This election is going to be fun. Not because of the talent on display – this is not the Champion’s League – but because most of the players are so hopeless their flounderings almost become endearing. There’s something wrong with each of them. Pick your favourite cripple.
Nicola Sturgeon is one of the more impressive performers which is why her lecture speech in London is, as always, worth paying attention to. Despite this, it was her remarks about her preferred outcomes that will draw more comment. Because, however unwittingly, the First Minister revealed how this election may yet chump us all. All across the country, you see, voters are confronted with imperfect choices. More noses may be held than ever before. Vote X to Get Y to Thwart Z is a ticklish calculation at the best of times and these are far from the best of times.
So, compiling an order of preference is a fraught business. Logic is not always the first casualty of political campaigning but it rarely survives the experience intact. Which, doubtless, is why Ms Sturgeon suggested that though the SNP could be relied upon to help “lock out” the Tories from power she would be inclined, if voting in England, to endorse the Greens.
Doing the latter, it should be observed, makes achieving the former less likely. The more Greens there are the fewer Labour MPs there are and the fewer Labour MPs there are the more probable it is that David Cameron somehow stumbles into a second term.
Now the SNP will pretend to be appalled by such an outcome but, och, they can see the upside of such a result too. This election, after all, is a win-win proposition for the Nationalists. Still, it’s a tricky line to maintain. On the one hand the SNP stress the importance of kicking the Tories out of power; on the other they say that Labour and the Tories are just the same. They assume – correctly, I think – that few people will be exercised by the logical inconsistencies in this approach.
Of course Sturgeon couldn’t admit that she’d rather Labour won in England because that would risk conceding that the single most important thing in this election is preventing another Tory government. That’s how Labour – in Scotland, England and Wales – want you to view the election. That’s Labour’s best, perhaps only, chance of salvaging something in Scotland.
True, there will be more than 50 anti-Tory votes from Scotland in the next parliament but it does still matter how many of those are cast by Labour MPs and how many are held by the SNP. Scotland can, albeit obliquely, still help Cameron stay in Downing Street. (Which is why the Tories, stupidly, are happy to nudge voters towards the SNP.)
Nevertheless, Sturgeon came perilously close to admitting Scottish Labour have a point. This was a moment of accidental honesty, I’m sure (it’s hard to imagine her predecessor being quite so candid) but that’s one of the reasons, I think, why Ms Sturgeon is more popular than Mr Salmond.
But the Greens? Really? The SNP is a capitalist party. Last time Sturgeon was in London she stressed the importance of economic growth and prosperity. The Greens, by contrast, think economic growth unsustainable. Their preferred outcome is permanent recession (of course they don’t quite put it like that) and, consequently, permanent austerity (that’s not how they put it either). Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t actually believe in that.
Why would she? If Sturgeon were English and had grown up in Accrington not Ayrshire she’d be a rock-solid member of the Labour party. Critical of the leadership, perhaps, but hardly a defection risk.
Either it doesn’t matter whether Labour or the Conservatives win the election or it does. Half the time the SNP would like you think it makes no difference; the rest of the time they acknowledge it does. (That’s why they will, on a case-by-case basis vote with Labour.) But admitting it does make a difference hands Scottish Labour their best-available lifeline. Which is why we endure sillyness like the SNP leader advocating a vote for the Greens; a vote that, if delivered, would render the SNP’s notionally-preferred outcome less, not more, likely.
It’s a complicated game, right enough. Whatever next? SNP for UKIP, perhaps, on the grounds that UKIP winning (some) seats makes a Tory government less, not more, likely? I kid, of course, but there’s some truth to that nonetheless. My enemies’ enemy is not always my chum except when, objectively-speaking, he can be useful.
Still, as I say, the Tory or Labour frame is Labour’s last hope in Scotland. Sturgeon would like voters to believe you can “Vote SNP, get Labour” but this is, er, illogical. But so, alas, is the SNP’s alternative plague-on-both-their-houses suggestion since, even if you accept this, the Nationalists would prefer – or at least say – they prefer one plague to the other. A choice between typhoid and cholera, you may feel, but still a choice.
Comments