally feeble majority of 4, lasted just 18 months and a Tory one would probably have collapsed even faster.

– on ONE occasion (the second of the two 1974 elections) Scottish MPs gave Labour a wafer-thin majority (319 vs 316) they wouldn’t have had from the rest of the UK alone, although they’d still have been the largest party and able to command a majority in a pact with the Liberals, as they eventually did in reality.

– and on ONE occasion (2010) the presence of Scottish MPs has deprived the Conservatives of an outright majority, although the Conservatives ended up in control of the government anyway in coalition with the Lib Dems when Labour refused to co-operate with other parties in a “rainbow alliance”.

– which means that for 65 of the last 67 years, Scottish MPs as an entity have had no practical influence over the composition of the UK government. From a high of 72 MPs in 1983, Scotland’s representation will by 2015 have decreased to 52, substantially reducing any future possibility of affecting a change.

The simple reality of the matter, established indisputably and unambiguously by these stats, is that England and the rest of the UK are and always have been perfectly capable of electing a Labour government if they want one, whatever Scotland does.

The truth is that Labour doesn’t need Scottish MPs, and an independent Scotland would NOT give the Tories a permanent majority in the remnant UK. Those are the facts, and voters should be deeply mistrustful of anyone who tells them anything else.

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rodmac

An excellent myth buster article!!

Daniel Walters

As a Tory-hating Englishman (who otherwise wishes the SNP the best of luck), that's quite reassuring. Thanks!

Dubbieside

Rev

The Labour MP myth got another airing today in The Guardian. They were getting taken to task about it though.

link to guardian.co.uk

Alex Grant

Excellent article Stu and one that we need to spread especially in the West of Scotland.
I am certain the majority of Labour voters believe otherwise

gracie

Thanks for this article, excellent information and thanks for researching it and giving us something tangible to point to, when supposed "leftie" publications like the Guardian trot out their lazy sloppy journalism.
Is it just my paranoia  or is the Guardian gradually leaning more to the right every day? 

John Jones

That's all very interesting as a history essay. But the subject in hand is politics and what's likely to happen from here on in.
I'm sorry to say that you've committed the cardinal error and based your analysis on an entirely anachronistic perspective.
Yes, as you point out, in the general elections between 1945 and 2010 there would have been relatively little change to the Westminster outcome if Scottish seats had been excluded. But that was then and this is now: the past, as they say, is another country.
For most of the period you're studying the Tories had a hefty electoral presence in Scotland: indeed in 1955 they famously won a plurality of Scottish votes; and even in the first Thatcher victory in 1979 they were capable of winning 31% of the vote in Scotland. Unless anyone wants to argue that those days are coming back and that the Conservatives are once again going to be a major electoral force north of the Border, taking comfort from playing with a data series stretching right across the ages of Macmillan, Heath and early Thatcher, where the hypothetical removal of the Scottish seats would, as you've shown, have hurt the Tories as well as Labour, is very unwise.
The only past elections that are actually relevant to understanding what would happen in future Westminster elections shorn of the Scottish seats are, in my view, those from 1997 onwards, when the Tories were finally reduced to where they are now, and where they seem likely to remain, which is to say effective electoral irrelevance in Scotland, with just a single MP. In other words, only from 1997 can we get any sense of what in modern political conditions, with Labour benefitting vastly more than the Tories from Scottish support, a new Parliament without any Scottish MPs might look like.
What this much shorter timeframe tells us is less reassuring for English Socialists. Yes, the Blair governments, despite the Tories' virtual disappearance in Scotland, didn't need to rely on Scottish MPs to control Westminster in 1997 and 2001. But are you really sure that those historic landslides, unusual by any standards in the UK's electoral past, provide confidence that Labour can expect to form governments regularly in London?
2005 is more comforting, as a solid but not landslide UK victory for Labour again didn't rely entirely on the party's domination of the Scottish seats. But in 2010, the most relevant prior example because reflecting the most recent political conditions, Labour won 41 Scottish seats and the Tories only 1, the consequence of which yawning gap north of the Border was that the Tories failed to gain a Westminster majority despite a comfortable lead in England. Had the Scottish seats not been available, Antony Wells, the political commentator, calculates that we'd have been looking at Cameron romping home with, taking account of the new Welsh boundaries, a tidy majority of 50.
This is why many people, reflecting on the more recent past, are even wondering if Cameron's interest in helping Alex Salmond hold a legally-watertight referendum in the near future might be motivated by the thought that, along with the coming boundary changes across the UK which will also help the Tories, he has in mind the eventual disappearance of the Scottish seats from Westminster and Labour having to start future races for power with, in effect, an additional 40-seat deficit vis-a-vis the Tories.
 

