Across the entire United Kingdom, this is the last battle for the Union.
This side of the border, it’s also another battle in the war for Scotland – and a critical one.
There are only two votes to play:
- the vote for an SNP monopoly of Scotland and certain independence in the short term – with this the last United Kingdom General Election to be held;
- the vote for a breathing space for the Union – selecting one candidate for your vote in each constituency – whichever one is likely to come second to the SNP – and trying to carry them to a win.
The difference between the Scottish tactical vote and the English tactical vote is that in Scotland, constituency by constituency, this vote can be for any of the pro-Union parties; but in England, also constituency by constituency, this vote can only be for either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats.
A vote whose primary concern is to protect the Union for another day is an anti-SNP vote in Scotland and an anti-Labour vote in the rest of the UK.
The SNP has attached itself to Labour inextricably, like a tar-baby – and will take it down beyond Scotland. This is Labour’s own fault for not clearly dissociating itself from the SNP at the outset in this campaign. This was an incredibly damaging – deliberate – decision.
In Scotland
The survival tactic for the Union applies to every single constituency.
It will require Labour voters – the most most blindly unaware of the risk to the Union – to vote Conservative in some constituencies and Liberal Democrat in others – where they privately know their own party candidate will not defeat the SNP.
Where this is the case – any serious pro-union Labour voter is wasting their vote and wasting the Union in a last ditch attempt to try to stem the local tide against their party.
There used to be a joke that a Scotsman casts his bread upon the waters – when the tide’s coming in.
Tactical voting is casting your vote upon those waters when the tide is coming in. You may help to elect a non-Labour but pro-Union candidate in your own constituency – but you will see Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters elect Labour pro-union candidates in other constituencies – and where you could not have expected them to win in the present circumstances.
This is a tactical not a political decision – to be made in extremis, if you understand that, without question, this is the point where the Union may be lost. It may be lost anyway – in the very next battle after this one – but a reprieve this time will give it the opportunity to reform for another and a better life.
The view from the ground
At the moment all the currents are flowing in the same direction for the separatist SNP, in a powerful flood tide threatening to sweep Scotland and beach the UK.
The force of this tide, as with any army, is the massed infantry – and the SNP infantry is massive as well as massed. These troops are uninterested in the issues. They are on nothing less than a crusade, focused only on a win. They see a win on Thursday as the last threshold they need to help their newly adopted party to cross before they get to forge onwards in one last push for a mandate for indyref 2 in 2016 – and then certain independence.
We are seeing evidence of the stirrings of frustration in these ranks just now. They have striven mightily in this campaign – sparing themselves no effort. They know what they’ve achieved. They know they’re on a roll for Thursday.
They know that this election is not a mandate for independence – but a mandate for indyref 2 to be in the 2016 SNP manifesto. They know they’re going to deliver that mandate on Thursday. And they know they can deliver the big one in May 2016.
Now that they’re certain of this, they are aching to hear the war cry of ‘indyref 2 for 2016′ to drive triumphant energy through the coming sweep on Thursday.
Some are starting to wonder why their Leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is not uttering that cry. Some are saying: ‘We just need the signal’. There is a suppressed fear of the inevitable betrayal of the infantry by the officers.
They will deliver on Thursday because that is their immediate target and nothing will deflect them from it.
But after that?
With the expected 50+ SNP seats in Westminster, they will need to hear that cry – that signal – to keep them motivated for another year; or they will start to wonder when and if they will hear it.
These troops are not tacticians, neither interested in nor bred for the time consuming delicacies of the political gavotte. They are the warriors, the force without which nothing is possible. They want to storm up Calton Hill and plant their battle colours on it now.
The view from the heights
The SNP hierarchy are aware that 2016 is not the ideal time to ask the indyref 2 question – not because they think that they might not get the answer they want but because they see the indications that this would not be an auspicious time to go solo.
The collapse of the price of oil puts clear limits on the ability to spend.
Beyond the current low price of oil, there is the hard truth that this slump – driven by a glut of cheap oil and gas – has highlighted the intrinsic fragility of much of the UK Continental Shelf, which has been kept on a form of life-support beyond its useful life.
