Don't Blame Me!
I enjoyed this piece by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times in which he takes elements of the Labour Party to task over their ridiculous efforts to blame the Conservatives for the rise and rise of the SNP.
Now I wrote about this myself just recently in response to a similar argument advanced by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian and if you ask me the Labour Party has no one to blame for their spectacular decline in Scotland, except Labour itself.
Labour’s hypocrisy has brought us to this crisis
By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times
The balance of power in Britain may be seized by a party that wants to break it up. That’s not something we can ignore
So this — if I have understood it correctly, and I think I have — is the argument.
In a little over a week, Britain may elect a government entirely dependent for survival on a left-wing separatist group that thinks Michael Foot would have been a good prime minister. The balance of power will then be held by a party that wants to break up the country. And laws in big areas — schools for instance — will only be passed with the permission of MPs whose own constituents will not be affected by them.
All this may be about to happen but I shouldn’t bring it up. Because if I do so, it might undermine the Union.
That, as I say, is the argument. Well, I’m sorry, but no.
Before we get going I just want to point out that I am a Tory living in Pinner. If Labour’s Douglas Alexander with his 17,000 majority is going to lose his seat to some 20-year-old nationalist sitting her finals, it’s not my fault. The idea that this catastrophe is happening because the Tories and David Cameron are talking about it — and they should therefore stop doing so — is patently absurd. This gets things precisely the wrong way round. Mr Cameron is talking about it because it is happening.
It is Labour that is losing these seats. Labour that dominated Scottish politics for a generation. Labour that crafted the institutions on which the SNP has built its power. Labour that ran the Better Together campaign. And if Labour collapses in Scotland, it is Labour’s fault.
I have previously stayed relatively quiet because I felt embarrassed to offer my opinion when there were all these Scottish experts about, explaining to me that things were different and I didn’t understand, and I should be ever so careful because, you know, none of us want to weaken the Union.
Well, fine experts they turned out to be. They have stumbled from disaster to calamity taking in the view of fiasco and debacle along the way. And a few days from them visiting the consequences of this dismal failure upon me and my family I think it is time to say something. Weaken the Union? I couldn’t do a better job of weakening the Union than all of them, that’s for sure.
On March 30, 1989, the first meeting of the Scottish Constitutional Convention met on the Mound in Edinburgh. With the Scottish Labour party by far the most significant political actor, the convention members signed the Claim of Right. “We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs.” The sovereign right.
In their book The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw explain how this historic moment came about. They trace the collapse of the main pillars of Labour’s Scottish domination — council housing, trade union power, local government hegemony and the strength of the Catholic church — and show how, as these crumbled, Labour felt the need to become more self-consciously Scottish as a way of maintaining relevance.
The centrepiece of this Scottish strategy was to begin to argue that the Conservative government had no mandate in Scotland. When this argument was first made it was a fringe one and highly controversial.
In a 1983 memorandum that became famous in Scottish left circles, the pugnacious Labour MP George Foulkes argued that Labour must be bold and “go beyond more vigorous resistance to new legislation on Scottish affairs . . . challenging the legitimacy of administrative directives and circulars which the majority of Scottish MPs have not endorsed”. His conclusion was resisted by the leadership.
Yet over the next five years, this controversial claim — that laws made in London were not really politically legitimate, and Scotland had a sovereign right to govern itself — became a mainstream doctrine. In the panic that followed the loss of the Glasgow Govan by-election to the SNP in 1988, the Labour party moved to make the Claim of Right.
And its language became more intemperate and extreme. Robin Cook, one of the party’s leaders, said that “to all intents and purposes Scotland is an occupied country in which the ruling power depends for its support on a powerbase which is outside the country”.
It was precisely the claim that the Conservative government lacked legitimacy — that very word — that Labour used to drive the Tories out of its Scottish seats. And now that they are being clubbed to death by the SNP with the weapon that they crafted, they contrive to complain that it is all the fault of the Tories. Do me a lemon.
The latest bit of nonsense is the idea that Scots have turned from Labour to the SNP because David Cameron talked of English votes the morning after the referendum. Doesn’t this conveniently forget that the SNP won a majority in Scotland in the 2011 Scottish parliament election, winning more than 45 per cent of the vote? Isn’t that why we had the referendum in the first place?
No. This wipeout of Scottish Labour is one thing they don’t get to blame on the Tories.
You simply cannot spend a quarter of a century arguing that Scotland has a claim of right to determine its own affairs, questioning the legitimacy of a majority that originates in England, crafting institutions to accompany this rhetoric and then say that the very same arguments are unreasonable when someone gently asks questions about English laws.
The SNP changes the nature of the problem of English laws. While Labour dominated Scotland, it is true that its Scottish MPs might have created laws in England that didn’t apply in Scotland, didn’t apply in their own constituency. And this would have been a matter of concern.
Yet at least these Labour MPs were unionists who cared about England as part of their country. The position with the SNP would be entirely different. They would be relied upon to sustain and support policies in a country they don’t want to be attached to, and in whose outcomes they have no interest. English education law is foreign policy to the SNP.
It will exercise this power in the service of an leftist ideology that England has often rejected and doubtless will reject again.
