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How Scottish independence stopped being scary
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If you’re used to Westminster’s bipolar politics, Scotland’s multi-party system can seem baffling. And so it’s easier for the London media to focus on the rotting corpses of the dying regime – older men raging against their own irrelevance – than follow the forces reshaping Scotland.

The path through the five Holyrood elections to date has been cut by a group we could call ‘the radicals’. These are the people who, as bombs blew Baghdad to bits in 2003, abandoned uninspiring Labour and Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigns, and elected the ‘rainbow parliament’ that included six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs and seven Greens.

In 2007 these same people swung behind the SNP, giving the party a one-seat plurality and stretching political possibility enough for it to win its majority in 2011.

These are the people who came round to the idea of Scottish independence in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, taking support from around 35% to a final vote of 45%, and then split their votes between the SNP and Greens in 2016, maintaining a pro-independence majority in Parliament.

If you believe polls, these voters will again be decisive in this week’s Holyrood election, throwing their weight more squarely behind the Greens and ensuring a mandate for another independence referendum.

But something else happened at the 2016 election: a sharp bump in the Tory vote. And to understand that, we need to dig into the withering loyalties, decomposition and recomposition that have underlain Scottish politics for centuries.

Having spent time in 2005 asking people around Scotland how they planned to vote, and why, the most common answer to the second question was ‘that’s how we’ve always voted’, often with an invocation of a father. Elections were patrilineal affairs.

These days, the most common answer is “I’ll see what they have to say”. The SNP didn’t become a part of people’s identities in the way their old parties used to be. It just convinced them to be open-minded.

The decline of Labour and Liberal Scotland

The coal seam that runs under Scotland’s waist was the foundation stone of the British Labour Party, its furnaces forging a whole new kind of economy and society. The party got between a third and a half of the Scottish vote in every election from 1922 to 2010, dominating the Central Belt – where most Scots live – for nearly a century.

Further north, there is a different history. The Liberals were the dominant party of Victorian Scotland, drawing on aristocratic Whiggish tendencies but also on a radical legacy. In the 1880s, the Highland Land League brought an end to the Highland clearances through mass rent strikes and land occupations, and got Crofters’ Party MPs elected across much of the Highlands and Islands. When prime minister William Gladstone – MP for Edinburgh – passed the Crofters’ Act of 1886, Crofters’ Party MPs largely merged with his Liberals, and many families in the Highlands remained loyal to the party for generations.

Rural Scotland – along with rural Wales and the south-west of England – gave the Liberals a home to retreat to in their lean years in the mid-20th century, and a base to organise from during their comeback in the 1990s and 2000s: think Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell.

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