Nation in Want of a Grievance by Iain Fraser & Grigor

Author:Iain Fraser & Grigor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scotland, essays, Jacobite, Lady Gregory, William Wallace, John Buchan, Scottish Enlightenment, Isle of Eigg, crofting, Statistical Account, Scottish, fiction, romance, relationship
ISBN: 9781849890427
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2011
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Do we need these tories now?

Once they ran Britain and Britain ran the world. But the glory days have gone for the Tories - and in Scotland they seem to have gone for good.

AS IN all good fairy tales, it seems a long, long time ago now. But this particular fairy tale is true, and it tells the story of a mighty and mass political movement called the Conservative Party. Its vibrant and ever-so-bawdy landed ancestors oversaw a merchants’ empire of fantastic wealth. In its more mature - though no less bawdy - years it helped Britain to an industrial and colonial influence unequalled on the globe.

And in its full maturity of the last century, it still presumed to set a proper course for Britain’s affairs, between the rocks and rapids of worldwide war, growing electoral competition at home, and the inexorable development of industrial and military challenges from abroad.

But today - as if faces once more election defeat on a British scale and a second and probably final annihilation in Scotland - the Conservative party must wonder if, in terms of the broad sweep of history, it now stands on the brink of oblivion. For William Hague will lose the coming general election on a crushing scale, and will soon thereafter be banished to the grim outer darkness preserved by his party for failed leaders. That is the harsh law of politics in any party.

In England, of course, the party will survive at least in the short- or even mid-term, as some sort of official opposition, with some sort of parliamentary presence, though its strategists - should it have any - must tremble at the thought of a split over Europe, and the memory of the 30-year exile from power occasioned by the party’s catastrophic fracture after the Corn Laws controversy.

But in Scotland, the prognosis must be thought as grimly terminal. Last weeks’ polls, after all, found that Labour can expect up to 50 percent of the popular vote in the general election, and the Scottish National Party about a quarter. But the Conservatives are on course to collect just 12 percent of Scottish votes - a result which will once again see them fail to win even one of the 72 Scottish seats at Westminster. And it will too almost certainly see the end of the long political career of the Scottish Tories’ only real heavyweight, Sir Malcolm Rifkind. After that, for each of them - oblivion.

And yet the fairy tale of effortless supremacy - until not so long ago - must indeed have once seemed without end. Until very recent times - perhaps, indeed, until the arrival of New Labour - the Conservatives were the natural party of government in Britain. Old Labour popped into a government of sorts in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, of course. But when they swept the boards in the 1945 “khaki election”, Major Atlee’s chums made the somewhat silly mistake of trying to finance a welfare state from a position of economic bankruptcy.

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