Minority government will allow Ed Miliband to call Nicola Sturgeon’s bluff
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Version 0 of 1. The fog of electoral battle is not an easy place to think clearly about strategy. But there is a lack of clear thinking about how the hung parliament that may be elected next week would work. Perhaps that explains why, even in politics, the arts can sometimes illuminate the big point in a way that reality fails to do. Anyone who caught James Graham’s play This House at the National Theatre in 2012 will remember what drove this instant classic of a stage drama. The play is set at Westminster in the 1970s as James Callaghan’s Labour government struggled to survive. The central question at every turn is whether Labour will be able to put together a majority to win key votes. Most of the time Labour succeeds, often at the 11th hour by devious ploys. But in the end, exactly as in reality, Labour finally falls short by a single vote, and is ousted. Readers who have swallowed the Scottish National party’s recent claims to be a progressive force may need reminding that in that March 1979 vote the 11 SNP MPs voted with the Conservatives to bring Labour down and usher in the Margaret Thatcher era. Keep that SNP decision to side with the Tories in mind, for we will return to it. But the SNP is not the central dynamic of Graham’s play. What keeps his drama tight and tense, as in the 1970s reality, is the relationship between the whips of the two main parties, Labour and Conservatives. The whips are the key figures in the play. And their successors will orchestrate the politics of the parliament we seem likely to elect next week, too. In a hung parliament everyone has to talk to and take account of everyone else. So it’s understandable that much speculation focuses on how relationships between the big parties and the small ones would work. The trouble is that this overlooks an obvious larger point and, by so doing, elevates the small parties in importance. For in the next parliament, especially with minority government, the crucial political talks will not be between the government and the minnows, but between the government and the main opposition. If there is a minority Conservative government after 7 May, the Tory chief whip will spend more time talking to the Labour chief whip about bills and business than to the Irish, the Liberal Democrats or Ukip. Conversely, under a minority Labour government, the Labour chief whip will talk more often to the Tories than to the SNP, the Greens or the SDLP. Just as the key relationships in Graham’s play are between Labour’s Bob Mellish and the Tories’ Humphrey Atkins and their deputies, so the hinge of the 2015 parliament may be the relationship between the Tories’ Michael Gove and Labour’s Rosie Winterton, or their successors. It’s useful that Gove and Winterton are a sociable pair. To say this is not to pretend there could be a grand coalition on German lines. That’s not going to happen soon – though it cannot be wholly ruled out at some stage. But it is to underline that in minority government “the usual channels” become unusually important. And it is sometimes easier to strike a big pragmatic bargain with your main political enemy than to spend all your time allowing yourself to be blackmailed and knocked off course by your own backbenchers or by small parties that pretend to be your friends. It is sometimes easier to strike a big pragmatic bargain with your main political enemy A second point is being widely overlooked, too. This one was forcefully made by the polling expert John Curtice at an event at Queen Mary University of London this week. It concerns the current fevered speculation – delighting the Sun in Scotland while enraging the Sun in London – concerning the SNP’s power over a minority Labour government and the possibility that the Scottish tail will wag the British dog. It is true that the SNP would like to force Labour to do things that will help the SNP. But the reality is that the SNP has considerably less leverage than friend, enemy and Fleet Street like to pretend. That’s partly because the SNP cannot do anything to bring Labour down, especially this side of the 2016 Holyrood elections, without seeing its claims to be Labour’s progressive ally go up in smoke. But it is also, as Curtice points out, because the only way the SNP can exert the ultimate control over a minority Labour administration is by voting with the Tories. Without Tory votes, the SNP can huff and puff but it cannot blow the Westminster house down. Armed with those Tory votes it’s another matter. But that is the one place that Nicola Sturgeon has sworn never to go, on principle. The ability to call her bluff would give Labour a big advantage if it gets the opportunity to use it. In hung parliaments, you don’t just talk to everyone else. You do deals with everyone, too. But deals involve strategic trades and standoffs, not just dark arts. Look at Danny Alexander’s attempt to skewer the Conservatives over child benefit cuts this week. The Tories tried it on. The Lib Dems wouldn’t buy it. Since the two were in coalition the plan never got any further. But a minority Tory government would encounter similar difficulties with such a plan too, unless the votes were there as a result of strategic deals. The SNP wins easy cheers in Scotland and fans nasty fears in the rest of the UK by threatening to exercise power at Westminster and to break up the system, though what that means is never made entirely clear. As Curtice points out, that could, anyway, be harder than it appears. But if the SNP is serious about wanting to work with Labour, it has to treat the party with a degree of respect that Labour can reciprocate. This will not be easy for either of them in the current circumstances or with some of the personalities involved. Yet there is one totemic act the SNP could take that would ease that possibility and clear a lot of the suspicion out of the way in advance. That is for the SNP to forswear a second independence referendum in the coming parliament. It would take guts for Sturgeon to make such a pledge. But it would take even more guts for Ed Miliband to ignore it if she were bold enough to try. • Jonathan Freedland is hosting Guardian Live: Election results special, on Friday 8 May at 6pm in Kings Place, London. Polly Toynbee is a panellist. For full details and to book tickets, see here |