The slump has also accelerated the end of some of the assets. During this crisis, wells and pipelines are being closed that will not be opened again. Jobs are being lost with the best of those affected relocating to other parts of the global oil and gas industry, leaving a depleted available workforce.
Assets with some potential left in them are being sold wholesale by the bigger players to the smaller ones, who have the ambition but lack the depth of financial reserves to ride out what may be a prolonged enough slump.
These small players are also highly unlikely to make the level of profit from unswept assets to enable them to pay the costs of decommissioning when that time comes. This will leave those who sold to them facing the legal responsibility of this decommissioning – and so on down the chain of owners, if necessary, to the original ones who have nowhere to pass the parcel.
All of this means that even when the price of oil comes back up to a reasonable level, the North Sea will not again reach the level of pre-slump activity.
And the general public has now seen for itself the truth of the instability of oil prices that makes oil an unsound factor to calibrate into a budgetary policy. This was argued during indyref 1 – and discounted untested by the evangelised.
Any future prospectus for an independent Scotland is going to have to show alternative sources to support the serious spending power promised. To date, the First Minster and the Finance Secretary talk repeatedly and glibly of ‘growing the economy’ without offering any specific indications of how and to what effect they plan to do that.
The SNP hierarchy has also now learned by experience that they are not yet ready to exercise successfully the full responsibilities of indy.
John Swinney has made mistakes – as with the changes he made to business rates which he had to roll back because their impact on businesses was damaging in the post-2008 economy.
Swinney has also had a hard time of it in assembling effectively the necessary systems and structures for handling nothing more than the collection of two minor taxes to be devolved to Scotland – the aggregates tax and the landfill tax.
This has been an educational experience in understanding just what would be needed even to have a go at ‘Full Fiscal Autonomy’.
And that was before the Institute for Fiscal Studies did the analytic diagnosis that showed that ‘Full Fiscal Autonomy’ would knock an annual £7.6BN hole in Scotland’s £70BN annual budget – nearly 11% of it which Liberal Democrat Leader, Willie Rennie, has rightly said is an unacceptable proportion.
And ‘Full Fiscal Autonomy’ is still a long way short of meeting the full governmental and administrative responsibilities of indy solo.
Then there are the serious failures to deliver a successful education service, a successful and trusted police service and a health service capable of meeting its A&E waiting time targets.
It’s not hard to see why the hierarchy are chewing the cud on 2016; a sound increasingly audible to the infantry, now ashore and encamped in the foothills to indy.
Between a rock and a hard place
The SNP hierarchy are caught between a rock and a hard place, leaving them no real room to exercise any choice and – therefore – leaving the Union in its weakest ever position.
The momentum for 2016 will be beyond control by Friday 8th May. But it’s not the ideal time for the cautious Sturgeon and Swinney.
The choice is binary.
They can let the infantry have their heads – because those guys can deliver success on indyref 2. But S&S know that this success will deliver to the SNP hierarchy a particularly tough assignment in getting indy-for-real up and running reliably, because any hitch will frighten the cavalry and the hostages taken in the battle.
If they give the infantry the signal to go, they will get indy, their raison d’etre – but it’s prematurity may be a poisoned chalice.
Alternatively they can stall 2016 and try to persuade the infantry, stoked for victory, that patience is wiser. But the infantry are not driven by wisdom. If they were they wouldn’t be the infantry. They’d be the officers. They are made for action, not waiting. Patience won’t cut it.
Some may hang on but many will drift away – angry, disillusioned, feeling used and betrayed. Some are already wondering if this is to be their fate.
In this scenario those who leave will not be recoverable. Once bitten. They have worked their socks off to put the SNP on the launch pad for orbit. They have earned the right to be the rocket for that lift off. They are ready for it – even if the rocket is not.
Alex Salmond would have had no problem with this situation. Always the buccaneer, he would have ridden the tiger. He’d have loosed the troops with no thought for the consequences, only – like the troops themselves – for the achievement of the ultimate ‘up yours’ win and a quick departure from ‘Westmonster’.
