Wings Over Scotland

There’s currently a fake “petition” on the Labour website.

Ostensibly it’s gathering signatures representing opposition to the bedroom tax, but in fact its only purpose is to harvest email addresses so that Labour can then bombard unwitting recipients with dodgy, untruthful solicitations for cash. (What would actually be the point of a petition about the bedroom tax at this stage?)

That’s not the terrible thing about it, though.

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Let’s start with the obvious: nobody has a clue who’s going to win the 2015 general election. But almost without exception, commentators are saying that should Labour’s vote collapse in Scotland to the extent that current polling says it will, it will radically alter Ed Miliband’s chances of kicking David Cameron out of 10 Downing Street.

That’s a message that Labour are delighted to hear, because their entire Scottish electoral strategy/manifesto is the phrase “If you vote SNP the Tories will get back in”. Now, we already know that on the empirical level that’s complete cobblers – the Tories historically get in when the SNP vote is lowest.

But it could be fairly argued that those statistics are correlation rather than causation, isolated as they are from the rest of the UK’s results. So we decided to take a more detailed look at some of the possible scenarios from this May’s vote and see if the Nats really could let the Tories in.

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We’re pretty sure the Daily Record is just trolling us on purpose at this point.

Wait, Labour pushed for a what now?

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Ed Balls today gave an interview to Sky News in which the would-be Chancellor appeared to explicitly rule out a Labour/SNP coalition for the first time, maintaining that the party is only interested in a majority. Yet the more strenuously Labour insist on a majority, the further from their grasp it slips.

Just over a year ago we ran an article suggesting that the opinion polls masked a much stronger position for the Conservatives than they seemed to show. We noted that when the election came round, it was likely that when UKIP supporters faced the reality of First Past The Post in seats where they had no sensible hope of winning, a significant proportion of them would reluctantly vote Tory instead to secure the EU referendum that is their defining goal.

Now we have some numbers on that.

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The kerfuffle on social media right now over some votes on fracking in the House of Commons tonight would probably dislodge a fair amount of gas trapped in rock by itself. Claim and counter-claim are zinging around furiously, but we eventually found a factual précis that even idiots like us could understand. Buckle up.

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It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.

Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.

But readers might be wise to be sceptical.

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Official poster from the Tories:

Official leaflet from Labour:

So if Scots vote SNP in May, both Ed Miliband and David Cameron will get in. Glad we cleared that up. We might start work on some sort of handy translation chart (“vote Green get Ulster Unionist”; “vote UKIP get Monster Raving Loony”), so if you spot any more do drop us a line.

Actually, that last one’s true, isn’t it?

Tonight’s Question Time for some reason featured a question about the SNP, which Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and UKIP representatives got to discuss at length with nobody from the SNP (or even from Scotland) there to respond. It was an enlightening insight into England’s attitude to the Scots as a whole, not just the SNP. Here’s how it went.

We recommend all of it, but UKIP’s Paul Nuttall is the star, from 3m 42s.

The No camp really do seem to be the world’s worst winners. In a mischievous piece of trolling today, the First Minister announced that the SNP’s policy of not voting on English matters at Westminster was to come to an end, and that it would intervene for the protection of the NHS, on the reasonable grounds of avoiding Barnett cuts to the Scottish budget were privatisation south of the border to lead to lower spending.

The reaction from Labour and the Tories was predictable, with the latter accusing Sturgeon of throwing principle “out the window”. George Osborne, furthermore, was quoted in the Telegraph telling a Commons committee that:

“I think it would be very unfair to the whole United Kingdom if we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was beholden on Scottish Nationalist votes in the next Parliament.”

And readers might be forgiven for thinking “Hang on, isn’t that what you wanted?”

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In a post earlier today we quoted some extracts from the political memoirs of former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on the subject of the infamous 1979 vote of no confidence which resulted from his government overturning the Yes result of the Scottish devolution referendum that year, as a result of a Labour MP’s amendment to the bill which meant that it required an effectively impossible threshold for a Yes vote.

Callaghan said of the amendment:

“This provision was carried by a majority of fifteen, with as many as thirty-four Labour Members voting against the Government. I have since wondered whether those thirty-four Labour Members would have voted as they did if they had been able to foresee that their votes on that evening would precipitate a General Election in 1979, at the least favourable time for their Government.”

He blamed the rebels on his own benches, rather than the SNP, for ultimately bringing about the collapse of his government and opening the door to the victory of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. And we’ve often wondered who they were.

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