Is it really wrong to raise this? To point out that we could be days away from it? To ask people to think what it would be like, and to try and avoid it? I can’t think that it is.
Is it a scare story? Well, it certainly sounds pretty scary to me.
The balance of power in Britain may be seized by a party that wants to break it up. That’s not something we can ignore
So this — if I have understood it correctly, and I think I have — is the argument.
In a little over a week, Britain may elect a government entirely dependent for survival on a left-wing separatist group that thinks Michael Foot would have been a good prime minister. The balance of power will then be held by a party that wants to break up the country. And laws in big areas — schools for instance — will only be passed with the permission of MPs whose own constituents will not be affected by them.
All this may be about to happen but I shouldn’t bring it up. Because if I do so, it might undermine the Union.
That, as I say, is the argument. Well, I’m sorry, but no.
Before we get going I just want to point out that I am a Tory living in Pinner. If Labour’s Douglas Alexander with his 17,000 majority is going to lose his seat to some 20-year-old nationalist sitting her finals, it’s not my fault. The idea that this catastrophe is happening because the Tories and David Cameron are talking about it — and they should therefore stop doing so — is patently absurd. This gets things precisely the wrong way round. Mr Cameron is talking about it because it is happening.
It is Labour that is losing these seats. Labour that dominated Scottish politics for a generation. Labour that crafted the institutions on which the SNP has built its power. Labour that ran the Better Together campaign. And if Labour collapses in Scotland, it is Labour’s fault.
I have previously stayed relatively quiet because I felt embarrassed to offer my opinion when there were all these Scottish experts about, explaining to me that things were different and I didn’t understand, and I should be ever so careful because, you know, none of us want to weaken the Union.
Well, fine experts they turned out to be. They have stumbled from disaster to calamity taking in the view of fiasco and debacle along the way. And a few days from them visiting the consequences of this dismal failure upon me and my family I think it is time to say something. Weaken the Union? I couldn’t do a better job of weakening the Union than all of them, that’s for sure.
On March 30, 1989, the first meeting of the Scottish Constitutional Convention met on the Mound in Edinburgh. With the Scottish Labour party by far the most significant political actor, the convention members signed the Claim of Right. “We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs.” The sovereign right.
In their book The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw explain how this historic moment came about. They trace the collapse of the main pillars of Labour’s Scottish domination — council housing, trade union power, local government hegemony and the strength of the Catholic church — and show how, as these crumbled, Labour felt the need to become more self-consciously Scottish as a way of maintaining relevance.
The centrepiece of this Scottish strategy was to begin to argue that the Conservative government had no mandate in Scotland. When this argument was first made it was a fringe one and highly controversial.
In a 1983 memorandum that became famous in Scottish left circles, the pugnacious Labour MP George Foulkes argued that Labour must be bold and “go beyond more vigorous resistance to new legislation on Scottish affairs . . . challenging the legitimacy of administrative directives and circulars which the majority of Scottish MPs have not endorsed”. His conclusion was resisted by the leadership.
Yet over the next five years, this controversial claim — that laws made in London were not really politically legitimate, and Scotland had a sovereign right to govern itself — became a mainstream doctrine. In the panic that followed the loss of the Glasgow Govan by-election to the SNP in 1988, the Labour party moved to make the Claim of Right.
And its language became more intemperate and extreme. Robin Cook, one of the party’s leaders, said that “to all intents and purposes Scotland is an occupied country in which the ruling power depends for its support on a powerbase which is outside the country”.
It was precisely the claim that the Conservative government lacked legitimacy — that very word — that Labour used to drive the Tories out of its Scottish seats. And now that they are being clubbed to death by the SNP with the weapon that they crafted, they contrive to complain that it is all the fault of the Tories. Do me a lemon.
The latest bit of nonsense is the idea that Scots have turned from Labour to the SNP because David Cameron talked of English votes the morning after the referendum. Doesn’t this conveniently forget that the SNP won a majority in Scotland in the 2011 Scottish parliament election, winning more than 45 per cent of the vote? Isn’t that why we had the referendum in the first place?
No. This wipeout of Scottish Labour is one thing they don’t get to blame on the Tories.
You simply cannot spend a quarter of a century arguing that Scotland has a claim of right to determine its own affairs, questioning the legitimacy of a majority that originates in England, crafting institutions to accompany this rhetoric and then say that the very same arguments are unreasonable when someone gently asks questions about English laws.
The SNP changes the nature of the problem of English laws. While Labour dominated Scotland, it is true that its Scottish MPs might have created laws in England that didn’t apply in Scotland, didn’t apply in their own constituency. And this would have been a matter of concern.
Yet at least these Labour MPs were unionists who cared about England as part of their country. The position with the SNP would be entirely different. They would be relied upon to sustain and support policies in a country they don’t want to be attached to, and in whose outcomes they have no interest. English education law is foreign policy to the SNP.
It will exercise this power in the service of an leftist ideology that England has often rejected and doubtless will reject again.
Is it really wrong to raise this? To point out that we could be days away from it? To ask people to think what it would be like, and to try and avoid it? I can’t think that it is.
Is it a scare story? Well, it certainly sounds pretty scary to me.
