By Kirsty Hughes
This article was first published on Kirsty Hughes’s substack: https://kirstyhughes.substack.com/p/semi-detached-general-election-in.
As the pre-general election campaign hots up, the polls still project a massive Labour landslide. And so, several commentators are turning to contemplating questions such as whether a Labour government needs a better opposition than a collapsing, much-shrunken Tory party will provide, or whether the Tories will really implode for a long time or revive under an even further right leader, or how far or fast Keir Starmer might move on closer EU-UK relations.
There are, of course, plenty of candidates for taking the Tories, however shrunken, even further towards the far right. Next week, for example, Suella Braverman will be in Brussels for the ‘National Conservatism’ conference speaking alongside, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
But, given the scale of Labour’s lead, there is little interest amongst London-based columnists as to who will be Westminster’s third party after the upcoming election – the SNP still or instead the LibDems? The two recent big MRP polls from YouGov and Survation cast rather unclear light on this question – showing the SNP might shrink to 19 MPs (YouGov) or stay fairly strongly at 41 MPs (Survation), in the latter case still the third party at Westminster but not in the former case.
On the EU, generalisations continue to abound about Starmer’s limited room for manoeuvre to improve EU-UK trade – and suggestions that a Labour government would look to re-join the customs union this week, were rapidly shot down by Labour.
There is little in all the London-based analysis and commentary so far to show any interest in the general election in Scotland. Fair enough, some might say – Scotland is only 8% of the population and will provide a total of only 57 MPs.
But what then happens is that the discussion about key issues, and on the state of the parties and their policies, ends up presuming that only Labour and Tory positions and debates matter, and that they are UK-wide. Yet England is not the UK. And the Scottish election results will be interesting for what they tell us, most of all, about Labour and SNP fortunes.
Semi-Detached Campaign?
But what we are also clearly going to see is a different campaign in Scotland from Labour. How different is going to be interesting.
Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has already been given more leeway over Gaza than shadow cabinet colleagues in the last six months. Last week, he joined calls for a ban on arms sales to Israel – a position Keir Starmer and David Lammy have, shamefully, yet to get to.
But there are surely limits to how far Labour can go in Scotland to disagree with key tenets of Labour’s Britain-wide or England and Wales campaign. Sarwar has opposed the two child benefit cap but Starmer and Rachel Reeves will not commit to abolishing it. Starmer dropped the £28 billion for major green investment months ago now. Labour politicians, candidates and campaigners in Scotland will look silly and be an easy target for the SNP if they diverge much from Labour’s stated positions on climate, the economy, benefits, the EU. Perhaps they will wave the union jack flag around a lot less here than in England. But they can’t and surely won’t argue for the UK to re-join the EU or its customs union or single market.
A film on how to make Brexit work better was launched by the FT last week. It suggested there is no need or appetite on the Labour side to talk about Brexit, let alone suggest re-joining the EU – marginal improvements are the issue of the day. There was no mention of Scotland in this film or of the different views in Scotland on re-join, independence and so on. It’s more an England discussion than a UK one.
Of course, what Labour will do is attack the SNP for its record in government, even though it’s a Westminster election not Holyrood (and yes until we are an in an actual election campaign, then that’s normal devolved politics). This week, Sarwar went on the attack on higher taxes in Scotland, labelling the SNP “terrible with public money” – expect this to crop up a lot in the general election too.
The SNP has had a difficult year, it’s not polling well, and it’s going to be a lot easier for Labour to attack a tired SNP government than take on and promote all Starmer’s messages crafted essentially for English not Scottish voters (not least for Tory voters now switching or switched to Labour). And, even in the general election campaign proper, attacks on the ferries’ shambles will be much easier than defending Starmer’s many flip-flops. But any divergence from Labour’s main messages in England and its main policy commitments will provide rich material for the SNP in pointing out the contradictions.
Tired or Youthful – or both?
The SNP may be looking tired but there are, too, some interesting demographic details in some of the recent polls. Over the last year, as many have pointed out, support for independence has broadly held up, while the SNP has gone down in the polls. And we know, too, that support for independence is much stronger amongst younger voters under 45 or 50 years old.
But looking at two of the several election polls so far this year – Ipsos and Redfield & Wilton – they both tell a tale of much stronger political support for the SNP than Labour amongst younger voters (all with the proviso that once broken down by age the sample sizes for each age category are relatively small).
The March Redfield & Wilton poll has the SNP and Labour neck and neck on 34% each. But the SNP leads Labour by 57% to 22% amongst 18-24 year olds and by 38% to 27% amongst 25-34 year olds. In the over -55 and -65 years old categories, Labour is easily ahead – at 45% to 20% amongst over 65s.
The Ipsos Scottish Political Monitor in January had the SNP doing better with a 39% overall vote share to 32% for Labour. But it had similar results to Redfield & Wilton on younger and older voters. For 16-24 year olds, the SNP had a striking 70% to Labour’s 28%. For over 65s, Labour had 38% to 23% for the SNP.
These polls do not simply suggest the SNP needs to get out the younger vote, Labour the older vote. These results also underline the known demographic differences in support for independence. They also add the key fact that, while the SNP may look tired, its supporters do not look old – the dynamism of youth seems to still be on the SNP’s side.
And it’s a pretty good question for SNP politicians back to Labour as to why Labour is doing so badly amongst younger voters (hint – look not only at the independence data but also at those English-Tory voter Starmer policies) – and it’s a fairly good riposte to Labour’s ‘tired’ attacks.
The Election in Scotland
I argued in a recent blog that the key political question for Scotland in the general election is whether Labour or the SNP get the most MPs and the higher share of the vote. Labour coming first would, no doubt, lead to many headlines about the decline of the SNP or the end of the independence debate – and to much SNP infighting.
But, even in a Labour first scenario, if the SNP keeps the lion’s share of younger voters, and the independence polls stay at 50:50, then the Scottish constitutional debate and the SNP’s role in that (whatever your views on the latter) will continue to play a key role in Scottish politics. But the constitutional debate will inevitably too be more easily dismissed by a Labour UK government that came first in Scotland too.
And if the SNP comes first, then – apart from the focus shifting forward rapidly to the Holyrood elections – the real way to differentiate Scotland in a Labour-governed UK, will be to re-energise the independence debate and shift the polls on independence, alongside providing a social democratic opposition at Westminster pointing up the differences to the essentially centre-right Labour that Keir Starmer will lead.
And whichever party comes first in Scotland, before the votes are counted, there will have been a rather different, rather semi-detached election debate in Scotland, only partially connected to the one run out of London and across England.
Picture credit: Kirsty Hughes