Vote what to ensure we don't get SNP?

Welcome to my first Blog of 2015. For various reasons it is rather later than I had intended, but I hope that you all had an enjoyable Festive Season and belatedly wish you all the best for a peaceful and progressive year to come. May the beautiful poetry of the basking sharks always be with you in your journey through this abundant universe.

The topic of the moment being tactical voting, let me add my tuppenceworth to the debate. I should put my cards on the table at the outset and declare my Party allegiance – I am, and have been for many years, a fully paid up member of the Labour Party. There is little likelihood of that allegiance changing in the foreseeable future. I might waver if the result of the forthcoming General Election in May leads to Ed Miliband negotiating a coalition with the Scottish National Party. I am no fan of Ed as Party leader, but surely even he is not about to commit that act of political suicide.

Those who follow politics on TV will likely have seen Scottish Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, on last week’s Question Time from Glasgow, rather uneasily side-stepping the not so small matter of Miliband’s failure to rule out a post-Election pact with the SNP. Many voters (and not just Labour voters) were hoping that Ed would take the opportunity during his appearance at Scottish Labour's Edinburgh event last Saturday to rectify that failure. However both Ed and Scottish Leader Jim Murphy somehow managed to deliver speeches which barely mentioned the SNP, far less addressed the vexed question of a possible Lab-SNP coalition.

Last Thursday Kez had loyally stuck to the rather unconvincing Party line that Labour are

campaigning for an overall majority, so talk of deals was irrelevant. Saturday's event, or

Miliband and Murphy - avoiding the issue

more accurately non-event, left a stream of Labour figures struggling to defend the indefensible on the Sunday morning politics shows. Edinburgh South's Ian Murray in particular gamely stuck to the script on Andrew Neil's show while suffering a fair old Paxoing from Gordon Brewer.

It is now common knowledge that a majority of Scottish Labour MPs in particular want to see an SNP pact firmly off the agenda. Any electoral risks in that approach (and there are some) are outweighed by the advantages of shooting the SNP’s fox before it shreds any more Scottish Labour bin bags. But the current refusal to budge on the coalition issue comes, I understand, directly from Miliband himself.

Miliband is apparently intent on continuing to resist pressure both from within his Party and from external forces to shift his position. His political miscalculation seems certain to dog Labour throughout the remaining weeks of the General Election campaign. But more crucially, it does no favours at all to the majority of pro-UK voters who still hope against hope to see the SNP bandwagon if not derailed at least slowed in May 2015.
   

The revenge of the sore losers

Miliband's failure to understand why ruling out a pact with the SNP matters so much is all the more incomprehensible given the level of SNP support suggested by a succession of opinion polls. Let's be clear - the Scottish end of the 2015 General Election looks all set to be the revenge of the sore losers. However much the SNP leadership protest that the Party has moved on from last September's rejection of separation, that is not how a fairly large chunk of the SNP's potential voters see things.

There is no real evidence that the percentage of the Scottish electorate who would be willing to vote for separation in another yes/no Referendum has increased beyond the 37% mark we saw last September. If anything, it has declined slightly as the SNP's unconvincing response to the collapse of the oil market has put their fiscal competence under some serious scrutiny. But while the combined pro-UK Parties' vote is still by some margin the majority, that vote is split several ways and unlike the SNP is not a single-issue vote. The simple arithmetic is that those who voted Yes seem about to vote tactically en masse for the SNP. Thus, only a similar tactical vote, Constituency by Constituency, for the pro-UK Party best placed to defeat the SNP, can halt - or at least limit - a predicted SNP landslide.  

Perhaps unsurprisingly (political Parties are big vessels, and hard to turn around in choppy waters), the leaders of the big Parties have now spoken out against tactical voting. I understand that to an extent – although I'm not particularly active in the Labour Party these days, I remain enough of a tribal apparatchik to appreciate the old rule that you never lend your vote because that breaks the chain of Party loyalty and you won’t get it back.

Sore losers hell-bent on revenge

However that rule is for normal times. Up here in Scotland, we are not currently living in normal times. The significant majority of Scots who voted against separation last September face a veritable onslaught from a vocal minority of sore losers who are hell-bent on imposing that separation on their fellow Scots whether we want it or not. That onslaught ought to be resisted by all available democratic means, even if one of those means is organised tactical voting. Extreme circumstances require extreme remedies.

The Independence Referendum demonstrated that the big UK Parties can in difficult circumstances work (more or less) effectively together to see off a common threat. Unfortunately the threat of separation has not been fully seen off by last September’s vote. A minority of the Scottish electorate continue to foment grudge, grievance and blame against the UK Parliament in their apparently unshakeable belief that democracy means re-running a vote endlessly until they get the result which they think they deserve. Another helping of the unity of purpose which allowed the settled will of the majority of Scots to shine through last September is needed in May’s General Election vote.
  

SNP - standing up for cheap populism

The SNP are in effect running a policy-free General Election campaign designed to appeal emotionally to the 37% who voted for separation last September. Their campaign is aimed not just at SNP voters, but at the disparate Yes alliances of last year. They want the votes of the hard left Radical Independence Campaign, of Trotskyist Tommy Sheridan’s Hope over Fear camp followers, and of the ragbag of other Indieniers who will accept neither the fact that they lost the Referendum nor the reasons why they lost it. Give us your votes, the SNP’s broad argument runs, and we’ll go down to Westminster to give the English oppressors, your colonial masters, a good kicking.

