Vote SNP in Scotland today

The nice thing about moving to Scotland is that I don't have to grit my teeth and vote Labour because I have the SNP to vote for. I have just returned from the polling station having done just that and I hope that what readers I have in Scotland will do the same.

To be honest I am lucky in having a good candidate in Deirdre Brock here in Edinburgh North & Leith which made my decision easier. When I moved into my current gaff a year ago the council messed up my housing benefit claim and then told me that it would take about two months to sort the mess out. I got in touch with la Brock who is currently one of my local councillors, only to find that she was abroad on holiday. Give the woman credit because she took time out from sunning herself to give the council's pen pushers a taste of the heavy manners and within 48 hours  the problem had been solved. I even got a nice e-mail from the chief Dalek in the housing benefit office apologising for the distress caused.

If I was wavering, commitment like that would be enough to push me into the SNP camp, but to be honest the need to get the SNP elected in as many seats as possible overrides all other concerns at the moment. People in England should vote Labour as the least worst option, but a heavy SNP presence will help keep Miliband's team on the left hand path.

Not only that, but reading various stories from the press it looks as if the aspirational scrote element in Southern England and the Midlands are having a collective arsehole clench at the thought of a big SNP presence influencing Labour. So the chance to stick two fingers up to the denizens of crappy little towns that enjoyed voting to close down our factories and attack our unions back in the day is just too good to miss. 

For the first time in many long years it seems as if the sun is about to shine on ordinary people.

Vote Labour in England today

Please vote Labour in England today, if you haven't already done so. Yeah, I know, they really are a party of the rich at national level and the middle class at local, but they are still a better option than the Tories. It means gritting your teeth and voting for some pretty unpleasant characters who have nothing in common with you either culturally or economically, but they are the best we have at the moment.

A lot of people think that all the parties are the same at heart,  and that may be true, but it's also not the point. Labour is the one party that has to listen to the claimants and McJobbers because we are the bulk of its voting core. Tony Blair defied the millions who marched in opposition to his war against Iraq, but he backed down from his plan to cut disability benefits when a few claimants in wheelchairs chained themselves to some railings in Whitehall.

The Tories are the party that gets turned on by the thought of cuts to social services. They are the party that is ideologically committed to ensuring that there is deep blue ocean between the working and middle classes. In short, the Tories are the party of the pissants who want to stand on their anthills and piss on the people below them. 

Labour does not have that nasty voting core, so has less interest in pandering to pissantery than the Tories. I suppose in a nutshell, you have more chance of getting a better deal out of life with Labour than the Tories.

I know that it's not much, but if you don't get out and vote then all you do is allow the pissants to gloat tomorrow. If you do vote then tomorrow they will feel like shit.

Making pissants feel like shit is just a good in itself - so vote Labour today.

Labour and Tory conspire together in yet another seat

Following on from the Thanet South love-in, yet more evidence emerges of the quite shameless way in which Labour candidates ally themselves with their Tory counterparts so that both parties can keep their snouts in the public trough. It's happening pretty much across the board in Scotland where what is left of Labour's membership is being encouraged to get the vote out for the Tories in the three border constituencies, but at least they don't allow themselves to be photographed doing it all that often.

In England Labour doesn't seem to care who knows that there is now a seemingly official alliance between Labour and Tory to squeeze UKIP's political nuts. Take the photo of Claire Jeffrey, who is the Labour candidate for Folkestone and Hythe and Damian Collins the sitting Tory MP as a case in point.

You see, it really shouldn't matter to a socialist if UKIP do well in that seat because in spite of all its protestations, UKIP really is the voice of Poujadist Britain. In  a nutshell, the core Kipper vote really is the self employed, the small business owner, or the lower management arsewipes that you find in larger firms. In other words they  are part of what I call the aspirational scrote element in society, and are as far removed from Labour's core vote of McJobbers and claimants as it is possible to get.

It is in Labour's interests to encourage the Kippers to stay loyal to their suburban dream so as to split the right-wing vote. Every seat that UKIP takes from the Tories reduces the chances of Cameron having anything approaching a majority when the dust settles tomorrow night. Not only that, but the higher the UKIP vote, the greater are the chances that Labour can slither though the middle in many a seat to grab it for themselves. 

In Scotland Labour are now dismissed as the red Tories, and the working class in the central belt are swinging behind the SNP as a result. Obviously in England there is no left alternative to Labour, but that's not to say that working class people can't sit on their hands tomorrow and not vote at all.

With idiocy like this all Labour does is encourage people to think that there really is no difference between the two main parties, and ignore the vote tomorrow. The only people who gain from that are the Tories.

Why are Labour so fucking stupid as to help the Tories like this?

Eddie Izzard flops in Glasgow

Damn, when I heard that there was chaos on the streets of Glasgow today I really thought that one of those Bastille moments had arrived, but it was all piss and wind.

The media bigged it up as one of nationalist mobs running riot, but as you can see it was just a forty strong press pack, about the same number of Labour hacks and half a dozen protesters. Most people were just going about their business, ignoring Eddie Izzard, the dress wearing weirdo who had been produced as meat for the baying mobs or something. Anyway, another English comic died a death in Glasgow...

I suppose that the hacks got a story, but it's a pity that it had only a tangential relationship to the truth. A bit like the time last September when they reported that Miliband had been hounded out of a shopping centre, something which I could call bollocks on immediately as I happened to be there and saw what happened. 

Sorry comrades, but if you were building up your hopes on the basis of dodgy hackery in action, then I have to tell you that the revolution has been postponed pending the arrival of more than half a dozen people.

Tories & Labour need to stop working together against the new politics of Britain

With thanks to Wings Over Scotland for these photos, which seem to show the Tories and Labour sharing a pitch in East Renfrewshire yesterday.

Here is David Montgomery canvassing for votes near an unmanned Labour stall.

And here is Jim "Spud" Murphy standing at the same stall a short while later after Montgomery has abandoned the pitch.

Now it may be that all this is coincidence. Murphy may very well be a teetotal vegetarian weirdo, but we have to assume that the rest of his crew are fairly normal people who left the stall to grab a wee heavy and a nip to keep out the cold. Montgomery may have seen his chance and darted in to that spot to do a bit of electioneering of his own, unbeknown to the Labour team who were sat in the local boozer. It is equally possible that fairies live at the bottom of gardens...

You see, this isn't the first time that Labour and Tory have been caught cuddling up to one another. They did it in Thanet just the other day when the two parties' candidates were actually photographed arm in arm in opposition to UKIP:

What seems to be happening is that neither party is able to get to grips with the fact that 21st Century political activity is going to be different from the 20th century version. Given that politics in the 20th century was not the same as politics in the 19th you would think that this point would be obvious, but they do seem to have trouble understanding the changes that have taken place.

The two former big boys want to force people back into the mass market politics that dominated the last century. However, the people are not willing to accept that, and the old parties are unable to come to grips with the plethora of new parties that are being created to represent the new politics.

The Tories are going to have to wake up to the fact that the newly prosperous, Mondeo driving, grandsons of Alf Garnet are not going to accept a party that is run by and for the traditional upper middle class. They want a party of their own, and UKIP fits the bill. The Tory Party is going to have to accept that there is a new party that sits to their right and work with it, or face years in opposition.

For its part, Labour has to accept that its decades of dominance in Scotland are now over. It may also have to accept that new, religiously based parties like Respect are going to have a major role to play in Northern English depressed mill towns. 

That is not to say that the big two should stop opposing these new forces. It is quite legitimate for the Tories to stand against UKIP and for Labour to oppose the SNP. However, it is ludicrous for the main parties to stand together in opposition to any new force.

So Labour should put forward its policies in places like Thanet and leave the Tories and UKIP to hammer it out between themselves. It is possible that Labour may even come through the middle and grab the seat. The Tories should do the same in Scotland and leave Labour and the SNP to have their separate battle.

To do otherwise is to give yet more ammunition to the charge that Labour and Tory together form a kind of conspiracy against the British people who are crying out for change.

It is that, more than anything else, that has led to those circumstances coming about in the first place.

Why you can stop worrying about a Tory victory, part two

In the first part of this post I looked at Cameron's options that would enable him to cling to power like a leech to a corpse even with 300 seats. The conclusion was that he couldn't remain in office, and that Miliband, who I gave about 250 seats would take over as Prime Minister. The assumption that Tories make under such circumstances is that Labour would be out of office within weeks, but I want to argue now that Miliband's position would actually be far stronger than such doomsayers imagine.

Let's not forget that politics is above all about allocating resources, and a minority Labour government would immediately have a lot of resources to allocate to its new chums. For instance the assumption has always been that the DUP would side automatically with the Tories, but the Ulster party has made it quite clear that they are more than willing to listen to offers from Labour. What they want is money, of course, and Labour will be in a position to shovel some of that their way. Couple the DUP with the 3-5 seats that the Alliance, SDLP and Lady Harmon who are all ideologically in tune with Labour, anyway, should grab, and that is a potential 12-15 votes that Labour can count on in any motion of confidence, all for a measly few million.

For Plaid Cymru in Wales who are also a Labour leaning party, their three or four seats can probably be locked in  with more powers for the Welsh Assembly, maybe even by raising it to the Welsh Parliament, along with some more funding. The deal with the Welsh along with that of the Ulster parties could be along the lines of we give you this, and you vote for us on government bills as and when required. In the interim, you can all say what you like, just so long as we are not expected to listen to you.

The same is true for George Galloway of Respect and the Green's Caroline Lucas. Galloway hates the Tories more than he hates Labour, so a bit of what the Americans call walking about money to spread throughout his constituency may keep him happy. Lucas may be even easier to placate. Something for Brighton Pavilion and the chance to introduce some Green bill, which may or may not pass depending on circumstances could be her price.