Geoff, England

One thing you forgot to mention is that post-WWII elections(apart from the significant blip of the Thatcher/Major era) have usually seen Labour gain the largest number (if not an outright majority) of votes cast in England.  Are the peddlers of the "permanent Tory hegemony if the Scots leave" myth aware of that fact , or do they simply overlook it because dealing in facts would weaken their case?

Malcs

I find this article a convincing rebuttal. The dissent from John Jones was undeserved, patronising, and bigger on rhetoric than reason.
As an Anglo-Scot I'm not massively enthused by the prospect of Scottish independence – I think both sides forget how much they actually share – but I do hope that at least one referendum in the UK will be fought on the basis of honest argument.

Morag

Scotland used to have 72 seats.  It's about to have 52.  That's a lot more than 10%, it's an absolute loss of 20 seats.  Scotland is losing influence at Westminster even within the UK.

Nicholas Whyte

I think you're a bit off on the February 1974 figures, which without Scotland would actually have changed a Labour minority government to a Tory minority government. Labour were only just the largest party int he Commons, with 301 seats to the Conservatives' 297. Without Scotland, the Conservatives would have been ahead by 276 to Labour's 261, certainly enough to remain in power as a minority government – and had they not pissed off the Ulster Unionists, they would have had a majority of the 564 remaining seats.

chrisp

'New Constituency Borders' will make it difficult for Labour to hold a majority in England and Wales alone and render the research a bit anachronistic… 
 

chrisp

"Given that as recently as 2001 Labour had a majority of almost 170" Far from typical that- and since then the game has changed – new labour have evolved from a party that supposedly represented the popular left to a kind of 'tory-lite' to appeal to the swing voters they need in middle England. Until the memories of Iraq, tuition fees, academies etc etc fade from the mind they'll not see a majority anywhere near that again.  

Andy JS

This article is not very convicing in my opinion. What happened between 1945 and 1983 is completely irrelevent to modern politics; between those dates there wasn't as big a divergence between Scottish and English voting patterns as there is now. And the article itself points out that the Tories would have won a majority in 2010 without Scotland and the same thing is likely to be true in 2015. So as far as modern politics is concerned, Scotland is making a big difference to UK politics.

[…] Celtic heartland overplays the party’s historic dependence on Scottish MPs, in particular. Elections in which Scottish MPs have been decisive are relatively rare. There have been no elections since the second world war in which Scottish MPs have turned a […]

McV

Great stats, and will be very useful for smacking down arguments with unionists in future debates. But I’m curious about one point.
In the last 4 elections, they go from a 40 drop to a 38 drop to just a 23 drop, to a massive swing over to Conservative majority. Was this because of a fall in labour voters in England or as a factor of a change from Labour to LibDem in Scotland?

McV

Many thanks for the response good sir. That’ll help in my debates. 😉

Alan

Brilliant!

Ali

not sure why you are so hung up on UK historical politics, or current politics… an independent Scotland can choose to change the way politics in Scotland work.

Alan

Just thinking… How much vote rigging?
 

[…] […]

[…] there’s a viable alternative to the neoliberal creed of the three London-based parties. Wings Over Scotland | Why Labour doesn’t need Scotland Originally Posted by TheWexfordInn it would force Labour to shift towards the right to […]

george firewood

I think everone has missed a vital point and that is that the scottish people would not have had to put up with any tory goverment whatsoever if we were an independant country.

