Come To A Considered View

John McDonnell is only stating the obvious, and Boris Johnson would say exactly the same thing if he were asked. Funny how he never is.

Labour is pretty much finished in Scotland, the treatment of which as a Labour heartland used to baffle old hands in England in the 1990s, who remembered assuming that Labour had won General Elections in the 1950s, "until the results came in from Scotland." They were adamant that John Smith and Gordon Brown had invented a myth of Labour Scotland out of thin air.

Meanwhile, the mere fact of Boris Johnson makes it inevitable that the Conservatives will lose at least 10 of their 13 seats in Scotland, and lose them to the SNP if only because there is not really anyone else.

There could never be a Coalition between the SNP and either main party, since, beyond what remains of the position of Secretary of State for Scotland, there is no job that the SNP could possibly want. 

But depending on how the numbers stacked up, then it would happily go into a confidence and supply arrangement with either of them, since it despises them both equally, in return for lashings of cash, and in return for an independence referendum.

Lashings of cash are in any case very much both Johnson's style and Jeremy Corbyn's, while most Labour people in England have stopped thinking about Scotland politically, and while most Conservatives in England have actively wanted rid of the place for years, so there would be no problem there.

The last independence referendum was cheerfully granted by the last Coalition, and it is quite clear that the Conservatives, who had hoped and expected that that Coalition would continue in 2015, now want to go back to it this year. 

And why not? It may have been a disaster for everyone from the Bedroom Taxed to the people of Libya, but in its own terms it was a great success, getting an awful lot done while lasting a full five years. It was probably Britain's last ever five-year Government.

So there is no possibility of a deal with the Brexit Party. Instead, that party will be used to ensure that the Conservatives lost back anything up to 50 seats to the Liberal Democrats, in the hope of going back to the glory days of the Coalition. 

Item One of the Coalition Agreement would of course be a second EU referendum to cancel out the first one, the best of three of which the first had been held in 1975. But that would be a detail, dealt with by Christmas. The new Government's programme would not be about Brexit at all. It would still be very lucky to last three years. But even so.

Since another hung Parliament is coming, however, then we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.