Henry Hill: Scotland's serious choice, UKIP's Ulster prospects, and history's lessons on devolution

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Britons against Britain!

This is an odd one. In the Scotsman a chap called Tony Banks stakes out the view that, far from being a nationalist, it is his belief in Britain and his British identity that is making him vote for independence!

That works about as well as you’d think. Essentially, the argument is that the withdrawal Scotland’s three-score deputation of left-wing MPs will be the catalyst that shifts the rUK away from a “London-centric” economy, diminishes the political power of the South East, and turns us wayward South British back onto the righteous path of social democracy. No evidence is proffered to support this rather mystifying conclusion.

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Henry Hill: Can UKIP become a truly national party?

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

UKIP: A national party?

“The scale of the advance of Ukip has shocked both the two main parties. As expected, it seems to have taken votes primarily from disgruntled Conservatives, but it is also establishing itself in traditional Labour areas. As Tim Congdon has pointed out, if that trend should continue Mr Farage would be able to claim that his was the only truly national party with strong support across the whole of England.”

Above is Lord Tebbit, temporarily forgetting that Alex Salmond has yet to win the 2014 referendum campaign. I know that Anglonats read this column but individual opinions aside, UKIP is very explicitly the United Kingdom Independence Party. It contests Scottish and Welsh elections. It even managed to beat the Conservatives to an MLA in Northern Ireland.

The problem is that, despite its clearly British sentiments, UKIP doesn’t appear to have a game plan for outside England. It continues to poll poorly in elections to the devolved chambers. It at least beat the Liberal Democrats to an MEP in Wales, and former two-term Conservative MEP for North Wales and so-called “Celtic Iron Lady”, Beata Brookes, recently announced her defection. Yet despite being in the unique position of being able to focus their resources on a single council, the Welsh wing of UKIP didn’t even put up a fight for Isle of Anglesey council.

Its performance in Thursday’s local elections was impressive but they are the worst possible local elections for judging UKIP’s non-Conservative reach, consisting as they did almost exclusively of rural English councils. The real tests will come over the next couple of years.

First up are the council elections in 2014. In Manchester, where I studied, the Liberal Democrats look on course to be wiped out, leaving Labour the only party on the council. If UKIP really do have the ability to reach out to Labour voters, then getting elected in a city that last elected a centre-right councillor in 1992 will be a good litmus test.

Next are the European elections. Whether or not UKIP can increase their performance in Wales, more interesting still will be to see if they can scoop a Scottish MEP (if they do, whether they simply unseat the Tory). In Northern Ireland the third European seat is currently held by a Tory-allied Ulster Unionist. Yet that alliance is now over, with the UUP in the doldrums and the still-miniscule NI Conservatives failing to break through. If the Tories run a proper European campaign in the province, which it looks like they will, the UUP seat could be vulnerable.

In response, UKIP have touted their own Faustian pact with a Northern Irish party: the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice. TUV leader Jim Allister is a former DUP MEP and has worked with UKIP in the European Parliament. With UKIP’s resources behind him it might offer a decent challenge to the seat, although obviously the impact is limited if the branding is all TUV.

At the general election It seems fairly safe to predict that, if UKIP to manage to win any seats in 2015, they’ll be in England. Nonetheless it will be interesting to see whether they can build up a vote outside England, particularly if it starts to cost the Tories their very precious non-English seats.

Then there are the devolved elections. The Northern Irish Assembly is currently scheduled to go to the polls in 2015 (although it might get delayed by a year). UKIP have beaten the Tories to a defector and thus David McNarry will be defending his seat as a UKIP MLA. If he holds it, let alone if UKIP scrape a second one somehow, that’ll be very embarrassing for the local Conservatives.

Finally, there are the Welsh and Scottish elections in 2016. These elections have an element of PR, so the question is whether or not UKIP can win any seats on the regional lists (and who from). Unlike Wales, where some small progress has been made, UKIP is very much the outsider in Scotland – to the extent that the unionist campaign have declined to include the party in their official bid to maintain the UK. With their combination of Anglo-centric right-wing politics and plan to abolish MSPs (but keep the Scottish Parliament, with Scotland’s MPs sitting part-time), it is very hard to envisage them making a real breakthrough.However, UKIP themselves seem more confident and are taking steps to ensure that their Scottish members influence the party’s image and policy making, which is a positive start.

It is these elections, and not English rural councils, which will demonstrate whether or not UKIP is able to genuinely carry the centre-right standard into territories which have spent the best part of twenty years resisting the Conservatives.

