Hated rivals Labour and the SNP might have to join forces against the cuts after next year's Holyrood elections
One of the sillier silly season stories to hit the front pages in Scotland last month was the claim that senior members of the Scottish National Party had approached Scottish Labour over a possible pact after the UK elections in May. It was instantly denied, of course. Labour and the SNP are the deadliest of enemies. One Labour minister said he would rather drink ‘a cup of cold sick’ than do any deal with the hated Nats.
This story had all the hallmarks of summertime wishful thinking, but it does raise the intriguing question of what would happen if the SNP fails to repeat its 2007 victory when Scotland goes to the polls next May. There is a feeling that the nationalist experiment is drawing to a close. In the UK election, Labour stormed back in Scotland with 41 seats out of 59 and over a million votes. In terms of next year’s Holyrood election, an August poll for the Herald by TNS put the party 14 points ahead of the SNP, while two others put the parties neck and neck.
Back in 2007, the SNP won by only one seat after a campaign in the dog days of Tony Blair’s UK premiership, when Labour was disorganised and unpopular. The nationalists were aided by a collapse of the vote for the smaller Scottish parties – the Scottish Socialist Party and the Greens.
Four years on, Labour morale is restored. The party is confident that voters have fallen out of love with SNP First Minister Alex Salmond following broken promises on local income tax, student debt and class sizes.
Labour is already picking its ministers, and considering possible coalition partners, since of course Holyrood is a Parliament of minorities, where no party ever gets an absolute majority. In the first eight years of devolution, Labour formed coalition partnerships with the Liberal Democrats. But now the LibDems are in government in Westminster with David Cameron’s
Conservatives, and if there is one party Labour hates more than the SNP, it’s the Tories. The LibDems wouldn’t find it easy either. Granted, there is nothing in the LibDem constitution that would rule out coalitions with Labour in Scotland and the Tories in Westminster. But there would certainly be tension.
How could the LibDems unite with Labour in opposing cuts in Scottish public services when in Westminster LibDem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg signed off the deficit reduction measures? The LibDems are anyway expected to get a severe drubbing from Scottish Labour and SNP voters who ‘lent’ their votes to Clegg thinking that he was, well, a liberal like former leader Charles Kennedy, himself the object of a summertime rumour that he was defecting to Labour.
An SNP coalition is even less likely, of course, given Labour’s visceral hatred of nationalism. However, it might be that the SNP and Labour are forced to come to some kind of arrangement even if there isn’t a formal coalition. Labour and the SNP have many shared policies. They’re both opposed to any extension of the English NHS reforms, variable top-up fees and spending cuts. Both support free personal care for elderly people, comprehensive education and enhancing Holyrood’s powers.
There is so much agreement, indeed, that it can be hard to find things to argue about – apart from independence and that’s clearly off the agenda. The SNP is committed to an independence referendum Bill, but no one expects it to be passed.
If Labour does win, the SNP opposition will of course give it as hard a time in the chamber as it can. But the parties might find themselves condemned to work together by force of political necessity – united in the bitter battle against the ‘London Tory cuts’. So, there could be something in that silly season story after all.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald
