Some more Scotland-centric deep background info:
Whatever Happened to Tory Scotland? by David Torrance.
Quote:
Most people think of Scotland as a Labour country – Red Clydeside,James Maxton, Tom Johnston and all that. But there is a very good argument for saying that Scotland is, or was, a Conservative country, at least in the twentieth century. The Tories were the most successful party in Scottish electoral politics from 1912 till 1964. In the general election of 1955, they won a majority of votes and a majority of seats – the only party in Scotland ever to have achieved that double. Even the SNP landslide in the Scottish parliamentary elections did not match that. So what happened? Where did Tory Scotland go?
Most people would answer that Margaret Thatcher killed the Scottish Tories with her poll tax, and she certainly helped bury it, as most of the contributors to this collection of essays concede. But that does not entirely explain the collapse of Scottish Conservatism as a political movement. That was all their own work. They failed to secure their own core vote. (sounds familiar, doesn't it? SLab take note! MGR1) The key is in the name because, of course, the Scottish Tories only became the Conservative Party in 1965. Before that, they were the Unionist Party and that was a very different kettle of political fish.
The Scottish Unionists that won all those elections in the twentieth century were very odd fish indeed. For a start, the Union referred to is not the 1707 Union between Scotland and England, but the 1801 Union between Ireland and Great Britain. The origins of the Scottish Unionist Party lay in the split of the Liberal Party in the 1886 when the Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, moved his Irish Home Rule Bill. The Liberal Unionists split and went on to form the Scottish Unionist party with the Tories in 1912 to oppose home rule for Ireland. Which means that the Scottish Tories were actually Ulster unionists all along. What made the SUP so successful was its appeal to the Protestant working class of West Central Scotland, who felt threatened by the migration of half a million Catholic Irish workers before the Great War.
Did the workers of Red Clydeside really vote for the sister party to the Ulster Unionists? Yes they did, many of them. The Scottish middle classes were too small to sustain a party of the Right on their own in Scotland, so they relied on working class votes. Richard J. Findlay suggests that, because most of his historian colleagues are sympathetic to Labour, there has been a disproportionate focus on the history of Red Clydeside and Labour politics in general.The Scottish Unionists have been hidden from history. Gerry Hassan, a writer who comes from the Left, agrees with Findlay and scolds the Scottish intelligentsia for perpetuating what he calls ‘the most enduring ’”Scotch Myth” that has grown up in modem Scotland, after kailyardism, tartanism and Clydeism: the myth of anti-Tory Scotland.’ That is quite a mouthful. Mind you, there is nothing mythical about the anti-Tory vote in Scotland today. The Conservatives lost all their Scottish MPs in the 1997 general election, when their share of the vote fell to a historic low of 17.5%. As John Curtice, Scotland’s leading psephologist, points out, they still have not recovered, despite the Tories turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher. In fact, their share of the vote slipped even further in 2010 and ‘11. And there is no sign of any halt to the Tory decline.
He asks why there has not been any Tory revival since the coming of the more liberal Conservatism of David Cameron. Is this because Scotland is an inherently more left wing country? Curtice’s answer is that Scotland is more fond of redistribution of wealth than England, but not by a very great deal. Certainly not enough to account for the minuscule Tory vote in Scotland. Curtice suggests that it must be the national question that accounts for the failure of the Tories to thrive in what is still, in all senses of the word, a fairly conservative country.
Alex Massie says the Tory problem is simple. There is, he says, no right wing party in Europe that is not a patriotic party, and the Tories are not seen, in Scotland, as a patriotic party. As every writer in this volume seems to agree, including the Conservative contributors, the Scottish Tories messed up over Scottish identity and by opposing devolution, and they are suffering still. Now, of course the Tories are a patriotic party, it is just that they are stuck with British patriotism at a time when Scots just do not feel very British any more. Not only that, Scots want more power for the Scottish parliament, so this is not like the old romantic Tory patriotism of John Buchan, the Unionist MP and novelist who famously said that every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist. The content of Scottish identity politics has changed. It is not about kilts and tartan any more but power.
I would have to say that none of the contributors to this collection offer much hope for a revival of the Scottish Tories, even under their gay, young, woman leader, Ruth Davidson. She started off on entirely the wrong foot by saying that there should be no more talk of powers for the Scottish parliament. She has since changed her tune, but few are likely to be convinced that the Scottish Tories have turned into modern political patriots. Their last chance was when the Davidson’s leadership challenger, Murdo Fraser, proposed scrapping the Scottish Tory name altogether and becoming a fully fledged home rule party. But it seems too late for that now. Perhaps the most intriguing observation in this volume is in the introduction by the journalist David Torrance. He says that the old Scottish Unionist Party in the twentieth century was ‘the SNP of its day… all it lacked was a 1950s version of Alex Salmond’.
The First Minister would claim to be horrified by that observation. After all, the SNP constitution bars the party from entering any electoral alliance with the Conservatives. But Torrance has a point. The SNP is patriotic, well organised and has prominent business support just like the old SUP. My suspicion is that, whatever he says publicly, Alex Salmond is well aware of his potential support from the patriotic right wing in Scotland, which is why he was so keen to back the Scottish regiments and abandon opposition to Nato. Whatever happened to the Scottish Tories? They turned into Scottish Nationalists. You read it here first.
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So, to sum up, the Conservative Party itself has never done well in Scotland. Frankly, they're seen as Anglo-Centric and fundementally hostile to Scotland's interests (as is UKIP, TBH). What Tory Scotland voted for was the Scottish equivalent of the Ulster Unionist Party, with all the connotations of sectarianism that came with it. Protestants voted Unionist, Catholics voted for Labour, particularly in the Clyde Valley/Greater Glasgow area.
The decline of the SUP is generally considered to have begun with the Suez Crisis. That fiasco effectively demolished one of the three pillers that the SUP was built on - the Empire itself. Then you have the general decline in religious belief which has left Scotland as the most non-religious part of the UK. That was piller number two gone. Currently, the third and last piller, the Union itself, is looking a little shakey. Undoubtably, that's a slight issue for the SUP's successor, the Scottish Conservatives.
Another issue that affects things up here is the political clout that Glasgow and the surrounding area has by virtue of having over 40% of Scotland's population within it's boundaries. Glasgow views itself as left wing, therefore, to control Scotland politically, you have to tack leftward enough in order to get Glasgow to vote for you.
To put things in perspective for those south of the border, it's the equivalent of Liverpool and it's environs making up nearly half of England's population and it's political preferences being the dominant force in English politics.
Mike. |
