AS the Holyrood elections loom, the Conservative strategy is starting to become clear. The Tories know that there is about as much chance of them winning the Scottish elections and installing Douglas Ross as first minister as there is of Jacob Rees-Mogg performing backing vocals on a Primal Scream track, so they are not campaigning in order to win.
After all, it’s pretty difficult to come up with a convincing argument for your belief in the importance of a strong Scottish Parliament – and your belief in the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine their own future – when your most prominent politician is buggering off shortly after the elections in
May to take up a cushy seat for life in the unelected House of Lords. Dished out for services to cheeky photo ops, posing with an assortment of barnyard animals and other non-sentient life forms like Oliver Mundell.
From the well-appointed expense account that this platform provides, Ruth Davidson will continue to pontificate on Scottish democracy. She will continue to have the power to influence our public life and the laws and policies which govern us – free from the pesky need to bother with getting votes from any Scottish people or having to pretend that she does actually care about the concerns of ordinary punters. In doing so, she’s only putting into practice what the real Conservative policy for Scotland is. That policy is to discount and ignore what the people of this country vote for in democratic elections.
Because they cannot win the next Scottish elections the Tories are instead fixated on trying to deprive the SNP of winning an outright majority by themselves. The electoral system used in Scottish Parliamentary elections is designed not to produce majority government and has succeed in this in every Scottish election bar one since the introduction of devolution. Because the Conservatives cannot possibly win by themselves they now seek to change the rules and to set an artificially high benchmark which is extremely difficult for any single party to achieve.
The Tories are attempting to hoodwink the people of Scotland into believing that if there is no majority SNP government after May’s election then Scotland will have accepted the Conservatives’ view that there should not be another independence referendum any time soon. They will pursue this even if there is still a pro-independence majority in Holyrood made up of the SNP, the Greens and any other minor pro-independence candidates who manage to get elected on the list. The Conservatives will discount all these other parties and the votes that they have received and will claim that by some quirk of pro-Conservative and anti-independence magic they don’t really count.
In this they will no doubt be assisted by the BBC and the anti-independence media which will be trying to promote the narrative that the failure of the SNP to win an absolute majority in an electoral system which is designed to make it extremely difficult for a single party to win an absolute majority will mean that they somehow lost the election even if as seems likely they remain the largest party by far. Even if there is still a healthy pro-independence majority in the next Scottish Parliament. This is simply an updated version of the same ant-democratic trick that Westminster played on the people of Scotland with the infamous 40% of the total electorate rule which enabled the forces opposed to Scottish self-government to discount the majority for home rule in the referendum of 1979.
The Conservatives and Labour are both desperate to conflate support for independence with support for the SNP. Yet the reality in Scotland is that support for independence crosses party political lines. Not only is support for independence one of the key policies of the Scottish Greens, there is also a substantial minority of Labour’s remaining support in Scotland which is sympathetic to the idea of independence. Pretending that independence is purely a party political issue and solely an interest of the SNP makes it easier for the anti-independence parties to resist the democratic demand of the people of Scotland for another independence referendum.
The real benchmark that the independence movement must surpass in the elections in May is to return a pro-independence majority. It is irrelevant whether that pro-independence majority is won by the SNP itself or by the SNP in combination with the Greens and any other pro-independence MSPs from minor pro-independence parties who manage to pass the threshold required for election. Whatever the anti-independence parties claim, the support of these other MSPs for independence does not magically cease to be valid just because they don’t represent the SNP in Holyrood.
We can expect other dubious claims from the Conservatives and their British nationalist allies in an attempt to discredit a pro-independence majority after May’s election. Not only will they focus solely on SNP support in the election to the exclusion of everyone else, they are also likely to point to the vote share of the pro-independence parties as a percentage of the total who are registered to vote, in effect claiming that those who couldn’t be bothered to vote were really expressing their opposition to independence.
READ MORE: Tories ‘preparing for a Scottish independence referendum’ despite rhetoric
The anti-independence parties don’t get to shift the goalposts after the event. In an election the winner is determined by the amount of seats won, not by the vote share. The Conservatives won a majority in last December’s General Election despite gaining just 43.6% of votes cast. Yet we can expect the Conservatives to argue hypocritically that they are justified in rejecting demands for another referendum because only X% will have actively voted SNP this coming May.
In May Scotland faces an election, not a referendum. In that election the SNP is not the only party standing on a platform of support for another referendum. The only bar that needs to be surpassed in order to demonstrate that the people of Scotland want another referendum is for any combination of pro-independence parties to win a majority in that election. The Conservatives would fiercely reject any suggestion that if they fail to win a majority in May then Scotland has rejected opposition to another independence referendum.
After all, they are not the only party opposing a referendum. We must just as forcefully reject any attempts by the Tories to suggest that the failure of the SNP to win an outright majority in May means that Scotland has voted against another referendum even if there is a pro-independence majority in Holyrood.
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