Politics is strangely quiet in Scotland now, but the promised referendum on independence is set to stir the parties up
Scottish politics is in a curious state. With the party conference season over and the Parliament back at work, there is still a sense that Holyrood is marking time.
This is partly because, six months after the Scottish parliamentary elections, neither Labour nor the Scottish Conservatives have a leader. Labour’s Iain Gray agreed to stand down after the party’s worst election defeat in 80 years, but a successor has yet to emerge.
The Scottish Conservatives are in an even worse position. They don’t know whether their party is going to survive. The top candidate for their leadership, left vacant by Annabel Goldie in May, is the deputy leader Murdo Fraser. His main electoral promise is to abolish the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party and replace it with a Right-of-centre organisation with a new name.
Meanwhile, Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, is lord of all he surveys, having an absolute majority in the unicameral Holyrood Parliament. The nationalists have been making all the running, planning laws on sectarian misbehaviour at football matches, introducing alcohol levies on supermarkets and making plans for gay marriage that have ignited the ire of the Roman Catholic Church. Controversial issues all, but without any opposition to speak of, there is very little chance of these being subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
And Scotland is in a hiatus in a more fundamental way also. Top of the in-tray for the new leaders will be the referendum on independence.
Most expect the ballot in 2015. That might seem a long way off, but it isn’t really because the campaign has already started. Alex Salmond has proposed that voters should be given more than one option: the status quo, federalism (‘devolution max’) or full independence. The nationalists obviously favour leaving the UK altogether, but they realise that this is still a minority view in Scotland. The vast majority of Scottish voters, according to the polls, favour a Parliament with greater powers of taxation. This is sometimes called ‘independence lite’ because defence, currency and foreign affairs would also remain with London.
Now, there is a Bill currently before the Westminster Parliament that goes some way to meeting this objective. The Scotland Bill was based on the work of the cross-party Calman Commission set up by the Labour leader Wendy Alexander in 2009. It proposes to split income tax 50:50 with the Scottish Parliament and give some minor powers over new taxes.
This Bill is now being moved by the UK’s ConLib coalition government, which is hugely unpopular in Scotland. But as things stand, Labour would seem to be obliged to go into the forthcoming referendum campaign supporting the Bill’s provisions, even though this would mean allying with the Tory-led coalition in the ‘status quo’ camp.
Some prominent Labour MSPs, such as former minister Malcolm Chisholm, are saying that Labour must adopt ‘devolution max’, if it wants to get back in the game politically in Scotland. Only by distancing itself from the Tories and offering greater powers than those in the Scotland Bill, will Labour be able to recover some of the ground lost in the Scottish election in May. But this means disowning its own policy on the Calman reforms and opting for something much closer to independence. And Murdo Fraser’s ‘new Tories’ are also likely, if he wins, to move to the ‘devo max’ position.
Either way, it seems inconceivable that the Scotland Bill will be the last word on Scottish devolution. Scotland may be about to take another long step down the road to autonomy, as the Salmond steamroller rolls on.
