A guide
to the new
Scottish Parliament
The final score
A last look at the seats
Barbara Millar
I have discovered a great affection for sand eels. To be honest, this is a somewhat belated affection – they didn’t figure hugely on my radar until I read Kenneth Roy’s recent review of the election broadcast of the Scottish Christian Party. It displays little of the tolerance, compassion, goodwill and acceptance one might expect would be a pre-requisite for a party that proudly trumpets the word Christian in its title. It thinks it’s perfectly fine to deny two gay men access to a B&B. It thinks it’s perfectly fine in the 21st century to deny women control over their own bodies and equally fine to demand to know a woman’s marital status by getting rid of the title Ms. But curiously there was one, admittedly non-human, cause the party positively espoused: the saving of the sand eel. Now, the only thing I knew about sand eels until now was their importance in the diet of puffins, those glorious birds who prefer sand eels above every other delicacy. I had read that puffins were under threat because of the reducing number of sand eels and I love puffins (and I am learning to love sand eels too), but I ask: do the sand eels want to be supported by the Scottish Christian Party? I would suggest absolutely not. The sand eels are evidently benign, self-sacrificing entities. They are born, mature, procreate (or not: some sand eels may well prefer same-sex relationships) and then quietly, resignedly allow themelves to be sacrificed to assuage the culinary demands of the puffin. Such altruism. These are quiet creatures, leading gentle, harmless lives until experiencing the ultimate traumatic end. A sand eel displays none of the singularly unattractive characteristics which would appear to be necessary to be a card-carrying member of the Scottish Christian Party.
I am now, on behalf of sand eels everywhere, severing any connection you may have been persuaded exists between the two. As the self-appointed spokesperson for sand eels I would say the following; ‘Yes, we do want to be saved. We have a vital role to play in the food chain which we acknowledge and accept. And we find puffins as cute as everyone else (although we sometimes review this situation when it suddenly dawns on us that we are the tastiest item on their menu). We will play our designated role in life unflinchingly, but let’s get one thing straight: we are not members of any organised religion and we will no longer be prepared to provide an acceptable face to any who seem to bear so ill-will to so many people. Frankly, if you don’t like so many members of the human race, how can you pretend to be our friend? We will have no more of it. We are throwing in our lot with paid-up members of the RSPB.’
We were left to
wonder what the
Lib Dems were for
Jill Stephenson: The aftermath (4)
The only good thing to be said about the Lib Dems’ results in the Scottish Parliament election is that there is only a small number of us who will be disappointed by them.
The Scottish public, similarly the wider British public, has shown itself to be incapable of understanding grown-up politics – the national need for Lib Dems to form a coalition with the Conservatives, given the scale of the financial crisis – and has shown its displeasure with this by punishing Scottish Lib Dems. It was always going to be the case that Nick Clegg’s rapprochement with David Cameron would damage his party, at least in the short term.
This probably has more to do with visceral hatred of the Conservatives among Lib Dem rank-and-file members and occasional Lib Dem voters than with policy, in Scotland at least. After all, the rise in student tuition fees and the proposed reforms to the NHS, which have alienated Lib Dems south of the border, apply to England but not to Scotland. It does, however, remain to be seen how far a reduction in the block grant will affect the provision of services in Scotland. To listen to Alex Salmond, the answer is ‘not at all’.
Yet if it is true that the very fact of the coalition was enough to alienate many Scottish Lib Dems, it is also – perhaps paradoxically – true that part of the Scottish Lib Dems’ problem has been the insistence of its leadership on trying to distance itself from the British Lib Dem leadership. Tavish Scott, when asked on television ‘Do you agree with Nick?’, answered emphatically ‘no’, and did all he could to give the impression that the Scottish Lib Dems were not related to Nick Clegg and his coalition cronies. His subsequent resignation from the post of leader of the Scottish Lib Dems after the party’s drubbing on 5 May is consistent with that.
