Boris must say no to a new Scottish independence referendum

Scottish politics are intrinsically conservative. That claim might be contested on the grounds that, until the recent arrival of some extravagant lunatics on the extreme radical flank of politics in Spain, the Scottish National Party was the most left-wing in Europe; or that elements of the Scottish electorate believe Churchill used tanks to massacre thousands of miners in Glasgow’s George Square, regard Lenin as a milquetoast liberal and Trotsky as half-way to a capitalist running-dog.

Yes, Scotland is ideologically a palaeo-socialist polity, but even that is a product of its innate conservatism. For more than half a century three generations of Scots voted so consistently for Labour that the formality of elections almost seemed an expensive waste of public money. Not that wasting public money, in any other context, was deprecated by the dependency culture over which party apparatchiks such as Willie Ross, Scottish Secretary in the 1960s and 1970s, and their allied trades union barons presided.

When the permafrost of Labour hegemony was finally thawed by the lethal climate change created by devolution – the most spectacular own-goal ever scored by a British political party, due to the Kerensky-style narcissism of Donald Dewar – it was succeeded by the similarly ossified era of SNP dominance. In that context, therefore, the threatened formation of a new party – and a separatist one at that – has a revolutionary flavour to it.

Yet that is what is happening. Former Scottish Nationalist MSP Dave Thompson has announced he intends to leave the SNP to join a projected new separatist party, the Alliance for Independence (AFI). This comes a week after Kenny “Free the Lockerbie One” MacAskill MP, former SNP justice secretary, said that giving both votes – constituency and regional list – to the SNP at Holyrood elections “just doesn’t work”.

Since MacAskill is an iconic member of the Headbanger Tendency in Scottish politics it would be easy to dismiss this new initiative as just the latest separatist buffoonery. However, it is not quite as simple as that. While there has been a history of short-lived “new” parties north of the border – Jim Sillars’s Scottish Labour, Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party and even a Scottish chapter of that quintessentially Home Counties tea shoppe party Change UK – this latest organisation is different.

It is distinctive because it is being formed for one very focused purpose: to game the bizarre Holyrood electoral system to manufacture a separatist landslide with the aim of forcing a second independence referendum – “Indyref2”.

To understand its objective and assess its prospects of success it is necessary to rehearse the arcana of the system by which MSPs are elected to Holyrood. (Trigger warning: if you found the Schleswig-Holstein Question and the Barnett Formula mentally taxing, this psephological maze may not be for you).

Technically, the Holyrood electoral system is defined as a “modified” version of the d’Hondt method employed in many European countries; its remote creator was Thomas Jefferson, who introduced it as an electoral formula for the US House of Representatives. The system obtaining in Scotland was modified by Donald Dewar, who persuaded a reluctant Tony Blair to embrace devolution; a moment in Labour’s history equivalent to a death cult’s mass suicide.

Under the Additional Member System the 129 seats are divided between 73 constituency MSPs, elected on the traditional first-past-the-post method, plus 53 “list” MSPs elected according to where they are placed by their party leaders on a regional list. Every Scottish elector has two votes, one for his constituency preference and a second for the top-up list. While this is marketed as a form of proportional representation, which it is, it has an interesting see-saw effect on election results.

Basically, the better a party does in the constituency race, the poorer it fares in the allocation of list seats. In the early days of Holyrood, the Scottish Conservatives endorsed this manipulative system because they relied on it to maintain any representation at all at Holyrood. A complex mathematical formula awards consolation prizes to parties performing poorly in constituency contests by lavishing “list” seats upon them, to narrow the margins of difference.

To illustrate this with a concrete example, at the last Holyrood election in 2016 the SNP won 59 constituency seats; this weighed against them in the allocation of list seats, of which they only received four. Labour won just three constituency seats, but was compensated with 21 list seats; the Conservatives won seven constituency seats and 24 list seats. Apologists for this system point out that the eventual outcome largely reflects the popular vote; but list MSPs have no personal mandate from their “regional” constituents, contrary to British practice and tradition.

It amounts to gerrymandering and, like all rigged systems, is open to exploitation. Now, the new AFI party is designed to exploit its vagaries. By not contesting any constituency seats, it would have no first-round advantage counting against it in the allocation of list seats where, if it recorded a respectable “regional” vote, it could expect to be generously rewarded. If it could persuade the bulk of SNP voters to switch to AFI in the regional vote – or even induce the SNP not to contest list seats – its regional tally added to the SNP’s haul of constituency seats could produce a super-majority.

It would effectively amount to the SNP fighting under two different names, entering the list contest under a pseudonym, and thus virtually disenfranchising Unionist voters. It would, morally speaking, be fraudulent, grossly inflating the separatist vote. But it could work: that is the kind of hazard created by contrived, manipulative voting systems. Unionists would be foolish to write off this new threat as a chimera.

On the other hand, this apparently ingenious ploy could blow up in its inventors’ faces. It would face innumerable pitfalls. The most obvious is the unlikelihood of the SNP cooperating. The instincts of the SNP are harshly authoritarian and monopolistic: the party wants to control every facet of separatism. To surrender all prospective list seats to another organization would be anathema to SNP control freaks. If the AFI appealed over the head of Nicola Sturgeon to nationalist voters it could provoke a very bitter turf war.

What if Alex Salmond, in revanchist mood, lent his support to the AFI? That intrusion of personality politics would mean civil war among the nationalist factions. What if the list vote split erratically between SNP and AFI, reducing the latter’s prospects of cleaning up in that area of the election? The worst threat is of fragmentation. The defeat in the 2014 referendum and the dismal failure to launch Indyref2 has bred frustration in separatist ranks and such demoralization can easily lead to fragmentation.

How should the UK Conservative government respond? By denouncing, long before it might happen, the fraudulent character of any such initiative, putting down a marker now, rather than being open to an accusation of sour grapes after the event. There should also be at least suggestions of revisiting Holyrood’s flawed voting model, if it can be used to disenfranchise Unionists, since the Scotland Act, the foundation charter of the devolution settlement, is a Westminster statute.

Boris Johnson’s government, in the coming years, should expect a perfect storm of disgruntled nationalist pressure against which it must stand firm. The 2014 independence referendum was the first reconsideration of the Union since 1707; it is totally unreasonable to demand a re-run within the same generation, especially with Brexit and a pandemic creating unpredictable hazards.

The present Tory government, due to Covid, has learned to live with a policy of state largesse. While it cannot endure permanently, just as the Polish governing party has found that combining social conservatism with state paternalism is a potent electoral formula, the current trajectory of state beneficence can only contrast favourably in Scottish eyes with the Third World future offered by separation.

Scots love to twist the British lion’s tail. They will register separatist sentiments in opinion polls, at no cost, and will probably return the SNP to power at Holyrood next year. They will also, with a Boris-led government at Westminster, continue to send waves of grievance-fuelled mediocrities to the House of Commons.

What a majority of them will not do, in a shattered post-Covid economy, with living standards reduced and EU membership a past memory, is take a massive leap – not into the dark but into clearly predictable poverty – by embracing an option they have already rejected by a 10% margin at a time of greater prosperity.