The future’s bright, the future’s…

Your columnist is up in Northern Ireland this week, spending a week on placement in the archives of the Orange Order in Belfast. It’s very nice to be back in the city, which is one of my favourites, and enjoy a few days buying things with pounds and catching up on iPlayer. It’s an interesting experience.

I’m staying in West Belfast, with the Catholic chairman of Conservative Future Northern Ireland. The archive is on the other side of a city, in a loyalist community. My journey to work and back takes me past painted kerbstones, rival flags, murals, and all the iconography of the scary Belfast we see on the news.

Yet contrary to what you might expect if you only experience Northern Ireland through the mainland news, on the whole Belfast and most of Northern Ireland is lovely. If you steer clear of a few trouble spots the people are friendly, the scenery stunning, the grand Victorian buildings splendid and the modernist monstrosities hard to find.

It isn’t normally my intention to turn this column into an extension of a tourist office, but with its Soviet-style public sector economy, unsavoury politicians, armed militants and frightening history Northern Ireland often gets something of a bad rap, which I suspect contributes to the sizeable “what’s the point” attitude you can find in England. To my mind, nobody who has visited Northern Ireland recently can fail to see why it’d be our loss to see it go. I got my first impression of Belfast during the recent flag riots and managed to fall in love with it anyway.

By the by, can you guess which biscuit is the favourite at the Orange Order HQ? Club Orange, of course. Testament, I am sure, simply to their excellent taste in chocolate snacks.

Posted on 8 May 2013 11:46:03 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: The challenge of teaching non-nationalist national history

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Teaching national history, avoiding nationalism

How to teach history in schools is a fascinating, complicated and important topic. It is also a fundamentally political one. Given that most school pupils do not go on to study history at an academic level at university, or even past GCSE level, their school lessons can underpin their understanding of the past for the rest of their life, an understanding which often shapes someone’s identity and even their politics.

I recently wrote elsewhere about the hornet’s nest that is the teaching of ‘national history’. That article was prompted by a debate held in the closing stages of my Masters degree here in Dublin about the practical impact of changes in historical understanding and practice (called ‘historiography’). Between them, the Irish and British examples demonstrated the problems both of teaching a historical narrative to school pupils and of not doing so.

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Posted on 1 May 2013 10:24:14 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Scottish independence may mean no Scottish banknotes

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Salmond’s Scotland: Out of the loop and off the money

Another of the strangely integrationist ramifications of Alex Salmond’s separatist ambitions came to light this week, when a Treasury paper revealed that in the event of a post-separation currency union between Scotland and the continuing UK, it might no longer be possible to continue issuing Scottish banknotes.

According to the Treasury, this is because Scotland’s weaker commitment to sterling under a currency union might have a negative impact on the confidence of the public and currency speculators in the “Scottiish pound”, in case Scotland were ever to withdraw from the union and devalue. Those notes issued and backed directly by the central bank underpinning the currency – the Bank of England – will be a safer bet. And despite SNP claims that the right to issue Scottish notes is ironclad, the relevant legislation – most recently the 2009 Banking Act – is issued by Westminster.

Yet Salmond’s plan will have farther-reaching consequences than simply sparing cashiers south of the border the occasional squabble over the legality of an unusual note. The Treasury is also expected to argue that for Scotland to maintain a ‘sterling zone’ it would have to accept budget constraints set in London - a foreign city where, Nicola Sturgeon’s unilateral declarations notwithstanding, Scotland would no longer be represented. Unionist politicians such as Alistair Darling and Danny Alexander maintain that Scotland would have to face cuts to sustain an economic union.

Thus the currency becomes another one of those strange issues where the SNP seem to be shrinking from the shiny new levers of statehood that independence is supposed to proffer them. Indeed, in this instance they appear to have stumbled into reverse gear.

And of course, all of this assumes that a currency union can be made to work at all. As one of Salmond’s former advisors points out, that’s the opposite lesson drawn from the Eurozone. A viable currency union seems to need a degree of banking union, fiscal union, political union… In short, it really just needs a Union. Happily enough, we’ve got one.

Defending Wales

According to a report seen by Wales Online, Wales might be seen as a softer target by terrorists looking to avoid the tough security climates in places like London. It also mentions the risks of domestic extremists inside the Welsh Muslim community. Earlier this week, a pair of would-be terrorists who trained in Snowdonia were jailed.

