The Charmed Life of Ruth Davidson MSP
I am fascinated by the charmed life, in image, media and political terms, of the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. For example :
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critical article about her in the press. Mysteriously, this Scottish politician who has never held a Cabinet Post or even sat at Westminster was the leading Tory pro-EU voice on the BBC’s bizarre Wembley EU debate on Tuesday evening, matched against the Exit campaign’s biggest artillery, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. I haven’t been able to stomach the entire rather nasty event, but what I have seen was pretty banal. She was praised for her part in the Scottish referendum campaign. Then she was praised for ‘pushing Labour into third place’ in the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections. In fact, Labour’s collapse, now an avalanche, and the similar collapse in the Scottish Liberal Democrats reshuffled the order and size of Scotland’s powerless and irrelevant minority parties, all of them hopelessly outvoted by the Scottish Nationalists. I doubt if Ms Davidson’s talents at being photographed with pints of beer had much to do with it. I’ll return to the strange position of Scotland’s Tory Party later.
I might add that Labour’s collapse (now probably irreversible in Scotland) was actually caused by David Cameron’s handling of the post-referendum crisis, when he turned the ‘pledge’ of more devolved powers into an aggressive attempt (‘English Votes for English Laws’) to exclude Scottish MPs and voters from influencing national UK decisions. Scottish voters revenged themselves on Labour (which had been prominent in the pro-Union campaign). It provided many with the excuse which they had long needed to abandon the dying Labour Party and switch to the SNP.
But what does the Tory party in Scotland actually stand for? What, most interestingly of all, would happen to it if Scotland became fully independent from London ( as I think is inevitable) , and accepted formal direct submission to Brussels on its own account, rather than via London, thus abolishing the formal, if forgotten, reason for the Scottish Tory Party’s very existence?
I think it would survive, as a political business, becoming perhaps a sort of Scottish Christian Democrat Party, sharing power from time to time with the SNP in a proportional Parliament, providing a safety valve for those Scots not wholly captivated by the SNP’s increasingly unmistakable cultural, moral and political leftism. Indeed, maybe the SNP, its main purpose achieved, would split into leftish and rightish wings.
In the last Scottish Tory leadership campaign, one candidate, Murdo Fraser, said (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Conservative_Party_leadership_election,_2011 )
‘that if elected leader, he would disband the party in favour of setting up a new centre-right party that would be fully autonomous of the UK Conservative Party, but would take the Conservative whip at Westminster. Fraser states that this would be carried out in order to 'de-toxify' the party in Scotland, stating that it would have a distinct Scottish identity, represent Scottish values, support devolution and decentralisation, and fight to maintain Scotland's place within the United Kingdom.’ He also suggested the name ‘Conservative’ should be ditched. He lost, but his suggestions show the state to which the Tories have been reduced in Scotland, where (incredibly) they once held a majority of Parliamentary seats. In fact, in 1955 and 1959, the then Unionist Party wonn an outright majority of votes in Scotland.
The Unionist name was very important. The Scots were not voting for English Toryism, but for a specific form of Scottish Unionism, now quite dead. The closest comparison that can now be made is the various sorts of Unionist in Northern Ireland, many of whom would be Labour supporters in England, but who ally with the Tories at Westminster for national reasons.
Scottish Unionism was specifically opposed to Irish independence, rightly fearing that it would presage a break-up of Union and Empire. It was careful not to call itself ‘Conservative’ because of the strength of Liberalism among Scottish Protestant voters (whom it particularly sought to attract, in a country once nearly as religiously divided as Northern Ireland is now). But in 1965 the Unionists merged with the English and Welsh Tories. They were duly punished, especially in the Thatcher era (though in fact she was in many ways more Liberal than Tory, as was her father, the unforgettable Alderman Roberts). By 1997, they won no Scottish seats at all and were down to 17.5% of the vote. Since then, with many of their voters despairing of Unionism, abandoning the religion of their forebears and switching to the SNP (which offers a new ‘union’ with the EU) , they have been searching for a role.
It is an extraordinary fact that the Daily Record, now seen as the Scottish equivalent of the Daily Mirror, supported the Unionists until 1964, when it switched to Labour (it is now suspected of flirtation with the SNP). There must be a lot of Scottish people who have, in their lives, voted Unionist, Labour and SNP.
Just as in England, the Tories appear to have shed any sort of political baggage to become a political party seeking office for the sake of it.
The FT’s account of the Scottish elections contained this interesting reflection on the nature of Ms Davidson’s party: ‘One of the two Tory candidates elected on the Glasgow list was Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a one-time advocate of abolition of the monarchy. The other was Annie Wells, a food retail manager and single mother with a working-class accent who told one campaign rally how she had won over a sceptical voter who started their conversation with the comment: “Ah’m no a Tory, hen.”’
I think even a casual observer must be able to see that whatever is going on here is not conservatism as most of us understand it. Ms Davidson, after a BBC career where she was no doubt exposed to the strong ideology of that organisation, joined the Tory party in 2009 because she liked the look of David Cameron. Interestingly, she says that her decision to join the military (sadly frustrated by serious injury during training) was sparked off by the sight of British troops in the former Yugoslavia, the anti-Sovereignty prototype for our later catastrophic intervention in Iraq.
But one thing Ms Davidson certainly does believe in is continued British membership of the EU. This belief is actually very profound among most of those, especially the university-schooled professional elite, brought up since 1960. It touches on the most fundamental creeds – internationalism, egalitarianism, the worship of modernity for its own sake and an active rejection of the past as a source of lessons for the present - of the new establishment uniting, whether they like it or not, Ms Davidson with Stephen Kinnock, and possibly Jeremy Corbyn, and David Cameron with my late brother. The great, deep switch from Protestantism, the 1688 settlement and a belief in national sovereignty , to secularism, disdain for sovereignty and a far greater affinity for France in 1789 to England in 1689, has more or less taken place. And enthusiasm for the EU is its badge and banner.
