Ah, the hysterical rage of SNP supporters, wholly unable to cope with the idea that, far from being the voice of Scotland, the voters of Scotland have just dismissed the SNP with derision and put it on the same level as the Tories and the Lib Dems. Except that the Prime Minister is now a Tory, a basically Scottish Tory who even has a house there. While the Secretary of State for Scotland is now a Lib Dem. And wholly unable to cope with the fact that, far from the SNP's "mattering once there is a hung Parliament", the mere fact of its existence - that the SNP is at all - is the reason why a latter-day Alec Douglas-Home is now Prime Minister.
Yes, Plaid Cymru should have been told to man up, as in 1979 when its two MPs voted against bringing down the Callaghan Government. It is an economically left-wing party, unlike the SNP. It has working-class support, unlike the SNP. It is barely, if at all, in any direct fight against Labour, there being very little Labour support in the Welsh-speaking countryside and even less Plaid support in the ex-industrial areas of South Wales, where opposition even to the present level of devolution is still strong and where distaste for the Welsh language is visceral. It is in coalition with Labour at Cardiff. It is not really in favour of separation; people who are, vote for it in the sheer absence of anything else, at least since Forward Wales was subsumed by David Cameron's Unconservative Party.
So it could and should have detached itself from its very one-sided relationship with Alex Salmond. After this, even if it is a bit late, one may hope that it will. Look what the very existence of him and his party has done to Plaid Cymru, its chances and its voters. There would by now have been a Plaid Cymru Minister of State in the Wales Office it it had not been for that existence.
Oh, what fun. This goes far beyond the going away for a generation before coming back again that has been the SNP's pattern in the past. Then, they always had the excuse that they had never been given the opportunity to do anything. But they have now had that opportunity in abundance, and stand exposed as do-nothing, whingeing, windbag, One Man Band party which cannot even remove a disastrous Leader, because there is no one to take his place.
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When you really look into it, it's hard to see why Labour hate the SNP so much. Had Labour really feared an election in 1979, they wouldn't have set the bar so high in the referendum, so I don't think it's that. It's not because the SNP are an electoral threat. They rarely take seats in the Central Belt and almost always lose them again pretty quickly. Their main effect is to keep the Tories out of seats in the rural North East. Of course, should the SNP ever achieve independence they would have to make Scotland pay for itself. That would mean dismantling the Labour crony state. Sadly, that's now Labour's real source of power. Maybe that's why they hate them so much.
ReplyDeleteGo on have your little tantrum!
ReplyDeleteStamping up and down, up and down. Probably got Jimmy Shand's Blubell Polka playing backwards while you are doing it.
Just under 100% of the Scottish electorate voted for parties that want more devolution or independence. It was in their manifestos whatever you claim.
Live with it son! Your face is probably twisted and black with rage.
Why is it the SNP's fault that Cameron is PM. It was Labour that refused to deal with the SNP - not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteDon Roberto, I think we know to whom that applies in this conversation. Believe in further devolution when you see it, what with there being one or two more pressing matters at the moment and for anything like the foreseeable future.
ReplyDeleteApart, that is, from Cameron's offer on finance. A masterstroke, even if not exactly one for the purist, since when the cuts come, and they will come particulary noticeably in Scotland, Alex Salmond can always be told that he has it within his power to raise the money himself. Which would go down a treat if he actually did it, I'm sure that we can all agree.
Galloway Guy, the SNP is unconscionable and untouchable so far as any other party at Westminster is concerned. Even the relationship with Plaid Cymru, which is not particularly like the SNP, cannot be expected to survive what that relationship has now cost Plaid Cymru. Everyone else has always regarded the SNP as beyond the Pale. That's just the way it is.
And that is no comment on Scotland as a whole, which has just given the Lib Dems and the Tories combined more votes than the SNP managed at the last Holyrood Election.
The SNP is now doomed electorally with Alex Slamond and doomed organisationally without him. The SNP is doomed.
"It is an economically left-wing party, unlike the SNP. It has working-class support, unlike the SNP"
ReplyDelete--If there really *is* a difference here, it is only because Plaid is a smaller party that will never, ever be large enough to govern in Wales. I am sure most Scots still view the SNP as more left-wing on economics than Labour.
The SNP also certainly has far more working class support than Plaid, which is precisely its electoral problem in the FPTP system. It receives 20-25% of the vote in working class seats, putting them far behind Labour in the latter's worst elections (except by-elections). It takes less in bourgeois seats and more in the countryside, where they win their few seats. Plaid is only a player in rural areas.
"Galloway Guy, the SNP is unconscionable and untouchable so far as any other party at Westminster is concerned."
--David, your ideas are untouchable by the political system you occasionally wish to defend (when you find a bigger "enemy"). At a national level, Labour would sooner deal with the SNP than your British populism. I do not know what pleasure you derive from your petty bourgeois respectability-seeking show.
"The SNP is now doomed electorally with Alex Slamond"
--Salmond is leader because the SNP did horribly without him. He is leader because he is the most popular politician in Scotland.
"And that is no comment on Scotland as a whole, which has just given the Lib Dems and the Tories combined more votes than the SNP managed at the last Holyrood Election"
--That is not much of an accomplishment given that Scotland has a 4-party system. Sure, the SNP did not properly win the previous Hollyrood election. The other parties, however, seemed very intent to corner them in a minority government, confident it would destroy them.
It is strange, since the SNP is probably closest to your philosophy of all the four Scottish parties, even if still far off (and I would far prefer yours to theirs). Given that the tone of your posting seems to suggest a residual tribal Labourism, it makes me wonder whether you decided what institutions were good and bad at age 13 and resolved to not change your opinion thenceforth.
Plaid Cymru is in government in Wales. The SNP doesn't win the seats that it does, the redoubts to which it has just been pushed back, by being economically left-wing.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of working-class people in rural areas (they predominate, in fact, at least in farming areas - how could they not?), and Wales is one of the great centres of rural radicalism; Plaid Cymru is the only party standing solely in that tradition, but there is also plenty of it in Welsh Labour and in the Welsh Lib Dems.
On "British populism", we shall see who the next Labour Leader turns out to be, and what emerges from electoral reform. Whereas we do not need to wait and see where the untouchable status of the SNP is concerned, since that is now an established fact. Even Plaid Cymru must we wondering now. Everyone else, without exception, never needed to wonder. They just knew.
If Alex Salmond is a popular politician, then exactly how badly would an unpopular politician do? The SNP is now a ghetto party, rather like the BNP: a certain, small and declining, number of people would never vote for anyone else, while no one else would ever consider for one moment voting for it, working with it, or anything.
The cornering of a minority Executive in order to destroy it has worked beautifully. The Executive has done nothing much, has done nothing at all on delivering its totemic policy, and is now paying the electoral price.
Whatever Cameron's scheme for further fiscal devolution may lack in ideological purism, it is a stroke of tactical genius. The cuts are coming. They will be particularly deep in Scotland, because spending is so much higher there. But Cameron will be able to turn round to Salmond and say "Well, why don't you put up taxes, then? You now can". Wouldn't it go down well if Salmond then did so?
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour and even the Scottish Lib Dems, since Lib Dems are not noted for their lack of brass neck, will be able to turn round and say that Cameron is only Prime Minister because a Rainbow Coalition was rendered impossible, not by any action of the SNP's, but simply by the fact that the SNP existed at all. That problem needs to be prevented from arising again, they will say. An easy enough thing to do. Over to you, dear voters.