A Rocket Up The Whole Thing

Well, that's that, then.

 

Following Nigel Farage's New Statesman piece, Nicola Sturgeon's explicit guarantee that the SNP would not support a Conservative Government but would, on certain conditions, support a Labour Government, means that David Cameron and Nick Clegg are now the only Party Leaders who do not openly and publicly want the supposedly useless Ed Miliband to become Prime Minister.

 

So much for David Cameron's (in itself, utterly unremarkable) request that Labour, Lib Dem and Green supporters vote Conservative at Rochester and Strood. I mean, they might, although I doubt it very much.

 

But the next General Election, far from being the most complicated since the War or what have you, has become a straight fight between ConDem Cameron and a pro-Miliband alliance of everyone else.

 

Vote ConDem to keep Cameron as Prime Minister. Vote any other way, since Natalie Bennett is also on record as being open to Labour conditionally but absolutely closed to the Conservatives, and the end result would be Miliband in Number 10, not by accident, but by design.

 

The only person other than Cameron who wants to keep him is Clegg. Do you agree with Nick?

 

Sturgeon promised to make the payment of the Living Wage a condition of public sector contracts in Scotland, while including the dig that Holyrood could not make it a requirement by legislation. Labour therefore, and in any case, needs to promise to legislate to that effect throughout the United Kingdom.

 

But her main condition was the absence of nuclear weapons from Scotland. Again, Labour needs not only to match that, but to exceed it, by making it Union-wide.

 

No, Russia is not a bastion of liberal democracy, nor is she our ally, which would be an entirely different matter. But she has neither the will nor the means to attack us; nor had the Soviet Union, which could not transport bread from one town to the next.

 

Russia's internal and external enemies are also, at best, no friends of ours. They, too, are no paragons of whatever our values might be.

 

Unless, in the internal case, those values are unreconstructed Stalinism, or Islamism, or "National Bolshevism" with the hammer and sickle in place of the swastika on the Nazi flag, or an anti-industrial, anti-urban and anti-scientific anti-Semitism.

 

If Sir Edward Leigh or Dennis Skinner, the broadly Old Right Fleet Street brigade or the Morning Star, were in truth as their respective detractors allege, then that would issue in the strongest possible hostility to Russia, rather than in the opposite approach that they do in fact adopt.

 

Tomorrow, veterans of the Waffen SS Galicia, many of whom settled in Britain after the War, will march to the Cenotaph in London, accompanied by their supporters. There is to be a silent protest against  them, in memory of the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, past and very much present.