Leader: Fraser on wrong road

NO PARTY is better at civil war than the Scottish Conservatives. Though decades have passed since the party’s most spectacular ideological factionalism – when right-wingers headed by Michael Forsyth controlled party headquarters in Edinburgh in the face of opposition from wetter Tories such as Malcolm Rifkind – there are still many who bear the scars.

Now, however, the party is in the thick of a tussle over its leadership contest that will make the battles of Chester Street look like a playground tiff. With a neat symmetry, Forsyth and Rifkind again find themselves on opposing sides of the argument. Sir Malcolm is backing Murdo Fraser’s bid to lead a breakaway Scottish party with a new identity and a new relationship with UK Conservatives – a strategy Lord Forsyth last week described as the biggest political error since Bonnie Prince Charlie turned back at Derby. So who is right? Is Murdo Fraser’s prescription for the Tories the right medicine for the party’s unquestionably grave political condition?

Fraser, it seems, has not learnt many lessons from Alex Salmond’s extraordinary victory in the Holyrood elections in May. What Salmond succeeded in doing was putting Scotland’s ages-old constitutional wrangling to one side and instead concentrate his party’s political energy on issues that he knew pressed the electorate’s buttons, such as free university education and the council tax freeze.

Fraser, on the other hand, has made the perpetual debate about Scottish identity the hallmark of his campaign, even proposing that the party he seeks to lead effectively wipes itself off the political map and starts afresh, with a new arms-length relationship with the UK Conservatives at Westminster. In his article on this page, Fraser talks of the distinction between Old Unionism and New Unionism, allying himself with the latter. This misses the point. The kind of party Scotland needs to reflect the views of the many hundreds of thousands of Scots on the centre-right of the political spectrum is one that has social and economic conservatism as its lodestar, not questions of how obviously Scottish or otherwise a party may be.

Fascinating though Fraser’s strategy may be to constitutional obsessives, it is hard to see what wider appeal it might have to voters who are first and foremost looking for a party that talks directly to their concerns about schools, the NHS, law and order, support for small businesses and the size and efficiency of the public sector.

As this newspaper has said before, this is the group of Scottish voters that has been ill-served by the Scottish political consensus that has developed in the devolution years, with broad agreement across a range of social democratic assumptions, limiting political diversity and electoral choices. This is fertile soil for a new leader who is prepared to plough it. And it is this that should be at the heart of the leadership debate within the party. The distinction Fraser should be making is not between Old Unionism and New Unionism, but between Old Conservatism and New Conservatism.

There are reports from hustings in some parts of the country that Fraser’s radicalism has not gone down well with some of the party faithful. It remains to be seen if this is a sign of a broader view within the party or just isolated resistance. It may yet be that Fraser can win over the sceptics and use his initial advantages – a deputy leader, heir apparent and early frontrunner, with a slick campaign machine – to emerge triumphant. But from this vantage point Fraser’s campaign pitch looks like an unnecessarily divisive diversion from the road the Scottish Conservatives need to travel if they are to have any hope of reconnecting with the sector of Scottish society they used to be able to regard as their own.