Arrogance, farce - and a crisis for the coalition

THE Noes have it.

Jack McFondle had conceded that a turnout of less than 50% would unravel the devolution settlement. He could not even attain that essential threshold in his own constituency. Nationally, the turnout was around 49%. Holyrood does not represent the Scottish nation and no longer holds a mandate from it. Many of those lefties on The Mound who were so contemptuous of Dubya’s close-run result in Florida would have given their eye teeth for a dimpled chad or two, in the carnage of the electoral abattoirs last Friday morning.

The Scottish Executive’s spin doctors will no doubt argue that there has been an equally low turnout before. They would be quite right: it happened in 1852, after Lord Palmerston had brought down the Whig government by congratulating Prince Louis Napoleon on his coup d’etat in France, and the Tories under Lord Derby failed to secure a majority. So McFondle and his cronies only have to go back as little as 151 years to find a comparable rejection by the nation. Yet the fact that 51% of the electorate has wholly disowned Holyrood, although statistically true, is an underestimate of the extent of public alienation.

Many voters in the east were rightly determined to support Margo MacDonald, which meant that they had no option but to boost the turnout, however unenthusiastic they were about the other dishes on the menu. The same applied to exasperated pensioners who were naturally impelled to vote for their special-interest candidate. In depriving the main parties of a few seats, independent voters incidentally increased the turnout, which would otherwise have been closer to 40%.

It is the numbers of votes cast that make the most educative reading. On the first poll, the nationwide constituency vote, the Scottish Labour Party - so long regarded as the unassailable monolith of hegemonial power - received 659,879 votes. In an electorate of just under four million, that represents some 16.7%. If that percentage of voting intention were recorded for the Labour party in an opinion poll, there would be a sensation. Yet it has actually happened in an election - papers in ballot boxes, done and dusted - and the full significance has not yet dawned on the devolving classes.

Because the percentage support usually canvassed in the media is of the total of votes cast, rather than of those entitled to vote, the spectacular scale of the defection from Labour has been camouflaged. When it is analysed in the privacy of the Labour bunker and the pantechnicon delivering brown trousers and bicycle clips has left from the back door, the brittle chorus of desperate reassurance will be: "Most of them have only stayed at home. They will come back to us. They have nowhere else to go." Oh, yes! In the lounge bar of a pub in Huntingdon there is a local cricket bore who, from 1992 to 1997, led his party in the same chorus of self-delusion.

What makes last Thursday’s defection more significant is that, from now on, there are many other places for voters to go. The main parties slipped on the scree last week; they may have precipitated a landslide. The putative ruling coalition is facing a crisis of authority. Again, look at the figures for the Liberal Democrats: they took 286,150 votes. Added to Labour’s tally, the coalition won a grand total of 946,029 votes - short of the one million mark. Yet, when more than a million Scots voted in an independent referendum to retain Section 28, which prohibited promotion of homosexuality in schools, the Executive and MSPs derided that turnout as unrepresentative. In just four years, Holyrood arrogance and folly has created a situation in which Section 28 commands more public support than the combined Labour and Liberal parties. Nice one, Jack and Jim!

The Section 28 debacle, which first marked the parting of the ways between Holyrood and Scotland, was an initiative of Wendy Alexander, who was also effectively the author of the Scotland Act. It is an axiom of Scottish politics that, whenever Wendy is given access to crayons and paper, then grief and humiliation for The Party We Love inevitably follows. The signs are that the Scotland Act is beginning to conform to this ominous pattern. At first, it seemed very simple - in an infinitely complex kind of way. By an ingenious combination of first-past-the-post voting, a carefully-doctored version of a German system of PR and the assistance of a member of the audience, Scottish Labour hegemony would be secured for 1,000 years.

The beauty of it was that, superficially, it appeared generous: so much so, that the SNP won 35 seats in the first election for Holyrood. In reality, the glass ceiling built into the system was designed to fulfil George Robertson’s claim that devolution would "kill nationalism stone dead". Last Thursday, that prediction was partially vindicated; but something went wrong - the scale of the abstention and the strength of the lesser parties and independents provoked near-meltdown in Wendy’s Heath-Robinson contraption. The Scotland Act was predicated on the retention of their monopoly by the four traditional parties. Now, the fragmentation of the party system threatens eventually to kill Scottish Labour stone dead as well.

Now, here is the nub of the matter and the next - possibly cataclysmic - pitfall into which Labour, in its enduring arrogance and self-interest, may well fall. At some point during this parliament’s four-year term, Labour has declared its intention to revisit the Scotland Act, to remove the provision whereby the number of MSPs should be reduced to approximately 106, in tandem with an equivalent cut in Scottish MPs at Westminster. If the Labour party is so purblind as to persist in that act of cronyism, it will be the final provocation.

Did Scotland, last Thursday, look like a country that wanted to retain the number of MSPs at an inflated 129? Any attempt to do so, allied with the 400m scandal of the Holyrood building project, would provide the combustible agent either to bring down the devolution settlement or to cause a seismic realignment of power in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the parliament continues its downward spiral. Out goes Swotty Wilson, assassinated by the Neanderthals in his own party. In come Tommy’s Trots - there are simians swinging into this parliament who make Daphne Broon, Wir ci-devant Minister fur Weans, look Sloaney. Thank you again, Donald Three Millions - Father of 49% of the Nation.