NHS scandal: Part II
Kenneth Roy
Ruth Davidson. Drawing by Bob Smith
Sixteen years after the 1997 general election saw the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party lose all of its MPs, asking ‘Whatever happened to Tory Scotland?’ still risks incurring the answer ‘who cares?’.
Recent interventions by the current party leader Ruth Davidson suggest the party is still grappling with fundamental questions about its identity, history and relationship with Scottish society. It is a party that doesn’t know what it is when the Scottish electorate seem to well remember what it once was.
Perhaps the overriding impression left by the prescient collection edited by regular Scottish Review contributor David Torrance is of a party that, for a number of reasons, simply let Scotland get away from it. The title calls to mind (though it wasn’t far away) Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw’s ‘The Strange Death of Labour Scotland’. If the latter represents an ongoing police investigation then the former is very much into cold case territory.
This is a relatively recent entry on the list of ailments and deficiencies considered by the assembled contributors. Monteith, a consistently impressive writer and thinker, is perhaps the most noticeable absentee from what is an otherwise high-calibre team marshalled by Torrance. The bulk of the contributions are from eminently suitable academics but their efforts are augmented well by Gerry Hassan and Alex Massie who write about anti-Toryism and the media respectively.
A party that has one solitary MP obviously has many problems, not the least of which is finding a place in a political culture that is, at least in part, defined against it. A number of contributors pick up on this point and are bold enough to acknowledge the limitations placed on Scottish politics as a result.
Gerry Hassan strums one of his favourite chords when he bemoans the narrowness of political debate and claims: ‘The lexicon and veneer of anti-Tory rhetoric has allowed all of this to be given a popular, radical cover, disguising the inadequate state of our body politic’. James Mitchell and Alan Convery go even further when they argue: ‘The emphatic vote for a Scottish Parliament in September 1997 was as much a rejection of Conservative rule as a vote for a Scottish Parliament’. Is it hard to imagine much the same being said in the future following a ‘Yes’ vote in 2014?
A number of the chapters highlight the once interconnected and now seemingly lost abilities to articulate a sense of Scottish distinctiveness and contemplate change when circumstances demanded it. Margaret Arnott and Catriona M M MacDonald capture this succinctly while displaying not a little iconoclasm:
The union, it might be argued, was the undoing of Scottish Conservatism in the twentieth century. At different times and in different ways, a determined attachment to constitutional precedent and a lack of clarity on how Unionism and Conservatism interfaced in the Scottish – as opposed to British – environment disabled the articulation of a genuinely ‘native’ Scottish voice.
Massie, I think, offers a similar diagnosis at the start of his chapter. Writing about what he believes to be the most important fact explaining the decline of the party, he notes: ‘it is difficult to find a successful right-wing party in Europe that is not considered, or does not consider itself, the patriotic party’. By the 1990s it had become abundantly clear that the Scottish Tories weren’t likely to receive invitations to any patriotic parties but this doesn’t mean they couldn’t have taken bold moves to become more presentable.
In his own chapter, Torrance outlines a number of structural changes and clarifications that might have been possible between 1997 and 1999, particularly the still vexed relationship with London, to allow the Scottish Conservatives to capitalise on devolution – the one thing that, ironically, offered them some sort of lifeline after 1997. On the other hand, perhaps such far-reaching reform was asking too much of a party that must have been traumatised and reluctant to sail off into the uncharted waters of a political culture that had rejected it so decisively. Massie makes a similar point when he contends: ‘There has been no active "decontamination" project, merely the hope that the Conservatives’ Scottish radioactivity will decay naturally’. Another variety of decay is certainly a prominent theme throughout.
This is a small volume that fills a large gap in the literature on Scottish politics but there are a couple of minor complaints. The 1970s feel a little under-scrutinised and it would have been interesting to read, for example, an extended analysis of the blow-back from the human cauldron that was Northern Ireland during that decade.
The brief but insightful comments by Mitchell and Convery suggest extended treatment might have been useful. In addition, some of the chapters feel as if they were curtailed before their time. Twelve chapters and an index squeezed into 190 pages will inevitably call for sacrifices but it would be a brave editor who asked one of the contributors to down tools altogether.
We should all care about what happened to Tory Scotland. It is an issue that transcends party or tribal rivalry and poses fundamental questions about our political culture. Even if Scotland were a country of social democratic voters electing social democratic politicians we would still need a strong voice of opposition to keep us honest and sharpen up our ideas. That isn’t the case anyway so it should be of some concern that those outside of consensual circles can’t be heard properly over all the anti-Tory backslapping. But such people also arguably deserve something more than the current Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.A tigerish party of the right would probably do more for Scotland than independence.
‘Whatever Happened to Tory Scotland?’, edited by David Torrance, is published by Edinburgh University Press.
Alasdair McKillop is a writer based in Edinburgh
