The Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie made a preposterous intervention in the Commons yesterday. He tried to reframe the SNP’s landslide victory in the general election as some kind of defeat, and prayed in aid the supposed fact that 55% of the Scottish people had cast a vote for anti-independence parties. (Actually, the correct figure is 54%, because the Greens are pro-independence and they took 1% of the vote, but let’s not quibble.) If taken seriously, Bowie’s point would have to mean one of two things – either a) that he thinks the first-past-the-post voting system should be replaced with a proportional representation system that might prevent a party winning a majority of seats on 45% of the vote, or b) that he regards any party that wins a majority on less than 50% of the vote as lacking full legitimacy, and thinks it shouldn’t be able to take controversial decisions without the consent of its opponents.
And yet we know he doesn’t believe either of those things. His own party won a UK majority on just 44% of the vote – a smaller mandate than the SNP won in Scotland. It is now pursuing a Hard Brexit in spite of the fact that around 52% of the UK popular vote went to parties that wanted to hold a second EU referendum with a Remain option on the ballot paper. If Bowie was being consistent, he would regard the election outcome as having deprived the Johnson government of any moral authority to proceed with its Brexit plans – but instead he seems to think that it was actually a stonking mandate for a Hard Brexit.
A four-year old child could spot the contradiction in Bowie’s stance. In fact, a foetus could probably spot it. Even a reasonably bright goldfish might not have too much difficulty. Why, then, hasn’t the mainstream media done its job and ruthlessly exposed the Tory hypocrisy? In fairness, there’s been the odd honourable exception like Bernard Ponsonby on STV’s election night programme, but in general journalists have taken the legitimacy of the Tories’ UK-wide mandate as read, while repeatedly calling into question the legitimacy of the SNP’s superior mandate in Scotland. That simply isn’t sustainable if the likes of the BBC want to avoid being seen as blatantly biased. Self-evidently, either both mandates are 100% watertight or they’re both open to question. Which is it to be, guys?
Incidentally, Bowie was missing the point in another way as well, because 65% of the vote in Scotland went to parties (the SNP, Greens and Labour) that support the principle that the Scottish Parliament should be able to hold an independence referendum if it so chooses. At this stage, that’s the only mandate the SNP are actually claiming – the mandate to hold a referendum. It’s a bit pointless for the Tories to now claim that a vote for Labour didn’t count towards that mandate, given that they spent the entire campaign warning that a vote for Labour was a vote for an indyref to be held next year.
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Apologies if someone else has already made this point, but it strikes me as a bit rich that the so-called Labour moderates are making such an issue of the fact that Jeremy Corbyn won slightly fewer seats in this election than Michael Foot did in 1983. That isn’t a meaningful comparison, because Labour have lost Scotland since Foot’s time, and that happened on the watch of the moderates themselves (when Ed Miliband was leader in 2015, to be specific). Corbyn actually did a bit better south of the border than Foot did, and that’s how he should probably be judged. OK, there was nothing inevitable about Labour only winning one Scottish seat last week, but if the moderates think that some kind of New Labour-type leader could have won more than a handful of Scottish constituencies, they’re deluding themselves.
And it’s all very well for the moderates to say that Labour has to be less ideological and move towards the centre ground where the voters are, but in fact Corbyn seems to have learnt that lesson in Scotland far better than they have. He’s at least taken some steps (however imperfectly) to make his peace with the Yes supporters who used to be Labour voters, while the “moderates” clearly feel that maintaining purity on Labour’s hardline British nationalist line is more important than winning elections. Ian Murray said as much himself – the Scottish Labour party destroyed itself in 2014 to save the Union, and it should destroy itself again now for the same reason.
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I’ve expressed my worries over the last few days that the SNP leadership might prove too cautious to bring about an independence referendum if the Tory government refuses a Section 30 order. But here’s a more positive interpretation.
The conventional wisdom is now that the 2024 election is unwinnable for Labour. I’m not actually sure that’s right, because electorates across the Western world have become more volatile in recent years. (Witness the Canadian Liberals jumping from third place to an outright majority in 2015.) But nevertheless the perception is that the Tories are in power until at least 2029, and that ought to concentrate minds in the SNP. There’s no point in them playing the waiting game for a Tory defeat in 2024 that they don’t think will actually arrive. If they know that sooner or later they’re going to have to overcome Tory obstructionism on an indyref by some means, it might just as well be sooner.
