7 Comments

• Brad Barrows 28th Jul '21 - 11:05pm

  Interesting words from Alex Cole-Hamilton regarding the potential for coalition with the Conservatives…it will be interesting to see how this translates into local government where the Liberal Democrats are currently in 6 coalition administrations – 5 coalitions with the Conservatives, 1 with Labour, and never once with the SNP. Given the choice between the ‘competing nationalisms’, the Liberal Democrats always side with the British nationalists rather than the Scottish nationalists. And, in 5 councils, they appear perfectly able to find common ground with Tories.

• Martin 29th Jul '21 - 8:02am

  Could this paragraph be rewritten so that it makes sense?

  He said: “When Douglas Ross, in the election, wrote to Willie Rennie, wrote to Anas, he said a ‘pan-unionist alliance’ – the subtext of that is, we have the subscribe to the Conservative view of what the union looks like.

• Fiona 29th Jul '21 - 8:07am

  Alex is right that we are (many of us) fed up with division. He’s quite right to say he’ll work with other parties where there’s common ground, as we have been doing for years. That doesn’t need to be in a formal coalition, and if we agree with any party on a particular issue, of course we’ll vote the same way! But it’s fair to stress how unlikely it is there will be a formal coalition involving the Conservatives.

  Coalitions under PR are inevitable, and if we believe in fair voting systems then we (as a nation) need to get over the idea that coalitions are a dirty word. Often the choice of who can form a coalition is restricted by who the voters have selected. All we can do is work to gain the trust of voters, then do our best to represent our values once in office.

  There’s a certain irony that the SNP gained a lot of goodwill (or avoided badwill) as a result of their minority government being forced into action by opposition MSPs. Does anyone really believe that Swinney would have U-turned over the exams fiasco without the serious threat of a vote of no confidence? Would Sturgeon have bothered to replace her minister responsible for Public Health (drug deaths) if opposition MSPs hadn’t called for a vote of no confidence?

  Brad – please don’t fall into trap of accepting the SNP’s attempt to label everyone against the division and poverty sought by Scottish Nationalists a “British Nationalist”. In particular, don’t forget that the SNP’s plan for Scexit in 2014 would have meant iScotland leaving the EU at the same time we left the UK. Even if they didn’t realise it at the time because they believed Salmond’s lies, very single person campaigning for Scottish independence in 2014 was simultaneously campaigning for Scotland to leave the EU.

• Fiona 29th Jul '21 - 8:15am

  Apologies for the double post, but I’d not seen your comment Martin before hitting the submit button.

  My understanding is that Ross was pulling a Corbyn. He wanted ‘unity’ between the opposition parties, but on his terms and under his lead.

  Even if he’d been less bullish about it, it would have been a disaster, which I suspect he knew. Set up as an offer unlikely to be accepted, knowing he could crow about being refused. Just as Corbyn’s Labour used our preference for an actual Government of National Unity to claim we were siding with the Tories, Ross used our preference for campaigning on our own policies and not insulting those with less strong views on the constitution, to claim we were soft on nationalism.

  But just as the Tories were able to use the threat of Corbyn’s Labour (and the SNP) to scare people into voting Tory, the SNP were able to use Ross/Johnson to scare people into voting SNP. The SNP and Tories have a weird symbiotic relationship going on, with each drawing strength from the other, and we need to find a way to break that.

• Brad Barrows 29th Jul '21 - 9:51am

  @Fiona
  You will notice that it was Alex Cole-Hamilton who accused Tory Leader Douglas Ross of “toxic British nationalism”. All I did in my post was point out that when faced with the choice of working with ‘toxic British nationalists’ or Scottish nationalists in local government, the Liberal Democrats always choose the former.

• Paul Barker 29th Jul '21 - 6:24pm

  Some fairly irrelevant comments here, Coalitions at Local Council level are about Local Politics, National Politics dont really come into it.
  On that Old Cliche that Fair Votes make Coalitions inevitable – Scotland rather disproves that surely ? In any case Parties always have the additional option of forming a Minority Government – more work of course but also more flexibility. A Labour Minority seems the most likely result of the next Westminster Election.

• Martin 29th Jul '21 - 11:04pm

  Paul Barker:
  A minority Labour government?? – You must be foreseeing a sizeable turn in the tide. At this moment a minority Conservative government looks more likely.

  The point about Scotland is that Scottish politics needs to get used to coalitions as an inevitable norm for proportional representation. The vitriol that is flying around that is sustainable under FPTP cannot has to change for PR. At some point there has to be some sort of rapprochement with the SNP. A Liberal Democrat federal government, otherwise known as Devo Max is (or should be) really a lot closer to SNP’s independence than the Westminster centred unionism of the Tories or Labour.

  Someone has to offer an olive branch. Why not Scottish Lib Dems, who could make an effort to offer some positive recognition of SNP governance, such as the governments efforts to mitigate child poverty in Scotland by introducing an additional Scottish Child Payment scheme? Management of the CoViD crisis has been much less profligate and nepotistic than Johnson and cronies have achieved. OK this is setting the bar really low, but claims implying that the SNP government is no better than Johnson’s are unsustainable, moreover it is difficult to make out that SNP is less internationalist and less willing to cooperate constructively with other countries than the current incarnation of the Conservatives.