Steve Syme

I had a look at the 2005 numbers…

Labour majority 66, but you say, without Scottish labour MP’s its 43?

…as there were 41 labour MP’s in Scotland, hows this work out? It oughts be corrected to just being a majority of 25 surely?

 

Angus McLellan

Can I nitpick? It seems unreasonable to mark down Feb 1974 as no change. Absent Scottish seats, Heath would have led the largest party. Sure, since the question put had been Who Governs? the answer would still have been Not You Mate! Wacky hijinx ensue.

[…] Why Labour doesn’t need Scotland Posted on January 10, 2012 by Rev. Stuart Campbell […]

[…] Why Labour doesn’t need Scotland Posted on January 10, 2012 by Rev. Stuart Campbell […]

John

Even if Scotland did make a difference to the outcome of the UK Government, as this article suggests, it’s not right for Scotland to impose a Labour government on England if the majority in England vote for the Tories. The same goes for England imposing a Tory government on Scotland when we vote for a Labour government. 
The two countries have different needs politically and the Union is passed it’s sell by date. Independence is the way forward for the benefit of Scotland and rUK. 
 

Bob Leslie

Just a few stats to add to your argument:
In reality, the only time Scots votes made a difference to who ruled in Westminster was for 18 months in the hamstrung Wilson government of 1964. At that time, there were 71 Scots MPs out of 630 (11.27%) of which 43 were Labour (6.83%).

In the last election there were 59 Scots MPs out of 650 (9.01%) of which 40 were Labour (6.15%).

Under current arrangements, therefore, Wilson would have probably lost that one too with Scottish votes once more completely irrelevant!

David Herdson

An interesting read, though I think you underplay both the extent of the change that there would have been in the swing elections and also the fact that Labour is now much more dominant in Scotland’s MP representation than it was up to the 60s or 70s.  Taking the examples in isolation –
Without a majority in 1964, Wilson would very probably have gone back to the country much earlier, as in 1974 – perhaps May/June 1965 – if he even made it to No 10 at all.  Without Scotland, the overall numbers get very tight indeed and Douglas-Home (presumably representing somewhere else*) may have stayed on.  Either way, it’s unlikely that there’d have been either a Tory leadership change or a 1966 election, Wilson would have been unlikely to have done as well in 1965 and the whole future changes.
In October 1974, the situation’s similar.  Without a majority even from the start, it’s almost certain that Labour wouldn’t have governed for close to five years: perhaps no IMF humiliation on there watch or, if there was, it would probably have brought the government down so no winter of discontent in 1978/9 for Labour.  Similarly, with the prospect of another election so soon, would so many Tory MPs have voted for Thatcher in a leadership election to be rid of Heath?  A sizable number were using her as a stalking horse to enable them to vote for someone like Whitelaw in the second round.  The closer maths may have prevented Thatcher from becoming Tory leader or PM.
In 2010, again there’d have been significant differences.  While Cameron would have become PM with an overall majority, it would have been an overall *Tory* majority rather than a coalition one.  That means no coalition bargaining, full-on austerity, no Lib Dem vote collapse (perhaps the opposite with Ed Miliband leading Labour, or maybe David Miliband would have won without Scottish Labour votes?), a much smaller rise of UKIP with a third not government-or-Labour English option.
In Feb 1974.  Without the Scottish MPs, it’s likely that Heath would have remained PM with most MPs and an ever greater lead in votes.  While the answer to ‘who governs?’ wouldn’t have been wholly clear, office would provide authority and he would probably have seen down the miners on something closer to his terms.  However, the inflationary boom was getting out of control and his government may still have fallen mid-term.  A second defeat for Wilson though would probably have meant the end of his leadership so another election in 1975 or 1976 would have seen PM Heath facing Callaghan or perhaps Foot as Leader of the Opposition.  How that would have turned out is anyone’s guess but it would certainly have been different.
Finally, there’s the question of individuals.  Assuming they didn’t take English seats but were active north of the border, no Scottish MPs means no Alec Douglas-Home, no Gordon Brown, no John Smith, no Jo Grimond, no Charles Kennedy, no Alistair Darling, no Robin Cook, no Malcolm Rifkind, plus many more, more junior politicians.  They played a significant part in the UK’s politics and to say things would have been the same without them is fanciful.
Scottish Labour’s UK representation mattered and continues to matter.

