Crikey, this post went on a bit. American readers not fascinated by the decline of the Conservative party are forgiven if they choose to skip past this in search of more congenial fodder below. If I knew how to I’d hide much of this behind a “to continue reading” link. Does Typepad allow one to do that? Can anyone help?
Anyway...
PoliticalBetting.com’s Sean Fear looks at the election results and says: “Quite why it is impossible for a centre right party to take at least 25% in Scotland is a mystery to me.” Iain Dale agrees that this is a question worth asking.
This post ended up being absurdly long. So it's going to be in two parts. Part 1 is how the Tory Party reached its present parlous state. Part 2, to be posted later today, will have some ideas for how the centre-right may recover.
So let’s try and answer it by saying that while it might not be impossible for a centre-right party to win 25% of the vote in Scotland, it is all but impossible for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, as currently constituted, to do so. Though Scots Tories profess themselves quietly cheered by Thursday’s results (winning one extra constituency seat, increasing their majorities in the three they already held), the truth is the party is unlikely to make any significant progress absent quite radical change.
There are sound historical and political reasons to explain the calamitous decline of Toryism in Scotland but their story can be explained in one line: they were caught on the wrong side of history and, worse, seemed happy to be there.
In the last five elections (two Westminster, three to the Scottish Parliament) the Tories have not done better than the 17% of the vote they won in 1997 - the night they were wiped out in Scotland.
But that does not mean only one in five Scots is moderately right-of-centre. On the contrary, one reason for the SNP’s advance is that they have picked up the votes of disillusioned Tories in places such as Perthshire, Angus and Aberdeenshire - all counties that would be True Blue in England. Other would-be Tory voters have died or simply stayed at home.
Until last week the SNP had yet to make inroads, in first past the post constituencies, into the Labour heartlands of the central belt. Their gains had been in traditionally Tory areas. Small town, respectable Scotland has shifted to the nationalists, vote by vote, over the past 20 years. Though the SNP remains a left-of-centre party it has also, sensibly, talked up its desire to lower taxes on small businesses, appealling to the aspirational voters that were a backbone of Margaret Thatcher’s successes in England.
The SNP’s populism - you might even say, on occasion, it’s mild Poujadism - actually mirrors some of Mrs Thatcher’s appeal. Just as she managed to win the vote of people who weren’t natural Tories but were proud Britons, so the SNP has persuaded Scots that you need not sign up to independence or every aspect of the party platform to support it. Voting SNP is, for these voters, a statement of belief in self and country.
In other words, Scotland’s C2 voters are more likely to vote SNP than Tory. (The decline in the Orange working-class vote that the Tories used to be able to rely on has also hurt them. It’s often forgotten that the Unionist in Conservative and Unionist Party originally applied to the Union with Ireland not England.)
There’s a tranche of SNP voters who are conservatives who do believe in independence. Then there is, I believe, a further slice of nationalist voters who could conceivably support a right-of-centre party were that party not the enfeebled Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. These people vote SNP (or Liberal Democrat) because they distrust labour and have no other appealling choice.
Many Scottish voters have always been instinctively suspicious of Labour’s central-belt dominated hegemony. In 1979, at the first (desperately close) Devolution referendum, the Northeast, Tayside, the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway all voted “No” to the proposition that a devolved parliament be established. The Tory party’s achievement, then, was to lose its natural territory, often to the SNP but sometimes to the Liberals, over the course of the next 18 years.
Nonetheless, the ’79 referendum is an important starting point, not least because the Tories urged a “No” vote in part because they promised to introduce a “better” bill (a promise they ignored) but also because at the 1979 general election the SNP lost nine of their 11 seats and seemed to be finished for good. How times have changed.
In 1979 the Tories won 31% of the vote and 22 of the 72 seats in Scotland. In 1983 they still commanded 28% of the vote and 21 seats. 1987 was a disaster: down to 24% and just 19 seats. 1992 saw a modest recovery to 25% and 11 seats before armageddon arrived in 1997: 17% of the vote and every single seat lost. The recovery since then has been modest and, in fact, in terms of share of the vote, non-existent.
Although the wipeout arrived eight years after Mrs Thatcher was forced from power, it was, in some ways, artificially delayed. Had she remained in office to fight the 1992 election I have little doubt that the Scots Tories would have been destroyed in that election. It might have been better for the had that happened. The five year stay of execution they received has hurt them more than it helped them from 1992-97.
Scotland never took to Thatcherism. In style and substance it seemed alien to many Scots, including many Scottish conservatives. This puzzled the Iron Lady since she though the virtues of thrift and hard work she felt she espoused were values traditionally shared by Scots, Nonetheless, the impression that the Tories were an English party ruling Scotland without the consent of the Scottish people grew inexorably during the 1980s.
With the notable exception of Michael Forsyth and the St Andrews graduates who founded the Adam Smith Institute, Thatcherism found few adherents in Scotland. The Scots Tory party clung to an older, gentler, paternalistic form of one-nation Toryism. It was, in other words, very “wet”. The Scots Tories were never likely to be considered “one of us”. Paradoxically, Scotland remained a much more conservative - with a small ‘C’ - country than England, even as England voted Tory and Scotland supported Labour.
