Don’t rule out odd alliances as election campaign hots up

Interesting article in the Herald. Certainly the Scots Conservatives would benefit from cutting the ties from London and a change of name. It is their attachment to the union however which is genuinely holding them back. From the nationalist perspective it would help our cause to have more than one party which advocates independence. To have it advocated from both a left and right perspective might be useful because the reality is that no-one can accurately forsee what policies would prevail in an independent Scotland. JOE

If, as the song has it, it’s a long, long time from May to December, then the opposite is also true.

Either way, by the end of September the days are growing very short indeed, politicians of all parties feel, and it’s time to start making preparations for what they’ll be doing in six months.

So we had Iain Gray giving his broadest hints yet that Labour might attempt to form a minority government if, as the polls suggest at the moment (though remember, again, it’s a long, long time etc), the party has the largest number of seats but falls short of a majority in Holyrood.

It is worth noticing, however, that he did not rule out coalition with the Lib Dems, even though the party is in coalition with the Tories at Westminster. Meanwhile, we had Annabel Goldie declaring that polling analysis put the Scottish Conservatives in “a strong, clear and consistent second place”. Well, it is the business of politicians to maximise their options and talk up their prospects.

One interesting aspect of Westminster having discovered (some time after Scotland) the realities of coalition government, and the way in which apparently odd alliances can lead to more imaginative and productive policies, is that there is almost no possible configuration of government which one could rule out at Holyrood with certainty.

Even the most bizarre pairing, a Labour/Tory coalition, is very remotely conceivable, in circumstances where a referendum on independence became the urgent, dominant political issue. But that seems unlikely. The equally strange prospect of the Tories shoring up a Nationalist administration is, however, one which has a good deal to recommend it, for both parties.

The Scottish Conservative party needs to do something imaginative. The Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie suggested yesterday that it should cut its ties with the national Tory party altogether.

Mr Cameron’s attempts to remove the “toxic brand” aspect of Conservatism failed completely here, though it is a policy which won round much of Middle England – a position which, furthermore, may well be consolidated if Ed Miliband’s leadership moves Labour leftwards. The “Respect for Scotland” agenda did no good at all.

There has been no electoral return for the Scottish Tories from the support they have given the Scottish Government on a range of issues (diverging from the party’s national stance), whether it was backing free care for the elderly or opposing tuition fees. Nor have they profited from the measures they have secured by this pragmatism – extra police officers, a new approach to drug rehabilitation, further cuts in business rates, a £60 million town centre redevelopment fund.

It may simply be impossible to sell anything with the Conservative label on it north of the border, though the paradox is that many of the party’s current priorities emphasise localism, devolution of powers and grass-roots initiatives, all of which ought to appeal to supporters of greater Scottish autonomy.

If Mr Cameron is serious about the existence of a “new politics” ushered in by the Westminster coalition, he might welcome the solution once suggested by Murdo Fraser, and content himself with support in the House of Commons from an entirely separate, distinctively Scottish, centre-right party.

There used, of course, to be such a thing. It was the Unionist party, and it is possible to track the decline of support for the centre-right in Scotland not – as is the usual analysis – from the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, but from the moment that the nomenclature was abandoned, and the Conservative label adopted. As late as the 1950s, some little time after the Red Clydesiders now held to be the fons et origo of “natural Scottish political sentiment” (ie, a whining, slavish dependency on the state), there was a natural centre-right majority in Scotland.

Until that point, too, there was – despite the name – a considerable strain of Nationalist sentiment amongst Unionists; the sort of attitude embodied by figures such as John Buchan. There was then, too, a good deal of centre-right support for the SNP; I suspect that there still is, particularly in areas such as Perthshire and Angus.

Of course, the Nationalists are now an avowedly left-of-centre party, but they would be wise not to rule out some form of co-operation with the Conservatives, and not merely for the fairly compelling reason that it might allow Alex Salmond to continue as First Minister even if Labour wins the largest number of Holyrood seats.

I admit that it’s unlikely that the SNP membership could bear the thought of being in a full coalition with the Scottish Conservatives (though a name change and full autonomy from the UK party might just make it less unthinkable). But the party has made much of dissociating itself from knee-jerk opposition to anything English, and it may be time for it to realise that an automatic opposition to anything which happens to be advocated by Conservatives is equally infantile.

Because the truth is that the proposed reforms of the welfare state which have been hammered out between Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne are likely to do more to help the poor than the indiscriminate profligate spending of the Labour party, which made the gap between the richest and poorest the widest ever, and left Scotland with a GDP per capita considerably lower than the EU average.

The practical lesson of having formed the government should also have impressed on the SNP leadership one overwhelming truth: that it is the Labour party’s reckless endangerment of the UK’s finances which now makes it financially impossible for Holyrood to maintain many of the distinctive policies that Scots might prefer. Though the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Nationalists may now all, in their various coalitions and governments, be imposing cuts, they are in reality the Labour party’s responsibility.

The main priority for all other political parties should be ensuring that these lunatics, who nearly bankrupted us all, should never govern again.

That may mean radical realignments of normal politics. For Scotland, the slogan “Together, in the national interest” at the Tory conference may mean an arrangement with the Nationalists which is far from conservative.

By Andrew McKie