ANALYSIS:If Alex Salmond loses a referendum on independence, his credibility will be terminally damaged, writes MARK HENNESSY
PLANNING THE devolution of some powers from London to Edinburgh in the late 1990s, Labour’s Tony Blair believed the desire for independence would die with the new Scottish parliament.
Under legislation passed in 1997, members of the Holyrood parliament are elected, some by constituencies, some proportionally from regional lists. Under the plan, it should have been all but impossible for one party to get a majority.
Alex Salmond yesterday destroyed that belief, easily surpassing the 65-seat threshold required for a majority. Having led a minority government for the last four years, Salmond now has decisions to make.
He has wanted independence for Scotland for all of his life. However, he abandoned a plan to hold a referendum during the last parliament because he could not get the votes of the other parties for the legislation necessary to make it happen.
Salmond promised to launch a full-throated campaign this year for a referendum mandate, but he was cautious. Yes, one would be held, but not until the parliament’s last year of life. And he did not make it a central issue of the campaign.
But all is different now. H has a mandate, he says.
Salmond can do what he wants. The difficulty for him, however, is that while he can call a referendum, he may not win it, if opinion polls have accurately gauged the opinion of Scots about a break with London.
Almost 60 per cent of people favour the continuation of the union. About one-third favour independence, but about three-quarters favour the holding of a referendum, though this figure dropped last year.
Salmond, therefore, faces a dilemma. He may never have such freedom again to put the issue to the vote. Yet if he does, and he loses, his administration’s credibility will have been terminally damaged with the electorate.
Describing Salmond’s desire for a referendum as “flawed, dangerous and reckless”, Labour’s Ed Balls summed up the SNP leader’s difficulty rather well: “The SNP does well as an independence party when they don’t talk about independence.”
Meanwhile, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s hopes for a rebirth for Labour in the UK has stumbled at the first hurdle in Scotland. Labour was badly hurt by the collapse in the Liberal Democrats vote, which transferred seemingly en bloc to the SNP, and lost a crippling number of MSPs. Iain Gray, the party’s leader in Scotland, held on by a whisker.
Labour in Scotland must now rebuild. The losses may help, if the proper lessons are heeded. Most especially, Labour needs better candidates. Too often, its best talent heads for Westminster, rather than limit their ambitions to Holyrood.
A referendum organised by the SNP would not be binding on Westminster, though, it is difficult to see how the momentum for independence could be stopped if voters backed Salmond’s dream.
Though the first minister is clearly able, his popularity has been created to no small extent on the back of generous public subsidies: no tuition fees in Scotland, no prescription charges, free nursing homes for the elderly, for example.
The difficulty is that much of this is paid for by English taxpayers, who get several thousands of pounds less of public spending every year than their Scottish brethren.
Salmond says Scotland pays its way, since treasury figures do not take into account Scottish North Sea oil.
The first minister believes Scotland can be viable on its own, blessed by the declining gift that is North Sea oil, but, more importantly, by the future revenues from his ambitions to make Scotland “the Saudi Arabia of green energy”. Not many others agree.
For the Liberal Democrats, yesterday was a disaster. Crushed by savage losses in Scotland, it suffered disastrously in English local elections, losing approximately 700 seats. It also lost control of a number of councils, including that of party leader Nick Clegg in Sheffield.
The Lib Dem leader received a double blow last night when the bid to replace first past the post voting with the Alternative Vote system was beaten resoundingly.
Clegg is now faced with an appalling vista. He does not want to quit government. His party would be left in ruins in any Westminster election and indeed he would almost certainly lose his Sheffield seat.
However, the Lib Dems will want to see him clashing with prime minister David Cameron, so bitter and public confrontations are likely to materialise in the coming weeks over NHS and House of Lords reform, along with other issues.
But he can only push this to a certain point, unless he wants to abandon, for the sake of saving his own skin, a once carefully planned strategy to persuade the British people that coalition governments can work and are to be welcomed, not feared.
So far, he does not face a leadership heave. Some Liberal Democrats, though, point out that the party’s councillors did better than the national average in the home patches of his two most likely challengers, Chris Huhne and Tim Farron, both frequent critics of the Conservatives.
For Cameron, Thursday perhaps offered too many riches. The Conservatives gained councillors, even though they assumed there would be losses.
In the Welsh Assembly elections, the party had its best ever performance, and in Scotland Cameron had no grounds for complaint.
However, his surfeit of riches has highlighted the fact that the Lib Dems are the ones “taking the bullet”.
“They’re our human shield,” said one Tory minister.
Some division of pain, even though felt only by underlings, might well have better served Cameron’s longer-term interests.