Thursday 9 April 2015

Sick of Scotland?

Are all General Elections going to be like this from now on?

I am not so sure. And none of this is anything new to the North of England, where our enormous population has been treated as electorally irrelevant since time immemorial.

We have now seen it twice: only the English like Nicola Sturgeon. All of those past SNP gains were under Alex Salmond. Sturgeon is on course to throw them all away, if her reception on home turf has been anything to go by.

But First Past The Post will serve the SNP well this time. In any case, all three national parties have promised to implement The Vow, so yet another Devolution Bill is coming.

A clause of that Bill needs to specify that legislation in the newly devolved areas would have effect only subject to a confirmatory resolution of the House of Commons, unless it had been passed at Holyrood by the majority of those MSPs who had made a prescribed public declaration of commitment to the continued existence of the United Kingdom with Scotland as an integral part of that Kingdom.

Another clause needs to change the manner of electing Scotland's MPs at Westminster. Each of the eight regions that are used for top-up purposes at Holyrood ought to return six MPs, with electors voting for one candidate, and with the six highest scorers elected, a total of 48 MPs.

That would effectively guarantee eight each to Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, but neither they nor anyone else could ever win any more than that.

At least at present, there would probably also be six Kippers and six Greens, amusingly the huge majority, if not the totality, of Green and UKIP representation in the House of Commons.

Might this also be applied to Northern Ireland, as the price of whatever, most obviously, the DUP demanded in return for its support? Northern Ireland could be divided into three, with two counties in each constituency, and with the above principle applied.

The DUP, the UUP, the SDLP, Sinn Féin and the Alliance Party would each be guaranteed three seats, with the Greens and various fringe Unionist organisations, including UKIP, scrapping it out for each of the sixth places.

The SDLP has been muttering that its support for Labour was not unconditional. But then, it never has been. Both Irish Nationalists, one of whom was also very much Old Labour, abstained in 1979, when two Ulster Unionists voted to save the Callaghan Government.

In any case, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats would all vote to give themselves eight safe seats in Scotland and their trying but undeniable family members three in Northern Ireland. They would all vote to contain the DUP a bit more.

They would all vote heartily to humiliate the SNP. And they would all vote for the sheer comedy value of turning UKIP and the Greens into, in parliamentary terms, overwhelmingly Scottish parties that were secondarily Northern Irish, if anything.

5 comments:

  1. The twin injustices of the Barnett Formula-allocating resources on nationality, not need-and the WLQ, where Scottish MPs can vote on laws like tuition fees that only affect the English (while our MPs can't vote on laws like healthcare and education that affect only the Scottish) will continue, until Scottish independence. Which is coming soon. The SNP is happy to play the waiting game, winning more and more concessions from Westminster until they're practically independent anyway-and until the English have had enough of paying for them while they behave as if they are.

    I saw the end of the Union in the last referendum, which was literally neck-and-neck (before the latest SNP surge). It won't be, next time.

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    1. It was nothing like neck-and-neck, and there is no West Lothian Question.

      The SNP will survive as a major force until such time as Labour and the Tories no longer find it amusing for annoying each other.

      No one beats the British Establishment in the end. Mostly, those who have tried end up joining it. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a fact.

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  2. You would lose Lady Sylvia this way.

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    1. You would, and that would be a great loss: Labour-allied, anti-war, anti-Trident, Eurosceptical, pro-life, upholder of traditional marriage, and so on.

      But I am not actually advocating this change, at least not for Northern Ireland. And of course, Lady Hermon might very well keep her seat, thus keeping out a Kipper or a follower of Jim Allister.

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  3. Those clauses would be there if you were in the next Parliament. I wish you were a candidate, I wish you were an MP, I wish you were our MP. That Geordie Shore reject has a lot to answer for. He'll never be an MP either, but you deserve more vengeance than that.

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