Scottish politics: the last year in review

On the 19th of September, 2014, Scotland woke up – or possibly started falling asleep – to the news it had voted No to being an independent country.

Next, the British Prime Minister took to the steps of Downing Street to acknowledge the result.

Telling the nation that “the people of Scotland have spoken” and promising to follow through on last-minute promises of further devolution, David Cameron’s speech was much as expected.

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Cameron said he was “delighted” and that Lord Smith would oversee the process of bringing together competing political parties to find agreement on devolution.

So far, so good. Then came the twist.

Continuing, Cameron said: “I have long believed that a crucial part missing from this national discussion is England… The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer.”

English votes for English laws (dubbed EVEL) had been tied to devolution. This had not been part of ‘the vow’.

Events moved quickly. Within 12 hours, Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP and the man who, more than anyone else had brought the Yes campaign so close, had resigned.

Standing in Bute House, a clearly emotional Salmond based his resignation around talk of holding Westminster’s “feet to the fire” – a phrase that was to echo in newspapers and from SNP politicians’ mouths over the coming year.

He said: “The real guardians of progress are not the politicians at Westminster, or even at Holyrood, but the energised activism of tens of thousands of people who I predict will refuse meekly to go back into the political shadows.”

His deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, was clearly placed to takeover. In fact, in the end she stood unopposed.

For the SNP, the move formed a natural transition, even if – at the time – some questioned whether Salmond really had to go.

And so while the SNP was on the losing side during the referendum, things went remarkably smoothly. Conversely, questions were much more complicated for the winners.

Johann Lamont resigned about a month after successfully leading Scottish Labour’s fight to save the UK – throwing what Kezia Dugdale called a “grenade of hard truths” on her way out the door.

Accusing the UK party of treating Scottish Labour like a “branch office”, Lamont told the Daily Record: “There is a danger of Scottish politics being between two sets of dinosaurs – the Nationalists who can’t accept they were rejected by the people, and some colleagues at Westminster who think nothing has changed.”

Lamont’s resignation, including the warning that UK Labour colleagues “do not understand the politics they are facing”, stood in stark contrast to Salmond’s.

While Labour entered a leadership contest, the SNP approached its conference with its membership soaring.

In fact, such was the spike in interest that MSPs were reportedly dragged into the party HQ to answer phones in an attempt to cope with the inundation of calls. By November the party claimed 60,000 new members – more than the Lib Dems – making it the UK’s third biggest party.

The challenge for Sturgeon, soon to be elected leader, was how to position the party post-referendum. In this sense, her conference speech was illuminating.

Speaking to a buoyed party, she said: “The only language Westminster really understands is that of power. So let them hear this message from all around our country.

“Power over Scotland no longer rests in the corridors of Westminster. In Scotland, today, power rests with the Scottish people – and that is where it will stay.

“The first test of that new democratic order is the general election next May.”

It was the first clear signal of Sturgeon’s intentions. Outlining measures to combat inequality – including action on land reform, community empowerment, educational attainment and gender inequality – Sturgeon sent a signal directly from the packed house in Perth down to Whitehall: on a scale never seen before, the SNP was ready to play the Westminster game.

And part of that meant moving onto Labour’s ground. As she put it: “Labour may have abandoned social justice. But in the SNP, the people of Scotland will always know they have a party of true social democracy.”

This too was combined with a new cabinet of five women and five men – making Scotland one of three countries in the developed world to achieve a gender-balanced cabinet. 

And so while the SNP turned its rhetoric towards combating inequality ahead of the general election, Scottish Labour emerged from its own leadership contest with the task of regaining lost ground.

Jim Murphy was elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party on 13 December, after winning 55.7 per cent of the vote – though without the support of the unions.

The MP for East Renfrewshire had gained notoriety during the referendum with his 100 streets in 100 days tour of Scotland, drawing both praise and criticism, before being sucked into the centre of the news cycle after being hit by an egg.

Having served as Scotland Secretary under Gordon Brown and as an MP since 1997, some claimed his experience made him the man to take on the SNP.

Others were less convinced, pointing to his links to the UK Labour Party and questioning how he could reignite support for the party, following Lamont’s criticisms.

But if doubts remained over the choice of someone so closely connected to New Labour, at least Murphy received Ed Miliband’s backing.

Reacting to the election, he said: “Jim showed in the referendum campaign that he is a fighter. He showed in the leadership campaign that he is a leader. I am going to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Jim in the campaign to get David Cameron out at the general election.”

For Murphy, the task was a huge one. The referendum had only just finished and already the general election loomed. 

Elected with Dugdale as deputy, his leadership was marked by a whirlwind of hyperactivity, based in a flurry of press releases attacking the SNP record, photo opportunities of him running in a Scotland shirt, and the decision to insert the word “patriotic” into the Scottish Labour constitution. 

Key to his plan was to win back support of ‘Glasgow man’ – a term used by Labour strategists for men in Glasgow, North and South Lanarkshire as well as the central belt, aged 25 to 40, who voted Labour in 2010 but didn’t vote at all in 2011 and then supported Yes during the independence referendum. 

