Forget Independence – Scottish Unionists should scrutinise the SNP’s abysmal record in power

We have now had a Parliament in Scotland since 1999. Next year’s election will be the sixth contest to return MSPs to its chamber.

Before the creation of the Parliament, Donald Dewar, who would go on to become the first Scottish First Minister, declared that the Parliament would make for “the better governance of Scotland and the United Kingdom.” He was an honourable man and there is no reason to think he didn’t believe this. There is, however, good reason to believe he was wrong.

The Union has been weakened and there is little evidence that Scotland has been better governed than when Scottish Affairs were the responsibility of the Secretary of State and the Scottish Office. Capable Scottish Secretaries were usually able to persuade Prime Ministers that Scotland had distinct interests which must be recognized and accommodated.

The one thing to be said for the devolved Parliament is that the administration has always been formed from a party or parties with considerable electoral support. It may therefore be considered more democratic than Scottish government was when Tory Governments held very few seats in Scotland. On the other hand, it has followed the example of Westminster and greatly weakened local government by pursuing centralising policies. Consequently, local democracy has withered.

The administration drawn from the new Parliament was first styled the Scottish Executive. This was deemed insufficiently grand and Alex Salmond as the SNP First Minister changed it to “the Scottish Government”. Our national comedian Billy Connolly had mocked Holyrood as “a pretendie parliament”. So now we had a pretendie Government. 

However, if you pretend long enough people will often come to accept the pretence as reality. The present First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, less of a showperson than Salmond but more capable than he was of presenting herself as a serious politician, has acquired an authority no previous First Minister has possessed. This year, taking advantage of the Coronavirus outbreak, and much helped by the blundering and inconsistency of the UK Government, she has been behaving as if she was – already? – the Prime Minister of an independent country. 

One might here pause a moment to remark that since the Scottish NHS was always devolved, and was the responsibility of the Home and Health Department of the Scottish Office, the Secretary of State in pre-devolution would have been as able as Ms Sturgeon has been to differentiate the Scottish response to a pandemic from the English one. Labour’s Willie Ross, who carefully kept all Scottish affairs away from the Cabinet, would have told the Minister of Health in London: “How Scotland deals with this is my business, not yours.”

Next May’s election is important. Polls predict a handsome win for the SNP and recent ones show that there is now a majority for Independence. The SNP would certainly claim that victory was a mandate for a new referendum while Unionists seem ready to fight the campaign on a “last chance to save the Union” platform.

There are 129 seats in the Parliament. 73 are constituency ones, decided on the Westminster first past the post system. 56 MSPs are elected on Regional List, where you vote for a Party, not an individual. The system was devised to achieve a balanced Parliament. Briefly, the more constituencies you win in any of the eight regions, the harder it is to win List seats.

The first two elections saw the system working as expected. No party had a majority, and we had Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions. Then things went wrong and the SNP started mopping up the constituency seats. What had happened? To put it simply, the SNP was a national party for Scotland while Labour, though regularly winning two-thirds of Westminster seats, wasn’t. The SNP won constituencies in all eight regions. In contrast, there were constituencies in the Borders, the North-East and the Highlands where Labour never won seats. In some Labour came third or even fourth.

The SNP has a clear advantage in the constituencies: it is the only Independence party, while the Unionist vote is split between Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The Unionist parties could conceivably get 51% of the constituency vote without winning a single seat.

So, what’s to be done, if you value the Union?

Some call for electoral pacts. Unionist parties would then field no candidates in seats where they can’t possibly win. A free run would be given to the Unionist Party with the best chance of taking the seats. This would be Labour in much of the West of Scotland and Central Belt, the Tories in the north-east, the Borders and some suburban city seats, the Liberal Democrats in constituencies they now hold and where they have been historically strong.

Theoretically, this may make sense. Practically, it’s head in the air stuff. Some voters might willingly transfer their votes. Many wouldn’t. Despite Boris Johnson’s success in attracting Labour voters in England’s Red Belt, Labour in Scotland is terrified of an overt association with the Tories and experience makes Liberal Democrats wary of such an association too.

There’s another objection to the proposal: it implicitly accepts that the battle is to be fought on the ground of the SNP’s choosing. The Nationalists want the election to be about the Union and a second Referendum. Why play them at their own game?

Instead why not ignore the constitutional question, ignore the arguments for and against a Referendum?

It’s an election for the devolved Scottish Parliament, an opportunity for the first time in five years to hold the SNP Government to account, to ask that it should be judged on its record in office since 2007

Heaven knows there’s enough to criticize, enough to attack: the sad decline in the standard and quality of our schools; the inadequacies of the Health Service; economic failure and ill-judged government investment; the emasculation of local government and the readiness of the SNP administration to overrise local planning decisions; the cronyism which sees quangos stuffed with SNP supporters; bad laws proposed and sometimes enacted which infringe civil liberties such as the proposal, happily struck down by the courts, to give every child and teenager a State-approved guardian, and most recently a draconian and absurd new Hate Law.

The list is long and this is a government which has largely escaped proper scrutiny. One should add to the charges its handling of the Coronavirus epidemic, where mistakes have been as common as in England but passed over with characteristic complacency.

In short, the question to be put before the electorate is not “do you want another referendum?” It’s simply: do these people deserve another five years in office? Surely, they have been in power too long for any good they may have done – and there’s not much of that.

As I say, a Government should be judged on its record, on what it is and has done, not on what it promises.

It’s not Project Fear the Unionists should embark on. It’s something more immediate: Project Indignation.

Have they the stomach for the fight?