Whilst England, Scotland and Northern Ireland have each had their share (doesn’t seem right to say “fair” share) of terrorist experiences in the last few decades, Wales has been spared most of it, and with the above-linked article taking great pains to stress that the authorities are on top of things in Wales we’ve every reason to hope that remains the case.

After all, the security services have past form when it comes to rigour in their treatment of Wales. Don’t take my word for it: read this report from the Wales on Sunday about MI5’s monitoring of Welsh nationalists in the run up to the Prince of Wales’ investiture back in 1969, after a series of “bomb outrages” perpetrated by hard-line nationalists. They weren’t being completely paranoid either – two men apparently blew themselves up on the eve of the investiture in what is believed to be an attempted attack on the Royal Train.

Happily Welsh nationalism declined to go down the urban warfare route and the programme was closed after the ceremony. Today’s Plaid activists can rest safe in the knowledge that they are no longer considered a threat to realm.

Though cowards flinch, and traitors sneer…

…we’ll keep the red flag flying here! At least, they keep it flying at the Scottish Labour conference, which was held in Inverness this week. It seems rather surreal, since I always associate that song with footage with those Labour conferences from the Eighties when they were busily and democratically engaged in helping Margaret Thatcher get re-elected. It seems like something Blair would have abolished. But as Dan Hodges discovered, “there’s no New Labour in Scotland, and there never has been”, which is disheartening for those who hoped that some vestige of the Blair election machine might be rolling like a unionist panzer onto Alex Salmond’s lawn.

Not, of course, that there will be much push in that direction from the UK party. Turns out that Blair did ban the socialist anthem from the Labour conference, but that like so many of the trappings of Labour’s less successful phase, its back. Is there a video? Oh yes. Be warned though, it is as exactly as excruciating as you would expect.

The changing face of Saint George’s Day

For those of you who sometimes complain in the comments that this blog seems to focus on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but not England, I’ve got to break it to you that that is its entire purpose. My remit for this little corner of the site is to keep an eye on the goings on of our three smaller partner-nations and occasionally put that into the broader British constitutional context.

If you do want to read about England from that perspective, I can heartily recommend this article from the Telegraph about the challenge posed by the resurgence of Englishness to the future of the British constitution and nation. There are also a couple of good pieces up on Open Unionism, if you’ll excuse the plug, including one from a former vice-chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament.

Since this goes out on Wednesdays I hope that all of you had a happy Saint George’s Day, English or no. I intend to set out to see if I can find somewhere to celebrate it, which I admit isn’t my usual game, but I’m in Ireland and filled with a spirit of bloody-minded adventure. Which, as no doubt at least one person I meet in my little quest will tell me, is itself a rather English state of affairs.

Posted on 24 Apr 2013 10:03:27 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Devolved politicians contest Thatcher's legacy

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

The Welsh Assembly remembers the lady; the Scottish Parliament debates her legacy

The Welsh Assembly opened its first post-Easter session with tributes to Lady Thatcher, which played out much as you might expect.

First Minister and Labour leader Carwyn Jones focused on her role in allowing Welsh coalmining to decline, as well as her (quite unintended) role in beckoning in devolution. He also accused her of alienating both sides of the Northern Irish issue, which is probably inevitable if you both fight the IRA and seek an accommodation with peaceful nationalism. He praised her role in liberating the Falklands and, in a rather barbed compliment, noted that her 1983 total of 14 Welsh Conservative MPs – including three from Cardiff – has never been repeated.

Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies was naturally laudatory, praising Thatcher as “a force for good” who turned Britain around. Yet as in Westminster, there were those who chose to stay away, from both the Labour and nationalist parties. Plaid leader Leanne Woods distinguished herself by rebuking the “no such thing as society” line by stating that Wales believes in “community”. To my mind, the full quotation is in fact all about the distinction between community – a tangible, local and personal phenomenon – and an abstract and remote ‘society’ that can only be represented by the state.

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Posted on 17 Apr 2013 06:18:46 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Thoughts from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante.  Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Fifteen years after what the BBC dubbed “Northern Ireland’s single worst terrorist atrocity”, a pair of Republicans were found liable in a civil court for the 1998 Omagh bombing.

Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly, who declined to appear at the trial, are now being pursued for damages by relatives of the bomb’s victims, and along with two other former members of the Real IRA have been ordered to pay damages of £1.6 million.

