Labour’s run to the right is pushing Scotland towards independence

Most Scottish nurses didn’t strike this week. Unlike their equivalents at Westminster, Scottish ministers sat down with health unions, and agreed, in the face of spiralling prices, to raise their wages.

Yesterday, they announced how they’d pay for this – a penny on each of the higher rates of income tax, a billion pounds a year for health and social care. This will include a 7.5% raise for most staff, 11.24% for the lowest paid.

With inflation currently running at around 10%, that does amount to a pay cut in real terms pay for most, but a smaller one than colleagues south of the border are being asked to swallow. This week, members of Unite and Unison voted to accept the proposals, while GMB members rejected it.

Announcing the deal earlier this week, Scottish health secretary Humza Yousaf said on Twitter: “In a week where Labour & Tories have been lining up to attack health trade unions, I'm proud to be part of a Govt that works constructively with them.”

It’s not hard for him to look relatively progressive.

At Westminster, Rishi Sunak has said unions asking that their members’ pay keep pace with inflation aren’t being “reasonable”. His ministers have refused to discuss pay with nurses’ elected representatives. UK Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting responded by giving an interview to the Telegraph in which he described medical unions as “hostile”, saying they are “holding back the NHS”.

Streeting’s boss Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has blown hot and cold on whether he’ll reverse Tory anti-union laws that have put the UK at the bottom of European league tables for workers’ freedom to organise.

Opinion polling is pretty clear that the position taken by both main Westminster parties isn’t very popular in Scotland. Nearly 80% of Scots said they would have sympathised with Scottish nurses if they had gone on strike. In fact, it’s not very popular in general – across the UK, support for striking nurses ran at 65% in an equivalent poll.

Scottish independence ahead

The last month has been the first sustained period of British history in which Yes has led in the Scottish independence polls at the same time that Labour has led in the Westminster polls.

This isn’t just some geeky psephological detail. It is a disaster for Unionists – a disaster made by Keir Starmer and the Labour right that has captured his ear.

To understand why, we have to understand who the swing voters are in Scottish constitutional politics. Because, broadly, there are two ways people approach the independence question.

One is about national identity: do people feel more Scottish or more British?

This is how those of a more culturally conservative disposition tend to approach the issue, and these people tend to be fairly entrenched in their positions. There isn’t much you can say to someone who feels deeply proud to be British that will persuade them to vote to leave the UK. It’s equally difficult to convince someone obsessed with their Scottishness that they should be a Brit.

The second way is to see it as a choice between states: is Holyrood or Westminster more likely to deliver the outcomes they want? And because these people – by definition – are not primarily motivated by national identity, they tend to have either liberal or left-wing leanings.

Swing voters in Scotland

Focus groups of swing voters in 2020, run by the Unionist group These Islands, found broadly progressive – or in some cases, explicitly socialist – arguments were what swung them one way or the other. It was former Labour voters swinging towards independence that boosted the Yes vote in the final months of the 2014 campaign.

This isn’t surprising. After all, between 60% and 70% of Scottish voters support social democratic policies, such as raising taxes, spending more on public services and renationalising natural monopolies. Scots have consistently elected centre-left politicians.

A Labour government is likely, yet left-leaning swing voters in Scotland say they’ll vote for independence anyway

A lot of support for independence is driven by the belief it will achieve these sorts of aims. And perhaps the strongest argument the No campaign has had for years is that ‘Scotland doesn’t need independence – it needs a Labour government’.

But Labour has led in every UK-wide poll (except for one tie in March) for a year. And yet all five Scottish polls held in the last month – plus a sixth with an unconventional wording – recorded support for Scottish independence ahead of support for staying in the UK.

A Labour government is not only possible, but likely, and yet those left-leaning swing voters in Scotland are starting to say they’ll vote for independence anyway.

A possible explanation for this is the Supreme Court ruling that the Scottish government can’t organise an independence referendum next year, despite its MSPs being elected on a pledge to do so. And sure, it would enthuse those already planning to vote Yes. But do swing voters care that much about a procedural snub?

It seems that they don’t. The Scottish Election Study polled voters immediately before and after the ruling, and in results released this week found no statistically significant difference. Rather, they said, support for independence has been creeping back up in recent months.

Which means we need to find another explanation.

Not just strikes

Of course, it’s not just strikes that have seen Labour move away from the Scottish electorate.

Around two-thirds of Scots say they would like to rejoin the EU. Starmer has made clear that his government would do no such thing. The SNP and Greens, by contrast, posit independence as a route to do just that.

Most Scots (and most people across the UK) believe that immigration is good (pdf) for both the economy and society. Again, this attitude is likely to be particularly strong among less-nationalist swing voters in Scotland. Yet Starmer has repeatedly talked tough on immigration. And on crime. And so on.

