Marcus Booth

4th Sep 2011

‘Tories set to disband in Scotland‘ is the dramatic headline in the Sunday Telegraph, the paper warns that ‘Cameron faces constitutional crisis with no Scottish MPs’.

Dramatic stuff, but really?

Tory leadership hopeful, Murdo Fraser’s proposal is, as I understand, to return to a state of affairs which existed in the period pre 1965, where there was a separate and independent Scots centre right party which sat in coalition with the Tories in Westminster – a settlement that delivered the UK a Scots Unionist PM as late as 1963. It is a proposal that deserves to be discussed without the injection of hysteria that we see from some quarters.

The reality is that the game has changed irrevocably, we face the very real prospect of the break up of Britain and this is not helped by a Scottish Conservative Party that is underperforming at almost every electoral level. This state of affairs, together with the almost total collapse of the Liberal Democrats in Scotland and a demoralised Scots Labour party means that Alex Salmond and the resurgent SNP can strut around the Scottish political scene like the Collosus of Rhodes – unchallenged and undaunted.

I imagine that Murdo Fraser’s call for a new party is as much about recognising that the centre right party in Scotland needs to speak, not to the Tory heartlands of South East England, but with a distinct Scottish voice.

An independent Scottish centre right party sitting as part of the UK Conservative group at Westminster might be able to speak to Scotland in a much more nuanced way and it could challenge and even oppose individual policies crafted in London or elsewhere which might have disasterous electoral consequences in Scotland in a manner that is more possible than in the context of the current state of affairs, which inevitably imposes a certain UK disciplinary straitjacket on the rare occasions this is an issue. It is surely worth a thoughtful debate.

Furthermore, the SNP would no longer be able to levy the rather easy and inaccurate accusation that the party of the Scottish centre right was in some way, English controlled.

Across Scotland, the SNP has steadily gained and then held ground in seats that David Cameron desparately needs to win back if a UK Conservative alliance is to govern with a majority.

The SNP campaigns with a number of faces – they are one thing when facing down the Labour party in the West Coast of Scotland, quite another when facing down the Tory threat in the North and East of Scotland where they pose as small ‘c’ conservatives and defenders of the defence community. Some may sneer at the intellectual inconsistency of the SNP, but the strategy works in that they get away with it.

I was a Conservative candidate in the neighbouring seat to Murdo Fraser in the 2001 election where we both challenged Nationalists.

Murdo is a talented campaigner and understands the SNP narrative.

In my own campaign, I believe that the 6.7 per cent swing we secured against the SNP was achieved in part because we campaigned on a wholly local platform – rejecting Tory election material which was designed to fight the Labour party in the West Coast of Scotland and taking the fight to the SNP in the North East. One size does not fit all even across Scotland.

Even the most peripheral analysis of the Scottish electoral map reveals that the Scots’ Tories have some of their best hopes of electoral success in SNP held seats.

The threat is not the same as in the South. In Angus the Conservatives are, for example, currently in coalition with (amongst others) the Labour party – not a situation that is likely to be easily replicated where I live in London.

Murdo is an excellent candidate for the party leadership and I know that he cares passionately for Scotland’s place within the Union. Murdo has further outlined important policies for the debate on the Union’s future that lie ahead.

The real risk to the Union in more general terms is to do nothing or pretend that a defence of the status quo is somehow ‘Unionist’. Out of hand rejections of any sort of debate on these issues is politically naive as the ‘do nothing’ approach leaves the door wide open for the SNP to continue to exploit the current state of our unhappy and uneasy devolution settlement in order to deliver the Union’s demise.

The present asymmetrical devolution is broken, the SNP are in the ascendancy. A revived centre right force in Scotland could play its part in reversing Unionism’s decline. Murdo’s proposal deserves a fair hearing and it is a good thing he has started a real debate.

Marcus Booth is an Executive Member of the Society of Conservative Lawyers and a founder of Stronger United.