Murdo Fraser is the frontrunner in the election for leader of the Scottish Conservatives. He has caused quite a stir by pledging, if he wins, to split from the UK Conservative Party. The new party would have its own identity and policies but still sit with the Tories in Westminster. The idea is to create a centre-right party which is 'much more attractive to ... people in Scotland'.
This idea isn't as revolutionary as it might sound. As Fraser points out, the Scottish party had a separate identity before 1965 as the Unionist Party. A similar set-up exists in Germany today. There, the centre-right CSU (Christian Social Union) acts as the Bavarian sister-party to the national CDU (Christian Democrat Union). This arrangement has existed since the War and has been so successful that the CSU has not lost power in Bavaria for half a century.
The independent Unionists experienced similar (if not quite as total) success in the years before 1965. Indeed, there seems no reason to believe the Scottish are intrinsically left-wing. Nonetheless, the fortunes of the Scottish Conservative Party has inexorably declined over the past 50 years. By 1997, they had no MPs left in the Commons. Today, they have just one.
The Scottish Conservative Party has lost its connection with centre-right voters north of the border. That has not just been bad for the party. It has denied those voters a voice in Scottish politics. That is bad for democracy.
A drastic change is needed. The creation of a separate party, with its own identity and policies, seems the best hope yet for relaunching progressive right-wing politics in Scotland. In the absence of a credible alternative, it's at least worth a shot.
The Conservative Party has always been at its best when acting as the radical force of British politics. It is at its worst when defending a rotten status quo. It happened in 1997 and the Party was decimated. In Scotland it never recovered. Unless it grasps the nettle and makes itself relevant to a modern Scotland, it seems hard to see why it ever should.
