Politics away from the streets: observations

The headlines have been dominated by rioting across the country, but there have been other political developments on which I offer a few observations

The week in politics has been dominated, understandably, by the outbreaks of violent disorder across the country in the wake of the killing of three young girls in Southport on Monday. I wrote about Friday’s rioting in Sunderland and the wider issues and there is only so much oxygen of publicity to go around, but a few things have happened which are worth putting on the record without necessarily devoting a whole essay to each (even I only have so many hours in the day, as Molly-Mae Hague observed a couple of years ago).

What the papers say

In the commercial world, this week I’ve written about the automotive industry and green subsidies (City AM), the baggage some candidates for the Conservative Party leadership bring (The Spectator), free speech in universities (CapX) and whether Nigel Farage is disappointed by the House of Commons (The Spectator).

The “other” Conservative leadership contest

Hardly noticed by the majority of people south of the border, it seems, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is also holding an election for a new leader. Douglas Ross, who has led the Scottish Conservatives since August 2020, announced in June that he would stand down after the UK general election, in which he stood for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East but was defeated by 942 votes. He remains a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Highlands and Islands. The contest will be shorter than that for the overall leadership of the Conservatives, with nominations opening on 8 August and closing on 22 August, any candidate requiring the signatures of 100 party members. There will then be hustings before voting begins in early September, on a preferential voting system, and the bottom-ranked candidate will be eliminated in each round, with their first-preference votes redistributed until one candidate receives over 50 per cent of votes cast. The winner will be announced on 27 September.

The general election was mixed for the Conservatives in Scotland. In terms of the popular vote, it was disastrous, with their support being halved to just 12.7 per cent, well behind Scottish Labour and the Scottish National Party. However, the Tories lost only one seat overall, going from six MPs to five (although that metric puts them in fourth place, just behind the Scottish Liberal Democrats as well). The real focus, for the moment, is the Scottish Parliament where they are the main opposition party, and it will be from the ranks of the Conservatives’ 31 MSPs that the new leader is drawn.

The first candidate to declare was Russell Findlay, MSP for West Scotland since 2021. He is a former journalist, having worked for STV, The Scottish Sun and The Sunday Mail, and while reporting on gangs in 2015 he was attacked with acid and a knife on his doorstep. Briefly director of communications for the Scottish Tories, he was appointed deputy spokesman on community safety in 2021 and has been Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Justice since 2023. Findlay has spoken of “common-sense Conservatism” and a desire to make the party “a patriotic conservative movement that stands for aspiration and ambition”.

The second candidate is 60-year-old Brian Whittle, MSP for South Scotland since 2016 and deputy spokesman on business, tourism and economic growth. He is a former athlete who represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games and the European Athletics Championships, winning a gold medal in 1986 and 1994, and competing for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games to win a silver medal in 1990. His background initially defined his political roles, and he was spokesman on health education (2016-20) and public health, mental health and sport (2020-21), then covering the environment, biodiversity and land reform from 2021 to 2023. Whittle wants to put “education, enterprise and empowering people” at the heart of the party’s platform.

The most recent entrant is the party’s current deputy leader, Meghan Gallacher. She is only 32 years old, born in mother’s home town of Bellshill in North Lanarkshire, and graduated from the University of the West of Scotland in 2014 having written a dissertation on “The decline of the Conservative Party from Margaret Thatcher to the present day and the impact of Ruth Davidson”. She represented Motherwell West on North Lanarkshire Council from 2017 to 2022, and in 2021 was elected to the Scottish Parliament for Central Scotland. She was deputy spokesman on children and young people (2021-23), and Ross appointed her to the vacant deputy leadership after the party’s disappointing local election performance in May 2022. Gallacher has suggested, I think rightly, that the Scottish Conservatives need a positive message as well as simply opposing independence: “Scotland knows what we stand against, but do they know what we stand for?” Her proposals include lower personal taxation, the right to buy a house and support for parents and pensioners to create a “modern, centre-right party”.

None of the candidates is currently saying anything dramatic or especially eye-catching, although Findlay has suggested the party should move its focus away from the case for and against independence. It is worth noting that two of them, Findlay and Whittle, have substantial pedigrees outside politics, in journalism and sport respectively, while Gallacher’s youth is her distinctive feature. Findlay is currently regarded as the front-runner, with the endorsement of several front benchers at Holyrood, but other candidates may come forward. Former deputy leader Liam Kerr has raised the idea of the Scottish Conservatives formally separating from the main UK party, an idea which was floated in the dark days after 1997 and revived in 2011 by Murdo Fraser. Parallels are often drawn with the Christian Democratic Union in Germany and their Bavarian allies the Christian Social Union, but I tend to think it is overrated as a panacea. It is also a puzzling policy for a party defined by its support for the Union.

