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What next for the SNP when they win the referendum?

Apr 19

Posted by James in Constitution, Parties | 60 Comments

I’m feeling sunny and optimistic. Let’s assume the question doesn’t get bogged down by the courts or by politics, that the Yes campaign is genuinely cross-party and no-party, that the public will get a chance to write the first constitution for an independent Scotland at some point, and that the referendum succeeds by a clear margin.

The SNP will, on this happy day, have achieved their objective. Admittedly it’s in some ways a simpler objective than any other party – Scotland is either independent or not – but it’d be an extraordinary achievement for a party which in 2003 looked a long way from government, and as recently as the 1980s looked a whole lot further away still.

So what happens next, both for the SNP and for individual SNP members and politicians? Here are some options.

Retire happy. At least one of the SNP’s younger MSPs I know will take this route. Job done. It baffles me that anyone wouldn’t have other political priorities, but it’s consistent. And it certainly makes sense for the older generation. Salmond’s not old by political standards – he’ll turn sixty just after the vote – but it would be a strong point to choose to stand down, and one way to disprove the adage that all political careers end in failure.

Attempt to become Scotland’s answer to the ANC. Sure, the ANC’s struggle was harder to say the least – the Maximum Eck never spent a day in Saughton for political crimes – but parties that fulfil their purpose and deliver radical constitutional change do sometimes try to stay together and stay in power thereafter. The game here is to become the new establishment, but, typically, this way corruption lies.

Join other parties. It’s not hard to see how this might work. The SNP span more or less the whole political spectrum at Holyrood, and they’re held together by a love of winning (no bad thing in a party) plus their primary purpose. Once independence has proved itself to be the settled will of the Scottish people, those who want to stay in politics would surely want to find more consistent ideological bedfellows. This could only happen once the three pro-union parties accept the result and move on. So at that point why wouldn’t Fergus Ewing, John Mason or even John Swinney join a Murdo-esque post-Tory Tories? Might Marco Biagi or Linda Fabiani go Green? Would the soft left of the SNP really not want to work with the Labour types they tend to agree with on non-constitutional matters? If a Lib Dem party still exists at that point, perhaps Michael Russell could lead it? (no offence Michael)  edit: I can see now I was wrong about this one 😉

Split into new parties. Obviously this can be combined with the option above. Across Europe party mergers, divorces, and realignments are ten-a-penny. It may not be clear what the empty space looks like, ideologically, but why might we not see something new here?

The membership is another matter. We certainly get plenty of comments here on Better Nation that start “I’m an SNP member now, but post independence I’ll be a.. ” and which typically end “Green” or “Socialist”. Many SNP activists see the party and the government as a means to this single end: they may campaign to elect a local MSP who they rate, but the purpose of that MSP is to vote for the referendum legislation, so that an independent Scotland can be more (insert other objectives here). Do they stay, or if not, where do they go?

The other most interesting question about the SNP’s post-referendum future is where do the brightest and best of the younger generation go, notably future FM candidates like Nicola and Humza? My guess is that both will want to hold the party together and hold onto office, but the membership and leadership have divergent ideologies which could well make that hard. Still, it’s not a bad dilemma to have. And I look forward to a politics where the debates are primarily about an independent Scotland’s economy, social policy, civil liberties and environment, not the constitution. That will be progress.

The Midlothian Question

Apr 9

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Local government, Parties | 4 Comments

A guest post today from Ian Baxter, Green Party activist and chair of Bonnyrigg & Lasswade Community Council. Ian has stood as a candidate for the Green Party (and its predecessor, the Ecology Party) many times over the last 30 years, and in 2007 came close to becoming Midlothian’s first Green councillor, something he hopes to achieve on May 3rd. He blogs at Hearts and Mines.

Last week, Midlothian Labour followed their Glasgow counterparts in losing an overall majority on the Council when Councillor Jackie Aitchison resigned and immediately submitted his nomination papers as an Independent candidate in next month’s local elections.

