Murdo Fraser’s campaign for the Scottish Tory leadership places a number of demands on the members of that party.
It asks them to believe that Fraser is the man to take on John Swinney. The same Fraser who has tried to capture Swinney’s constituency six times since 1999 and lost on every occasion.
As Oscar Wilde didn’t quite say, to lose one election to John Swinney might be regarded as a misfortune but to lose six looks like carelessness.
It asks them to buy that Fraser has changed his mind about wanting to scrap the Scottish Tories and set up a new centre-right party called The Caledonians. Even though he put this plan at the heart of his last, unsuccessful leadership campaign.
It asks them to treat as credible a bid to ‘unite our party, not divide it’ that opened with an attack on Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Douglas Ross, followed by a jibe questioning his rivals’ ‘history in the party’.
That’s one way to unite the Tories. Someone should sell ‘honk if you’ve been insulted by Murdo Fraser’ bumper stickers at the next conference.
Crumbling
More than that, however, it asks them to accept that the answer to their crumbling electoral fortunes is to mimic the SNP’s grievance agenda.
Fraser announced his bid pledging to be ‘active in promoting Scottish interests, not fearing to challenge Westminster colleagues if that were necessary’.
Finally, a Holyrood politician with the courage to blame everything on Westminster.
No one would take issue with a leader in Scotland saying where he thought the UK party was going wrong. But that is not what Fraser has in mind.
Whether it’s as the Scottish Tories or – give me strength – The Caledonians, he wants to lead a party that makes a virtue of being at odds with UK Tories.
Supporting the Union while being antagonistic towards Westminster is not an original strategy. It is known as nationalist-Unionism and has its roots in the Liberal Party, as documented in David Torrance’s masterful book Standing Up For Scotland.
Fraser recently penned a comment piece in which he urged Tories to recall John Buchan’s pronouncement that ‘every Scotsman should be a Scottish Nationalist’.
Those words are often used to suggest that contemporary Unionism has somehow gone astray in emphasising UK unity and Westminster sovereignty over much-cited but seldom defined ‘Scottish interests’. This trend has been dubbed ‘muscular Unionism’ by critics who understand that the job of nationalism is to demand concessions and the job of Unionism is to hand them over.
These critics regard this more openly British Unionism as a reversion to the North Britain project of the 18th century and its anglicisation of Scottish institutions and culture.
This kind of Unionism is politically moribund, they say, in a country where many more call themselves Scottish than British.
While this analysis largely misunderstands modern Unionism, its point about historical context is well taken.
Unionists cannot disregard generational trends in national identity and expect to be politically successful in Scotland, but nor can nationalist-Unionists credibly claim that Buchan’s outlook pertains today.
His speech was delivered in 1932, when there was a lively nationalist movement but as yet no Scottish National Party.
The founding of the SNP and its electoral breakthroughs more than three decades later were transformative, not only shaping nationalist sentiment but marrying it to party politics and parliamentary representation.
Insincere
The SNP established a through line from ‘Scottish interests’ to Scottish independence. Anyone beginning at the former point must aim for the latter point or be considered insincere.
The ‘Scottish nationalism’ that Buchan spoke of has changed beyond recognition and so has the ‘Scotsman’. His 1932 speech segues to a lamentation that Scots are ‘losing some of the best of our race stock’ and that ‘every fifth child born now in Scotland is an Irish Roman Catholic’.
I point this out not as a cheap shot but because it illustrates another limitation of Buchan’s version of Unionism: it was rooted in a Scotland of pervasive anti-Catholic prejudice, in which the Unionist Party was informally known as the ‘Protestants Vote Here’ party.
Nostalgia for nationalist-Unionism collides with these developments and with the existence of the Scottish parliament envisioned in Buchan’s speech. When there is a rival source of political authority, demagoguing against Westminster becomes a riskier strategy.
If all you offer the voters is competing brands of Westminster-bashing, don’t be surprised if they opt for the full-fat variety over its diet imitator.
Whether Murdo Fraser’s diet nationalism could appeal to the voters is up for debate, but Scottish Conservative members have no appetite for wrapping themselves in tartan and swinging a claymore in Westminster’s direction.
Conflict
Why would they? Scotland has had 17 years of grievance from the SNP. Almost two decades of manufacturing conflict between Holyrood and Downing Street. All it’s achieved for Scotland is lower education standards, longer waiting times and ferries that don’t sail.
We don’t need another party obsessed with flag-waving and Westminster-bashing. One SNP is already one too many.
I have nothing against Murdo Fraser. In fact, I quite like him. He’s affable and good-humoured. His views, though wrong, are earnestly held. There is a mind at work there.
The same cannot be said of some of his colleagues. You need not be a signed- up member of Russell Findlay’s campaign to understand his urgency when talking about knocking the Scottish Tories into shape. Among the many shake-ups under Ruth Davidson was a great clearing out of parliamentary deadwood. Unfortunately, that process stopped once she was gone.
There remains too much flotsam and jetsam. A good handful of Tory MSPs have achieved a level of anonymity to rival that of the witness protection programme. They have found time, however, to become professional malcontents, chucking bottles but never contributing ideas.
If briefing against their leader was an Olympic sport, some of them would be picking up gold in Paris right now.
The Scottish Conservatives need a leader who can take the party forward without compromising its commitment to unity, a leader who wants to take on the SNP, not take after them.
But they also need a merciless refreshing of their MSP group. Too many have done too little for too long. It’s time they cleared out.