Someone needs to tell Tom Harris MP that the “Unionist” in the “Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party” referred to the Union with Ireland, not that between Scotland and England.
Equally, the fact that the Conservatives (in London) and the SNP (in Edinburgh) sometimes seem to be reciting similar talking points should scarcely come as any great surprise: the Labour party is their common enemy. True, the Conservatives oppose the Nationalists north of the border but as far as the UK party is concerned that’s a secondary front and one, more particularly, on which there’s little need for a fresh offensive this year.
If, as Alan Cochrane hints, the Scottish Tories have dropped “Unionist” from their name then fine, even if they might actually be better off dropping the “Conservative” bit. That remains a tainted, even toxic, brand in Scotland – not least because the electorate doesn’t care that the Tories have spent the past decade on their knees begging forgiveness for their supposed sins. As is so often the case, the Bavarian model is the attractive one here.
Cochrane asks how the Tories are supposed to win back support if they don’t distinguish their attacks from those salvoes the SNP are hurling at Labour. Well, the easy answer is that they can’t and so they should concentrate on a) incremental gains and b) winning the Battle of Ideas. That means having some.
Since it is the nature of the electoral map that an SNP-Tory alliance is the safest, most natural way of defeating Scottish Labour, the Tory agenda should concentrate on developing policy ideas that, if implemented in coalition with the nationalists (a trick the Tories missed: Salmond is happier alone than he would have been in an SNP-Tory coalition) would move the governance of Scotland to the right and, theoretically, therefore in an encouraging direction.
Sure, there’s the constitutional question, but the Tories ought perhaps to have some faith in the people: there might be some desire for the devolution of additional powers to Holyrood, but there is no massive groundswell of support for outright independence. At least not yet. But that’s a battle and an argument for another day. The bottom line is that the Tories can’t fight Labour and the Nationalists simultaneously. That means they need to be opportunists, shamelessly so in fact and take their chances wherever they arise.
I maintain however that the Scottish Tories should prefer a Nationalist ministry in Edinburgh to a Labour one. It presents greater opportunity (not least because there are, after all, quite a number of Tories inside the SNP, whereas there are none in the Labour party.)
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