Ajockalypse now

ON MAY 8TH Scottish voters woke up to a political landslide: overnight the Scottish National Party (SNP) won almost all of Scotland’s 59 seats, up from six in 2010. Opinion polls had predicted a surge for the separatist party. But even the most bullish nationalists seemed astonished at the scale of their victory. It shows how profoundly Scottish politics has swung to their cause. It therefore points to a potential break-up of the United Kingdom.

Some commentators imagined support for the SNP would drop after last year’s referendum on Scottish independence, in which some 55% of Scots plumped to stay within the union. Instead, the opposite: the SNP’s membership has since quadrupled, to over 100,000. It has also broadened its support, expanding into regions that recorded a strong “No” majority in September. With barely 5% of the vote nationally, the SNP has become the third-largest party in Westminster.

What explains this success? Tactical reasons include the strength of its ground war: with a young and enthusiastic membership, the “Nats” have canvassed frenetically, especially on social media, in a way that other parties can only hope to imitate. Many of its candidates are similarly youthful: Mhairi Black, vanquisher of the Labour campaign chief Douglas Alexander, is at 20 years old, the youngest MP for more than two centuries. Youthful enthusiasm also helped boost the Scottish turnout rate, which was over 75% in some seats.

The SNP’s attack on the coalition’s spending cuts is another huge part of its appeal to the disaffected Labour voters who were its main new recruits. Its manifesto pledges to scrap an unpopular scheme to dock housing benefit from social tenants with a spare bedroom, and to reintroduce a bonus tax for bankers. Although many of its pledges are similar to Labour’s, it has positioned itself as the more radical party. That points to a longstanding leaden-footedness in Scottish Labour, who many voters considered to have treated their country as a “branch office” of Westminster. By contrast the separatists’ sharp-witted leader, Nicola Sturgeon, was the stand-out performer of the campaign.

Yet the big reason for the SNP surge is the party’s success in propagating a view that Scotland is fundamentally different from the rest of the United Kingdom. They claim that it is more socially liberal, greener, and far more left-wing. That is bogus. Poll after poll shows that on almost any conceivable issue, including the ideal role and size of the state, Scots are little different from other Britons. Nonetheless, the notion of Scotland being so exceptional as to require separate statehood is potent.

This has smashed Labour, which won 41 seats in Scotland in 2010, and will now have a small handful at best. Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader, was another casualty—seeing his 10,000-vote majority blown away like chaff. And with the Tories returned to power in Westminster, the prospect of the SNP resuming its push for independence looks pressing.

With the Conservatives having, at best, a single seat in Scotland, David Cameron will lead an almost English-only party. This makes the Tories seem even more alien to separatist Scots. Should the EU referendum Mr Cameron has promised lead to a “Brexit”, which Scots do not want, the clamour for national dismemberment would rise.

To prevent that, Mr Cameron needs to launch his own assault on the SNP’s flawed arguments. Despite claiming to be a more “progressive” party than Labour, in Scotland the SNP has overseen cuts to funding for hospitals and schools. Yet such arguments, though imperative, will not alone draw Scots back from the warpath towards independence. That is likely to require a far bolder constitutional rethink—perhaps amounting to a new federal United Kingdom. The thinking must start now.