The Scottish Tories face a new challenge

When she spoke to Holyrood at the beginning of the 2016 election campaign, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson was feeling confident.

“The SNP and Labour, despite the fact they hate each other so much, are really very similar. We’ve had that soft-left consensus,” she said, predicting her party would become the first opposition in the Scottish Parliament.

Her confidence, it seems, was not misplaced. Despite coming from a worst-ever vote share in 2011 of 13.9 per cent of the constituency vote and 12.4 per cent on the regional lists, this election saw the Scottish Conservatives resurgent, claiming an improved vote share in almost all constituency seats, even in those one-time working class Labour heartlands.

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In the constituency vote overall, the Conservatives recorded 22 per cent. Davidson herself took Edinburgh Central and her deputy, Jackson Carlaw, won Eastwood in a three-way fight with two veterans – Labour’s Ken Macintosh and the SNP’s Stewart Maxwell.

Even more astonishing was the performance on the regional lists, with 22.9 per cent of the vote. Four Conservatives were elected in Mid Scotland and Fife, and two in Glasgow. 

The fact Davidson herself had moved from Glasgow to place herself on the Edinburgh list in the hope of getting two or three list MSPs in the capital shows the success was even beyond her own ambition. 

Lothian elected three list MPs and one, herself, via first past the post. A strategy to focus mainly on the regional list vote has also brought unexpected gains in the constituencies. 
“We’ll see if the gamble pays off, see if it works,” she told Holyrood as the campaign kicked off.

It did, and it has, and the Conservatives have more than doubled their cohort of MSPs to 31.

It is their highest ever representation in the Scottish Parliament and the first time the Conservatives have had more elected members than Labour in Scotland since 1955.

Dr Alan Convery, lecturer in politics at the University of Edinburgh, specialises in the devolved Conservative parties. “The Scottish Conservatives had an excellent night. Ruth Davidson fought a focused and disciplined campaign and it has paid off. 

“Not only have they held on where it was tight, for instance Ayr, they’ve also started to make a return to where they have been strong in the past - Eastwood and Aberdeenshire West, for instance,” he said.

But has the ‘soft-left consensus’ really been broken, or is it just a victory for Davidson’s unfaltering focus on attracting those who had voted No in the referendum on Scottish independence? 
The Union, she had told Holyrood, was “an article of faith” for the party.

And far from returning to the heady days of winning the majority of the popular vote, as the Unionist Party did in 1955, this result must be taken in the context it only returns the party’s vote share to where it was in 1992.

That year, of course, was marked by the closure of the Ravenscraig steelworks, which characterised the end of large-scale industry in Scotland and a culmination of the effect of free-market Thatcherism on Scotland.

The Conservative brand has suffered in Scotland since, but it would appear Davidson has successfully managed to detoxify it since becoming leader in 2011. 

The winning back of Eastwood, where Jim Murphy had famously taken a Tory scalp in the 1997 general election, was a hugely significant moment of the 2016 revival. In his victory speech, Jackson Carlaw paid tribute to his leader’s broad appeal as someone with a working class background.

“When I came into politics the Conservative Party was a blue-collar meritocratic party that sought to represent people whatever their circumstances across Scotland. Perhaps we lost touch with that for too long. In Ruth Davidson, though, the Conservative Party has found a champion,” he said.

With the SNP and Scottish Labour largely focused on each other, Davidson has been able to distance the Scottish Conservatives from a UK party characterised by its largely privileged Etonian leadership, aided by a separate policy development team reactive to Scotland’s realpolitik.

Speaking to journalists on the day after the election, Davidson cited the election of working class single mother Annie Wells as the party’s unexpected second list candidate in Glasgow as a highlight, paying tribute to her “character and work ethic”. 

Wells told supporters she could break through longstanding scepticism at the Tory brand in working class areas.

Three-quarters of the new Conservative MSPs have never served in parliament before, Davidson pointed out. 

“They’re not parliamentarians, they’re not politicians and they will take time to get up to speed,” she said, “but I think it is a huge strength of our party that we bring in people from so many different backgrounds, with so much expertise and experience from outside Holyrood into the chamber, that I hope I will be able to raise the level of debate, that sometimes in Scotland has been a disappointment to us all.”

The Conservative campaign was assiduous in focusing on the constitution, seizing on confusion in the Scottish Labour position to portray itself as the strongest defendant of the Union. Now the party’s other policies will come under the spotlight.

Dr Convery said the party will now feel pressure to outline an alternative programme for government for the first time since 1997.

“Having been successful in their bid to be a strong opposition, the Conservatives need to seize the opportunity to show that they have changed and can offer a distinctly Scottish centre-right alternative. If they succeed, the bigger prize of course in the longer term is the question of government.”

That prize remains a long way off. For all the new MSPs, the party still polled only 22 per cent of the vote and even Davidson recognises many of those votes may have been borrowed. 

“I know very well that many thousands of people who backed me and my team last night are not dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives,” she said. “They simply wanted somebody – anybody – to do a job for them in the parliament of holding the SNP to account.” 

It would appear she understands the Tory recovery can only continue by proving to these voters she can continue to represent them going forward. That starts by shifting the focus to policy. 

Although during the last minority SNP government the Conservatives backed subsequent budgets to win concessions, as the largest opposition its role will inevitably change. The party’s manifesto promised to challenge the government on funding for colleges, mental health service provision and force a rethink on the named person scheme.

Davidson told reporters things were about to get more interesting for them. 

“We’re not going to moan from the sidelines but pass every bit of legislation anyway as we’ve watched the Labour Party do too often in the last five years,” she said. “I think we’ll be a different sort of challenge to the SNP.”

She accused the SNP majority government of “hubris and arrogance” when passing legislation which had resulted in poorly formed laws. 

“We’ve seen in the last five years majority government in Scotland has passed bad laws,” she added. 

“It is a bad law to say you can arrest someone for singing a song in a pub if there’s a TV in the background playing football, but you cannot arrest the same man for singing the same song in the same pub if the TV behind them is playing the rugby. That is a bad law. 

“It’s because the SNP didn’t care enough to listen to people who had real expertise.”

And reform of the working of the parliament itself, including the committees and their conveners is now on the table. Davidson said she will push for reforms to allow ministers and the conveners of committees to be questioned more often.

“I said during the election campaign that we would press for a parliament with teeth. Before the new parliament gets under way, we have an opportunity to act on that.”

This election result has surpassed Davidson’s hopes. Now the responsibility to provide the teeth, not just the gum bashing, is hers.