Indeed, one reason for Scottish Labour’s whole-hearted conversion to the devolution cause was a (small ‘C’) conservative desire to shield Scotland from the chill winds of reform blowing from the south. In days when it seemed that the Tories might rule Westminster in perpetuity, Scottish Labour sought comfort in the idea of a parliament in Edinburgh that would be its own plaything forever: it would be a bulwark against reform. (As in fact it has been. Scottish Labour has resisted the kind of health and education reforms Tony Blair has pushed through in England).
Scotland was a more socially conservative place than England too. The “Loadsamoney” ethos of the 1980s was many miles removed from, indeed offensive to, the douce, church-going conservatism you could still find in large parts of Scotland. This too pleayed its part in weakening the bond between the Tory party and its supporters.
Thatcher seemed - or was perceived to be - unsympathetic to the decline of heavy industry in Scotland too. Though many English factories and plants suffered as well, heavy industry was never as important a part of English identity or sense of self-worth as it was north of the border. The closing of the great steel mill at Ravenscraig, for instance, was a hammer blow to Scottish self-esteem.
Equally, the increasing stridency of Euroscepticism inside the Tory party, which reached its zenith in the Major years played a part in alienating Scottish voters. It made the Tory party appear to be a collection of Little Englanders whose concerns could scarcely be further from those of Scotland. (Scots, generlly speaking, are more comfortable with EU integration: after all, we’ve been part of a full political and economic union for 300 years without losing our sense of identity). When Teresa Gorman and Bill Cash were on the TV every night you could sense Scots asking one another - with the appropriate shudder - Who are these people?
Then - and much more importantly - there was the Community Charge (Note to US readers, if you’re still with me: this was a new tax, replacing unpopular property taxes with a flat fee for local services: everyone paid the same, regardless of income. It quickly became known as the Poll Tax and sparked riots and protests across the country.)
The tax was introduced in Scotland a year before it came into effect in England because Scottish Tories wanted to avoid what would have been an unpopular and costly rates revaluation. That nuance is lost in the mists of grievance. It was perceived as an affront to Scotland. A Tory government that could not command anything close to a majority in Scotland was seen to be imposing a controversial new tax on Scotland, treating the country as a guinea pig, ripe for experimentation. The charge was unfair but unstoppable. A cry of “Can Pay! Won’t Pay!” swept the land. The Tories were doomed from this point on. Dumping the Iron Lady offered a respite, but no more than that.
Through all this, the Tories seemed unable to grasp the fact that much of Scotland had bought the idea that the country suffered from a “Democratic Deficit”: ie, that it was unjust that Scotland be ruled as a party it had not voted for. The idea that this could be true, of, say, Tyneside too cut little ice: Tyneside wasn’t a full and equal partner in the Union.
So, the demand for home rule grew steadily. The longer the Tories remained in power at Westminster, the worse their prospects in Scotland became.
Backed by every significant Scottish newspaper (and the BBC) the devolution cause became the settled wisdom of Scotland’s chattering classes. By setting themselves against it, the Tories put themselves in a place where they could, however unfairly, be termed the “anti-Scottish” party. They were an English party whose comeuppance would come soon enough. Prior to the 1992 election it was generally believed the Tories would not have enough MPs to staff the Scottish Office. What would happen then?
Those hopes proved misplaced. After his against-the-odds triumph in 1992 John Major said he would “take stock” of the constitutional question. But, perhaps encouraged by the belief that putting the case for the Union front and centre had worked, Major’s reforms were laughably inadequate. Reconstituting the Scottish Grand Committee and repatriating the Stone of Scone to Edinburgh Castle were gestures that were never likely to satisfy what was a clear and growing demand for constitutional change. The Tories had lost the argument in Scotland, but could not bring themselves to admit it.
So the apocalypse was delayed until 1997. The Tory vote fell to 17% and all 11 Scottish Tory MPs lost their seats. It was a massacre from which the party has yet to recover. Indeed, although the Conservatives have regained representation at Westminster (1 MP!) and at Holyrood (thanks, initially, to proportional representation) they have failed, in two British and two Scottish elections, to win a greater share of the popular vote than they did in 1997. By that measurement, then, the revival, if there is to be one, seems as far away as ever.
How can this be surprising? The Tories campaigned against resurrecting a parliament in Edinburgh in the referendum that followed their 1997 evisceration. Once that was passed with a healthy majority, the Tories were in the awkward position of having to turn around and ask for people to send them to serve in an institution they believe should never have been created. Unsurprisingly this did not prove persuasive.
Thus the Tories have spent the last decade apologising and trying to prove that they are “nice” people. You could have a Tory round to tea without terrifying your kids. They’ve been forced to admit the obvious time and time again: they accept the existence of the Scottish Parliament, have no desire to repeal its existence and are determined to make it work. Despite these protestations, however, the electorate has not forgiven the Tories for their 20 years of opposition to home rule.
All this helps explain why Scotland is such barren territory for the Conservative Party. The Tories set themselves against the most popular policy of the day, finding themselves on the wrong side of the most fundamental political issue of the last 20 years. That allowed them to be portrayed as anti-Scottish at a time when the bonds of the Union, forged in war and Empire, were loosening anyway. This was not the smart place to be.
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