Consider it an advance on Punch and Judy politics: British electoral combat has ascended from the level of the kindergarten to that of the teenage playground. Ahead of 7 May, the UK’s political parties have taken to running about saying who likes who, who’s been seen holding hands, and who will absolutely never be friends ever, ever, ever. The main Conservative theme of the week came in a poster whose message can be broadly distilled as: “Ugh, don’t touch him. He’s best friends with those two!”
To bring you up to date. Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Nationalists and the Greens have all said they will never go into coalition with the Conservatives, which implies they’d be happy to bed down with Labour. Meanwhile, the Conservative chairman said on Friday that his party would never do a deal with Ukip, which seemed to contradict what David Cameron said, or didn’t say, earlier this month, when he pointedly refused to rule out an arrangement with Nigel Farage.
For its part, Labour denied a Sun report that its been cosying up to Sinn Féin, maintaining its insistence that there’ll be no Downing Street sleepover for any of its mates — and that it wants to have the house all to itself. The Tories think Labour’s having a laugh. Hence that online ad showing a grinning Ed Miliband outside No 10 with digitally manipulated images of his supposed new best friends, the SNP’s Alex Salmond and — boo, hiss — Gerry Adams. Oh, and the Lib Dems have said they won’t sit alongside Ukip. In case anyone was thinking of asking.
It’s confusing, all this, not least because it’s new to British politics. In 2010 the prospect of a hung parliament was invoked as a terrible fate to be avoided, as redolent of instability as a run on the banks. With no British experience of coalition for 65 years, the very idea was alarming. Now it’s taken as read, despite Labour’s public pretence that a comfortable Commons majority is within reach.
The only question is who’ll be in it. Hence the talk of permutations, possible and impossible, and the “red lines” that each party’s post-election negotiators will supposedly refuse to cross.
Such a shift is of interest to the Westminster nerdocracy, of course, as they scour policy documents for potential signs of compatibility between, say, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party and the Greens. But it matters beyond that narrow sphere, and not only because this pre-election jostling could determine the makeup of the next government. The jostling itself could be significant — with an unforeseen impact on the union that holds us all together.
Some of that impact is direct. Take the Tory poster that, in its original version, showed Miliband and Salmond (minus Adams) in Downing Street. Scottish Unionists instantly slapped their foreheads in despair. “Conservative Central Office appear to be working for the SNP,” blogged the Spectator’s Alex Massie. For what is the Nats’ key message for 7 May? That it’s safe to vote SNP because you’ll get a Labour government in Westminster, only this time its feet will be held to the fire by a strong contingent of Scottish nationalists.
Labour tries to dismiss that as wishful thinking, arguing that if the SNP seizes its seats, that could prevent Labour becoming the largest single party and it’ll be the Tories who get first crack at governing again, perhaps with Ukip as their allies — whatever Grant Shapps says. In that scenario, the Tories will bow to Farage’s key demand for an in/out EU referendum this year: if “out” wins, pro-European Scotland will surely agitate to leave the UK once and for all.
Even without that doomsday scenario, an SNP surge will aid the cause of independence just months after its referendum defeat — and imperil the union once more. Yet here’s the Tory ad machine echoing the SNP’s core argument, giving the cause of nationalism a nice little push.
Seeking to rouse resentment
Of course, the target audience for the latest Tory message is not Scottish voters at all. It’s the English the’re aiming at, seeking to rouse resentment of anticipated Scottish special pleading and the truckloads of cash Miliband would be forced to send north to buy the Nats’ support.
And this is the heart of the matter. The current pre-election jockeying is turning ugly, with would-be representatives of the four nations of the UK turning on each other. Note the former Welsh nationalist leader Dafydd Wigley’s inept comparison of a Trident nuclear base to the Auschwitz death camp, made in the course of arguing that if the SNP succeeds in negotiating the removal of Trident nuclear missiles from Scottish soil, then don’t even think about dumping them in Wales.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin and the DUP are enjoying a rare moment of Northern Irish unity, as they consider legal action to protest against their exclusion from the proposed TV debates.
It’s a dispiriting sight. While the big forces that threaten Britain stretch far beyond these shores — an ailing global economy, climate change, violent jihadism — the nations of these small islands are turning against, not towards, each other. One of Labour’s more thoughtful politicians is watching this with alarm. If a country is defined as a community of shared sympathy, he tells me, then “at the moment politics is pulling those sympathies apart rather than pulling us together”.
We don’t have to be passive in the face of this change. There is another way of looking at it, one that would start by accepting that the UK has always been a union of four sometimes competing nations — but we’ve not been honest about it. Ours has been a “crypto-federalist” system, one that hides our true nature from ourselves. Now the combination of devolution and genuine multiparty politics has brought that federal reality out into the open.
Arguments between Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland that used to be buried, chiefly by the bland arithmetic of the Barnett formula, are now being played out in public. For voters it’s probably a disconcerting experience, like a gathering of the extended family where you discover demanding relatives you only dimly knew you had.
Now the Scots will have to negotiate with the Welsh, the English with the Northern Irish and all combinations in between, as politicians seek their place at the governing table.
It’s loud, it’s nasty, and it needs to be handled with care — but it’s better we see it than have it fester underground. And it’s important we get it right. Otherwise we may not stay together at all.
— The Guardian News & Media Ltd
