Alex Massie Alex Massie

Could the Tories do a deal with the SNP? (Yes they could)

We have been here before, you know. Seven years ago Alex Salmond looked forward to the prospect of a hung parliament and spied an opportunity to ‘make Westminster dance to a Scottish jig’. If Scotland returned at least 20 SNP MPs – members, as the then First Minister indelicately put it, ‘ready, willing, and able to defend our parliament and our people’ – then Scotland’s interests might yet hold the balance of power in London. Not, he stressed, as part of any formal coalition but on a case-by-case and vote-by-vote basis.

That didn’t happen, of course. The SNP won only six seats in 2010. Still, a victory delayed is not the same as a victory denied and Salmond’s party stands on the brink of a historic victory. Labour need to haul themselves up to perhaps 35 percent of the Scottish vote if they’re to remain the largest party in Scotland. That would be both a disastrous result for Labour and a miraculous reprieve.

Salmond, I suggested last month, has a new roving commission. He is Nicola Sturgeon’s Ambassador to London television studios and his brief is to stir up trouble wherever he can. Hence his weekend suggestions that the SNP, not Labour, would be the real power in the land and Messrs Miliband and Balls would just have to get used to that. If Labour think they can stiff the SNP they’ve got an unpleasant appointment with reality waiting for them.

Labour’s approach relies on the notion that Scots will punish any party that is seen to assist the Tories. That means, Labour think, the SNP have nowhere to go. They will not be forgiven for ruining a Labour government and risking another Tory ministry.

There is something to this but not, perhaps, as much as Labour think.

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