Anyway I look at it, this spells trouble for the United Kingdom:
Just 15 percent of Scots voted for the Conservatives, the party that will now govern the entire U.K., Scotland included, on its own terms and without the mitigating force of a coalition.
The Tories’ plans include a doubling down on austerity policies that the SNP ran pledging to reverse but that it will have little power to stop despite winning 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Parliament. That will likely strengthen the SNP’s argument that Scotland is better off on its own.
“It’s absolutely perfect for them. It plays to all their narratives about the differences between England and Scotland and the wickedness of the Tories,” said Torrance, who has written biographies of the SNP’s top leaders. “They can just sit back and reap the benefits.”
Obviously, the cultural, political, and historical factors in play in the U.K. are distinct and have no perfect corollaries in American society. But just try to imagine what would have happened if George W. Bush had been reelected in 2004 despite getting roughly 15% of the vote in New England. Imagine if a third party had swept virtually every seat from Westchester County, New York to the northern tip of Maine after running on a platform diametrically opposed to both Bush’s foreign and domestic policies, and yet discovered that they had no power in Congress and no real ability to change the behavior of the Bush administration.
Finally, imagine that New England had the ability to vote themselves out of the United States without threatening a new civil war.
That’s kind of what is going on in Britain, and unless the Tories show some serious restraint in pushing ahead with the agenda that they now have the power to enact, they’re going to make it so Scots overwhelmingly decide that they’d rather be governed by people who share at least one or two important values with them.
The Scots want left-wing government. They just rejected the center-left parties resoundingly, had a giant unprecedented victory, and will get a more emboldened conservative government as their reward. This cannot sit well with them.
The U.K. is coming apart.