Of course that is risible gutter populism. Scotland is not an oppressed or deprived country, and we are not a colony of England. In any case, none of the UK Parties will be keen to deal with separatist MPs at Westminster. The SNP’s group of MPs will, regardless of its size, be little more than a noisy, faintly ridiculous irritation. But that will suit the SNP just fine. It will give them an ideal 5-year platform to advance their grudge and grievance agenda, to blame Westminster (ie the English) for all of Scotland’s problems and to agitate for another shot at separation.

IndyRef 2 is off the menu

On separation - my assessment for what it is worth is that for the foreseeable future, the SNP’s Independence Project is dead. Doubtless, those on the more colourful fringes of the 45er cult will still rattle their imaginary chains of oppression, blame all of Scotland’s woes on the Evil Satan Westminster, and make a racket out of proportion to their size and importance. But as both Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond (one of these people is leader of the SNP) have implicitly conceded, there will be no IndyRef 2 any time soon. The volatility of the global oil market has brought into sharp focus the fact that the SNP’s fiscal plan for an independent Scotland as set out in their White Paper was an undeliverable fantasy.

SNP landslide - will it materialise?

On the SNP’s fiscal projections, Scotland would have resembled not so much the sick man of Europe, but one on life support. This is not Westminster scaremongering or Project Fear 2, but simple common sense. It’s the economy, stupid. It’s always the economy, stupid.

However this does not mean that Scots voters can afford to write off the widely predicted SNP landslide in May, nor indeed another four years of unscrutinised one-Party Government at Holyrood after the 2016 Election, as a blip in the electoral cycle. After 8 years of an SNP Government campaigning for separation, Scotland really needs a competent Government at Holyrood to exercise their extensive powers in running the services which affect our everyday lives. Key, and fully devolved, services like education and the NHS are areas in which the SNP administration at Holyrood has conspicuously failed to shine during the past eight years.

The last thing which Scotland needs in the wake of last year’s destructive and divisive Referendum is another five years or more of Quebec-style Neverendum uncertainty, with all of its negative economic effects. Quebec eventually saw off the separatist threat, but its economy still struggles to recover from the years of fiscal stagnation which resulted.

All of the above factors would, you might think, have concentrated the minds of the big UK Parties on the importance of seeing off, or at least minimising, the threat to Scotland of a big SNP win in May 2015. The SNP are openly campaigning to garner a tactical vote from the separatists who voted Yes last September. It would make sense therefore for the UK parties at least to give a nod and a wink to similar collaboration by those who voted so decisively for the retention of the UK. But apparently not.

On Twitter, where active #SNPout campaigns are starting to show results and to gain attention from Scotland’s mainstream media, the big Parties’ attitude has been derided as putting Party before country. It also appears to me as putting tribalism before survival. In the rough business of politics, loyalty is a commendable virtue. There are times for being marched behind the shed to be shot alongside your Comrades, because the alternative is worse. This is not one of those times.
 

The tsunami facing Scottish Labour

The Scottish Labour Party in particular, who really should know better given the scale of the disaster which they face if an SNP landslide actually materialises in May, continue to argue the line that the General Election vote is not a re-run of the Independence Referendum. Although they are technically correct, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that the return of a strong cohort of SNP MPs to Westminster will probably keep Labour out of No 10 for at least the next five years. It will also allow the SNP at Holyrood to continue deflecting attention from the social issues and affairs of Government which they ought to be addressing, while Scots suffer another five years of fruitless balancing of constitutional angels on the head of the Nationalist pin.

For all their bluster, the SNP leadership know that they are unlikely to play a significant role in the next Government, whichever Party forms it. Indeed, they are counting on that – they have ruled themselves out of a coalition with the Tories (though Hell conspicuously failed to freeze over when Alex Salmond stood shoulder to shoulder with Annabel Goldie from 2007 until 2011 at Holyrood), and are equally aware that there is no political advantage in the SNP being the junior partner in a Labour Government, especially a successful one.

Trident - SNP's red-ish line in the sand

The SNP have drawn red lines in the sand over Trident renewal and an additional anti-austerity £180bn for Scotland – red lines from which neither themselves nor Labour could afford to retreat without it being seen as capitulation. (While Nicola Sturgeon's recent comments to the Guardian indicate a bit of a u-turn on Trident - not so much Bairns, not Bombs, more Bairns AND Bombs - that is more positioning and mischief-making than anything else.)

Labour are equally well aware, one hopes, that any formal coalition with a parochial Party whose very raison d’etre is the destruction of the UK would not only kill off the Scottish Labour Party – Scottish members would be queueing up to resign - but would significantly impact upon its voter base (and membership) in the rest of the UK.

No time for naïve politics

Given all of the above, it is unclear why Labour has taken such a firm public stand against the tactical voting now being promoted by some significant figures on the Scottish political scene. At the very least, it is naïve politics. Given Labour’s current dominance of Scottish seats at Westminster, the Party would not be required to sacrifice a single Labour-held seat to tactical voting. Indeed, most of the tactical votes, if they materialise, would be one way traffic towards Labour from Tory and Lib Dem voters in seats where the SNP pose a genuine threat but where, given the rude health of most of Labour’s Westminster majorities, a quite modest transfer of votes would likely be enough to prevent the seat changing hands. The Labour Party leadership seems to be doing its damnedest to discourage such cross-Party co-operation, where the sane course of action might be to sit quietly on their hands and to leave their local activists to work under the radar. Let us not pretend that has never happened before.