There was a time when Midlothian was described as ‘the one party state’ with 17 out of 18 councillors belonging to the Labour Party (albeit on 46% of the vote). That was under First Past the Post. More recently, ahead of the STV-based local elections in 2007, I was told that the then council’s Chief Executive was overheard saying that if Labour didn’t get two of the three seats up for grabs in the Bonnyrigg ward, then it was in serious trouble. If he’s to be believed, then I think that time has now come.

Midlothian has six three-member wards. In 2007, Labour won 9 of the 18 seats, with the Nats 6 and the Lib Dems three. Soon after the election, however, Lib Dem councillor Katie Moffat jumped into the red camp and normal business resumed.

Change is not something Midlothian flirts with much, but this time it might just smack us on the lips. In common with most areas across Scotland, the Nationalists only fielded one candidate per ward five years ago. They all topped the list on first preference votes, with one, Margaret Wilson in Penicuik, not far short of double the vote of her nearest rival.

Throw into the mix a near collapse of the Lib Dem vote, and some local factors which I’ll come to shortly, and this looks very much like one council which will be changing hands in four weeks’ time.

Penicuik has always been a Lib Dem stronghold, once represented by Michael Moore, now Secretary of State for Scotland – indeed he was the one non-Labour councillor back in the days of the one-party state. In 2007 they came close to winning two of the three councillors there. However, the SNP, fielding two candidates, have a decent chance of removing the Lib Dem, though my bet is there will be no change.

Les Thacker, the Lib Dems’ councillor in Midlothian West will not be so lucky. Loanhead and district has always been fluid electorally, and with 9 candidates standing, it will again provide a bit of interest. My guess is SNP Group leader Owen Thompson will return along with his running mate Andrew Coventry replacing the Lib Dem representation.

In Midlothian East, Katie Moffat only just scraped in last time for the Lib Dems, but even with her red rosette I can’t see Labour taking two seats here. Another SNP gain, I’d say.

Midlothian South will be a hard fought battleground between SNP and Labour. Last time it was 2-1 to Labour, with newly elected SNP MSP Colin Beattie and Labour councillor Wilma Chalmers both standing down, it’s a difficult one to call. It could go either way, but I think SNP will sneak two in.

In Dalkeith, SNP’s Craig Statham and Labour’s Alex Bennett were two votes apart on first preferences last time, with Depute Provost Margot Russell squeaking in for Labour on just 761 first prefs. Local factors will come into play, with controversy surrounding the Woodburn Community Centre possibly affecting the Labour vote. However, with neither of the SNP’s candidates a sitting councillor, I think Labour may prevail.

Which brings us to Bonnyrigg, where once again I will be flying the flag for the Greens. In 2007, Bob Constable was elected for the SNP on the first round of counting with 400 votes to spare. Jackie Aitchison – now standing as an independent – was elected immediately after. Labour’s Derek Milligan had to wait until the seventh and final round before eliminating myself to take the third spot.

With two Nats standing, and the Labour vote potentially split three ways, there will be a fair amount of vote transfers taking place before anyone reaches quota. Bob Constable and Derek Milligan (benefitting this time from alphabetic precedence) will probably be elected – although Derek’s well known association with a number of controversial local issues and tendency to hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons could mean there is an outside chance his running mate Louie Milliken may overtake him.

So who gets the third seat in Bonnyrigg is the question. Without Labour backing, Jackie Aitchison is unlikely to succeed, though where his transfers go and what he does and says during the campaign may be critical. The SNP has not been particularly active locally and Labour candidate Louie Milliken is virtually unknown in these parts. Unlike in 2007, I am now chair of the community council and have been very active in exposing the Labour Council’s maladministration over allegedly missing grant funding made to Bonnyrigg Rose for a car park which still hasn’t materialised several years on.

Given the local factors involved, my own activity over many years, the relative anonymity of my main rivals and some very encouraging canvass returns, I am optimistic for my chances here in being the first Green councillor on Midlothian Council.

Should that happen, I would see the make-up of Midlothian Council on 4th May being SNP 9, Labour 7, Lib Dem 1, Green 1. How that translates into power will be interesting.

