AHC:Tory Scotland.

Gorrister

Gorrister

Scotland is a very safe Labour Region when it comes to elections, as it will either vote Labour or SNP, in rare cases will Scottish Constituencies elect Tory MPs, this challenge, is to make Scotland go for the Conservative Party as it does OTL with Labour.

Bonus Points if you can make Wales Tory as well.
 

David T

spookyscaryskeletons said:
Scotland is a very safe Labour Region when it comes to elections, as it will either vote Labour or SNP, in rare cases will Scottish Constituencies elect Tory MPs, this challenge, is to make Scotland go for the Conservative Party as it does OTL with Labour.

Bonus Points if you can make Wales Tory as well.
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Here's one suggestion for at least keeping the Tories competitive in Scotland: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/0XqLMh4pn3g/XGFmDlBcC60J
 
V-J

V-J

Well, it kind of was Tory for a small while in the post-war period.

You will get mountains of people in this thread saying "Abort teh SNP yeah fer sure", and tons of other people saying "Abort teh Thatcher yeah fer sure", but Scotland has never been good ground for the Tories, ever. This goes back hundreds of years, way back into the 19th century, when they were regularly outfought by the Liberals.

When you look at things in the round, you realise the post-war '55 spike was a blip; they managed that by the collapse of the Liberals and their annexation of the National Liberal vote in Scotland. Probably the last gasp of the Orange vote also helped. Their early post-war strength was therefore deeply artificial, there was no real long-term structural underpinning to it. The decline of the Tory vote in Scotland pre-dates both the big Nationalist bang of the seventies and Thatcher.

I think there are things you can do to arrest the decline, and probably avoid the extinction of Toryism in Scotland, (Kill off the Liberals in the fifties, keep the Tories One Nation and devolutionist, etc) but I don't believe for a moment that you can make them permanently dominant in Scotland.
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

V-J said:
I think there are things you can do to arrest the decline, and probably avoid the extinction of Toryism in Scotland, (Kill off the Liberals in the fifties, keep the Tories One Nation and devolutionist, etc) but I don't believe for a moment that you can keep them dominant in Scotland.
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Not even having Scottish home rule pre-WW1 be implemented, with the Tories being the big benefactors since they supported it (albeit as a counterweight to Irish home rule, but still)?
 
Simon

Simon

Well up until the late 1970s/early 1980s I believe that they still did fairly well in Scotland so it's more a case of keeping the Conservatives as a viable option. One suggestion that I remember from previous threads was to avoid the formal merger of the Unionist Party with the Conservatives, and associated with that the Progressive Party staying active. Other suggestions would be trying to maintain some more of the heavy industry up there, difficult I know, and mitigate things like the community charge, aka. the poll tax, possibly by looking at something more along the lines of the current council tax. IIRC rather than being imposed the community charge was requested by either the local Scottish politicians or government because of all the hoo-ha over the last revaluation for the rates in Scotland as they thought it would be fairer, can any confirm or deny that?
 
V-J

V-J

Dan1988 said:
Not even having Scottish home rule pre-WW1 be implemented, with the Tories being the big benefactors since they supported it (albeit as a counterweight to Irish home rule, but still)?
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Well, this is the post-1900 forum 'n all. I assumed the OP was talking no earlier than the middle of last century, so I confined my post to post-war changes.
 

The Red

Prevent the Unionist party from uniting with the 'English' Conservative party. Predominantly working class Scotland will always vote Labour of course, but keep the Scots nationalist angle and you at least keep the Tories significant, similar to OTL Wales perhaps.
 
Simon

Simon

V-J said:
When you look at things in the round, you realise the post-war '55 spike was a blip; they managed that by the collapse of the Liberals and their annexation of the National Liberal vote in Scotland. Probably the last gasp of the Orange vote also helped. Their early post-war strength was therefore deeply artificial, there was no real long-term structural underpinning to it. The decline of the Tory vote in Scotland pre-dates both the big Nationalist bang of the seventies and Thatcher.
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Granted I'm not as big a fan/obsessive/nerd, deleted as feel appropriate ;), as some of the Politibrits but the three elections before the '55 spike as you put it they were regularly getting roughly 45% of the vote. After the spike they were still on average getting 29% of the vote until 1979 when it went back up to 31% before starting the general falling trend. Maybe I'm missing the nitty-gritty details but a party that over 50 years from 1945 which gets on average 33% of the vote hardly seems like one whose support was 'deeply artificial'. Now I don't think the original challenge is really all that achievable but at the same time the claim that the Conservatives were foredoomed to electoral extinction there also seems a bit off as well.
 
