Opinion polls suggest the SNP could hold the balance of power at Westminster after the general election. Who might deliver the nationalists from EVEL?
It is a prospect to send Tory MPs fulminating to the shires and Labour unionists to the barricades. Alex Salmond, the defeated former leader of the Scottish National Party, swanning into Westminster in May and dictating the future government of England, even bidding to be deputy prime minister.
It sounds like a political fiction. The nationalists were defeated, weren’t they, in the independence referendum last September? How could a party that doesn’t even vote on English legislation end up participating in its government?
Well, if the SNP return with 20 to 40 MPs, as the polls indicate they very well might, then they will almost certainly be participating in some way in the formation of the next UK government. That’s electoral reality. Westminster has become a parliament of minorities, and neither of the big two – Conservative or Labour – appear to be in any shape to govern unaided.
The SNP may have lost the referendum, but it has gone from strength to strength. Under its new more youthful leader, Nicola Sturgeon, party membership has nearly quadrupled since September. The SNP is now the third largest party in the UK.
Scottish Labour collapsed in disarray as the SNP established a 20 point lead in the opinion polls on Westminster voting intentions. According to one of the UK’s most authoritative polling analysts, Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, ‘every Labour seat in Scotland has to be regarded as currently at risk’.
Would the voters of England accept the nationalists calling the shots? The morning after the referendum, David Cameron promised to introduce English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) precisely in order to reduce the influence of Scottish MPs in Westminster. They can vote on English legislation while English MPs have no reciprocal rights on devolved legislation at Holyrood.
But the way things are going, not only will Scottish MPs remain able to vote in the Commons after the May general election, they could actually determine the very government of England.
Salmond, who remains influential, has said the SNP will not form a coalition with the Conservatives, which makes it more likely to join a Labour-led coalition. As a condition of supporting Ed Miliband, Sturgeon will demand deliverance from EVEL and more tax-raising powers for Holyrood. Salmond has said that when he returns to Westminster he will abandon his party’s former self-denying ordinance in refraining to vote on English bills.
Some are now suggesting that Ed Miliband would find this too high a price to pay for winning the keys to No 10. That the Labour leader would rather govern as a minority or even form a grand unionist coalition with the Tories.
What then if David Cameron offered the SNP further home rule in exchange, not for a formal coalition, but a ‘confidence and supply’ deal not to bring down a minority Tory administration? Could Sturgeon turn down an offer of ‘true’ home rule for Scotland?
The SNP did a deal with the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament in 2007 allowing Salmond to become First Minister of Scotland at the head of a minority administration. Might the nationalists again be prepared to deal with the devil in Scotland’s cause?
Alex Salmond is a canny operator, who models himself on the Irish political leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. He is a gifted opportunist who changes policy to meet the political needs of the moment. Only a fool would try to predict the outcome of this most extraordinary general election. All we can say for certain is that British politics is now more unstable than at any time since the days of Irish Home Rule before the First World War.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald
This opinion piece was first published in the January/February issue of Public Finance magazine
