Labour play the SNP’s territorial game over the budget

What a stooshie there is over the Scottish budget and John Swinney’s plan to scrap the Glasgow Airport Rail Link. I have found the reaction from Labour very interesting. Their strategy appears to be to attempt to paint it as an anti-Glasgow policy from an Edinburgh-centric party.

Jeff thought that Steven Purcell may have jumped the gun by describing the SNP’s budget proposals as “anti-Glasgow”. But if he did, Labour certainly weren’t embarrassed about it, and enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon. Already during the budget debate Margaret Curran had asked a pointed question about just what was in the budget for Glasgow.

Separate parts of Labour soon latched on to the idea. For instance, Tom Harris was very quick to tweet the following: “Gutted by the SNP’s decision to axe the Glasgow Airport rail link. Serves us right for not being Edinburgh, I suppose.” I also noticed an update from the official Scottish Labour Twitter account which said, “Glasgow is being ripped off by the SNP in Edinburgh.”

Will “the SNP in Edinburgh” became a nice little catchphrase, just as “London Labour” effortlessly rolls off the tongue of any nationalist? I predict that it won’t. “The SNP in Edinburgh” is slightly clunky-sounding, while “London Labour” has an alliterative, almost symmetrical quality.

Trying to associate the SNP with Edinburgh is also a bit strange given that the SNP occupy just one of Edinburgh’s five seats while Labour MSPs currently sit in two of them. At least in this respect it makes about as much sense as “London Labour”, which was always quite a curious turn of phrase given that Labour have their greatest concentration of support in Scotland, not London.

You can say one thing — Labour’s move into the realm of regional politics is an interesting strategy. But as far as I can see, most people seem to just be rolling their eyes at the anti-Glasgow claim. The relative merits of Garl aside for the moment (and I think it is a mistake to scrap it), there surely can’t be many cities that have had more public money poured into them in recent decades than Glasgow.

Do Labour risk painting themselves into a Glasgow-shaped corner? Is there any real point in Labour playing this card? If there is one place in Scotland where their vote is safe, it is Glasgow. I fear that by focussing so strongly on Glasgow, they could easily make themselves less electable in the rest of Scotland.

I mean, in what way is wailing for yet more pork in Glasgow supposed to appeal to the rest of Scotland? Most people were quite heartily sick of the Glasgow-centric nature of the Labour party, as Lallands Peat Worrier explains quite well. And the Glasbolisation of the Scottish media is as tiresome as any London bias.

But it will be interesting to see how the SNP cope with the anti-Glasgow accusation. They cannot really afford to give up on Glasgow. Nor can they reject Labour’s line of reasoning, because this sort of territorial whining is their bread and butter.

That is one of the things that puts me off the SNP so much. They try to exaggerate the cultural and political differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK, while playing down any differences within Scotland. Take, for instance, top SNP blogger Jeff, who on Friday scoffed not once but twice:

…as if there is any significant difference between Glasgwegians and Edinburgers.

Let’s all settle down shall we, factionalism is what tore Scotland apart in the early 1700s. Let’s not go back to those days.

It’s kind of funny to hear the SNP pleading against tearing a country apart. After all, it is normally de rigueur for the SNP to constantly make out that there is a significant difference when in reality there is just a bit of normal human diversity — just as long as the dividing line is the Scottish / English border.

The constant SNP refrain that a democratically elected Conservative government should not have the right to govern over Scotland because they have slightly less support north of the border is one of my biggest bugbears. As I have pointed out before, there will be regional differences within any democracy, no matter how you draw the borders.

So in Scotland you have Labour’s famous dominance of the West of Scotland. Meanwhile, the further north you go, the more likely you are, generally, to be in an SNP seat. There are no SNP constituency MSPs south of Kilmarnock and Loudoun, with the vast majority coming from north of the central belt. The other parties have their geographical cleavages of support too.

But for the SNP, the only important regional divide is the one that divides Scotland from the rest of the UK. They would have you believe that other regional differences don’t exist, or at least that they are not nearly as important.

This is one of the reasons why I reject nationalism. It is fundamentally disingenuous. At least Labour’s tactic has this going for it: it could show up the major contradiction of the SNP’s world view.

11 comments

  1. Wow, some very mixed up thinking here.

    You seem to entirely avoid explaining that Scotland is not a ‘region’ but is a country, a country with distinctive constitutional, legal, educational, health and cultural customs.

    Disingenuous to the say the least.

    Your rant seems to equate the Scots ‘nation’ to ‘geordies’.

    The point is that if England predominantly vote for the Conservatives and Scotland chooses a mixture of Labour / SNP / Liberal with possibly one Tory, then that is an explicit difference, a difference of political opinion that brought about devolution in the first place!