David Herdson

Counterfactuals usually are!

Lots of long winded comments,for me it comes down to Scotland,once again,leading the way and doing so by GOOD example.That is the way to fairness independence first instructions later.

trackback
Jim

The 1992 election is also not correct to be categorised as ‘No change’ – although the Tory majority was 21 (vs 71 without Scottish MPs), that majority was whittled down bit by bit over the term of office, to the point where it was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. The latter part of the administration was dominated by rebellions over Europe, made crucial due to the wafer thin majority. The Tory rebels over Maastricht would have had little leverage if the majority was 70+, the entire tone of that administration would have been different. Major wouldn’t have needed to fight his own party so much, he would have been able to concentrate on running the country, and perhaps Blair would have been less successful in ’97.

If English and Welsh constituency boundaries reflected population distribution more accurately (rather than having a built in Labour bias as now) then without Scottish votes, its doubtful Labour could form governments south of the border with anything other than a landslide of 1997 proportions.

[…] is well-documented now that Scotland’s votes have never swung a UK government one way or another, and that in […]

trackback
Illy

Weren’t there some nice pictures here?  I’m sure I saw some nice graphics of this data last time I looked.

Illy
Ed

Help! I’ve been trying for almost an hour to find the infographic that shows the effect of the Scottish vote on UK election results since 1945 – the one with two adjacent timelines. Where is it? I’ve tried searching this site in vain (partly because I can’t remember even roughly when it was posted) and Google Images is giving me nothing.

It’s a very useful graphic for undecideds and folk in England who have problems with being ‘abandoned’.

It would ideal if the article containing that graphic was included in the Reference section, under ‘Why Labour doesn’t need Scotland’.
Cheers.

[…] It’s already been demonstrated that the outcome of Westminster General elections is not greatl….  Even if Scotland doesn’t return a single Tory MP, we cannot protect communities in the rest of the UK from Tory governments.  England outweighs the rest of the UK in terms of population by a very considerable margin, the Scottish vote can only make a difference to a Parliamentary majority if the parties achieve very similar numbers of seats in England.  That doesn’t happen very often, and when it does happen it tends to produce governments with wafer thin majorities that don’t last the full term. […]

Sherry Cunningham Greene

Please send new posts! Slàinte mhath!

S Ennazus

The sad thing is, the main reason Scots would vote for independence is because of how awful the Tories treat people, so Scotland can become a separate state in the EU without a Tory ever destroying people’s lives, communities, industries and the environment again, just so their tax dodging corporate donors who live in tax havens can make more money, and their upper class friends can be given a Tory safe seat to live for free off the tax payer. The whole of the UK should get rid of the Tories and stay together, instead of helping them split up the UK.

