Anyone who wishes to see a left-leaning Labour government in England should be rooting firmly for a No vote.
Anyone who wishes to see a left-leaning Labour government in England should be rooting firmly for a No vote
One of the most often repeated assumptions about the impending Scottish independence referendum is that a Yes vote would effectively mean the end of the Labour party in the rest of the UK.
With a Yes vote Labour would ultimately lose 41 of its MPs, while the Conservatives would lose just one. This, so argue, would result in an inbuilt majority for the Conservatives.
First of all it’s important to point out that the doomsday scenario – Scotland becoming independent – would not banish Labour from the corridors of power in what’s left of the UK. Even without Scotland, Labour would still have won power in 1997, 2001 and 2005 – albeit with a reduced majority.
The Conservatives may have won a few of the more pivotal elections – 1964 for example – but there is very little to suggest that Labour would have been confined to the electoral wilderness. The party would simply have had smaller majorities when in power.
So in sum, fears on an ‘inbuilt Tory majority’ are overblown’.
Where an independent Scotland almost certainly would make a difference, however, is in the nature of the Labour governments we would see in what remained of the UK. Indeed, while it would be an exaggeration to talk of the death of Labour in the rest of the UK, a Yes vote would likely move Labour to the right in an attempt to win over English voters, who as a rule vote to the right of Scottish voters.
In other words, future Labour governments would look a lot more like Tony Blair than Ed Miliband. Which makes it all the more peculiar to see some English progressives cheering on the Yes camp. Anyone who wishes to see a left-leaning Labour government in England should be rooting firmly for a No vote.
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10 Responses to “Would independence mean a permanent Tory majority?”
Malkomm
Well if it wasn’t for those Scottish Labour MPs, the Tories wouldn’t have any need of coalition partners and would have pushed through those boundary ‘reforms’ that would further reduce the number of Labour MPs.
If a future Tory government gets their way with those changes to the boundaries how will Labour’s chances be affected then?
InbredBlockhead
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
InbredBlockhead
With Straw and his ilk describing the English as a race not worth saving plus Rotherham etc, it is hard to see why England would want Labour in power again. The last , Blair, Brown Scots led Labour Government were the most viciously anti native working class terrorist group, ever faced by the UK. Time yet in the event of a Yes vote for English Nationalism to wake up and think of the children of the native people.
David Lindsay
Where is this “Tory England” from which Scotland needs so urgently to secede for her own protection? With 85 percent of the population, England returns the overwhelming majority of members of the House of Commons, and the Conservative Party has not won an overall majority in 22 years and counting. Labour’s poll lead stands at seven points, which would translate into a famous Labour victory. There is all of a one-point difference between England and the country as a whole.
Nor has Labour ever needed Scotland in order to win a General Election. In 1964, fully 50 years age, members from Scotland delivered a Labour overall majority of four when there would otherwise have been a Conservative overall majority of one that would not have lasted a year.
In October 1974 (the General Election in February had been inconclusive, so another one was held), members from Scotland turned what would have been a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party into a Labour overall majority so tiny that it was lost in the course of that Parliament.
In 2010, members from Scotland turned what would have been a small Conservative overall majority into a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party and with David Cameron as Prime Minister, anyway.
On no other occasion since the War, if ever, have members from Scotland, as such, influenced the outcome of a General Election.
For that matter, where is this “left-wing Scotland” that so needs to secede? The above facts, and the common or garden neoliberalism of the SNP, its vote concentrated suspiciously in places that used to vote Tory, tell a very different tale.
As does the rise of the Labour Movement simultaneously in England, Scotland and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If there really was some proto-Socialist paradise rooted deep in Scottish culture, then why did anyone in Scotland feel any need of that Movement?
All polling shows that political attitudes in the three parts of Great Britain are practically interchangeable. The difference is that Scots think that those in Scotland are well to the left, even if their own, as individual respondents, are not. The English, especially, think of their own views as out of step with a right-wing polity at large. But in fact, those individual views are entirely typical, and effectively identical, on both sides of the Border.
swat
No. People will tire of Tory dogma, and will readily swirch to a social policy that values people.
So Labour will still be able to form Govts if it is not overtaken by militant Lefties.