It has all the absurdity of two men in safari suits – Monty Python’s Michael Palin and John Cleese squaring up on a London canalside and slapping each other with fish in a ritual dance. This is Scotland’s idea of Euro-democracy, in which fish-slapping is about the only show on the hustings circuit, mainly featuring Tory and Nationalist candidates making claim and counter-claim about “exclusive and shared constitutional competency over marine resource conservation”.
To the fishing industry, that matters. But it matters also that such an arcane aspect of constitutional wrangling is what this European election is coming down to. “It is as if they agree on almost everything else, and have agreed that this is the one thing they are going to argue about,” says one brave soul who has attended most of the candidate hustings held so far. Little wonder that the 24.7% turnout registered at the last European parliament election in 1999 is widely expected to fall further.
This is the election where your vote makes little difference. It will elect seven members of a legislature with much less than half Brussels’ law-making power. They cannot even reform the severe embarrassment of their own expenses system, however much they might want to. According to Labour’s David Martin, speaking at a conference earlier this year, we can already assume we know who five of the MEPs will be after the June 10 vote, the sixth seat is debatable, and only the seventh is wide open.
In England at least there is the added pep of local elections and London’s mayoral vote, but this battle over two seats is almost certainly as exciting as electoral politics will get this year in Scotland. And with the turnout expected to be low, all the emphasis from the mainstream parties is on identifying and persuading core voters, rather than persuading people to switch. Quite apart from the extent to which Scottish MEPs work together in Brussels and Strasbourg, that is why the clashing and point-scoring is so limited. If all you want is to reach your core voter, there is little to fight over.
Increasingly, that means reaching identified supporters by phone. If you see street stall campaigning, consider yourself blessed. This isn’t effective campaigning: it’s about visibility, not least for the MPs and MSPs who want to raise their profile for their next elections. The campaign is a dry run for next year when a Westminster election is expected, meaning scarce campaign resources are being kept in the bank.
Labour tactics have been to stress their achievements, mainly in government in London, while practising next year’s tactic of branding Michael Howard as a return to the Thatcher-Major years. Campaign insiders say it is very hard to motivate activists when the news from Iraq is so bleak, though they admit that Iraq may not be so much the problem with voters as Tony Blair’s dwindling stock of integrity. This election shows signs of going down as the one when the shine came off Blair’s golden electoral appeal, and hastened his departure from 10 Downing Street.
The SNP, which came close to beating Labour in share of the vote in 1999, have three campaign themes : local council tax, to give them something tangible about which people feel aggrieved; Iraq, in the hope that resentment about it will motivate their voters; and a tough line on fisheries and European mishandling of the Common Fisheries Policy. In a Scotland-wide constituency where the geo graphical location of your vote does not matter, that confirms the SNP’s increasing bias towards the northeast.
The Iraq issue ought to benefit the Liberal Democrats, but if there are protest votes looking for a home Jim Wallace’s party face competition from the Scottish Socialist Party and the Greens. These new kids on the block think that, depending on turnout, they will need between 90,000 and 120,000 votes from anywhere in Scotland to get one MEP seat. The SSP equates that to seven out of every 10 people who supported it in last year’s Holyrood vote.
As Scotland already has six-party politics, there is less prospect of a breakthrough by the UK Independence Party with its anti-EU rhetoric , and almost none by the BNP. The UKIP have had three members from southern England for the past five years, and polls suggest they could better that in the current Eurosceptic climate. Their Scottish credentials are weak, with a campaign based temporarily in Lockerbie, while their true home is in Birmingham.
That leaves Scottish Conservatives well positioned with a Eurosceptic stance, to which their faithful can be expected to respond. As the faithful are older and more likely to vote, that ought to be good news for Tories.
The news on June 13, when the result is announced from the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, may not carry the shock of a UKIP or BNP break through that some foresee for England. In Scotland, the vote share looks likely to help Conservatives get back on the map.
30 May 2004