The SNP launches its manifesto today in Edinburgh. Nicola Sturgeon will be arguing that the policies in the document are for the benefit of the whole of the United Kingdom, which is a way of reassuring former no-voters who might back the SNP, and also of appealing to the left wing faction of the Labour party.
Scottish Labour will be claiming that many of those policies such as voting for lower tuition fees in England are in fact a theft from their own party’s ideas, and that the SNP is in fact using Labour as a think tank for its own manifesto.
But what is also interesting is how the party that is scrutinising Sturgeon’s claims today could end up working with her parliamentary colleagues from May. As James noted yesterday, Angela Eagle rather shifted the party’s line on this by telling the Sunday Politics that Labour would ‘speak to any party that has got representation in the House of Commons in order to try to build a majority for a Queen’s Speech that the country desperately needs’.
This morning Andy Burnham didn’t go quite so far when he was asked about this on Good Morning Britain. He said:
‘We, you would talk to people. I mean we’re all going to have to see what happens on May 8th, but it seems to me a bit presumptuous to be kind of almost saying, well let’s presume how the voters are going to cast their votes so now is the time to be arguing our own case at the moment rather than doing, second-guessing what the deals might be afterwards.’
One of the gambles that the party may have to make if and when it does start talking to people after 8 May is whether it can call the SNP’s bluff by producing a left-wing Queen’s Speech with a challenge to nationalist MPs to vote against it and therefore vote with the Tories to usher in a Conservative government. This gamble is firstly based on a Queen’s Speech being sufficiently left wing that Labour could credibly claim the SNP have trashed a decent offer, rather than something that many of Ed Miliband’s own MPs don’t think goes far enough. And secondly it does rely on the assumption that it would seriously damage the SNP to veto a Labour government. Given many assumed the SNP would be seriously damaged by losing the independence referendum, that may be a very risky gamble indeed.
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