Brown is the new grey

As terror returned to the streets of London, there was something missing. We had the al Qaeda back-story; the tales of heroism, the stoicism of Londoners who partied on regardless. But it was somehow incomplete, as if the star of the show had forgotten to turn up.

It was of course the absence of Tony Blair that made this crisis less of a drama. He would have been out there among the party people, soaking up the emotion and urging endless war against an implacable foe prepared to die to kill. Nor did we have hotheads like John Reid declaring world war three, demanding the suspension of human rights and sending the tanks aimlessly onto the streets.

Instead we had Gordon Brown urging us to be alert and vigilant, as if he was talking about the latest inflation figures. The new Justice Minister, Jack Straw, told the Today programme that “these things happen”. The manner in which Gordon Brown faced his first test as Prime Minister told us all we need to know about the character of this new administration. This is a government which is determined to keep its head when all about lose theirs, to react cautiously to events, and not hit the headlines with heat-seeking soundbites.

The Brown cabinet is very much in this downbeat image. The interesting thing about Gordon Brown’s new administration was its lack of interest. A monotone cabinet compared to the Technicolor of the last ten years. Grey men like Alastair Darling, Des Browne and Jack Straw. “A government of bores”, said one commentator, “the snoozers, the narcolepts and the headbangers”. The press are distraught at the prospect of a cabinet bereft of attention seekers of the Blair era, like Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn and Tony Blair himself. There’s not even a comic turn to replace John Prescott. The first act of the new government, a constitutional review, looked like an exercise in anti-politics - trying to put the nation to sleep rather than wake it up.

Brown’s halting and awkward victory address before Number Ten was pure bathos. I mean, who talks about school mottos and ‘doing their best’ in grab-it-now, private-equity Britain? Dowdy Sarah Brown looked like a harried mother who’d just dropped off the kids on the school run. I think we get the message: that there has been a change.

So is this fade to grey some cunning plan by Gordon Brown to draw a line under the Blair era of glitz, spin and freebies. Or is the lacklustre quality of the new administration a sign, like John Major taking over from Margaret Thatcher, that Labour has simply been exhausted by a decade of reckless charisma an unable to renew itself?.

Well, it’s worth remembering that the Chancellor isn’t just some accountant who happened to stumble into the Treasury. Gordon Brown was on of the architects of New Labour and is himself a genius of spin, a master of media manipulation. He knows all the angles, and his wife Sarah - who is the best-looking Prime Minister’s spouse in modern history - used to run a London PR company. So they know that stage management is essential in politics, and undoubtedly calculated that there was simply no point in trying to compete with the tawdry glamour of his predecessor and his celeb entourage. Beter to play to your strengths - dignity, probity, prudence, diligence.

And with the Prime Minister fingered for the third time by PC Plod over cash for honours last week, and more coffins coming back from Iraq, a bit of sobriety in government may be no bad thing. Faced with a Conservative leader who for some inexplicable reason wishes to be the “heir to Blair”, it makes sense to adopt the style of an older patrician conservatism, which melded “one nation” social concern with economic realism. The Daily Mail really, really likes Brown.

The new PM’s focus his administration on domestic policy, rather than foreign policy adventures. He’ll leave that to David Miliband, who is the keeper of the Blairite tradition. The kind of issues that Brown intends to address arevery different building houses, cutting personal and public debt, getting value for money in the public sector, improving social mobility and child poverty figures. These are actually rather dull issues, compared with starting foreign wars and crushing the Left, and they can’t be dealt with by emotional speeches and market fixes, like the disastrous privatisation of the English NHS. These problems require sobriety and hard graft - or at least the impression of it.

And yes, perhaps a certain anonymity doesn’t do any harm. The godfather of this cabinet is Alistair Darling, who has managed to hold down most of the jobs in government competently and without any media fuss. He is the opposite of John “fit for purpose” Reid, who progressed with much fanfare from ministerial post to ministerial post leaving a trail of high profile disasters behind him, from the NHS consultants contracts to the war in Afghanistan, which he said would be over “without a shot being fired”.

Darling has turned no-being there into something of a political art. In government since 1997, he has served in almost as many roles as Reid: Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Social Security Secretary, Work and Pension, Transport and Trade and Industry. Oh yes, and he was Scottish Secretary as well while holding down transport, but no one remembers. It is as if Darling has one of those pen-shaped devices from Men In Black which erases all memory in a flash. Brown clearly thinks that this is the way to do things, and has been looking to fill his cabinet with the men who weren’t there.

Instead, Brown intends to co-opt a bit of glamour by co-opting big names like Paddy, Lord Ashdown from politics, and people like Alan Sugar into his council of business advisers. Brown used outsiders very effectively when he was Chancellor to introduce unpalatable measures. . Independent commissions like Lord Turner’s on Pensions, Lord Wanless on the NHS, allowed Brown to introduce compulsory pension contributions and a tax increase - both of which would have been electorally difficult to sell had they come from his mouth alone.

In many ways the most intriguing appointment of all is Baroness Shirley Williams with some brief on nuclear non-proliferation. Perhaps this indicates that, as this column argued, Brown is indeed concerned that renewing Trident could help encourage a new arms race. Countries like Iran can point to Britain’s nuclear deterrent as a sign of western hypocrisy when countries like Britain are trying to stop them creating their own deterrents. Brown may be looking for ways to make multilateral nuclear disarmament a reality, and to provide moral leadership in the run up to the 2012 renewal of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

So a cabinet of grey technocrats beavering away in obscurity while a few charismatic individuals, very much at arms-length, are used to generate some excitement. That, I believe, is the Prime Minister’s general intention. He will set the moral tone for this administration by embodying an unashamedly old-fashioned, even conservative approach to public service. People may not be excited, but that won’t matter as long as they have confident that the country is being well run.

However, there is more to politics than competence and hard work. Modern leaders need to be good communicators with a sense of theatre and an ability to empathise - in short charisma. Clinton had it, Blair had it, Thatcher had it, Churchill had it. Brown doesn’t have it. If that alleged car bomb had gone off in London, Brown would have had to be down there, on the pavements, feeling peoples’ pain. Brown doesn’t do empathy , but he’s going to have to learn. We live in an emotionally incontinent age in which people are expected to bare their souls to the camera in time of national crisis.

Brown is more in the line of Clement Atlee, Labour’s post war Prime Minister, of whom it was said that “a car pulled up outside Number Ten and nobody got out”. Brown would no doubt point out that Atlee was responsible for creating the National Health Service, the education system and social housing. It was a towering achievement. But Atlee, who inherited a Labour landslide, also lost government to the Tories

The Scottish takeover of England

At last, the master plan is nearly complete (fiendish cackle)! Scotland’s reverse take-over of England is now unstoppable. Gordon Brown is Labour leader and will enter Number Ten on Thursday, swathed in plaid, bible in hand, casting out all symbols of English frippery and decadence. Merrie England will be turned into a dour, Scottish workhouse. An end, you might say, of ye olde song.

Broon cronies, led by Alistair Darling, will move into the Treasury to oversee the continuing transfer of English taxes to Scotland and subvert the other great offices of state. Meanwhile, in the wings awaits another perfidious Jock, the LibDem leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, waiting to step in as co-ruler of England, if Brown loses his Commons majority because of an English voter revolt. Yes, it’s a very tartan coup.

Now, you know I’m joking, but a lot of people reading this on the internet won’t be laughing. They are the thousands of irate posters who really believe that English democracy is being extinguished by a Scottish invasion. On the political blogs and websites, from the Guardian’s Comment is Free to the Online Telegraph, there is now a kind of paranoid consensus that a Scottish Raj - as Jeremy Paxman called it - really is taking over.

This paranoia has infected large parts of the metropolitan media. A number of really rather influential people in the London who I have spoken with recently genuinely seem to believe that Scotland is, at best. meddling in English affairs, at worst, staging a kind of constitutional take-over. People I respect tell me that having a Scot in Number Ten is constitutionally untenable because English voters will not have a say in things like health and education in the future Prime Minister’s own constituency. I’ve never actually met any English people who want a say in Kirkcaldy’s schools, but that is what the editorials all claim, so it must be true.

It’s not just the loveable buffons like Boris Johnson who rant against the “brooding Scottish power maniac” about to become PM. Guardian columnists like Simon Jenkins can barely conceal their personal loathing for Gordon Brown - he just doesn’t like his face, as he explained in a lengthy piece on Saturday on “the Brown scowl” - and their conviction that Scotland is somehow stealing English treasure. The Tory leader, David Cameron, is under pressure from his English MPs to drive Scottish MPs out of the voting lobbies on English bills and to scrap the Barnett formula.

Scotland, we are told, is living the life of Reilly - or the life of Roddy - at the English tax-payer’s expense. Now, Gordon Brown attempted to explain, in his News 24 interview last week, that the Scottish budget is finite and that Nationalist policies axing prescription charges or student fees, have to be financed by cuts elsewhere in the Scottish estimates. But the message just doesn’t get through.

So, how is Brown going to deal with southern discomfort? Well, in his News 24 interview of Friday he actually indicated that he was going to answer the West Lothian Question, though few in England seemed to notice0. Speaking about English frustration over devolution, Brown said that. “If there are issues that we have to deal with in the future so that the [English] 85% feel all their concerns have been listened to and addressed then we will do so”. Yesterday in his Manchester speech the Labour leader promised a “new constitutional settlement” which will recognise the English dimension to devolution.

But how? Don’t expect Brown to adopt the slogan of ‘English votes for English laws’, which the Tories have been flirting with since the last election - that would lead to the effective creation of a parliament within a parliament dealing with English legislation. It could mean the writ of the government in Westminster would not run over 5/6ths of Britain.

