Yes, my latest timeline. Yes, another Scottish political timeline. I worked on a draft a few months ago, posted on here under a different title, with initially a different goal. The first chapter may seem like it has little to do with the Scots Tory Party, but that will come. One thing in advance I am ruling out here is a full seperation between the Scottish and main UK Party. And this all happens after Thatcher.
Never accuse me of not attempting the impossible again....
Hope you enjoy.
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Chapter One. The 2004 European Elections until the 2005 UK General Election.
John Swinney sat in his constituency office in Blairgowrie the morning after the results came through. They were for the Scottish National Party nothing short of a disaster. The SNP had seen their share of the vote fall to under 20%, which given the unpopularity of the Labour Party at the time, this being a year after the Iraq War, was nothing short of disastrous for the party and personally for him. That being said, looking at the results, he believed he could put a positive spin on the results. The Labour Party had, after all received just 26.4% of the vote, their lowest figure in the post-war era of Scottish politics and in addition to this, for the first time over 40% of the Scottish public voted for parties which supported independence.
This was not to stop the rising discontent within the party, many of whom were members concerned that they may lose their seats at the next Holyrood elections. He felt, however that he needed the party to show a united front in the face of the media, and as a result called a meeting of the SNP shadow cabinet. The meeting was a tense one, and as he walked into the room, the last to enter, the shadow cabinet fell silent.
He decided to be upfront about the issue of his leadership, stating he was going to ask every member of the Shadow Cabinet in turn whether or not they supported his leadership. He began by asking a close ally and his deputy, Rosanna Cunningham. Cunningham stated she was fully in favour of his leadership and that he should continue in post. After that, the rest of the room fell into line one by one. He had achieved what he wanted. He had secured his leadership.
When Jackie Bird announced on Reporting Scotland that not only was Swinney staying, but that he had the support of the SNP Shadow Cabinet, Bill Wilson was visiting a fellow Nationalist MSP Campbell Martin, both were strong critics of the direction Swinney had led the party. As Swinney had managed to gain the support of the shadow cabinet, it was now clear that any opposition to his leadership must now come from the backbenches. The question was how could they oppose the leadership whilst at the same time remaining loyal to the party. As such, they agreed to form a new group, the 2004 Group, committed to fundamentally pushing the SNP forward, and to be more confrontational than Swinney had been since he became the leader of the opposition.
Within a month, they had managed to gain some front page headlines, with announcements openly criticising Swinney’s leadership of the party. This was taken badly and as a result, on the 1st August, the SNP announced that any MSPs who were members of the 2004 group would risk expulsion from the party. This was done in the hope that Wilson, Martin and also Jim Sillars, a former SNP Deputy Leader,. Would roll back and toe the line. The opposite was the case. As a result on August 12th 2004, the Scottish Democratic Party was formed. At the news conference were Jim Sillars, the two nationalist MSPs, the independent Dennis Canavan and Margo MacDonald, an independent MSP and Sillars wife.
This created a new group in the Parliament, an event which caused further stirrings in the SNP group and considerable glee to Jack McConnell, the First Minister. Secretly, moves were being set in motion for a call within the SNP group for a return of Alex Salmond, although they were at this point so divided, any challenge to Swinney would risk splitting the party even further and driving even more members to the SDP.
Throughout the summer, the two new parties were sparring and openly competing for the nationalist vote. Swinney made a big play of the fact that if the SNP vote was split in the upcoming general election, the Tories could win Nationalist constituencies such as Perth, East Perthshire, Angus and even Alex Salmonds old fief of Banff and Buchan. He was openly playing the fact that should this new party continue to grow, nationalism in Scotland could be set back a decade.
In November, however the Nationalist travails were overcome by another party with problems. The Scottish Socialist Party firstly announced that its leader Tommy Sheridan was stepping down for family reasons. It then emerged in a tabloid newspaper that he had been implicated in visiting Cupids, a club for swingers. Sheridan denied this, and sued News International for defamation. This would lead to the downfall of the SSP, whose six MSPs were now openly in a state of civil war. Sheridan for his part eventually formed a new political party, Solidarity, which would compete with the SSP at future elections for the hard-left vote.
Jack McConnell in the meantime had settled into his second term quietly, watching as his rivals imploded before his eyes. The largest story involving him between August and December 2004 was when he was present as a small ceremony marked the end of tolls on the Skye Bridge.
McConnell was, however to have a more difficult start to the new year, however when a survey of the Scottish Parliament building which cost £430 million, revealed that insulation behind the granite facade could be damaged, missing, or water-logged, followed shortly by news that the windows above the chamber could be cracked. This was a further embarrassment to the Executive, at a time when it was hoped the issues over the cost of the building were behind them.
The new year saw the parties move into full election mode for the upcoming UK General Election. That the SDP chose to fight all fifty-nine seats did not help the SNP at all. It also aided the campaign of the other parties. As a result, on May 5th 2005, the election saw the blackest day the SNP had suffered since the day Thatcher got elected and they got reduced to just two MPs. Alex Salmond held off the Conservatives by 108 votes after the SDP ran a strong campaign splitting the Nationalist vote and in the Western Isles, Angus MacNeil held off the SDP challenge by just 2 votes, with Labour a further 7 votes behind, this being after three full recounts. Aside from that, the seats which changed hands that night were Perth and North Perthshire, Angus and Moray, all of which went to the Conservatives and Dundee East which went to the Labour Party.
This left the electoral map of Scotland with 41 Labour MPs, 11 Liberal Democrats, 4 Conservatives and 2 Nationalists. In terms of percentage of the vote, the Labour party were down on 2001, but had held on due to the split in the SNP vote, the Liberal Democrats secured their best ever Scottish result, winning over 23% of the vote, and the Conservatives finished third, benefiting from the nationalist split somewhat. The SNP, whose night was a disaster, won 10.9% of the vote. The SDP, whilst not winning any seats came close in several seats, nearly taking Falkirk from Labour along with the Western Isles. In terms of percentage of the vote, they ended up with 8.1%.