While Labour runs to the right, the Scottish government has, if anything, shuffled slightly to the left over the last year, ever since the Greens allied with the SNP, and Sturgeon kicked the right-wing Fergus Ewing off her front bench.

While the Scottish government’s more radical policy ideas may yet melt into waffle, it is at least talking a good game on everything from tenants’ rights to the climate crisis.

In yesterday’s budget, it pitched in the same direction. As well as raising tax on earnings above £43,000 – and more on salaries above £125,000 – it increased stamp duty on second homes to 6%, abolished peak fares on trains, raised Scottish benefits in line with inflation, and allocated £2.2bn to climate investment.

While the tax increases (1% on each upper band) aren’t huge, the rhetoric was strong. Announcing them, deputy first minister and interim finance secretary John Swinney said: “We choose the path where people are asked to pay their fair share, in the knowledge that in so doing, they help to create the fairer society in which we all want to live."

The message got through to the press gallery, with the BBC’s Scotland editor James Cook saying it “may go down as the moment when the SNP leant a little further to the left — and a lot further than at some points in its history”. The Daily Mail squealed gratifyingly.

It increasingly feels like the voters Swinney and Sturgeon are trying to sway are not the ones Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves want to reach.

To some extent, these differences of strategy can be put down to differences in Scottish and English society. Anglo-British nationalism preaches deference to monarchy, aristocrats and the posh. Scotland’s national mythology – the Highland clearances and Scottish enlightenment – promote underdogs, proletarian virtue and bourgeois competence. Some of this may be reflected in small but significant statistical differences: in England, for instance, 21.6% of workers are in a union, compared with 28.4% in Scotland.

The effect of different electoral systems

Different assumptions underlie what constitutes a ‘swing voter’ in Scotland and England.

The first-past-the-post electoral system means Westminster Labour faces few threats from anyone to its left – in most English constituencies, progressive voters have nowhere else to go.

Because left-leaning demographics tend to mass together in cities, Labour’s vote tends to be overly concentrated in urban areas, where they can win vast majorities – the nine MPs with the biggest winning margins in 2019 are all Labour.

But that means thousands of wasted votes, leaving Labour to scrap for a total majority via more right-leaning swing voters in a few marginal seats. Over generations, this has produced an assumption that ‘swing voter’ and ‘centre right’ are synonymous.

In Scotland, it’s not just on the constitutional question that this logic doesn’t apply. Holyrood’s proportional electoral system means the SNP, Labour, Greens and, to some extent, Lib Dems, are all in competition for the left of the electorate, and no one can bank on anyone. Swing voters come from across the spectrum, with each political party running its own strategy to win over specific demographics.

Likewise, the difference in scale matters. In Scotland, with its population of 5.6 million, personal networks, word of mouth and people organising in their spare time can have real power. Across England, with 56 million, it’s harder to get a message out, and so the media and those with big money have more relative power.

Starmer clearly believes he needs to genuflect to right-wing papers and the City of London – even in the face of overwhelming public support for, say, striking nurses.

After nearly a quarter century of devolution, these differences of dynamic (along with other similar effects) have produced a difference in political culture.

UK Labour, in its run to the right, has either failed to understand this difference or, perhaps more tellingly, has chosen to focus on English marginals while accepting it will likely lose potential Scottish votes in the process.

But that affects more than just votes in a general election. The party has also, in the process, chosen to sacrifice support for the Union.

Britain, as a nation in these islands rather than a global empire, was founded by Labour in 1945. The Tories may have been in power when Scots voted No in 2014, but Labour had led in the UK-wide polls for 30 months, making the prospect of a Labour government seem comparatively likely within months. And from 2015 to 2019, the Labour Party offered a clear social democratic voice within the UK, and Yes never once consistently led in the Scottish polls, despite Brexit.

From January 2020 until March 2021, with UK Labour cowed, the balance shifted and Yes got its longest run of polling leads in history. Johnson had just won at Westminster, the English Left was moot, Brexit was ‘getting done’, on top of which Sturgeon was showing Covid leadership. And in 2021, perhaps because the Salmond trial had damaged Scottish politics and the vaccine rollout boosted Britain’s reputation, No started to lead again, and then as partygate brought down Tory support the prospect of a Labour government kept No ahead. In other words, when a Labour government seems likely, No leads, and when a Labour government seems unlikely, Yes leads.

That was, until a few months ago.

With Starmer riding so high in the polls, people have looked more closely at what a Labour government might actually look like. And, as Starmer has worked hard to reassure the right wing press and the City that he doesn’t represent any real change, and as the Scottish government has started to talk a more clearly progressive language, those Left leaning independence swing voters seem to have started to sway.

I’ve argued before that social democracy has long been the force holding the UK together. By abandoning the commitment to progressive ideas on which he ran, Starmer is abandoning something else: his chances of reuniting the UK.