The Winnie Ewing effect

Many of the tributes to Winnie Ewing, who died yesterday, will rightly focus on her victory as the SNP candidate in Hamilton in 1967, which literally changed Scottish politics forever.   Apart from a few weeks at the end of the Second World War, the SNP had never held representation in Westminster prior to that landmark moment, but they've held it continuously ever since.

But for my money her biggest electoral achievement of all was single-handedly transforming the European Parliament constituency of Highlands & Islands from a three-way SNP-Liberal-Conservative marginal into an SNP fortress over the course of a decade and a half.  She was the SNP candidate on all four occasions that the enormous constituency, covering roughly one-eighth of the population of Scotland, was contested.

Highlands and Islands results in European Parliament elections:

1979:

SNP 34.0%

Liberals 30.7%

Conservatives 26.1%

Labour 9.2%

1984:

SNP 41.8% (+7.8)

Liberal-SDP Alliance 28.1% (-2.6)

Conservatives 16.0% (-10.1)

Labour 14.1% (+4.9)

1989:

SNP 51.5% (+9.7)

Conservatives 16.8% (+0.8)

Labour 13.9% (-0.2)

Greens 9.5% (n/a)

Social and Liberal Democrats 8.3% (-19.8)

1994:

SNP 58.4% (+6.9)

Labour 15.6% (+1.7)

Conservatives 12.3% (-4.5)

Liberal Democrats 10.1% (+1.8)

Greens 2.4% (-7.1)

UKIP 0.8% (n/a)

Natural Law Party 0.4% (n/a)

Make no mistake - a big part of those increases was the ever-growing personal vote for Winnie Ewing.  Not all of it, admittedly, because the SNP made big advances nationally in both 1989 and 1994, with the latter being at the time the highest national share of the vote (32.6%) the party had ever received in any type of election, even eclipsing October 1974.  Nevertheless, the bulk of the Westminster constituencies that overlapped with Highlands & Islands remained firmly in Liberal Democrat hands until as late as 2015, which gives you a guide as to the extent to which Winnie Ewing was denying gravity with her own results.

At around the time she left the European Parliament in 1999, she became one of Holyrood's inaugural MSPs, and famously chaired the first session, taking the opportunity to utter a line that caught the popular imagination so much that BBC Scotland even integrated it into their title sequence for the official opening of the Parliament a couple of months later: "The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March, in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened."  To this day her children Fergus Ewing and Annabelle Ewing carry on the family tradition as MSPs, with the latter serving as a current Deputy Presiding Officer of the Parliament.  Another famous member of the Ewing clan was Fergus's late wife Margaret, who was leader of the SNP group at Westminster between 1987 and 1999.

It's thus horribly ironic that stories started surfacing this week that the Yousaf leadership plans to withdraw the SNP whip from Fergus Ewing.  The blogger Paul Kavanagh even used his column in The National yesterday to call for the SNP to give Mr Ewing the boot.  The timing is of course just a tragic coincidence, and I'm sure Paul will be mortified about it.  Nevertheless, out of common decency it's surely now unthinkable that the SNP will go ahead with their plan of expelling Mr Ewing in the short-term, and hopefully they'll now have the space to reflect and forget the whole thing in the longer-term.  The Kavanagh column implied, as the controversial journalist David Leask might put it, that Mr Ewing is somehow not "real SNP".  But as SNP members look back on his mother's legacy, they'll surely ask themselves the simple question: "if the Ewings aren't real SNP, who actually is?"  

Paul Kavanagh branded Mr Ewing a Tory, and said the only thing that separates him from "yer actual Tories" was his belief in Scottish independence.  I doubt if that's true, actually, but even if it is, and with all due respect to Paul, it's belief in independence that is supposed to separate SNP politicians from unionist parties.  Fergus Ewing might have been a Tory if he hadn't believed in independence.  Margo MacDonald might have been Labour.  Kate Forbes might have been a Lib Dem.  But they all joined the same party because it was independence they had in common.  But now?  Why would it seem so obvious to Paul Kavanagh that independence-supporting Fergus Ewing belongs outside the SNP and the (effectively) opponent of independence Ben Macpherson belongs within it?  What does that tell us about the core principle of the SNP in 2023 - the one that defines who is inside the tribe and who is outside?  Is it trans rights? Pronouns? Bottle return schemes?

Hopefully today's tragic news will play a small part in helping the SNP to step back, and reconnect with what they once were as a party, and should never, ever have stopped being.