Mythbuster no.52 - "Tories with Naked, Merciless Power Run Amok When Scotland Leaves"

The progressive left, socialist and non-socialist, is somewhat divided over Scottish independence. While long standing stalwarts like Jim Sillars and Tommy Sheridan argue alongside the Scottish Greens for a non-nationalistic "Yes" vote to deliver a more egalitarian Scotland, the Scottish Labour Party, with some honourable exceptions, has maintained a stubborn resistance to the idea.

This has of course reached a screeching crescendo in the petulant denunciations of the Yes campaign by former Nu-Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling, though his qualifications to be referred to as a progressive of any sort may be highly questionable. Somewhere to his distant left, George Galloway MP is to be found touring Scotland, having upped-sticks from his temporary base in Bradford, to caustically excoriate the independence cause, citing in its place class solidarity over nationalism - socialists should stay in the Union to fight for a more egalitarian, socialist society.

At the heart of this argument is a supposition, repeated by Laurie Penny of the New Statesman magazine on the BBC at the weekend, that (allegedly progressive) Scottish Labour MPs are essential to delivering a non-Tory Government across the UK as a whole. Ms Penny contemplated the prospect of "permanent Tory Government" in the remaining UK if Scotland was to depart. This echoes Galloway's argument and also is deployed by some in the Labour movement as a decisive reason to be against independence - vote for an Edinburgh Government, and you abandon the people of Liverpool to the neoliberal grip of the Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs.

Can only the Scots stop her legacy?

Terrifying stuff if you live south of the border and have either a social conscience and/or personal vulnerability. How dare progressive Scots be so self-indulgent as to veer off to their communitarian Nirvana while the rUK (remainder of the UK) is mired in the social dystopia that the Coalition has summoned up.

Except, it is (nearly) complete nonsense. As with so much of the No campaign, it relies on combining fear and guilt rather than contemplating the facts.

And here they are:

Since 1945, there have been 18 UK-wide General elections.

At a UK level, Labour have won 8 of these outright: 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966, October 1974, 1997, 2001 and 2005.

At UK level, the Tories have also won 8 outright: 1951 (although Labour won more votes than them), 1955, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.

Two UK elections - February 1974 and 2010- produced "hung" Parliaments where no one party had an outright majority. In 1974, Labour had more seats than the Tories (although this time the Tories won the most votes) and governed as a minority administration for 7 months before calling another election which they won outright by just three seats.

By contrast, in Scotland, Labour have won more than half the Westminster seats in 16 of the 18 elections. The only exceptions were 1951 when they tied with the Tories on 35 seats each and in 1955, when the Tories won outright by 36 seats to 34 . After that, the Tories declined gradually, with a decisive moment in 1987 when their seats more than halved in number after Thatcherite economics devastated swathes of Scotland. The decay continued all the way to 1997, when they finally lost their last MP in the country. They have since regained one, but remain a somewhat diminished force north of the border - and in addition to Labour, the SNP and (until recently at least) the Lib Dems have held significant levels of support to create a rather different political system and voting culture compared to other parts of the UK, a tendency further embedded by the devolved Parliament.

So Scotland has almost always elected a majority of Labour MPs (albeit their numbers exaggerated by the first past the post voting system) but on numerous occasions has ended up ruled by a Tory or Tory-led Government it didn't vote for.

What about the reverse - the claim that Scottish MPs have been so numerous on the Labour benches that they have made the critical difference for the UK, tipping the Union supposedly leftwards where, in their absence, the Tories would have held naked, merciless power?

Well, from a good look at the statistics, the answer is that Scottish Labour MPs have made the decisive difference precisely once - in 1964, their 43 to 24 lead over the Tories in Scotland trumped the results in the rUK, where the Tories led Labour by 280 to 273. This produced an overall UK total of 317 Labour to 304 Conservatives and 9 Liberals. With such a narrow majority, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson went back to the country in 1966 and won by a much wider margin and although Labour continued to dominate in Scotland, it also won outright in the rUK.

The only other occasions where arguably there has been a crucial impact were October 1974 where the absence of Scottish Labour would have seen the rUK with a continuing hung Parliament - this occurred in any case by 1976 when Labour lost its UK-wide majority through by-election defeats and had to survive via a pact with the Liberals. And in 2010, an absence of Scottish MPs would have produced an rUK Parliament with an outright Tory majority - though how different this would have been to the present Coalition, which has pursued the most extreme rightwing agenda in our history, is anyone's guess.

