Wooing the Scots

The Conservatives were once the party of the Union. So much did they identify with it during the great struggle over Irish Home Rule that the party even changed its name to the Conservative and Unionist party.

Part of the strength of the Conservative party was that they had support throughout the Union, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland. When they claimed to be a One Nation party they meant that they were a party of all classes and all parts of the United Kingdom.

There was no part of the country which the Conservatives did not feel was theirs. Their main strength may have been concentrated in Southern England, particularly the counties around London, but they had a presence and an appeal throughout the United Kingdom. In Scotland in 1955 they won half the vote and half the parliamentary seats.

The inexorable decline since then eventually undermined their credibility as a Unionist party. The Ulster Unionists broke their alliance with the Conservatives, effectively ending Edward Heath’s chance of holding on to the premiership in 1974, and support for the Conservatives began to decline sharply in both Scotland and Wales.

Heath had been in favour of devolution to Scotland, but his successor Margaret Thatcher reversed Conservative policy and resolutely opposed the devolution bill which Labour was attempting to put through. Once the Conservatives returned to government in 1979 all talk of devolution ceased.

The Conservative leadership believed that devolution was the slippery slope to separatism, but the consequence of taking that position, and also of introducing a number of policies which were perceived as insensitive to Scottish opinion, had the effect of causing a collapse in support for the Conservatives north of the border.

The party refused to participate in the Scottish Constitutional Convention which drew up plans for the revival of the Scottish parliament, and its electoral fortunes reached their nadir in 1997 when the party failed to win a single Scottish seat.

Instead of rethinking their position, however, the party then chose to campaign for a No vote in the referendum on whether there should be devolved government in Scotland and the return of the Scottish parliament. They lost.

Since that time the Conservatives have accepted devolution and pledged to work within the new institutions. Aided by the system of proportional representation adopted for the Scottish parliament the party has been able to gain some representation within it.

But there has not been any general revival in its fortunes. Scottish politics has been dominated by Labour and the SNP, and the Conservatives have been marginalised. Their warnings that devolution would not stem separatism but fuel it, were not borne out at first, but with Labour’s growing unpopularity, the SNP has begun to advance again, and in 2007 it succeeded in winning a majority in the Scottish Parliament and the right to run the Scottish Executive.

The Conservatives have viewed the advance of separatism with dismay because of the attachment they still hold to the Union. But an influential strand of opinion within the party has begun to question whether holding fast to the Union is any longer in the Conservative interest.

The often strident reassertions of Scottish identity and the evidence for the declining salience of Britishness and British identities for many people in the UK, has led some Conservatives to revive notions of Englishness, and even to imagine a future for England as a nation and as a state, freed from the encumbrances of the other nations of the United Kingdom.

The argument is partly about the cost of the Union, and the subsidies paid by the English to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, partly about the unfairness of the constitutional settlement, but partly also reflects the feeling that if the Scots no longer want to be British, separation might be better for everyone.

There are electoral considerations as well. An England shorn of Wales and Scotland would be much more prone to return Conservative governments. If the north of England could somehow be detached as well the Conservatives might never lose power at Westminster.

David Cameron inherited a party which had lost much of its foothold in Scotland, and seemed unsure how to regain it. It had become perceived as an English party, and overwhelmingly a Southern English party, with little relevance or appeal to other regions and nations in the UK.

The old basis of the Union, the British Empire, which had been a joint enterprise in which all the nations of the United Kingdom could engage and benefit from, was no more, and the other great unifying factor in British politics, the welfare state, was much more strongly associated with Labour than with the Conservatives.

David Cameron in this situation might have decided to go with the sceptics in his party and quietly distance himself from the Union, preparing his party and the country for a possible breakup of the United Kingdom, or aggressively using the attitude of the Scots towards England to mobilise English support for measures to rectify injustices to England. But he has decided to do the opposite.

In a recent speech in Ayr at the Scottish Conservative Conference (23 May 2008) Cameron has set out his thoughts on the Union, and a new strategy for re-establishing the Conservatives as a Unionist party. He has decisively rejected the policies of the sceptics in Conservative ranks. Instead he has called for a revival of Unionism. The Conservative party, he declared, is a Unionist party and a party of the Union, and its duty is to defend the Union.

He ridiculed the recent dissension in Labour’s ranks between Wendy Alexander and Gordon Brown over whether or not to call the SNP’s bluff and demand an immediate referendum on whether Scotland should become independent. Labour had become incapable of defending the Union, or understanding how to defend it.

A referendum held at a moment when the Westminster government was so unpopular would assist the cause of separatism. Cameron denounced that strongly in the speech — ‘the ugly stain of separatism is seeping through the Union flag’ —and declared himself to be passionate about the Union. He did not want to be prime minister of just England but of the whole of the United Kingdom.