Alternatively, Brown could set up an English Grand Committee to debate, and even vote on exclusively English legislation - but with the proviso that the decisive final vote has to be made by the House of Commons as a whole. The former Tory Scottish Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, has proposed something along these lines. This would be a way of recognising the English dimension while retaining a unitary UK parliament. It would not, however, stop contentious measures such as the 2004 Higher Education Bill, which introduced top up fees, being voted through on the strength of Scottish Labour MP. But it would give a formal voice to specifically English concerns, and concentrate the mind of any government minded to ignore it.

The other response would be to cut the number of Scottish MPs further - say to 30 - so that their influence in Commons votes is reduced. This seems to me the very minimum that Brown could do to address the English question, and it is supported by many constitutional authorities. No one argues that Scots should be driven from Westminster, just that they currently exert a disproporiontate influence. The numbers have already been cut from 72 to 57, as part of the constitutional rebalancing, so why not take it a stage further?

These issues, and of course our old friend the Barnett Formula, will all be raised in Gordon Brown’s constitutional review which he promised yesterday. It will also look at scrapping the Scottish Secretary and introducing a minister of the regions, reforming of the House of Lords, and compiling a written constitution. I can’t for the life of me understand why Labour didn’t announce this new constitutional settlement before, rather than after the Scottish elections. It would have shot a number of nationalist foxes.

It makes a lot of sense to review devolution, a decade after the 1997 referendum, and could have answered the charge that Labour was determined to curb the powers of the Scottish parliament. Brown’s favourite MSP, Wendy Alexander, has now signalled that new powers will be something that is examined in this constitutional process, and Brown will have to look at the question of taxation at least.

But will new a constitutional settlement be enough to calm the Southern brow, extinguish metropolitan paranoia and let Englishmen sleep peacefully in their beds again? I’m not so sure it will. One of the unintended consequences of devolution is that the metropolitan media has largely stopped reporting Scotland, believing perhaps, that it is already a separate country. One senior political writer told me recently about how he was asked by his desk editor for a dateline on his story on the Scottish elections, as if it was a foreign report. London coverage of the new SNP administration has been almost non-existent, apart from the airing of grievances about tuition fees.

So, there will be tears before bed. Perhaps the Telegraph and the Tory party should set up an annual football match with the SNP and the Scottish press. Turn the turf war into a war on the turf. Isn’t that the traditional way we resolve these matters in the UK? It’s just a thought.

The Liberal Democrats lose it again

It seems like the only senior politician Gordon Brown doesn’t want in his government is Tony Blair. A cabinet of all the talents is turning into a cabinet of all and sundry, with invitations being issued, it is said, to Tories like Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Liberal Democrats like Lord Carlile, even possibly the former SDP leader, Lord Owen. Perhaps he’ll be knocking on Alex Salmond’s door next.

No one could decide whether the offer to Lord Ashdown was a bungle or a sting. Certainly, the former Liberal Democrat leader rejected it pretty contemptuously, as if Brown wasn’t fit to ask. But I’m not sure myself whether the affair was in the end, damaging to Gordon Brown - revealing him to be an underhand manipulator, or whether it enhanced his reputation for openness. I’m tending to the latter.

Think about it. Gordon has the reputation of being a ruthless control freak, a Stalinist who cannot tolerate the views of his own civil servants and fellow ministers, let alone the opposition parties. Well, I don’t recall Stalin offering many seats in the Politburo to the Mensheviks. A willingness to give a crucial role in Northern Ireland to a man, Paddy Ashdown, who has a world-wide reputation as a tough negotiator, and happens to be a Liberal Democrat, doesn’t look like the action of a politician who is incapable of delegating responsibility, or taking account of other people’s views.

The oddest thing is that the offer was made public at all. Normally, when top politicians discuss things like this, and
it happens more than anyone realises, there is a tacit understanding that confidentiality will be observed. This is especially the case among Privy Counsellors, who belong to a kind of freemasonry which obliges them to observe confidentiality almost as a matter of course. I’m beginning to wonder if Gordon decided he was quite happy to have the offer made public, even though it made Ashdown’s leader, Sir Ming Campbell, look a bit of a chump, since he had earlier made clear that he could not accept any Liberal Democrats serving in a Labour cabinet.

The Libdems have continued to sound distinctly chumpy, fulminating about “dirty tricks” and the Chancellor’s “underhand tactics”. But this is beginning to sound petulant. It mean, it wasn’t exactly Watergate. Does it really make sense for the Liberal Democrats to be so upset at being offered a place in government? something they have been seeking for years? The idea of replacing the shop-soiled outgoing Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, accused of spinning his legal advice on Iraq, with Lord Carlile, head of the independent watchdog on antiterrorism legislation, sounds pretty astute. It would mean that Brown could not be accused of having a tame, in-house legal adviser if he ever has to go to war again.

The Liberal Democrats really have been behaving very oddly recently, refusing to join a coalition in Wales, not even talking about one in Scotland and now turning down a seat in the the next Labour Cabinet. This from the party which has always made a virtue of its support for coalition government and power-sharing. You begin to wonder whether the LibDems are serious about government at all, or whether they have decided to remain on the sidelines of politics as a kind of debating club for eccentrics.

Of course, Ming the Mong - despite what some people seem to believe - hasn’t ruled out a formal coalition with Labour, only “serving in a Labour government”. A version of the Scottish-style Lib-Lab partnership agreement is still on the cards if there is a hung parliament, as many expect, after the next Westminster elections. But it still looks like a funny way to go about seeking influence. Just consider: at the end of this week, the Liberal Democrats could have been in government in Holyrood, Cardiff and Westminster.

So, perhaps Brown - in making this belated bid to co-opt Paddy Ashdown - just wanted to make clear to the wider public what it was that Sir Ming was finding so objectionable. To hammer home the message that the incoming PM isn’t an old Labour tribalist. In future, Brown will be able to say that he offered them real influence and they turned away. It makes Brown seem like the man who does the business, the man who is in charge.

Moreover, as with Brown’s extraordinary decision to overrule the Prime Minister over the Euro-summit last week, the affair adds to the Chancellor’s reputation as a ruthless operator. Telling Tony Blair by telephone that he had messed up on the latest incomprehensible Euro-treaty, was pretty heavy handed - even from the great clunking fist. Blair stands down later this week after all an you might have thought he would have been kinder to his outgoing boss, a little more magnanimous.

But Brown realises that he’s never going to be loved - well, except by Sarah. Not with his craggy, dour, lived-in face, with its occasional flashes of inappropriate mirth. Brown realises he is going to have to go for experience, authority, intelligence, competence, toughness and determination. He is looking more relaxed - as his hour long interrogation by the BBC’s editors showed. But he lacks his predecessor’s easy charm and he is not going to pretend that he is everyone’s mate.


Brown will settle for the image of a very serious, morally upright and uncompromising politician who is still streetwise. And that may not be a bad reputation for a leader to have as the world faces a troubled and uncertain future.

Salmond blows them away

At First Minister’s Questions on Thursday Jack McConnell asked: “What do Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Austria and Switzerland all have in common?” Alex Salmond replied: “They’re all independent countries and they all come above Scotland in the index of success compiled by the Labour Party’s former economic adviser”. Ouch.

It was such an obvious trap that you wonder why McConnell set it for himself. Indeed, Salmond seemed slightly amazed at being offered such an open goal and hesitated a nanosecond before blasting the ball into the back of it. The Labour leader had intended his questioning to underline the inconvenient truth that all those countries have light railways, like the one proposed for Edinburgh, but he ended up underlining his own party’s failure to grow the Scottish economy within the union.

It wasn’t the best FMQs, on Thursday, and there were hints of the unloveable ‘smart Alec’ making a comeback. But what no one can deny is that under the new First Minister, FMQs have been transformed. And the audacious self-confidence on display at this weekly joust has somehow set the tone for the entire SNP administration.

The effect of the last six weeks has been devastating . The SNP hasn’t so much hit the ground running as lapped the political field on an almost daily basis. Opposition MSPs are astonished, blown away at what has been happening - and I’m not just giving an SNP party political here. Even one of the most prominent critics of the SNP, who I won’t name for obvious reasons, told me last week that he thought the SNP had “played a blinder”.

And here’s a curious thing: a lot of opposition MSPs, those not poisoned by animus or self-delusion, seem to agree that the Scottish parliament has moved up a gear since the nationalists took over. It has raised the game of everyone in the place. Debates are actually worth listening to; MSPs who have been languishing in back-bench obscurity have started making speeches and interventions that are pointed, intelligent and relevant. Indeed, you could, with fairness, say that the Scottish parliament, this underpowered and under confident institution, has suddenly come alive.

Partly, this is down to the flood of initiatives from the SNP which continues unabated. It has been hard to keep up - look away and you’re likely to miss a couple of major stories. Last week we had a Climate Change Bill setting one of the most ambitious targets for C02 reduction in the world - 80% reduction by 2050 - which has stunned environmental groups. We had the end of private health care in the Scottish NHS - a move which might have caused a massive row three years ago, but which went by largely unremarked. And before we could get our heads around that, the nationalists announced what could be the biggest house building programme in Scotland for three decades - increasing housing supply by 50% every year until 2016.

Now, it’s absolutely true, as Labour point out, that these announcements aren’t all they might appear. The SNP housing policy is still at the task force stage. The headlines about the SNP cutting class sizes to 18 last week were hardly justified by the announcement of 300 new teachers, many of whom might have been trained anyway. Nor has the abolition of the graduate endowment fulfilled the SNP’s manifesto pledge to abolish student debt. Prescription charges have not been abolished, and only chronic sick are likely to see early relief. The new Scottish Executive is becoming almost as fond of consultations, task forces and reviews as the previous administration.

