SNP’s era of public rows runs on

Good morning. Both the SNP and the Labour party are beset with renewed internal divisions. Some thoughts on both of those in today’s note.

The Kate you give

One of the first questions any victorious leader faces is what to do with their internal rivals. Boris Johnson in 2019 and Keir Starmer in 2020 both opted for similar approaches to their beaten rivals: to offer them jobs with a great deal of internal importance. Starmer offered Rebecca Long Bailey the role of shadow education secretary, a post that is coveted by many Labour MPs, while Johnson tried to make Jeremy Hunt defence secretary, a job that similarly ranks highly among Conservative MPs’ list of preferred posts.

Long Bailey took up Starmer’s offer. Hunt, however, turned Johnson down, because the defence secretary gig had previously been held by Penny Mordaunt, one of the few Brexiters to vocally support Hunt’s leadership bid. He didn’t want to take a job created for him through the sacking of an ally, and as a result he went to the backbenches.

Humza Yousaf, pondering the question of what to do with former leadership candidate Kate Forbes, opted to offer her the post of rural affairs. Although the role is of strategic importance to the SNP — by bearing on the very votes for which the party is competing with the Conservatives — it isn’t a role of similar internal importance. Forbes has instead chosen to quit government and go to the backbenches.

How big of a deal is this? Well, it confirms that the SNP’s new era of open disagreement is going to run for a while longer and that Yousaf did not try particularly hard to keep Forbes in the fold.

But one important thing not to do when discussing the SNP is to over-apply precedent or examples from other political parties in the UK, because the SNP is completely unlike the Conservative party, the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats.

The ideological gap between Yousaf and Forbes was incredibly large. On the one hand, you had a liberal candidate pledging to continue the centre-left approach targeted firmly on Scotland’s central belt and public sector workers, who powered its recent electoral successes. On the other, you had a social and fiscal conservative vowing to tear that approach up and to focus on the SNP’s old base of rural and affluent voters in its first breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is comparable to the gulf between Jeremy Corbyn and his three opponents in 2015, and that between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in the first Conservative leadership election in 2022. And in those contests, supporters of the eliminated candidates in the Tory race transferred on largely ideological lines. Supporters of Hunt fell in behind Rishi Sunak. Supporters of Suella Braverman fell in behind Truss. And in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, supporters of Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper almost exclusively transferred between one another, while Andy Burnham’s supporters split more evenly between the two and Corbyn.

Something very different happened in the SNP contest with how the votes were transferred.

In the first round, none of the candidates received more than 50 per cent of the vote, so the contest proceeded to another round. Of those SNP members who put Forbes as their first choice and voted again, about 56 per cent put Yousaf as their second preference. Meanwhile, about 63 per cent of those who voted for Yousaf cast a second preference for Forbes.

The big reason why this contest is different is that the SNP is different. While most members of the SNP are on the liberal-left, most members of the SNP are not liberal-lefties first and foremost. They are supporters of independence. Both Yousaf and Forbes ran on gradualist platforms and were at best cool towards Alex Salmond. Ash Regan ran on a maximalist platform and was much warmer about him.

It’s a misread to see Yousaf and Forbes as candidates with two ideological bases in need of cultivating with a seat around the cabinet table, as is the case with defeated rivals in the other main British parties. The big and continuing factor destabilising the SNP is there is no obvious path to a second referendum let alone to Scottish independence. For that reason — more than any other — the SNP’s age of public infighting is going to continue.

Corbinned

Jeremy Corbyn will not be the Labour candidate in Islington North at the next election, and has given a strong hint he will stand as an independent. Could he win? Well, maybe.

Islington North is a very, very, very safe Labour seat and it has been since the 1930s. Corbyn did not do any better in Islington North than his neighbours in equivalent seats and in some elections he did worse. In 2005, he suffered a big swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, despite the big issue for voters who shifted from Labour to Lib Dem being the war in Iraq, which Corbyn also opposed. Meanwhile David Lammy, who voted for the war, took a smaller swing in nearby Tottenham.

Really a lot of the time when we talk about an MP’s “personal vote” we are often conflating two things. There is the real and genuine “I vote for this party because I support this individual MP” personal vote enjoyed by say, Vernon Coaker in Gedling or Ben Bradshaw in Exeter. This vote can be very important: it’s almost certain that without it, Labour would not have held those seats in 2010.

But mostly the national picture matters a lot more. Although Coaker did much better than he “should” have done in 2019, he still lost his Gedling seat. Bradshaw did much better than he “should” have done, and kept his seat, but ultimately his constituency would have remained Labour in 2017 and 2019 even without his personal vote. There is little evidence that Corbyn has a personal vote of this sort that is enough to win his seat as an independent.

But then there’s the personal vote of the MP’s allies in the local party, councillors, other activists and their local machinery. Former MP Douglas Carswell in Clacton did not have a personal vote worth speaking of, but he was able to persuade essentially his entire local party to defect to Ukip with him, which mattered much more than his pull in the constituency. Similarly, MPs who defected to the Social Democratic party in the 1980s who were able to take activists with them did better than those who could not. Corbyn has a real following in his local party and therefore he may well be able to bring over enough local institutional support. He does have this kind of personal vote and he could, in the right circumstances, do well enough to get at least a third of a vote — the point that an independent candidate has a puncher’s chance of winning an election.

Now try this

I saw Death Cab for Cutie last night at the Roundhouse. I know some Inside Politics readers are going to their second London gig tonight and I hope you have as good a time as I did. It was a wonderful mix of new and old songs and I was particularly pleased to hear my favourite track, “Pepper” from their new record, Asphalt Meadows.

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