Tide of opinion: What effect will Labour’s victory in Glasgow have on the country?

Does Labour’s victory in Glasgow spell the end of Salmond’s days of plain sailing? David Torrance looks at how a two-party state will shape the referendum debate

AQUATIC similes now feature heavily in the Scottish political lexicon. The SNP’s stunning victory last May was likened to an electoral tsunami, an unstoppable force of nature with the First Minister riding on the crest of a wave. In a similar vein, Thursday’s local government elections were hailed by his opponents as an indication that, in the words of Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont, “the tide is going out on Alex Salmond”.

Lamont was careful to add a qualifying “perhaps” to her statement, for the result may yet come to be seen as only a modest check on the SNP’s momentum. It will be another two and a half years until the waters settle and we have a clear idea of what the new political landscape in Scotland looks like. Although Labour’s achievement in Glasgow was a departure from the Nationalist plan, the party of independence still believes it is capable of something much stronger come 2014. So, in the wake of Thursday’s election, has the water been between now and the referendum become more choppy for the Nationalists? Or is it still plain sailing for Alex Salmond and the SNP?

“The Nationalists overplayed their hand in this election,” says a senior UK Government source. “They were never going to seize control of Glasgow City Council so they mismanaged expectations and have lost momentum as a result. The important thing for the Unionist campaign is that Labour got a boost.” Indeed, the most important factor for Scotland’s strongest pro-Union party is psychological.

There was a danger that Labour morale would completely collapse after so many of its MSPs were swept away at the seismic Holyrood election of 2011. Had last Thursday’s results brought further woe then there was little prospect of already depressed Labour activists summoning the energy to campaign for re-election, never mind a No vote in the referendum campaign. All that has changed. “As a psychological boost the result can’t be underestimated,” says a former Scottish Labour strategist. “The first message it gives Labour is that the SNP are not unstoppable, even in the referendum, while the second is that Scottish voters are discerning and will respond to a good case if it’s put before them. What Johann [Lamont] now has to do is transform the result into a position of strength, overhauling the party machine, finding new money and developing a winning case for the Union.”

Labour, on that latter point, remains weak. The party is essentially split between those who want to devolve more powers and an old guard (who, bizarrely, take their lead from former Tory Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth) who think any further concessions will simply speed up “separation”. There is also the platform issue. Although Lamont is relaxed about campaigning alongside Tories, some of her Westminster colleagues are reluctant. All this needs to be resolved ahead of a scheduled campaign launch in June.

“There’s still a long way for them to go,” says the UK Government source. “A lot of issues still haven’t been resolved but the crucial thing is that Labour are no longer on the floor. For the pro-Union campaign that in itself is significant.” That the coalition is willing to emphasise Labour’s importance to the No side says a lot about where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats now find themselves.

Although the Scottish Conservatives had a modest goal (becoming the third party of local government) and achieved a modest result (coming third), there was no evidence of Ruth Davidson’s leadership rejuvenating Scotland’s most Unionist party. Instead, what one activist calls “managed decline” continues, as it has since the 1997 general election landslide.

The quietly federalist (or, as Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie would have it, “Home Rule”) Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, have effectively been removed from the referendum equation. Although Business Secretary Vince Cable put on a brave face and talked up the Glasgow result as being “good for the Union”, his party machine was long ago factored out of any cross-party Unionist campaign, a strategic decision the local government elections have vindicated.

“The assets they can bring to the table are people like Charles Kennedy, who’s not tainted by the coalition, and maybe Ming Campbell for the more cerebral stuff,” says the UK Government source, “but nobody’s expecting anything from the Lib Dems in terms of organisation – that had already been planned for.”

As one Lib Dem insider puts it, “the further marginalisation of us and the Conservatives is not good news. It solidifies the dynamic around two parties – one, the SNP, for independence and the other, Labour, for the Union.”

Indeed, the SNP see this polarisation of Scotland into a two-party state as a bonus in the run-up to the referendum campaign. “In a sense it’s a rejection of Westminster politics in Scotland,” says a Scottish Government source. “The result underscores that we have a distinctive political culture in Scotland, and that’s part of our overall narrative. If people are voting in a different fashion from down south then the logical extension of that is to have the full powers of independence.”