Likewise, Tory Leader Ruth Davidson’s normally sure touch seems to have deserted her over this one. Currently holding just one Scottish Westminster seat, the only way for the Scottish Tories is up. And for the first time in a long while, there is the prospect of a Scottish resurgence, particularly in those traditionally tartan Tory areas where some post-Thatcher Tories tactically lend their votes to the SNP or Lib Dems to keep Labour out. The Scottish Tories have potentially 7 seats within their grasp. That is possibly over-optimistic, but they are certainly capable of bagging a few more MPs to share David Mundell’s lonely taxi. The SNP may have been an acceptable tactical vote (nothing new about this tactical voting business) for some Tories while separation remained a pipe dream, but I cannot believe that any Tories relish the prospect of a commercially toxic Quebec Neverendum here, far less an actual break-up of the UK.

So far as the other big Party is concerned, one doesn’t like to kick a dog when it’s down, and the Scottish Lib Dems are undoubtedly down at the moment. They find themselves victims (willing victims, it has to be said) of their collusion with the Tories in the current Government, and also pig in the middle of the fight between SNP and Labour. In most of their seats they are vulnerable to the SNP and even with tactical votes are not in a good place. Without strong tactical voting, they are surely doomed to lose a clutch of seats.

Can Lib Dems see off Salmond?

Danny Alexander in particular looks to be in a bit of trouble, caught between the SNP machine and an energetic Labour campaign which although it has no chance of taking the seat, can still take his votes. The other big struggle of course is Gordon, where Salmond is trying to carpetbag the retiring Malcolm Bruce’s seat. The Lib Dems’ Christine Jardine is a good candidate, but unless the anti-Salmond vote (which should not be underestimated) coalesces round her, it will be very difficult for her to derail the Salmond bandwagon. She deserves better.

Rules – there to be broken?

I admitted at the start of this piece to being a Labour Party member. I am well aware of what the Party’s rule book says regarding promoting or supporting other Parties. If I leave the Labour Party, I would prefer it to be of my own volition rather than by expulsion, so you will understand that the views which I am expressing here are theoretical and hypothetical. My feeling is that whatever the Party leaderships are saying on the matter, many ordinary Party members will make up their own minds as to how their votes on this occasion can best advance the causes in which they believe.

In any case, and the SNP’s cut-price fashion accessory memberships aside, few Scottish voters are actually paid-up members of any political Party. Since 1999, ordinary Scottish voters have become pretty clued-up as to how to use their votes to maximum effect. They understand the mechanics and quirks of the three different voting systems currently in use for Council, Holyrood and Westminster elections. They know that votes can be used to keep unwanted candidates out as well as to put wanted candidates in.

I suspect that whatever the Party leaders may be saying, many voters still regard the coming election to some extent as a continuation of last September, and will use their votes with that in mind. I believe in Parliamentary democracy and the sanctity of the secret vote at the ballot box. UK democracy is not perfect (what system is?) but one only has to cast around this troubled world to realise that it is still more effective, more fair and less corrupt than most other countries.

Referendum, not Neverendum

I was one of 2.1m Scots who voted No last September because I believed then that there was nothing which as a proud Scot I was prevented from doing by being part of the UK family. Nor could I see anything which I would be able to do, politically, culturally or socially, in an independent Scotland which is currently denied to me as a UK citizen. I still firmly believe that. I also believe that Scotland dodged a fiscal bullet by voting No. And while of course there is more to independence than money, no‑one ever knowingly votes to be poor. One can’t feed the kids on empty dreams.

Taking all of that into account, I firmly believe that the important vote in May is a vote which will keep the SNP at bay. Everyone out there has the freedom to decide what the vote might be. I am sure that sensible Scots will use it wisely.

Voted No? Time to repent and be saved

This will be my final post until after the New Year, so let me offer very best wishes for the Festive Season and the coming year to my modest but committed readership. I aim to reduce that modesty a bit in 2015. I am slightly disappointed that I have not yet managed to attract some of the zoomier Indieniers whom the Twitterati of a No persuasion seem fated to attract – their colourful style would certainly liven up the comments section. But perhaps sentences longer than 140 characters are a bridge too far for most of them.

Christmas not cancelled after all

In keeping with the spirit of the season for goodwill toward all men (and women), I am signing off 2014 with a good, grumpy rant. Those of you who inhabit the twilight world of social media will likely be aware of the existence of the fiercely pro-Indy website Bella Caledonia. Bella, along with fellow traveller Wings over Scotland, is dedicated to all things pro-independence. Bella doesn’t aim for any political balance or consensus, though in common with Ms Sturgeon she does tend to ignore any hard questions. Instead she has simply cancelled membership of Scotland for the 55% of us who got it so badly wrong back in September.

I have never quite worked out the rationale for sites like Bella, which sprung up like weeds during IndyRef. Most have since succumbed to post-IndyRef ennui, but Bella, and the Wingnut from Bath, soldier on. My personal theory is that while most No voters were confident enough within themselves as to how and why they were voting, the Yes camp needed to talk constantly to each other to reinforce the many Nat myths and prejudices. But of course that may simply be prejudice on my part - you get reasoned debate here, but if you’ve come for impartiality, you’re on the wrong train.

An offer you CAN refuse

Anyway, back to the gorgeous Ms Caledonia. You may or may not have heard that Bella, in keeping with the sentiments of the season, has generously opened her columns to those untouchables who were stupid or evil enough to vote No on 18 September 2014. Yep, all 2.1m of them. Always room in Bella heaven for one more sinner who repents, apparently. To avoid accusations of bias (and because I have a well-developed sense of the ridiculous), it is worth reproducing Bella’s invitation to the 55% sinners in its entirety.

