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All available evidence
tells us that our Party will attract much greater support in elections
to the Scottish parliament than in Westminster elections. We certainly
have to hope that the evidence is accurate and that it remains up to
date. We must all have had the same thought — let’s get ready now
for 2003 and Holyrood: The Sequel.
We would do well to
recognise that we have suffered an unpleasant experience; a reminder
that our onward march is not inevitable, but has to be worked for.
Before our progress can be resumed we have a job to do in reassuring our
public, whose morale is bound to have been affected, no matter how we
seek to explain or excuse.
Certainly things could
have been very much worse; and one would like to think that our enemies
expected us to suffer more severely: We were after all
"irrelevant" to Westminster; and the campaign, focussing upon
issues over which the London Parliament had no further Scottish
jurisdiction, helped to make confusion permanent in voters’ minds.
Probably this muddle added to the basic defect of the campaign. The
battle was found on TV essentially — a fact which further diminished
our prospects, as constant reference to "the three main
parties", and the constant quotations of their daily guff, and the
constant parading of their chief glowworms made obvious.
But we were not the only
victims. Intelligence and democratic hopes were consistently outraged.
The "campaign" was nothing of the sort. Each party made a
daily statement, and these statements had no relationship whatsoever one
to another. The Media, which ought to have tried to enforce some sort of
order, meekly reported each morning that the Labour Party would to-day
be talking about Health, the Tories about the Euro, the Liberals about
Education, and so on. The gears never meshed. The cogs never engaged.
The assertions met with no response. As a result there was no debate
worthy of the name.
Who benefited? All those
who had decided that politicians deserve only anger, contempt and
ridicule, and that politics should properly be countered by boredom. For
all the silliness about low turnout indicating great contentment, we all
know — even Mrs Liddell who most zealously spouts the nonsense —
that the true reason for the turnout is the widespread and spreading,
notion that politics have become something which sensible people will
seek to avoid. In truth our political health is in a desperate state,
and those who deny it are merely adding to the list of examples of spin,
lies, evasion which many voters, and more nonvoters, have decided, are
what political argument is all about.
Oddly enough, there was
one exception to the rule; one hero soared upward dragging his dubious
following with him. All he had to do was answer some questions in a
reasonably direct manner, retain civility, and behave in general terms
like an average normal decent person. That’s what Charles Kennedy did,
and how it paid off for his party. Self-selected; linked by nothing but
a readiness to wear the same name tag: invisible and non-existent in
large tracts of the country, their vote advanced by quite uniform
percentages. There are good explanations for recurring Liberal revivals.
This one arose from their leader’s ability to make himself likeable.
Sadly his only concession to the now normal level of political spite was
in a malicious and quite unfounded slur on the SNP, but no one worried
about that, and probably no one noticed.
Finally, the obsession
with tax. If British politicians have really decided that income tax
will never be raised, we will all have to learn to say farewell to
aspirations which will never be met and reconstructions which will never
be allowed. AIf Young (one of the journalists who had a good campaign;
lain Macwhirter another) pointed out at an early stage that the task of
restoring public life after the Thatcher unwisdoms, could not be
attempted without massive revenue-raising. If it is not going to come
from income tax we are going to have some desperate household bills to
look forward to. And if a Labour Government will not tax to provide
services for those who cannot make full private provision, then what are
they for? Let’s keep asking.
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