Labour could probably even have UKIP on board if it was willing to give the Kippers a vote on Britain's membership of the European Union. Sadly that is unlikely to be on offer, so I shall put UKIP on the Tory side of the Commons for the moment. However, stranger things have happened in politics, and Labour was once the party that opposed the EU, but that was when the party had a real ideology to back its moves. Today it is a managerial machine, so it is hard to imagine a scenario that allows Miliband to offer a referendum to Farage.

The only potential problems that Labour faces are with the SNP and the Lib-Dems, who I put on 50 and 30 seats respectively for this debate. The SNP have made it plain that they want to lock the Tories out of office, so keeping them onside should be relatively easy. Money will form a part of it, but for the rest Labour is going to have to negotiate its major bills with both the SNP and the Lib-Dems. Compromises will have to be made over that legislation, but it is not the end of the world for that to happen, and in a crunch vote Labour may be able to rely on the support of one, discount the opposition of the other, and still get the bill passed.

Finally, Labour on about 250 seats is a Labour that has been reduced to its core vote in the big cities and council estates. That vote is basically made up of local government workers, people doing the McJobs who often rely on benefits to make up their wages, along with all the other claimants such as the unemployed and disabled. It would have actually lost seats to the Tories, probably in Southern England and the Midlands. If Labour can then go on to govern without the support of the aspirational scrote vote that Tony Blair worshipped when he wasn't sucking up to the super rich, then Labour's position could be fairly solid in the longer term as well.

It really all relies on Labour losing the big swinging dick attitude and being willing to compromise and negotiate with other parties; parties that are already in tune with Labour and who hate the Tories to begin with.

Why you can stop worrying about a Tory victory, part one

It seems as if the week before every general election the party that is most likely to win has a wobble that leaves it shaken and uncertain. Usually these wobbles are self-induced, and certainly the one that Ed Miliband created on Thursday night when he tried to distance Labour from the SNP. This has led to a loose bowel moment for a lot of people, so let's get into reassurance mode and point out that Cameron is unlikely to remain Prime Minister for much longer, and Miliband is pretty much the racing certainty to take his place.

How can I be so sure? Well  just look at some possible scenarios, and to create them I want to be as conservative as possible and extenuate the positive for the Tories and play up the negatives for Labour.

We'll put the Tories on near 300 seats next Thursday, the Lib-Dems on 30, with UKIP getting five and let's allow the DUP to grab an extra two so that gives then ten seats. For its part, Labour can have about 250 seats, the SNP 50, and the minor parties ten. On the surface that means Cameron is going to wander back into Number Ten courtesy of the Lib-Dems.

However, the Lib-Dems are his only option and if they decide that having just lost about half their MPs they would rather rejoin the human race than continue supporting Cameron and refuse to play ball then the Tories are doomed. Not only that, but the Lib-Dems would have to vote for a Tory Queen's Speech, as an abstention would mean that it fails to pass. Under those circumstances Nick Clegg has Cameron's pecker firmly in his pocket, so the best that the Tories could hope for would be a Cameron led government that is in office but not in power.

To make matters even nicer, any Cameroonian Queen's Speech that did not contain a pledge of a referendum on the European Union would not be supported by UKIP, and any that did would fail to get Lib-Dem approval. Think about it for a moment: Nigel Farage has one of Cameron's balls and Clegg holds the other, and they are both able to squeeze them tightly.

It is possible that Labour could abstain on the Queen's Speech, but that is unlikely. Forget the SNP reaction, as Miliband would be torn apart by his own party. If Cameron is foolish enough to even proceed with the Speech, then Miliband has no option but to lead his troops into opposing it.

Under those circumstances Cameron would have to resign, and he would have no option but to advise The Queen to send for Miliband to form a government. Of course, Cameron could then oppose the Queen's Speech, but if his party does that then all hell will break loose in the markets. The Tories take their orders from the forces of darkness that control capitalism, and are unlikely to offend their dark masters in that way.

Faced with a Miliband government and having failed to lead the Tories to victory on two occasions, Cameron's position would probably be untenable. It is possible that dear old Boris will become the new leader by acclamation, but it is equally as likely that the Tories will need a bout of internal blood-letting before a new leader emerges as capo de tuti capi. 

Coming up in an hour or so I want to look at Miliband's options under those circumstances, but for the moment, sit yourselves down, let me put the kettle on for you and then make you a nice cup of shut the fuck up and stop worrying. Cameron will pass into the history books this month.

Miliband's brain fart has probably cost him Scotland

I suspect that Friday 30th April 2015 was the night when Labour threw in the towel as far as Scotland was concerned and accepted that it had to take the hit next week. That or Ed Miliband had a brain fart of monumental proportions.

If you watch the video clip which has kindly been made available by Wings Over Scotland for us, you can see that Miliband reiterated what has been Labour's policy for an age or more, which is to say a week or two for the rest of us. He said that Labour would not enter into a coalition with the SNP, nor would they do a "deal" with the Scottish party.

He then confirmed that a deal is a supply and confidence arrangement, which left his audience under the impression that everything had been ruled out. Certainly that is the way that Scottish social media are reporting it, and they are outraged by what seems like a betrayal from the leader of the main British anti-Tory party.

However, if you think about it, Miliband was not ruling out all types of deals. For instance he was careful never to mention case by case arrangements, which is how the Scottish government operated until 2011 when the SNP won their first ever overall majority. It's messy, and supply and confidence would be better, but if that is the way that Labour wants to proceed then that's the way it has to be.

You may say that this is over analysing the use of language, but then just remember how Bill Clinton got away with telling porkies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He denied having sex with her, which was sort of true as his defence attorneys had conveniently got the judge to agree to a check list of definitions as to what sex actually was. Thanks to that, having a girl on her knees sucking his cock did not count as sex.

Then we had the whole debate about what "is" means. He had stated to his aides, "There's nothing going on between us," which of course was the literal truth as he was sat in the Oval Office talking to them at that moment, not having her deep throat him. You see? It's the difference between "is" and "was" and that was enough to save Slick Willy and his willy.

Compared to all that, Miliband's strangled use of language last night comes over as an exercise in straight talking, but I wish that he had not felt the need to go into political speak. I wish he had said something like the following:

 Look, we are all civilised people and we all know that Tories really are lower then vermin. We have to keep those creatures as far away from power as we can so that we can all enjoy a better future, but unfortunately the Scots don't believe us. They remember Blair and how traditional Labour communities were left to rot, so they are voting for the SNP as a safety net. They don't believe that Labour has changed, but I can assure you that it has. We will work with the SNP in the short term so that the trust of the people of Scotland and the rest of the country can be regained.

Had Miliband done that he might even have regained some trust in Scotland before the election and saved some seats. As it is, the SNP is now pretty much odds-on to grab all Labour's seats, and probably take all the others as well, in a kind of two-fingered gesture to Westminster.

I am not quite sure what Miliband's strategy was last night, so will leave it as a brain fart, something which we all have from time to time.

Brighton Green activists demonstrate how silly their party is

This is just so funny. Two Green girlies who were supposed to be leafleting for Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion decided to have one of those jolly hockey sticks moments when they discovered a pile of newspapers with a UKIP advert on the front pages. So the naughty little things tore the adverts out of each front page, before carefully arranging their handiwork and then  taking photos of it all. A fellow walks in who seems to be in charge of the team, but instead of bringing the girls to heel and reminding them that they are wasting time with all this, he just stood around looking a bit helpless at it all. Says it all about the Greens I suppose.

What neither of the girls knew was that the building they were in has a CCTV camera which recorded all their activities. Somebody then leaked the footage to the Brighton and Hove Independent who quickly realised that they had an exclusive on their hands and a big bucket of shit to pour all over Caroline Lucas.

Needless to say the paper got in touch with UKIP who quickly took advantage of the opportunity to go into full self righteous git mode - as did the Tories for that matter. Over at Green HQ it was red faces all round, but to be fair to them, the adult spokesmen did apologise profusely.

None of this amounts to very much, and it is certainly not the "absolutely disgraceful" affair that UKIP tried to portray it as.

It is just very silly, girly and twee. It tells you all you need to know about the Greens and why you should not even think about voting for them.

UKIP's battle for Thanet South means ignoring everything else

 UKIP appears to be throwing everything into taking Thanet South where Nigel Farage is standing, to the exclusion of pretty much all the other seats where the Kippers are in the running. Given that UKIP can't even render the seat's name properly - it is Thanet South and not South Thanet - there must be some doubt as to just how effective the newcomers will be when added in to the not very bright mix that is to be found on the ground there. 

A source in one of those Southern English seats that are now being ignored passed onto me an internal e-mail sent to party members that encourages them to drop everything to help out in Thanet. The killer paragraph reads:

 If you can, please come to South Thanet this weekend, for two days of action, contacting voters, and convincing them of why they need UKIP MPs in the House of Commons. It's the final weekend of campaigning so we must make it count. Keep an eye out for other messages about how you can help some of our key seats in the run up to Polling Day. 

The e-mail ends with a plea for people to bring their cars, volunteer on polling day especially, and even helpfully includes a link to the hotels of the area in case anyone wants to stay over.

The Thanet South battle is reported to be going very well for UKIP, with Farage now pretty much odd-on to take the seat. This e-mail suggests that there is much nervousness in the high command, which is why neighbouring seats are being abandoned, but why is the people's army not able to fight more than one organised campaign? After all, other small parties manage it rather nicely.

Kippers still complain that their party would have won Heywood and Middleton last year had they not also been fighting in Clacton on the same day. However, all that proves is that the party is so incompetent that it could not fight two by-elections on one day. In the year that has gone by since then, UKIP does not seem to have made an effort to organise itself into an election machine, hence the decision to throw everything into winning Thanet South.

The machine is what wins the ground war. It is "the science of methodically identifying who your supporters are, persuading undecideds, and dragging them to the ballot box." The Liberal-Democrats are the experts at this, with most of the data being built up during council election campaigns. Last year UKIP had them as well as the European elections, so why is their ground campaign so lacking?

My source, who is a long time UKIP voter but who only joined the party this year, reported to me last night that the problem that UKIP has in his area is down to the fact that many of his new party associates are "thick in the extreme." Digging a bit deeper, it came out that they are not knuckle-dragging inbreds, but they are fairly comfortable small town men who tend to be older than the average and who don't really understand that internet thingie. They use e-mails because they are basically letters that you don't have to post, but getting them to understand how social media and texting services like Whatsapp can be used is pretty much beyond them.

It may be that all this is due to the fact that UKIP cannot win many new members in the big cities. It is not just that the bulk of the people live in them, but cities are where things happen; they are places where new ideas are tested to destruction and either improved upon or discarded. If UKIP had a basically urban membership then it is more then likely that a machine would have been created to win elections, and party regulars would then be shipped out to where the yokels live to teach them how to do things properly.

UKIP's problem is that it is a party of yokels and it will pay the price for that in unwon seats next week.

Labour in South Thanet gives a lesson in how to lose an election by siding with Tories

Meet Will Scobie and Craig Mackinley, the Labour and Tory candidates in Thanet South who now seem to be engaged in a love-in. Don't ask me which is which because as UKIP have been quick to point out, it doesn't really matter:

The excuse for all this is the unverified claim that UKIP has been joined by demonstrators from the National Front who are trying to break up Labour and Conservative meetings. No evidence has been produced to back this claim as yet.

What has emerged is this video which the toytown left are trying to spin as an attack on ordinary people in Thanet South. Actually if you watch it you can see that it is a demonstration against a small group of the followers of St. Leon the Loser, headed by a woman in hideous red hair named Bunny la Roche. 

If the name rings a bell, Bunny was the woman on a recent Question Time who screamed abuse at all and sundry:

Nope Not Hope has more information about her, and even far left sites such as Socialist Unity find her too much to stomach.

All this leaves me rather puzzled. UKIP takes its support mainly from former Tory voters. Many of them may be of the Alf Garnett school of thought, but they are still not disgruntled Labour people. In other words, UKIP hurts the Tories more than it hurts Labour, so why is Will Scobie not leaving  Sir Bufton Tufton from the Tories and UKIP's Alf Garnett to slog it out between themselves? A split right means that he could take the seat, which is all that matters in electoral politics when you think about it.

Secondly, why are both Labour and Tory seeming to ally themselves with Trotscum? At the end of the day, all those weirdos want to do is use whatever issue is important at the moment to garner more recruits for their wanky little sect.

I can sort of understand why the Tory's Craig Mackinley might be afraid since it has just emerged that he was involved with a company that advised Eastern Europeans on how they could claim benefits in the UK. Obviously he will want to distract attention from that wheeze to try and avoid his vote sliding over to UKIP, but what is Labour's excuse?

Thanks to the cack-handed way that Labour has behaved in Thanet South, all the party has done is confirm what UKIP have been saying for years, namely that there is no difference between Labour and the Tories.

Nice work, Will. This has probably lost you the election and helped get Nigel Farage elected.

SNP look set to take 57 seats

The latest poll from TNS is just amazing:

SNP 54 (+2)

Lab 22 (-2)

Con 13 (NC)

Lib 6 (NC)

Green 2 (-2)

UKIP 2 (+1)

Putting that into the seat calculator gives the SNP 57 Westminster seats, with Labour and the Tories one each. You can just imagine the SNP wondering who the Labour survivor will be and then throwing all their weight into getting the poor bugger out, can't you?

The Tory campaign has actually not been all that bad, but the problem that they have is that the party hardly exists outside the three border seats, one of which they hold already. The catastrophe here is a cold dish that Labour has to sup next week.

How did it come about? Much play has been made of the way in which Labour hugged the Tories up close during the referendum campaign, and the hubris that led Labour into doing that is certainly one of the reasons. 

At the start of the year, Jim Murphy who leads Labour's Scottish branch office was telling anyone who would listen just how easy it was to outwit the SNP at all levels. The attitude in Scots' Labour seemed to be one where they were telling their constituents that it was okay to have had their fun, but now it was time to revert to the old cause. Labour really believed that the traditional vote would rally behind the old, tattered banners just because Spud Murphy gave them their orders.

The Labour campaign in England seems to be going from strength to strength, but in Scotland people quickly began to pick holes in Labour's campaign slogans. There was a resentment at the downright lies that the party told, with the chief one being the enormous porkie from Spud Murphy that "The biggest party gets to form the government." You did not need to be a constitutional scholar to point out that what matters is a majority in the Commons, not where it comes from.

These tall tales have come thick and fast, with each one being quickly shot down. Labour made a play on "exploitative zero hours contracts" which they pledged to ban, so the young graduates with computers, internet access and time on their hands who are all gagging to pay back the Labour Party over its referendum stance, began to dig at that one.

It took until this weekend when some clever souls discovered that Glasgow's Labour run council has about 2,000 of its wage slaves on those contracts. Now Spud has been forced to admit that they will not actually ban zero hours contracts, just the exploitative ones, if that makes any sense.

As Wings Over Scotland pointed out today, you normally have to wait until after the election is over for stuff like this to come out.

However, at the end of the day, Labour is losing because its national leadership has to appeal to the Southern English, aspirational scrote vote and so it has to slap down the Scottish branch whenever it gets out of line. Two weeks ago Chuka Umunna had to remind Spud that his no-cuts pledge was worthless since Labour policy is made in London and not Edinburgh. Before that, Rachel Reeves gave the SNP an open goal when she said that Labour was not the party for claimants.

A Labour wipe out in Scotland is now on the cards and it is all their own fault.

The polls are flatlining with hardly any movement for any party.

Take a look at this graph from UK Polling Report. It shows that the three main parties have been flat lining since the start of the year, with Labour and the Tories now neck and neck. Even if the Tories do get an extra point or two, it will not influence the outcome all that much as Cameron's team has to be about five points clear of Labour to offset Labour's inbuilt advantage in seat distribution.

Labour can take some comfort from the results since even with the deluge that awaits the party in Scotland, the party is still competitive with the Tories in the country as a whole. It is almost as if every time Miliband looks like losing another few points in Scotland, his party perks up south of the River Tweed, so the overall Scottish effect is nil.

The Greens are clearly the losers here since they have sagged quite clearly to five percent, which is probably why Labour is still polling relatively well. The UKIP sag seems to have ended and the purples are now riding steadily on about 13 percent. It will be interesting to see if the notion of the shy kipper vote is anything other than hot air. If it is, then we can expect UKIP to poll around 15 percent or so next week.

All the postal votes went out early last week, and since postal voters tend to complete their ballot papers and send them off within 48 hours, we can assume that for 20 percent of the population the election is now over. Even if one party does start to climb in the polls, the fear must be that it will not influence the final outcome by all that much. Needless to say, with every day that goes by, the chances of that happening become slimmer and more remote. The parties have thrown the kitchen sink at each other, and only in Scotland has it influenced the way that people intend to vote.

How this will pan out when the votes are in we just do not know. Our old friend the universal swing has no meaning when people are voting for different parties in Scotland and to a lesser extent in Wales. Not only that, but in England we have Labour, Liberal, Tory and UKIP all seriously in contention for votes, with the Greens still hoping to grab whatever scraps fall from the main table.

This election will be chewed over for decades to come!

Labour needs to scrap the Bain Principle as part of its rebuilding strategy

The Bain Principle is named after Willie Bain, the Labour MP for Glasgow North East. In a nutshell it states that Labour will oppose whatever the SNP proposes no matter what the circumstances. Bain enunciated this in a 2012 tweet, but the policy goes back a long way.

The policy began once Labour realised that the demand for devolution was not going to disappear and a limited devolution bill was promised from the 1992 general election onwards. The problem was to make it seem as a Labour gift to Scotland and that meant removing the SNP from the equation.

Take the parliament building as a case in point. The original plan involved using the wonderfully dignified Royal High School building on Calton Hill had the 1979 referendum on devolution not been fiddled by a Labour amendment that made it impossible for the bill to pass. Following that farce, Scottish nationalists held vigils outside the building which meant that for Labour it could not be used as the new parliament. Donald Dewer had it that the Royal High School was a "nationalist shibboleth," with the result that millions was spent on a new parliament building. Those millions did not matter to Labour as all they wanted was to present the new parliament as the Party's gift to the people of Scotland.

When that wheeze failed in 2007 with the election of a minority SNP government in Scotland, Labour went into overdrive to try and derail as much policy as they could. The SNP were elected on a promise to scrap the scheme for a new tramway system in Edinburgh, a scheme that had already overrun by many millions of pounds, was years behind schedule, as well as creating chaos in the city.

None of that mattered to Labour. All that mattered was that the SNP policy to cut the losses and scrap the trams had to be opposed. So Labour joined with the Tories to force the SNP government to continue with the plan. This is why Edinburgh now has just under nine miles of tramway, constructed at a cost of almost a billion pounds.

In 2012 the SNP put forward a motion to oppose the Tory plan to reduce the 50p top rate of income tax. Labour refused to vote for that, hence Bain's tweet which confirmed what many people already knew, that Labour opposed SNP policy for the sheer devilment of it.

The strategy behind all this seems to be to undermine the SNP at every opportunity and then  take the credit when Labour puts forward exactly the same policies that they had opposed when propounded by the SNP. The problem for Labour is that the electorate are not as stupid as Labour thinks they are and they have seen through this wheeze, as Labour will find out next week.

Following the deluge on the 7th May, Labour really needs to rebuild from the bottom up, and start putting forward policies that play on the council estates, as well as working constructively with parties that share some of the same values.

SNP seeks to involve people with a campaign leaflet

The SNP seems to have come up with a decent wheeze that will enable them to build up a good database of supporters and the issues that matter to them. This leaflet, printed on two A5 sides of thick paper plopped through my letterbox the other day along with a stamped addressed envelope so that it could be returned to the party.

It is very rare for any party to go to the trouble of asking the punters what they think, still less for that party to make it easy for people to reply. I filled in the form, and told the SNP that I thought that the war against claimants was the major issue of our day. Then I ticked the box to say that I would vote for Brock in this election and gave them my details. 

If the SNP do as well in this coming election as the polls predict then a lot of it will be due to out of the box thinking like this. The idea behind the leaflet is simple, so simple that I have never seen it done before. It will leave more than a few people thinking that the SNP actually gives more than a tinker's cuss about them and their concerns.

I told a couple of friends who are standing for election in England about this leaflet and they both agreed that it was a fine idea, but neither seemed to want to take it up. The first said that it was too late and the second told me that he couldn't afford all that postage.

The quick reply is that people could be asked to use their own stamp, or party workers could collect the completed cards. Alternatively, if a stall is set up in the centre of the constituency, people can fill them in there and then.

Good ideas need to be copied.

Labour abandons its Scottish section, but still looks a winner.

A party needs many things to win an election, and a fair wind is certainly one of them. Often that good breeze comes about because a party looks like a winner, so things start to fall into place effortlessly. Take this chance encounter between Ed Miliband and a girly gaggle out on a hen party. It could have happened to David Cameron, but it didn't. Instead, Cameron went to talk to some workers and many of them got so bored with him that they preferred to go back to work instead of listen to the man a moment longer. Miliband met the tottie quite by chance and all of a sudden he went from geek to sex god in the public eye.

The Labour campaign went into overdrive over the weekend as it began its final sprint towards the finishing line.

The first thing that Labour did was toss its Scottish branch to the wolves. Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the Commons made that very plain when she said: “We’ll speak to any party that has got representation in the House of Commons in order to try and build a majority for a Queen’s Speech that the country desperately needs for a change of government.” 

With that comment you can forget the plaintive wail that still emanates from Scottish Labour that the biggest party forms the government because the national party has now kicked that idea into touch. Labour will try to work with anyone who will join them in getting the Tories out.

Secondly, Miliband appealed directly to those Tory voters who are not complete scum suckers, as well as to the remaining leftist UKIP and Lib-Dem contingent, by telling them that  if they are worried about tax evasion, avaricious energy companies and fat cat bankers, then he is the man who will champion those causes. The toy town left will scream at that, but if it solidifies Labour's right flank then it is to be welcomed.

Labour seems to have done the electoral maths and accepted that the Tories on 280 seats are still going to be unable to form a government, but Labour with as few as 260 certainly could. 

The SNP now seem to be certain to take almost 50, and any that they fail to grab will probably remain in Labour hands. Add the Welsh, Ulster and English one-seat parties to get another ten or so. If we add the shell-shocked remnants of the Lib-Dems who may manage to save 25 MPs if they are very lucky, then Miliband has a majority of the 650 seats in the Commons.

Thinking about this for a moment, Miliband has to treat the SNP with kid gloves, but all the others can be brought on-board or dumped depending upon the mood. He could even leave the Lib-Dems to stew in their own juices, if Labour did take 265 seats or so.

Cameron by way of contrast does not have any of these options. At best he can count on the eight or so members of the DUP, with maybe the Lib-Dems, always assuming that they do not decide to take whatever deal Miliband offers them. UKIP can be discounted because whatever seats they have will come from the Tories, so their success or failure does not alter the Con-Lab balance of forces.

It's no wonder that Ed Miliband is looking so chirpy - barring a disaster, in a little over two weeks he is set to become Prime Minister.

Scottish police seem to be helping Jim Murphy's campaign.

You couldn't make this story up because nobody would believe it: the Scottish police have pulled in a protester and demanded that he give them advance details of all and any plans that he has to demonstrate at Jim Murphy's public events. Sean Clerkin is the demonstrator and what McPlod did not know is that Clerkin seems to have had a camera hidden on his person and he has said that the video will go live on YouTube tomorrow.

Now it may be that Sean Clerkin is an irritant to some politicians, but this is an election after all, and political hacks have to accept that not every event will be stage managed to their satisfaction. The police refused to rule out sharing any information that Clerkin gave them with Murphy, so the obvious conclusion that people will reach is that they are aiding the Labour campaign.

Miliband won the challengers' debate

Last night's event was called the challengers' debate because neither Cameron nor Clegg were there. Cameron had made it plain that he wasn't going to attend so the BBC didn't invite him. Did you watch it? I suspect not, since it was a bit like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, and only Survation bothered to conduct a poll to decide the winner. Their result was Miliband 37, Sturgeon 31, Farage 27, Bennett 5 and Wood 2.

The only high spot came when Farage made the quite legitimate point that mass immigration means that demand for housing is far outstripping supply, and the audience began to jeer. In other words what we had was a fairly typical, well-fed, ample-bottomed, BBC audience that is made up of people who cannot even imagine what it is like to be anything other than comfortable and middle class.

Farage took the opportunity to claim that the audience was rigged, and the moderator, David Dimbleby pointed out that it had been chosen from a polling company's panel. I suspect that exchange will be tomorrow's headlines as Farage was clearly stumped and struggled to reply

It was rigged of course, since those panels are made up of people like me, who do it out of interest and for the odd few quid that comes our way. That skews things away from your average punter and towards the political animals. Then you have to find people from the panel who live where the debate is taking place and are willing to go to it. That tends to exclude the people who actually work for a living and are tired at the end of the day, or who have to go home to cook a meal and look after the kids. However, it includes the comfortable middle class who spend their days sitting in offices and who may even have nannies to look after their whelps. So no, the BBC did not rig the audience, but that isn't to say that the audience wasn't rigged. That said, Farage got his message out to his people sitting at home, so he probably won't be too bothered about the studio audience.

Sturgeon can also be rather chuffed since she made her visceral hatred of the Tories very plain to everyone. She then went on to invite Miliband to work with her party to ensure that no matter who wins the most seats next month, the scummy Tories are kicked out of office. Obviously, Miliband could not agree to that since he has candidates of his own in Scotland, but his replies were measured and thoughtful, so Labour has plenty of wriggle room after the votes are in.

As for Miliband, he came over very much as a Prime Minster in waiting, which was clearly his intention. I wish he would stop sounding like a satnav's robotic voice, and there were times when I wanted to throw something at the screen when he trotted out the "hard working families" line once to often, but he did enough to encourage Labour voters in England to turn out next month and vote for his party.

Now that the debates are over I think I can conclude that Miliband has done more than enough overall to humanise himself and allow people to see the real Labour man that he is, rather than the caricature that the Tories wanted people to see. He is not as left wing as I would like, but there is enough of the old Labour Party in him to encourage the lost voters to return to the fold.

Sturgeon has been magnificent throughout and has shown time and again that this is not about independence, it really is about getting the Tories out and putting some stiffening into Labour's backbone. 

Farage comes in third in my list. During the course of these debates he has done enough to steady his vote at around 14 percent and halt what seemed to be a steady decline into oblivion. Whether that decline will start again is another matter, but it is true to say that UKIP's position at the moment owes everything to him.

With three weeks to go, everything is still to play for.

When Robin Grey, ukelele man, told David Cameron: "Fuck off back to Eton"

What is it about the political right and their love of young men with closely cropped hair and cheap suits? One such specimen tried to intimidate a busker, of all people, during yesterday's walkabout by David Cameron in the border constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The ludicrous result is that the video is now all over the web, and Cameron's visit has been forgotten because all anyone can talk about is the day the busker came face to face with the goon. Here's the video clip that has the whole world whistling along:

Robin Grey is the name of the hero who ruined Cameron's day, and here is is with his nan enjoying a jamming session  as they try to improve on the lyric that came into his head yesterday as he saw Cameron heading towards him:

It's still very much a work in progress, and somebody needs to tell him to always hold the mobile 'phone horizontally to make the clip look better. That said, I'm betting that a polished version will be uploaded soon so that we can all sing it during the next three weeks should David Cameron be foolish enough to ever again venture out amongst real people.

Which he probably won't.

Jim Murphy is put in his place over no cuts pledge

No wonder Jim "Spud" Murphy looks even more puzzled than usual. He spent the weekend telling us that there would be no cuts and the Labour manifesto out today gives us more than a few. Now it is true that I still think people in England should vote Labour, but that is against a backdrop of a strong vote for the SNP in Scotland to make sure that the cuts are kept to a minimum or dropped altogether.

In a BBC interview, Chuka Umunna who is the Labour business spokesman, felt constrained to put Spud in his place and remind him that Labour is led from London, and not Edinburgh:

I think we can fairly easily conclude from this exchange, which admittedly was forced out of Umunna, that Labour has pretty much given up on Scotland.

That does not mean that people in England should go off and vote for the Monster Raving Loonies, or the Greens, as a protest. Labour manifesto has enough in it to justify a vote south of the River Tweed, but smoothie-chops like young Chuka here are motivated by a desire to get their snouts in the Westminster troughs more than they are by socialist ideology, or indeed any ideology at all. 

So they may try for cuts, but will probably not go down to the wire over them, because at the end of the day, staying in office is all that matters to people like this.

So a vote for the SNP in Scotland makes more and more sense, even to people who do not support the idea of Scottish independence. If you want to ensure that Labour does not implement cuts, then make sure that there is a large SNP cohort who will allow Labour's placemen and troughers to keep their place at the trough, in return to avoiding cuts to our services.