Scottish Tories
Problems for Mrs Thatcher
Ian Ross
All politicians need luck, but some at least can make their own. Mrs Thatcher, on her fourth visit to Scotland inside six months, seems to have made her own bad luck. There are those inside the Tory Party — if not in its head quarters — who claim that nobody told the Leader that on the same day that she was gaily posing beside the fishermen and oil rig roustabouts of Aberdeen, there was a key local government by-election taking place in Edinburgh. Whether she knew or not, her laboriously polished attack on the SNP as the Rice Krispy party — "all snap, crackle and pop" — blew up in her breakfast the following morning, as the SNP candidate at S lateford-Hailes came in with 1200 votes more than the Tory, with Labour, the previous incumbents, limping home a bedraggled third.
Of course, the result explains precisely why it is that Mrs Thatcher, the only Tory leader in history who could visit Scotland and neither attend the Edinburgh Festival, nor shoot anything, keeps coming here. The party loyalists have been telling her that the rot has stopped, that next time they will not only keep their seats, but win some back; but the voters in Wester Hailes, a miniature new town on Edinburgh's outskirts, ignored what the opinion poles and the professional politicians told them, and put up the Nationalists' vote from third place, and 28 per cent of the poll, to first place, and 48 per cent, in just four months.
Scarcely evidence of a rot stopped, either for the Tories or for Labour; but Mrs Thatcher's repeated journeyings at least suggest that she has realised, as few Labour leaders yet have, how very far the rot has gone. In 1959, there were twenty-five Tories out of Scotland's seventy-one MPs; in February 1974 twentyone; and in October 1974, a bare sixteen. Even these figures conceal the truth; for the Tory share of the vote has fallen from 39.7 per cent in 1959 to 24.7 per cent last October, and it is only by the vagaries of the electoral system, as well as the skin of their teeth, that many Tories held on last time. Traditionally, they have averaged one lost Scottish deposit per election; last October, they lost ten.
That is the grisly background to the Leader's repeated visits, and also no doubt to the sudden upsurge in other Tory attentions; this week, both James Prior and Sir Keith Joseph are here, at suspiciously short notice, and over the recess a number of local members never previously known to break the surface have been stumping their constituencies lamming into the SNP for "supporting Labour"; Labour MPs still stump their territories abusing the Nationalists as "Tartan Tories", so the combined effect is merely to increase the SNP's coverage and publicity, both of which they attract, and organise, rather better than their rivals anyway.
This latest tour has had one important difference, however; after an initial appearance which resembled a Royal procession, and two subsequent low-key trips in which the charm, the grooming, and the presence were more in evidence than the policies, this time Mrs Thatcher has been making copy, as well as pictures. The issues which Mrs Thatcher chose were strong local runners; the plight of the self-employed, and the small businessmen, and oil. Scotland has a high number of individual and family businesses, not only because fishing and agriculture are important here, but because a country of small burghs and long distances still supports many local manufacturers, services and shops. Good ground ffor Tories, since the Labour Government has 6Iearly decided that those who buy their own insurance stamps are their kulaks, ripe for forced collectivisation, and since constituencies dominated by these sturdy individualists have been in the van of the flight from Heath-style Toryism into the arms of the SNP. Moray and Nairn, Banff, East Perth, South Angus, Galloway — traditional Tory country which the government of 1970 to 1974 converted to Nationalism.
Stern reminders of the virtues of thrift, ambition, hard work, self-reliance, go well in much of scotland. Allied to mortgages and the grant-aided schools, they go down well in douce suburban Scotland, too, Natural territory for Mrs Thatcher, and for Sir Keith, if the change of heart has not come too late, There is no hope of persuading the victims of urban deprivation and industrial decay in the West of Scotland, corralled as they are in grim ghettoes of socialist concrete, to vote Tory, and never has been; but if Mrs Thatcher can recapture all those middle-class Nationalists, and the handfuls of Liberals, leaving the SNP to continue its own inroads into the Labour stronghold, then Scotland could indeed settle the result of the next election, Bravely clambering up oil-rigs, hair magically kept Hollywood-unruffled beneath the hard hat, joking on the fish quays, pressing the flesh in the smarter shopping centres, brings in the cameramen; but what seems, certain to be a new and sustained campaign to defend small enterprises and initiative may bring in the votes.
