How will the SNP versus Tory battle at Holyrood play out?

credit - Parliament TV

The period between a parliamentary election and the summer recess when MSPs or MPs are back for a few short weeks before heading off on their holidays is for those of us who like football somewhat like a ‘pre-season’ or ‘close season’ period, when teams play each other in meaningless friendlies, while snapping up and offloading various players.

But like the ‘beautiful game’, it’s only when the season kicks off in August in the case of football and in the Scottish Parliament’s, early September, that we get to see the whites of the eyes of the assorted title challengers and relegation strugglers.

There’s a very real sense that the new parliamentary session represents some of the most uncharted territory since the start of devolution, in terms of the great unknowns if not in actual historical significance.

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The opening session of the parliament from 1999 to 2003 naturally stands out due to the birth of devolution after years of resistance to it during the 18 years of Tory government under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. 

It’s equally undeniable that the SNP’s narrow victory in 2007 represented a watershed in that it was the beginning of the end of the period of Labour’s dominance of the political terrain in Scotland, although the Nationalists’ outright win four years later was by far the most seismic in that it was to precipitate the independence referendum.

So now that MSPs have been back at Holyrood for a week, what exactly should we expect in this parliament and how will the battle-lines be drawn?

There’s what seems like the ‘old gang back in charge’ with the SNP continuing its dominance, with an unprecedented third term in power, albeit with its parliamentary position slightly diminished due to the loss of its overall majority.

The SNP will probably be able to get its way most of the time and the five-year period of governance shouldn’t be as knife edge as the party’s last spell as a minority administration, although there are already difficulties brewing on issues such as the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, where the opposition parties look set to inflict an early defeat.

Nicola Sturgeon’s launch of a fresh independence drive at the start of September will of course be a defining feature of the parliament, which still has an overall pro-independence majority when the votes of the six Greens MSPs are factored in.

How that all plays out is the biggest unknown of all in Scottish politics given the Brexit process, which will unfold at the same time as Sturgeon’s government carries out its pledge to legislate for a fresh independence referendum.

It’s very much a case of leaving the door open to independence as the SNP continues to make music to gauge what the chances are of winning a fresh referendum on leaving the UK.

Although it’s clearly not business as usual given the impending prospect of Scotland being pulled out of the EU against its will, the fact that the independence issue is as live as ever means that the constitution will loom large in this parliament just as it did in the previous two.

But what marks this parliament out from others is the fact that the Scottish Tories are now the second biggest party, replacing Labour as the formal opposition – even though that’s a loose and unofficial term in Holyrood parliamentary terms.

To have a nationalist party, albeit one that describes itself as social democratic, vying with a centre-right or conservative party is not just unprecedented for the Scottish Parliament, but also for the UK in modern times, as well as being a rarity in much of Europe, save for a handful of examples including the Irish Republic.

It’s a great unknown as to how the Scottish Tories will handle their elevated status, which of course sees party leader Ruth Davidson handed the role of getting the opening shot at Holyrood’s weekly First Minister’s Questions.

Davidson, despite being up against a very good politician in Nicola Sturgeon, will probably fare well enough in such encounters, having already proved herself to be an able communicator and campaigner – one who is vastly more popular than her party.

However, there has been some speculation that Davidson may struggle in some aspects of FMQs now she has more questions to ask, with suggestions she may have problems with a lack of policy detail and an ability to go off script if Sturgeon answers her first question straight out. 

It’s worth thinking back a few months when the story broke about Scottish Tory canvassers being instructed by party officials to tell voters that they were calling from ‘Ruth Davidson’s party’ rather than the Scottish Conservatives. 

So while Davidson may well remain popular, the fact remains that her party at Holyrood is aligned to a government pursing austerity on a scale not seen in decades, with food banks – a term barely, in use six or seven years ago – that are just as widespread under Theresa May as they were under David Cameron.