gorscot

A decent attempt, but lacking in any factual or analytical information, which in fact debunks your assertions. You choose to omit a number of key points. As of now, it is much more difficult to elect a Tory MP than a Labour MP, because of the historical boundaries.It requires circa 7,500 extra Tory votes. You may recall, more likely not since as a xenophobe you have no interest in British/English politics, that the LibDems blocked Tory boundary reform as a tit for tat for Tory refusal to back change in the voting system.With a Tory Govt not reliant on LibDem support, that reform would be advanced, at a stroke, adding, on best psephological estimates,circa 70 seats to the Tory column.
Current OP estimates, if an election were to be held tomorrow, predict a Labour majority in a Westminster Parliament, including Scottish MP’s, of 56 to 76. However, that is essentially misleading, and is heavily based on a UKIP OP rating relevant to the upcoming EU elections. There is absolutely no reality of those figures attaching to a General Election, and since the ratio of Tory voters to Labour voters ‘defecting’ to UKIP is 2.5/1, the Tory party would gain considerably.
Now, move forward to a General Election, say in 2017, devoid of Scottish MP’s, and that projected Labour majority has entirely disappeared, replaced by an overall Tory majority of circa 40 seats. And no reasonable prospect of a Labour Government for, in the opinion of many analysts, for up to 50 years!
Your analysis is flawed, fatally, because it looks back and not forward, and times have, significantly changed.I know of at least 20 UK professional psephologists who would concur with my progressive analysis, and none who would credit yours as anything other than a historical analysis, and certainly not impartial!
It is interesting that there are a number of humanist,christian, muslim,charitable and other groups, as well as socialist and trade union members, in England and Wales about to enter the debate precisely because of the very real fears which Scottish Independence presents in relation to a more egalitarian society. Nationalism has, of course, been regarded as the enemy of the working people throughout history, indeed oft described as a tool of the ruling classes to divide workers and reduce collective action on their behalf. As Lenin wrote, ‘Marx had no doubt as to the subordinate position of the national as compared to the labour question’. Indeed, CK Maisels, writing in The Marxist, is directly critical of the SNP.” Anyone reading the press from 1966 onwards can clearly see how the SNP was manufactured for the job of providing the diversion from the Labour Party.It was to gain this very thing that they were after all created by the bourgeoisie”. “Misguided comrades who believe that Scottish Nationalism is a progressive force, either do not understand,or opportunistically refuse to accept,the fundamental role of Nationalism”.
n his article ‘Nationalists against Workers’, Johnston writes “Rather than strengthening the forces of socialism such a ‘popular front’as we currently witness of various leftists joining together with hedge fund managers for Scottish Independence serves only to weaken the movement of socialism whilst bolstering the nationalists”
So you see your deliberately deceptive, and highly inaccurate, analysis, reflects only the deception which underpins nationalism. Scottish Nationalists not only do not care for the plight of the working people of England and Wales, and would happily consign them to endless Tory purgatory in pursuit of their corrupt end, but continue to deceive the traditional caring Scottish socialist that they are a party of the workers! Nothing could be further from the truth, and together with humanitarians, muslims et al WHO DO CARE, your lies will be exposed to the scrutiny of labour voters in Scotland, and they will defeat the ends of nationalism and continue the struggle of ordinary people across the UK against their elitist oppressors!

Pedant

It’s “Ramsay MacDonald” not “Ramsey MacDonald”, dear.

Aldo

@Gorscot –

Historical evidence is all we have to go on. Any predictions on your analysis of the political landscape in the future is irrelevant.

You forget that independence is not SNP, they have just been the vehicle to get us to this point. Scotland has the power to make change and vote for the party we decide which is the whole point.

[…] Labour doesn’t need Scotland (so Go Independence!). […]

HYUFD

Gorscot Your boundary changes point is irrelevant, Blair and Attlee all won more votes than the Tories in England and Wilson did in 1966 and October 1974, as a result they won more seats. The boundary changes issue has only emerged in the last decade or two because of lower turnout in Labour seats.

In any case boundary changes would only add 20 seats to the Tory total, less than a third of the 70 you state
link to bbc.co.uk

HYUFD

Jim Even with boundary changes adding a net 20 to the Tory total, Attlee in 1945, Wilson in 1966, and Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005 would all have won comfortably

Richard

Gorscot

It might be helpful, while you have that crystal ball out if you could give me Tuesdays Euromillions numbers.

Surely, any predictions are mere speculation and assertion?

John Prestwick

The consequences of not having Scotland in UK elections would be a bit more complicated than that.

