Tuesday 24 June 2008

Pssssst - wanna buy a Prime Minister?

Hardly used, just a year old, very good at U-turns, going cheap...

A poll in the Grauniad has Cameron's Conservatives 20% in the lead - that takes them into landslide territory, a possible 400 Conservative MPs out of 644 - Labour could be losing previously 'safe' seats all over the place.
Of course, Scotland will, as always, be different - although the Conservatives are making a recovery here it's very slow going for them, two or three seats this turn perhaps - the collapse of Labour will be mirrored by a surge in SNP support (as indicated by the story in the paper "Backing for other parties, at 10%, is up one on last month, partly because of the strong nationalist performance in Scotland.")
Cameron won't be facing any challenge from the Libdems either - they dropped two points as well and they'll continue to get squeezed, quite likely losing all of the gains they made while the Conservatives were in disarray. They're still suffering from the way Charlie Kennedy was treated and Clegg simply doesn't have the nous to know what an appropriate way for a senior politician to behave would be.

So Cameron looks to be in an incredibly strong position - his party has its highest rating for 20 years and Labour is playing sweet chariot (74% of people said that the change from Blair to Brown was a change for the worse and only 24% of people think that Labour in its current state has a chance of winning the next election).
Labour's position has weakened as Labour MPs queued up to cave in on issues they had previously expounded on as great matters of conscience, with claims like "I was given assurances that these powers would never be used" adding to the increasing distrust that people have for the shifting sands of Labour's slow disintegration.

There is no such thing as a safe seat, votes do not belong to parties, they belong to individual electors. Every elector has the right to choose a different individual or party to vote for at every election. Labour appears to be running on tramlines straight into learning that lesson the hardest way possible.

We're facing, once again, the prospect of the Conservatives being in power in the UK but with very few seats in Scotland. The choice facing Scotland will be whether to elect SNP MPs who will work for Scotland's best interests whatever the situation or Labour MPs who will, once again, use that situation to promote grudge and grievance against rule from Westminster.

Scotland has moved on, politics in Scotland has moved on, and will continue to move away from that political sclerosis. It's unfortunate that Labour hasn't managed to move as politics changed, but Scotland will continue to grow and improve in any case.
The next couple of years will mark an interesting time in politics - the decline and possible fall of the Labour party while Scotland moves on. An SNP Government in Edinburgh, a Conservative Government in London and an independence referendum - we truly live in interesting times.

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