Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

What all parties can learn from the SNP

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Picture: Getty

In the run up to the 2015 general election, there was a lot of talk in Westminster about the demise of two-party hegemony. We were coming to the end of five years of coalition government and the thinking was that neither the Tories nor Labour could get a majority, possibly ever again. This theory has since been crushed as First Past the Post works its magic. But there is one exception to this: the SNP. From having only six MPs in parliament when Nick Clegg was deputy prime minister, they ended up with 56 after 2015, and though they dipped in 2017, they went back up to 48 seats in the House of Commons in December – their dominance of Scottish politics looks destined to continue.

The reason the SNP have managed this contains a lessons for all political parties: you can only be pure about one thing at a time, if you want to win. For the SNP, that one thing has been Scottish independence. Yes, the SNP have had a range of other policies during their time of growth – but none of them are red lines. If you support Scotland leaving the Union, you can get behind the SNP. It is their one absolute and anyone who knows anything at all about British politics knows that.

You might think the Lib Dems tried this – with Brexit being their purity test – but I would argue heavily against that view. If the Liberal Democrats wanted to be the ‘stop Brexit’ party during the 2019 general election campaign, then they should have used every second of public attention to get that particular message out. Their basic pitch in December should have been, ‘It doesn’t matter if you have voted Tory in the past, Labour in the past: if you want to stop Brexit, vote Lib Dem this time.

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Nick Tyrone
Written by
Nick Tyrone
Nick Tyrone is a former director of CentreForum, described as 'the closest thing the Liberal Democrats have had to a think tank'. He is author of several books including 'Politics is Murder'

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