For example, if Scotland had been in the UK in 1974:
– The February 1974 election would still have been a hung parliament but with the Tories as the largest party, not Labour, so Heath would have temporarily stayed in power.
– He would have almost certainly called an election before the end of the year, as Harold Wilson did.
– Part of the reason why Wilson won the October 1974 election was that there was a swing towards Labour by voters who just wanted a stable government. The miners’ strike was also defused after the election; it’s not clear whether Heath would have handled it better than Wilson, but he would have probably stopped it, thus giving himself a small enough boost to win a majority.
– This means that the 1974-1979 Parliament could have been a Tory government, not Labour.
– If Heath had been in power in the late 1970s, it might have been Labour that ended up defeating the Tories after the Winter of Discontent, not the other way around.
– This is all theoretical of course and shouldn’t be treated as serious analysis. But I reckon that theoretically, if the UK didn’t have a “left-leaning” Scotland in 1974, it is entirely possible that we would have never had Margaret Thatcher!
– Not only that, but we probably wouldn’t have had Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, either. Nor would we have had Charles Kennedy, John Smith, Menzies Campbell, David Steel or Jo Grimmond as party leaders.

It’s also worth noting that even without Scotland, the voting system is biased in favour of Labour. This is because Labour’s safe seats tend to be areas with low voter turnout, whereas turnout is higher in Tory safe seats. If you look at the results in England in the 2005 general election, Labour won a majority of the English seats despite narrowly receiving LESS votes than the Tories!

Paul

How do the maths work here, out of interest?

1974 Minority Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————————
Labour majority: -33
Without Scottish MPs: -50
POSSIBLE CHANGE – LABOUR MINORITY TO CONSERVATIVE MINORITY
(Without Scots: Con 276, Lab 261, Lib 11, Others 16)

Moreida Lord

Excellent article Stuart – as always the facts speak for themselves. Thank you!!

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Martin S

But… but…

Scots made a difference in 1964 and (Feb) 1974. And those are the *only* Labour victories between Attlee and Blair.

If we replace Labour victories with Tory victories in 64 and 74, we have uninterrupted Tory government for nearly 50 years. (Without 64, Wilson doesn’t get 66.)

Put another way, England without Scotland only elects Labour governments in landslide years – 1945 and 1997.

So no. Labour needs Scotland rather a lot.

Rivers

I’m sorry but I don’t know what this article is basing these figures off. As far as I can tell it seem to be viewing a “majority” as a majority over the second largest party rather than a majority in parliament. For example in 2005 Labour won 355 seats, 41 of which were in Scotland. Considering you need 325 seats to win a majority we see that the absence of Scotland in 2005 would have left Labour the largest party but short of a majority.
This simple fact means that without Scotland Labour would have only been able to form a majority government in 1966, 1997 and 2001. There would have been multiple periods of Labour minority governments or some form of Labour coalition but parliamentary majorities would not have happened. The only bright side for us English Socialists is that demographic changes mean the Tories may well die off in the next few decades.

I don’t know why this argument is being peddled anyway. If I was Scottish I would be more inclined to vote for independence knowing that Labour had to rely so heavily on Scotland to get into power.

[…] elections since the 1945 Attlee administration the Scottish vote would have had an effect a mere handful of times. In general we get the Tories or Labour based on the way that England […]

[…] you should allay your fears by looking at the actual evidence, which shows that Scottish MPs make almost no difference to the composition of the UK government […]

Konrad the wise warrior

Just a wee note here, but if voters in rUK prefer to have a Tory government, why should Scotland skew their elections and create the conditions for a different government?

As we campaign to have the government we vote for, why should we be concerned if Westminster goes to the Tories if England, Wales and Northern Ireland vote for them?

What is the problem there?

