A Son of the Rock

The Tory governments of the 1950s and early 1960s did not alter the framework that the post-war Labour Governments had erected. During that time, at the 1955 General Election, the Tories in Scotland secured a majority of the total Scottish vote. There was almost no disparity in electoral behaviour across the UK. Slightly earlier, at the time of the abduction of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey in 1951, the SNP had only 0.7% support.

Yet today the Scottish political landscape has changed utterly. There is a Scottish Parliament – run by the SNP! – and Scottish Tories have great difficulty securing a so-called “first past the post” (a term I detest) seat in Scotland.

So what happened?

By the 1960s the binding force of the Empire had gone, the sense of togetherness engendered by two World Wars, where Britain was in great danger – more so in 1940: though almost as much in WW1, where Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe, “he was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon” – had slipped away. Deference (“the toffs know how to run things”) was no longer the force it was.

All three of these factors apply equally to England, though.

Was it just that the mere presence of the SNP gave an apparently safe home to voters who could not stomach switching all the way from Tory to Labour? The rise of the SNP – especially in rural areas; Labour dubbed them the Tartan Tories – combined with a resurgence of the Liberals certainly helped erode the Conservative vote.

Thatcher, though, completed the process. She was always a Little Englander; a trait most Scots tend to find unattractive. She also appeared hectoring and strident. Scotland’s macho culture wasn’t going to accede to that. She also tore down that framework I mentioned earlier so that only an emasculated NHS was left.

It is possible Scottish voters became canny at working out which candidate could win and adopted tactical voting as a means of keeping Tories out. In this regard doctorvee gives evidence that the Tory vote in Scotland actually still holds up; but then the Liberal vote also did not die away completely in the UK in the inter- and post-war years, while their representation did.

It could be argued that Scotland is – or was – a conservative (small c) country. It was certainly so when I was growing up. (So many things are different now.) That that conservatism came to be expressed in voting for Labour is not quite an irony. As far as Scotland is concerned, Labour were always conservative. And New Labour never reversed the effects of Thatcher’s policies – because they never tried to.

Despite that there is, though, still the strain in Scotland’s culture that emphasises community. It is exemplified in the phrase, “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns.” I think it was a sense of this communitarianism that Scots were hankering for in rejecting Thatcherism and, later, despite the old ties, Labour.

A more significant factor in the SNP coming to power, though, was familiarity breeding contempt. After a time voters in the UK seem to get tired of the same old lot in power and hoik them out. And Jack McConnell was hardly inspiring as the face of Scotland. The hoo-has surrounding the cost of the Parliament building and the demise of Henry Mcleish didn’t endear the administration to the public either.

It’s nowhere near time for, “Come in Alex, you’re time’s up,” – folk are not yet fed up with the SNP – but it will come.