A couple of polls have suggested that Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservative Party might just edge ahead of Labour to become the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament. That is a truly horrible thought. Just imagine it, the timid, illiberal, centralising SNP opposed by David Cameron’s representative in Scotland. Their leaflets don’t push the fact that they are Conservatives. They are trying to make their campaign all about Ruth, as if she is somehow the saviour of the union. That, of course, is an argument that does not stack up, as this video from the Scottish Liberal Democrats shows.
It was the Scottish Conservatives who pretty much kept the SNP in power during their first term of minority government.
Do we really want them, with their contempt for benefit claimants, nonchalance about inequality and poverty and disregard for human rights and civil liberties, as the official opposition to an SNP government that is already so fiscally conservative and illiberal?
Their claim to be the only ones who care about the union has been shown up to be a pile of hogwash by Nick Clegg. In an article originally published in the Times and now on the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ website, he said:
As the Holyrood elections get closer and closer, I have become increasingly bemused that Ruth Davidson and others have sought to claim that the Conservatives are somehow the authentic opposition to the SNP.
It jars starkly with my experience when governing alongside the Conservatives in Coalition in Whitehall for five years.
In that time, I witnessed an odd ambivalence in the Conservative Party towards Scotland: indifference one minute; confrontation the next.
My party frequently disagreed with the Conservatives on Scottish issues, which was perhaps unsurprising since the only Scots around the Coalition Cabinet table were Liberal Democrats.
Whether it was over the negotiations with the SNP on the referendum bill; the conduct of the government during the campaign; or the approach to devolution both before the campaign and in the weeks and months that followed the vote, Liberal Democrats consistently stood up for Scotland when it was of little interest to English Conservatives. Not a single senior member of the Conservative Party represented a Scottish seat.
My Lib Dem colleagues and I – in particular Michael Moore, Alistair Carmichael, Danny Alexander and Jo Swinson – had to go to great lengths to deliver real powers for Scotland.
David Cameron and George Osborne are brilliant tacticians – the general election result in England is evidence of that – but sometimes they can be too cunning for their own good.
Whenever Scotland was on the agenda I saw time and time again how they sought to secure short-term political advantage before the long-term interests of Scotland and the Scottish people.
Shortly after the Holyrood elections in 2011, when the SNP won a majority and therefore the mandate to hold the independence referendum, the Conservatives wanted to push ahead with it on their terms and their timescale, sending a clear message that the UK Government, and not the Scottish Government, was in charge.
In the Conservatives’ hands, the referendum would have become a confrontation between Holyrood and a beligerent Westminster government that refused to respect their mandate or accept the need to relinquish powers in any meaningful way.
It was the Liberal Democrat Scottish Secretary Michael Moore who stopped them, insisting that it was for the Scottish Government to put forward their plan and for the two governments to then work together. Michael was diligent and respectful throughout the negotiations over the referendum and made sure it would be fair, legal and decisive.
It was also Michael who oversaw what at the time was the greatest devolution of power – especially tax raising powers – to Scotland since the formation of the United Kingdom as part of the Scotland Act, something the Conservatives had previously displayed little interest in doing. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, have argued for the devolution of power and for a federal United Kingdom for decades.
And don’t be fooled by what has happened since the election: the new Scotland Act was drafted by Liberal Democrats in the Scotland Office before the election, based on the cross party work of the Smith Commission.
During the referendum campaign itself, it was Danny Alexander who co-ordinated the Government’s efforts. In particular, he did a huge deal to expose the weakness of the SNP’s economic case and to encourage businesses to speak out about the impact independence would have on them and their employees.
It was the morning after the referendum when the mask really slipped. As the result became clear, David Cameron and George Osborne’s first reaction was to genuflect to their English backbenchers and antagonise Scottish voters by turning the debate immediately towards the divisive issue of ‘English Votes for English Laws’.
In doing so they gave the SNP the grounds to cry foul and helped to foster a sense of grievance among some English voters that the Conservatives would harness very successfully at the subsequent general election with their spine chilling warnings of what would happen if a weak Labour government was pushed around by Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
Once again it was the Liberal Democrats who stood up for Scotland.