“As we stagger about the burnt-out shell that is post-IndyRef Scotland, we are trying to make sense of it all. So next week we are offering a space for No voters to have their say. Understanding what the hell just happened before we all disappear for Christmas Pudding and box-set bliss is important – so we’ll be giving over space to allow No voters to express themselves now we are three months on. If you voted No – what do you think and feel now?

You might want to apologise. You might feel vindicated. You might have realised you were being lied to all the time. Does the oil price prove we would have been an economic basket case? Or does the pensions revelations prove that propaganda won? Did the Vow wow you? Whether you changed your mind or feel it was the right thing to do, we want to hear from you.”

It is hard to know where to start when de-constructing this hyperbole. “What the hell happened”? What the hell happened was that a democratic vote was held under the conditions and within the generous timescale set by the SNP themselves, and that the Yes vote lost decisively. No mystery there whatsoever, Bella, hen.

And “lied to all the time”? Well, it was a long political campaign fought fairly hard and sometimes fairly dirty by both sides, and election literature is rarely cited as a paragon of objectivity. But lied to? All the time? “Propaganda won”? That simply insults voters’ intelligence.

Not a waste land just yet

Then we get to the meat of it. “The burnt-out shell that is post-IndyRef Scotland”? Like others, I am saddened that my country has become a more divided and mean-spirited place than it was when Alex Salmond embarked upon his doomed vanity project in 2011. But a burnt-out shell? Last time I looked, it was still business as usual in this busy, relatively prosperous, first world corner of one of the world’s most successful and enduring political unions. Buses and trains were still running, pubs were still serving, Hibs’ results were still pretty erratic, you could still buy Eddi Reader's CDs in good record shops everywhere. Here on Planet Sensible, IndyRef was a small earthquake. No-one dead.

Glasgow's George Square - still there

Then we get to “You might want to apologise”. Apologise? What on earth for? Since when was any person exercising his or her vote in a free democracy somehow accountable to the losing side for spoiling their day? I mean, it’s not as if Lesley Riddoch and Pat Kane were pushed over Niagara Falls in a barrel as part of the No camp’s victory celebrations or anything, though I know people who would have paid serious money to watch that. 

Don’t talk about the oil

Personally I am waiting for letters of thanks from all the Indy fantasists whom my vote has saved from the potential economic basket case which is North Sea oil. In the run-up to the vote, Salmond and Sturgeon were told by enough expert oil economists to fill the Glasgow Hydro (ok, that’s stretching it, but you can see where I’m going) that oil was far too volatile a market to be the cornerstone of an independent Scotland’s economy. They ignored all of that. It seems pretty clear now that the figures used in Salmond’s White Paper Scotland’s Future were cooked to support what the SNP knew all along was a flimsy economic case.

So I suppose that, unintentionally, you have got some of it correct, Bella. This No voter certainly does feel vindicated, and does think that Scottish voters were being lied to. And the lies were not just about oil but about some other key areas, such as: membership of the European Union; currency; and who is really responsible for the current problems in the Scottish Health Service.

And the lies continue. Nicola Sturgeon’s latest line (parroted also by Salmond, Stewart Hosie and other SNP nodding dogs) that oil was “always a bonus” for the post-Indy economy is simply untrue, unless their White Paper is also fantasy fiction (on the other hand …). And for Sturgeon to keep repeating that the current rock-bottom state of the oil market is unimportant because Scotland wouldn’t have been independent until 2016 anyway is beyond risible.

Now cheaper than Evian water

Nicola claims that oil will be back up to $100 per barrel quite soon, though that is not what most oil economists are saying. $100 is in any case still well below Salmond’s cautious minimum of $113 upon which the SNP’s whole economic case for an independent Scotland is based. There are more holes in the SNP’s fiscal narrative than in the colander in which I will be rinsing my Christmas sprouts.

My country I vow to thee

And now we get to the Vow, which the Yessers have adopted as their great get-out clause for the SNP leaders’ breaking of the Edinburgh Agreement and disavowal of the Smith recommendations. There is no mention anywhere in the Vow of Devo Max. Smith has clearly set out the “substantial new powers” which were mentioned. The SNP signed up to that. If the SNP were trying to sell a house, they would have been sued for breach of contract by now.

But politics is all about Hearts and Minds, and 37.7% of the Scottish electorate still need to be convinced that independence may not be the better route for Scotland’s future well-being and prosperity. So if you do feel tempted to take up Bella’s kind offer, you can send your contributions to her at bellasletters at yahoo.co.uk – or via @bellacaledonia. I am resisting that temptation for two reasons. Firstly, a quick scan of the contributions thus far (yes, there have been some) have obviously been carefully selected for their blandness. And secondly anything at all contradictory to the Bella orthodoxy (which can be summed up as Westminster is the Great Satan and all No voters are the Footsoldiers of Beelzebub) is subjected to the usual ad hominem attacks in the comments section. The comments are longer than most of the contributions.

Nick likes Alex's Christmas present

And there does seem to be a disproportionate number of entries from No voters repenting of their sins. I do not know of even one voter who voted No because of the Vow. I do not know of one voter who switched from Yes to No at a late stage because of the Vow. I do not know of one voter who has any regrets about voting No, or who would vote Yes next time (in Bella’s world, next time is just a matter of when the minority rise up and demand it – how within a Parliamentary democracy this will actually be effected is less clear). A more cynical person might suspect that some of the entries are not genuine.

And if you are one of the No-voting Twitterati, I wouldn’t bother passing on any comments to Bella via that route. Bella’s commitment to open democracy is such that most of the noisier No voters on social media are summarily blocked from the site (including yours truly – I had to do my research for this piece via the back door).

