The diverging paths

Now that the dust has started to settle on the outcome of the Westminster election and the SNP’s not so shock defeat, it’s time to reflect on what the result holds for the future – not just in Scotland but across the rest of the UK as well.

The first takeaway is that turn out in this election was shamefully low. In no small measure that was due to the failures of political parties which did not motivate and enthuse their supporters to turn out and vote for them. The Labour party won the election, not on the basis of any great popular enthusiasm for Starmer’s centre right managerialist project, but due to widespread disgust with a corrupt and chaotic Conservative government which has presided over the evisceration of public services and standards of decency in public office.

Even so, the opinion polls grossly overstated the size of the Labour lead and Starmer won his landslide victory on the back of just over one third of the votes cast in a shocking indictment of the first past the post system. To absolutely no one’s surprise Anas Sarwar has announced that he is not after all a fan of changing the first past the post system to something more proportional, and this has nothing at all to do with the fact that in Scotland the system gave the Labour party twice as many seats as it would have won under a fairer system. He even had the unmitigated gall to claim that the Labour party doesn’t make the rules, it just plays by them.

Neither of those claims are true. While it is true that the Labour party didn’t make the rules for the general election we have just had, it is now the governing party and possesses a crushing Commons majority. The Labour party could absolutely introduce a fairer electoral system in future elections, but it chooses not to as that would prevent it from winning an absolute majority of Commons seats on a minority of the popular vote.

Equally the Labour party only plays by the rules when it suits the Labour party. The rules of elections are long established but that didn’t prevent Anas Sarwar from denying that pro independence parties had won a mandate for a second independence referendum in the Scottish elections of 2021.

For its part the SNP failed to motivate independence supporters to come out and vote SNP with a lacklustre promise to use an SNP victory to ask Keir Starmer for another independence referendum. Everyone and their granny knew that the answer to that was going to be no. Vote SNP to get slapped in the teeth yet again is not a winning electoral strategy. The other tactic error made by the SNP was to frame the election as a chance to get the Tories out when in the Scottish context it really ought to have been concentrating its fire on the duplicity of Starmer’s Labour party promising change when all it was really promising was a more efficient delivery of austerity.

However in the longer term what will prove to be significant in this election is the growing political divergence between Scotland and England. Between them, the Tories and the hard right English nationalists of Reform UK won 41.2% of the vote in England, easily beating the 34.4% won by Labour in England. By contrast, in Scotland the combined Conservative and Reform UK vote was just 19.7%.

What this means is that when – and it is a question of when not if – the right wing English parties regroup, they will then be in a very strong position and well placed to win a Commons landslide of their own, and as we learned from the recent election they do not need to come close to winning a majority of the popular vote in order to do so. That regrouped English right wing is likely to be further to the right than the current Conservative party and will adopt the an English version of the authoritarian right wing populist nationalism which characterises the US Republican party.

For its part the Trumpist Republicans are likely to grow even louder and more hysterically strident in their condemnations of ‘liberal democrats’ following this weekend’s assassination attempt on their cult leader. Never mind the Trumpist assault on the Capitol on 6 January and its persistent lies about the 2020 election. Never mind the plot by some followers of Trump to kidnap the Democratic Governor of Michigan, their war on women’s reproductive rights and on minorities. And let’s not mention Project 2025, the Republican plan to turn Trump into a dictator and round up the enemies of the far right. It’s ‘woke liberals’ who are the real threat.

That’s how fascism arrives, by painting itself as the victim of imaginary enemies who must be ruthlessly extirpated in order to protect the people – or at least the white male Christian heteronormative people, who are the only ones who matter. What happens across the Atlantic makes its way over here eventually and the rise of the far right is no exception. Britain is uniquely vulnerable to fascism with the first past the post system and few effective checks and balances on the leader of the party which commands a majority in the Commons.

Following the recent general election, the Trumpist authoritarian hard right now has a foothold in the House of Commons. Farage has made no secret of his desire to form the real opposition to the Labour government. He will certainly cause the battered and bruised conservative party to move even further to the right, the leading candidates for the Tory leadership, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, and Suella Braverman are all on the hard right of the party and any one of them is likely to seek a rapprochement with Farage.

For a Scotland which is politically much further to the left than England, the eventual political demise of the Starmer project will render the UK politically incompatible with prevailing views in Scotland. The United Kingdom will fall apart due to its inability to accommodate the diverging politics of its two largest nations.

That said, the SNP cannot simply sit back and await the eventual demise of the British state. It must takes steps to ensure that it is able to take advantage of the inevitable unpopularity of the Labour party when that time arrives. It can do that by ditching the failed strategy of asking Westminster for another referendum and adopting some variant of the de facto referendum tactic. It can also do it by challenging Labour from the left. Starmer’s move to the right opens up political space for the SNP to do that. Amongst other things that means rejecting out of hand the calls of a certain ex MP to ‘rethink’ opposition to Trident. Support for independence is strongest amongst younger voters and those are the very people who need to be motivated and energised. As England moves politically further to the right, it’s by creating a vision of a more left wing future in an independent Scotland that the SNP can energise and enthuse the pro independence voters it needs.

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