This isn’t Sturgeon’s way and it is certainly not Swinney’s; but what can they do?
If they deny the infantry the prize of their hard earned momentum, they may throw away the only real chance ever of getting independence.
And if they go with the flow, the dream may die the hard way – in practice – taking the Union with it.
The rest of us can only watch and vote tactically on Thursday to play for time – and that time may be critical.
If enough seats are saved from the maw of the separatists this week, the cautious Sturgeon and Swinney are more likely to try to persuade the engine to idle for up to 15 years. The danger will then have passed – with enough time to allow the Union to carry out the necessary constitutional reform and mould itself into a unique and exciting federation – which would leave little incentive for separatists to bring down.
In England
Voters in England, the largest and most economically powerful member of the Union, who value the texture, variety and potential of union, have no more choice than do voters in Scotland if they want to see it get a breathing space for possible survival.
They too have to vote tactically in the same way and for the same reason as pro-Union voters here. But they have a short spectrum of choice.
If voters in England vote for Conservative or Liberal Democrat candidates – on a constituency by constituency basis, there is a chance – no more than that – of another United Kingdom General Election in five year’s time.
It is hard to believe, in the current circumstances, with the stability of the economy a powerful Conservative card and a weak Labour Leader, that Labour can drop 40 seats or so in Scotland, win enough in England to replace that number – and then win still more to emerge with the largest number of seats.
If voters in England vote Labour, they can only create a Labour group that will be unable to govern without the SNP. And that can only mean that in another five years time the Union will be toast.
The SNP has absolutely kippered Labour. They will smoke it out in Scotland and fillet it in England.
A Miliband administration in this context would be a glove puppet with the SNP’s hyperactive fist up its back. Apart from the cost of deals for support, that fist would be Deputy Leader of the SNP, Stewart Hosie’s. And he would be taking his instructions from Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who will not even be a member of the House of Commons, with no responsibilities to it.
Hosie, of course, is the man who took up with gusto Alex Salmond’s promise to Westminster, to ‘hold their feet to the fire’ [and Il Magnifico may well be in the House himself]. Hosie is also the man who very recently made overt the degree of sadism with the SNP would ensure Labour’s compliance with its own demands.
He said that the SNP could vote for a Labour Queen’s Speech – and then vote down, item by item, its consequent budgetary measures. For example they might vote in support of a Labour Queen’s Speech which contained a pledge to renew the Trident CASD nuclear deterrent – but then, in the House, vote down the financial allocations which would make that renewal possible.
This would keep a minority Labour government on life support for a public audience to watch its inability to function.
Nicola Sturgeon is also talking about a legal challenge to the constitutional legitimacy of a Conservative UK government elected almost exclusively from England. She fails to see the parallel problem of a Labour UK government elected everywhere but Scotland, if her party eviscerates Labour here, as it promises to do this Thursday.
The only ‘constitutional’ difference between these two outcomes is that the SNP would accept one incongruity but not the other – which like the SNP’s annexation of Scotland to themselves, would see them also – and bizarrely – annexe to themselves the constitution of the United Kingdom.
Unless tactical voting becomes a majority taste for the time being, the separatist SNP will find the means to keep the House constantly distracted from the normal business of government by constitutional challenges of one kind or another – always pressing for the reform of an institution they cannot wait to leave.
And when they do, they will leave an incoherent hash-up of ill-considered reforms a weak and terrified Westminster will have voted through willy-nilly [like the coming disaster of the Smith Commission recommendations] – whose publicity value fpr the SNP outweighed their constitutional utility for the UK about which the SNP, of course, cares not one jot.
But Scotland will be gone and the aggravated mess the rest of the Union will then have to address will be unimaginable.
The bottom line for pro-Union Labour voters in England is that if they vote tactically and accept that Labour will not govern in this term, there will be a UK General Election in five years time, where their party may achieve some recovery and seats in Scotland and where they will be free to fight for their own party’s victory.
If the current Union goes, Labour’s ability to govern what is left will be unlikely.
And for 7th May – for pro-Union voters in Scotland and in England:
JUST DO IT – and be proud of it.