A Christmas gift for Yes

I have a counter invitation for any Yes voter, Bella fan or whatever. Feel free to make your counter-comments. Feel free to tell No voters why we should be apologising for the current collapse of the oil price, for the mess the SNP have made of our National Health Service over the past 7 years, for the outright lies we were told by the SNP regarding European Union membership, for SNP’s breach of the Edinburgh Agreement and of Smith.

And if you’re confused about the reference to the Edinburgh Agreement, this is directly from the Scottish Government’s own website.

"Question: If Scotland votes No, will there be another referendum on independence at a later date?

Answer: The Edinburgh Agreement states that a referendum must be held by the end of 2014. There is no arrangement in place for another referendum on independence.

It is the view of the current Scottish Government that a referendum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. This means that only a majority vote for Yes in 2014 would give certainty that Scotland will be independent."

Feel free to show us where in the Vow it states that the IndyRef losers were guaranteed Devo Max or any other form of independence by the back door. Feel free to list all of the ways in which the English Imperialists are oppressing Scots – what parts of our culture are not available to Scotland as part of the UK.

Unlike Bella, you won’t be blocked, you will be published and your submissions will be taken seriously.

Yes or No, we’re still all One Scotland, so enjoy your Festive Season. If you’re on a budget, a barrel of Brent Crude might be the answer to your problems. At under $60 a barrel, it’s currently cheaper than Evian water.

Nicola’s dream

With Christmas coming up, no post would be complete without a quick Festive tale. Here is mine.

The week before Christmas, wee Nicola snuggled up under her big blue saltire duvet with her favourite teddy bear Hosie and drifted off to sleep with dreams of what Santa might be lining up for the massive stocking she planned to hang over the Bute House fireplace.

She woke up with a start to find that she was sitting on Santa’s knee – yep, the real Santa, red suit, boots, long white beard (he looked a bit like Mike Russell actually, but no dream is ever perfect).

“And now, young Nicola”, said Santa, “I understand from my elves that you have been a very good girl this year. What are you hoping to find in your stocking?”

“Well, Santa”, said Nicola in a sleepy voice, “In my odd moments off I’ve been catching up on Game of Thrones on DVD. I kind of fancy myself as a bit of a Daenerys Targaryen. I reckon a couple of dragons like hers would really cement my position in the Holyrood debating chamber and shut those noisy Kezia and Ruth women up.”

“Oh, dear, Nicola”, replied Santa, “We do our very best to give all the kiddies what they want at Christmas, but dragons are a bit of a tall order even for poor old Santa. Isn’t there something slightly less exotic you might want?”

“Weeell…”, said Nicola, “There is this wee problem I’m having with my predecessor, Alex. Alex Salmond, you might have heard of him, Santa? He doesn’t seem to want to retire and he’s stealing all my limelight, and it’s making me very cross. Can’t you maybe get him to behave a bit better and to keep his mouth shut occasionally?”.

“Tell me, Nicola“, said Santa, “What colour would you like your dragons?”

Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation

The poll for the Scottish Labour Party leadership has closed. Tomorrow we will all know who will lead the Party into the 2015 General Election and the 2016 Elections for Holyrood. I await this news with some trepidation. Which candidate wins will determine whether the Party spends another four or five years in opposition having yet another interminable internal debate on Manifesto minutiae, or whether Scottish Labour finally has a leader capable of giving the Party a realistic chance of clawing back some of the ground lost over the past decade or so.

Will it be Murphy, Boyack or Findlay?

The contest appears to have narrowed to a race between bookies’ favourite Jim Murphy and the left’s choice Neil Findlay. Murphy still looks likely to edge it. But root-and-branch Labour Party members have always been prone to opting for principle over power. A fair few of them still suffer from that Nigel Barton‑ish purism which prefers opposition in perpetuity to compromising a single line of Clause 4. That ideological blindness, together with the vagaries of the Party’s electoral college, make predicting a winner a dodgy business.

The fact that the contest has narrowed down to two alpha males in no way reflects on the excellence of Sarah Boyack’s candidacy, incidentally. Boyack has consistently impressed during this campaign as articulate, intelligent and measured. She also has valuable experience as a serving Holyrood Minister, which is not true of either of the other candidates. In less feral times, her star may have shone more brightly. But in truth, Sarah as leader would be a peace time consigliere, and Scottish Labour currently needs a wartime consigliere, someone who won’t lose much sleep if certain political opponents end up sleeping with the fishes. It is perhaps unfortunate that Boyack didn’t choose to stand for Deputy Leader, where her poise and experience would have strengthened the top team. But in politics, 20/20 hindsight wins no prizes.

For the sake of the Labour Party’s survival (and I really do think it is that critical), the winner needs to be a pragmatic attack dog who will hit the ground running and take the fight to the ruling SNP. His first priority should be to start to expose, and make political capital from, the SNP misinformation (and in several instances, downright lies) which is starting to unravel now that the Independence Referendum is lost.

Oiling the wheels

Foremost of these, of course, is the collapse of the oil market. Only last year, Alex Salmond was confidently claiming that Scotland was at the start of a 40 year oil boom, and predicting that the industry would generate £57 billion of tax revenue in only six years. Back on Planet Earth, in the short weeks since the Referendum Brent Crude, which during the campaign Salmond was bullishly asserting would never fall below $113 a barrel (the economic predictions in his White Paper Scotland’s Future are predicated on $120 a barrel), fell to a current low of $65, with little prospect of an early recovery.