It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales!

While the Anglocentric press has largely ignored the Scottish Conservative leadership election, it has also paid scant regard to the coronation of a successor to Labour’s Vaughan Gething as First Minister of Wales. There was a frisson of excitement at his travails and then his grudging, angry resignation after barely four months, but that was the end of the matter for many. Nominations for leader of Welsh Labour opened on 20 July and closed on 24 July, but there was only one nomination, and therefore the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, Eluned Morgan, was declared the new party chief. The Senedd with be recalled next week to confirm Morgan as First Minister, after which she can name a new tranche of ministers.

Morgan will be the sixth leader of the devolved government in Wales, all of whom have been Labour, but the first woman to hold the position. Although she has represented Mid and West Wales in the Senedd since 2016, she was a Member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 2009, and in 2011 was awarded a life peerage as Baroness Morgan of Ely. She was on the Labour front bench in the House of Lords from 2013 to 2016 and again briefly from 2016 to 2017 but has been on leave of absence since May 2021. She was Minister for the Welsh Language (2017-21) and Minister for Mental Health and Wellbeing (2020-21) in the Welsh Government before joining the cabinet as Secretary for Health and Social Care.

Of her five predecessors, Alun Michael (1999-2000) served for only nine months, Rhodri Morgan (2000-09) notched up nearly a decade, Carwyn Jones (2009-18) lasted nine years and Mark Drakeford (2018-24) held office for just over five years, before Gethings’s fleeting tenure. The next Senedd elections are scheduled for May 2026, so Morgan has some time to make her mark but must act with dispatch, and needs to be aware that she will face the Welsh electorate at a time when the Labour government at Westminster could be suffering a mid-term slump.

Is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?

To complete the tour of the nations of the United Kingdom, the Northern Ireland Executive is celebrating six months in office. That might seem a slight achievement, but Michelle O’Neill (First Minister) and Emma Little-Pengelly (deputy First Minister) have been in office longer than Sir Keir Starmer, John Swinney or the outgoing Vaughan Gething, despite being younger than all of their counterparts. There is also a new Taoiseach in Ireland, Simon Harris, who took office in April. Moreover, although the Northern Ireland Executive was established almost 25 years ago, it has been suspended on and off for about a decade of that period, so that it is currently sitting at all is no mean feat.

In truth, while there have been some encouraging noises about co-operation between the parties involved in the executive and some optimistic photo opportunities, there has been little concrete progress. It has agreed a budget for 2024/25, but a Programme for Government has yet to be published and there are some hard political and financial decisions still to be faced. In addition, there is still no certainty on whether Casement Park in west Belfast will be redeveloped in time for the Euro 2028 football championship, and the UK Government recently refused to guarantee a £200 million loan for Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders, putting the company’s future in considerable doubt. I outlined some of the problems facing Sir Keir Starmer in Northern Ireland for The Spectator recently.

All of this is set against a complicated electoral situation. The general election in July saw Sinn Féin holding the largest number of seats for the first time ever, with seven Members of Parliament (who do not take their seats), but still only winning 27 per cent of the popular vote. With two MPs from the Social Democratic and Labour Party, it means that half of the province’s representatives at Westminster support a united Ireland. Meanwhile the Unionist vote has fractured, so there are now only five Democratic Unionist Party MPs, one each from the Ulster Unionist Party and Traditional Unionist Voice as well as an independent Unionist MP (Alex Easton) in North Down. The non-sectarian Alliance Party only won a single seat, which was relatively disappointing for them. All of this means the Unionist share of the vote is something like 44 per cent while the Nationalist/Republican vote is around 38 or 39 per cent, and the 15 per cent won by the Alliance making up most of the balance. Make of all of that what you will; each side is claiming the momentum is with them.

We’re all going on a summer holiday…

Or are we? At Westminster this week you could find every emotion you wanted; euphoria, relief, exhaustion, despair, anticipation, perplexity. With public disorder continuing, many ministers will not be released from their offices for a while, and six Conservative MPs—say it with me, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, Dame Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick—are vying for the leadership of the party. The summer of 2024 will not, I suspect, be remembered as one of leisure and ease.