How we got to the Scottish referendum

HOW has it come to this? How is it that Scottish independence, once almost unthinkable, may now be just days away? An energetic campaign by the nationalists over the past months is one explanation. But the underlying causes go back much further. They lie in long-term shifts in the Scottish electoral landscape. For decades, the rise of Scottish nationalism was a bourgeois phenomenon—the product of the collapse of the Conservative vote in Scotland (see chart below). This happened in two phases.

First came the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the late 1960s, which gave the secessionist Scottish National Party (SNP) its electoral breakthrough in the two 1974 general elections under the slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”. This was almost entirely at the expense of the Tories (for years the stereotypical SNP voter was a dour oil executive). Then came the government of Margaret Thatcher, whose monetarist reforms accelerated the decline of Scotland’s heavy manufacturing base. The effect was similar to that in industrial bits of northern England: it made the Conservative Party unpalatable even to the middle-class voters who used to support it in large numbers.

But the flow of disaffected Tories to the SNP was fairly spread-out. Under Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system, this kept the nationalist parliamentary presence modest. In every election since 1970 the SNP has won fewer seats than it would have under a proportional system. Labour, by contrast, has an efficient distribution of votes (in the large cities, mainly), and benefited from the same trends—so acted as a unionist safety net. Note how its share of seats soared through the 1980s and 1990s. For decades, then, nationalism’s progress was limited. It did not command cross-class allegiance and fell foul of the electoral system, so seemed relatively harmless (see chart below).

It was partly to preserve this state of affairs that the Additional Member System (a fudge of first-past-the-post and proportional models) was chosen for the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. The purpose of this system is to prevent any segment of society from dominating a polity by making it hard for a single party to obtain a majority of parliamentary seats. Despite Labour’s dominance, it had to govern in coalition with the Liberal Democrats in both the 1999-2003 and 2003-2007 parliaments, for example. Even when the SNP surged ahead in 2007, it could only govern in a minority, so could not call a referendum on independence (see charts below).

The disadvantage of first-past-the-post systems, however, is that by raising the threshold of parliamentary dominance, they contain the possibility of sudden, violent shifts in political power in the event of individual parties crossing that threshold. Despite its conservative electorate, SNP had espoused a centre-left creed since the 1970s. With Labour in government during the 2000s, it began to win over working-class voters, but had to compete for them with the Liberal Democrats. The 2011 Scottish election, however, was a perfect storm: blue-collar voters disillusioned with Labour, a Labour leadership complacent after decades of dominance in Scotland, the Liberal Democrats now in government and suddenly unpopular. The SNP obtained a good (37%) increase in vote-share but a spectacular increase (152%) in seat-share on the constituency list. It could form a majority government and set about making plans for the referendum.

That decades-long trajectory—the gradual emergence of a cross-class nationalism—has continued over the course of the campaign. According to the poll-of-polls produced by What Scotland Thinks, an independent research outlet, a unionist lead of about 20 points has turned into one almost too close to call. That shift has mostly taken place in the working-class districts of big cities that once spurned nationalism. If Scottish nationalism is now within striking distance of its goal, it is because it is more of a one-nation cause than ever before.

Mapping the performance of the SNP

The Scottish National Party is the leading party in the Scottish Parliament. It was formed by a merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party in 1934. It won its first parliamentary seat in 1945 in a by-election in Motherwell, but lost it three months later in the general election. It would be another two decades before it won another seat. Our interactive map tracks its growth and geographical spread through Scotland since 1950.