With just 24 hours until nominations open in the Scottish Conservative leadership contest, Murdo Fraser has stuck his hand up. That makes six contenders so far to replace outgoing leader Douglas Ross. Fraser has stood for the post before, in 2011, but lost out to Ruth Davidson. Perhaps the pivotal reason for Fraser’s defeat was his radical proposal to scrap the Scottish Tories and set up a new centre-right party separate from the UK Tories but sitting alongside them in government and opposition. The sort of long-running coalition seen between the CSU and the CDU in Germany or the National Party and the Liberals in Australia.
There is no rule that says democracies require power to alternate between centre-left and centre-right parties
There was one problem: Scottish Tory members wouldn’t hear a bar of it. The party could hardly argue that Scottish interests were served by remaining in the Union while declaring that Scottish Tory interests could only be advanced by independence from Westminster. Davidson proved victorious on the members’ ballot and set about transforming Conservative electoral fortunates while leaving their connection to the Westminster Tories untouched. She doubled their presence in Holyrood, gave them their best night in a Commons election since 1983, and ousted Labour as the main opposition to the SNP. Fraser returned to the backbenches to lick his wounds.
Now he has returned and assures the Scottish Tories that he no longer wants to abolish them. ‘I won’t be splitting the party or setting up a new one,’ he says. ‘My aim is to unite our party, not divide it.’ By sheer coincidence, this change of heart has taken place on the eve of nominations opening. In the ranks of conversion journeys, Saul on the road to Damascus has been joined by Murdo on the road to the leadership ballot. It is a canny move, of course. Don the party-split millstone a second time and it would drown him again. That’s why, a week ago, he proposed an internal review to re-examine the relationship with the Westminster party. Not a bad tactic but it relies on the membership not realising what is going on.
Proponents of a new centre-right party – Fraser has previously proposed ‘The Caledonians’ as a name – contend that the Tory brand is irredeemably toxic in Scotland. Too intractably bound up in folk memories about the big, bad Mrs Thatcher and her reign of anti-Scottish terror. The only chance the Scottish centre-right will ever have of entering devolved government in Edinburgh is by divesting itself of all that baggage and reorganising around a fresh party that cannot be seen as a vassal of English political dominion. Scotland, we are told, will vote centre-right but it won’t vote Tory.
The rub with this analysis is that supporting evidence is scant. Everyone has heard the factoid that the Conservatives are the only party to have won more than 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland in the last hundred years. It’s more or less true, the Unionists, the National Liberals and the Conservatives having taken 50.1 per cent in 1955. (You do, however, have to ignore the 1931 election, in which they managed 54 per cent between them.) But we are talking about a Scotland that would be unrecognisable today. Deference to a tweed-bound landed gentry was alive and well and sectarianism was pervasive. The Unionists were unofficially known as the ‘Protestants Vote Here’ party. And while the Unionists were anti-socialist, they were not what we would consider ‘centre-right’ in fiscal and monetary policy. They were statist, interventionist and Butskellite, albeit more concerned with decentralising power from Westminster.
If Scottish Tory splitters were advocating a populist right-wing party of the sort that does well on the Continent, combining social democracy with social conservatism, their breakaway proposal might make sense. As it is, their plan is to take forward the same policies as the Scottish Conservatives just under a more distinctively Scottish branding. This assumes the flaw in Scottish conservatism is the party, not the policies, but what if it’s the policies too? If you want independence, you vote SNP. If you want a party that promotes Scottish interests short of independence, you vote Labour. Advocates of a new centre-right party are convinced there is a constituency for British unionism, Scottish patriotism and reductions in business rates. Perhaps there is, but it’s likely not as sizeable as they imagine.
There is no rule that says democracies require power to alternate between centre-left and centre-right parties. The centre-left Welsh Labour has won every Westminster election since 1922. The centre-right CSU has won every state election in Bavaria since 1958. Wales just doesn’t vote centre-right. Bavaria just doesn’t vote centre-left. The Scottish Tories are so busy trying to figure out what kind of centre-right party Scotland wants that they’ve neglected a more basic question: does Scotland want a centre-right party?
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