[…] all but the narrowest of right-wing majorities in England. (Something that’s underlined by the fact that, almost every time the UK has elected a leftwing government, that government has not been […]

Josh

Interesting piece. I see that you are still responding to comments, so I would like to ask a question. Like Paul above, I am confused by your maths. You write:

1964 Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————

Labour majority: 4
Without Scottish MPs: -9
CHANGE: LABOUR MAJORITY TO CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY OF 1
(Con 280, Lab 274, Lib 5)

I can see that the Conservatives get a majority of 1, with 280 to 279 seats. Now, switching 6 seats from Conservative to Labour flips the positions of these parties. So surely it should read “Without Scottish MPs: -6”. OK, this is perhaps a typ0. But then you write:

1974 Minority Labour govt (Wilson)
————————————————

Labour majority: -33
Without Scottish MPs: -50
POSSIBLE CHANGE – LABOUR MINORITY TO CONSERVATIVE MINORITY
(Without Scots: Con 276, Lab 261, Lib 11, Others 16)

Adding these up, we have 564 seats without the Scots. So 283 seats forms a majority. Labour needs 22 seats; not sure where you pulled the number 50 from. Finally:

1974b Labour govt (Wilson/Callaghan)
—————————————————–

Labour majority: 3
Without Scottish MPs: -8
CHANGE: LABOUR MAJORITY TO LABOUR MINORITY
(Lab 278 Con 261 Lib 10 others 15)

Here I can understand how the mistake might occur: Labour has 278 seats, the other parties combined have 286; the difference is 8. But only 5 of those need to change for a majority.

Maybe my maths is wrong. Maybe I have misunderstood what you mean by majority. However, it seems that every time you give numbers that can be checked for consistency, there are errors. Your aim is to clear up misuse of numbers by “careless pundits”, but why should I trust your analysis?

[…] isn’t the biggest issue here that the Scottish vote doesn’t have a significant impact on the outcome of Westminster General Elections? Where is the motivation for me, a Scottish voter, […]

[…] 10)   In only 2 out of the last 67 years have Scottish Votes had any bearing on the UK party in Power. […]

[…] Scottish vote is proven to have no significant impact on the complexion of Westminster […]

[…] Tory rule without Scottish Labour MPs. But as this video highlights, it’s actually a false idea. For virtually every British election in the last 50 years, Scottish votes would not have changed […]

[…] been well-documented by Wings over Scotland (the source of the above image), among others, that even with 8.6% of the Wesminster […]

[…] of the British government. There have been rare exceptions: in 1964, Scottish politicians prevented the Conservatives from forming a government. The Labour government formed that year had a majority […]

Bruce

As an ardent Labour supporting Englishman living in Scotland I found this article very interesting and somewhat comforting. Also some vey good responses have been posted. One area that doesn’t seem to have been discussed (although I may have missed it) is the potential to more from the urgent ‘first past the post’ towards a more proportional representation system (possibly promised to the lib dens as part of their allegiance with the Tories). It may take some time but I think it will come and wonder how future elections would be affect by that alongside an independent Scotland.

[…] In the 2010 General Election, 42% of Scots voted Labour, 18.9% voted Liberal Democrats, 19 .9% voted SNP and 16.7% voted Conservatives.  The Conservatives are in power.  This is not democracy for Scotland.  There were over 25 million English valid votes (3.4 million votes in London alone) and 2.4 million Scottish valid votes.  There is too large a divide in political opinion between Scottish and English voters for us to be participating equally in the creation of our laws and policies.  If you remove the Scottish electorate from most UK elections , the result would have been the same with or without the Scottish vote. (bbc, wingsoverscotland) […]

Tom Wilde

This article is a useful piece of research. However, it does reflect the tendency of SNP supporters to view the Union as being one between “Scotland and (cough)”, or between “Scotland and rUK”, or even (in moments of carelessness) between “Scotland and England”. It isn’t. The Union consists of four countries, not two. I’m mentioning this because if the myth is that Scotland “imposes Labour government on English voters” the this article well and truly busts that myth. However if the claim is that Scotland AND WALES have often jointly imposed Labour government on English voters, then that may well be true. I’m trying to dig up the figures on that at the moment. Wales has returned a majority of Labour MPs in every election since the 1930s, usually a large majority. Despite that, quite often during that time Wales has been part of a UK with a Tory government. Similarly, England has several times had a Labour government despite returning a majority of Conservative MPs. This is normal. Should California leave the United States because it sometimes votes for a different presidential candidate from the one elected by the USA as a whole?

