Analysis: SNP victory
Thursday night’s vote signifies three things: The slow electoral death of the Labour party, the chasm dividing Scottish and English politics and the emergence of Scottish independence as a tangible possibility.
By-elections come and go and they all appear very important at the time, but rarely do they have repercussions which genuinely shake the political landscape for years to come.
Tonight is different. If any government has ever faced an out-and-out announcement of its own demise, Labour is facing it tonight. The party has lost its safest seat in the country. No Labour MP can honestly look at his or her seat now and feel anything but a nervous shudder of apprehension. That’s important, because personal apprehension is what political mutinies are made of.
The prospect of an actual leadership bid is unlikely. This is partly due to timing – parliament is in recess and the party conferences are still a couple of months away. But it’s also for strategic reasons. Two unelected prime ministers in a row smells unconstitutional, in that vague way that people refer to the non-existent British constitution, and anyway there’s no obvious candidate. The mere fact front benchers like Burnham or Harman are talked about as leadership material is proof of that.
But what tonight will do is reduce Gordon Brown’s authority to miniscule proportions. It was low when he lost Crewe and Nantwich and lower still when he relied on the DUP to force the 42-day detention plans through, but by this stage it’s barely existent. The summer will be spent planning the fightback, one that will presumably begin with his speech to the party conference at the end of the summer. It’s difficult to envisage how any kind of fightback could conquer this level of disaster, and one can safely presume it won’t.
The Scottish National party (SNP) has enjoyed a boost it has never experienced before. The party have never won a by-election in government. This is an un-travelled road for the nationalists, but one that leads to a place they very much like the sound of. It’s a measure of how well the party has done that the Tories came in third place without any improvement in their vote. The SNP squeezed every centre-left party around and the Liberal Democrats suffered at their hands just as Labour did.
Tonight’s vote confirms what many people have suspected for a long time – that the politics of England and Scotland are travelling in markedly different directions. As England becomes increasingly attracted to a centre-right party, echoing trends across western Europe, Scotland has made its preferences clear: The winning party pursued a consistent centre-left approach to government. They have ignored calls for university tuition fees, they have scrapped prescription charges, they have made their objections to Westminster’s foreign policy more than clear and they have made considerable political capital out of Labour’s efforts to pursue a courtship of middle England. Mr Brown’s decision to invite Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, his spectacular own goal on the 10p income tax rate and recent reforms to welfare have obviously not gone down well in this poor area of Glasgow. Labour is now paying the price in Scotland for what it thought was necessary to retain power in England. The supreme irony is that it’s Mr Brown’s sheer Scottishness that makes many English voters mistrust him.
This national divide is more evident tonight than it has been for some time and it extends beyond simple political analysis. The SNP’s new-found momentum, all of it following explicit manifesto promises of a referendum on Scottish independence, indicates not just a second term for the party but also a willing audience for their message when a referendum finally does come.
Whether that will be enough to make Scots vote for independence is still uncertain. They have certainly shown few signs of being that committed to the cause before. But there is little doubt now that the referendum would result in vastly expanded powers for the devolved Scottish parliament, at the very least.
Mr Salmond said this by-election would create a ‘political earthquake’. It’s obvious now he was more right than he was wrong. But Labour’s disaster tonight will not just affect the party. It may well have consequences for the country as a whole.
Ian Dunt
