What Lisa Cameron’s defection means for Conservative party and SNP

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Good morning. Lisa Cameron, history-maker: the MP for East Kilbride has become the first SNP MP ever to leave the SNP and join a unionist party after defecting to the Conservatives on the eve of the SNP’s annual conference. But in many ways, Cameron herself is the least interesting part of the story. Some more thoughts on that below.

Leaving the SNP behind

It is a story almost as old as the party system: an MP becomes estranged from their party over a major issue, is deselected by their local party, and defects to another party. Lisa Cameron is in many ways a typical example: she voted against extending the right to an abortion to Northern Ireland and is a religious conservative in a party that increasingly isn’t a happy home for religious conservatives.

She had lost a crucial vote in her constituency party and faced a run-off against a challenger she had a real risk of losing. Now she has defected to a rival party on the eve of her party’s conference. She blames “bullying” in the SNP’s Westminster group of MPs which, again, is not a surprising or new part of the story. Defectors have always had these stories, sometimes real, sometimes invented.

None of this is particularly interesting, other than the fact Cameron’s previous party was the SNP, and she has joined the Conservatives, an avowedly unionist party, which no SNP politician has ever done before. Indeed, defection from the SNP is very rare indeed. There have been 87 SNP MPs elected since Robert Macintyre won the Motherwell by-election in 1945. Just three sitting MPs have defected to another party, ever.

Here’s another fun fact: all three of the MPs to do so (Neale Hanvey, Kenny Macaskill and now Lisa Cameron) have all defected during this parliament. Cameron’s move is part of a bigger story: the SNP, once famous for its unity in public, has become in many ways just another regular party, every bit as prone to division and defection as everyone else.

I used to think that the SNP’s divisions over trans rights had brought about a wider change in the party and that the very public divisions over sex and gender had broken the taboo on public infighting, ushering in a new era in which the SNP, like every other party, washed its dirty linen in public.

But I now think that was wrong: I think the SNP’s rows over gender recognition reform just happened to be a case of “right place, right time”. I now think that the vital moment came when Boris Johnson opted to block the SNP’s request for another referendum.

This was a big gamble. Lots of people (including, embarrassingly enough, me) thought this would galvanise support for independence to a level where it couldn’t be ignored. In my defence, I was in good company: privately, many in Westminster, including several people in Johnson’s inner circle thought that if support for independence reached two-thirds of the Scottish public, then avoiding another referendum would become untenable.

But instead support for separation did not mount, there was no significant public outcry, and it became clear that, for the moment at least, a British prime minister could simply say “no, not yet” to requests for another referendum.

I now think it was that event, and with it, the pushing of the SNP’s major aim into the long grass, which triggered the SNP’s newfound appetite for infighting.

The secret of the SNP’s success — even when “success” meant a handful of MPs at Westminster and the odd by-election victory — has been its ability to win the support of the vast majority of pro-independence voters. Plaid Cymru’s great challenge in Wales has been that it has never done this — there have always been prominent politicians in the Welsh Labour party whose sympathy for Welsh independence has been an open secret, and I have even met one or two eccentric Welsh Conservatives who are open to the idea. That has placed a hard ceiling on Plaid Cymru’s electoral appeal.

The SNP, however, has been able to hold together social and economic conservatives like Kate Forbes in the same party as left-liberals such as Humza Yousaf. That has now changed, and increasingly the SNP is struggling to contain its rebels and mavericks which is far better news for opponents of Scottish independence than that one MP has joined the Tory party.

The House of the Rising Sunak

Speaking of the Tory party, though . . . it is also really interesting that she has been welcomed into the Conservative party. Here’s what Cameron now has to say about Scottish independence:

Families like mine experienced significant division regarding the issue of independence. This has taken its toll and I have come to the conclusion that it is more helpful to focus my energies upon constructive policies that benefit everyone across the four nations of the UK, and to move towards healing these divisions for the collective good.

Note that none of this is the same as saying “I now think Scottish independence is undesirable”. She’s just saying that it is divisive and the time has come to focus on other things. This is quite a mealy-mouthed statement, and it is striking that the Conservative leadership have welcomed her to the fold. Yes, for reasons I’ve already set out, I think the Conservative party’s hopes of killing Scottish independence are better served by having an open door for people who share Tory principles and are in favour of Scottish independence in theory. But I wasn’t aware that Douglas Ross or Rishi Sunak shared that belief.

The real story here, though, is that one way Rishi Sunak is changing politics is that he is making the Conservative party a home — perhaps the only home — for religious conservatives, regardless of their faith. We may well look back on that as the most significant thing about his leadership.

Now try this

I’ve just finished Ann Patchett’s latest novel Tom Lake — I took a while to warm to it, and at first, only the fact I was gripped by the plot, and my general affection for all things Patchett, made up for the fact I found it a little bit twee. But it grew on me and is worth persisting with, though I don’t think it is quite as good as her previous novel, The Dutch House. Zehra Munir’s review is here.

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