Welsh v Scottish Tories
October 28, 2009 by David Torrance
This from today’s Scotsman:
TURN your minds back to that memorable night in 1997: a Labour landslide; an end to 18 years of Tory rule; and, in Scotland and Wales, not a single Conservative MP left standing. Now turn your attention to next year’s general election: polls suggest that Cameron’s Conservatives may end up with, at best, two or three seats in Scotland, while in Wales they could secure up to a dozen constituencies.
A YouGov poll in yesterday’s Western Mail (Wales’s equivalent of the Scotsman) serves to illustrate the gap between the two. While Labour scored 34 per cent, the Conservatives were just behind with 31 per cent, with the Welsh Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, trailing on just 15 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 12 per cent.
Compare and contrast with the most recent Westminster voting intention poll for Scotland, which puts the SNP on 38 per cent, Labour on 25 per cent, the Conservatives on 18 per cent and the Lib Dems on 14 per cent. As the Scotsman revealed earlier this month, this is likely to give the Tories just two seats in Scotland at the next election.
The Welsh poll, if translated into seats at the general election, would give the party an astonishing twelve seats, a gain of nine on its 2005 tally of three. For a party which (as in Scotland) got none in 1997, that is quite a turnaround. And when you put it in total constituency context – Wales has 40 compared with Scotland’s 59 – it is even more remarkable, not to mention unsettling for the Scottish party.
Polls, however, are polls. As the old adage dictates, the only poll that truly counts is polling day. Yet even that does not provide respite for the Scottish Tories vis-à-vis the Welsh. At the European Parliament elections in June the Conservatives in Wales beat Labour in the popular vote for the first time in living memory, while in Scotland – and despite largely successful attempts to depict the result as a triumph – the party came third and its vote share declined.
The Welsh Conservatives, then, are obviously in rude health. But then that has at least something to do with the state of Plaid Cymru. Like their sister party, the SNP, Plaid are in government in Wales, although only as junior partners in a grand red-green coalition dominated by Labour. The weakness of Labour also goes some way to explaining Conservative strength: the poll shows the party to be in a dismal state in one of its historic heartlands.
All of which begs the obvious question – why are the Conservatives on the march in the Principality but not in Scotland? In terms of policies, leadership and historical context, there is little in the Welsh experience that differs markedly from that in Scotland. Indeed, until recently party support in the two component parts of the UK followed similar patterns. Indeed, while Scotland returned one Tory MP in 2001, Wales remained a Tory-free zone.
Greater cynicism about the devolution experiment in Wales may also go some way towards explaining the performance gap. Famously, the referendum there barely scraped a “yes” vote for an Assembly while in Scotland there was a decisive majority endorsing a Scottish Parliament. In leadership terms the Welsh and Scottish Conservative parties also had their share of problems: in Wales Rod Richards was forced to resign as leader following accusations of assault (he was later cleared); in Scotland David McLetchie stood down following pressure over taxi expenses in 2005.
Analysis of the parties’ respective performances in the devolved institutions may offer more by way of an explanation. Although both have a similar proportion of seats (12 out of 60 in Wales; 17 out of 129 in Scotland), the Welsh party has been remarkably good at gaining constituency seats, most recently winning five at the 2007 Assembly elections. This suggests strong party organisation which simply does not exist north of the border.
It seems to have little to do with leadership. The YouGov poll, for example, shows a big gap between those who rate the Welsh Conservative leader, Nick Bourne, as opposed to the party as a whole, while in Scotland Annabel Goldie is often revealed as her party’s biggest asset. But there are tactical differences. In Wales, Bourne began the process of “detoxifying” his party long before David Cameron came along.
This took several forms, but vocal support for the Welsh language and an early acceptance that a coalition with Plaid Cymru might, at some point, become necessary, are the most prominent examples. As a result, the Tories are no longer depicted as being “anti-Welsh” in Wales, while the same cannot be said of the party in Scotland. Goldie’s policy of a la carte support for the SNP, meanwhile, seems to have had little impact on party support.
Scottish Tories protest that Scotland has a more crowded political arena, while Wales lacks a Nationalist movement with a big ‘N’. There is, to be fair, something in this. Plaid Cymru are markedly weaker than the SNP, and still presents itself as ostentatiously left-wing, to an extent Alex Salmond and his party abandoned long ago. This means that in Wales there is no competition on the centre-right, while in Scotland the SNP’s ease with the neo-liberal agenda prevents the Scottish Tories maintaining a unique political identity.
Nevertheless, the disparity between the state of Welsh and Scottish Conservatism remains embarrassing for the party north of the border, not to mention frustrating for David Cameron: if his colleagues in Wales can take on Labour and the Nationalists, then why not in Scotland? Perhaps the Tory brand in Scotland is just too toxic, too immune from warm words and smart political tactics.
There appears to be no formal mechanism by which the Welsh and Scottish Tories (beyond meetings of the Shadow Cabinet at Westminster) can swap notes, but arguably there ought to be. There could be fewer than five months until the next general election, perhaps Annabel Goldie should despatch a key aide to Cardiff as a matter of urgency.
David Torrance is a freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster.
DAVID TORRANCE
ENDS
Comments
Feel free to leave a comment...