This, coming in the same week that the parents of a young boy murdered by another Republican bomb addressed the Northern Ireland Assembly, provides a jarring reminder for a mainland reader about how strong the legacy of the Troubles still is in the province.

For me, with an Irish family but too young to remember the Troubles, it’s also a weird reminder of just how long they lasted. Grainy footage of soldiers and smoke from the 1970s, or Margaret Thatcher defiantly addressing the party conference after evading the Brighton Bomb, is history for me, and I was only vaguely aware of John Major’s premiership. But 1998, coming as it does during the reign of Tony Blair, seems uncomfortably proximate, and for someone more familiar with the daily dysfunctions of modern Ulster politics, this conviction serves as a timely reminders of how far Northern Ireland has come.

***

It’s been have-your-cake-and-eat-it week at the Silk Commission on Welsh devolution, as they received the official submission of the Church in Wales. The Church’s position, like so many other bilateral devolution proposals, takes two strands, which are as follows.

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Posted on 21 Mar 2013 10:27:14 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: We will have to raise our game to gain from any collapse of the UUP

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Last week, I wrote about the decision of the “McUnionists” – Basil McCrea and John McCallister – to start a new pro-Union party rather than defect straight to NI Conservatives. In the week since speculation has continued as to the new party’s prospects and potential.

Writing for the Belfast Telegraph, Alex Kane sets out a fairly optimistic case. To his mind, the UUP’s cleaving to the DUP has opened up a space in Northern Ireland’s crowded political arena: “territory which Alliance has never been able to claim and which the Conservatives and UKIP don't even recognise.”

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Posted on 7 Mar 2013 08:26:53 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Will the defections that never were shake Northern Ireland's Conservatives from their complacency?

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

What do you do when you realise that your white knight isn’t riding to the rescue after all?
That is the question that faces the Northern Ireland Conservatives this week, as Basil McCrea and John McCallister announced their intention to establish a new “liberal unionist” party. The pair resigned from the UUP after the announcement of a ‘Unionist Unity’ candidate in the Mid Ulster by-election.

Both of these defections have been expected for some time. The question has always been where they would go afterwards. They had four options: remain independent unionist MLAs; establish a new party; join the Lib-Dem-alike Alliance Party; or join (and inevitably lead) the NI Conservatives. Of these, the worst outcome for the Tories was a new party.

It represents a wound on two fronts. First, it brings a new party with a charismatic and elected local leader right onto the territory the NIC’s were hoping to occupy. Second, it probably hammers the final nail into the coffin of the notion that the NI Conservatives are likely to attract many UUP defectors and should thus plan around such defections.

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Posted on 28 Feb 2013 06:26:06 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Welsh separatists and arch-devolutionists did the Union a favour this week

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

This past week, I have had the unusual experience of watching people whose politics are diametrically opposed to mine making a case that I wholeheartedly agree with. And on devolution, no less.

In the past week, Wales has been doing what more of us should be doing and facing up to the constitutional consequences of the Scottish referendum. The big concern, naturally, is what happens to Wales in the boldly renewed/sadly diminished United Kingdom that emerges at the tail end of 2014. Arch-devolutionary first minister Carwyn Jones and hard-left separatist leader Leanne Wood are both understandably worried about the departure of scores of Scottish Labour MPs from Westminster. There’s some talk of a ‘constitutional crisis’.

At its most tedious and least useful, the response is simple “more-powers-ism”. Whether or not Scotland leaves, argue several Plaid spokespeople, Wales will need to receive lots of new powers, either to counter-act the “privatising instincts” (if Scotland leaves) of the Tories or as part of a “positive vision” for the United Kingdom – i.e. a less united one – if Scotland doesn’t.
Much more interesting, and in accordance with David Cameron’s own thinking, is the need for a constitutional convention to come up with a joined-up, stable and defensible settlement for governing this country, and bring an end to the devolutionary process. A constitutional convention which Tony Blair should have organised when he initiated devolution, and which is thus years overdue.

I hope one day to write more fully on the hollowness of the unionist effort in the devolution ‘debate’ since the defeat of the integrationists in the late Nineties. But it can be summed up very simply in that we have been totally rudderless. On the one hand, devo-scepticism has been turned into the domain of ‘Dinosaurs’ and other species of bad people. On the other, we’ve lacked the imagination or the courage to take the bull by the horns and come up with an alternative vision for where devolution is headed than that of the nationalists.