Given that stance, it won’t be all that easy for the Scottish Tories to oppose the SNP government over areas such as council cuts, which in this year’s budget the then Labour opposition claimed amounted to about £350m worth of cuts to councils and an estimated 15,000 job losses.

How could Tory MSPs voice opposition to Scottish Government cuts, when their Westminster counterparts are making those of their own on a much bigger scale?
Could the new intake of Tories be relied upon to speak up in areas where it was claimed in the last parliament that the Scottish Government fell short, such as voting against a proposal to extend a compulsory living wage to those employed by public sector contractors. 

There’s also the issue of what stance the Scottish Tories will take on the new welfare powers being devolved to Holyrood that will allow the Scottish Government to top up social security that has been cutback by Westminster.

Will the Scottish Tories simply ape the likely line of Theresa May’s government in opposing any such welfare top-ups or will Davidson seek to go her own way on some issues as she did with opposition to the tax credit cuts put forward by the last Chancellor, George Osborne?

In fairness, the SNP will also have a choice to make on such issues and whether it commits to restoring welfare benefit cuts, in what will perhaps be a potential flashpoint of the new parliamentary session in terms of how powers are actually used or if they are used at all.

It’s on such issues that the vanquished Scottish Labour Party, now relegated to a humiliating third place at Holyrood behind the Tories, could make some progress on a very long road back not so much to power but more towards being a political force again. 

Davidson’s success in May’s Holyrood election arguably owed more to her party’s uncompromising unionist stance, Scottish Labour’s ongoing existential crisis and again, her own personal popularity, than anything else.

In truth, the Tory brand in Scotland remains toxic, both due to the party’s past and present, whether it was Thatcher’s poll tax or Cameron’s bedroom tax and it could be a grievous error for Tory supporters to think Scotland has now learned to love their party again.

Using the party’s new status as the opposition to act as salespeople for the UK Government and Theresa May, whose honeymoon period may not last, poses a real risk of alienating those who voted for the party in 2016, perhaps for the first time, ahead of next year’s council elections, making a revival potentially short lived.    

The fact that the Scottish Tories more than doubled their presence at Holyrood from 15 seats in 2011 to 31 in May’s election does represent in itself a dramatic change in the parliamentary landscape. 

Just as at the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, the SNP found itself with a larger number of MSPs than expected due to its landslide win, the Tories have a similar situation, which while bringing many positives for a party also brings potential headaches.

Just think of the case of Bill Walker, albeit an extreme example, who was elected on the coattails of the SNP’s landslide in 2011 in the Dunfermline constituency, where the Nationalists had finished a poor third four years earlier in the equivalent seat.

While it’s unlikely that we will see a replay of what was one of the more distasteful episodes of devolution with the 2016 intake of Tory MSPs, whenever there’s an unknown quantity of politicians there is often a recipe for the unexpected whatever internal candidate vetting has taken place.

Labour after its landslide in 1997 under Tony Blair also had its issues, with some difficult characters unexpectedly finding themselves as MPs. The unresolved tensions over Brexit and Scottish independence, as well as what was the best result for the Tories in Scotland since the mid-1950s, mean it would be an extremely bold pundit who would predict how things might play out from here on in.     

The much criticised term ‘Ulsterisation’ has been used to describe the new make-up of the Scottish Parliament, a term suggesting that the prism of debate is confined to the ‘national question’ as in Northern Ireland, where the main parties are defined by their support or opposition to unionism and nationalism.          

There’s also the Dail (parliament) in the Republic of Ireland where the two main parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, both broadly centre-right, with their origins in the Irish nationalist movement, and where the Irish Labour party usually finishes a poor third in elections.

Both examples are probably too simplistic given that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have been on their own different journeys constitutionally.

But if the Scottish Tories simply base their opposition to the SNP on independence and policies such as the named person plan, there a risk that social justice and class-based issues get pushed down the political agenda, as has arguably happened in Ireland.