We vetoed their plans for a government commission on English Votes for English Laws and instead insisted that any commission should be cross-party and look at all aspects of devolution, not just the divisive issue of votes in Parliament. And it was the Liberal Democrats who insisted that the ‘Devo Max’ reforms that we, the Conservatives and Labour had promised in the vow made shortly before the referendum would go ahead with no strings attached, instead of making them contingent on English votes as the Conservatives initially wanted.
On the afternoon of the referendum itself, I told David Cameron that while I understood he had some restive English MPs on his backbenches whom he had to deal with, big constitutional changes should be made on a cross-party basis, not just to suit the political needs of one party.
I was dismayed at the prospect that the politics of grievance in Scotland, exploited mercilessly by the Scottish Nationalists, could so quickly be supplemented by the politics of grievance in England, exploited mercilessly by the Conservatives.
Far from opposing the SNP, the Conservative party has alighted on the SNP as the perfect whipping boy to stir up their English voters, just as the SNP have always used the Conservatives to whip up their own voters in Scotland. The SNP and the Conservatives, whatever they might say about each other, now have a strong interest in talking each other up, not down.
The attitude I repeatedly found myself coming up against from senior Conservatives was that the politics of Scotland were ‘Labour’s problem’, not theirs. In fact, a situation where the SNP rules the roost in Scotland suits them just fine as it makes it virtually impossible for Labour to win a majority at a general election.
So don’t buy Ruth Davidson’s nonsense about the Conservatives being the real opposition in Scotland.Time and time again the Tories have put their own interests before those of the Scottish people.
This does beg a very big question about Michael Moore, who was undeniably a wise and reasonable voice as Secretary of State. Nick acknowledges he did a very good job. You have to wonder why on earth he sacked him. But, leaving that aside, his broader point is bang on. The Tories can’t be trusted to deliver for Scotland. Ruth Davidson might look great in a tank or on a buffalo, but she is still David Cameron’s representative in Scotland, and David Cameron’s government treats Scotland with contempt and has been worse for the union than even the SNP.
In the most recent Parliament, it was the smallest group, the Liberal Democrats led by Willie Rennie who forced the SNP to change tack on several occasions over big issues like stop and search and use of armed police on routine duties. If people really do want a strong opposition, then it’s the Lib Dems who are best placed to provide it.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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18 Comments
I don’t see why it’s such a horrible thought. A controlling bunch of pro independence statists opposed by a group of controlling anti independence statists (labour) is even worse in my opinion.
The conservatives are the only party to opposed the named person scheme, they’re the ones most fit to be the opposition.
Its horrible in just the same way as the Scottish representatives of Corbyn’s Labour party as the main opposition to the SNP is horrible. Why single one of them out ?- they are both utterly illiberal.
They’re so horrible they need to be singled out as worse than labour? But not so horrible the lib dems couldn’t go into coalition with them, right?
Why would the Scottish Lib Dems put this on their website? A letter from the most unpopular leader the Lib Dems have ever had praising people like Danny Alexander. The Scottish Tories must be dancing in the streets.
Personally I think it’s time for the Lib Dems to think small again. Pick one group of society and gone in their support. I believe that group should be small business, give it a voice, target it specifically and build support for a base that identifies with you.
Just a thought.
I agree and the reality is it makes independence look even more like an inevitability.
Sorry, Nick, but your treatment of Mike was cavalier and appalling and showed terrible judgement. Mike had the measure of Salmond and you threw it all away. Mike is too nice a guy to complain publicly….. and it gives me no pleasure to say it.
No amount of fine words can wash that away now…… not only that, but it went down incredibly badly in Scotland and in the Borders in particular. IMHO it made the referendum even closer than it need have been. It also made it even more difficult to defend a seat that had been held with distinction in different forms since 1965.
Yet again. This is the sort of thing that we should have been saying during the Coalition and the 2015 election campaign. We would not have sustained the electoral disaster we did last year if the Coalition had been explicitly set up as a transactional arrangement, rather than the rose-garden love-in bromance that we had.