But there‘s no way that a minority SNP government, or indeed any government, could possibly have implemented its manifesto in six weeks. Just being there would be success in itself. But what Salmond has done, most effectively, is stamp his authority firmly on parliament and Scottish public life, and set the political agenda. Salmond has used his executive powers to the full, saving local hospitals, abolishing dawn raids, ruling out nuclear power, reforming relations with Westminster, reviewing infrastructure projects. No one can be in any doubt that Scotland is under new management, and has a new direction.

This is exactly what Labour did Wesminster in 1997. They made such a dramatic statement of intent in the weeks and months after they won the general election, that they changed the climate of public affairs for the next six years, before things went seriously wrong over Iraq. Those early weeks of the Blair administration - the change in tone, the blizzard of initiatives like Bank of England independence and devolution - even the handling of public events like the death of Diana Princess of Wales, showed just how important the first hundred days of a new administration can be.

The great difference, of course, is that Tony Blair had behind him a majority of 169 seats; Alex Salmond has a deficit of 20 and no coalition partner. The most astonishing thing about this first ever Nationalist administration is the way it has managed to suspend disbelief and deliver a radical programme without any visible means of support. Of the thirty odd votes so far in the lifetime of this government, Salmond has not lost a single one - at least of any consequence.

No, I can’t quite understand it either; no one expected this. On Thursday, even many SNP MSPs were convinced that the nationalists had lost a key vote on local income tax; in the end, parliament backed the motion by 64 to 62. This doesn’t mean that local income tax is a done deal; but it does mean that the council tax is history. That is a very big hurdle crossed.

Luck? Of course - but self-made luck. The SNP parliament minister, Bruce Crawford, is really earning his crust. This unflambouyant politician is turning out to be as skilled an operator as any chief whip in Westminster. His ability to deliver two votes so far on the vexatious trams issue was achievement enough, but he has also scored a series of unreported successes over votes on skills academies and Trident, both of which brought the Liberal Democrats on board.

What has bewildered the opposition Labour party most is the unexpected competence of the SNP ministerial team. Lacking any government experience, and with no unifying ideology oher than separatism, running a devolved administration should have been a rocky learning experience for the nationalists. They should have been all over the place, contradicting each other, bickering over independence and picking pointless fights with London. Easy meat for Labour, with their experienced ex-ministers and their inside knowledge of public affairs. But Labour hopes that this administration would collapse in a heap have been dashed, and it is Jack McConnell who is floundering.

It can’t last of course, and this week the SNP is likely to lose its first important vote - over Edinburgh’s trams - which the finance secretary, John Swinney, seems minded to ignore. My own view is that the SNP should accept the will of parliament on the light railway, but hand the bill for any cost overruns to the new administration on Edinburgh City Council. That would concentrate minds in the capital.

There is a danger that the nationalists, like the Scottish football team get intoxicated by their own early success and up becoming overconfident and reckless. SNP ministers have yet to be tested in crisis. But Alex Salmond has shown what he is capable of and given the political world a lesson in how to turn an indifferent election result into a political triumph.

It is all so unlike the early weeks and months of Holyrood in 1999, when senseless rows about medals and expenses ruined the show. Perhaps if Donald Dewar had entered government with the same imagination panache as Salmond, the story of devolution might have been very different.

Hello? Hello? Is that the Scottish Executive?

”Hello, you’re through to the Scottish Executive. The central inquiry line is now closed. Normal office hours are 8.00am to 5.00, Monday to Friday. However, if your inquiry is urgent, please hold and you will be put through to the security control room.”

That is what UK ministry of justice officials would have heard when they were supposed to have called on 25th May to inform Alex Salmond and the Scottish Executive about the secret talks with the Libyans over the fate of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al- Megrahi. Whitehall claim that attempts were made to contact Scotland but it was a bank holiday and no one was home.

Well, had the ministry officials held on for just thirty seconds, they would have been put through to the duty officer at the Scottish Executive. I tried it myself yesterday. For, of course, when it comes to running the country, there is never simply ‘nobody home’. There are always officials on duty, in case of emergency, and ministers can be contacted at home on their mobiles.

The claim that “attempts were made” to contact the Scottish Executive is so ridiculous that I can hardly believe that Whitehall officials are serious in suggesting it. It is even more disturbing that some sections of the Scottish press appear to accept it as a valid explanation of what happened - that it was cock up rather than conspiracy. Yet London could easily have contacted someone in the Scottish Executive that Friday. The sheer cynicism of this explanation is an insult to the intelligence of Scots, and an affront to the Scottish media, who are being treated as complete idiots.

From the moment this story broke, Downing St and the Scotland Office have been trying to manipulate the truth. I won’t say they have been lying, but their economy with the truth amounts to wilful distortion. First of all, we were told that the memo of understanding, signed by Tony Blair in a tent in the Libyan desert last month, “specifically excluded” Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al Megrahi. We now know that it did not exclude al Megrahi.

Then we were told that it had been made clear to the Libyans during the talks that any deal could not include al Megrahi. This is untrue. Official sources in the Libyan government confirmed to the Herald that the memo was clearly intended to cover the Lockerbie bomber, that this was explicit in the transactions in the desert. The Sunday Herald has discovered that British officials actually told their Libyan counterparts, that Scotland was a “minor complication” over prison transfer that Libya need not “worry about”.

And the Sunday Times reported yesterday, Libyan consular staff had even visited al Megrahi in Greenock prison to tell him that diplomatic efforts were under way to have him transferred. In other words, the Lockerbie bomber was told even while the Scottish Executive was being kept in the dark.

The former Labour minister, Brian Wilson, has said that “the only fact that matters” is that the Scottish Executive would have had to give explicit approval before Megrahi could be transferred from Scottish custody. That isn’t really true either. It is not at all clear, under the Scotland Act, that the Scottish Executive could have blocked the move. The foreign office could have argued that this was part of an international treaty, and could have cited the constitutional primacy of Westminster.

But even if they had intend to secure Scottish approval, it still beggars belief that Downing St. did not keep the Scottish law officers and the First Minister informed of what was going on. It seems the decision not to call was taken by the Prime Minister himself. The Sunday Herald revealed yesterday that senior officials at the foreign and commonwealth office advised Tony Blair that he should Alex Salmond about the deal over al Megrahi.

Which brings us to the final piece of misinformation - the claim that the Scottish Executive had been informed about the diplomatic moves on prisoner transfer on the 25th of May. I was assured that this was the case by a senior UK government source last week. When I asked who had been contacted and what had been said, I was told that no one actually knew. “But the attempt had been made” to contact the Scottish government. Needless to say, the Scottish Executive has no record of any call.

Now, some in the Scottish media seem to believe that this is a storm in a tea cup, and that it’s time to move on. Well, I’m sorry, but this is too important to let go. There was a pattern to events, which betray a shocking degree of disrespect to the Scottish government and to the Scottish people, who were not told the truth about this affair, and are still not being told it.

The people who concocted this misleading account of events need to be held to account, and the UK government should be required to tell the whole truth about this affair. The foreign and commonwealth office should issue an apology to the Scottish law officers for failing to inform them of the transactions with Libya and the Scottish Executive must receive an assurance that nothing like this will happen again.

This is basic issue of trust. If Downing St. really wanted to clear this matter up it should issue a clear statement to the Libyan government revoking the memorandum and making absolutely clear that al Megrahi will under no circumstances be transferred, either to Libya or to another Muslim third country. That he will serve out his 27 year sentence in a Scottish jail.

But why, you ask, would Downing St.. concoct a story that was so patently ridiculous that no one could possibly believe it? Well, one plausible explanation is that Downing St. felt it had to prevent, at all costs, the story breaking in London. It would have been highly damaging, not just to relations with foreign countries, but to the government’s antiterrorism policy, if it had become known that Tony Blair had been in secret negotiations with the Libyan dictator over he possible transfer of the man convicted of the worst ever terrorist atrocity on British soil.

The government killed the story in London by assuring the UK press that the story was pure invention by a Nationalists First Minister determined to pick a fight with London. They knew this was untrue, but felt they were ‘lying for Britain’. This interpretation was accepted by the BBC Newsnight programme and informed the now infamous interview by Kirsty Wark, for which the BBC subsequently apologised.

What infuriates me most about this whole affair is the implication that anyone who questions the Downing St.. account is a nationalist sympathiser. Well, I belong to no party, but I can tell this this much: if they want to hand the political initiative to the SNP, they are going exactly the right way about it. And I say this to UK government sources: in future, don’t ring me unless you are prepared to tell it straight. You might find I am on not at home.

The new Tartan Tories

Back in the 1970s, Labour used to dismiss the Scottish National Party as the “tartan Tories”. It never made a great deal of sense, since the SNP has generally been significantly to the left of Labour. Moreover, the SNP and the Conservatives have been bitter enemies because of the defining issue of the Union.

Until now - for something very strange has happened in Holyrood: The two parties which were at each other’s throats only six weeks ago, have suddenly discovered that they really get on rather well. Before the election Alex Salmond said that the only people he would refuse to do business with was the Tory party. Yet since he became First Minister he has been doing little else. The tartan Tories are back.

The rapprochement is most striking at First Minister’s Question Time, which has turned into the Eck and Bella show. The Conservative leader, Annabel Goldie, has been performing the role of straight-lady to Alex Salmond, feeding him knowing lines like “When will the First Minister next be meeting the Prime Minister, and what will they discuss..” Ho ho.