In his speech he does acknowledge the grievances which have fuelled English nationalism. He agrees that the constitutional and economic arrangements between different parts of the United Kingdom have become unjust, too weighted in Scotland’s favour in particular, and he repeats the pledge first popularised by William Hague, to find a way to permit English votes for English laws, solving the West Lothian question.

But he adds a very important qualification, missing in much recent Conservative thinking on Scotland. He says that it if it is a choice between ‘constitutional perfection’ and ‘preservation of our nation’, then he has to choose the latter.

This is a restatement of the traditional Conservative attitude to the Union. The old union state had many anomalies. Different regions, including Scotland, were given special privileges, and governed in ways that were often different from the rest of the United Kingdom, and this was justified in the cause of keeping the Union together. England as the dominant partner could afford to make concessions to the smaller nations in the United Kingdom.

Cameron goes much further however than simply restating this old Conservative and Unionist position, that anomalies and asymmetries can be tolerated in the cause of sustaining the Union. He also argues that the causes of the increase of separatism in Scotland did not arise simply from constitutional and economic grievances which the Scots held against England, although he acknowledges freely enough the ‘mistakes of the 1980s’ — rather like Tony Blair apologising for Labour’s mistakes of the 1970s.

Cameron thinks the problems go deeper. The loss of a sense of Britishness, and the weakening of attachment to the symbols of Britishness, is the real malaise from which separatism springs. His solutions to this malaise are a blend of the traditional and the modern. He rubbishes Gordon Brown’s ideas about Britishness, arguing that to recreate a sense of belonging it is necessary to put the emphasis upon the key institutions which define Britishness and make people want to be British.

His list is a short but telling one — the monarchy, the armed forces, and parliament. The first two are obvious in a Scottish context, the last less so, with the re-creation of a Scottish parliament. But by ‘parliament’ Cameron means British sovereignty, the ability for the British people to decide crucial questions for themselves, and he invokes the spectre of Brussels, as the most visible external threat to Britishness which all supporters of the Union must unite to oppose.

He then goes on to invoke a very different kind of Conservative Unionism. The reason why the Union is still relevant, he told Scottish Conservatives, is because the United Kingdom is a model of inclusive civic nationalism. ‘Being British is one of the most successful examples of inclusive civil nationalism in the world.’ Britain moreover is a ‘shining example of what a multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multi-national society can and should be.’

This is language which Margaret Thatcher would never have used. Cameron, however, goes still further. In the second half of his speech he develops the argument that the Conservatives are at their best when they are progressive.

The Conservatives, he says, are a party of the centre-right, of enterprise, of families, of self-reliance, common sense and practicality. But they only really succeed when they show they are the ‘party of everyone’ — rich, poor, young, old, urban and rural — and so become the party of the future, the party of progress.

This is vintage One Nation Toryism, a world away from that other tradition in the party, represented by Salisbury, who believed that ‘delay is life’ and that the task of the statesman was to offer ‘shelter in our time’, and who once wrote that ‘nothing matters very much and few things matter at all’.

Cameron has no time for the pessimistic and sceptical side of Conservatism. In a revealing passage in his speech he offers his own reconstruction of the Conservative Pantheon. When has our party served Britain best, he asks rhetorically? When it has ‘relentlessly pursued progressive ideals’.

This is the party of Wilberforce, Peel, Disraeli, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, and Margaret Thatcher. The list is interesting for who is included and who excluded. There is no room for Salisbury, Balfour, who were placed at the top of the Thatcherite Pantheon in the 1970s. Missing are Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and of course Edward Heath, probably the most progressive Conservative of the post-war era.

But then Heath’s great ‘progressive’ achievement, entry into the European Community, cannot yet be acknowledged. The scars of the party’s civil war over Europe are still too fresh.

What all this means for Scotland and for the Union is that Alex Salmond may have a problem. The SNP are planning to hold their independence referendum in 2010, apparently hoping that if by that time there were a Conservative government in Westminster, they could argue to the Scottish electorate that they were now subject to a government for which they had not voted, and which represented only English interests.

David Cameron may not yet have found a way to revive the Conservatives as a serious electoral force in Scotland. But he has found a new language in which to talk about Unionism. Labour has struggled to cope with the SNP and has made a series of political mistakes which have played into their hands. Cameron seems unlikely to repeat those.

He is aware of the game that the SNP wants him to play, but he is unwilling to play on their terms. Instead he talks about governing all parts of the United Kingdom ‘with respect’. If the SNP are hoping for a re-run of the Thatcher years should the Conservatives return to government, they may be disappointed. They may face instead a more confident and strategic Unionism than has existed for several decades.