Dear Edinburgh Lib Dems: Do you want to die?

Apr 7

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Local government, Parties | 26 Comments

Another guest today from Dan Phillips. You may have seen his biog a week ago, but here it is again. Dan’s a press photographer by trade but a political obsessive at heart. A small ‘l’ liberal, he blogs at liberalsellout.wordpress.com. The blog has taken to dissecting the local elections in Edinburgh of late and this is his latest post in this vein.

If you as a party were fighting for your life, you’d pull the finger out.

Or you would have thought so. It’s less than a month to go till the polls and not a peep has been heard from the Lib Dems.

They were the last to put out their candidate list. Not a single policy has been trailed in the local media. Not a hint of what they would do in a coalition. And this is a tipping point for the birdy badged party.

A perfect storm in Edinburgh meant they were annihilated at Holyrood. Trams, the UK Coalition combined with the god-awful campaign they ran conspired to remove all their representatives from the capital – not even an insurance list seat.

You would think they’d have learnt. But given the inertia from their camp apparently not.

In 2007 they clinched 17 councillors – but only just. Seven of those were in the last round barely scraping past the finish line. Some didn’t even make the quota but were merely the last candidate standing. In short they won by being everyone’s second favourite – they are the lowest common denominator.

But need I say it, the context is ever so slightly different now. The Nats are standing two candidates in many of those same wards where the Lib Dems won through inertia (like Sighthill, Craigentinny and Portobello to name a few) while the paucity of independent candidates in this election means there is no second chance to get it right. If you don’t get a decent haul of first preferences, expect execution in the first round.

So how to avoid this fate? Well you could put out at least some sort of policy. Maybe trumpet your successes as a council over the last five years. Do something to cut the tram albatross from around your neck. Possibly, and I know this is radical, give your lost voters a reason to return, and the hard core a reason to turn up.

Or you could do nothing and let the self imposed vacuum be filled with the policies of the opposition.

It’s up to the Lib Dems what they do. But to my mind there are only four safe-ish seats, and that’s a relative term. Edinburgh’s voting patterns contrive to bind the UK Coalition partners together. In three seats where the Lib Dems are strongest, so are the Tories. And we know that the Tories prefer the Lib Dems substantially over any other party, so expect to see the blues haul the injured Lib Dems over the line in Almond, Corstorphine and Meadows/Morningside. In Drumbrae/Gyle the Lib Dems had 45% of the first preference in 2007 – it would be a colossal disaster if they could not return there.

Everywhere else? Well it’s up to them. I suspect that Southside will return Mackenzie for the Lib Dems but it is very narrow, election fans. Beyond that every seat will have to be wrung from the opposition.

The defence to such inaction could be that the SNP have been silent too. That in 2007 the Nats hadn’t put out a manifesto at this stage either. But the Nats aren’t at risk of being torn asunder by the four other parties currently lashed to their limbs.

If you wish to be uncharitable to the Lib Dems you could note they have made one promise in their ‘Edinburgh Voice’ newspaper. The strapline directly underneath the masthead on one reading declares an Edinburgh ‘free from the Scottish Liberal Democrats’. Carry on like this and they might just deliver it.

“To abandon human rights would therefore be a greater threat to the coalition than most commentators realise”

Apr 3

Posted by James in Crime, Parties, Westminster | 5 Comments

Nick Clegg’s support for a massive extension of online monitoring may be a disappointment to disgruntled activists, and to any voters who listened to him on the subject prior to (and immediately after) the May 2010 election. But it should be no surprise. It’s certainly in keeping with a consistent experience of the three UK parties of government.

They regularly appear solid on policy in opposition but then are either ineffectual or do a series of direct u-turns once in office. The list is endless. Labour talked about equality of opportunity before 1997, but left behind the most unequal UK ever. The Tories joined the Lib Dems in howling about tuition fees in opposition, before working together to treble them almost immediately their coats were over the Downing Street chairs. I still remember the Tory backbencher telling me in 1997 that “we’re fine on this now, but don’t trust us when we get back into office“. Too true.