But Labour aren’t laughing. If it hadn’t been for the Tory refusal to join in Jack McConnell’s ‘pan unionist anti-SNP coalition’ after May 3rd, Alex Salmond wouldn’t be taking First Ministers questions at all. In a very real sense, the Tories gave Salmond his chance to seize power - and they have kept supporting him. After the emergency statement over the Libyan memorandum, Annabel was almost more indignant than Alex Salmond.

It’s not the Green party that has been keeping this nationalist government alive, but the blue party. The Tories have saved the nationalist administration from defeat on two crucial occasions - both times on the vexed issue of Edinburgh’s trams. The Tories support the light rail project, but you’d be hard put to tell, because in the two knife-edge votes they have backed Salmond against Labour and the Lib Dems.

This has infuriated the Liberal Democrats, who simply cannot believe that the Tories - the great defenders of the Union - should be giving aid and comfort to the Nationalists. Last week, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, Tavish Scott, dissolved into rage during the trams debate, accusing the Conservatives of “fraudulent opportunism”.

Indeed, the Tory and SNP elections manifestos disagreed on everything from local income tax to the referendum on independence. But that hasn’t stopped the Tories and the SNP doing deals on policy behind the scenes. This is most striking on law and order. Last week, the SNP Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, adopted the Conservative hard line on sex criminals, agreeing to satellite tracking and even lie detector tests to stop registered sex offenders from going to ground. He is also looking at DNA retention, bail and sentencing policy.

In the coming weeks, the Tories will also support the SNP on issues like cutting business rates, school discipline and hiring 1,000 police. They are hoping to come to an agreement too on cutting council tax. It really is quite remarkable, but if Salmond survives his first hundred days, he will have Annabel to thank.

Now, you might say that it is a pretty high risk strategy for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party to be supporting the separatists in power. Shouldn’t Annabel be doing more to defend the United Kingdom she loves? After all, the longer Salmond is allowed to remain in office, the greater surely will be his ability to foment discord between Holyrood and London.

But the Tories were in such dire straights before the last election, flat lining in the opinion polls and failing to benefit in any obvious way from the coming of David Cameron, that something simply had to be done. Tory was a tainted brand, a four letter word, and a generation of Scots had grown up to regard the Tories as “the English Party”. The Tories had to do something to make them relevant again, to get back in the race, and show they were truly Scottish.

Sensing that the future was minority government, they made a declaration before the election that they would not enter any coalition with anyone, but would work on an issue by issue basis. This insulates them, to some extent, from the charge of opportunism. They can defend their actions by saying they have simply been following the logic of consensus politics and trying to get conservative policies implemented.

The Tories have also been influenced the analysis of the historian and former Tory candidate, Michael Fry, who has argued that nationalism is the future of the Right. Beneath the thin crust of collectivism, according to Fry, lies a true Presbyterian Scotland, with a culture of thrift, hard work and self-reliance. The SNP leadership has always been liberal left, but there is no reason to suppose that its voters are. Most SNP seats in the past have tended to come from former Tory areas like the North East. The SNP is a single issue party, with no firm ideological roots in the left or the right - you can be a socialist nationalist or a conservative nationalist, but you are still a nationalist.

Annabel’s gamble is that they can exploit this fluid situation of weak nationalist government to shift the centre of gravity of Scottish politics markedly to the right, and show that Tories can make a difference. At least until the next general election - for one suspects that, if there is achange of government, and David Cameron takes over in Downing Street, that the Tories may lose their enthusiasm for dabbling in Scottish nationalism.

In the meantime, Conservatism is back in business, for the first time in twenty years. They have become the true tartan Tories.

Be afraid of Salmond

27 May 2007

Alex Salmond is in office, but not in power. The Scottish National Party administration is a weak and feeble creature, unable to get its way in parliament, insecure and liable to be snuffed out at any moment by the combined might of the opposition parties.

Right? Wrong. Absolute tosh and garbage. This supposedly impotent administration has confounded the consensus of the commentariat, myself included, that it wouldn’t be able to do very much. If this is inactivity, heaven help us if the SNP ever get a working majority.

Salmond and co have simply brushed aside the pessimists and driven forward a programme of government which is bold and imaginative. Confidence trick it may be, but it’s a pretty good one. Hardly a day goes by without a new and eye-catching initiative making the headlines. Clean coal technology and reopening the Scottish pits; writing nuclear power out of the energy equation, carbon capture at Peterhead, scrapping the Edinburgh air link, reviewing free personal care, new measures on sex crime, freezing council tax, a Scottish television channel.

Yes, you heard it - a Scottish digital television channel. SNP people have been urging BBC executives to use the forthcoming analogue switch off as an opportunity to set one up. I can assure you that there is a lot of interest in this in Queen Margaret Drive from the top down, where the idea has been under discussion for some time.

Of course, like many initiatives the SBC may never see the light of day. Nor does the Scottish government actually possess the power, for example, to freeze council tax, according to authorities like Prof. Arthur Midwinter. But many SNP initiatives will materialise. There WILL be more police on the streets; local hospital emergency facilities, like Monklands, will stay open; free school meals will be restored; and prescription charges abolished. Postgraduate student fees will be scrapped and bridge tolls axed. The challenge will be to the opposition parties to stop Salmond dominating the public agenda.

For example, all the Scottish parties support free personal care and want to see it properly funded - which right now it isn’t. Frankly, I can’t see any of them siding with the Department of Work and Pensions on the issue of attendance allowances, when Salmond demands the #23 million back. Ditto public sector reform. Following the publication of the Howat report - which the previous administration had shamefully kept secret - Salmond is promising to make the Scottish state more efficient and transparent and to cut a way through the bureaucratic jungle. He means it, and so do the Tories who will back him. Good-bye Scottish Enterprise - at least as we know it.

And it’s not all populism either. The SNP showed that they are capable of seeing beyond the next headline by not sacking Labour’s capable Elish Angiolini, as Lord Advocate, and by removing the post from cabinet. In doing this they took a real risk. In future, on issues like Shirley McKie, the Human Rights Act etc, the SNP will not have political influence over the Crown Office, and could lose control of events. But, as Tony Blair used to say, it was the right thing to do.

The opposition parties - with the exception of the Scottish Tories who have seized the new opportunities with both hands - haven’t got the measure of this new administration at all. Like the political commentators, they are still thinking that Salmond is a hog-tied minority leader with a big mouth and no power. The Liberal Democrat leader-in-waiting Tavish Scott last week accused the Nationalists of “hitting the ground prevaricating”, as if they weren’t doing very much. He should try looking around.

The Nationalists have entered government with the same sense of determination and purpose Labour showed when it took office in Westminster in 1997. Of course, Tony Blair’s government had a 169 seat majority, whereas Salmond has a 20 seat deficit, and no visible means of support. It is being held aloft by will power alone, but the will certainly is there. This administration will have to be brought down by combined action off the opposition parties, and they are going to have to time this action very carefully indeed.

First of all, they need a casus belli - a justification for going to war with Salmond. It’s not that easy to think of one presenting itself, unless the First Minister does something deeply unpopular like releasing half the Scottish prison population. Not entirely fanciful, since the SNP is committed to replacing jail by community sentences.

However, Salmond will be careful to avoid doing anything so controversial that it could raise a confidence issue in the parliament. Instead, he is going to tighten up on the monitoring of sex criminals, and is even contemplating reopening the issue of Catholic adoption agencies right to refuse gay couples. The Left shouldn’t assume that this administration will be particularly liberal.

Which leaves the opposition parties with the option of forcing Salmond out by cutting off his financial lifeline - refusing to support the budget to pay for all Salmond’s initiatives. This is the surest way of forcing another election, and they would have the active assistance of the UK Treasury in choking off Salmond’s cash. However, the opposition parties might find that they have fashioned a noose for their own necks if they do this.

Salmond would go to the country on the strength of the agenda outlined in his first hundred days, the most ambitious prospectus put before the electorate since 1999. He would force Labour to argue the case for hospital closures, more bureaucrats, keeping council tax, prescription charges etc.. Following its disastrous outing at the last election, Labour is in no shape to fight an election. Its leader, Jack McConnell, has been kicked around the press by his own MSPs, by Labour MPs and by the UK campaign team, who have no confidence in him. Yet, as we saw last week, the only credible challenger Wendy Alexander, the hungry caterpillar, is simply not ready to take over yet, if at all.

Nor will the Scottish Press be so eager to support Labour as they were last time. They have been shown to be dangerously out of touch with their own readers. So, there is every possibility that an early election could be equally damaging to Labour, and that the SNP could be returned with a substantially increased majority. This is what happened in 1966 and in 1974 when minority Labour administrations in Westminster sought re-election after finding that they couldn’t continue. The people gave them a mandate to show what they could really do.

So, Labour may well decide that it would be fatal to strike early, even if it could line up the support of the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. Which means we may all have been wrong again in believing that this government will be short-lived. Salmond is going to be given space to show what he can do. He has called our bluff, and he intends to go on calling it.

Brown versus Salmond - what a contest!

13/5/07

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. We will shortly have two of the most gifted Scottish politicians of their generation facing each other across the constitutional divide. Alex Salmond as First Minister of Scotland; Gordon Brown as Prime Minister of the UK. What is England going to make of this r grudge match?

On Friday, as Gordon Brown toured marginal constituencies in the South of England, he was pursued by a bagpiper reportedly hired by the Tories. The objective was clear: to indicate that in some way Gordon Brown is a stranger in a foreign land, that his not really ‘one of us’.

This has become the new Tory “dog whistle”, replacing immigration, as the subliminal message that Tories want to communicate to Middle England. They won’t want to make overt attacks on the next Prime Minister’s Scottish origins. But Tory focus groups have no trouble identifying disquiet about the Chancellor’s personality - the dour Scot has a lot of work to do if he wants middle England to warm to him. A few thousand eco homes won’t win the South.

