Sell people metal shoes for their horses and fit them for them. Brilliant business model. I mean, when is a horse not going to need a shoe? We’ll be comfortably off for the rest of our lives with that trade. No way it can go wrong.
That’s the thing; there is no business model that lasts forever. Today’s money-spinner is tomorrow’s obsolescence. So how is ‘don’t get better, just hope all my competitors keep getting worse’ for a business model? Surprisingly effective if you are the SNP. Well, until now. Now they’re in trouble.
Over the last 12 years the overriding reality in which the SNP has existed is that there were few if any opposition parties which looked worth voting for. Even when there was, they were mainly the wrong party. The only one of the mainstream parties which stood an effective leader and looked like it had some vision was the brief Ruth Davidson era at the Scottish Tories.
That is the party least likely to take votes from the SNP and yet even with Ed Milliband stuttering through a UK election campaign in 2017, that was the year the SNP lost about one in three of it’s Westminster seats.
Even the awful Keir Starmer was enough of an alternative option against a not exactly inspiring John Swinney to decimate the SNP’s MP numbers. He went on to become the least popular prime minister in history and hand the SNP a Holyrood victory.
Scottish Labour have been determined to sacrifice their own interests to an ideological view of a united Labour Party in a united Britain. It has had much the same audience for that for the last decade. Somebody like the SSP might have nibbled some votes on their left, but it had imploded so that role went instead to the Scottish Greens.
They proved they can take both seats and votes from the SNP, but they also demonstrated what looks like a pretty hard cap to their rise by foregrounding strong beliefs which, whatever you think of them, certainly diverge quite sharply from commonly-held views among the public. They also seem determined to select candidates not to reach out to the public but which represent the world in which its activists wish they lived.
It just doesn’t look like a compelling-enough option to elevate to the status of ‘contender’. The SNP was so weak in this year’s election that the Greens really ought to have made more headway.
Safety, stability, safe pair of hands, grannies favourite, clubbable pally, getting lots of photos taken of you at football – that is sort of the default setting of a budget dishwasher or the stock photograph you get in a new picture frame
All of this feeds into a simple reality about politics and voting – most people don’t pay enough attention to absorb the detail needed to make a real, meaningful assessment of governmental performance or the likelihood an opposition party will be better. They rely heavily on signalling.
That is why the politics industry is so obsessed with what used to be called ‘spin’. You can gain credit for running government well, but it takes time and others will be shooting at you while you try to do it. So you seek credit for signalling to voters that you’re on their side or are fighting for the thing they want.
Sturgeon’s record at signalling is as stellar as her governmental performance was dire. She was cautious, conservative, scared to take on her officials and out of her depth in the details of public policy (Sturgeon liked lawyer-style detail, but policy needs detail to be coordinated with analysis, vision and an understanding of ht big picture and that is a different skill set completely).
But she was great at signalling the opposite. People thought she was reforming land ownership, introducing a National Energy Company, in complete control of government. She was very good at it. She instinctively knew how to play-act competence and vision without actually having it. Hence no visible legacy.
Humza Yousef tried to do the same but didn’t have the skill set. What in Sturgeon’s hands looked exciting and purposeful looked chaotic and messy in his – though he shared her lack of grasp on government.
Then Swinney took over and his signalling is, well, both pedestrian and trading on that fact. If you’ve seen the film Wag the Dog you will remember a Dustin Hoffman scene where he eviscerates a campaign advert for being such a dreadful cliché it is hard to know why it existed (or is that just political strategy geeks like me?).
That is more or less what I felt about the Swinney position. Safety, stability, safe pair of hands, grannies favourite, clubbable pally, getting lots of photos taken of you at football – that is sort of the default setting of a budget dishwasher or the stock photograph you get in a new picture frame. If you literally have no vision, spend all your time telling people that’s because ‘stability’.
(Incidentally, I do wonder what everyone means by ‘stability’? Is the SNP a happier house now that two years ago? Is government making fewer mistakes? Is the SNP soaring in the polls based on anything it did? What form exactly is this stability taking – the same as before but with someone old?)
If you’re not going to wallow in complacency, you need to do something else – but what could that be?
This really ought to have failed at this point in the trajectory of parties-in-power, but instead met Keir Starmer in his ‘Santa Claus for the other party’s votes’ mode where his only strategy seem to be act like cardboard and offend anyone who traditionally would have voted for him. The SNP ‘slightly better than the other guy’ business model held.
But hell, if Burnham doesn’t have some real signalling chops. I remain to be convinced that he will deliver – technically ‘we’d like to nationalise water but want to explore alternatives first’ and ‘we want to try anything at all in the private sector but would be willing to nationalise if it is the only choice’ is the same policy. It’s just that Burnham manages to make it sound like a giant breakthrough.
I didn’t watch the speech but even I am a bit optimistic that this might actually make a difference. He literally can’t make a worse mess of a National Care Service than the SNP, voting reform could really change the entire political debate, he’s changed the national mood on centralisation and frankly just hearing someone in power not constantly repeating ‘Treasury doctrine’ is a relief.
This is the brutal reality which has emerged overnight – the SNP is no longer slightly better than its closest competitor, it is substantially worse. No, not on everything, and clearly died-in-the-wool indy supporters are unlikely to flip. Also I think we’re all a long way away from being convinced Michael Marra has the same signalling chops in the Scottish context.
But given that the Scottish Government can barely buy approval ratings just now and given that the previous times the SNP saw major setbacks didn’t involve seismic shifts in voting totals, it would be mad to feel complacent right now.
And that is the problem. If you’re not going to wallow in complacency, you need to do something else. But what could that be? I mean, literally, what is the new business model? New John? After quarter of a century in Scottish politics are they going to rebrand him? Or replace him? With who? Flynn looks less compelling every time we see him and Mairi McAllan isn’t exactly a new direction.
Be competent? Stop making mistakes? Get a vision? That’s all simply saying ‘be someone else altogether’. You can’t do that. Presumably the Scottish Government isn’t intentionally incompetent. It presumably doesn’t have better visions in the top drawer. I’ve never seen any other party achieve this in power after having been there for anything like as long as this Scottish Government.
Perhaps Burnham crashes and burns. Perhaps Marra turns out to be a disaster. Perhaps voters have give Labour enough chances. Perhaps a revived independence campaign changes the mood. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
For me, one thing is clear; the SNP can’t wake up each morning and say ‘fuck it, this will do’ and be confident of hold on to its nearly two-decade grip of total dominance in Scotland. It is in new territory, and I’m a long way from being convinced it has what it takes to win that fight.