So it seems quite an act of either dissimulation or of ignorance to parrot the idea that without Scotland, the rUK would be condemned to perpetual Tory Government. All bar one of Labour's post-war victories would still have been achieved without Scottish MPs (which is not to diminish the powerfully positive contribution of many Scottish politicians to the progressive and socialist causes over the years - with some powerful contributors to the advance of the welfare state and to significant social gains in the days before Thatcherism and Nu-Labour).

But in sharp contrast, Scotland has had governments it did not vote for after the eight of the eighteen elections. It's not a happy record and is one that speaks of a country with a basically egalitarian culture that has instead been subjected periodically to ever harsher neoliberal experimentation. The UK is now by some indices the fourth most unequal country on the planet - if Scottish votes could make a difference, there is precious little sign of it; and crucially, the maths show it is an argument that really does not add up. Scottish MPs make up 9% of the total - a small minority and for much of the time an effective irrelevance in terms of any numerical impact.

Radical Independence - ideas for a new society

The truth is that progressives on both sides of the border have nothing at all to fear from an independent Scotland but rather quite the opposite: for those to the north, there is the prospect of building a more equal society freed from much of the block on change posed by the London Establishment and its agents. Movements like the Radical Independence Campaign have been central to promoting this alternative vision of a new country.

For those to the south, there is the prospect of a neighbour powerfully demonstrating the value of a society based on the common weal as opposed to narrow personal interest. Moreover, there is indeed no reason at all to contemplate perpetual Tory Government with Scotland gone. The real challenge it to ensure that there is a genuine left wing alternative on offer to the people of the inelegantly named rUK.

And that's another matter altogether.

The stats:

Election date	Labour (seats won)	Conservative (seats won)	Liberal & successors (seats won)	Others (seats won)
1945 Scotland	37	27	0	7
1945 UK	393	210	12	25
1945Ruk*	356	183	12	18
1950 Scotland	37	31	2	1
1950 UK	315	298	9	3
1950 Ruk	278	267	7	2
1951 Scotland	35	35	1	0
1951 UK	295	321	6	3
1951 Ruk	260	286	5	3
1955 Scotland	34	36	1	0
1955 UK	277	345	6	2
1955 Ruk	243	309	5	2
1959 Scotland	38	31	1	1
1959 UK	258	365	6	1
1959 Ruk	220	334	5	0
1964 Scotland	43	24	4	0
1964 UK	317	304	9	0
1964 Ruk	274	280	5	0
1966 Scotland	46	20	5	0
1966 UK	364	253	12	1
1966 Ruk	318	233	7	1
1970 Scotland	44	23	3	1
1970 UK	288	330	6	6
1970 Ruk	244	307	3	5
1974 f Scotland	40	21	3	7
1974 f UK	301	297	14	23
1974 f Ruk	261	276	11	16
1974 o Scotland	41	16	3	11
1974 o UK	319	277	13	26
1974 o Ruk	278	261	10	15
1979 Scotland	44	22	3	2
1979 UK	269	339	11	16
1979 Ruk	225	317	8	14
1983 Scotland	41	21	8	2
1983 UK	209	397	23	21
1983 Ruk	168	376	15	19
1987 Scotland	50	10	9	3
1987 UK	229	376	22	23
Ruk	179	366	13	20
1992 Scotland	49	11	9	3
1992 UK	271	336	20	25
Ruk	222	325	11	22
1997 Scotland	56	0	10	6
1997 UK	418	165	46	30
1997 Ruk	362	165	36	24
2001 Scotland	55	1	10	5
2001 UK	412	166	52	29
2001 Ruk	357	165	42	24
2005 Scotland	41	1	11	6
2005 UK	356	198	62	30
2005 Ruk	315	197	51	24
2010 Scotland	41	1	11	6
2010 UK	258	306	57	29
2010 Ruk	217	305	46	23

*rUK - "remaining UK" - i.e., combined totals of MPs sitting for England, Wales and Northern Ireland constituencies at Westminster

Data Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Scotland#1945
http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm