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Starmer may be the final nail in the SNP coffin

Spurned from a coalition, Sturgeon’s party would quickly sink into irrelevancy

Tom Harris is a former Labour MP for Glasgow South

Until recently, the question as to whether or not Labour would do a deal with the nationalists in order to govern in a hung parliament has been a toxic one for the party. If they decline, they are accused of not being serious about replacing the Conservatives; if they say yes, they risk accusations of being in Nicola Sturgeon’s pocket – an attack that had devastating consequences for Ed Miliband’s hopes of victory in 2015.

Yet in his conference speech on Monday, Starmer appeared to bury the issue for good by ruling out an electoral coalition with the SNP “under any circumstances”.

Of course recent polling suggests that a majority Labour government is at least a distinct possibility, and such a prospect makes the need for coalitions less urgent. But even in the event of a hung parliament, the SNP may well face a bigger dilemma than Labour. Spurned as a coalition partner, what, in reality, could Sturgeon’s party do? Side with the Conservatives to bring the Government down? Hardly. That tactic was tried in 1979 and it took more than a decade for the party to recover.

Starmer also knows that the last thing Sturgeon and her party want is for Labour to appear a likely prospect for government. Nationalism in Scotland has profited from Labour’s remoteness from office under both Miliband and Corbyn, and although it has yet to stage any kind of significant electoral recovery under Starmer, that could change if he looked likely to become prime minister.

So long as Sturgeon can keep Scots’ minds focused on the latest grievance over independence, she can be assured of between 45 and 50 per cent of the vote and almost all of Scotland’s Westminster seats. As soon as the election becomes something else – replacing the Conservatives in government, for example – the task of shoring up the SNP vote becomes harder. After all the anti-Conservative rhetoric of the SNP leadership, how can they recommend a vote for themselves when they have proved so irrelevant in opposing government policies? More to the point, if they really think the Conservatives are that bad for Scotland, what credibility can they have in recommending a vote against the only party that can defeat them on a UK-wide basis?

Timing may also help Starmer’s case in Scotland. A BBC investigation into the long-running ferry debacle – the SNP-led Scottish government stands accused of corruption (unproven) and incompetence (undisputed) over the procurement of two new ferries to serve Scotland’s island communities. Neither ferry has been completed on time, the costs have rocketed and it has emerged that the (nationalised) company that won the contract may have had a helping – and illegal – hand in winning the tender. It is a fine example of the kind of socialism that Sturgeon claims to believe in: directed from above, opaque, expensive and ultimately failing to deliver.

Starmer’s Labour, on the other hand, may well remind Left-leaning Scots that there is another way which leans more towards social democracy than socialism, and which values outcomes and practical measures, not statist ideology, to achieve its goals.

If, as expected, the Supreme Court concludes next month that Sturgeon has no legal right to hold her own independence referendum, she will resort to her Plan B, claiming that the general election will represent a de facto” independence referendum. Yet if Labour by then has maintained its poll lead, the move will be seen as a desperate one, made in an effort to look relevant, when many of her fellow Scots might choose, for the first time in more than a decade, to have a say in who runs Britain.

The longrunning ferry debacle is a fine example of Sturgeon’s socialism: opaque, expensive and ultimately failing to deliver

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2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

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