On security and civil liberties – especially on the futile attempt to trade the latter for the former – we have this same problem in spades. Governments, including this one and its predecessor, are almost always wrong, and oppositions, including this one and its predecessors, are almost always right. Whoever you vote for, it seems, the permanent government gets in, and the policies remain the same. The glee in the Labour spokesperson’s voice on Westminster Hour when asked if she’d be supporting this latest dogs’ breakfast was inescapable: “we dropped it! we dropped it!”, she said. Be in no doubt that Labour would pick it up the moment they ever return to office.

This might just be another attempt by the Lib Dems to discard a chunk of the broad base of support they assembled up to 2010. We’re not quite two years through a supposedly five year term, and there’s very little left. Broad but, it turns out, shallow, and only the Orange Book minority has really been shown any love by the leadership. Students were driven away, anyone concerned about privatisation of the NHS or Royal Mail is long gone, let alone those who wanted a principled left alternative to Labour. It seems almost absurd to think that’s how people ever thought of them.

The email monitoring legislation does feel a little different to previous betrayals, though. It has the air of a terminal nosedive about it, a sense that the party is approaching what looks like the point of no return. The smarter sort of Lib Dems on Twitter, the few of those that remain in the party, are saying things like “I have not sent my LD membership renewal until I see what happens with the surveillance stuff“, “I don’t know where [Clegg’s] going, but I have no appetite to go on the journey with him“, “As someone who generally is keen on Clegg he’s fucked this up big time“, and “The question is what we can we do about it? How can we make the leadership listen?”

As Polly Toynbee put it today, “civil liberties was their last USP“, although she’s excluded Iraq, presumably because their policy there was actually much weaker than the media and the party implied: “if there’s a second resolution we’ll back a disastrous war“. (Polly-haters should try again with that piece, incidentally. Except for a spurious paragraph where she suggests “Labour has been spring-cleaning it roots” (sic), she’s on good form.)

Less than a month ago Julian Huppert, the darling of the Lib Dems on Twitter, wrote a remarkably prescient piece for the Guardian. Here is just one chunk (emphasis mine):

Civil liberties are a core, unifying issue for the Lib Dems. There are MPs in the Labour and Conservative parties who would defend civil liberties to the very end, and others – too many others – who would tear them up at the first opportunity. There is no such division in the Lib Dems. Issues such as civil liberties are utterly uniting for our party, and utterly divisive for the others. To abandon human rights would therefore be a greater threat to the coalition than most commentators realise. […] if we do not provide a thorough, reasoned defence of civil liberties, no other party will.

Aside from the usual Green-and-Nat-ignoring self-serving Westminster tripe at the end, most observers would have agreed with this assessment of the Lib Dems until the weekend. But now it transpires that their champions around the Cabinet table don’t care about this issue either. Who knew? Perhaps it’s some odd highball tactic so Clegg can accept a “compromise” that the party wouldn’t otherwise have swallowed.

No amount of reasoning with the Clegg/Alexander leadership could get them to change their minds on private control of NHS, and no amount of lobbying could persuade Lib Dem MPs or peers to rebel in any numbers on it either. Will they go the same way over internet surveillance? Are they really ready to go down with Clegg on this issue and take their whole party with them? Or will we, finally, start to see some backbone from their backbenchers?

Why I’m (re)joining the SNP

Apr 2

Posted by Jeff in Parties | 28 Comments

Democracy doesn’t run itself. There’s a reason why political donations, like charitable giving, are tax deductible. The public has a vested interest in political parties being well populated and well funded. The more average Joe’s that sign up with direct debits, the less the Souters’ will be required to play a part.

So I’ve never understood how so many people can be fleetingly interested in politics once every four years while still resentful that those very few that are constantly, consistently involved don’t just fix everything for them, the way they want. My preferred vision of an ideal country is for political parties to be chock full of engaged individuals, branch meetings to be lively affairs and candidate selections to be thorough and exciting. We are, sadly, a long way off and we shouldn’t need George Galloway to remind us of this.