Tom Wilde

“Historically the Union WAS specifically between Scotland and England.” Correctamento! However, I was talking about Union of today rather than the Union of 1707. It has evolved a great deal over the last four centuries, as you say yourself, and it is now a union of 4 countries, not 2.

I recommend taking a closer look at the figures for Wales. I think you underestimate the effect of the consistently large Labour majorities there. Can I post links here? Maybe not, but I recommend to you the Wikipedia article called “Elections in Wales”. Building on your figures with the Welsh figures given there, it looks to me as if without Scotland AND Wales, the 1950 election would have resulted in not a Labour government but a Conservative one with a substantial majority. The Conservative governments of 1964 and Feb 1974 would both have resulted in Conservative majorities of 20+. The Labour government of Oct 1974 would have been in a certainly unsustainable minority of about 20 and 2010 would have been an emphatic Conservative majority. Therefore the complexion of the government would have been substantially (not marginally) different in at least 5 cases since 1950. And this makes it true, I think, that “England has several times had a Labour government despite returning a majority of Conservative MPs.”

However, I did my sums in a tearing hurry just now and may be wrong! I’m sure you will check for yourself.

[…] to count. I want my vote at an election to carry some weight when I put my cross on that paper. Looking back historically Scottish votes make little difference to the Westminster government. Yes in 2010 we stopped a […]

Julio

In 2005, more people in England voted Tory than Labour, yet we ended up with the disastrous Blair / Brown governments.

[…] are only four occasions since the Second World War that removing Scottish MPs from the equation would have changed the […]

[…] But more importantly, it doesn’t matter what I believe. Because in the vast majority of General Elections since WWII – THE SCOTTISH VOTE DOESN’T… […]

[…] final sentence is of course complete lost on him: damn those Scots for affecting the outcomes of 2 out of the 18 elections since the Second World War, amirite? When will something be done about those pesky Scots, altering […]

Rim Rec

Of course the best argument to those English Labour people who say “We Need Scotland for a Labour Westminster Government” is that English Labour activists should campaign harder.

We just got to get the “Record” to be honest show integrity and publish the article.We need to get the truth to those closed minds of the Labour support.

[…] Never mind that Labour’s majorities in 1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005 were large enough that they could have won even if every Labour voter voted for SNP (in fact 1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005 would likely still have been Labour governments even if […]

[…] really happening is of course that English politicians have become so used to the fact that Scotland has almost never made a difference to who governed at Westminster that they think it’s undemocratic for the other constituent nations of the UK to exercise […]

[…] people of Britain haven’t voted for the European People’s Party since the 1950s, but we still get them as our government because the rest of Western Europe outvotes us every time. The only time the people of Britain get […]

[…] on us.  Scottish people have very little impact in how the country we’re part of is run.  Only in two elections (1964 and 1974) since World War II has the Scottish vote influenced the outcome of a General Election.  But in 2016 we could have a […]

[…] – a keyframe of the story of the 21st Century. It’s a moment that we Scots will, as ever, only be able to significantly alter in the event of a close contest. We have a way out. But what […]

[…] on us.  Scottish people have very little impact in how the country we’re part of is run.  Only in two elections (1964 and 1974) since World War II has the Scottish vote influenced the outcome of a General Election.  But in 2016 we could have a […]

[…] unified education system, that England’s colonial adventures only began in 1707, and the well-debunked notion that Scottish seats are necessary for a Red Rosette […]

James

Without Scotland Wilson would never have become Prime Minister in 1964, and therefore could not have called an election in 1966 or led Labour in two elections in 1974.

GM

John
Ignored
says:
3 May, 2013 at 11:17 am

Even if Scotland…

Agreed. That’s an important principle for me as well.

The article isn’t about that as you state but its premise is correct. Our ‘minority vote’ can only reasonably be expected to make but a marginal difference in electing unstable short term government and only once in a blue moon at that.


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