One way or another the major UK parties have been pretty rough in their election campaign efforts to neutralise or exploit the likely consequences on Westminster of an SNP-dominated contingent from Scotland. Have they been too harsh?
Probably. David Cameron has called the SNP “threat” unprecedented, but even he must know there is a very clear precedent: the disruptive impact of the Irish nationalist bloc of MPs on later Victorian Westminster, right up to 1914. But is it a helpful guide in very different circumstances in 2015?
An Ed Miliband minority Labour government might face the same plight as William Gladstone’s fourth premiership (1892-94). His party had fewer seats (272 to 313) and votes (45.41% against 46.96%) than the defeated Tories and their Liberal Unionist allies and was dependent on 81 Irish MPs. It was not a coalition and didn’t last long.
But Gladstone’s government had survived a House of Lords veto (419 votes to 41) on his second Irish Home Rule (ie devolution) bill. When it fell in 1895, it was on the same rearmament budgetary issues that had prompted the old boy (by then 84) to step down as prime minister the previous year. Following a landslide victory – 411 seats including 71 Liberal Unionists – Lord Salisbury’s Tories resumed their 20-year dominance that had started when the Liberals split in 1886 over Gladstone’s first Home Rule bill and promptly fell from power.
Tricky, isn’t it? For my money, George Dangerfield’s 1935 classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England (you can still find it on Amazon), remains the most gripping account of the Irish parliamentary drama – one of multiple crises that engulfed the Asquith Liberal government of 1910-14, also dependent on informal Irish nationalist and Labour support. But here’s a briefer flavour of earlier disorders that includes 41-hour filibusters, cut telephone wires and – from Fenian extremists outside – a cabinet murder (1882) and two Commons bombs in 1883.
But Ireland’s relationship with its big neighbour was always more unequal than Scotland’s, exacerbated by conquest, absentee land ownership and religion. Scotland retained much devolved power after 1707 and has had “Home Rule” since 1998 (Wales, too), the kind Asquith finally enacted in 1914. The war meant it was never implemented and was overtaken by bloodier events, partition and civil war in 1921. So the comparison is poor.
In any case, is copying 19th-century Irish nationalists in causing irresponsible mayhem in the SNP’s strategic interest when it is trying to persuade wavering Scots (“switherers” in the jargon) to support independence? Certainly not, as this scholarly exposition explains. Most new SNP MPs will be inexperienced, not all will love or want to follow the wily Alex Salmond. Ed Miliband would hold some aces too: do you want to vote us down with the Tories and trigger a new election like you did in 1979 to Jim Callaghan, Nicola and Alex?
After all, Nicola Sturgeon says she and Salmond want only to restore some leftwing backbone and conviction to Labour’s centrist ideology and save us all from unpopular austerity, even though their own record is spotty. Don’t smaller parties, in formal coalition or not, use what muscle the parliamentary maths offers them to influence ruling parties all over Europe?
To take the rarely mentioned prime example of regional clout, what is Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU)? It is Angela Merkel’s permanently rightwing regional ally, always trying to put some backbone into those wishy-washy North German Protestants and Rhineland Catholics who dominate the majority Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin.
Every country’s political culture and habits are different. But even the most insular Briton vaguely knows that most EU states routinely run on coalition lines. Even leftist Syriza in Greece has a rightwing nationalist party, the Independent Greeks, in the mix, maximising its opportunities to be unkind to migrants.
Conversely, in Spain the Catalan nationalist “convergence” bloc – whose goals are now closer to the SNP’s demand for independence but which is actually quite fragmented at home – prefers always to sit in opposition in the Cortes in Madrid, seeking to extract more concessions from the national government. And so on.
Much closer to home, many people remember the historical alliance between mainland British Tories and their cousins in the Ulster Unionist party. It grew out of 19th-century all-Ireland unionism, opponents of the nationalists. As the UUP, it survived the partition of 1921, dominating Ulster’s old, gerrymandered Stormont parliament until it slowly broke up under pressure of the Troubles and direct rule from London in the 70s. But the on-off link with the Tories was only broken in 2012.
All the while the Tories were happy to trade UUP votes for influence when they needed them for decades, John Major’s fragile regime (1992-97) included. Jim Callaghan’s minority Labour government (1976-79) was equally happy to do business. So it may prove again after the 2015 election, with the DUP and Sinn Féin seeking to trade as well as the Greens, Ukip and Plaid Cymru.
Come to think of it, did not the Liberals decide to support Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government after the new Tory PM, Stanley Baldwin, called a pointless election in December 1923, losing 86 seats but remaining the largest party with 258 seats to Labour’s 191 and the Liberals’ 158? They did, though you would not think so today after listening to Nick Clegg on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme wriggling about who he might support on Friday. MacDonald lasted nine months and fell on a confidence vote (304 to 191) after a red scare. The Tories came back.
Ahead of polling day it suits the parties to be evasive about the parliamentary maths that will dominate all their calculations once voters have spoken. Sturgeon can only afford to utter the m-word because of her unusually strong position in Scotland. Nicola mania will eventually go the way of Clegg mania and other enthusiasms. “All political careers end in failure,” explained Enoch Powell, whose own mania moment in 1968 faded too. It will be destroyed by the inevitable disappointments of life, which overwhelm the delusion every generation has that theirs is special. It is fun while it lasts.
But nothing lasts for ever. If that is true of the big party dinosaurs, it is also true of their small cousins.
That is another lesson of the past. Syriza’s mishandling of negotiations with its EU creditors is already hurting it. In Germany, the seemingly indestructible CSU (“the only thing to the right of the CSU is the wall”) finds itself outflanked on the right by the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the anti-immigrant street movement, Pegida. Its repositioning antics have caused merriment.
In Catalonia, the nationalist leader, Artur Mas, is being outflanked by radical and grassroots sovereignty movements that are pushing him further than he had previously gone towards seeking full independence from Spain – which has its own grassroots anti-austerity movement in Podemos. As with Scotland, that is a challenge for Spain and the EU.
And then there is Canada, where the Parti Québécois has a long and chequered history of fighting for independence for the francophone province. In 1995’s referendum it got to within one percentage point of a win. Last year, it pushed its luck with a secular “charter of values” which struck many as an attack on minority faiths. It lost power to the Liberals. But it never gives up.
Like Catalonia, it is a separatist saga we should all study to find out what might happen next in Britain. Tricky, but interesting. We’ll pull through.
