In the run up to the Scottish independence vote, there’s been much chatter about how Scotland is both more liberal and more wealthy than England and that this is the chief source of tension precipitating the push for independence.
I’ll admit to not ever following Scotland’s politics or culture too closely and this caught me somewhat by surprise. My incredibly ignorant generalized view of both places is that Scotland is a rural, rough hewn & plain speaking while England is genteel, sophisticated and mannered. As a result, I naturally assumed England to be the liberal country and Scotland to be more conservative.
Evidently, I’m wrong about this so I’d appreciate a better perspective on how Scotland got to be more liberal than England.
I think you are misreading the reports and applying an American veneer to British Politics. Scotland isn’t more liberal, it’s more left wing. The two are not necessarily the same thing. Scotland isn’t more socially liberal in an American, East Coast sense.
Also, the people aren’t more wealthy, I’m not sure where you get that idea. They get more free stuff from the government - University tuition fees being the prime example - but that doesn’t make them richer. This heat map shows median earnings across the UK - you can see large pockets of high earnings in the South East of England, very little of the same in Scotland.
The UK and Scotland both have social policies that are Liberal, there is no religious Right.
With regards to economic policy, the two diverge. This is because of the collapse of the Conservative vote in Scotland in the 1980s, a legacy of the Thatcher years. The Conservatives have only one MP returned by Scotland out of 59.
Scotland also has a strong Socialist heritage many of leading members of the Labour Party are Scots. The existing devolved Scottish Parliament gets a portion of UK tax revenue to spend on services for which it has responsibility. The formula by which this is derived is generous.
The dominant party in the Scottish Parliament, the SNP, decided to spend money on some attractive social benefits that please the electorate. The middle classes really like the lack of university fees. Scotland really does not like the changes to UK social policy that reduce welfare benefits (but then who does?)
If Scotland were exposed to the vissitudes of the international economy by being independent, it would find it very difficult to pay for these things. However, the SNP try to convince the electorate that Scotland is rich, it has the golden touch. It is a socially progressive country that will provide fair benefits for all. Their model is Norway…but without the $1 Trillon sovereign wealth fund that country has salted away.
It is a dream, like fantasising how you would spend the money if you won a lottery. It is very easy to be liberal and generous if you have money. But the reality is, they don’t.
I think this subject is slightly distorted by Scottish nationalism. As others have said, Scotland is not richer than the rest of the UK, and indeed it is Scotland’s industrial working class heartland that has made it such a Labour stronghold, although “traditional Labour” does not equate to “socially liberal”. But on the centre right, there is a problem. The Conservatives are seen as too English. Rural areas that in England would be safe Tory country are strongly contested by other parties such as the Lib Dems and SNP (but not Labour). I’m not convinced that this it evidence of some particular Scottish aversion to centre-right views. Furthermore, if you are a centre-right nationalist, you may well vote SNP for now, despite the fact that on other issues they are much like the Labour party.
If Scotland became independent, would a centre-right party become viable again, as in a serious contender to win elections? I think so. It is the case in every other European country AFAIK.
My own outsiders perspective is that Scotland is in many ways more conservative than England. The absolute loathing of the Tory party is responsible for this vote going Labour. Indeed the rightward move by the national labour party in the 1990’s was chiefly due to Scots who were Tory minded.
Presumably a Scottish centre-right party on the European model would emerge once the national question was settled.
But “centre”, “left” and “right” are relative terms, and it’s entirely possible that the centre in Scotland would be to noticeably to the left of what is currently the centre in the UK, and the Scottish centre-left and centre-right parties positioned accordingly.
True. Or noticeably to the right, like Ireland is in some ways (e.g. lower corporation tax, as the SNP have talked about). But I wouldn’t really call Irish politics more “right wing” than the UK, what little I know of if, so it just shows that a single-axis right/left description is not a satisfactory way of characterising political positions. A future Scottish “right” party would not have the same platform as a rUK Conservative party, I agree.
The best measure of the difference is between the Scottish and English versions of the Daily Mail. In Scotland it is stripped of most of the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, pro-Tory, little Englander stories. The two editions have little news content on common. In England the Mail makes my blood boil, in Scotland it is almost a reasonable newspaper.
Rural areas vote more ‘conservative’ in America, but not necessarily in the rest of the world. In Latin America, and in parts of Asia, rural areas lean more left-wing than urban areas. (Look at a map of where the main support for Thaksin, or Hugo Chavez/Maduro, or Humala are).
On a global perspective, genteel/sophisticated prosperous urbanites are quite likely to be ‘liberal’ (in the social/cultural sense) but not really economically left-wing at all. America is somewhat unusual in that our two major parties don’t really differ much on economic issues, so social and cultural issues end up playing a large role.
It should be noted that “conservative” does not fully converge into “religious conservation”. Religious values often fall at odds with other right-wing values, in US, in the '80s, the crazy right figured out how to leverage religious fervor to their advantage, establishing a sort of unholy alloy that seems impossible to redivide.
I could see a resurgence of conservatism with a Scottish/European edge. There is a history of Scottish noblesse oblige conservatism that aligns with European Christian Democracy. Nothing like rabid English Toryism.
Yea, the British Labour Party (in its origin) had largely evangelical/Methodist roots (some wag once made a remark that ‘the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’.)
Yes, but that’s been rather eclipsed since Thatcher. Which probably accounts for the decline of Toryism in Scotland, where one-nationism had an appeal that Thatcherism lacked (and still lacks).