Has the sun set on the SNP's oil fantasies?

A blip, claimed new First Minister Nicola Surgeon on Sky News a week past Sunday, until the Sky interviewer had to point out to her that all the expert oil economists were saying quite the opposite. Of course the SNP have a track record in ignoring experts who dare to challenge their fantasy economics. These same oil economists were telling Salmond throughout the campaign that the economy of an independent Scotland would be simply too small to be sustained on something as volatile as North Sea oil. This was not fear or lack of ambition by Better Together (the standard accusation any time the SNP’s claims were questioned) but simple arithmetic. Maybe the oil price will rise again. But it is now clear to anyone who cares to look that oil is an inherently unstable commodity, far too unstable to serve as the fiscal foundation of a new nation state.

But as in so many other areas (currency, EU membership, joining NATO), the expert advice was ridiculed, or more usually dismissed as Westminster scaremongering. Alex was right and all the experts were wrong.

It’s the economy, stupid

And the First Minister may have changed, but that mindset has not. When Nicola Sturgeon was pushed further on how an independent Scotland would have fared in the current oil climate, she made the risible statement that the price collapse wouldn’t have mattered anyway because even with a Yes vote, Scotland wouldn’t have been independent for at least another 18 months.

The SNP are now desperately backtracking and saying that oil income (which, remember, is not revenue from the oil itself but only the taxation collected on its extraction) was not essential to the Scottish economy anyway and was only ever intended to provide Scotland with a Norway-style oil fund. That is emphatically not what the White Paper said. In one of the few parts of the document which is actually specific about money, it clearly says that oil revenue will finance 15% of an independent Scotland’s budget. What we would actually be looking at is an £8 billion hole in that budget. That’s an awful lot of schools and hospitals for a small country with a population of only 5.6m souls.

Oil really is the SNP’s $64 question

$113 a barrel? Try $64, Alex

The oil question is not some minor fiscal detail. It matters. It matters a great deal. The whole of the SNP’s case for independence was essentially predicated on their tired old mantra from the 70s, It’s Scotland’s oil. It is now apparent that had Scotland actually achieved independence, far from being an oil-rich paradise we would now be an economic basket case with greater fiscal problems than Greece (and, most likely, no European Union safety net to bail us out). A Party which gets their basic economics so badly wrong is not to be trusted. More fiscal autonomy from Smith? On the evidence so far, John Swinney and his pals should be kept as far away as possible from even the small change in the national biscuit tin.

Independent in Europe?

And now we should turn to the vexed question of Europe. For the record, like most No voters of my acquaintance I am firmly pro-European Union. It is not a perfect institution by any means, but by any sensible measure it has served the UK (and by extension Scotland) pretty well since we joined in 1973. In trading terms Scotland’s largest export market – over half of all sales - remains the rest of the UK, but we still do very well in Europe’s free market. The social chapter has also made its contribution to social justice. Social attitude studies tend to confirm that Scots are happy to remain part of the European Union. And after oil and currency, Scotland’s entitlement to remain in the EU was of significant importance to Scots voters.

The Yes campaign understood that, so Scottish voters were repeatedly told during the campaign, that Scotland’s re-entry to the EU on the current UK terms was a given. This was despite several prominent European politicians challenging that view during the campaign. Again any doubts were summarily dismissed as “scaremongering” (there was something quite Orwellian about how all attempts to establish a factual basis for some of the SNP’s more arcane claims were dismissed as scaremongering, talking Scotland down, etc).

Lies, damned lies - and Scottish taxpayers pick up the tab

Membership of the EU turned out to be another example of Alex right, everyone else wrong. Salmond even went so far as to claim to Andrew Neil in a TV interview that the Scottish Government had taken formal legal advice on the matter - a claim which subsequently turned out to be, to put not too fine a point on it, an outright lie. No such legal advice had been sought or received. In terms of the debate (to use Salmond’s phrase as he tried to bluster his way clear of Neil’s probing) or in any other terms, No does not mean Yes. To add insult to injury, new First Minister Nicola Sturgeon then went to court with £19,453 of taxpayers’ money in an attempt to prevent the media reporting Salmond’s bare-faced lie.

The oil price fiasco can possibly dismissed as economic incompetence, though it is not a good advertisement for the SNP’s ability to run a burger van, far less a small country newly independent. But Salmond’s dishonesty over European Union membership, which suggest a willingness to say whatever it takes to garner Yes votes, is in a different league altogether. To many, it poses serious questions over his fitness to rule.

The beast is back

And the European Union obfuscation is not an isolated example of Salmond’s inherent deviousness. We heard over the weekend, though it was hardly a surprise, that Salmond plans a return to Westminster via retiring Lib Dem Gordon Bruce’s seat in the Gordon Constituency. Salmond appears so confident of winning there that he is already setting out the conditions under which he is willing to horse trade with the other UK Parties in the hung Parliament he confidently expects in May 2015.

Apparently even more rocks will melt before Salmond’s SNP enters into coalition with David Cameron’s Tories. Salmond’s principles here appear flexible, given that he happily stood shoulder to shoulder with Annabel Goldie’s Tories at Holyrood from 2007-2011. He has also magnanimously let it be known that he may be willing to do a deal with Ed Miliband’s Labour, though a formal coalition is not on offer. And no, I don’t know what Nicola Sturgeon makes of these antics either. Clearly Salmond seems to have forgotten his forced resignation following the Referendum defeat and has resumed his place at the head of the table.