I took the principle down to London of choosing a party from the local options and joining it although, in the same way that I don’t really believe I’m a Londoner, I never really felt a proper member of GPEW, even one at the outer fringes (which is all I ever was, and all I ever intend to be, irrespective of the party I’m a member of). So, now that a return to Scotland is looming, if not quite imminent, sticking to that principle but jumping ship seemed like a good idea, and there was really only one option.

The SNP is taking the debate, constitutional and otherwise, wider and deeper than any other party. While I rail against the idea that a Scot can’t be ambivalent about independence, so regularly touted by the more fundamentalist Nationalists out there, there is no avoiding the intertwining of the SNP and independence, irrespective of the fact that independence alone will neither improve nor worsen the lives of any Scot. Politically I may be pale green but the Scottish Green Party is only advancing the independence debate on its backfoot, and that lacks a certain appeal, despite being justifiable, as we enter an historic period that needs to be grasped with all fingers and all toes, whichever side of the argument one is on.

In terms of political debate, independence is the only show in town, and Scotland shouldn’t be ashamed of that.

And, well, it might be the paltry departures boards at Scottish airports, it might be voting for 1 Tory MP but still being stuck with a Tory Chancellor, it might be the growing desire to hear a distinctly Scottish voice on a global stage, it might be the creeping belief that Scotland would be a fairer place if it left parts of the UK behind, it might be a selfish desire surrounding who would more usefully spend Scotland’s considerable energy revenues or it might simply be the unsustainable tug-of-war of a coalition Government taking the UK one way and a Scottish Government taking Scotland another, but it’ll most likely be a Yes vote in 2014 from me.

To be the best you’ve got to beat the best, and I don’t see the UK taking on Finland in education, France in egalitarianism and Sweden in Social Democracy any time soon. Scotland could, given the chance.

How can you get excited about a Russian doll that sits inside another Russian doll? The same way that you can’t get excited about a country that sits inside another country. You can’t see something if you don’t know it’s there and you don’t know something’s there if you can’t see it. It’s time Scotland stepped out of the shadows.

And joining the party that is doing its utmost to make that Yes victory a reality seems appropriate if I am to make good on my personal principle of being a member of a party and assisting in the (very) low level funding of politics that greases the wheels of democracy.

This is not to say that I ever want to be a Convener of this or a Councillor of there, the sooner Scotland moves away from the notion that to be a member of a political party means holding some wonkish desire to hold some sort of office the better. And anyway, another reason the SNP is an appealing party to join at the very fringes is because it is abundantly clear that the party is fizzing with healthy energy, positive ideas and young, fresh talent ready to shore up any MP, MSP, MEP or councillor gaps that may arise, as I suspect we shall no doubt see in May.

It’s worth noting that running a blog and being the member of a political party, particularly the SNP, is an occupational hazard to be risked at one’s peril. It’s no accident that I cancelled my first bout of SNP membership in less than glorious circumstances, but I don’t intend to make the same mistake twice. I maintain that there’s no good reason why an ordinary person can’t write about politics as a hobby without fear of being a fish in a barrel that will inevitably be shot at. (It does help that a particular bane of my own blogging life recently ran into pleasingly emasculating professional difficulties, even if indulging in such schadenfreude probably makes me a slightly lesser person).

Not that the SNP is perfect of course. There are good reasons beyond Malcolm Chisholm MSP why the area I will be moving to is the only constituency in Scotland not represented by the SNP at Holyrood. Complacency is surely not an option for a party a couple of years out from the biggest date in its history. All negative associations, from Rupert Murdoch down to Joan McAlpine, should be objectively considered. Not that one should join a party only to take pot shots at it.

Many Scots have joined the SNP in 2012. The party, and by extension Scotland itself, has a seductive momentum and is clearly going places. In the spirit of being the change that one wants to see in the world, from greater public participation in political parties through to Scotland having a voice on the world stage, it is very pleasing indeed to be back onboard.