Events this week in the Scottish Parliament will only confirm the sense of Scottish “otherness”. Alex Salmond will y be elected as First Minister of Scotland, with Nicola Sturgeon at his side. Salmond will then head off to meet the Queen - an even of immense symbolic importance, even if not very much will be said.

The English media will then begin to realise the enormity of what has occurred in Scotland. No only has Labour been defeated, but the nationalists have been allowed to form a government unaided, unrestrained by any unionist coalition partner. Alex Salmond may have very little scope for getting his own way domestically as a minority leader - much of his legislative programme has already been dumped. But the point is that it will look and sound as if he is the leader of Scotland, and many English commentators will conclude that Scotland is now, to all intents and purposes, a separate country.

Polls suggest that more English people support independence for Scotland than Scots. Resentment at Scotland supposedly being featherbedded by public subsidies and for living in relatively cheap homes, is not hard to find. The London mayor, Ken Livingstone - no friend of the Chancellor - claims that London is being impoverished in order to stuff the mouths of Brown’s homeland, and that the metropolis needs a better deal.

The idea that this global financial powerhouse - the richest real estate in the world - is in need of financial assistance from low growth Scotland may sound daft from our point of view. But if you are a professional family in your early thirties, living in a rented shoe box and faced with sending your kids to a run down local school, you might well start to wonder whether Londoners don’t deserve a better deal.

It is not that easy, however, for the Tories to play the English card, at least overtly . They are a unionist party, after all, and dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom. They can’t appear to be in league with the Scottish nationalists, even though, in a very real sense, they are. As First Minister, Alex Salmond will have no qualms about raising the West Lothian Question. His troops in the Commons will insist that it is unacceptable for Scottish Labour MPs to “dictate” to England its policies on education, health and such like, when English MPs have no say in a Scotland.

The West Lothian Question was always a difficult one for Labour, since their majority was reduced in the 2005 general election. But with a non-Labour party in office in Holyrood it becomes all but impossible to mount a convincing argument for Scottish MPs to retain their full voting rights in the Commons. (My own view is that it would be wise pre-emptively to reduce the number of Scottish MPs further) I suspect that this may be in the back of the Chancellor’s mind when he promised a constitutional review to restore power and respect for parliament. And if it wasn’t in his mind, it soon will be.

The irony of Gordon Brown setting up what the Guardian newspaper described as a cross party “constitutional convention” on the future of Westminster, when he has refused any review of Holyrood’s constitutional status, will not be lost on the Scots. Brown’s convention is meant to review things like the ministerial code, Royal Prerogative and war making powers. But if such a body is set up it will have to look at the reform of the House of Lord, and at the new constitutional relations across Britain.

The Northern Ireland and the Welsh assemblies are moving towards greater autonomy. It will no longer be possible, with a nationalist government in Scotland, for relations between Holyrood and Westminster to be managed by cosy personal relations within the party of government as has been the case since 1999. Constitutional machinery will have to be created to resolve the many disputes that will arise between a nationalist FM and London.

The Tories will realise that they have nothing to lose by agreeing to endorse Brown’s plans for parliamentary perestroika, since it will inevitably raise the question of voting rights of Scottish MPs. If the Chancellor is trying to restore power and influence to parliament, he is going to have to look at the issue of “English votes for English laws”, as the Tory home affairs spokesman David Davies calls it - this is the idea that Scots MPs should withdraw from votes on purely English legislation.

And if Prime Minister Brown tries to block any consideration of the WLQ, newspapers like the London Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph will go for him. The London media is not anti-Scottish as such, but if it believes Scotland is already drifting off into the post-imperial sunset, it will have no qualms about demanding that Brown should stop, as they will put it, imposing laws on England on the strength of votes from MPs from another country.

They will also raise the whole Barnett Question. With a nationalist administration abolishing prescription charges and bridge tolls, scrapping university fees, delivering free school meals and subsidies to first time home buyers, the perception will be that Scotland is getting away with grand larceny - financing a social democratic paradise on the backs of English tax payers.

Alex Salmond will agree that Barnett is unfair and should be scrapped; that there should be a new needs assessment and that Scotland should be forced to raise its own taxes in order to fund its own spending programmes. This could hasten the day when Scotland gets its own tax powers and assigned revenues from oil. And that really would be the beginning of the end for the UK. The Liberal Democrats may live to regret handing Alex Salmond the keys to Scotland.

Tony and me

And so where were you on that bright May morning in 1997 when all those Tory hate figures like Michael Portillo and Michael Forsyth were buried by the Blair landslide. Bliss it was..etc, (turn to page 94). We’ve been forced to relive those moments so often during Tony Blair’s long good-bye, that it’s all becoming a little sick-making.

And anyway, how do we really know he’s gone? I’ve been writing political obituaries of Tony Blair since 2004, and he still hasn’t actually left office yet. Until the last nail is driven into his political coffin, I reserve judgement. Even if he goes on a gap year to Africa to do the mission thing, he might still come back hoping that the nation and his party will realise its mistake and demand his return. Don’t laugh, Alex Salmond did it.

And no, I don’t bear him any personal animosity. I’ve always found that I couldn’t help liking Tony Blair, even as I loathed what he was doing to our political culture. The first time I really got to know him was back in the 1992 Labour conference when, as a journalistic assignment, I elected to follow this interesting but still largely obscure shadow minister around the Labour Party conference fringe. It was an extraordinary experience.

Blair pursued this like a military campaign. He would speak at three fringe meetings in each lunchtime. It was all talk and go, but the amazing thing was that they all seemed to love him for it. He would segue seamlessly from the Police Federation to the civil liberties campaigners and charm both of them equally. Trades unionists were a pushover, and business groups saw someone they could, well, do business with.

Blair’s great asset was his likability. He talked a lot of platitudes, about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime; about governing in the interest of the many rather than the few; about reconciling social justice and economic efficiency - but we weren’t really listening to the words. Blair was like one of those people at school who for no obvious reason were just hugely popular - everyone wanted to be around him. He made people feel good about themselves.

I was as susceptible as anyone, and while our relationship has never exactly flourished, I have always found him immensely personable. The last time I spoke to Tony Blair was during a dark rainy night in February, when I and a group of journalists were invited to a country house hotel in Erskine to break bread with the Prime Minister and talk about the Scottish election campaign. He bounded in, with the same old expression of slightly dizzy resignation his face which seemed to say: ‘Hey, we all know this politics business is kind of ridiculous, but let’s all try to get through it as best we can”.

The PM looked immensely fit and lively, and talked absolute unalloyed nonsense about the Scottish election . But the warmth in the room was unmistakable. The greatest conman in political history he may have been, but the secret of successful confidence trickery is the realisation that people really like to be conned. They want to have their naive beliefs validated; to think that pigs really can fly, if there is a leader around with sufficient determination to get pork airborne.

Blair used his personal plausibility to extraordinary effect. From that very first moment when he announced that everyone accepted that he was a “pretty straight kind of guy” after the Bernie Ecclestone bung back in 1998, to his back-to-the-wall encounters with furious British public in the 2005 general election. Alistair Campbell devised the so-called “masochism strategy” to deal with political unpopularity, which involved getting Tony Blair to confront as many angry critics as possible, preferably on camera, to show how difficult it was for them not to like him.

The supreme achievement of the Great Persuader was the Iraq war. Only Tony Blair could have faced down two of the biggest parliamentary rebellions since Irish Home Rule, and persuaded MPs to go to war on the basis of an intelligence “dossier” that had been downloaded from a PhD thesis on the internet. The Commons in February 2003 suspended disbelief, and voted for the most costly foreign policy disaster in post war British history with their eyes wide shut. They simply wanted to believe that Tony knew what he was doing.

The Prime Minister charmed the country’s newspaper editors as easily as he charmed parliament. They don’t like to admit it now, but back in 2003 the press actually believed that we could walk into an Muslim country, bomb the capital, lock up the government, grab the oil and then sit around in the sun while Iraq turned into a beacon of democracy. Some people still believe even today. In fact, Alistair Campbell seems to think that’s what really did happen.

The bigger the lie, the more people want to believe, that was the great discovery of the 20th Century totalitarians, and in a small way, Tony Blair has confirmed the thesis. If the people love you enough, you can say almost anything and enough of them will believe. It’s not just PR - as Gordon Brown is finding out - the spin is only as good as the spinner.

Brown versus Blair - no contest

Everyone thinks that Tony Blair is distraught at the thought of Gordon Brown taking over from him, but there are consolations? After all, what better way to continue the love affair with the British public than to leave them when they are still clamouring for more and to be replaced by someone who can’t even get the camera angles right in his campaign launch. Who managed to get a door slammed in his face on national television on his big day. Blair’s characterisation of the Chancellor as “the great clunking fist” after the March budget has fixed Brown’s image in the public mind. Leaden, stiff, heavy, inelegant and brutal. The cartoonists are already getting to work.

Blair has had more farewells than Sinatra and that has made deprived his successor of the gift of novelty. Brown looks worn out even before he starts in the job, at least by comparison with Blair, who seems to be handing over to the older man.
The Chancellor has been forced to carry the spirit of Blairism into the future by agreeing to red lines on the war, terror, detention, id cards, Trident, nuclear power, and market driven public services.


Brown is a brilliant politician, of course, and will no doubt have a few surprises up his sleeve. His greatest asset is his youthful ministers - Yvetter Cooper, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Douglas Alexander, James Purnell - who will be elevated to senior cabinet positions. The new PM will signal a generational change even though he is not part of it. Brown will confound critics of his control freakery by pretending to give power away, to independent boards, specialist committees, co-opted business figures. He’s even hinted at non Labour figures entering government in some way.

