Angus Robertson: why Labour should work with the SNP

“There are a range of senior figures within the Labour party in England who would be prepared to work together,” as part of a non-coalition deal after the election, claims the SNP’s Westminster leader Angus Robertson, speaking to Prospect in an interview last week. The notion was yesterday dismissed as “ridiculous” by a Labour spokesperson. The latter party has ruled out a coalition pact with the SNP.

Robertson claims, too, that the potential for the two parties to work together has existed for longer than this pre-election period. Shortly after the last general election in 2010, he says, "I was telephoned at home by a then member of the Labour government, a Cabinet minister, who wished to explore whether there was a potential for cooperation in the circumstances then. I said, 'yes, there were, we'd be happy to have discussions about it.’” That became impossible, however, after the party "ruled out cooperation with the SNP and let the Tories in,” as Robertson puts it. A senior Labour figure close to the 2010 coalition negotiations told Prospect that the idea of a “wider coalition involving [the] SNP” was briefly and tentatively considered at the time, but “fell away quickly because it was clear the Lib Dems had designs on the Conservatives not us.”

As I meet Robertson, the SNP MP for Moray since 2001, in his Commons office he’s just finished a phone call. He’s been trying to sort out a satellite dish for his mother’s home. Based in a small town in his northern Scottish constituency, he finds it hard, he explains, having to cram all his London work into half a week in Westminster even though home keeps intruding. He was born in London, and says there is “more to commend” the city “than the institution which is the Westminster parliament.” It’s the latter which he wants to leave: he and his party would rather he were based in Holyrood helping run an independent Scotland.

But, having just lost out on that chance last September, the SNP are going to be stuck down here for a while, and will have to deal with their Unionist rivals if they want to influence government. Polls suggest they could win 35 or more seats in the Commons, meaning they could hold the balance of power and help to decide who forms the next government. They’ve ruled out a deal with the Conservatives, and Salmond has told the New Statesman they’d try to bring down a Tory minority government by voting against that government's initial "vote of confidence.” So these comments are part of an attempt to present his party as Labour’s to lose or gain. But how would such an arrangement work? Could two parties who’ve been at loggerheads for so long work effectively in government?

Labour has ruled out a formal deal with the Scottish nationalists, but Robertson, the 45-year-old SNP MP for Moray since 2001, will play a significant role in any post-election negotiations and says his party and Labour can find common ground as part of a more informal deal. His party's public spending plans promise an end to extreme austerity, including a rise of 0.5 per cent in departmental spending, and there are Labour MPs who also oppose Ed Miliband’s commitment to some measure of continued cuts. Robertson says that he thinks progressives within Labour and other parties will welcome "the opportunity of a parliamentary cooperation with a much more ambitious progressive agenda: with a key target of a new approach instead of the austerity cuts proposed by the Tories [and] wasting £100bn on Trident renewal, [as well as] being genuinely ambitious when it comes to reform of the inter-relationship between the nations and regions of the UK.”

And he’s got a clear warning for Ed Miliband’s party: work with us or risk bringing any future referendum forward. He says he thinks that failure to work with the SNP on the part of other progressive parties (the Greens and Plaid Cymru have pledged to work with the SNP to defeat austerity) and thus “decide that they want to leave the field clear for the damaging governance of the Tories,” would “certainly hasten Scotland's independence.”

Plus, he says, he and Miliband have form: “I worked very well on a personal level with Ed Miliband and his colleagues in the run up to and during the Syria vote,” he says, “I think that was a pretty good example of what progressive cooperation could mean in better decision making, better results, and signposting an alternative future.” Miliband name checked his own resistance to war in Syria during last week’s #battlefornumber10 leaders showcase on Sky news as a key moment in his leadership. The SNP have long called for an “ethical” foreign policy, and have said that an independent Scotland would ban the sale of Scottish arms to repressive regimes. Foreign policy and defence are reserved powers in the UK, meaning they are run from Westminster and the SNP has previously had little influence over them.

Among his policy priorities for any deal in the next parliament, other than Sturgeon’s softer spending plans, are the devolution of power from Westminster and Whitehall and parliamentary and electoral reform such as extending the vote to 16 and 17 year olds. His party has already said it would vote to scrap the nuclear defence system Trident, and Robertson—also his party's defence spokesman—doesn't commit to keeping defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP, calling the target a “notional spending commitment” which is artificial, including as it does administrative spending such as Ministry of Defence pensions. He also wants to win his party greater representation on parliament's select committees, which work on a nonpartisan basis to hold the government to account.

There has been some hostility in the press towards the idea of a separatist party helping to rule the UK. As a nationalist, can he understand why English people don’t like the idea of being governed in part by a party they haven’t voted for? “We've been enduring that for many decades in Scotland, so it's something that we are well aware of,” he says, but “our agenda is one which on many levels is supported by people in England:” plenty of people across the land want a different tack on austerity and radical reform of the way the UK is governed.

Does he think his party, which has said it could try to influence a Labour budget, might struggle with economic credibility as another possible criticism, given that the Treasury recently concluded that falling oil prices would have left an £18.6bn "black hole" in SNP assumptions for an independent Scotland drawn up during the referendum? “I think people will reflect on the fact that the SNP has balanced the budget every year since taking power in Scotland in 2007. That's of course something that neither the Tories nor the Labour party can claim to have done at a UK level,” he says.

It’s clear that Labour is where the SNP is firmly pinning its hopes. He rules out to me again any action by the SNP which would allow a Tory government: “‘Tory’ is still a four letter word in Scotland,” he says. As for the Lib Dems, he’s willing to work with the party but is vague on whether he would work with Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander. He says it’s “unlikely” he’ll have to worry about the latter “because we’re working very hard to defeat him in Inverness”—a recent constituency poll by Lord Ashcroft put the SNP’s candidate Drew Hendry ahead of his Lib Dem rival by 29 points. And Clegg? “I’m not quite sure how the voters of Sheffield will judge [him].”

But, in the long term, he thinks his political future lies in an independent Scotland. “The people of Scotland will determine the speed of change,” he says, “but you can already see that there are issues such as Trident renewal in the face of Scottish opposition… [that] will profoundly influence the speed at which Scots decide to take the next step towards independence.”

“I believe it to be inevitable and I would wish it to happen as quickly as possible.”