There’s a story told about a speech at the Conservative Party conference in the early 2000s, at a time when the party was at a low ebb. New Labour was still a while away from its Iraq nemesis and had just been returned by a sizeable majority. The mood in the hall could hardly have been bleaker.
Thatcherism was here to stay
In such an environment, the presence of the conference’s guest speaker, a certain Margaret Hilda Thatcher, would surely only darken the atmosphere further by reminding the delegates of where they had come from and how far they had fallen.
Yet Mrs Thatcher was having none of it.
“Why are you so glum?”, she demanded. “For goodness’ sake, we won! We won!”
The delegates glanced at each other in nervous confusion. They’d heard the rumours about her health, and this seemed to confirm them. Maybe she really was losing her grip.
But as she developed her theme, the penny dropped. What she said was, for Labour to win, they had to move to the right and at the very least, broadly adopt the neoliberal consensus that Thatcher had taken the country towards. From this day forward, she argued, all governments would look like hers. Whatever the colour of the rosette, Thatcherism was here to stay. From today’s vantage point, you have so that was pretty prescient.
Reform’s success and what it could mean for Scotland
Political commentators have a phrase for people who try to move the needle – “outriders”. Thatcher was undoubtedly one, and last week we saw another during the stunning success of Reform in the English local elections: Nigel Farage, whose party is now polling at an incredible 30% – which would probably make him Prime Minister were an election to be held tomorrow.
I live north of the border and therefore my next chance to vote is in the Holyrood election, next year, and I’m trying to determine what this significant change in voting behaviour in England – a shift to the right, a focus on immigration, perhaps the beginning of the end of the two-party system – means for Scotland.
Perhaps it changes everything and nothing
Nothing, because whoever is in power in Westminster the fundamental problem of electoral arithmetic remains – what England wants, Scotland gets, be that a hard Brexit it didn’t vote for, or the closing of Grangemouth, or indeed governing parties it has rejected since 1955. Even Reform’s aim to reverse devolution is simply a ramping up of a rolling back of devolved powers that’s been going on for a decade. That lack of agency must also be keenly felt, if only they’d admit it. A Labour group in Holyrood who promised no more austerity and a viable oil refinery only for Keir Starmer to slash fuel allowances and close Grangemouth, Scotland’s only oil-rich refinery.
So perhaps it makes sense to just ca’ canny, and in that light maybe John Swinney’s calling of a summit to highlight the “threat” posed by Reform wasn’t the smartest move. As the commentator Gerry Hassan notes, Farage prefers the SNP to Labour and everyone blaming everyone else for the rise of his party inadvertently makes his case for him. It makes him seem more important and crucially allows him to portray himself as the anti-establishment maverick outsider, just like his weel-kent Lewis man and Ayrshire golf course owner pal in Washington.
But on the other hand, things are definitely changing, and the rise of Reform is already changing the political weather in Scotland.
Decoupling between parties and movements
As recently as last August, Reform was polling at as little as 3% up here, but as people considered the consequences of GE24 Reform doubled their support, mostly from Tory defectors, and suddenly they were knocking on the door for list seats in Holyrood. Their subsequent polling of about 12% was achieved at the expense of a Labour Party tanking at under 20% because of a hugely unpopular Keir Starmer.
Meanwhile, the SNP has recovered to around 30% of the vote and other pro-independence parties have consolidated, meaning that it’s very possible that Scotland will return a pro-independence majority next year – and then the question will be how the government chooses to use this mandate against a Westminster that will never agree to a second independence referendum. And it’s fascinating that Reform has increased its share in Scotland seemingly without anyone crossing the constitutional divide to help them do so. It confirms that there has long since been a decoupling between parties and movements as people see the latter as a safer bet to securing a better constitutional arrangement.
It’s also interesting that Reform’s gains in Scotland have come at a time when the constitutional debate is relatively quiet, so perhaps the decoupling is happening on the unionist side as well.
Looking beyond Farage
From my point of view, we need to ignore the noise and stop being obsessed with blowhards like Farage and his ilk. We need to make the fundamental case that, for as long as we choose to outsource our democracy to another country’s chambers and institutions, we will always be governed by people and parties we didn’t vote for and, in the case of the House of Lords, can never vote out.
That Scotland can only become the fullest version of itself with the type of powers that other independent countries rightly take for granted is a reality that was hiding in plain sight, long before Nigel Farage turned up.
More in politics.