Although other Nationalists concede that elements of the local government campaign were flawed, not least “a very bad spin policy” which meant not winning Glasgow became the story, none are seriously concerned that it derails the Yes campaign in any meaningful way. “Private polling suggested that voters were planning to say to us, ‘Don’t get carried away, our support is not carte blanche,’ ” reveals one SNP strategist. “But that didn’t happen and we made further gains. The turnout in the referendum will also be much higher, particularly if voters are engaged.”

As the First Minister said on Friday, “the SNP have been in government for five years now and we’re still winning at local level”, which his party thinks bodes well for the referendum. “We remain an election-winning organisation,” says the Scottish Government source. “The referendum is a different matter because you’ll have the SNP at the heart of that, but it will also be bigger and broader than just Scotland’s national party.”

This is a point Scotland’s Greens are keen to emphasise. Having received a modest boost in the local elections, one party insider says the result should “recalibrate the belief that they just have to run an SNP campaign in 2014 and that’ll win it”. “There are a lot of people who’ll vote SNP but not for independence,” he says, “and also people who’ll back independence but not the SNP, including Greens and other left-wingers. There’s a constituency out there who are deeply frustrated with the status quo and want change – the SNP as yet are not offering that.”

Indeed, one SNP strategist believes last year’s tsunami and last week’s check on that tide has fundamentally altered the terrain upon which the independence referendum will be fought. “What’s emerging is that the fight will be on the basis of social justice issues and not the constitution: are they best delivered by the SNP or Labour in two years’ time and, if it’s the former, does Scotland have enough powers to do so?”

There is a view that last year’s tidal wave actually highlighted the wrong terrain, big-picture issues such as the monarchy, currency and defence, over which the political battle has raged for the past year. This, runs the theory, was a “phony war”, when in fact the issues Scots care most about are already controlled by Holyrood. “The result should remind the SNP not to indulge in navel gazing about reserved stuff,” says the strategist. “The referendum will actually be contested upon what’s already devolved and who’s better placed to deliver it.”

This neatly highlights the UK dimension, which cannot be underestimated in fashioning the political landscape over the next two years. Still smarting from the “omnishambles” of the past few weeks, the coalition parties did not have a good night in England either, with even the non-establishment Tory Boris Johnson having a close shave in the race for London. Also damaging was the rejection of, as David Cameron put it recently, having “a Boris in every city”, a series of directly elected mayors across England.

The contrast, the SNP believes, is increasingly between an unpopular and incompetent Westminster government and a popular and competent administration at Holyrood. The timing of the 2014 referendum – sandwiched between June elections to the European Parliament and the 2015 UK general election – is predicated on this basis.

Although Labour did relatively well south of the Border, polling continues to show that Ed Miliband is, as one SNP insider puts it, “unelectable”, while even if he was it would not necessarily place Labour in a strong position vis-à-vis Scotland. “Scots don’t like what the Tories are doing to welfare and nor is Ed riding to the rescue,” says the SNP strategist. “We simply have to demonstrate that we’re the better bet.”

That said, there are weaknesses in this scenario. Despite having an overall majority, the Scottish Government has been legislatively cautious since last May, while maintaining momentum in the absence of elections and bold policy initiatives might become harder over the next two years. Its welfare and pension policies are also underdeveloped, leaving them vulnerable to Unionist attack. “We don’t have to provide a scale model of the entire state,” argues the strategist, “but our existing social messages will be pumped up while we seek to make some totemic changes to pensions and welfare which will be seen by the Scottish public as undeniably a good thing.”

The onus would then be on Labour, and particularly Ed Miliband, to convince Scots they would do better were they to form the next UK government. But given the broad consensus between the coalition and Labour on most welfare reform, Miliband clearly has less room for manoeuvre. Unionists, however, believe this underestimates the constitutional dimension. “What is damaging for the SNP is people getting bored by endless talk about independence,” says a senior Scottish Tory. “Normal Scots simply have not been fired up by it.”

It is possible, of course, to read too much into local election results. Thursday’s results do not mean Ed Miliband has suddenly become Tony Blair, and nor do they indicate that a majority of Scots are prepared to vote Yes in two years’ time. So Labour’s Gordon Matheson may have been premature in declaring that the SNP juggernaut had “landed in a ditch in Glasgow”. The Nationalist wave has not receded just yet, but there is scant room for complacency on either side of the referendum debate.