    Denying difference is a strange and quaint quality of the uber unionist AM2.

    Are you afraid of difference?

  2. “it is normally de rigueur for the SNP to constantly make out that there is a significant difference when in reality there is just a bit of normal human diversity — just as long as the dividing line is the Scottish / English border.”

    “normal human diversity”

    eh?

    What are you talking about?

  3. You seem to entirely avoid explaining that Scotland is not a ‘region’ but is a country, a country with distinctive constitutional, legal, educational, health and cultural customs.

    Constitutional and legal, yes, of course.

    But Education and health barely differ from the English systems, and the cultural differences both within Scotland and within the UK are the whole point of Duncan’s post…

  4. For this ill crafted attack on the SNP re geography to be effective you would have to be able to show that the differences within Scotland are greater than the differences between Scotland and England.

    I don’t think many will agree with you on that.

  5. Hi Duncan.

    What I find hilarious about the whole thing is that we are going to have a massive bust up over a £120m project when were going to have to cut spending by somewhere between 10-20%. I think the rail link is a good idea and i am certain it would have economic benefits over and above its costs (why I would normally say it should be saved and something else cut) but there is going to have to be so much cut, that im afraid things need to go. We are going to have to cut by so much, economic rational isnt going to even come into it.

    We have to remember in Scotland we have a new forth bridge to build at £2billion (current estimates and lets be honest almost certainly on the low side). I saw Labour were moaning that the bridge doesnt have alternative transport infrastructure on it i.e light rail- where on earth do they think the money is coming from to do that?

    If anyone fancies it, go to http://www.ifs.org.uk it has a public spending tool where you can fiddle about with the figures and see what you would protect and what would be cut. Its very interesting, protect health with a spending freeze in real terms and so cut everything else by 14%.

  6. Hi John

    “Education and health barely differ from the English systems”

    There are massive structural and ideological differences in both of these, more so over the last 12 years of Labour privatisation creep and increasingly in the future as a chasm grows between the principals of free higher education & health provision in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

  7. Wardog,

    Once again with your selective reading you appear to have missed the point.

    It is possible for Scotland to be both a region (of the UK, of the EU, etc…) and a nation at the same time. Malc wrote a post last year about why you can legitimately the SNP a regionalist party.

    Scotland does have a distinctive legal and education system among other things. That is one good reason why devolution is a good thing. But it is no reason to leave the UK. After all, the SNP is in favour of remaining part of the EU, and the differences between legal, education and other systems across Europe is vastly greater than the differences within the UK.

    The point is that if England predominantly vote for the Conservatives and Scotland chooses a mixture of Labour / SNP / Liberal with possibly one Tory, then that is an explicit difference, a difference of political opinion that brought about devolution in the first place!

    My point — which you appear to have missed — was that just as England is more likely to vote Conservative than Scotland, you have vast regional differences within Scotland. For instance, the SNP do better in the north, Labour do better in the west, the Conservatives to better in the south and the Liberals do well in rural areas. Is this a reason to chop Scotland up into bits?? I hardly think so, because once you chopped them up into bits, you would soon find differences within the bits, and we are back to square one.

    Denying difference is a strange and quaint quality of the uber unionist AM2.

    Are you afraid of difference?

    Err… I’m not the one who is denying difference. Indeed, I am so embracing of difference and diversity, that I am not the one who wants to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK on the basis of “difference”! Yes, nationalism is quite a charming ideology…

    “normal human diversity”

    eh?

    What are you talking about?

    Would I be talking about the “difference” you were espousing in your previous comment?

    JPJ2,

    I am quite confident that I can say that I would have vastly more in common than almost any twenty-something English person than I would with, say, a 50 year-old Doric-speaking fisherman, or a Gaelic-speaking resident of Lewis, where Sundays are still closed.

    Richard, thanks for that link. I’ll take a look at it later when I get the chance.

  8. Wardog, I assume your next contribution to this debate will be along the lines of “You smell like doggy-doo-doo”?

  9. “Will “the SNP in Edinburgh” became a nice little catchphrase, just as “London Labour” effortlessly rolls off the tongue of any nationalist? I predict that it won’t. “The SNP in Edinburgh” is slightly clunky-sounding, while “London Labour” has an alliterative, almost symmetrical quality.”

    So wouldn’t the equivalent to “London Labour” be “Edinburgh SNP”?

    That sounds more symmetrical than “the SNP in Edinburgh” ;0)

    As regards the substantive point, there is, of course, also the issue of the favourable treatment for Edinburgh vis-a-vis Margo’s pork barrelling as the price of her support for last year’s Budget.