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Posted on 15 Feb 2013 10:51:14 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: The fate of the UUP is a warning to Scotland's Conservatives

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

I read the news that Grant Shapps intends to include Scottish seats on the party’s list of forty targets with no little sense of relief. It’s a welcome sign that the party is taking Scotland seriously. I had shared the FT’s ‘previous expectations’ that we would likely target almost exclusively English seats, spiced up perhaps with a smattering of Welsh ones.

I worried about this not just because being written out of Scottish politics makes it harder for us to win general elections, but because it is bad for the Union. If ever we did find an England-only route to secure political power, the UK would probably be placed under heavier strain than Alex Salmond could ever hope to exert, as the temptation to avoid the compromises necessary to win over Scottish voters would be immense – after all, we wouldn’t ‘need’ them.

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Posted on 7 Feb 2013 06:35:48 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: A question of Scotland’s referendum question

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

The Electoral Commission yesterday passed its judgement on the question to be used in the Scottish independence referendum.

For those unaware of this particular battle, Alex Salmond has for some time been touting his preferred formulation: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” One hardly needs a degree in psychology to see how such a question might tilt the playing field rather.

Thus the unionist campaign has been doing what it can to highlight the issue and bring pressure to bear on the SNP. Better Together launched the amusing Referendum Fix website and mobilised their supporters to put their names to an open letter by Alistair Darling. They maintained that the question should be set by the neutral Electoral Commission, rather than a separatist administration that was seeking both to referee the referendum and campaign on one side of it, which seemed reasonable enough.

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Posted on 31 Jan 2013 08:19:44 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Why is Labour standing clear of Northern Irish politics?

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

I’m going to start this column by praising something said by Tom Watson. Don’t worry, I won’t be long. Here it is:

"On Saturday, Ed set out his One Nation vision for Britain and a Labour Party fighting for fairness in the North, South, East and West - in Scotland and in Wales. There will be no 'no-go areas',".

Set aside for a moment the fact that Labour pledging to fight in Scotland and Wales is akin to the Conservatives pledging to struggle on in, say, Knightsbridge or Hertfordshire. It’s still an admirable sentiment, isn’t it? Putting some flesh on the notion of ‘One Nation Labour’ by pledging to take the fight to every corner of Her Majesty’s Kingdom of Great Britain.

Except when you think about it, that’s not actually the name of our country, is it? To be fair, he does only claim to have a “vision for Britain” rather than the United Kingdom, but outside the offices of constitutional scholars that distinction is ordinarily the province of pedants. Yet on the very day that this ‘One Nation’ vision was being sent out (inevitably accompanied by a request for money), the Labour Party executive was ruling against the latest bid by the party’s tireless Ulster wing to contest elections.

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Posted on 25 Jan 2013 10:33:19 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: Why Scotland ought to matter for the Conservatives in 2015

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow him on Twitter here. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

He will be editing this new “Red, White and Blue” column, focusing on politics across the United Kingdom, every Thursday.

I’m not a fan of codified constitutions. I developed my deep distaste for them in my years studying, and subsequently following, American politics. The effect on the way politics worked just seemed so meritless. On fundamental issues, policy debate by elected representatives is suborned to rather arcane and entirely self-serving debate between competing lawyers on what precisely a collection of long-dead people had meant to say when they wrote the constitution.

The fundamental assumption behind such debates is that the will (or what can possibly inferred to be the will, according to the predilections of an unelected judge) of the Founding Fathers is more important than the will the modern American citizenry – for example, the idea that if the Fathers only intended guns to be owned within a militia, this outweighs the fact that the great majority of US adults support private firearms ownership. Really, the purpose of a written constitution is to bind future political debate within the preferred parameters of its drafters.

On that note, the SNP are proposing to introduce a codified constitution for the Kingdom of Scotland should they triumph in 2014. Not only that, but they are also talking about using it to make SNP policies, such as free education and a nuclear weapons ban, constitutionally binding.

Of course, Salmond says in the above-linked article that a codified constitution would be formed with “widest possible involvement of popular opinion.” And there’s no guarantee that the first general election of an independent Scotland would deliver an SNP government – presuming that the drafting of a constitution would wait until after such a poll. But even setting aside my distaste for them, I think that the SNP line over a codified constitution is a tactical error – and one the Scottish Conservatives might be able to exploit.

