After last September’s referendum – when Scotland voted convincingly to remain part of the UK – the leaders of Britain’s main political parties in London might have thought their Scottish troubles were over for a while.
They were wrong. Buoyed by the huge wave of popular enthusiasm generated by the pro-independence campaign, the Scottish National party – the key force behind the referenthdum – has seen its support continue to surge since it lost the vote.
In March, membership of the SNP passed 100,000 (Scotland’s population is only 5.3 million), taking the party to two thirds the size of the centre-right Conservatives and half the size of centre-left Labour, Britain’s two major parties.
The SNP’s increased strength could give it a decisive influence over the UK election result on 7 May. The polls are predicting the party could win more than 50 of Scotland’s 59 parliamentary seats – an astonishing, once-in-a-generation turnaround. The party has never held more than 11 seats, and in 2010, at the last election, it won six.
The SNP surge
Political experts will be arguing for years over the precise reasons behind the SNP’s dazzling rise, though there is no doubt it has benefited from the momentum of the impressively energetic “yes” campaign in the months and weeks before the referendum.
Some blame decades of Labour complacency in Scotland, or credit the SNP’s leadership under first Alex Salmond and now Nicola Sturgeon for the party’s success. The SNP has also set out to position itself as being more progressive than Ed Miliband’s Labour on austerity, which has hit parts of Scotland hard since the economic crisis of 2008.
What does this mean for the election?
The biggest question is what it means for Labour, since for decades it has dominated Scottish Westminster politics and sent scores of MPs to parliament from Scotland.
In 2010, Scotland elected 41 Labour MPs. But such is the scale of the recent swing to the SNP that even some of Labour’s safest seats are now in danger of being lost. That includes the seat of Douglas Alexander, the man who may be foreign secretary under a future Labour government.
The centrist Liberal Democrats – currently in coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives – are also facing humiliating losses at the hands of the SNP, with the nationalists potentially claiming nine of their 11 Scottish seats.
The Conservatives only held one Scottish seat in 2010, meaning that in terms of lost seats, the huge surge in SNP support will not substantially affect them. The party might, indeed, be expected to welcome the nationalist surge because of the wound it looks set to inflict on Labour.
But the Conservative party has troubles of its own, and has been unable to capitalise on Labour’s Scottish slump with a growth in its own support in England. For months, the polls have consistently suggested that it is extremely unlikely either Labour or the Conservatives can win enough seats to lead a majority government, meaning whoever is the next prime minister will need the support of one or more other party to govern.
Another coalition?
The Liberal Democrats would be keen to form another coalition government, and it’s possible they could work with either the Tories or Labour.
But with the Lib Dem vote itself heavily squeezed – on current projections, they may lose half of their current 57 seats – the party is unlikely to have enough seats to play kingmaker on its own.
Instead, the SNP will almost certainly be the third biggest party after the vote, giving them a huge amount of power in the post-election negotiations.
How this will differ from 2010
Critically, the buoyant SNP will make a very different negotiating partner than the Lib Dems did in 2010. The party’s huge support has allowed Sturgeon to play hardball even before the vote – ruling out supporting a Tory government in any way, for instance.
That means that even if the Conservatives are the biggest party on 8 May, they will be forced to try to cobble together support from the Lib Dems and some of the other smaller parties, probably including the unionist parties in Northern Ireland, to get them over the line.
Sturgeon has called on Labour to form an anti-austerity alliance with her party and “lock David Cameron out of Downing Street”, though she has also made other demands in return for the promise of support.
So will we see a Labour/SNP coalition?
No. Ed Miliband has said Labour will not form a formal coalition with the SNP, because there were “big differences” between the two parties.
The SNP said “nobody was proposing” a formal coalition, which would not be its preference anyway.
What could happen instead?
One alternative would be for Labour and the SNP to come to a looser agreement to work together on a basis known as “confidence and supply”.
This would see Labour forming a minority government, having come to a deal in which the SNP would support it on key legislation – including the Queen’s speech, which sets out a government’s legislative programme, and the budget – but could judge other proposals on merit and reserve the right to vote against Labour.
But even that arrangement might falter over the question of the renewal of Trident, Britain’s nuclear submarine programme – something to which the SNP is implacably opposed. Sturgeon has said the issue is a “red line” for her party and that “any confidence-and-supply arrangement would require the non-renewal of Trident”. Miliband is equally adamant that he will not negotiate on his commitment to renew the country’s nuclear capability.
Is there a third option?
Labour could potentially form a minority government, alone, without any kind of formal deal with the SNP, gambling that the nationalists would not vote against a Labour Queen’s speech or budget. That could collapse the government, triggering another election, and risking the Conservatives winning – something the SNP would be reluctant to be blamed for.
So does all this mean Scotland might try to break away again?
Good question. Salmond insisted before the September referendum that it would settle the issue of independence “for a generation”, a phrase repeated by David Cameron after the result.
But Sturgeon has repeatedly refused to rule out including a referendum in the SNP’s manifesto for the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections.
Despite the party’s huge electoral support in the polls now, there’s no guarantee that a second referendum would produce a different result than the last time (Sturgeon was booed by some of the audience in a TV debate between Scottish leaders in early April when she refused to rule out another vote).
The SNP in Westminster
It is worth remembering, finally, that while Nicola Sturgeon, as SNP leader, has been taking the lead on her party’s campaign in the debates and elsewhere, she is not running for a seat in Westminster. Sturgeon sits in the Scottish parliament, which has some powers and is Scotland’s first minister.
Instead, the SNP’s large group of MPs after the election could be led in Westminster by Angus Robertson, who performed the role in the last parliament, or potentially by Salmond, who resigned as first minister after losing the independence vote and is contesting a national parliamentary seat on 7 May.