Of course a few conditions still have to be met before Salmond gets to play kingmaker or toast any more English tootsies before the fire. First of all, he still has to win the Gordon seat. Only a political naïf would deny that the odds are in his favour. But it is no shoo in either - there are early signs that the Gordon voters are not too happy to be taken for granted, and an informal cross-Party tactical vote is already coalescing round Lib Dem candidate Christine Jardine. Scottish voters have proved in the past to be pretty good at tactical voting. The Constituency’s young Labour candidate, Braden Davy, has to all intents been taken out of the fray already, smeared in a particularly nasty manner over some youthful indiscretions by the odious extreme Nationalist website Wings over Scotland. Wings is the Bath-based mouthpiece of wingnut Rev Stuart Campbell, the author of the Referendum campaign’s very own Zinoviev letter, the Wee Blue Book. If the sizeable Tory base in Gordon votes tactically – and that part of Scotland returned one of the largest No majorities in September, so has no real reason to vote SNP - it could well be an early bath for Alex.

Secondly, win or lose Gordon, the SNP still have to deliver on their predicted sweep of Scottish Westminster seats in the 2015 Election. Certainly the polls are running ridiculously high in the political silly season which has followed the Referendum result. For a while, no newspaper was complete without its wee map of Scotland coloured almost completely yellow. But in truth there have not been that many reliable polls as yet, and there are signs that the bubble is levelling out.

Back to Westminster for Salmond?

The SNP may well see a modest increase on their current six seats, but under the first past the post system it would take a very large swing to SNP before many seats change hands. Experienced political commentators are sceptical about a predicted Labour wipe-out. The SNP predicted a similar Westminster landslide at the 2010 General Election. It didn’t happen. Despite what the SNP and the polls were saying, Labour actually went up slightly.

A more likely outcome for 2015, once Labour has its new leader up and running, as the Referendum dust continues to settle, and as the SNP start to come under scrutiny as a Government rather than a campaign team, is that the SNP gain some seats, Scottish Tories gain some seats, the Lib Dems drop some, and Labour do not that well, but not as badly as predicted either. That is pretty much what the bookies are saying, and you don’t meet too many poor bookies. Although the Nats have always been hot on the early gloat (remember Free in 93?), they are much less accurate with predictions.

Who’s the SNP Daddy? Not Nicola, apparently

Win or lose, Salmond’s tactics for the SNP’s Westminster campaign (and it does seem to be Salmond’s campaign, rather than Nicola Surgeon’s) are becoming clear. He is already pursuing the same divisive and destructive line as he did during the referendum. Since he announced his candidacy, he has been taking every able media opportunity to stoke up anti-Westminster feeling and to fuel a sense of grievance over the alleged betrayal of the Vow by the Smith Commission.

Frankly, his behaviour as regards the Vow and Smith is beyond reprehensible. He has already been called out on TV by Andrew Neil (one of the few commentators who seems capable of standing up to his bullying – certainly no-one else on the BBC is taking him on over the hard issues, and STV is little better than the SNP state broadcaster) over his claim that Smith has reneged on a previous promise to deliver Devo Max.

“All five parties have signed up to all of it, line by line”

This Max wasn't promised in the Vow either

It cannot be said too often that there is no mention at all in the Vow of Devo Max, Pepsi Max or any other damn Max. The Vow only talks vaguely of “substantial new powers”, which is exactly what Lord Smith’s report offers to Scotland. Presumably that is what the SNP’s representatives John Swinney and Linda Fabiani thought on the Wednesday before publication of the Commission’s report, too. As Lord Smith himself has said, “all five parties have signed up to all of it, line by line”.

In any case it is time someone put to bed the SNP’s oft regurgitated lie that the Vow was somehow responsible for turning an expected Yes landslide into a hefty defeat overnight. Anecdotal evidence is never wholly reliable, but contrary to what some of the zoomier SNP apologists would have people believe, no other hard evidence on voters’ pre-Referendum intentions are available. Personally I do not know of one single No voter – not one – who changed his or her vote from Yes to No on having read the Vow.

Winning hearts and minds

Most No voters were not traitors, deluded, duped, too stupid, too old, too rich for independence. Ask us and we will tell you – there was nothing on the ballot paper about any Vow, just one very simple question. And we answered No to that question because we were unconvinced that the Yes campaign had made a conclusive argument for independence. As for the claims that a huge chunk of No voters are now regretting it, again ask us and we’ll tell you:

• we look at the current oil price;

• we look at the recently highlighted NHS crises in Grampian and in Lothian;

• we look at Scotland’s hospital waiting lists, which are longer than those in England and Wales;

• we look at Scottish parents’ deep dissatisfaction with the shambles the SNP are making of our school curriculum;

• we look at the recent collapse of two SNP Government-financed energy renewables companies, after Salmond’s boast that Scotland was about to become “the Saudi Arabia of renewables”;

• we look at the way in which Salmond and Sturgeon have ripped up the Edinburgh Agreement and the Smith Commission Report;

• we look at the downright lies we were told by Salmond about EU membership;

• and most of all we look at the boorish antics of those Yes voters (and elected representatives) who seem unable to accept the democratic decision of 2.1m Scots.

And from all of those factors, and more, we are quite, quite sure we made the correct decision on 18 September 2014. If the declining band of Indieniers really want a quick re-run of 18 September 2014, all I can do is summon the ghost of Wendy Alexander and say - Bring It On.