The reason for the move seems fairly clear. All the stuff about how all “modern” countries have codified constitutions creates not just a dividing line between the SNP and the majority (but not all) of the unionists, but casts the United Kingdom as somehow archaic or backward. It also demands a defence of the uncodified constitution, which whilst perfectly possible is harder to mount than “but everybody else has one”. It also allows the SNP to reach out to Labour voters by dangling the prospect of a Scotland where state generosity is preserved in constitutional aspic, safe at last from the depredations of… well, us.

But despite Salmond’s caveats about “wide consultation” – and the SNP don’t have a good track record on consultations since their majority – this sort of talk still ties the prospect of an independent Scotland closer to the SNP’s vision for it. Which, given the narrowness of their coalition, is a problem.

The ‘Yes’ campaign is technically an independent body whose cause is backed not only by the SNP but the Scottish Greens, the Scottish Socialists and others. But in practise, it’s the SNP’s show and almost everyone knows it. The Nationalists haven’t really managed yet to disentangle in the minds of the electorate the general idea of post-separation Scotland from the partisan visions of the nationalist party, and this talk about putting SNP policies into Scotland’s constitution will do nothing to reverse that.

It is part of an interesting wider trend in the campaign. Pro-union Labour blogger Ian Smart once mused on the fact that the SNP could have responded to all of the problematic policy-based attacks being thrown at them by the No camp by responding, quite fairly, that those were issues to be decided by the Scottish people in an independent Scotland. The problem is that this does very little to reach out to people beyond ‘existentialist’ nationalists, who are a small minority of voters.

So to build a voting majority big enough to deliver independence, the SNP have had to get drawn into policy-based fire-fights and wed the prospect of an independent Scotland to their particular vision for it. And to have any chance of winning over Labour voters, that vision has to be fairly left-wing.

All of which leaves an opening for the Scottish Tories. More than any other party, the SNP have profited from our party’s woes north of the border by hoovering up a lot of the anti-Labour vote. In places like the north-east of Scotland, they hold a number of Westminster seats in what used to be our Scottish heartland (back in the halcyon days when we had such a thing).

Assuming a ‘No’ win in 2014, the 2015 general election, and the 2016 Scottish elections are being viewed by some in the party as a chance to pry back some of that lost support. First, the prominence of the union issue can help pro-union centre-right voters who currently vote SNP realise that even when the SNP don’t mention breaking up the UK much in their manifesto – and in 2011 they didn’t – it is and always will be their raison d'être. Second, the need to pitch to Labour voters will allow the Conservatives to point out to those same voters that the SNP aren’t really centre-right either.

This isn’t just the assessment of this columnist: taking SNP votes was the basis of the Tory strategy outlined to me at the party conference by, amongst others, Grant Shapps. This is good, because winning in Scotland is very important and should be something our party pays proper attention to.

Not just because of the big electoral advantage it gives Labour, but because as I told the panel at ConHome’s ‘A Plan to Win the Next Election’ conference event, it should be deeply troubling to the Conservative and Unionist Party that separatists can mount a credible campaign to break up the country on the basis that we will sometimes be in power. Our weakness in Scotland is bad for the UK, not just for us.

It is obviously hard, facing an election that looks as close as the next one, to spare time and resources for Scotland, as it does not have much by way of low-hanging fruit. But for the reasons outlined 2015 is an opportunity for us, and we should try to make the most of it. To that end, I hope some room for the Scots is found at ConHome’s upcoming ‘Victory 2015’ Conference. A Scottish revival isn’t going to happen by magic, after all.

Posted on 17 Jan 2013 12:33:40 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Hill: An opportunity for the Northern Irish Conservatives, if they can take it

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow him on Twitter here.

He will be editing this new “Red, White and Blue” column, focusing on politics across the United Kingdom, every Thursday.

It is hard to believe that Belfast City Council, when it voted to restrict the flying of the Union Flag on the City Hall to a series of ‘designated days’, could foresee the scale of the tide of loyalist fury that its decision would unleash.

For those unfamiliar with events, a brief recap: following an unsuccessful motion by the two nationalist parties on Belfast council to ban the flying of the Union Flag over city hall, a motion was passed to restrict it to certain official days (such as the Queen’s birthday). This motion was supported by Sinn Fein, the SDLP, and the non-aligned Alliance Party, which holds the balance of power. The Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist parties voted against.

Protests at the time were to be expected. Some protests turning violent was also probable, this being Northern Ireland. Even the attempt by protesters to storm the building, temporarily halting council proceedings before the vote, was not surprising.

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Posted on 15 Jan 2013 06:27:49 | Permalink | Comments (0)