David Torrance's blog

An OurKingdom symposium: see also articles by Gerry Hassan, James Mitchell and Gareth Young

Like any sensible political party confident of electoral victory the UK Conservatives are already preparing for the uncharted territory of sharing power with an SNP minority Scottish Government. The French call it cohabitation, but unlike France the UK lacks a constitution that sets out the rules of the game.  

The Tory challenge, therefore, is largely a tactical one, particularly as the existence of a Scottish Parliament precludes any prospect of a government ‘imposing' domestic policies on a Scotland which voted yellow, red and orange rather than blue. For the SNP too, this is the undiscovered country from which no MSP has yet returned.

Some old SNP battle cries will, however, re-emerge from the mist of the 1980s. Some SNP MPs have already raised the prospect of David Cameron winning a general election with ‘no mandate' north of the border, while the austerity in public spending laid out by the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne at last week's Tory conference is sure to be attacked as ‘anti-Scottish'.

Cameron and his advisers are not stupid. They realize that their biggest challenge on forming a government with only two or three Scottish MPs is to prevent a repeat of the situation the Conservative Party got itself into during the Thatcher years. Exactly how this will be attempted (saying ‘achieved' would be too presumptuous) already seems clear.