Wuz we robbed? Well, no…

It is absurd to claim (and no serious psephologist would do so) that at least 200,000 voters actively switched from an intended Yes vote to a No vote overnight because they had read a mocked up Vow the front page of the Daily Record. But that is the suspension of disbelief which seems to pose no problem, not only for the tinfoil-hatted Indieniers who just can’t accept they lost because despite all the window posters, balloons and slogans their two-year campaign simply wasn’t persuasive enough, but for the leaders of the SNP. Either they are terminally naïve or they are insulting the intelligence of the Electorate. And whatever else Salmond is, I don’t think he is naïve.

There was nothing in the Vow which had not already been promised to Scots voters anyway. It had been the mantra of every single Party during the campaign that whatever the outcome of the vote, a return to the status quo was not an option, and that more powers for Holyrood had to follow on from the Referendum. Salmond himself is on record before 18 Sep 2014 dismissing the Vow out of hand as offering voters nothing new. And for once he was telling the truth there.

It Doesn't say Devo Max anywhere

So why is he telling bare-faced lies about it now? There is little doubt that the publication of the Vow, along with powerful interventions by that other big beast of Scottish politics Gordon Brown and, significantly, the single rogue poll which a few days before the vote wrongly suggested a 1% lead for the Yes campaign, helped to firm up the No vote and to ensure a healthy turnout. But a wholesale switch of 200,000 votes from Yes to No? Bollocks frankly, and Salmond’s claims to the contrary are fraudulent.

I see nothing disreputable about the Gordon Brown or Daily Record interventions incidentally. There is nothing in the Edinburgh Agreement which ruled out campaigning for a No vote (not that either Salmond or Sturgeon have abided by the Edinburgh Agreement).

It would be good if the Scottish media could now start to act as proper journalists rather than SNP members with typewriters. They might follow the likes of Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo, Jackie Bird and Nick Robinson, and start calling out Salmond, Sturgeon, Hosie et al every time they try to punt their “Vow betrayed” nonsense. Ask Alex and Nicola politely to list all of those powers which they claim were promised before the referendum. And when they have done that, show voters exactly where in the Vow those powers were promised.

Because the Vow is easy to find, and a quick scan will show that not one single specific power is mentioned there. There is, I suppose, an argument about what actually constitutes “substantial new powers”. But the fundamental question remains – if the SNP didn’t believe those substantial new powers were contained in Smith, why did Swinney and Fabiani sign up to Smith? Sign up to every line of it?

Grievo Max

Of course the real reason Salmond continues to whip up the cult of grievance and blame which so scarred the mean-spirited, divisive Referendum campaign in his new found enthusiasm for a return to Westminster, is that he really doesn’t have any other campaign weapons. His ultimate aim remains the breakup of the UK. Having failed to achieve that through the Scottish electorate, he now wants to head for Westminster to stir up anti-English sentiment there. Having taken a £65K payoff from his last departure from the Great Satan (which he has no intention of repaying, incidentally), he now wants to go back down there to “rumble the place up”.

  

Will Alex be doing that next May?

The only thing he rumbled up last time he was at Westminster was the MPs’ expenses budget, infamously claiming for meals that he hadn’t eaten because he wasn’t actually there to eat them. Before M’Learned Friends come beating down my door, I should make it clear that Salmond was not charged with any impropriety at the time. What he was doing (essentially claiming for expenses which he had not incurred) was apparently at that time within the rules, though it would now be classed as fraud. But I will leave it for you to judge whether, rules or not, it was an appropriate way for an elected representative to behave. I will leave it to you to consider what he might have done or said had, say, a Labour MP been caught thus with his hand in the till.

Similarly, Salmond has in the past been highly critical of MPs from other parties who have twin-tracked as MSPs. But once again it seems that the rules are different when applied to himself. He has made it clear that when - if - he wins the Gordon seat, he has no intention of giving up his Banff and Buchan MSP seat. Just a whiff of hypocrisy and double standards there maybe?

Are the Westminster and Holyrood elections a foregone conclusion?

It should be clear from what I have said above that I believe not. I regret that once again I am writing about the trail of debris left by the Referendum rather than the more optimistic whither now piece I had in mind for this week. But whatever the will of the UK Parties, moving on will remain difficult while the ruling SNP clique at Holyrood continue to gripe, moan and pick over the bones of the fight they just lost, rather than do the job for which they were elected in 2007 and 2011. Scotland has been without a proper, active Government for too long.

BBC bias in action?

As even some prominent pro-independence commentators are starting to acknowledge (and I commend to everyone Gerry Hassan’s excellent IndyRef; 12 Hard Truths in this week’s Scotland on Sunday) another Independence Referendum is not going to be conceded or won any time soon, not even if Salmond wins every Westminster and Holyrood seat in Scotland. That ship has sailed. So any attempt to re-run either the 2015 General Election or 2016 Holyrood Election as Indy by Proxy is doomed to fail. If the SNP are smart enough to start acting like a proper Government for all Scots, they just might pose a problem for the UK parties. But if they persist in presenting as a ginger group for their dwindling band of sore losers, they are ultimately sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Maybe not this time round. But it will come. You can’t buck the law of diminishing returns.

Meantime, the task of the UK Parties remains as it was – to work together to see off the threat of a UK breakup. There will be time after that for a return to the old tribalisms. But at the moment, the opponent of my enemy is my friend. And the first test of that should be in Gordon, where a good Lib Dem candidate, taking over from the well-respected Malcolm Bruce, looks the best bet to see off the destructive arrogance of Alex Salmond and to kick the wheels off his bandwagon. I might not be admitting it openly – I am aware of the Labour Party rule book and the penalty for supporting candidates from other Parties – but I’m damn sure I know where I would be putting my cross in the privacy of the polling booth.