We face a big round of Elections in 4 days, what to do ? I know! Lets spend our time slagging each other off – it works for Labour after all.
Why do we get embroiled in this sort of nonsense. The national public are still against us, let us just accept that and stop trying to believe we are something electorally wonderful, that time is still a long way off. Look what has happened to other minor parties in national coalitions, they are out of sight for years. It is a very slow process to come back, very slow indeed. If anything we going backwards at the moment. In life there is always a price to be paid, and we are now paying for that coalition. For goodness sake keep the name N… C…. out of sight.
Jim
It is, of course, very dangerous to generalise and stereotype, but small business over the years has quite a reputation for poujadiste-style right wing leanings. I thought UKIP was “their” party? Lib Dems don’t want to dally with that kind of thinking, surely?
Accusing small businesses of having “poujadist” leanings is ridiculous. Small businesses have anti-high regulation and anti high tax leanings, but it is nothing to do with xenophobia.
@David Evans “Sadly it is the clear view of most of those voters that he failed to do that and even worse, they believe that we, the party at large, agreed with him that he should break that the pledge and that trust.”
If I had not spent so much time on Lib Dem Voice over the last few years, I would not know that there were any Lib Dems disagreeing with the leadership’s party line during the Coalition. Only Jeremy Browne springs to mind as a high-profile dissenter, and that was in completely the opposite direction to the liking of many Lib Dems!
I sometimes wonder if the view that I have is distorted by an unrepresentative high proportion of “rebels” sounding off on this site.
To the public, Nick Clegg was – and is – the face and the voice of the Liberal Democrats. And to the electorate, the Lib Dems are that party they saw in Coalition and who are proud of their entire record in Government.
After Sturgeon’s fantastic (dare I say “Clegg like”?) performance at the leaders debates one pundit suggested she was coming over so well because David Cameron and Ed Milliband just didn’t know enough about Scottish politics and therefore had no response.
Exactly! – Why did Nick Clegg give Michael Moore the boot?
@malc 1st May ’16 – 10:18am
Well said.
@David Raw 1st May ’16 – 11:27am
As always, excellent point well made.
@Alex Macfie 1st May ’16 – 12:40pm
Nail, head, hit!
@paul barker 1st May ’16 – 12:55pm
“We face a big round of Elections in 4 days, what to do ? I know! Lets spend our time slagging each other off – it works for Labour after all.”
A fair point Paul. Do you think those of us on opposite sides of the debate should simply agree to disagree and keep away from divisive pro-Clegg, pro-Laws, pro-Coalition topics?
@theakes 1st May ’16 – 1:10pm
As with Alex, nail, head, hit!
@Peter Watson 1st May ’16 – 10:08pm
“If I had not spent so much time on Lib Dem Voice over the last few years, I would not know that there were any Lib Dems disagreeing with the leadership’s party line during the Coalition.”
Peter, that is really interesting, because had I not spent so much time on Lib Dem Voice over the last few years, I would not know that there were many Lib Dems apparently AGREEING with the leadership’s really successful party line during the Coalition.
Personally I do not believe that NC and his inner circle could have been as inept as they appeared to be but instead that they held and pursued an economic agenda that was alien to that of the bulk of the party and of our core vote but somewhat closer to that of Cameron and Osborne.
@Peter Soal 2nd May ’16 – 9:02am
Re the sacking of Michael Moore – why indeed.
Being the official opposition doesn’t mean anything when you are nowhere near forming a government. Scotland will never trust the Tories, whoever their leader is (and I would argue that Ruth Davidson is doing a better job than David Cameron), so the only alternative to a SNP majority government at Holyrood is an SNP minority government. It will take the Liberal Democrats a generation to get back to the levels of support that we had in Scotland, and it will probably take Labour nearly as long, always asuming that Scotland remains part of the UK. If the next referendum, whenever it comes is for ‘YES’ then all bets are off.
PS Luckily, I don’t think we have an official opposition in the Scottish Parliament.