Claims that John Swinney lost the Holyrood election sit oddly with the biggest ever majority favouring democratic change to the constitution.
“If winning doesn’t matter, why do we keep score?” (Vince Lombardi, legendary American Football coach)
I’ve always loved that story about Brazil’s national football coach giving a press conference after losing to arch-rivals Argentina. Brazil had played, arguably, the better, the purer, the more aesthetically pleasing football over the 90 minutes, but Argentina had ‘parked the bus’, disrupted play, wasted time and then hit Brazil on the break. Not pretty, and a bit naughty for sure, but a highly effective gameplan to employ against a technically superior side. Jock Stein used to tell his teams that you couldn’t always go to work in a suit – sometimes the hard task in front of you demanded you wear the dungarees. Sometimes you need to win ugly. Like golfers say, the scorecard doesn’t paint any pictures.
Still smarting from the mugging, the Brazil coach said something like: “the scoreboard might say 3-1, but anyone watching knows that ours is a moral victory”. Naturally, it took about three seconds for someone to tell the Argentinian manager and to ask for his response.
“Tell him I offer my sincere congratulations on his moral victory”, he said. “And I’m sure he will wish to reciprocate by congratulating me on my actual victory”. Ouch.
History shows that winning and losing, victory and defeat, are more complicated concepts than they first appear. In 280BC, King Pyrrhus of Epius defeated the Roman army at Heraclea, before beating them again at Ascalum the following year. When Pyrrhus was congratulated on his wins, he famously responded: “Another such victory and we shall be utterly ruined”. In other words, the cost of victory would ultimately be defeat. By winning the battles, he lost the war. From this, we derive the phrase ‘pyrrhic victory’, which describes an outcome that could technically be described as a success, but which incurs such losses that the ‘victory’ is empty, pointless and self-defeating.
Who won Scotland’s election?
As the dust settles on the Holyrood election, it is evident that an agreed narrative from the unionist press is that Thursday was somehow a disaster for John Swinney and the SNP. The Sun‘s front page: “Nats Fail: Down and Rout” summed up the seemingly agreed line.
But facts are chiels that winna ding.
That John Swinney didn’t achieve an overall majority should surprise precisely no-one. For a start, the d’Honte voting system is deployed precisely to engineer a minority government and a chamber that broadly reflects the popular vote, a much better system than the first past the post system in Westminster that most recently handed Labour an enormous landslide based on a popular vote of just over 30%. Indeed, only once in the 27 year history of devolution has a majority been achieved, in 2011 – a seismic result that triggered the first independence referendum. Indeed, the 73 pro-independence MSPs in the chamber represents a historic high. And it’s worth noting that the SNP achieved the result in the wake of several changes of leader, branchform, motorhome-gate, mixed record in government and against a Labour Party that outspent them three to one. As one SNP member put it – what do we have to do to lose?
(Very recent) history echoes. The Conservative victory in the general election of 2015 was achieved with 37% of the popular vote. When David Cameron then called for a referendum on EU membership, no-one questioned his right to do so. And yet a government that consistently polls above 40% is told “now is not the time” to ask a constitutional question. It’s democratic deficiency writ large.
No longer a united kingdom
Whatever your position on the constitution, we should all agree that this is the most egregious of double standards. Plaid control Wales. Sinn Fein runs Northern Ireland. The SNP and Greens control Scotland. Suddenly, England is the outlier – unless you see Reform as an English nationalist party.
Is the UK finished? Of course, this seems unthinkable. But then again, the idea that Britain might actually leave the EU was scarcely credible just a decade ago. Such things always seem unthinkable until they happen, at which point we immediately wonder how we didn’t see them coming. The possibility was always there, hiding in plain sight.
It might be stretching it to call last week a tipping point. But despite all the claims that what really matter are issues like the cost of living, Holyrood 26 shows that the question of the constitution, put front and centre in 2014, still needs to be answered. And by returning the biggest pro-independent majority in history, Scotland has once again indicated its favoured direction of travel.
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