The SNP, once more under the shrewd leadership of Alex Salmond, who returned to the post in 2004, was also recovering from a series of average election performances but Mr Salmond saw that the 2007 Scottish Parliament election would provide his party with its biggest chance yet to win power.
He saw that his party representing the Scottish interest and with no obligation to a wider party at UK level left him a golden opportunity. He set about professionalising the party machine, amassing an unprecedented £1 million election war chest from sympathetic business donors and presenting a set of policies that played into Scottish anxieties about escalating council tax bills, the NHS and education priorities.
Labour was flat-footed, perhaps believing that an SNP victory would never happen. In the months leading up to the 2007 election, it was obvious that only one party had momentum and it was not Labour. Anxieties about the SNP’s core aim of independence were put to one side because voters knew that the break-up of Britain could not happen without a referendum. Labour’s campaign was confused; the SNP’s, with promises to abolish the council tax, cut class sizes and restore hospital A&E units, was exciting for many of those “soft” Labour voters who had deserted Labour in 2005 and were ready to do so again. To Labour’s dismay and disbelief, the SNP emerged as the largest party. When their promise of an independence referendum proved an insuperable roadblock to forming a majority coalition with the Lib Dems, Mr Salmond opted for minority government, daring Labour and the other unionist parties to bring him down. His calculation proved prescient especially as his honeymoon in government turned out to be no nine-day wonder. He and his minority government set about delivering on manifesto promises that did not need legislation. Through delicate and skilful manoeuvring, he was able to attract enough support from at least one opposition party to get his annual budgets through Parliament.
Labour was dumbstruck. Unable to react, it became embroiled in an internal row over the leadership campaign expenses of Wendy Alexander, who succeeded Jack McConnell as Scottish leader. She resigned and was followed by Iain Gray, whose dogged but lifeless leadership meant that Mr Salmond, as First Minister, was able to retain his position as the major personality of devolved politics. As Labour’s problems grew at Westminster under Gordon Brown, poll after poll showed that the SNP was, if anything, consolidating its position in Scotland.
The gloss was bound to come off the nationalists at some point. From mid-2009 it did. Their very status as a minority administration meant that a whole series of probably over-the-top manifesto priorities, such as cutting class sizes and abolishing student debt, had to be ditched. The SNP had delivered a council tax freeze, but the next step of abolishing the tax altogether and replacing it with a local income tax was also put on hold, simply because the nationalists did not have the parliamentary votes.
Labour, in the meantime, entered into an opposition coalition with the Lib Dems and the Conservatives over constitutional powers looked at by the Calman Commission, which recommended a tranche of new tax-raising and other powers for Holyrood. Calman was a direct riposte by the unionist parties to the SNP’s independence agenda, although some unionists saw it as yet another concession to the nationalists. The SNP, for its part, was busy redefining what it meant by independence, talking loudly and often of a “social union” with the rest of the UK that would give Scotland full fiscal independence but with shared defence and diplomatic interests and retaining the Queen as head of state. It was dubbed independencelite. It was also a recognition by the SNP that Scotland, for all the SNP spin about the “London” parties, remained firmly unionist while wanting their devolved Parliament to acquire more profile through greater autonomy from Westminster.
The 2010 election allowed Labour to present itself as more in tune than the SNP with Scots’ wishes on the constitution while exploiting to the full Scots voters’ fears about a Conservative government returning to the worst days of Thatcherism. Many found the latter tactic somewhat childish and disreputable, but there is no doubt that it worked. The key trend in the general election results of 2010 was that voters throughout Scotland voted for the party in their constituency most likely to keep the Tories out. Labour was the main beneficiary, returning 41 MPs, while the Lib Dems retained 11, the SNP repeated their 2005 performance with 6 MPs and the Tories returned a paltry 1, showing that whatever else, David Cameron was still regarded with suspicion north of the Border. But Labour, for the first time since devolution, found itself in opposition on both sides of the Border.
Northern Ireland comes back from the brink
David Sharrock
Ireland Correspondent
It was the parliamentary term in which the Northern Ireland peace process was finally completed, a time of extraordinary events that few could have imagined even five years earlier. The defining image must be that of the Rev Ian Paisley, the old warhorse of No Surrender Unionism, and Martin McGuinness, the former “Public Enemy No 1” in his role as Provisional IRA commander, laughing uproariously together in the company of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern. And yet there should be no surprise that, this being Northern Ireland, the conclusion of the peace process does not mean the end of the Troubles nor the threat from violent Irish republicanism to the security of the State. A page was turned in the history of Britain’s involvement with Ireland but the story was left far from over.
The backdrop was the usurpation of the Ulster Unionist Party, since the founding of the Northern Ireland state its “ruling party”, by its rivals the Democratic Unionists in the 2005 general election. As disaffection with the outworking of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the dysfunctional power-sharing Executive led by David Trimble, the First Minister, reached new heights among Unionists, a sea change in voting patterns swept away the ancien régime, rewarding the DUP with nine Westminster seats and reducing the UUP to just one, North Down, held by Sylvia Hermon.
Mr Paisley’s party promised an end to “pushover Unionism” and the experiment of sharing power with Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Yet even before the 2005 anointment of the DUP as the new voice of Northern Ireland’s majority community, there were sufficient straws in the wind for Mr Blair’s advisers to form the view that the real endgame in Ulster was to bring together the political extremes, abandoning the centre ground shared by the UUP and the SDLP, to create a new political status quo.
Indeed, Mr Blair’s delayed departure from No 10 had much to do with the Prime Minister’s determination to see his project reaching some definable goal, nearly a decade after the euphoria of the Good Friday Agreement. He courted Mr Paisley assiduously with a near-perfect reading of the psychology of Ulster’s “Dr No”. By now in his 80s and with a terrifying brush with mortality a recent memory, Mr Paisley was conscious that his political career was drawing to a close. He wanted, and was encouraged by Mr Blair in this with lengthy intimate chats about religion, to leave behind a legacy that subverted all the beliefs of his admirers and enemies.
At the same time Mr Blair’s wingman in Ulster, the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, was given the job of playing Bad Cop to the PM’s Good Cop. Mr Hain threatened the DUP with dire warnings that, if it failed to respond to the political progress that Sinn Féin was making, the British and Irish Governments would implement a Plan B – a far deeper green shade of Direct Rule for Northern Ireland bordering on joint sovereignty shared between London and Dublin.
Sinn Féin was suffering some game-changing setbacks. The manner in which Mr Blair had indulged Republican leaders for so long over the Provisional IRA’s failure to decommission its vast arsenal of weaponry no longer impressed Washington, which began to threaten Gerry Adams’s frequent trips to the United States with visa withdrawals. The Provisionals’