The comical truth about SNP and Labour that they don’t want you to know

The sound of fanfares and hooves on cobbles, Black Rod doing her time-honoured duty, and the King dressed up like a doll in sparkling robes and crown, reading out words about public transport and sewage in the rivers. Yes, it must be the opening of parliament, Westminster style; and at the beginning of a new era of Labour government, this week’s speech from the throne naturally aroused far more interest than usual, and was more packed with promised legislation. 

Any student of recent Scottish politics, though, was bound to notice just how familiar much of Labour’s list of promised policies looked; largely because many of them are in areas where the Scottish Government has already taken action, or has suggested that it would take action, if it had the relevant powers. 

It’s true, of course, that recent Scottish Governments – bedevilled by the iron grip of Tory austerity, and by chronic problems in implementation and effectiveness – have often failed to measure up to their own rhetoric, on issues ranging from climate change to housing and health.

That the rhetoric is strikingly familiar, though, could only be denied by those so obsessed with Scotland’s constitutional divide that they can see nothing else. Set aside the matter of independence, and Labour and the SNP emerge as almost comically similar parties, currently fighting like centre-left polecats over who exactly has the power and resources to abolish the Tories’ notorious two-child benefits cap; and even beyond child poverty, the examples are legion.

A columnist of the right, for instance, is outraged by Labour Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s promise of “clean energy by 2030”, and suggests that the should “learn from Sturgeon’s mistakes”, after the SNP’s forced climbdown from their own ambitious 2030 emissions target.

On public health, the SNP has never tried to emulate the long-term cigarette ban now adopted by Labour, but has been widely criticise for other “bossy” health measures, such as minimum alcohol pricing.

Dangerously detached from reality

On transport, the Scottish Government has already taken ScotRail back into public ownership, as Labour now promises to do for all the train companies of England and Wales. And on employment law, an issue reserved to Westminster, the Scottish Government has long made clear its opposition to abuses such as zero-hours contracts – although once again, its success in banishing those practices where it does have control (ie, in its own procurement policies) has been mixed at best.

In policy terms, in other words, these are two centrist social-democratic parties, fighting over the same political territory, and often in the same political language, for the same broad tranche of Scottish voters; and what makes Scotland’s current political conversation so bitterly toxic, and often so dangerously detached from reality, is that both parties are now in almost hysterical denial about how much they have in common. 

Even to call them both “social democratic” is to invite outrage, as both parties add to the current firestorm of political disinformation by loudly claiming – in defiance of much evidence to the contrary – that the other lot are really just Tories, either “tartan” or “red”. And the point is that while this bitter turf war between rival social democrats is a mere sideshow in UK politics, in Scotland it is currently almost the whole substance of our political debate; a debate that is not only founded on half-truths and myths – and therefore deeply stupid and uninformative in itself – but also flatly incapable of any constructive outcome, and often doomed to descend into nasty personalised language about the motives and morals of the other tribe, with much use of the word “disgraceful” on all sides.

Equality, decency and compassion

And that, in the end, is more than a pity. It goes without saying that the independence issue, in Scotland as elsewhere, arouses strong emotions of identity and belonging, on both sides. Most people, though, seem to understand that the question of Scotland’s future governance is finally a means to an end; and that about that end – a just and environmentally sustainable society, founded on human equality, decency and compassion – the SNP and Labour are largely in agreement, whether they care to admit it or not. It’s precisely because many Scottish voters can see or sense that, that they have become so willing to swing between these two parties; depending on who, at the time, seems most capable of delivering on those aspirations.

It might therefore be time for those in each party who can see beyond the current bitter stand-off to start talking to each other, as officially or unofficially as they like, about the details and nuances of the kinds of policies in which both parties are interested. The aim of such conversations would not be to merge the parties, but consciously to raise the level of detailed public debate about the many areas on which they agree, and to tap into some of the brightest thinking and most effective action, on all these issues, currently taking place in Scotland.

Divided and disempowered

Between them, after all, Labour and the SNP attracted some two-thirds of the Scottish vote, on July 4; both parties won more than twice as many votes as their nearest competitor. And even if there is no equivalent to this centre-left stand-off in any other part of the UK, Scottish politics must begin to find ways of working with it.

At best, Scotland might even find itself in a privileged position, able to keep the resurgent political right well at bay, while making a major contribution to an increasingly vital international debate about the future of social democracy. Only, though, if our two leading parties start telling the truth about the political landscape we now inhabit, and about how it can be turned to our benefit, instead of leaving us forever divided and disempowered by an obsession with single-issue politics, in an age of infinite complexity and possibility.