Do this, the logic went, and he could hold the 2010 vote. In the context of post-referendum Scotland, however, this was easier said than done.

But while the SNP surged on the back of the referendum, talk of EVEL – pursued by the Tories through the backdoor, rather than primary legislation – and alongside widespread claims ‘the vow’ had not been delivered, domestically, things were not so positive.

Sturgeon’s election as leader had seen Kenny MacAskill – the longest-serving cabinet secretary – replaced by Michael Matheson, who wasted no time in changing the direction of Scottish Government policy.

First, Matheson dropped plans for a new women’s prison in Inverclyde – a plan which had been fiercely criticised by opposition parties and campaigners for appearing to run contrary to former Lord Advocate Dame Elish Angiolini’s recommendations on female offenders.

Next came controversy over stop and search – particularly the news that, contrary to its claims, the police were still carrying out searches on under-12s.

Then in February, Police Scotland conceded that over 20,000 records on stop and searches had been lost after an employee “pressed the wrong button”.

In March, Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Higgins was forced to admit officers in armed response vehicles had attended 1,644 routine incidents since October, including missing person searches, drink driving and dangerous driving incidents.

The abolition of corroboration too proved troublesome for the SNP, with Matheson forced to announce plans it would be shelved in April.

The matter had divided opinion, with some concerned that a basic principle of Scots Law was being eroded, while others claimed conviction rates for crimes committed in private, such as sexual assaults, would improve.

In the end, the issue had been put to a review, led by Lord Bonomy, who recommended the requirement be retained when it comes to hearsay as well as confession evidence. 

Reacting, Matheson was forced to shelve the plans, though he insisted he could return to the issue again after 2016.

And while criticism mounted over the SNP’s justice policy, April also saw results from the 2014 Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, showing performance in reading had dropped across primary schools between 2012 and 2014, as well as in the second year of secondary school. 

Critics leapt on the figures as proof that, after eight years of SNP-led government, literacy was declining, while Education Secretary Angela Constance was forced to admit the results “were not as good as they should be”.

Literacy campaigners, the Read On, Get On coalition, led by Save the Children, said the findings were disappointing for those wanting to close the attainment gap between rich and poor.

Spokeswoman Claire Telfer said: “The ‘stand-out’ issue is the impact of poverty on children’s progress in reading. For too long, too many poor children in Scotland have been allowed to fall behind in reading.

“It is deeply disheartening to see a standstill in reading rates for Scotland’s poorest children. One in five children from deprived backgrounds are not reading well by the end of primary school. There are no signs of progress in reducing the gap between the most and least disadvantaged pupils.”

For a government supposedly driven by social justice, it looked bad. 

But it was on the economic case for full fiscal autonomy that the SNP came under greatest pressure.

The price of oil had begun to plummet from October onwards, raising real questions over how an independent Scotland’s finances would have looked had the country voted Yes. 

Before the referendum, with Brent crude sitting at over $110 per barrel, the SNP had predicted another oil boom. By New Year, it was under $50 – falling to its lowest price in six years as part of a global slide.

Next came a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which found full fiscal autonomy would leave Scotland with a £7.6bn hole in its finances – above and beyond its share of the UK deficit.

The IFS paper said: “Scotland’s projected deficit in 2015–16 is now 4.6 per cent of GDP, higher than that for the UK as a whole. In cash terms, this is equivalent to a gap of £7.6 billion. Unless oil and gas revenues were to rebound, onshore revenues were to grow more quickly than in the rest of the UK, or government spending in Scotland were cut, a similar sized gap would remain in the years ahead.”

Yet while the opposition tore into the SNP’s domestic record, its polling continued to soar.

The Smith Commission had reported in November, recommending a raft of new powers to gather income tax in Scotland, set rates, create new benefits in devolved areas and make discretionary payments in any area of welfare.

Immediately, critics claimed the report did not go far enough. Then in May, the Scottish Parliament’s Devolution (Further Powers) Committee warned that the Scotland Bill 2015 – the legislation based on the commission’s report – “sells Smith short”.

And with the onset of the general-election campaign, domestic issues in Scotland fell away from public consciousness, with the campaign quite clearly fought in the shadow of the constitution and the referendum.

In fact, while Scotland obsessed over its relationship with the UK – there is arguably nothing new about that beyond a ratcheting up of intensity – the most striking feature of the General Election was the extent to which the rest of the UK began to obsess over Scotland.

In part, the narrative was inevitable. After all, Cameron had guaranteed as much when he stood outside Downing Street less than eight months before and brought the West Lothian question so clearly into British politics.

But it was more than that, with the Conservatives unleashing a series of adverts aimed at talking up the threat posed by the SNP in the event of a hung parliament.

One particularly memorable image showed Ed Miliband, at that point neck-and-neck with Cameron in the polls, placed comfortably in Alex Salmond’s front pocket. 

Salmond joked about it – later boasting he would use the image for his Christmas cards – but the strategy formed a staple of the Tory campaign, particularly as polls continued to point to a big SNP win. 

