Revolutionary times
Colin Bell
Edinburgh So many riveting questions dominate the small talk of Scotland as we anxiously await the extra hour of drinking time which a gracious Government is giving us next Week. Stunned by a week in which newsPapers were forced to change their front Pages every hour on the hour, and in which Earl Haig discovered that devolution was hardly understood by the people' (a fact Which he rather oddly imparted to the bail;' Telegraph, not noted for its hegeMony of the Scottish breakfast table), fifteen hundred Scots so far have invested £2.50 in the Government's bumper fun book, the Scotland and Wales Bill. God knows how many of them will have Mastered its 166 pages before the House of Commons rips it into pieces, but it should Make a handsome pair with the almost inevitable report of the long overdue Inquiry into the murder of Mrs Rachel Ross, a crime in which there have now been so many confessions, perjuries, pardons and acquittals that it has managed to discredit the police, the judiciary, the executive, the law, and thus at least advance the spirit of democracy. There will be an inquiry, too, into the running of the Carstairs State Hospital, Scotland's Broadmoor, from which two Inmates managed to escape with great ease, and the alleged assistance of a fireMan's axe. There has been an inquiry into Sir Hugh Fraser, and Mrs Thatcher seems determined that the next general election should be followed by an inquest into the deliberate suicide of the Scottish Tories.
t Heady stuff, and made all the richer by p°e tide of speculation that the Blessed ,bo Mackintosh will be refused the Chair of Politics at Edinburgh University on the
excellent grounds that he knows a great deal about the subject, has published several standard works, and would therefore represent a dangerous breach of precedent in a university whose primary concern is the architectural destruction of the city. This will, of course, spare the Labour Party the embarrassment of a byelection in Berwick and East Lothian, and guarantee the Government at least one vote for their Devolution Bill, if not much else.
There must, however, be a by-election soon. Since 1918, Scotland has averaged 1.5 by-elections a year; but there has not been one now since November I973—and the odds on there being several in 1977 must be very short indeed. In fact, all the parties here are constantly inquiring after the health of any MP who so much as sits down for his morning porridge, and in some cases, into the incredible longevity of noble parents. What would happen at a byelection, any by-election, is not entirely clear; for some local government results have rubbed home the point that where there are three contenders, it is entirely possible for the least-favoured horse to sneak through the mutually destructive carnage of the two fancied runners. Of course, there is every reason to suppose that the Labour vote would drop, and drop very far indeed. A long run of opinion polls have tended to confirm that the 36 per cent which they polled in 1974 has now shrunk to somewhere about 30 per cent; and overall, the polls have indicated that that is just about the level of both the SNP and the Tories. Three parties polling around the same, and trapped in an electoral system only suited to a two-party model, is a recipe for psephological chaos.
The extra jokers in this pack will be played in Westminster, and judged in Scotland. Broadly speaking, the Scottish media have been critical of the Bill, particularly over the question of revenue-raising, but it is sheer guesswork what the people think; and guesswork, too whether Tory opposition to the Bill on second reading will solidify a Unionist vote around their banners, or extinguish all their hopes. One newspaper, the Daily Record, has attempted to raise guesswork to the status of an art (if not a science) by inviting its readers to complete a Record referendum; despite the academic advice and justification of Professor Richard Rose, whose typewriter is said to be water-cooled to enable him to maintain his productivity, nobody is terribly convinced that 44 per cent of Record readers want total independence. But then, suppose they do, and any kind of referendum becomes a very dangerous toy to throw to the Labour back benches.
Those who criticise the Record poll most savagely are implicitly admitting the Nationalists' greatest strength. For when they cry that it was a write-in poll, and that this enabled dedicated Nationalists to flood the mailbags, they overlook the fact that an election too, unlike the customary opinion poll, is a write-in, and one in which enthusiasm and organisation reap their reward by differential turn-out. The SNP has no rivals when it comes to putting canvassers on the street, posters in the window, and delivering the vote.
All that bubbling zeal must occasionally spill over; and there is no doubt that the mysterious lack of by-elections, or of a general election, has begun to cause problems for the SNP. Troops who have been told repeatedly that the battle looms, that victory is certain, and that a final issue of grog is on its way, can become desperately restive when stood down. A number of local constituency associations have recently picked quarrels with their candidates (a familiar problem to the Scottish Tories, incidentally, who have lost half a dozen prospective candidates this year in mildly exotic circumstances), and although the standard explanation is that this is all part of a general upgrading, there is no doubt that part of the problem is the turning inward of frustrated appetites.
But this is, of course, mere trivia when compared to the problems of the Labour and the Tory parties. Nobody joins the SNP without agreeing that they want Scottish independence, whereas the Nationalists' opponents can count on no such general measure of agreement on the national question. Some genuinely think that devolution is a good thing, and some that it is wicked; many think it is expedient, but cannot fix upon the exact prophylactic dose. Some have staked their careers and reputations on their analysis; others are merely waiting to pick the bones after the battle. These are revolutionary times, and every Scottish MP carries his resignation in his knapsack.
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