teuchter I had hoped to address your point about the fallacy of Scots being "naturally" more left wing than the English, but it's going to take more than one word, and I'm busier today than I'd realised.
I know I've discussed this in the past on here, but it's probably time it was addressed again.
I agree that Scottish people are not naturally more left wing than English people. There are reasons for the myth, though, and these are structural.
First let’s put to bed the idea that Scots are “naturally” left wing. If that were the case, why did a majority of Scots (50.1%) vote Tory in 1955 (returning 36 Conservative and Scottish Unionist Party MPs to Labour’s 34)? That is an outright majority of the popular vote, not just the largest party.
It’s true that in that same year the Conservatives won an outright majority of the popular vote in England, but in that same year in Wales an outright majority voted for Labour (57.6%), something that has never happened in Scotland. That’s right: Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland. It wasn't until 1964 that Labour began to overtake the Conservative and Unionists in Scotland in terms of share of the vote. In that year, though, the Conservatives still managed 40.6% of the Scottish vote, compared with 44% in England.
So what happened? Why the apparent divergence between Scotland and England that we see today?
Well, first of all it is worth remembering that just as Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland, so the Tories never had an outright majority of the popular vote in England after that 1955 general election. Thatcher never once had a majority of the popular vote in England. In each of her general elections, a majority of English voters voted against her party.
True, the Tory percentages in England during the Thatcher era were in the 40s, while in Scotland they began at 31.4% in 1979, and began to slip into the 20s. But even in 1992, more than a quarter of Scots were still voting Tory. (By 2010, it was only 16.7%).
However, hold onto one salient point here: in more than half a century, the Tories have never managed more than half of the votes cast either in the UK as a whole or in England alone.
The reason that they have had government majorities (that is, a majority of seats in Westminster, as opposed to a majority of votes) is the first past the post electoral system (FPTP). It’s seats that count, not votes. There are a huge number of seats in Westminster that are safe seats. It’s around 400, give or take, depending on various factors. They tend not to change hands. And even then, some don’t “matter” as their MP will not form part of a government majority (eg SNP seats). In 2010 there were 650 constituencies, but only upwards of 150 seats – 23% of seats or so – were “marginal”. The average Westminster seat has not changed hands since the 1960s; fewer than one-in-ten seats has changed hands in 12 of the last 17 general elections since 1950. Furthermore, marginal seats are not evenly spread. I don’t want to get into the complicated algorithms, but there are more marginal seats in the South of England than there are total seats in Scotland. It is in the handful of marginal seats that Westminster elections are really fought.
There were around 190 marginal seats in the 2015 general election; 29% of constituencies. Nor were all of these as hotly contested: only a tiny proportion saw the highest campaign spending*, usually in three-way marginals.
Nor is that the end of the matter. Within each constituency in that handful, only a small margin separates the first placed party from the second placed. And it is influencing
those margins that Westminster politics tailors itself towards.
The majority of seats (in normal times) can be relied upon, so the policies are tailored towards placating those swing voters in that handful of marginal seats. Traditional Westminster wisdom holds that these represent “Middle England”, and all three Westminster parties calibrate their policies towards not offending them. The media, especially press, but also broadcast, plays its part in perpetuating this traditional, individualist, centre-right “common sense” orthodoxy. The New Labour phenomenon was built on that. As was Miliband’s promise to ape Tory austerity ideology.
Any party will stepping out of line would risk losing those swing voters, the funding of big business, or being called “loony” by the press, as Corbyn can attest, despite his policies being in the mainstream of what was the Post War Consensus, but is now deemed old fashioned and loopy. However, the majority British public - including the majority of Conservative voters – hold very different views to those of the parties. The vast majority of the British public, including English voters, including even Tory voters, wants the NHS to stay in public ownership. They also support re-nationalising the energy and rail companies, and they opposed the sale of Royal Mail. However, there is no party with a chance of winning offering those policies that English voters can vote for. Not even Corbyn has satisfied those demands.There is therefore a democratic deficit in England as well.
The people of England are not so out of step with the people of Scotland. It is the Westminster political classes that are out of step with the people. There is a perfect storm of inter-party ideological homogeneity, business funding, media manufacture of consent, and neoliberal consensus in the ruling classes.
Why Scotland was perceived as different is to do with the historic role of the Scottish ruling elite. Civil society in Scotland pre-devolution was heavily weighted towards the public sector precisely because neither Edinburgh nor Glasgow was London: the Scottish middle classes were disproportionately employed by the state, by non governmental organisations, and so on. They were in effect the ruling elite of a client state; functionaries in the pre-devolution apparatus. The Scottish media, as the media always is, was staffed by representatives of that class. They wrote about what they knew, about the milieu they inhabited. "Real people" in their case were not employed in London's Square Mile institutions, but disproportionately in St Andrew's House, in various commissions, in the management structures of state owned industries. They were pro-Union, because their position depended on it. During the 1979 devolution referendum they were much more equivocal than in the 1997 re-run. What had changed was Thatcherism, which challenged and dismantled the institutions that employed them. And since they
were the Scottish media, they nurtured a narrative of difference. While the media in England was pro-Thatcher, the media in Scotland became more and more hostile, even formerly Tory papers like the then Glasgow Herald.
I'd like to go more into this, but I've already taken longer than I intended. And I'd like to address too the Herald's swing back to the Tories now that it feels the need to defend the Union.
And I'd like to correct your assumption that the reason for supporting Scottish independence is that "Scotland would be better off with its own government because it would be more socialistic than a UK government". I don't make that crude case, nor do I base it on any assumption of a more "socialist" population in Scotland. Indeed, as we are seeing, the Labour vote was not a socialist vote (indeed just as Labour was not a socialist party).
There's much more to say but I'm already running late.
*NB. Fraud cases pending.
