EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND: It will soon be July 4, when Americans in Akron and elsewhere celebrate independence from Britain and, in this election year 2024, some of them may be wondering about the state of our democracy.
Here in the United Kingdom, July 4 will also be a democratic landmark, in that it will be election day. Unless the opinion surveys are off the mark to a truly historic degree, it appears that the Conservative Party (aka the Tories — Britain’s oldest party, with roots in the late 17th century) will be unseated after 14 years in power, and the new prime minister will be Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party.
This election looks particularly interesting in Scotland, the northern nation of the United Kingdom (a political marriage formed in 1707). Here, a type of national pride as well as an antipathy to the Tories dating back to deindustrialization and the Margaret Thatcher years has moved many Scots to seek full independence from the U.K.
The last time independence was explicitly on the ballot, in the form of a simple yes/no referendum, was September 2014; the Scots voted 55% to 45% to remain in formal union with England. But much has happened since then, particularly Brexit, which a large majority of Scots voters opposed, leaving them to feel that they were dragged out of the European Union against their will.
The view from Scotland
This disenchantment with the London (technically Westminster, where the U.K. Parliament meets) government has led many Scots to support the explicitly nationalist Scottish National Party (SNP) or its sometime junior partner the Green Party, also committed to an independent Scotland. The other major parties (the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and Labour) are officially committed to preserving the union but, in a bid to woo Scottish nationalist voters, Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar (the leader of Scotland’s Labour Party) have been downplaying that issue.
If this all sounds pretty confusing, that’s because it can be, given the various layers of representation. Since 1999, Scotland and Wales have both had their own regional parliaments as well, Scotland’s dominated by the SNP and Wales’s by Labour. But the July 4 election is for the elected part of the U.K. Parliament (the House of Commons) only.
That parliament, with roots dating back to the 13th century, has 650 elected members, directly elected from constituencies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the Tory leader, took a huge gamble May 22 and called for this election, he was in effect asking King Charles III to dissolve parliament. Now all 650 members have to win their seats back, unless they’ve decided to retire.
Unlike in the U.S., British election seasons are short; the campaigning began in late May and will end on July 4. And voters will certainly have choices: in every constituency in the U.K. at least five candidates filed to run. In the constituency of Edinburgh North and Leith, where I reside when I’m here, we have received leaflets from candidates ranging from Reform UK (a party led by Donald Trump acolyte Nigel Farage) on the right to the Communist Party of Britain on the left, with several other options in between.
Afraid to face the voters?
Voters don’t choose the prime minister; they vote for a member of Parliament, and the leader of the party which ends up with the most candidates elected becomes the prime minister (or, technically, they are invited by the monarch to form a government). The last general election was in 2019 and in fact the last two prime ministers (Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss) did not get that office via general elections; they got it by winning party leadership votes.
This last point has led critics to complain that recent Tory governments have been afraid to face the voters, particularly since former Prime Minister Boris Johnson went down in flames in 2022 over his blatant flouting of COVID restrictions, among other things. By law, there has to be a general election at least every five years, which would have meant by next January at the latest. It appears that Sunak decided things weren’t going to get appreciably better for voters by then. Inflation has finally calmed down, but living standards have declined under 14 years of Tory rule, and Brexit still stings for many. He may also have thought that an election held during summer holidays might yield a lower turnout, aiding his party.
How will this play out in Scotland? The SNP, which won 43 out of 59 Scottish seats in the 2019 election, is expected to lose some ground to Labour, which won only two Scottish seats that year. The question is how much ground? The SNP has been rocked by recent scandals.
Its popular party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, abruptly resigned early last year and it soon emerged that her husband, the former chief executive of the party, was under investigation for misuse of party funds. Since then, like the Tories, the SNP has had two leaders (and thus two first ministers of Scotland) without facing an election, either for the U.K. parliament or the Scottish parliament.
Critics of the SNP argue that it devotes too much attention to the cause of independence and not enough attention to governing Scotland effectively, given that many governing powers are devolved to the Scottish parliament, which the SNP controls. From 1959 until 2010 the Labour Party controlled a majority of Scottish seats in the U.K. parliament, but it was then eclipsed by the SNP in Scotland just as it was also eclipsed by the Tories in Westminster.
Handover of power
Many U.K. Labour governments needed Scottish support to maintain their majorities and it was also in 2010 that U.K. Tory leader David Cameron became prime minister, ending 13 years of Labour governments. For all its complications, the U.K. political system is remarkably stable; assuming Labour wins on July 4, it will be only the third handover of power from one party to another since 1979.
So on American Independence Day, British voters will likely vote to free themselves from Tory rule (students of history will recall that American supporters of British rule in the colonies were called “Tories” in 1776).
But the question here in the northern U.K. is whether Scottish voters will be so excited about overthrowing Tory rule that they shelve their own independence aspirations for a while, which is what a big shift to Labour would indicate.
Democracy is a complicated balancing act.
Dr. Michael Graham. Ph.D., is a professor of history at the University of Akron.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: University of Akron history professor awaits landmark election in UK
