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Clash of the Titans

Tuesday, 25 September 2007

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Issue 168 front cover Holyrood magazine is the fortnightly insiders guide to understanding the complexity of Scottish politics and policy developments and is widely regarded as being the leading publication for political news and information in Scotland.

As the concepts of Britishness and Scottishness go head-to-head, political commentator Peter Oborne looks at the men behind the conversations

Over the last six months there has been a double handover of power in Britain. South of the border, after a bloodless coup, Gordon Brown seized control from Tony Blair.

And a month before Brown became Prime Minister, Alex Salmond was elected First Minister in Scotland after scraping to power in a famously tight election victory. Today the two men are engaged in a battle to the death for the United Kingdom. Only one of them can win - and the future of the Union is at stake.

Since the early summer, the First Minister and the Prime Minister have set to work bringing to bear two utterly contrasting visions of Britain’s future. Salmond is determined to exploit to the maximum the unique political opportunity granted him by is great victory in May to achieve independence for Scotland.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown has set out to defeat Salmond through the creation of a new and more generous sense of Britishness. He is painfully conscious of the fact that once, Alex Salmond achieves his objective, the Labour Party will cease to exist as the natural party of government.

It has been fascinating to study the methodologies of both men – arguably the two most consummate politicians of their generation. Although their objectives are irreconcilable, their techniques and even their phraseology have been exactly the same.

Both politicians have the largeness of vision to perceive the strength of their opponent. Gordon Brown knows that Salmond has the priceless advantage in the post - democratic era of claiming the politics of authenticity. Salmond, however, has a full respect for the strategic vision and low cunning of his distinguished adversary.

They are also intelligent enough to appreciate their own personal weaknesses. They both grasped that they were seen by most voters as too insular, too clannish, and too arrogant. In Scotland, Labour nonchalantly predicted that Alex Salmond once he found himself in power would become lost and isolated. Likewise in England, David Cameron, in a disastrous miscalculation, reckoned that Gordon Brown would swing to the left.

Both Salmond and Brown confounded their opponents - by brilliantly moving towards the centre ground of politics.

Up in Scotland, Alex Salmond has stuck like a limpet to the mainstream, an especially impressive achievement. Circumstances were far harder for him than for Brown when he took over as First Minister three months ago.

His SNP was an embattled minority at Holyrood, with all the other political parties determined to see him fail. Whereas in London, Gordon Brown can call upon a client press, much of the Scottish media – such as the profoundly biased Daily Record, whose misreporting of serious events has become a disgrace to the craft of journalism – were little more than a manifestation of the Labour political machine.

And yet Salmond has used the power of office to reshape Scottish politics in a remarkable way. Like Gordon Brown in London, he has skilfully moved to the centre. He has been extremely careful not to appeal only to his core vote, and presented himself as a national leader rather than the head of a coterie. He has cleverly - or shamelessly, depending on one’s point of view – stolen New Labour devices.

One of the most interesting of these is Gordon Brown’s idea of a ‘national conversation’, announced the moment he became Prime Minister. The Prime Minister hopes to use his period of consultation to build himself an idea of Britishness that would leave Alex Salmond’s Scottishness parochial and irrelevant

The Prime Minister hopes to use his period of consultation to build himself an idea of Britishness that would leave Alex Salmond’s Scottishness parochial and irrelevant Quotation

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Salmond responded by launching his own National Conversation – along with other Brownite notions such as citizens’ juries. But the Salmond National Conversation has the opposite intention. He wishes to show that there is nothing parochial or menacing about the daring idea of Scottish independence, but that it is a necessary response to the 21st century political predicament.

The remainder of this article will be devoted to examining just how successful each political leader has been in using the device of a national conversation to further his or her ends. I will examine the paradoxical fact that, though Brown and Salmond are engaged in a political war only one of them can win, they have both so far used the device with consummate brilliance and great success. There is a solution to the paradox: they are using the device as a stratagem to confound different opponents. First: Brown. On the face of things, Gordon Brown holds all the aces in this contest. He is able to use all the resources of the British state machine, has a commanding parliamentary majority, etc, etc. But Brown has a problem. He is fighting on two fronts. In england he faces David Cameron and a partially revived Conservative Party. In Scotland he confronts an insurgent Scottish National Party.

In England Gordon Brown has offered a political masterclass in his first three months, and fought off Cameron with brilliance. With the Conservative leader massing his forces to expect an attack from the left, Gordon Brown utterly confounded him, moving very sharply to the right in a brilliant flanking movement.

Everything that Brown has done – including last week’s unscrupulous stunt in bringing Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street - has been finely judged to appeal to English centre-right voters. Meanwhile Brown has turned brutally on his own party. At next week’s Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, he plans an out and out attack on the rights of ordinary Labour activists which would bring a gasp of admiration from Tony Blair at his most audacious.

It is not widely known that several weeks before leaving office, Blair sat down and wrote a long and carefully argued memorandum for Gordon Brown, setting out what strategy he should follow in Downing Street. Blair said that he must cleave to the centre ground of British politics, and never lurch to the left.

Brown has publicly distanced himself from Blair. But he has stuck to Blair’s strategy to the letter. Although publicly he likes to reiterate that he represents change at the end of the Blair era, these protestations should not be believed. Gordon Brown has stuck absolutely to the New Labour vision inherited from his predecessor, and used it skilfully to bamboozle Cameron’s hapless Conservatives.

However, he has paid a price north of the border for his success in the south. It is not that Brown has neglected Scotland. Indeed he devotes obsessive attention to his homeland and skilfully removed the useless Jack McConnell - in what looks like an unscrupulous use of state patronage, apparently offering the High Commissionership to Malawi as sweetener to induce McConnell to stand down as Labour leader. Whether McConnell’s replacement Wendy Alexander can demonstrate that she is any more than a Brown apparatchik remains to be seen.

The problem is not that Brown does not care about Scotland. It is simply that winning england from Cameron requires an entirely different approach than fighting off Salmond in Scotland. To give one recent example, the voters in south-eastern constituencies may be impressed by the palpably bogus friendship that has sprung up between Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown, but in Scotland, where memories remain of the poll tax and economic deprivation, the Thatcher publicity stunt has brutally backfired.

So Brown’s move to the right - and away from his Labour base - in England has opened up scope for the insurgent Salmond in Scotland. Salmond, from his exiguous Holyrood base, has used the National Conversation to dominate the political scene that matters to him.

Writing on the Our Kingdom website – which has become an essential guide to understanding the dynamic constitutional situation thrown up by last summer’s regime change in Holyrood and Westminster – the journalist and writer Neal Ascherson recently listed the astonishing way that Salmond has changed the political reality in Scotland in just three months. On issue after issue – broadcasting, fiscal autonomy, the name of the Scottish Government, the National Conversation itself – Salmond has led and his Labour and Liberal Democrat opponents (forget the Tories) have limped feebly behind.

Gordon Brown’s idea of a national conversation – though claiming to be radical on the constitution - has a fundamentally conservative objective. He wants to use it to drive the Conservative Party away from the centre ground and establish himself what he calls a national government.

Alex Salmond’s National Conversation is genuinely subversive and daring. He wants to achieve nothing less than the undermining of the British Constitution, one of whose most famous building blocks is the 1707 Act of Union.

Brown’s dilemma is that the more he wins in England, the more he loses in Scotland. It is a dilemma he has yet to solve

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