Not The Full Shilling

The thing about proponents of English independence is that they also want to bring back pre-decimal currency. Their England is as realistic, or even desirable, as was the Scotland of at least a very great many of such Scottish Nationalists as there were before the 1980s.

Anyone who posits a coalition between Labour and the SNP knows absolutely nothing about either of them. I mean, literally not the first thing. And it is a very old enmity. It did not arise only when the SNP became a major force in Scottish politics. It is fundamental, both to the SNP, and to the Labour Party at least in Scotland, if not farther afield.

In 1979, it was the SNP that proposed the No Confidence Motion that brought down the Callaghan Government; at the consequent General Election, Scotland provided Margaret Thatcher's majority precisely, as people who were politically active there at the time must have had a good idea that it might have done. As long ago as 1974, whereas the Conservatives abstained on Harold Wilson's Queen's Speech when he did not have an overall majority, the SNP voted against it.

Moreover, as what is now the SNP's very long period not only of rule but of hegemony in Scotland makes abundantly clear, such a wildly improbable coalition would be well to the right of the present Government. Economically, that is the position from which the SNP runs Scotland, and that is the position from which Labour provides what little Opposition that it does, to the point that it will soon be humiliated when the Conservatives had made some concessions to the unions after Labour had insisted that Mick Lynch be lynched.

Likewise, both Labour's and the SNP's foreign policies are much more belligerent and intransigent than the Government's, while their social policies manage the remarkable feat of being even more authoritarian. All in all, the people who are spreading fear of a "coalition of chaos", as if there were anything unchaotic about Boris Johnson, ought in their own terms to be working actively for a coalition between Labour and the SNP. Mercifully for the rest of us, there has never been, nor will there ever be, the slightest risk of any such arrangement.