I suspect that is ground that Swinney and Forbes wish to move into. The are certainly from the soft right of the SNP. With a pro Indy majority possible at the next election and no possibility of a referendum..maybe a return to a fiscal autonomy position might have a broad appeal.
p.s. The name check I made, John Buchan, also served as Canada's 15th Governor General, wrote the 39 steps novel and received a state funeral there when he passed, his ashes returned home subsequently. So, off topic, long live Canada, may they resist Trumpian filth.
Trying to be fair and objective - my dislike of Farage's outfit and populism notwithstanding, I'd be a liar if I didn't acknowledge their slow quiet success in Scotland. It all reminds me of that moment years ago, do the SCUP choose Ruth Davidson or Murdo Fraser? Murdo vowed if leader to break the 1965 merger, and lost because of it. Interestingly, while Ruth had more immediate success, it proved fleeting because she never resolved the fundamental underlying issue, namely that 1965 merger and all the issues coming with it.
As a labour man, do you accept that the soft unionists and the soft nationalists have a lot in common and could see of the threat of the populist right? As a soft nationalist, I have never been that bothered about remaining part of the union. I just want Scotland to operate free of any Westminster control.
Oh yeah, I am not some hardline unionist. Always pro-devolution - traditionally called 'home rule'. My uncle Ian Davidson when he was an MP for SLab told me many interesting things about the late 1980s, as that old centralising socialist Labour instinct fought tooth and nail against embracing devolution. Donald Dewar, in the labour and Scottish political home rule tradition, is an incredibly important personality who forced it. But to answer your question directly, soft unionist and soft nationalist have always overlapped...our contemporary binary polarisation notwithstanding. If anything, I - self diagnosing - perhaps hold such distain for the SNP because they were so happy to encourage a binary SNP vs hard unionist Tory electoral situation. It has left so many unrepresented, and it is anathema to our historic political traditions.
As much as I loved Dewar, he was wrong about one thing. Devolution was considered by new labour to be the death knell for the nationalists. Instead it set us on our inevitable current path..
Oh Dewar is no saint, nobody is. Scottish Labour folk of a certain age contemn his desire for it to be a parliament of middle class lawyer types, Dewar was, for all his virtues, always a somewhat unimaginative bureaucrat. There's a reason he blocked people like my uncle - a whole generation of Scottish Labour MPs - from becoming MSPs in 1999, it was HIS baby. Ironically, he undermined his own vision and party by accidentally cementing an arrogance in SLabour, namely WM was the A team, Glasgow Council the B team and Holyrood was a - post Dewar's stellar and unique leadership - the C team.
Their slow quiet success comes despite having virtually no representation in Scotland or party structure. It will be interesting to see where it goes, although I feel the success of reform is tied to the presence of the unfathomably popular Farage who won't have the same appeal North of the border. Davidson was the answer for the SCUP, but she fatally undermined herself with her pro eu stance. She was also never really a Tory.
The fundamental issue is that the centre right is broad, with various competing instincts. Ruth hot away with delivering a socially libera variety by hammering unionist messaging - which alienated constitutionally ambivalent socially traditional voters who are broadly centre right on policy. At no point did she resolve the fundamental problem: pre 1965, the Unionists were actually associated as being the distinctly Scottish brand, defending against more centralising British forces. Pre 65, ‘unionism’ did not mean for many the centralist unionism of Thatcher onward. Murdo wax correct, Scotland needs an independent centre right party capable of articulating a distinctly Scottish cultural soft unionism free of the baggage of London centralism. Scots left and right historically tended to hate that London pull
I suspect that is ground that Swinney and Forbes wish to move into. The are certainly from the soft right of the SNP. With a pro Indy majority possible at the next election and no possibility of a referendum..maybe a return to a fiscal autonomy position might have a broad appeal.
p.s. The name check I made, John Buchan, also served as Canada's 15th Governor General, wrote the 39 steps novel and received a state funeral there when he passed, his ashes returned home subsequently. So, off topic, long live Canada, may they resist Trumpian filth.
A soft policy right which - as I tried to highlight in my piece - ironically has its roots in the Scottish Party, founded by Unionists in the 1920s.
Good article Dean.
Trying to be fair and objective - my dislike of Farage's outfit and populism notwithstanding, I'd be a liar if I didn't acknowledge their slow quiet success in Scotland. It all reminds me of that moment years ago, do the SCUP choose Ruth Davidson or Murdo Fraser? Murdo vowed if leader to break the 1965 merger, and lost because of it. Interestingly, while Ruth had more immediate success, it proved fleeting because she never resolved the fundamental underlying issue, namely that 1965 merger and all the issues coming with it.
Reform is not centre right, UK conservatives are increasingly moving to the right, and Starmer’s Labour is no longer on the left.
As a labour man, do you accept that the soft unionists and the soft nationalists have a lot in common and could see of the threat of the populist right? As a soft nationalist, I have never been that bothered about remaining part of the union. I just want Scotland to operate free of any Westminster control.
Oh yeah, I am not some hardline unionist. Always pro-devolution - traditionally called 'home rule'. My uncle Ian Davidson when he was an MP for SLab told me many interesting things about the late 1980s, as that old centralising socialist Labour instinct fought tooth and nail against embracing devolution. Donald Dewar, in the labour and Scottish political home rule tradition, is an incredibly important personality who forced it. But to answer your question directly, soft unionist and soft nationalist have always overlapped...our contemporary binary polarisation notwithstanding. If anything, I - self diagnosing - perhaps hold such distain for the SNP because they were so happy to encourage a binary SNP vs hard unionist Tory electoral situation. It has left so many unrepresented, and it is anathema to our historic political traditions.
As much as I loved Dewar, he was wrong about one thing. Devolution was considered by new labour to be the death knell for the nationalists. Instead it set us on our inevitable current path..
Oh Dewar is no saint, nobody is. Scottish Labour folk of a certain age contemn his desire for it to be a parliament of middle class lawyer types, Dewar was, for all his virtues, always a somewhat unimaginative bureaucrat. There's a reason he blocked people like my uncle - a whole generation of Scottish Labour MPs - from becoming MSPs in 1999, it was HIS baby. Ironically, he undermined his own vision and party by accidentally cementing an arrogance in SLabour, namely WM was the A team, Glasgow Council the B team and Holyrood was a - post Dewar's stellar and unique leadership - the C team.
Their slow quiet success comes despite having virtually no representation in Scotland or party structure. It will be interesting to see where it goes, although I feel the success of reform is tied to the presence of the unfathomably popular Farage who won't have the same appeal North of the border. Davidson was the answer for the SCUP, but she fatally undermined herself with her pro eu stance. She was also never really a Tory.
The fundamental issue is that the centre right is broad, with various competing instincts. Ruth hot away with delivering a socially libera variety by hammering unionist messaging - which alienated constitutionally ambivalent socially traditional voters who are broadly centre right on policy. At no point did she resolve the fundamental problem: pre 1965, the Unionists were actually associated as being the distinctly Scottish brand, defending against more centralising British forces. Pre 65, ‘unionism’ did not mean for many the centralist unionism of Thatcher onward. Murdo wax correct, Scotland needs an independent centre right party capable of articulating a distinctly Scottish cultural soft unionism free of the baggage of London centralism. Scots left and right historically tended to hate that London pull