V-J

V-J

Simon said:
Granted I'm not as big a fan/obsessive/nerd, deleted as feel appropriate ;), as some of the Politibrits but the three elections before the '55 spike as you put it they were regularly getting roughly 45% of the vote. After the spike they were still on average getting 29% of the vote until 1979 when it went back up to 31% before starting the general falling trend. Maybe I'm missing the nitty-gritty details but a party that over 50 years from 1945 which gets on average 33% of the vote hardly seems like one whose support was 'deeply artificial'. Now I don't think the original challenge is really all that achievable but at the same time the claim that the Conservatives were foredoomed to electoral extinction there also seems a bit off as well.
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I don't think you read what I wrote closely enough. Or maybe I wasn't clear enough. But I didn't say that their entire strength as a party was deeply artificial, I explicitly said that their early post-war peak was artificial and an historical blip; and I didn't say that they were doomed to extinction, as I said in my last paragraph, their decline could be slowed and stabalised by different political outcomes. (But only, I think, that)
 

The Oncoming Storm

While maintaining the 1950's level of support is impossible for the reasons set out above, they should never have imploded in the way they did. Certainly Thatcher has a portion of the blame for setting herself so firmly against devolution, had the Tories allowed a second Devo referendum in 1980 without the 40% turnout clause then it could have passed and a lot of the heat may have been taken out of Scottish politics in the 1980's.

Also there's one guy who I think did a lot of harm to the Scottish Tories but never gets identified as such, Gordon Campbell, Scottish Secretary under Heath and the man who argued against Scotland getting a dedicated share of North Sea Oil revenues, something that Heath was apparently willing to grant. He was also pretty unsympathetic to the concerns of Scottish fishermen about joining the EEC, two things that helped ensure he lost his seat in February 1974. Had he or someone else, taken a different view then the SNP's big breakthrough may never have happened. I heard it said once about the Scottish Labour Party that it was no accident that "Scottish" always came before "Labour." In contrast the Scottish Tories were perceived to have got it the other way round.
 

Blackadder mk 2

V-J's right in that the Conservative dominance of Scotland after the war was the blip rather than the rule, I remember reading about how the Unionists during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century were having trouble appealing to Wales, Scotland and the industrial North, sort of like how the modern party has such troubles. Only this time, Wales is a lot more accepting of Tories than they were during that time.

If you want the Conservatives to remain a strong force in Scottish politics, then you could try getting rid of the Liberals so that the anti-Socialist Unionist vote has nowhere else to go, keeping the Conservatives on a devolutionist platform so moderate nationalists feel appeased. I think AndyC mentioned a TL he thought about doing a year or so ago wherein Major resigns over Black Wednesday and is replaced by Malcolm Rifkind who has better luck in winning over Scottish voters, which may help. Thatcher sped up the trend in the Tories losing votes in Scotland, rather than causing it, I remember seeing that it was more in the 1974 elections where the vote share began dropping a fair bit.

None of these really makes the Tories dominant, just makes them a fair bit stronger than OTL, which is really the best you can hope for.

Dan1988 said:
Well, how about something like the Government of Scotland Bill, 1913 (as shown here through the debates) gets passed? Or even earlier, at least until 1905?
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In an earlier post, you say that the Tories backed it when the voting lists show that the Tories seemed to vote against it, unless you're saying that a POD could be them backing it earlier. This rather defeats their whole point on the Union, unless we're arguing that Austen Chamberlain gets the leadership earlier and/or Garvin and F.S Oliver convince the Unionists to then push for Home Rule All Around on the lines of Joseph Chamberlain's ideas for Home Rule?
 

The Oncoming Storm

Just to add I once read that another factor in the Unionist's 1950's heyday was anger over the Atlee Government's nationalisation a which meant that Scottish firms like Colville's Steel, were subsumed into firms based in London. The Unionists were perceived as "Scotland's Party" in contrast to the London run Labour and they were able to use this line of attack very successfully.

Clearly this strategy was obsolete by the mid 1960's but by simply turning the Unionists into a region of the Tories, Heath threw the baby out with the bathwater. They should have gone for a name change and a CDU/CSU style arrangement.
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

Blackadder mk 2 said:
In an earlier post, you say that the Tories backed it when the voting lists show that the Tories seemed to vote against it, unless you're saying that a POD could be them backing it earlier. This rather defeats their whole point on the Union, unless we're arguing that Austen Chamberlain gets the leadership earlier and/or Garvin and F.S Oliver convince the Unionists to then push for Home Rule All Around on the lines of Joseph Chamberlain's ideas for Home Rule?
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Scottish home rule was one of those issues they brought up as a contrast to Irish home rule. So anything which is a win-win for the Tories. Home rule all around (or as I'm most familiar with it as, café para todos) could work as well.
 

Thoresby

I think the big problem is the demographics, the dominance of Glasgow the Central Industrial belt in population terms means that like in the Welsh Valleys the Labour Parties natural working class base is simply a bigger part of the population. And considering the geography of Scotland it's difficult to imagine a Scottish Lincolnshire, i.e. prosperous rural areas and county towns with sufficient population to support a useful number of MP's.
 
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