On Thursday, at long last, the campaign for Holyrood 2016 will be put out of its misery. Unlike the three most recent national polls in this country, it has been an unloved thing, failing to capture the imagination of the public and seeming to have been a chore for the professional politicians who have embarked on it these past six weeks or so. History will remember it as a fuel stop for the SNP to pick up supplies and reinforcements on its journey towards independence or irrelevance.
Prior to this one, in every big vote in Scotland since 2011 it had seemed that we had been invited not merely to watch history in the making but to participate in it. In the days leading up to the 2011 election, while few were daring to predict the SNP’s subsequent landslide, nevertheless there was an atmosphere in the latter days of that campaign that made you think something was changing in the way politics were being conducted in Scotland.
For the first time in many, many years there was a feeling abroad that, for once, the voices of ordinary people might actually count. In the ensuing SNP landslide, the people who ran Labour in Scotland failed to detect that the wind was changing. This election was as much a judgment on Scottish Labour’s terminal sense of entitlement as it was an endorsement of the SNP.
In the political life of the nation here and there lights were appearing and, in the last few months before the independence referendum, Scotland caught fire. Even amid this conflagration, Scottish Labour had still not awoken from its slumbers. In its disdain, bordering on outright scorn, for the little people who were running amok in the referendum lay the seeds for its utter annihilation in last year’s Westminster elections.
If the Holyrood 2016 campaign has been memorable for anything, it will be for the realisation that the people have still not forgiven Scottish Labour for the contemptuous attitude of its leaders and officers towards its own people on the ground. And so the SNP is set fair for a third successive term of government with a second successive overall majority.
This in itself will confer a little piece of history on this otherwise unremarkable campaign. Since the dawn of parliamentary democracy in the UK, I can’t think of any other election where one party has been more assured of both victory and a working majority.
By the end of the next term, the SNP will have governed Scotland for 13 years. Its popularity will pass of course, as all things do, and much of it has been gathered in the person of Nicola Sturgeon. It is the opposing parties’ misfortune to be encountering a woman whose charisma and qualities of leadership make her one of the finest politicians this country has produced. Such are her personal approval ratings that the SNP’s commitment to social justice has been able to survive some tough questions, but only just.
Thirteen years is a long time, though. Very few administrations are granted such a stretch in office and, with it, the opportunity to improve the lives of the majority of a country’s citizens. Margaret Thatcher used her 13-year reign significantly to improve the lives of a small minority of Britons only, using the secret bounty of North Sea oil revenues and monies accrued from selling off national assets.
For those gilded few, her reign could be considered to have been a success, and it’s only in recent years that those duped into thinking they too had been allowed to share in the dividend are discovering that it was an illusion. The vast social cleansing of London to allow the development of millionaire apartments has made the capital one of the world’s money-laundering destinations. This has been Thatcher’s real legacy.
The 13-year reign of New Labour that followed Thatcherism was a heaven-sent opportunity to restore some balance but it was squandered on an empty enterprise to maintain power at all costs rather than to change society. It reinforced Thatcherism when it should have been unstitching it.
These next four years should permit Sturgeon the time she needs finally to tilt the balance of society in favour of the many rather than the few.
Scotland may claim to be a fair, equal and socially democratic country but these words crumble in the face of reality. Vast tracts of Scotland are still owned by a few desiccated old aristocrats or by unknown global capitalists in British tax havens. Justice is still largely dispensed by a privately educated elite. A 20-year mortality gap still exists between the richest and poorest neighbourhoods of our major cities. Underneath all this, its tracks visible between every crack and crevice of civic Scotland, the local authority gravy train runs free. Scotland’s 32 local councils, a ridiculously bloated number for a country of this size, provide countless hundreds of self-serving officials with ill-deserved six-figure salaries and early retirement plans.
The dismal argot that political parties deploy in their election manifestos is designed to manage expectations and to ensure enough room to wriggle free of any forensic scrutiny in the future. The SNP’s 2016 effort is no different and is suffused with words such as “fairer”, “equal”, “transformation”, “prosperous” and “potential”. I don’t doubt they mean what they say and that their hearts are in the right place. But these will become viable only if they think the unthinkable and do what has never been done in modern Scottish or UK society.
This means a proper programme of land reform that will slowly loosen the grip of unearned privilege. It means cutting Scotland’s local authorities by half and ending the culture of financial entitlement that rots them from the inside.
In education, it means funnelling our best teachers to schools in those neighbourhoods where parents can’t afford £30-an-hour tuition fees. And it means forcing our universities to even up the odds for poorer students in the face of such an unfair economic advantage.
By 2020, I challenge Nicola Sturgeon to be able to look the hundreds of thousands of Scots living in poverty squarely in the eye and say: “After 13 years of government, my party made your lives better.”
