Wings Over Scotland

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

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

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.
 

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?

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.

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?

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. 
 

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.

ahh, found it
link to wingsoverscotland.com

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

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

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!

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

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.

“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.

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