Scotland the Brief

Part 3: Choosing a Future
22 Strands of Molten Cheese

A minority SNP government was elected in May 2007, and after seven months in office had increased in popularity. Independence sentiment varied in polls, but several had it at 40%, close behind devolution. Why this drastic shift in a former loyal Labour heartland? The reasons are complex, and quantitative poll-based discussions dont in themselves explain them. Scotlands clocks are set to a different time: political manoeuvre, longer-term policy divergences, changing shifts within the Anglo-Scottish relationship, and above all the way in which political contestation has energised these and reinforced a parliamentary conflict.

The record of 1999-2007 governments in economics, in which much hope had been invested, was chequered. The Lib-Lab coalitions had not diminished the high levels of real unemployment and consequent poverty, despite the expansion of micro-management in state-run concerns such as Scottish Enterprise. The stagnation of the small enterprise SME sector continued, worsened by out-of-town supermarkets and low-value-added call-centre jobs. Anger in Scotland at Labours foreign policy the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the proposed new Trident nuclear weapons combined with the price of oil rising towards $100 a barrel compared with with $10 in 1999), to stoke up discontent.

The six-week election of 2007 was hard-fought, with for the first time the SNP formidably placed throughout. The party's propaganda had been, since the glory days of 1974 and Its our oil!, amateurish: this was markedly different. The swing to the SNP (from 27 to 47 seats) was considerable, but largely at the expense of the Scottish Socialists and the Greens, who fell from 13 to two MSPs. Labour still held 46, but lost heavily with the introduction of PR to local government, retaining a majority in only two authorities, Glasgow and North Lanark, and losing control of a dense system of patronage and local power. The Liberals and Conservatives stood pat.

Alex Salmonds powerful propaganda campaign was backed by prominent businessmen, notably Sir George Mathewson of the Royal Bank and Brian Souter of Stagecoach (who contributed £ 500,000 to SNP funds) while still offering a social-democrat agenda. His coup was the decision to go for a minority government, calculating that by seizing the machinery of power while maintaining party integrity, he could consolidate the SNP advantage. Labour, which in Wales took on Plaid Cymru as partners, obliged by sulking in London. Salmond's dialogue with Gordon Brown, which started on 31 May 2007, was perfunctory, but eloquent with Democratic Unionist-Sinn Fein in Belfast and the Labour-Plaid Cymru Cardiff coalition.

In policy terms Salmond and his small cabinet moved into an obvious vacuum: the need to rebalance the mixed economy, and free it from the shackles of a collectivist oligarchy who used it as a form of outdoor relief, something that persisted from World War I and its aftermath. What endured from this time was a weak small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) level of enterprise, alongside a tendency to retreat into the fur of the big beasts the railway companies, the banks and insurance houses, the industrial giants, of which ICI was the prototype and above all the state.

Hence the deluge on MSPs of PR material from worthy causes perhaps interesting as a route of female promotion but information on or action about manufacture, innovation, and technical training did not compare with what would be available in a European industrial region. With Salmond, and his oil-economist background, the social-democratic wish-list was always balanced by a concern with the supply-side. This was a route down which the other parties were ill-adapted to go.

Coalitions like those in the 'cooperative federalism' of the German Federal Republic usually go through a pre-election compromise on spending. Party promises get suspended because of the others, letting the elite off the hook. A minority government hadnt this excuse. Moreover Whitehalls Consolidated Spending Review was severe: particularly in Scotland, where Gordon Brown calculated on the SNP government taking flak from the electors. The SNPs actions were aimed at the pragmatic goal of keeping equidistance from Liberals and Conservatives and building up a momentum freezing local Council tax, reprieving hospital departments, granting rates rebates to small businesses, ending tolls on road bridges. John Swinney as Finance Minister paid for this by reducing the budgets of state development agencies, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Expertise, widely regarded as inefficient. There was a lot of controversy over details, particularly the growth in the road budget, which was scarcely welcome to the Greens. But (lumpy) road budgets, in which expensive projects run into jams, give a cash reserve which is notoriously easy to switch short-term of course to other goals.

The recipients of careful one-to-one fixing by the SNPs Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Bruce Crawford and Chief Whip Brian Adam, the Conservatives took the bait, and carried the 2008 budget through. But the quiet confrontation with Whitehall, and possible independence, was also welcomed amongst the independent Left, long alienated from Blair and Brown, to whom independence was becoming a precondition of social democracy.

In the summer of 2007, far remote from any SNP initiative, the Labour government in London became locked in a mounting crisis through its poorly-policed expansion of the City at the expense of industrial investment, while the SNP exploited further areas of divergence with Westminster, first constitutional and then economic. On August 14 the Scottish Government published Choosing Scotlands Future, the independence white paper, beginning a National Conversation which would continue until a referendum in 2010. Was this a step too far? Even some on the drafting group regarded the exercise as going through the motions of a party commitment. Initial poll results were disappointing, but the conversation website built up.

There were still functional lacunae: Parliament only fitfully reflected the drama of the situation it had created. Outside First Ministers Questions the play of politics that Westminster regularly staged was subdued, and youth in particular (nationalist-inclined in most polls) seemed apathetic rather than energised. Yet under this it seemed to dawn on the ordinary sensual Scot that independence was less of a hindrance to good relations with England and Europe than a centralised UK constitution, or any likely variation on it. UK federalism, the pious goal of the LibDems, was not and had never been a runner. Scottish Conservatism remains moribund. Independence, qualified by Europe and what Salmond calls the social union could be based on the confidence of both players to make ad hoc deals, regardless of differences of size. This rather than federalism could fit an unequal partnership. In 2007 London had better relations with independent Dublin than it had with Edinburgh and Cardiff.

Secondly there was Salmonds detection of North Sea Oil Mark 2, or the tapping of the might of the mighty Atlantic, plus the development of carbon capture pumping the lethal gas back into the strata under the North Sea. The initiatives had been taken by the previous government, but without a coherent strategy. Salmond added a Council of Economic Advisers, also under Mathewson, with high-profile membership. Now the SNP represented a reasoned challenge to the pro-nuclear power stance of the London government, as attractive to Scotland as the partys opposition to the new generation of Trident submarines.

The Labour party, under Wendy Alexander, deemed acceptable to Gordon Brown, failed to recover. Worse than that, revelations about her campaign-funding plunged the party into internal crisis. Without success, could Scottish Labour stay together? Would its west-coast Scottish oligarchy tolerate continuing weakness? Glasgow, hitherto impervious to the SNP, was still in many respects Irish republican at base, and could move in a surprising way.

In January 2008 there was a Holyrood debate on who should control the Scottish elections, following the debacle of 3 May, when 106,000 votes were disallowed. This discredited the Scotland Office, the rump of the old administrative state. Would Holyrood Labour fight for its control to remain? It would not. The debate was brief and consensual: everyone agreeing that electoral management would have to be devolved.

At the very least the minority SNP government will produce a lastingly different Scotland. The longer it can keep up its egg-dance, the worse for the Union? Or the better the chance of these islands at last becoming post-imperial?

Scotland feels more like a different country, wrote Andrew Marr in his History of Modern Britain (2007), and London now seems a lot more than 400 miles from Edinburgh. Devolution, he concluded, did not seem to have renewed the Union, although it hadnt taken an axe to it, It is more like two pieces of pizza being gently pulled apart, still together but now connected only by strings of molten cheese. Not exactly a term out of classic political science, but you could see what he meant.