Morning After the Night Before - First Thoughts

I have got a few bullet points...for things to think about.

First, unequivocally good things, in no particular order.

1) Andy Wightman

2) No UKIP

3) SNP win

After that, everything gets a bit nuanced.

First, the SNP got 150 000 more votes, and fewer seats, losing their overall majority.  (six Greens means there IS a pro-Independence majority...just barely) This Yes majority could unequivocally have been MUCH bigger. One cannot, of course, blame the SNP for wishing to maximise their vote, and the Greens did okay in getting the idea of the SNP 1 and Green 2 model across...but maybe could have done better.

RISE didn't happen at all.  Neither did any of the other left parties.

Looking back, SNP absolute Majority in 2011 (and the consequent Indyref) is now clearly to be seen historically and arithmetically as a freak result, in that the SNP did WELL in the constituencies but not TOO well, which meant that, unlike this time, their massive list vote counted for enough to push them just over 65 seats.  They gained votes and lost seats, indicating that it is impossible for them to game the system except in the way they DID game it, which was pretty much at the expense of the Greens, and, incidentally,  the salvation of Labour, and the triumph of the Tories.

Like Labour, the SNP's instincts are territorial.  Independence is their baw.  And naebiddy else gets to play with it.  As an issue, however, and as an immediate prospect, as indicated in their manifesto, another referendum is definitely OFF the table.  

The effectiveness of the Tories in opposition will be, i think, a factor in the next few years, in cementing the No vote. in the Tories natural constituency which they are now on their way to recovering after the anomalies of the Thatcher/Major years. (The Tories having no representation in Scotland was demographically nonsensical...there IS a Scottish Middle Class which now dares again to speak its name.)  However, i don't see the Tories improving on this next time around...but i DO expect them to do much better than laboutrr did in terms of pure parliamentary gamesmanship.  They have adjusted much better to devolution than Labour have.  They have, ironically, achieved much of the local responsiveness that Murdo fraser asked for last time round.

The factors that might "materially" change the circumstances enough in Scotland to provoke another referendum are all, i think, external.  Everything depends on UK politics...which is ironic, because if you look at the Welsh and regional English results, there being any such thing as a United Kingdom any more is at least debatable in terms of the landscape of politics.  (For example, what has happened to Labour in Scotland has absolutely NOTHING to do with Jeremy Corbyn or Ken Livingstone).  On the other hand, it will take an acceleration the Balkanisation clearly under way in the rest of the UK (in London, Wales and the rest of England as at least three distinct polities) , which Brexit and a Tory victory in 2020 would accomplish, to affect the constitutional question

As for Labour, like Britain itself, they have lost an Empire and are yet to find a role.  There seems to be a split emerging between those who still dream, after all this time, that the last ten years haven't really happened and they can wake up one morning and everything will be fine again, to those wanting to take the party further to the left...which doesn't seem to have done anything for them this time, to those who want to take the party in a "new" Blairite direction...and eventually displace the SNP in the centre. One almost doesn't want to look.

Ironically, a feeling that this "hasn't really happened and we'll wake up back in Labourland" also afflicted a lot of SNP activists which i think accounts for a lot of the jitteriness over the last week or so...

Part of the Tory triumph, maybe, is that they have made the psychological journey towards coping with the new normal of ongoing devomax with the SNP in charge...much more completely than even have the SNP themselves.

As for the bigger, historical picture, if the 2011 result was anomalous, and independence really is off the table for the foreseeable future, both of which seem to be true this morning, then this result for me speaks of a wish for stability. We want to be boring.  We've made that collective decision.  For the SNP as a safe pair of hands, and for the Greens to prick their conscience once in a while, and the Tories to push them further towards competence as an end in itself, I guess I'm not unhappy this morning, though i'm a little disappointed for Zara Kitson.

I'm not massively entertained, however.

THAT photo

                                                   

In the same week as the Hillsborough Inquest finally delivered its verdict to an outpouring of solidarity and shared celebration – and of renewed vilification for the slimy sods of News International, Nicola Sturgeon poses for THAT picture...holding up a copy of the Sun, endorsing it as it endorses her...

Now, in the left-Indy- Yes voting corner of the local twitttersphere I inhabit, this has, of course , provoked some comment. “It's a fake” yell some...”she was tired”...say others...”it was a joke” say yet more, and then, most ludicrously of all...”It was an accident”

Please don't try to tell me there was no thinking behind it, or that the SNP electoral machine , especially that surrounding the First Minister, is anything other than professional! Now that really is stretching the envelope of credibility...Nicola Sturgeon poses for a photograph...by ACCIDENT!?!

Next you'll be saying that's not really Ruth Davidson on that tank because she has no taste for her self image on various eccentric forms of transport.

So, given that what we've just seen is a piece of old fashioned machine politics, that responding to the endorsement of the biggest selling paper in the country with a wee bit of endorsement of the product is just the expected quid pro quo, is just business as usual...what was the thinking behind it?

Oddly enough, listening to Nicola Sturgeon this morning on the Today programme, effortlessly batting around that old Welsh Harumpher she was talking to, there was a bit of a clue.

It's not about Independence she was telling him. Over and over. Loud and clear. “I know YOU and my political opponents think we're obsessed with nothing else” she seemed to say, “but the truth is that you're the ones who keep going on about it. This is about a programme of government, and, by the way, the top item on the list is education.”

Now, in 1997 Tony Blair talked a lot about education...

(BANG..there we go...that's the trouble with politics at the moment...you just mention somebody's name...Hitler, Tony Blair...and you find yourself in hot water)

...as part of the New Labour project for occupying the centre ground of British Politics. And, in UK terms, of course, New Labour was hugely successful. The problem was, that in endorsing, as Blair and Brown did, the Thatcherite “revision” of the post war settlement that held “Britain” together as a cohesive social unit, New Labour continued the fissuring of that project, the Break Up of Britain...and opened the door, in electoral politics in Scotland, to the SNP strategy of replacing the Labour party on the centre ground of a distinctly SCOTTISH politics that was different from the UK.

The trap for Labour was that to do what it took to win a UK election, it had to abandon it's base of support in the “regions”...and in THIS particular region, there was someone waiting to take their place, someone who would dress in the left wing clothes that they had shed in order to win seats in the South East of England.

Thing is...that story is over now. The replacement job is done. If there is one thing that this election definitely signifies, it is that we have come to the end of that particular old song.

This is the New Normal of Scottish politics, the new centre...with the SNP in the middle, the Tories on the right, and contested territory on the left...and fr a political party, the centre is EXACTLY where you want to be.  Ask Tony Blair.

What is going on is that the SNP no longer need to wear the clothes of the left, because, though it may offend the twitter sphere, they know that there are more votes in a Sun endorsement than there are votes to be lost to people who will probably vote Rise or Green or Labour on the list vote anyway. They know that the people of Scot;land are not nearly as left wing as the noisier folk among us would like to think. 

They know that Blair was right.  Elections are won in the centre.  But that was in the UK...then.  This is Scotland now.  And the centre is wherever Nicola says it is.

This election is about consolidating the centre ground.  Competence is the name of the game.  And independence, to the degree it is on the agenda at all, is in the gift of a UK electorate who may well vote for Brexit, and relect the Tories in 2020...and will come as an award for that competence, as what we used to call "the settled will" of the Scottish people. 

We'll see on Thursday night if they were right to make the choice. We'll see over the next few years if nemesis follows hubris the way it usually does. But please don't give me any nonsense about “that photo” being the equivalent of Ken Livingstone making an arse of himself over the weekend.

They know exactly what they're doing.