The SNP leader believes a win will give him "the moral authority" to go for an independence referendum again, writes MARK HENNESSY
FOLLOWING LAST year’s Westminster elections, Labour in Scotland moved into a comfortable lead, giving it hope that it could oust Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party from power in the Holyrood parliament.
Since then, however, the SNP, helped by the lacklustre performance of Labour’s leader in Scotland, Iain Gray, has come back strongly as Scottish voters slowly turned their attention to Thursday’s election.
In Holyrood elections, voters have two votes to elect 129 MSPs under the mixed-member proportional representation system; where 73 are chosen under first-past-the-post, while 56 more are returned from eight regional lists.
Though he should be well shy of the 65 seats needed for a majority, Salmond is in ebullient form, believing a second term, even if a minority one, will give him “the moral authority”, as he puts it, to push again for an independence referendum.
He abandoned a plan to hold a St Andrew’s Day referendum last November, saying he wanted to make it the central issue of this campaign – but, in reality, he could not get support for the holding of the vote from the other Holyrood parties, as he needed.
Today, Salmond says a referendum will be held, though he has sought to calm voters who admire the SNP’s performance in office, but who do not want separation, by saying it will not happen until towards the end of the parliament’s four-year life.
For some, a referendum shortly would pass because Scots will want to protect themselves from Westminster cuts. Others believe it would fall because Scots will not fancy the prospect of surviving outside of Westminster’s embrace.
Currently, the polls indicate a majority against independence, though Salmond has successfully portrayed Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats as being people “who talk down” Scotland’s potential, rather than being in tune with majority opinion.
In the end, the election will be fought on local issues. Here, the SNP is promising a five-year council tax freeze, plus guaranteeing no tuition fees, no prescription charges, no fees for nursing home care.
More than a few believe Salmond’s figures do not add up.
Nevertheless, he is the most popular. “Voters will vote on the merits of party leaders and on the positions of the parties on the major issues at stake under devolved powers,” says Prof Charlie Jeffery of the University of Edinburgh.
“They will not simply look at Cameron/Clegg/Miliband and Libya/the UK budget/spending cuts in England and project their views on these on to their voting intentions for Holyrood,” he said recently.
The exception is the Liberal Democrats, who seem set to face losses in both Holyrood and on Scottish local councils because of voters’ anger towards the Conservatives/Liberal Democrats coalition in London.
The Liberal Democrats’ leader in Scotland, Tavish Scott, has been trying to put blue water between himself and Nick Clegg: “I grew up with Thatcher. I grew up with all that stuff going on. We all too well remember what they did to manufacturing industry in Scotland. It’s not naturally where I’d be in politics,” he told a Scottish Sunday newspaper.
Asked if he would support a Labour-led coalition in Holyrood, Scott, who eventually stormed off complaining he had been asked to listen “to crap”, said: “Do you really think I’d really pay any attention to what London thinks after fighting this campaign? No, no. Why would I pay any attention to London on this issue where we fought a campaign having to deal with the consequences of London for the last six, seven weeks?”
Currently, it is unlikely Scott will find himself as the bridesmaid in post-election talks with anyone, let alone Labour, since the Liberal Democrats could lose up to 10 of its Holyrood seats – if the most pessimistic polls are to be believed, along with hundreds more councillors – the vanguard necessary if the party is to continue to hold on to its Westminster representation in years to come.
In urban areas, the Liberal Democrats are vulnerable to Labour, while the SNP is hard on their heels in rural districts. Even North-East Fife, a seat where the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a 4,500-strong majority in 2007, is in doubt, given Salmond’s decision to make a late change to his programme to campaign there in recent days. Even Orkney, a Liberal Democrat bastion for a generation or more, could fall on a bad day.
Ironically, the fact that all of the 131 seats in Holyrood are not being filled by first-past-the-post could hurt Nick Clegg’s party north of the border this time. Usually, the Liberal Democrats could hope for seats from the proportional system used to choose the regional list MSPs. This time, however, given that they are at the butt of attacks from all sides, they may get few preferences.
Since the days of Thatcher, Scotland has been a cold place for Tories, though the party’s leader there, Annabel Goldie, could be in line to make small gains – but extraordinary ones, perhaps, given the climate.
A female politician who tells a TV leaders’ debate her job is to hold Salmond and Iain Gray “by the short and curlies”, as she did on Sunday, has a way of not being ignored.