How Scottish politics got stuck in the mud

Guest writer Stuart Donald, author of a recent paper published in Compass and previous guest on the Common Weal Policy Podcast, looks at last month’s Scottish election results through the lens of his research into proportional democracy.

In May, the SNP was returned to power for a fifth consecutive term. Down six seats on 2021, the party still finished more than three times the size of its nearest rival, with Labour and Reform tied for a distant second and the old unionist vote splintered three ways. Twenty years in office, carrying every grievance that incumbency brings, and it had once again lapped a divided field. For much of the Scottish establishment the verdict has hardened into a demand: the voting system is broken, a machine that manufactures one-party rule, and Scotland should do what Wales has just done and remake its parliament as a properly proportional one.

They are not wrong that the machinery matters. What the demand leaves out is that the machinery was the establishment’s, Labour-led design. When the parliament was set up, Labour built it to keep itself in power. The Additional Member System was sold as a corrective to Westminster's distortions. But with Labour holding the casting vote, it was shaped to fall well short of full proportionality. It leans toward constituency seats and keeps the regional list deliberately thin, unlike the more balanced mixed-member systems of Germany or New Zealand, where genuine proportionality was the point.

That was the calibration: proportional enough to look fair, thin enough to leave Labour as the permanent largest party, riding on a constituency wall it assumed would never crumble. It has instead entrenched the SNP, and in 2011 delivered the outright majority it was built to push against. The mechanical complaint is not wrong. The list top-up is too small to offset the constituency result, so the largest party collects a bonus of seats and the parliament behaves more like Westminster than the consensus chambers of the continent. Make Holyrood as proportional as the new Senedd and that bonus would shrink. But this explains only the shape of the SNP's majorities, not why they keep occurring. For that, you have to look underneath the machinery, at two things the establishment demand is careful not to confront. The first is the question that has not moved since 2014.

There has been a pro-independence majority at Holyrood at every election since 2011, and still no second referendum. The unionist case for refusing one rests on the "once in a generation" claim made in the wake aftermath of the first Indyref, one that loses validity with every passing year. The deeper failure is that they will not describe the exit; they insist the union is voluntary, yet have never set out the route by which Scotland could actually leave it. Instead they blame the SNP for its "obsession", as though the ambition were the party's alone, when it is shared by roughly half the country, and by closer to 60% when over 55s are set aside. In other words, a settled democratic majority is told, in effect, that its preference is legitimate but permanently unactionable.

That does not dissolve the demand. It freezes it, and a frozen demand keeps returning the party that carries it. The second runs deeper and is far less understood. The modern political scene in Scotland is often said to be healthy with a competitive six-party contest. But on closer inspection, the competition is hollow, because only two of those parties, the SNP and the Greens, can credibly occupy the same broadly social democratic ground - the part of the political spectrum where a large share of voters now sit. The reason has nothing to do with Scotland. The Conservatives and Reform are committed by ideology to leaner public investment, and to withholding it from the groups they judge undeserving, notably migrants and the alleged ‘workshy’. Labour is the awkward case, and the revealing one.

At Holyrood it matches most of the Scottish settlement, free tuition, the child payment, expanded early years, free personal care. But the match is tactical, a way of aligning with SNP and Green positions rather than a settled conviction, adopted in a political context its UK party believes it could never govern from, because it holds such a prospectus to be unelectable in England1 (you can imagine the battles Scottish Labour had to ensure internally to get even this far).

But while not obvious in the UK bubble, none of these policies is radical; each has a counterpart somewhere across mainland Europe, sustained as readily by centre-right governments as by the left. The reason for this is structural; under proportional representation, the voters who rely on these policies retain real bargaining power, so no governing coalition - whether on the left or the right - can quietly set them aside. They appear radical only from Westminster. But ore importantly, the policies work, and that is the uncomfortable part for Labour.

The evidence is made clearly by Danny Dorling, Oxford professor of geography, leading authority on inequality in Britain and also a Labour party member. He often asks audiences in England to name the country in Europe that has turned around child poverty in recent years. The room goes quiet. Few realise it is Scotland: the only part of the UK where child poverty has declined over the past decade. The point is not just that this is unknown, but that it is unusable. Labour maybe advocates these policies at Holyrood, where they are electorally viable, yet will not carry them south.

Not because the evidence is weak or the costs prohibitive, but because under First Past the Post the spending required to reduce poverty in England risks the marginal voters the party must keep to retain power. None of this is a brief for the SNP. There is no shortage of critics from within the party and the wider independence movement itself, who are frustrated by the its various failures including the performance of the NHS, super-centralised government and its flip-flopping on environmental policy. But this has no link to the structural point.

Whatever the SNP's failures of execution, it occupies a stretch of political ground that, across most of Europe, is held by ordinary governments of both left and right. In Scotland it is held by one side alone, not because the other side disagrees in every case, but because the other side cannot follow it there.

So the establishment, through a selective amnesia about who built this system and an ever more tenuous faith in Labour as the moderate voice of the union, has the diagnosis exactly inverted. SNP hegemony is not a malfunction of the voting system, to be engineered away by adding list seats. It is the rational output of a politics blocked on two fronts at once: a constitutional majority with nowhere to go, and a social democratic majority with no one else to vote for. The party did not capture this ground. It was left standing on it, alone, by opponents who had reasons of their own to walk away.

Why those reasons exist at all, why the English median demand has been made so much thinner than Scotland's, is the larger question, and it is not a Scottish one. It is the subject of Compass’ recent paper, Lifting the Lid on Britain's Pressure Cooker Politics. It traces how four decades of First Past the Post filtered redistribution out of viability at Westminster, hardened inequality into a structural fact rather than a political choice, and produced the accumulated pressure now carrying Reform toward an unchecked majority no proportional democracy in Europe would permit. Scotland's divergence is the mirror image of that process: the same electoral mechanism, simply absent. The full argument, with the comparative data behind it, is set out there and at sdonald4pr.com.

1 The Liberal Democrats, the fourth unionist party, while less of a political force in Scottish politics today, prove the pattern most starkly. The only time they have held power at Westminster, in the coalition formed in 2010, they oversaw the trebling of tuition fees in England, having campaigned against them. They abandoned the very policy Scotland treats as ordinary the moment they could act on it, leaving England with by far the highest fees among its north-west European peers, most of which charge little or nothing.