‘We don’t get the government we vote for’ has been the mantra of the SNP in Scotland for the last couple of years.
After the massive surge of the SNP vote in the 2015 UK General Election, taking 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, that complaint has become the claim, frequently voiced by the First Minister of Scotland, that the Conservative UK Government ‘has no mandate in Scotland.’
Let’s demythologise a lot of this.
In the current circumstances of Scotland’s electoral representation at Westminster, any UK government could be said, by this ‘logic’ to have ‘no mandate to govern Scotland’, since each of the main UK parties has no more than a single seat here.
But democracy is about accepting the will of the majority. In the UK that majority has this time been a clear one.
In terms of the Scottish electorate for this election – 4,094,784 - the total SNP vote of 1,455,160 represented 35.53% of that electorate.
And Scotland, with its own elections to its own parliament, absolutely gets exactly the governments it votes for.
England, with its Conservative tendency, has often had to take the Labour governments the Scottish vote previously ensured the UK would get – yet England never once declared that the UK government had no mandate in England.
And England alone in the botched devolution within the Union, remains without local powers to govern itself.
Think on.
In the 2015 General Election, 49.38% of all who voted in Scotland voted for the SNP – which took 53 out of 56 Scottish seats.
This 49.38% did not vote for a party with UK wide representation – although slightly more voters did – with a pro-union 50.6% of the votes cast.
The job of the UK General Election is to elect the government for the UK.
In Scotland, where the largest vote for a single party in Scotland was for a party not represented in the rest of the UK, those who voted for it were not concerned with getting ‘the UK government’ they voted for – because the one thing such a vote could not deliver was a ‘UK government’. Had they wanted ‘the UK government they voted for’, they would have voted differently.
Instead of this, they chose to eviscerate in Scotland the two largest parties with UK-wide representation, leaving Scotland with no serious leverage at Westminster, however loud its voice there may now be.
This may feel like a victory of sorts just now, when the adrenaline of the demolition job on Labour and the Liberal Democrats is running high; but the reality of being a fringe entertainment with no clout will wear thin as something of a pyrrhic victory.
If, within Scotland, we were to implemnt the consequences of the SNP refrain – ‘We don’t get the government we vote for’ and the ‘no mandate to govern in Scotland, how could the SNP Scottish Government disallow independence from Scotland to Orkney and Shetland, if they so wished it – and they have serially explored this option?
Since 2007, the traditionally strongly Liberal Democrat Northern Isles – geographically separate and culturally distinct – have not had the Government they voted for. Holyrood could as easily be said to have no mandate to govern these islands.
In the 2015 General Election, Shetland voted SNP but the greater majority of the Liberal Democrats in Orkney kept the single constituency a Liberal Democrat seat – whose majority, for the time being, validates the Northern Isles seeking independence from Scotland if they wish.
And in the UK itself, look at London, the most heavily populated area in the Union.
In the 2015 General Election, the majority [61.6%] of the London seats returned a Labour MP. The overall Labour vote was 45.75% of the total turnout of voters in London.
The London Labour seats form a contiguous mass of the city. The turnout in the London Labour seats alone was 72% of the turnout across the whole of Scotland. The population of London is 156% of the population of Scotland.
By the SNP’s arguments of ‘We don’t get the government we vote for’ and ‘the Conservative UK government has no mandate here’ why are we not hearing London agitate for independence of the rest of the UK?
Because the rest of the Union accepts the principle of majority vote that underpins democracy.
If we followed the SNP government logic, any Scottish Holyrood constituency which had not voted SNP – any single household indeed which had not voted SNP - would be refusing the authority of the majority government on those grounds; and the SNP majority government would have no consistent argument to deny their secession.
Robbie the Pict’s Pictish Free State would be as valid as any other.
