Burnt bridges and minority governments

According to Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP has a mandate not only to form the next Scottish Government but to implement the manifesto on which it fought and won the election. The first part of this statement is clearly true, and none of Scotland's parties have either the capacity or the desire to prevent the SNP from continuing in power.

The second part of the statement, that the SNP has a mandate to implement its manifesto, strikes me as rather beside the point. There is only one way of implementing a manifesto as a minority government, and that is by engaging in horse-trading in order to garner sufficient votes (or abstentions) from other parties to pass your policies into law.

Sturgeon's words were interpreted in at least one newspaper as a threat to Labour and the LibDems that the voters would hold them to account if they stood in the way of SNP policies. But threatening Labour and the LibDems with punishment from the voters is rather like threatening to stand on somebody's toes after you have cut off their legs. The threat is not so much hollow as meaningless, particularly given the perception that Labour's latest drubbing at the polls was at least in part a result of its being perceived as too soft on the constitutional issues. Both parties are likely to conclude that they have little to gain from being midwife to the SNP's third term.

The Conservatives fought a successful campaign based almost entirely on the notion that they would confront the SNP at every turn. It's hard to see how they can now be expected to cooperate with an SNP administration they have been elected to oppose. (And hard to see how the SNP could stomach such support, given the frequency with which they hurl the word "Tory" into every debate and at every opponent.)

This, we are told, is because Scotland has fractured along a constitutional faultline, something that in more hysterical moments is described as "Ulsterisation". There is no denying this, but it's also worth asking how we got here. After their (fairly narrow) defeat in the Independence referendum, the SNP were faced with a choice. They could keep the pressure up, denounce the post-referendum settlement as a betrayal, and keep open the possibility of a second referendum. Or they could decide that the referendum had settled the issue for the time being (I hesitate to use the word "generation"), be an active player in designing the post-referendum settlement, and find common ground with other parties on specific issues.

Not surprisingly, they chose the first path. It was the one that offered the best hopes of achieving independence in the foreseeable future, enabled them to keep a broad coalition of supporters happy, and bolstered their electoral strength. If I was a SNP strategist, I would have made the same choice. But everything has its price, and the price of this strategy was to foreclose any possibility of partnership with the "Unionist" parties. There's no point complaining that potential partners are refusing to cross the river when you are the one who has burnt all the bridges.

As a result, the SNP finds itself in an awkward position. The Conservatives will only support them on major issues if the SNP swears off any attempt to hold IndyRef2 in the course of this parliament. Labour and the LibDems will only support them if they can portray such support as a humiliating climbdown in which SNP has been forced to adopt their policies.

So their most likely partners are the Greens. This could make for a very peculiar form of minority government, one in which the government party has little room for manoeuvre and in which the junior partner can take credit for any successes (land reform, progressive taxation, scrapping of the SNP's plans for cuts in air passenger duty) but won't necessarily be burdened with the blame for its failures. In the worst-case scenario, the government could find itself forced to pass legislation that Green supporters like but which damages the SNP's own electoral base. At the very least, we are in for an interesting five years, and Sturgeon's talk of mandates and manifestos won't allow her to escape the reality of having to choose between the various forms humiliation on offer from the "Unionists" or accepting whatever clapped out nag Patrick Harvie decides to sell her.

SNP: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?

When they haven't been gloating over the ongoing demise of the Labour Party, SNP supporters seem to have been busy debating whether the 2016 Holyrood election was a glorious reaffirmation of the party's dominance or a frustrating stumble on the path to independence. On the face of it, this seems odd. The 2011 absolute majority was something of an anomaly, and the 2016 result still sees them with 63 seats (out of a total of 129), 46.5% of the constituency vote, and 41.5% of the regional vote. These are figures that any other party can only dream of, and that leave the SNP well placed for a third term of government, albeit reliant on the votes of others.

However, the concerns are real. Firstly, there is the question of the gap between the constituency vote and the regional one. Which of these represents the SNP's "true" level of support? On the one hand, there are those who argue that the lower regional vote reflects the mistaken decision of SNP voters to lend their list vote to other pro-Independence parties. On the other hand, there are those who argue that the SNP's constituency vote is (artificially) boosted by the Greens (who only ran in two constituencies) and by a few stragglers from RISE and Solidarity.

There is, unfortunately, no way of settling this decisively - short of interviewing thousands of voters about how they voted and why. But given that the Greens' total regional share of 6.6% was only 2.2% higher than their pre-IndyRef total in 2011 and was actually lower than the 6.9% they achieved in 2003, the most likely explanation for the difference seems to be Green voters lending their constituency votes to the SNP rather than SNP voters lending their regional votes to the Greens. (To be honest, I'm not keen on the whole concept of a party's supporters "lending" votes as it seems to imply that the votes are somehow the property of the party, but I'll let that pass for the moment.)

If this is correct, then the true level of support for the SNP, was 41.5% this time round. (And for anyone who wants to argue that the constituency vote is the best test of support, all I can say is that this would leave Labour claiming second place overall, and would place the Liberal Democrats 7% ahead of the Greens.)

The second concern, which I haven't seen discussed in much detail so far, is the impact of the campaign. The verdict following the Independence referendum was that the Yes side might have lost the vote but that they had won the campaign, turning a 30% deficit into a 10% one. The clear implication was that one more successful campaign would turn the shortfall into a surplus, a view that appeared to be confirmed by the SNP's dramatic victory at the UK General Election of 2015.

Now let's look at the Scottish Parliament campaign. According to the Poll of Polls on Pro-Indy blog Scot Goes Pop!, on 1 March the SNP was on 53.4% on the constituency ballot and on 47.4% on the regional ballot. In other words, the SNP appears to have lost 7% on the constituency ballot during the course of the campaign and 6% on the regional ballot. (It's interesting to compare this to the widely criticised Labour Party campaign which actually held its vote at a stable level during the campaign - although admittedly at a level that still sees the party consigned to the political wilderness for the next five years at least.)

While the overall result is clearly a good one, SNP members and supporters would do well to ask whether their strategy was fit for purpose. And they may also want to ponder on what lessons to draw from the fact that, during a campaign which focused overwhelmingly on the issue of a second referendum, they appear to have suffered a signficant loss of support.

W(h)ither Labour?

Labour’s result in the Holyrood elections on 5 May 2016 was dreadful ... but it wasn’t simply the result of a poor campaign. The poll of polls on Pro-Indy website Scot Goes Pop! at the start of campaigning on 1 March gave Labour 21% on the constituency poll and 19% on the regional poll. That compares to final figures of 22.6% and 19.1% on the day.

Labour’s result was confirmation of its dire position since the referendum in September 2014, and was made worse by the fact that the party was overtaken by the Conservatives. This is both a psychological blow for Labour and a real one. (Politics is a zero-sum game – what is good for your opponents is bad for you.)

Perhaps Labour could have achieved a better result by offering more centrist policies on tax (or more unequivocally radical ones) or by opposing a referendum more clearly (or by offering further flexibility on the constitutional issue). However, my own guess is that Labour is the victim of circumstances that are of its own making (historically) but which are now beyond its control. If this is the case, then all it can do is keep trying to shift the focus away from the constitution and onto day-to-day issues, but with no guarantee of success.