Over the weekend, I was given a historical question to ponder by our good friends in the RTE History Show (presented by Myles Dungan on Radio 1, between 6 and 7 on Sunday evenings – you should listen, it’s very good).
Their question was: can the SNP’s sweeping victory in the Westminster election be compared to Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph in 1918, the election that paved the way for Irish independence?
It seems to me the answer is yes – and no. And that 1918 might not be the most relevant Irish parallel.
Let’s start with the similarities. Last Thursday, the SNP won 50% of the votes, and 56 of the 59 seats on offer. Labour with 24.3%, the Conservatives with 14.9%, and the Lib Dems with 7.5% all took a seat each
In 1918, across the 32 counties of Ireland, Sinn Féin won 46.9% of the vote and 73 seats; Unionists won 25.3% and 22 seats while their allies the Labour Unionists took 3% of the vote and 3 seats; and the once dominant Nationalists or Home Rule Party won 21.7% of the vote, but just 6 seats.
So the first similarity is the advantage that the First Past the Post electoral system gives to a party on the rise – almost a clean sweep of seats for the SNP with just half the votes, a slightly less dramatic victory for Sinn Féin with a slightly lower vote.
I should point out here that 25 of the Irish seats were uncontested in 1918, presumably because opponents knew Sinn Féin would do extremely well – it is certainly arguable that had people in these constituencies voted, the Sinn Féin average would have been higher. (Myles Dungan and I disagreed on this point, but as he’s not here to argue with me, I’ll just claim I’m correct).
The second similarity is that both Sinn Féin and the SNP were up against a party so long in power, and so unused to having to campaign, that their organisation had atrophied. Labour in Scotland, and the Home Rule Party in Ireland, were old, stale, and unable to cope with an electoral insurgency.
The third similarity is the help London gave to Sinn Féin in 1918 and the SNP last week. Many of the Sinn Féin leaders were actually in prison at the time of the election, locked up as a result of a bogus “German Plot”. This naturally gave them huge positive publicity in Ireland. While David Cameron didn’t actually throw Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond into jail, he did spend weeks denigrating them, and the potential influence they could have at Westminster. The British press also attacked the SNP, with a particularly vile sexist tinge to coverage of Sturgeon. All this worked a treat in middle England, where it scared voters into supporting the Tories; it also had an effect in Scotland, deepening support for the SNP.
But there are differences too. The first is that Ireland in 1918 still had an Ulster Question, or at least a North-East corner of Ireland question. The SNP doesn’t seem to have a similar geographically concentrated group of opponents, divided from the main body of nationalists by religion. If they had, they would face the same choices faced by Irish nationalists if they press ahead with independence: partition, coercion, repatriation, or persuasion.
The second difference is that the SNP deploys no latent threat of violence. The same cannot be said of Sinn Féin in 1918. It was, after all, just two and a half years since the Easter Rising; the Volunteers had been reorganised; and the Sinn Féin manifesto gave a broad hint that violence was certainly possible. It spoke of abstaining from Westminster, establishing an Irish representative assembly, and appealing to be heard at the Peace Conference following the end of the war. But it also promised to make “use of any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection by military force or otherwise”.
But the biggest difference is, perhaps, abstention. Sinn Féin had no intention of going to Westminster; the SNP have nowhere else to go. Their new MPs can’t set themselves up as a Scottish Parliament, as there already is one!
Perhaps a better parallel for the SNP is the General Election of 1885, when the new leader of the Home Rule Party, Parnell, tightened discipline, improved party structures, and took advantage of a wider electorate to increase his number of MPs from 63 to 85. He then used this disciplined bloc at Westminster to support first the Tories and then the Liberals, extracting a promise to introduce Home Rule as the price of the switch. The SNP dream must be that at some point it will hold the balance of power and be able to get what it wants from Westminster – and all entirely peacefully.
David McCullagh
