The SNP and the Tories - is This the Love that Dare not Speak its Name?

Which UK party do the Scottish Nationalists most want to do well in the coming election? Might they prefer the Tories? And might the Tories, deep down, also prefer a Scottish exit from the UK to the continuing Union they claim to support? Is this the love that dare not speak its name?

 

Since their narrow failure to win the independence vote in September, the Nationalists have been in a very interesting position. I take the view that Gordon Brown’s intervention, in the last days of the campaign, swung the result for 'No'. But the implied promise, that by staying in the Union, Scotland would even so be given almost everything short of actual independence, has led to the moral destruction of that Union. There's no doubt a vote now would go for separation.

 

I do not know if London’s politicians could ever have made enough concessions, swiftly enough, to satisfy Scots that they were sincere about the Brown pledge. But I am sure that David Cameron’s attempt to use the pledge to outmanoeuvre the Labour Party disgusted and disillusioned many of those who until then had been prepared to give the Union a chance. Any hope that the Union could survive in the long term (as long as we remain under EU sovereignty, anyway) died at that point. 

 

Loyalist Tories (blinded to all other facts by their ridiculous refusal to grasp that their party is finished and ought to be) still have only the vaguest idea of the hatred for the Tory Party which exists in the North of England. Likewise they can barely conceive of the even greater loathing of the Tory Party which flourishes in Scotland itself. It is visceral, and not open to discussion.

 

Whether Mr Cameron , whom I regard as a thorough cynic, shares this blindness, I do not know.  Somehow, I fear I will never get the chance to let him unburden his inner heart to me. My request for an interview with him still moulders in a drawer somewhere, long ago yellowed by time.

 

But, were I a cynical Tory strategist, in possession of the private polling such people see (whose results are easy to guess at) , I would be doing all in my power to manoeuvre Scotland into leaving the UK. I would never say so, because the remaining believers in my party would be outraged at such a  betrayal of the Unionist principle. But I would carefully calculate my actions to achieve this end, without ever actually making it so obvious that it couldn’t be denied. The feebleness of Mr Cameron’s arguments for the Union before the referendum, his bad tactics in dealing with Mr Salmond, his post-referendum manoeuvres, can all be explained by incompetence or lassitude, and might actually have been caused by these things.

There’s no shortage of bunglers in the Tory machine, and Mr Cameron is not actually an especially clever politician. Remember, this is the man who nearly split his party, quite needlessly,  over grammar schools,  who has twice reversed himself over Green policies, who did split it over same-sex marriage,  who bungled the Juncker affair, who has twice reversed himself over green policies,  who destroyed Libya, who embarrassed the Queen by claiming childishly to a foreign politician that she had been ‘purring’ over the referendum result, and who hired Andrew Coulson as a Downing Street aide against the strong advice of many.

 

Even so, it is wise to remember that political cynics, competent or incompetent, are distinguished by the fact that they do not have any principles. That is how they get on. Charles de Gaulle managed to fool French conservatives into thinking he would hang on to Algeria, while all along intending to pull out. He told them ‘I have understood you’ , and they thought he meant ‘I agree with you’, because that was what they wanted to think. Thus he came to power.

 

The Tory party’s best hope of a getting a Westminster majority again is to get rid of Scotland.  A UK shorn of Scotland would produce a Tory majority Parliament and so at least temporarily halt the slow but accelerating death of the Tory Party.  But time is short. The core Tory vote is (literally) dying in droves as it is composed almost entirely of older voters. It is not being replaced. And as the new mass migrants become UK citizens, they are unlikely to become Tory voters.  The break must happen soon if the Tory party is to regain its lost ability to govern with an absolute majority, and all the fundraising and other advantages that come with that status.

 

The SNP are aware of this. They play heavily on the Scottish hatred of the Tory party, and one of their most effective arguments during the referendum was to say that, if Scotland voted for independence it would never have another Tory government. Continued Tory dominance South of the Border would work for them in the post-election period , when they will work furiously to reopen the question of independence while the votes are running so strongly their way. By contrast, a Labour-dominated government in London would weaken their cause – not least Labour currently has absolutely no reason to want a Scottish exit from the Union. It still hopes to regain at least some of the votes and seats it is currently losing to the SNP. It is also quite willing to have some sort of informal arrangement with the SNP to hold power at Westminster, a deal the Tories cannot do without looking as unprincipled as they actually are. There's another aspect of this. The chances of a Labour majority government are now virtually nil, thanks to the SNP surge, so undermining the Tory 'Vote UKIP, get Red Ed' bogeyman campaign.  The Tory campaign needs to re-engineer its bogeyman. 

 

This brings me to various stories in this morning’s newspapers, recounting interviews given by the SNP ex-leader Alex Salmond, over the influence his party might hold if Labour forms a government in May.

 

The Daily Telegraph said that words spoken by Alex Salmond, the SNP’s ex-leader led to ‘accusations that he would "hold Ed Miliband to ransom" ‘. I could not find, in the story beneath, who exactly had spoken these words, which also appeared in connection with the story in a  number of other newspapers. But there was no doubt that the words actually spoken were not helpful to Labour, which is frantically trying to play down the Scottish threat, and to avoid committing itself to any kind of deal with the SNP. The impression was given that Labour is the SNP’s patsy and puppet. Is it that straightforward?

 

What if the Tories and the SNP both ended up helping each other to get what they wanted – a Tory majority government at Westminster, and Scotland gone from the UK? A phrase from my childhood - 'accidentally on purpose' - springs to mind.