This distancing may have seemed prudent, but it also left one asking what the Scottish Lib Dems were for. Maintaining local police forces seemed to be pretty much all that distinguished them, after they had cravenly jumped on the spending spree bandwagon started by Alex Salmond and leapt on with alacrity by Scottish Labour. At least the Scottish Conservatives showed some character in questioning how much we can have ‘for free’.
So why vote Lib Dem, with no hope of denting the mass voting battalions of the SNP and Labour, when – if you oppose the SNP – voting Labour is more likely to be effective? And why vote Lib Dem when voting SNP is the best way to dish Labour?
Yet the scale of the SNP’s success is staggering. Much has been made of the seismic shift that this has brought to the west of Scotland, the tribal heartland of Labour. But it is also, most unexpectedly, staggering here in Edinburgh, where the SNP now holds five out of six seats. That is an extraordinary result in a city where after the 2007 election there was one SNP MSP (Kenny MacAskill) and the party was in only third place in Edinburgh Central, Pentlands and South.
What the Scottish Lib Dems will do about choosing a new leader is yet to be clarified. I am probably not alone in regarding Tavish Scott’s departure as no great loss, after his lacklustre campaign.
It is not clear whether the shambles that is the Edinburgh trams project, presided over by a Lib Dem-led council, was a factor in this. It certainly looms large in the popular consciousness, whether among business people in Leith Walk, whose main road has been disrupted at length by tramworks, or among those on the south side to whom the whole tram project is in practical terms irrelevant while at the same time causing the most irritating disruption in the centre of the city.
What is clear is that the Lib Dems did not see the SNP juggernaut coming. To be fair, no-one did. In Edinburgh Southern, we were deluged, both early and late in the day, by Lib Dem literature – including a message from Charles Kennedy – painting Labour as the chief challenger to the sitting Lib Dem MSP, Mike Pringle, a very good constituency member. Lib Dem leaflets told us that only Pringle could defeat Labour, and that there was therefore no point in voting Conservative.
The SNP was not regarded as a player here. One leaflet told us: ‘Experts have [said] that this constituency is a straight contest between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The SNP and the Conservatives simply can’t win here’. Not for the first time, ‘experts’ have been a long way wide of the mark. Yet in 2007, the SNP candidate had been third, with 6,117 votes, with Labour on 9,469 and Pringle winning with 11,398 votes. He was as shocked as anyone last week by the SNP’s 12.1% swing to victory.
It is not surprising that Orkney and Shetland, alone, have returned Lib Dem constituency members. In both, the SNP remains in third place, behind an Independent. The last thing the islanders want is to be ruled from Edinburgh. A central authority that is at a further remove, in London, seems more congenial. But losing traditional Lib Dem strongholds in the borders and across northern Scotland (including Charles Kennedy’s vast Westminster constituency) is a desperately worrying portent, and Scottish Lib Dem MPs must be glad that there will not be another general election until 2015. They have to hope that, by then, the coalition will have bought them some popularity. It begins to look as if the only response to that will be ‘dream on’. At grass roots, the language of ‘betrayal’ persists.
What the Scottish Lib Dems will do about choosing a new leader is yet to be clarified. I am probably not alone in regarding Tavish Scott’s departure as no great loss, after his lacklustre campaign. Yet that leaves at Holyrood only one constituency MSP (Liam McArthur) and three list Lib Dem MSPs – Jim Hume, Alison McInnes and Willie Rennie – none of whose profiles could be considered high. Presumably, however, it would make no sense to have a leader outside the parliament.
The only consolation for the Lib Dems is that the Greens, who were also squeezed by the nationalists, were unable to beat them for fourth place overall, in the way that some had predicted. Yet the future is not bright (or orange): a mere five MSPs are nothing to rejoice about, and the disgraceful lies told by the ‘No’ camp in the AV referendum campaign seem to have persuaded enough people to support them, so that there will be no reformed voting system to help Lib Dems in future Westminster elections. And the thing that remains to be seen above all is how, after a campaign of such promises of freebies from the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems alike, the new SNP government will deal with the big black financial hole that will confront it.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