But he will never escape the shadow of Tony Blair, and the constant comparisons of their respective styles. Blair has prolonged his leave-taking to such a degree that Gordon Brown has been forced to mate with his ghost. How can we be sure Blair is really gone? We can’t. The most successful Prime Minister in Labour history will be a living reminder of the limitations of his successor. Unless, that is, Gordon Brown decides to drive a stake through his heart.

What the SNP victory means

“I’m off to buy a hat in order to eat it” so said one prominent media face on Friday morning. When Alex Salmond announced two years ago that he was going to win 20 seats, everyone in the Scottish press, myself included, scoffed at the idea. Pah! the nationalists had come third behind the Liberal Democrats in the 2005 general election vote. “Alex will live to regret that”, we said. Well, the hat shops of Scotland are doing brisk trade this weekend.

Let’s be clear: this was a hugely significant even revolutionary result - and I use that word advisedly. It is comparable to the Labour victory in 1997, which brought to an end the Conservative hegemony of British politics - only this election could have rather more profound implications for the British constitution.

Scotland now has a new political landscape. To understand why, you have to look beyond the headline result, in which the SNP had only a one seat advantage over Labour. Gaining 20 seats was, of course, remarkable enough, given the dominance of Labour in West Central Scotland and the hostility of the popular media, which tried to hijack the election by vilifying Alex Salmond. The Sun should be rightly ashamed of its polling day front page depicting a hangman’s noose as the penalty for voting SNP. This time, the Sun really lost it...

But look across the councils of Scotland. Labour have been reduced to two: Glasgow and Lanarkshire. The SNP have returned 360 councillors, a hundred more than their target. This means that the Labour monolith, which has run Scotland from the bottom up, is now being dismantled from the top down. IN future, in all those councils which were Labour one-party states, there is now a series of coalitions in which the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, where not actually in office, will provide vigorous oppositions.

The new cohorts of non-Labour councillors represent the seed-corn of the political future. They will be working to challenge Labour’s hegemony of the local state, of public appointments, of the local media. It has become a truism to say that Scotland is now two countries: West Central Scotland and the Rest. But even in Labour’s heartland, in its Western fortresses, there is now an SNP presence.

Five nationalist MSPs in Glasgow, for Heaven’s sake. The voters of the West may have responded to the command of the popular tabloids like the Record and the Sun this time, but they may not do so readily once non-Labour politicians are no longer aliens in the West.

Of course, for the revolution to be realised, the SNP must form a government. This will have to be cemented within the week, and the only realistic, and democratically credible solution is a coalition between the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. They have the numbers - 65 - they have the policies - trident, local income tax, nuclear power, fiscal autonomy - and they have the “moral authority” - a phrase that Alex Salmond has astutely inserted into the post-election political discourse.

And such a coalition would also have the only credible leader in the Scotland. Alex Salmond has proved in this historic campaign that he has earned the right to be the next First Minister. It is very difficult to see how Jack McConnell could continue to lead Scotland from the back after his dismal outing. Read the devastating comments on the Labour leader from his own campaign team in today’s Sunday Herald.

Nicol Stephen, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader also had a poor campaign, where he failed to connect, lost two key MSPs in Euan Robson and George Lyon and shed thousands of votes in his own constituency majority. If McConnell and Stephen’s political overlords - Gordon Brown and Ming Campbell - believe they can prevail upon them to cling onto power, with a kind of rump Lib-Lab administration backed by the Tories, then they are simply deluding themselves.

The people of Scotland would not stand for two parties which were given such an electoral pasting attempting to cling on to power. Such a coalition would lack any kind of authority at all, moral or otherwise. It would confirm the worst paranoid fears of Scots that Holyrood was actually run by London. McConnell would appear as a puppet and Stephen as a muppet.

Of course, the Liberal Democrats don’t want to do a deal with Alex Salmond. They don’t trust the SNP leader, think he’s a demagogue who would not listen to them and would run the Scottish Executive as if it were his fan club. But the LibDems may not be in a position to refused to do a deal. The logic of proportional democracy, and their own pronouncements on the need for stable coalition government in Holyrood, may ultimately force them into a coalition, whether they like it or not. It has to be with the SNP because there is simply no reasonable democratic alternative. The people have spoken. They have their ministerial careers to think of too.

What these two parties should do is park the referendum issue in a constitutional convention for the duration of this parliament. The SNP and the Liberal Democrats have both talked favourably about setting up a constitutional convention to review Scotland’s future relationship to the UK, its powers and responsibilities, its financing and taxation. Lord Steel has pointed the way in this paper today. <> They should call on all interested parties in Scotland to join in this convention and allow it to do its work, as did the 1988 Scottish Constitutional Convention, which drew up the blue-print for devolution. Let this whole constitutional issue be taken out of the day to day running of the Scottish parliament, and allow the government of Scotland to be stabilised.

Let the LibDems continue to say they don’t want a referendum, by all means; and let the SNP say they do want one - but farm out the whole debate to the Constitutional Convention. It should decide how and when the Scottish people should be consulted after it has deliberated. I believe that the SNP would agree to do this, and would even accept a multi-option referendum at the end of it, including the Liberal Democrats option of federalism - a devolved parliament with enhanced powers.


The alternative for the SNP is anyway that their bill for a referendum, if they put it to the parliament as piece of minority legislation, would be resoundingly defeated. So, what have the Nats to loose? Gordon Brown may try to prevent Labour taking part in the new Constitutional Convention Mark 2, but that would split the Scottish Labour Party. I have spoken to members of the party who would willingly participate. If Ming Campbell orders the LibDems to stay out, they would split too.

Taking the referendum factor out of the equation would allow a Nat-Lib-Green coalition to honour its democratic covenant with the voters prepare a programme for government. That programme practically writes itself. The Liberals and the SNP are agreed on the need to scrap the council tax, introduce local income tax, lower business taxes, establish a growth target for Scotland, promote enterprise. They are both for renewable energy, against nuclear power and Trident and in favour of liberal policies on asylum and immigration. They want more police on the streets, more teachers in schools, smaller class sizes and maintaining local hospitals.

On crime, they agree on community sentencing, police reform and longer sentences for knife crime. They want affordable housing, promotion of wave and tidal power, carbon emission targets, implementation of the National Gaelic plan. I can also reveal exclusively that Alex Salmond would not object to Nicol Stephen's number one legislative priority - an hour of physical education a day in schools - just so long as it doesn’t apply to him.

There is such an obvious fit between the policies of these two parties that it seems almost absurd that they are not able to do a deal, and this would not go unnoticed by the people of Scotland. The Greens would certainly support it, especially if Robin Harper were to be given some kind of environmental brief, and even Margo MacDonald, the last of the independence, might be tempted.

What Labour might ask the Liberal Democrats to do, given that the option of a continuation of the Lib-Lab coalition is not credible, is to retreat to the backbenches, let Salmond run a minority administration and join Labour MSPs in a guerilla war against Alex Salmond. Do everything to frustrate the effective operation of the Scottish Executive, and hope that the Scottish civil servants would also sit on their hands and do nothing to assist the nationalists in running an effective administration.

Well, the Liberal Democrats would be entitled to do that, certainly. There is nothing in the rule book that says they have to join a coalition, just as their is no rule that the largest party in the Scottish election should necessarily lead it. But Nicol Stephen would do well to note his own parlous state after this election, where the Liberal Democrats came fourth after the Conservatives. The only way to salvage something from the mess is to try to remain in government and exert some influence on events.. The Liberal Democrats have to ask themselves whether they really want abandon their ministerial posts and their policies just so they could prove that the Scottish people had voted in the wrong way on May 3rd. The people might not be very forgiving.

They should observe how the SNP won this election against the determined opposition of the pro-Labour establishment in Scotland. They might consider whether boycotting the new Scottish Executive might exclude them from relevance to the new political Scotland, and the emerging Scottish consensus on the need for greater autonomy for the Scottish parliament. Might be better to get in there and stake their claim, rather than appear to go down with Labour.

After all, where have Labour been for the last forty eight hours? They ceded the media, and the political initiative, entirely to Alex Salmond, right from the moment when the nationalist leader, after helicoptering into Edinburgh like a President-elect, cheekily delivered his victory speech even before he had won the election. Was it a media coup, or a constitutional coup d’Etat?

Where was Jack McConnell then? If Labour were so convinced of their own moral authority to govern, why did the former First Minister not come out to present his case to the nation on Friday? Condemn Salmond for hijacking the election, pre-empting the nation and assuming the mantle of leadership? I spent much of the post-election period with the international media encampment on the lawns outside Holyrood. The SNP were there in strength throughout, but of Labour there was little sign. Ministers, from McConnell down, simply hid from the cameras because they didn’t know what to say.

More to the point, where has Gordon Brown, the architect of Labour’s campaign, been when his party and country needed him? Playing Macavity again, and pretending not to be there when things went wrong? Leaving it to Tony Blair, of all people, to field the questions on the situation in Scotland, when it was the Chancellor who should have been taking to the airwaves to make the case for a united Britain.

The Labour establishment in Scotland failed to get its post-election act together, and it is important to ask why. Was it for the same reason that the campaign was misconceived from the start? Was it because of the cynical arrogance of a cabinet ministers who believed that Scottish voters could be scared into line by a relentlessly negative campaign expressed in the rebarbative rhetoric of the Sun?

