Leslie Huckfield offers some thoughts on the current political situation North of the Border

Any analogy with Caesar’s Roman Empire is political rather than geographical. Think of Bute House (Scotland’s First Minister’s Official Residence) as Caesar’s Palace in Rome, with the Gallic Wars run from Jackson’s Entry (SNP headquarters near the Scottish Parliament). Roads between SNP HQ are ruler-straight so that no Sat Nat is needed to reach all SNP Constituency Convenors.

Between Hadrian’s and Antonine Walls, much territory has been covered by Charlotte Street Partners, a media and public relations group whose clients include prominent organs of the Scottish state, serviced by its cast list of mainstream Scottish media names.

Charlotte Street fills the gaps where Bute House and Jackson’s Entry can’t reach. Not only has this political and machine media machine bequeathed access to seats on local councils, Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament) and the Westminster Parliament, but on its coat tails are local authority, NHS and university and further education chief executives and principals. They have all grown up to rely on the patronage of this SNP empire for any career advancement. In short, if you don’t keep in with the SNP, you’ll get nothing.

Effectively, Scotland is run by about 200 people. While in England, adherence to the state or upholding the Establishment means supporting the Monarchy, the Honours System, politically appointed peerages, outcomes from Royal Commissions and Judicial Inquiries, in Scotland adherence to the state effectively has meant being under the tutelage of and in the grip of the machine run by Bute House and Jackson’s Entry.

All this is buttressed by Holyrood Election results which from constituency and regional lists in 2021 gave the SNP 44% of all votes and 50% of all seats. Even within Scotland there is little appreciation of the SNP’s dominance. Scottish Labour has only two Holyrood Constituency MPs and without Regional Lists, Scottish Tories, Labour and the Greens would be barely visible in the Scottish Parliament.

Since Scotland’s ‘liberal elite’ are mostly comfortably domiciled in the public sector, the overall result is a patronaged political and administrative middle class whose strap line is that they ‘would like to do more but are handicapped by Westminster and Whitehall.’

Likely SNP Indictments

With the full force of Police Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the judiciary in Scotland about to be unleashed on the SNP, not only is this entire patronage and control system in jeopardy, but the new First Minister and remnants of the SNP hierarchy don’t have the political clout or skills to save it. In short, there will soon be in Scotland a political patronage vacuum, a mile wide visible from any International Space Station.

In the meantime, working people are being hammered by critical cost of living issues like food, rents and mortgages, with a hapless SNP/Green Government driven to spend its Barnett Consequentials on mitigation of the harsher effects of Tory austerity.  

Rutherglen and Hamilton West

The first earthly manifestation of the vacuum will be in the forthcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West Election, with Margaret Ferrier’s seat up for grabs – a byelection assisted by Labour-led South Lanarkshire Council’s assiduous communications prodding all its electors to sign the Recall Petition. Though Keir Starmer’s Glasgow office should win the by election, his repeated policy retractions and dilutions show that Starmer and Anas Sarwar’s Labour beyond Rutherglen will surely be incapable of filling Scotland’s political vacuum.

Without more Labour MPs in Scotland, a Starmer government will find it difficult to achieve a House of Commons majority, yet its political reach is limited since it doesn’t support Independence or even another referendum. So, after Rutherglen, most working people in Scotland will soon see that the vacuous Starmer/Sarwar Labour agenda has little to offer them.

Tories and Labour Also Have Form

But in increasing their central political grip, the Tories and Labour also have form. Michael Gove and Dean Godson (House of Lords, Policy Exchange and 55 Tufton Street) dreamed up their candidates’ ‘Gold’ A List in the late 1990s. Today Tory head office “sieves” all would be candidates.

Labour’s HQ used to have an A List, for trade union-sponsored candidates, and a B List for the rest. As long ago as the 1980s, Labour’s NEC had already decided that it wasn’t politically ‘safe’ to allow byelection candidates chosen by local parties, so the central Party began imposing shortlists from which local parties might choose. These approved shortlists are now extended to all parliamentary selections, with ‘suitably qualified candidates’ filtered by Labour staffers feverishly trawling through previous social media posts.

The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act of 2000 reinforced all this through creating a “nominating officer”, giving central party organisations more statutory control over the whole process. There can be no doubt that the composition of the House of Commons has dramatically changed – and arguably diminished – both through this process and through the expansion of a ‘political class’ of special political advisers (SPADs), research and constituency staff. Collectively this has delivered a different generation of MPs, hand-crafted by those who run central political machines, with many devoid of actual local political experience or background.

Politically, Labour has changed more than the others. Before thinking of applying to become a Labour candidate today, it’s almost mandatory to produce a glossy video, boasting of your local constituency ties, so that international human rights lawyers, media presenters, think tank researchers and barristers have a much better chance than bus or train drivers and posties. All this is run from Labour’s HQ in Southwark, with Scottish Labour only permitted a pre-formatted template.

But almost unaided by legislation, the SNP machine has evolved like this anyway, using copycat already available models from Labour and the Tories. With some notable exceptions, Jackson’s Entry’s ruler-straight Roman Roads have mostly produced a crop of SNP MPs and MSPs happy to observe their central party’s wishes, as exemplified by the cast list of grandees and elected representatives hastily wheeled out to support the election of the current First Minister as the ‘continuity candidate’.

In short, with any reconstruction of the SNP/Charlotte Street machine beyond their current capabilities and Scottish Labour’s political and administrative powerlessness under the domination of Starmer’s Southwark citadel, Scotland could be about to witness one of its first uncontrolled major political events in fifty years.

Leslie Huckfield lectures at Glasgow Caledonian University and is a Director of the Sheffield Cooperative Development Group. His book How Blair killed the co-ops: Reclaiming social enterprise from its neoliberal turn, was published by Manchester University Press in 2021.

Image: Bute House, Charlotte Square Edinburgh. Author: Kim Traynor, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.