Will the Snips be snipped?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
In the old land of the Picts, the north-east of Scotland, an interesting sideshow battle is being fought during this election. Surprisingly, the last party to win an absolute majority of Scottish seats was the Conservatives in 1959. It is a feat which they are unlikely to repeat: they will not pick up many seats in Scotland from Labour (though it would be pleasing to see Mrs Judith Hart's 698 majority in Lanark overturned). All parties here agree that Labour has held its place well. The proletarian heartlands of the central belt are much less susceptible to a Torywards swing than is London, or the West Midlands.
The sideshow is between the Tories and the SNP (ScotNats or, colloquially north of the Tweed, the Snips). Three constituencies running along the north-eastern coast, Moray and Nairn, Banffshire, and East Aberdeenshire, were among those that the Snips took off the Conservatives in 1974, part of their October total of 11. They are marginals, with majorities from 367 to 4371. The Tories should take back at least two of them, and must do so if my colleague Ferdinand Mount's prophecy — that the SNP will lose half its seats—is to be fulfilled.
By contrast Mrs Winifrid Ewing, defending Moray and Nairn, cheerfully boasts that the Snips will win more than 15 seats. She is almost certainly wrong. And yet, and yet: to visit the North is to be reminded that the one certain thing about Scottish politics is its uncertainty, its volatility, its oddness. The political situation in Scotland presents a series of puzzles and paradoxes. Begin with the question: Why do people vote ScotNat? The party itself is a puzzle. To us it seems — does it not? — at best silly, at worst rather nasty. It has only one essential policy, secession from the Union. (In its offices in Edinburgh is a bizarre collection of posters from other fissiparous parties: 'Pacte Democratia per Catalunya'; Tai le gout du Quebec'.) Yet on the psephelogical evidence, that policy is not supported by most of those who voted ScotNat in 1974: otherwise the devolution referendum would have passed easily.
The referendum defeat is still being analysed in the pubs and clubs of the Old City, between the University and the Scotsman, where the Edinburgh intelligentsia gnashes its teeth and licks its wounds (national movements are, notoriously, led by teachers and journalists). Indeed, looking back on 1 March it is difficult to repress a smile of Schadenfreude: How dare the Scottish people have let Neal and Tom down! But it is one thing to talk of the 'fearties', of the 'client-mentality' of the Scotch which holds them back from seeking their destiny; or to talk as Mr Tom Nairn wittily has, of the SNP being a bourgeois nationalist party which woke up to find that it didn't have a bourgeoisie.
Another way of putting it might be that— with good reason — few people want separa tion, but that what the Snips provide is precisely an opportunity for expressing resentment, chippiness, a vague feeling of being the despised underdog; an emotion which is unable to develop into real self con fidence. For that matter the client-ness of the Scottish working-class might explain why so many of them remain loyal to the Labour Party, come what Labour Chancellors may do: another paradox.
Asking voters why they support the Snips only adds to the confusion. An old woman whom Mrs Ewing had just importuned in Elgin High Street on Saturday morning told me, 'Aye, I'll vote for her, She'll put an end to those awful strikes.' (Cf. the man who once told a canvasser that he was voting Liberal because they would stamp out blacks and perverts.) To be fair — and as Mrs Ewing says, 'We are a very fair party' — some of what the SNP says makes sense in the north-east. The lives of the three constituencies are still centred around farming and fishing, in the grand rolling hills, and in the douce little ports of Peterhead and Lossiemouth. Farmers and fishermen believe, rightly, that the Com mon Market has served them badly (admit tedly, it is as rare to find a fisherman as a farmer who will ever admit that times are well). Fishermen faced by the depredations of the continental fishing fleets, and now with the ban on herring fishing in the North Sea, may understandably vote for a party which offers a 100-mile fishing limit. Farmers dissatisfied with the CAP will listen to Mrs Ewing's complaints about 'crafty West German farmers', more than to an enthusiastic European such as Mr Albert McQuarrie, the Conservative candidate in East Aberdeenshire.
If the Tories are to succeed in these three two-sided contests, if they are to win back similar seats like South Angus and Perth, if indeed they are to hold Mr Nicholas Fairbairn's seat of Kinross and West Perthshire with its majority of 53, they must count on more than just a national swing. They must hope that the air is hissing out of the Scot Nat balloon. There is some evidence, not just the referendum, that this is the case. The Snip appeal is essentially 'one-off; as it were. A circus can work very well in politics for a time; not permanently. You have only to see the Snips campaigning. Much noise; every passing child is given a couple of stickers. It is essentially frivolous. The SNP claims that it will take a very high proportion of first-time voters; so, perhaps, it will. But it may be that, for many people, voting for the Nats is, just that: something you do the first time you are on the electoral roll, once, and not again. That was the view of the Tory candidate in Moray and Nairn, Mr Alex Pollock when we talked in Lossiemouth (a few hundred yards, incidentally, from the house where Ramsay MacDonald was born). Whatever first-time voters might do, he was confident that the Conservatives can win most of the voters who have recently settled, of whom there are several thousand in this constitueneY and also in East Aberdeenshire. They have come, many of them, with The Oil (though there are also numerous servicemen moved into the Moray Firth bases).
Some of the oil workers are Scotchmen; some of them may like the Snips, monotonous slogan, 'It's Scotland's oil'. Even some of the Englishmen among them may consider the SNP — for its nuisance value, as. a very English friend living in Scotland put it. Last week the Snips were considering stepping up the nuisance: they would ruP candidates in England in protest against Lord Robertson's ruling that the SNP could not expect equal network air-time with the three national parties. There was talk of standing in seats with a large Scottish community. Perhaps it was not an entirely absurd idea. After all, Liverpool Exchange was represented by an Irish Nationalist to the 1870s. In the end, though, this proved so much waffle, typical of the effusive emotionalism we have come to associate with the Snips (the SNP manifesto speaks with feeling of the 'deplorable record' of alcoholism in Scotland). But erratic as the Snips may be, and fickle and capricious as are their supporters, there is a final paradox in this election. As Tories will candidly admit, it is now or never for them to win back the seats which they lost: another victory by the SNP and they will become entrenched: not necessarily as a genuine and powerful national movement, not necessarily taking at every election a third of the vote as they did in October 1974, but permanently exercising the disproportionate power which a minority partY can enjoy; and moreover perpetually soM.ing the constitutional air which the 'Union breathes — while lacking the force and the support to do anything which might finallY break the Union cleanly apart. That is the Tories' problem, and Scotland's problem too. The legacy of the last election was Labour's fit of panic, begotten by the 31 per cent SNP vote in October 1974 and ultimately giving birth to the Scotland Act. With luck the Tories will pull it off and add half-a-dozen Snip-held seats to the bag they need to win the election. I'M not sure that I entirely share the confidence of some Conservatives, or of our Political Commentator; but before leaving Scotland I put a tenner at 4-1 for the Snips to win three to five seats: £40 can pay for a few bottles of Banffshire vin du pays.
Previous page