A lot of people in Scotland this weekend have discovered to their surprise that they were closet nationalists. Friends, including long time Labour supporters talk of being astonished by their own elation at the result of this election. There is an unmistakable air of excitement, of optimism even, which has largely blown away the embarrassment felt by the computerised chaos of the count. Scotland doesn’t often feel this way. Beware - it might be habit forming.

The Liberal Democrats are afraid they might win

This much we know: Scotland will have a new government, probably within the week, and Alex Salmond should be leading it as First Minister. Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Tavish Scott, on BBC’s Politics Show, ruled out any ‘cling-on’ coalition with the Labour rump. The only question now is whether the Liberal Democrats want to be part of the future, or part of the past.

Well it appears that they are determined to stick in the past, for last night their spokesman, Tavish Scott, appeared to rule out any coalition with the SNP even before negotiations began. This is unfortunate, because the Libdems were about to be offered a deal in which the contentious issue of a referendum on independence would be handed over to a cross-party constitutional convention or commission.

The Liberal Democrats have already called for a convention in their manifesto, so they could hardly refuse to participate in it. Tavish Scott had of course made clear he would still demand that the SNP drop its commitment to a referendum. But what they Libdems don’t seem quite to realise is that, in a sense, the nationalists already have. It comes down to a matter of simple arithmetic.

If the SNP are forced to govern alone, as a minority, which seems likely now, they would anyway have little chance of holding the independence referendum. This is because the bill to stage the referendum would be voted down by the Scottish Parliament, where the SNP is in a minority. So, why put it in the first place?

Everyone is so convinced of Alex Salmond’s perfidy that they have failed to consider the possibility that he might actually mean what he says. That he really does want to show that the SNP can run an effective administration in Edinburgh under the terms set by the devolution settlement. In fact, there is every sign that this is precisely what the SNP leader wants to do, and that he is not going to allow a referendum to get in his way.

The nationalists aren’t completely stupid, and they can read the polls as well as anyone else. They can see that, right now, there is no great demand in Scotland for formal independence. Fewer than 25% of Scots voters say they would support separation from the UK.

The vast majority would support extending the powers of the Scottish parliament, broadly along the lines proposed by the Steel Commission two years ago. That means tax, economy, broadcasting, nuclear energy etc.. That’ll do nicely. It would make Scotland functionally independent across 80% of the legislative competence of a national parliament.

In otherwords the Liberal Democrats wre pushing at an open door. They were only a couple of negotiating days away from an agreement that the next four years would be about their programme for government rather than about the metaphysics of independence. The whole constitutional issue, referendum and all, would have been hived off to the convention, where the great and the good could think profound thoughts, while the Lib/Nat/Green executive got on with scrapping council tax and promoting renewable energy.

The SNP cannot give up on its core commitment to independence, clearly - but make no mistake, it was poised to shelve it for the lifetime of this parliament. I detect no urge from senior SNP sources to force the convention to report by a certain timetable, or to come up with any particular constitutional proposal. Nicola Sturgeon has made clear that she accepts that the Liberal Democrat option of federalism would be one of those considered.

The Liberal Democrats may not want to join a government led by Salmond - many don’t like him - but they are now placed in a very odd position now if they don’t. Do they want to lose all their ministerial posts, all their influence in government for nothing? Don’t they want to implement their manifesto? And surely, if they are so concerned about the fate of the union, shouldn't they be in there, fighting their corner, and ensuring that Salmond is bound by collective cabinet responsibility?.

But what about Salmond own fundamentalist fringe? Would the awkward squad of new SNP MSPs have bought this pragmatism, or see it as betrayal? Bill Wilson, the standard-bearer of unreconstructed revolutionary nationalism, has said there is no point in being in government if every day is not spent trying to secure liberation from the English yoke.

Well, I suspect Mr Wilson may find himself in Alex Salmond office in the course of the week, where he will find that the SNP leader is a very persuasive man. Mr Wilson will have to explain what purpose would be served by engaging in futile gestures like putting forward a referendum bill that has no chance of being adopted. I suspect even Mr Wilson can count.

Everyone assumes that Salmond is only interested in being in government so that he can create instability and confrontation with London. But needless provocation is not going to bring independence any closer. The Scottish electorate is very unforgiving of parties who think that political theatre is more important than good governance, or who believe that fomenting strife and confrontation is more important than seeking reconciliation and consensus. Look what happened to the Scottish Socialist Party.

The SNP have discovered - much as New Labour did in the 1990s - that oppositionalism is a dead end. That you have to go with the grain of public opinion rather than against it, and win trust. The New Nationalism has been as successful as Tony Blair’s New Labour. The SNP has won a truly historic election and it is eager to demonstrate that it can run a responsible government.

Now, the nationalists may fail. Their commitments are massive, and their means of delivering them limited, especially if the Liberal Democrats remain aloof. Looking down the likely candidates for ministerial positions does not exactly inspire confidence But Alex Salmond has shown in the last week that he has that sense of purpose, that sense of destiny, which is essential in a national leader.

Meanwhile, Jack McConnell and Gordon Brown have been engaging in back-room plotting to destabilise the new administration. Four days on from polling day, all we hear is the inarticulate whine of ex-Labour ministers a trying to explain why they didn’t have the nous to demand a recount of a 48 vote majority.

But you can’t reverse history in the courts of law. The Scottish Labour Party have lost the election, lost the coalition and they are about to lose their leader, Jack McConnell. Their only option now is to go gracefully into opposition, where they can sort themselves out, rediscover what they stand for, and provide effective opposition to the nationalist government which remains the only democratic outcome.

Sunbathing to independence?

In London last week the Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, told me that when he filed his copy from the Scottish election campaign, his desk editor him asked what dateline to put on it, as if it were a foreign report. A telling illustration, perhaps, of London’s attitude Scottish independence: a lot of people already seem to think Scotland is another country.

This may explain why most metropolitan political commentators were more interested in the French Presidential election last week than the Scottish one - even though the Holyrood outcome would arguably have greater impact on Britain. On the three hundredth anniversary of the Act of Union, Scotland appears to be on the verge of tearing it up by allowing the Scottish National Party to share power.

But if my observations are correct, England is unfazed - dreaming on in the long hot spring. The Prime Minister may believe that Britain itself is in danger, faced with an unscrupulous nationalist party leader, Alex Salmond, who is determined to foment trouble and strife. But London isn’t exactly donning hard hats and digging trenches. Constitutional crisis? What crisis?

There is, of course, that strand of rabid English nationalism on the internet, which believes a Scottish Raj is running England and draining it of treasure. They are looking to a fight as always. But most London people I spoke to last week aren’t antagonistic to Scotland; mostly, they just don’t care. And why should they? Scotland is a cold northern territory, with large landmass but few people, which doesn’t really have much to do with the South East of England. Even the climate is different now that global warming has really arrived.

The City of London was congratulating itself last week on becoming the world’s number one financial centre, having relegated even New York as the place to do the business. Billions are raised and spent on the stock-markets every day, and private equity houses are tearing up the corporate structures of the world. London is a global economic hub, with intergalactic house prices, and apparently limitless wealth. Why should it be bovvered about what happens in Scotland?

We have a strong financial sector in Edinburgh, but it isn’t in any obvious sense a rival. We don’t have any industry and the oil is generally assumed to be running out. We are not strategically important, except of course for Trident, and England doesn’t need Scots to fight colonial wars any more - they have Prince Harry to do that.

It’s often said that Scotland has reassessed the Union, now that the ties of Empire that bound these two nations together have weakened. That Scots don’t have a stake in the UK any longer. But the same is true for England. The sentimental attachments have gone, consumed in the fire of globalisation. If Scotland wants to be independent, as David Cameron himself put it recently, then it would be unfortunate, but no national disaster.

I still detected mild irritation at the Scottish propensity to consume public spending, but I think most people in England get this in proportion. The sums involved may seem large to us - perhaps a thousand pounds per head in public spending - but to a stupendously wealthy country like England, five billion is a drop in the bucket. Lost in the national accounts of one and a half trillion.

Anyway, as the Financial Times itself noted last week, if oil is taken into account, the deficit - or “Union Dividend” as Labour call it - shrinks dramatically to 1.2%, which is half the deficit that Gordon Brown is running for the UK. The Scottish press, true to form, reported the Financial Times analysis as a warning to Scotland that an independent Scotland would be unviable as the oil runs out. But the report was actually pretty potent propaganda for the SNP.

The FT concluded that: “the current high level of oil prices would allow Scotland to declare independence from the rest of the UK without having to cut public spending.” It went on to warn that oil is a declining resource, and that there may be little scope to build up a substantial oil fund in future. You can’t build an economy on one natural resource, and Scotland would have to diversify and grow its economy.

Incidentally, the FT also endorsed the SNP claims about Scotland’s poor performance under Labour. After adjusting for inflation, FT figures show that Scottish “gross value added” – workforce incomes and profits – grew 17 per cent between 1997 and 2005 against 25 per cent in England. And a lot of this was down to increased public spending. The Scottish private sector grew by only 11.6 per cent, a miserable annual rate of 1.6 per cent, against the English rate of 2.8 per cent.

But that's Scotland's problem. From a London point of view, the falling future oil wealth merely confirms Scotland’s marginality to the UK economy. I find that most people in England who know anything about the history of Scottish oil accept that the UK did pretty well out of it and that it more than justified any Barnett premiums on Scottish public spending.

But again, this all has the air of an old argument, an intellectual relic from the days before Scotland had its parliament, and when the failing UK economy depended on oil revenues. This is now, and whatever else happens, England is certainly not going to go to war over oil or Scottish demands for more autonomy.

