Judgement Call

I am not one to defend the Leaders' Debates. At best, they should have featured every party with at least 326 candidates. But they were and are really unconstitutional in principle, since we do not elect a President, but a Parliament. With any luck, that they have taken over this campaign will guarantee that they are never repeated.

But the SNP has finally declared itself a branch of student union politics by its stunt before the Court of Session. Alex Salmond is on Question Time that night, anyway, so he physically could not be on the Leaders' Debate. All he wants is a meaningless court judgement, and he won't even get the one of them that he really wants. A court cannot rule that the BBC is biased against the SNP, be that true or false in itself.

What this whole business has shown is that the prominence of the SNP has made Scotland irrelevant. We are heading towards the most dramatic General Election in living memory, yet few or no seats in Scotland will change hands. The share of the vote in Scotland will alter hardly or not at all. And the most exposed Scottish politician as such (Gordon Brown barely counts), both in Scotland and in the country at large, will remain a man, no longer an MP or a candidate to become one, who purports to advocate separatism while in fact constantly demanding that central government spending match that in somewhere with ten times as many people. But with no suggestion of reciprocity: there would be no matching spending in England if the Olympics went to Scotland. Nor with any accountability over how that money is spent. It is impossible to take seriously either him or any political culture that can produce and sustain him.

Meanwhile, UKIP is also planning to take the BBC to court. Again, be they right or be they wrong in principle, is that really how a serious party behaves? And note that, just as the SNP pretends to favour independence, but in fact demands nothing but ever-higher central government spending in Scotland, so UKIP pretends to be in favour of parliamentary sovereignty, but in fact advocates binding referendums at both national and local level. As much as anything else, that foreign and deeply flawed device is characteristic of the Continent rather than of these Islands. And calling for its adoption constitutes a resigned, fatalistic concession that there can never be better parliamentarians. Why vote for a party which says that?