Vote Labour, the message went, and you will get Salmond.

Polls continued to suggest no party could win a majority, with the open nature of UK politics demonstrated by the seven-way UK leaders’ debate – a platform that allowed both Nicola Sturgeon and Ukip leader Nigel Farage to dominate headlines.

But for all the electoral arithmetic over coalitions and confidence and supply arrangements – along with repeated questions over how Miliband would work, or refuse to work, with an SNP bloc – things turned out to be much more straightforward.

The SNP swept the board in Scotland, winning 56 of 59 seats, leaving Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives with just one MP each.

Meanwhile Labour suffered across the UK, on a scale few had predicted.

Exit polls suggested that David Cameron’s party had performed well above expectations and by lunchtime on the Friday, projections were confirmed: the Conservatives had won a majority, taking 331 seats – eight over the line needed to govern alone – leaving Labour with just 232.

Even if Labour had not collapsed in Scotland, it still would have been unable to make up sufficient numbers to stop the Tories taking power. And even if it had been hard to define what would constitute a success for Labour in the post-referendum landscape, it was now apparent it faced a wipe-out.

The SNP rout saw Jim Murphy, Margaret Curran, Danny Alexander, Michael Moore, Jo Swinson and Charles Kennedy lose their seats. Douglas Alexander, Labour’s general election campaign manager, lost his seat to a 20 year old, with Mhairi Black becoming the youngest MP since 1667.

The next day brought the resignations. Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg went within hours.

Jim Murphy, however, clung on, refusing to give up until he narrowly won a no-confidence vote a week later.

For Labour, the result kick-started yet another period of introspection, with Labour forced to hold contests for leader for both Scotland and the UK.

For the Scottish party, having gone through five leaders in eight years, the choice was limited between Kezia Dugdale – Murphy’s old deputy – and Ken Macintosh. 

For UK Labour, though, things were more complicated. The contest swung wildly between Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and backbencher Jeremy Corbyn.

And while Corbyn had struggled to scrape together enough nominations to get on the ballot, within weeks of the contest kick-starting, he had moved from 100/1 outsider to the bookies’ favourite.

Promising a return to more traditional Labour values – including pledges to end austerity, pull out of NATO, scrap Trident and renationalise much of the energy sector – he took the Labour grassroots by storm.

The surge in support startled the centre and right of the party, with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell all mobilising to try and head off a Corbyn victory.

As Blair put it, writing in the Guardian: “The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes ‘disunity’. It is a moment for a rugby tackle, if that were possible.”

But while Labour was engaged in a fight over its identity, the SNP adapted itself to a new role as the third party in the Commons.

The party entered the chamber, walking all over its normal procedures and protocols in the process. Members took selfies, got in petty fights over seating and earned rebukes from the Speaker for their insistence on clapping. 

On other occasions, such as Mhairi Black’s stunning maiden speech, they earned respect from across the aisles. And in this sense, the party’s place has become an increasingly curious one, as it seeks to work within a United Kingdom it seeks to dismantle.

The SNP’s decision to vote on fox-hunting legislation symbolised the change, with the party breaking its loosely held convention of abstaining on English-only issues, apparently, to teach Cameron a lesson after his party blocked amendments on the Scotland Bill.

And scrutiny of its record bears contradictions too – with the SNP still rising in the polls, despite controversies surrounding its record on justice, climate change, educational attainment and A&E waiting times.

Recent polling from TNS showed a staggering 62 per cent of voters plan to back the party in their constituency vote at the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections.

Yet despite huge popularity, views on the party’s record in government are decidedly mixed, with less than a third describing its performance as ‘good’ in three out of four key areas.

On the party’s economic record, 25 per cent said it was doing a good job, 24 per cent said poor, while 45 per cent of people chose ‘neither’.

On health, 34 per cent rated the SNP Government’s performance as good and 29 per cent said it was poor.

On crime and justice, 23 per cent described its performance as good, and 29 per cent said it was poor. 

So how does the SNP continue to poll so highly, despite its domestic problems? Part of this could be down to the failure of the opposition to gain traction, but clearly domestic issues are not the main driver of Scottish politics.

The missing piece, in any review of a year in Scottish politics, is the referendum. 

More than anything, it has been the debate over Scotland’s future – the vote the country had, and another that may still come – that has dominated its politics. 

The SNP is already under pressure to put a second vote in its 2016 manifesto, with Sturgeon having to walk a tightrope between holding off until she knows a Yes is secure, and keeping her new membership happy.

It has been a febrile year. The referendum was meant to put an end to questions of independence, yet for many, it seems to have only been the end of the beginning.

In fact, there remains a sense that, for all the chaos of the past year, Scottish politics could actually be sitting in a period of relative calm – having sailed out of one referendum and yet to spot the next one lurking on the horizon. 

It seems natural to go to the morning of 19 September for answers about the course of the last year, even if the answer only raises further questions, namely, will there will be another vote on independence? And when?

The answer to that question will go a long way to determining the contents of next year’s review.