Mrs Thatcher showed a much poorer grasp of the situation when she turned to oil; or as it always is up here, the Oil. Scots have a sound, solid respect for private enterprise, and a recent survey revealed that even among lifelong Labour voters nationalisation was broadly despised and feared, but they make a keen distinction between the right to own your own farm or , shop, and the rights of the mighty international oil companies. Mrs Thatcher's promise that State participation in the North Sea would be unscrambled by a Tory Government quickened a few pulses. Most Scots see the ownership of the oil as an issue with only three solutions; ownership by foreign corporations, ownership by the British Government, or ownership by a more or less exclusively Scottish public body. Between the first two, the distinctions blur; and it is only the third alternative which excites the arguments — there may be no majority for an independent Scotland seizing all the oil, but there is scarcely even a minority which does not wish to see a good deal more Scottish control of the way in which the oil is extracted and exploited, and the way in which the bills for new homes, schools, roads to service the short-lived oil communities are paid. The Leader's other contributions to her party may also prove significant, If defending the family business wins votes and defending Exxon may yet lose them, her firm restatement of the Tory commitment to an, elective Assembly for Scotland puts a tourniquet on the haemorrhage. Devolution has been at or near the head of Scotland's political agenda for eight years now, and the Tories have travelled a long, and frequently faltering, path in their efforts to find a devolution policy. Heath's vaguely defined, and strictly appointed, Assembly, which popped up immediately after Mrs Ewing in 1967, not only attracted no-one, it made no visible progress under the Tories.
In 1974, the Scottish Tories went heroically to defeat with a policy which sometimes sounded as if Alick Buchanan Smith made it up each morning in his bath. Having been defeated, and defeated here by Nationalists, not Labour (the Tories lost eight seats to SNP in two elections, and only one to Labour), they did some rapid shuffling and came ddwn firmly if belatedly, for the elected, if still amorphous, Assembly. But just as Labour has its rumblings from recalcitrant Unionists like Tam Dalyell of The Binns, so this summer there are signs of Tory doubt from Ian Sproat and others. All this Mrs Thatcher has stopped by the simple device of backing the Assembly in principle, while reserving her detailed position until the Government's White Paper. This may not tempt many existing SNP voters, but it should comfort uneasy Tories fully aware of the pitfalls of entering an election as the only party which thinks London does well by Scotland.
As a parting gesture, the Leader exercised one of her undoubted privileges, and replaced George Younger as Chairman of the Scottish party with Russell Fairgrieve. On the mannerly surface of Tory politics, the change can be explained in terms of Mr. Younger's new burdens as Shadow for Defence; but there is unquestionably an element of loyalty rewaided, and strength entrenched. Mr Younger, in common with the great majority of the Scottish Tory MPs and officials, was a fervent Heath supporter last February; Mr Fairgrieve, along with John Corrie, Teddy Taylor and Nicholas Fairbairn, allowed it to be known that they saw nothing wrong with Mrs Thatcher while the shots were still flying. All are to the right, and if they also embrace much of the dwindling Tory stock of eccentricity, they can point to the proven failure of the steady left.
This appointment naturally raises once more, as did the Leadership election, the problem of Alick Buchanan Smith. Few politicians in Scotland are so widely liked and respected for their honesty, humour and sincerity. But few have nailed their colours to so many sinking masts; in February, it was said that he survived as Shadow Secretary of State because the only alternative, Teddy Taylor, was still in disgrace over the EEC. This Autumn, he may not survive because most of the obviously able Scottish Tories are as yet too young and untested by experience — in particular, Malcolm Rifkind, who is overseeing Tory thinking on the devolution issue.
But despite Mrs Thatcher's efforts, it is still problems, problems, all the way for Tories here. Above all, the problem is not so much appearances, and reminders that Mrs Thatcher knows her way to Euston, but policies; there is nothing like a sustained battle between three established parties and a highly muscular newcomer to raise the intensity, and the content, of political argument. Scottish voters now need wooing by persuasion and facts.
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