Where conflict may break out over the SNP factor is in parliament, in the wake of the Gordon Brown coronation as Labour leader. An SNP victory in the Chancellor’s heartland would embolden the Tories to play the English card in Westminster. If the SNP is the largest party, the Tory leader David Cameron, will say Brown is fatally undermined by this rejection in his own home land.

The Conservative press will say that the new PM has no right to dictate policies to England when he sits for a seat in a ‘foreign’ country. The Conservatives will demand “English votes for English laws” - for Scottish MPs to withdraw from votes on purely English legislation. And Alex Salmond, if he is FM, will be egging them on.

This may lead to some constitutional wrangling, no doubt. There will have to be some kind of constitutional commission to review the situation in Westminster, West Lothian Question and all that. The Scottish parliament will certainly demand more powers if an SNP-LibDem coalition is formed. However, my own view is that the Tories will stop short of demanding that Scots MPs are thrown out of Westminster.

I believe they will see it as important to keep Scottish representation in what is becoming, de facto, a federal parliament in London. This is England, after all, and the English are too mature and sensible to want to provoke needless conflict over abstruse constitutional anomalies. A way will be found to muddle through. As the temperatures rise in the hottest April London has ever seen, it will be in everyone’s interest to cool it.

So, if my visit south is any guide, England is - right now - pretty sanguine about the rise of Scottish nationalism. Probably, like most Scots, they don’t really believe that Scotland will ever be independent in a formal sense. Fused at the hip on this island on the edge of Europe, Scotland and England have a common destiny which they cannot avoid. We are ‘in and out’ of Europe, speak the same language, share a common currency, have close family ties.

Many of those English families, who still have their sons living at dependent at home in their late twenties, can well understand the argument that it might be good for Scotland to go it alone economically. That you can’t live on subsidies forever. Doesn’t mean that the family is broken up or that they start going to war with each other. Both countries would just have to learn the art of living apart together.

Why the Sunday Herald supports the SNP - sort of.

Given that the entire Scottish press is agin’ them, the success of the SNP in this election campaign so far is pretty remarkable. The nationalists have consolidated and even increased their pre-campaign lead - something they have never done before.

They haven’t won the election yet, but they have already won a moral victory of sorts. Their leader, Alex Salmond, has dominated the election campaign, set the terms of debate and persuaded hundreds of thousands of voters against the collective advice of the nation’s opinion formers.

You can’t help thinking that there is something wrong somewhere, when the national press is so out of step with the voters. You would think that this huge shift of opinion would be reflected somewhere in the public prints. But it remains the case that, until today with this paper’s endorsement of Alex Salmond, there has been no major newspaper in Scotland willing to offer even qualified support to the party which, if the polls are to be believed, now commands the majority support of Scots.

Alex Salmond would do well to brace himself for some rough treatment in the closing days of the campaign as sections of the press try to destroy Scotland's apparent infatuation with him. No, it hasn’t been as bad as 1999, when the SNP were monstered, but there have been pretty robust attacks from the red tops nevertheless. Just look at some of the Daily Record’s recent headlines: “1000’s OF DRUG DEALERS WOULD GET OUT OF JAIL”, it claimed, if the SNP won. “SNP TRIPLE TAX GRAB”...“DONT LET SNP DESTROY PROSPERITY”... “ECK OF A BAD DAY”.

The Sun, which once flirted with nationalism, has been equally hostile to the SNP. All we need now is a reprise of the famous Sun front page of 1992: “If Alex Salmond wins the election will the last person to leave Scotland please turn out the lights”. Mind you, the Scottish bra Queen, Michelle Mone, appears to have got there first, promising to take her uplifting business elsewhere if independence looms.

Of course, television is the dominant medium of modern politics, and it is obliged to be impartial. But the written press influences debate in the electronic media, it sets the agenda, makes the stories, identifies the issues. Perhaps this election is an illustration of the limitations of the media in influencing voting intentions. So far, it’s the Sun wot lost it.

Labour’s strategy for this election, as conceded last week by Jack McConnell, was to surf the expected tide of pro-union feeling in the last two weeks of the campaign. Just as John Major wiped out Labour’s lead in the last fortnight of the 1992 general election campaign over the economy, so Labour’s strategists confidently forecast that they would do the same to the SNP. They would first burn off the narrow SNP lead, and then grind them into obscurity in the closing days, by exposing their tax and spending pledges to relentless scrutiny.


But it hasn’t happened yet. The polls last week moved in the SNP’s favour, with MRUK in Thursday’s Herald, turning a four point deficit into a four point nationalist lead, and Yougov in the in Friday’sTelegraph according the SNP a nine point advantage over Labour. The largest poll yet, by Yougov for Strathclyde University, today indicates the SNP are eight points ahead in the first vote. This means the SNP have almost doubled their headline first vote polling lead in the space of a fortnight.

Doesn’t mean they will win of course, and there are still a lot of “don’t knows”. Moreover, under the vagaries of the additional member electoral system, they could win and lose at the same time. That nine point lead for the SNP in the Telegraph/YouGov poll translates into a five seat lead, according to professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University. A similar lead for Labour in the 2003 Scottish election gave them a twenty three seat advantage over the SNP in the Holyrood parliament.

The spread of SNP votes makes it difficult to translate its poll figures into actual seats, especially in West Central Scotland. The nationalists need to take key Labour constituency seats like Kelvin, Govan, Kilmarnock, Cumbernauld in the West, as well as Linlithgow, Livingston, Aberdeen Central and Dundee West. This is why no few commentators are willing to predict that the SNP will be the largest party on Friday morning. One possible nightmare scenario is of the SNP winning the largest number of votes but not returning the largest number of of seats in the Holyrood parliament.

Much still depends on the extent to which the marginal parties, like the SSP and Solidarity and the independents enter the race in the closing days. The Greens may turn into late-breaking king-makers, if as the other parties expect, their vote increases. It is quite possible that, if they return eight or nine seats, the Scottish Green Party could hold the balance of power in Holyrood. It would force the bigger parties to launch an auction of environmental policy promises to win the support of the Greens.

This might be no bad thing. The environment is such a huge, overarching issue that many Scots will be inclined to split their votes, as they did in 2003, backing the Greens on the list. The Liberal Democrats have tried to colonise green territory by pledging that Scotland will be carbon free by 2050. But the Libdem equivocation on things like road tolls has not done a lot for their environmental credibility. .

Nor is there much certainty about how the Liberal Democrats will perform on Thursday, they are running a low-key campaign with a low-key leader. Nicol Stephen seems to regard an hour’s PE as an election winner, and scarcely opens his mouth without mentioning it. The Liberal Democrat leader has tried to argue that the Holyrood election is a referendum on the constitution, which it manifestly isn’t, and implied that Scots have no right to hold one, which is presumptuous - especially since the Libdem have actively participated in the last three referendums on the UK mainland. Nicol Stephen also angered Labour by appearing to rule out forming a coalition with them if they aren’t the largest party.

The Scottish Conservatives have mounted a dignified campaign led by the doughty Annabel Goldie, everyone’s favourite auntie. They have also talked a good deal of sense on issues like local taxation, affordable housing and drug rehabilitation. But they have been caught between the grindstones of the constitution debate. Annabel Goldie’s defiant insistence that the union is inviolable has contrasted with comments from figures like enterprise spokesman, Murdo Fraser, and even David Cameron that - though they don’t recommend it - Scotland could survive perfectly well as an independent country.

In taking this line, they are trying to come to terms with the debate as it is taking place in Scotland. Labour, meanwhile, have simply excluded themselves from it. Tony Blair’s visits have become increasingly negative, culminating in his highly personal remarks on Thursday that Alex Salmond is only interested in “fighting England”, as if the SNP leader were a latter day William Wallace.

Now, there is a case to be made that the SNP leader, if he became First Minister, would be likely to take a more robust line towards Westminster on issues such as the attendance allowances which were withheld from free elderly care, or the #381 million in council tax benefit. Then of course there is oil, Trident, immigration... But it might be that the Scottish voters, while showing no obvious interest in secession, may want a government in Holyrood, which is a little more confrontational.

This is the only way of reconciling the great electoral contradiction of this election, which is that support for formal independence is dwindling, even as the SNP is drawing ahead of Labour. In the Yougov poll on Friday, support for a separate Scotland in Europe was down to 23%. Other polls have placed independence in Europe lower still, while showing a large majority in favour of more powers for Holyrood.

Jack McConnell is convinced that this contradiction is the key to victory. He has been tearing round the country to shopping centres and old peoples’ homes, selling the message that Labour, not the SNP, is the real “patriotic party”, Scotland’s real national party. However, he still looks the underdog. TV interviewers have begun to treat him as a loser, talking down to him and badgering him about inconsistencies in his local taxation policies. Bernard Ponsonby’s assault on the FM, currently running on YouTube, isn’t a pretty sight.

The SNP has conducted a cool presidential campaign, based around the personality of their leader and on an independence-lite policy programme. This is either perpetrating a fraud on the electorate, as Labour say, or it is just what it says it is - an attempt by the SNP to show it can be a credible party of government in Holyrood. The intriguing question, given the dismal showing in the opinion polls for a separate Scotland, is whether the SNP has now entered on a course that will inevitably lead it to become a “post-nationalist” party like its Catalan and Quebecois equivalents. Certainly, there is a long way to go before the SNP could conceivably win a referendum on independence. All those spending commitments have to be honoured, local income tax introduced, relations with Westminster harmonised.

And, first things first, it has to win the Holyrood election on Thursday and manage to cement a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats who are still refusing to countenance any referendum on anything. It all seems like an impossible task.

But the polls can’t all be wrong. And what they are saying is that, unless Labour pull something out of the hat in next three days, Alex Salmond will the next inhabitant of Bute House.