So today national Labour leader, Ed Miliband declared that there will be no coalition with the Scottish Nationalist Party: ‘There will be no SNP ministers in any government I lead’, he declared.
This is too little, far too late and only under pressure.
If he could make this statement today, with this bravado – why could he not have made this position clear from the outset – or at any time since?
Was he considering the matter and wiser counsel dissuaded him? Or was he against it but more foolish counsel prevented him from laying out the party position.
And how clear is this position in any case? The Labour leader has been very careful to say nothing at all about his willingness to enter into a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with the separatist SNP to get his party into government.
The SNP tariff would be no less for this than it would have been for a coalition. Either way they would be shoring up a Labour administration on a hefty full-fiscal-devolution-and-no-Trident pro quo.
The only difference now is that without a coalition, some SNP members [hard luck, Alex] will not be strutting their stuff it as ministers at Westminster.
Had Mr Miliband made this very same statement at the outset, no one would even have thought of asking the second question about confidence and supply now.
Being forced unwillingly to the stump today simply keeps suspicion alive. There is certainty as to the Labour leader’s direction travel; and doubt only about his means of deploying the volunteer SNP.
This has been an issue wholly ineptly handed by the Labour party and by its leader.
Even if you subtract principle – which the Labour party has unashamedly done on this matter – just look at the electoral maths.
The result of the 2010 UK General Election saw Labour with 258 sets out of the overall 650 available, with 326 needed for an overall majority. Of the 59 seats from Scotland, Labour took 41, the SNP 6 and the Liberal Democrats 11.
With Labour and the SNP apparently set to work together after the May 2015 election, in office or out of it, formally or informally and for the same SNP tariff – the 41 seats that Labour won last time will be available again to support the party – even if a substantial number of those 41 seats have transferred to SNP colours.
Add another 10 seats – the 6 current SNP seats and perhaps 4 the SNP may take from the Liberal Democrats [and forget the 2 seats Labour have lost from their overall 258 tally at the 2010 election].
If nothing else changed, from this scenario,the number of seats/votes in the House of Commons that Labour could deliver would be 268.
But Labour’s evasions on the matter of taking support from the SNP are known to be costing it votes in its English seats. Voters there, already disaffected, will not be at all reassured by today’s obvious dissimulation. The party may well lose some seats south of the border on this issue. The current Conservative poster campaign, using ALex Salmond as the frightener, appears to be making its point in England.
And then there is UKIP, which threatens the security of Labour’s hold on some of its east coast seats.
It is entirely conceivable that Labour’s final tally in May – not of seats but of votes it can muster in a division in the House, will be no different than in May 2010. But the loss of credibility the party has suffered and will suffer in this politicking can only see its baseline support decline further in and after this election.
Where will the Conservatives finish this time? UKIP will do them some damage but not as much as had been expected. The UKippers will retain their red-neck grasstroots vote but will not hold the level of chauvinist middle-class vote it had looked like doing.
The spectrum and nature of UKIP ‘eccentricities’ and off-piste excursions would seem to have knocked the confidence of that sector of the vote they aimed to get. And the Conservatives will deliver the promised In/Out referendum on EU membership, which will make it easier for potential defectors to hang on, with the dazzle fading from the Faragistes.
Then there is the John Major differential, from way back in 1992.
Major was the shock winner in that contest with Labour’s Neil Kinnock, with hordes of voters admitting afterwards that they had walked into the polling booth itself, intending to vote Labour – but that, with pencil poised, they thought of their mortgages, their savings and of inflation – and voted for Major.
This time the economy and the relative economic stability achieved are playing well for the Conservatives. Neither Mr Miliband nor Mr Balls has been convincing on the economy; and what they have said has played to the traditional fears of inflated spending and borrowing under Labour – a visceral fear also triggered by the borrowing plans put forward by a bullish but economy-insecure Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
The 1992 urge to think of personal self-interests as the pen is poised over the ballot paper is likely to have its impact this time too. The reality is that almost everyone votes to protect their personal interests, whatever they see these as being.
The Conservatives seem set to emerge again in May 2015 as the party with the greatest number of seats, if not an overall majority.
As the sitting Prime Minister, accepted protocol would see Mr Cameron with the prerogative of trying to form a government likely to last all or most of a five year term.
He is likely to invite the Liberal Democrats back in. Depleted by some degree as they will be, they will still bring both additional seats and familiar experienced faces on the team.
If this partnership went as a minority administration, they would be backable to survive. If Alex Salmond led a few rumbustious egocentric ‘rumbles’ in opposition for opposition’s sake and Labour joined in, they would lose further ground for irresponsibility.
All Labour had to do from the start of this campaign was to recognise that today is the day of conviction politics. The SNP are unequivocal about what they want and why they want it. It is not what the rest of the UK wants and they know why they don’t want it.
Just as it did not manage it in the Scottish independence campaign, Labour has been unable to articulate that position persuasively and with conviction, literally to give it a voice.
Labour’s decision in local campaigns to fight on local issues is intelligent – but a General Election is a national argument as well; and the party at large ought to be articulating that larger vision the country wants to hear.
Without that, the ‘local issue’ local campaigns might as well be fighting for seats in local authorities or at Holyrood where local and regional issues are addressed.
The reality is that the game’s over and the pass was sold at the starting whistle. This has been a weak and weakly led campaign – and the weak go to the wall.
Conservatives in Scotland who had even thought to vote Labour as a protective pro-union vote where their own candidate cannot win will now, for that reason, vote for the Liberal Democrats.
Nick Clegg has repeated his earlier assertion that the Liberal Democrats will not contemplate an electoral compact with the SNP. This removes the possibility of Lib Dem coalition with Labour as a minority administratration with on a confidence and supply deal from the SNP
Like it or not, this election is still about the continuation or the break up of the United Kingdom.
It ought to have been about constructive constitutional change and not one of the major parties has had the nous, the ability, the confidence and the courage to take on this core issue.
