The UK is in a precarious position. Never before have I seen its fragmentation so close on the horizon. The Scottish Independence Referendum has transformed the political landscape in Scotland, in fact it has been transformed beyond belief. Now living abroad I have seen the upcoming SNP tsunami coming for a while, whilst the established political parties seem to be stuck in a state of paralysis, scaremongering, slinging mud in both tabloids and broadsheets to no effect. In fact quite the opposite is the case, it has galvanised Scottish nationalism. The Conservatives, according to Danny Alexander (fighting to save his seat in Scotland I might add) has commented:

“I think the Tory campaign has been a total disgrace… I think they are deliberately trying to stir up ill-feeling between Scotland and England in a desperate attempt to fend off UKIP, and I think it has long-term consequences. When you stoke tensions, you are playing with fire”.

Where does this ill-feeling come from? Surely, after ‘love-bombing’ the Scots during the referendum pleading with them to not ‘leave’ the UK but ‘lead’ it, why use such vulgar rhetoric in the mainstream media? A swerve to the right on behalf of the Tories? UKIP have always banged on this drum. Then there is Labour and the Lib-Dems refusing to enter any post election agreement with a strong SNP presence who coincidentally ‘pose the biggest threat to the constitution’ since the abdication! What is this drivel? This condescending tone which certainly, in many instances, has racist overtones. Is there an underlying English superiority complex or something?

I think there is. I was born and raised in south London. Most of us were children of immigrants but shared one common thing… a loathing of ‘northerners’ and by that I mean anyone north of the M25! Such loathing never came from the home, it came from the football terraces and the printed media of the time, just look back at the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, the Miners’ strike and the vilification of Neil Kinnock during the 1992 election for examples. In fact I went through primary and secondary school without any knowledge of how the United Kingdom was created and indeed how the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland were lost. My generation just accepted the status quo and kept their inhibitions and you just have to look at numerous opinion polls carried out in southern England recently to see the disgust at the rise of the SNP north of the border. We were, in my opinion, conditioned to think that way through the only means available at the time: radio, television and the papers. Just listen to the comments made by an editor in one of Britain’s leading newspapers below:





Nicola Sturgeon is being portrayed by the right wing press as the “Scotweiler” and “The Most Dangerous Woman in the UK”. The new South Glasgow University Hospital has been branded “Sturgeon’s Deathstar”! In the past month I have had to put my head in my hands at the sheer lunacy of some of the commentary coming from the Tory friendly press. In essence, they are playing a very dangerous game with the union. Writers such as Tim Stanley have commented:

#WorstCrisisSinceTheAbdication is exactly the kind of language that fuels a crisis. Why are Tories doing this? http://t.co/aopEowtB8q

— Tim Stanley (@timothy_stanley) April 25, 2015

However technology has changed this for the better and the hashtag #WorstCrisisSinceTheAbdication has become the butt of many a joke on social media circles. No sooner do the dinosaurs of the print world produce misogynistic, antagonistic headlines only for them to be instantaneously thrown back at them by the common Joe Soap with a smartphone. So the reality right now is the SNP may well have the numbers to support a Labour led minority government. Constitutional crisis I hear? No! The Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 makes the possibility of a minority government collapsing more difficult. According to Colin Talbot:

“Under the FTPA the only circumstances in which a Government falls would be if (a) they resigned – unlikely but not impossible or (b) the following is passed by a majority in the House of Commons “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government”. Nothing else forces a Government out of office – not defeat on a Queens Speech, a Budget, a key piece of legislation, a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, nothing”.

This puts another feather in the cap of the SNP. They are a party who have had four years of minority government in Holyrood whereby they had to win arguments to pass legislation. This saw the removal of prescription charges and the introduction of free third level education. We should be shouting for more of the same down south! Most of the English press continue to paint the SNP as outsiders, pickpockets and unworthy to have a say in the government of the UK which in itself is extremely dangerous and undemocratic. Add to that the concoction of an ‘English Manifesto’ launched by the Conservatives recently you can see a real ‘us versus them’ line being drawn in the sand. Now i’m no fan of Nigel Dodds and the DUP but he stated in The Guardian:

“Take the “right” of SNP MPs to vote in the Commons, or the supposed lack of legitimacy that stems from it. No one who purports to be a unionist can question it. They have the right. That’s why we fought and won the referendum: to enshrine the rights of Scots to go on sending representatives, fully equal to every other, to Westminster. Glib and lazy talk about SNP MPs somehow not being as entitled to vote in every division in the Commons, as any other British MP, simply fuels nationalist paranoia.”

Dodds is spot on here. The so called Conservative & Unionist Party are doing their utmost to destabilise the union for short term political gain, they are not seeing the ramifications of their ill thought out election strategy. The Tories aren’t dealing with a ‘raggle-taggle’ disjointed political party, we are talking about a national movement which (along with other progressive parties) managed to win 45% of the Referendum vote (where 84% of all eligible voters actually voted). They may well have won had Gordon Brown not come out in the final few days and scared the ‘be-Jesus’ out of pensioners. I for one am not the only outsider amazed at the political revolution occurring in Scotland:

The SNP are, by membership size, one of the largest political party’s in the UK with over 100,000 members. Given the size of Scotland that is an astronomical figure. In comparison, Labour’s membership has declined rapidly in Scotland with Scottish unions now questioning their allegiances as Labour intend to press ahead with more austerity should they gain power. New Labour failed Scotland, and the Labour heartlands know it. Labour’s new leader in Scotland is, in Jim Murphy, New Labour. For two years, during the Scottish Independence Referendum campaign Labour shared the podium with a variety of prominent Conservatives. A party hated in Scotland for its neo-liberal policies which saw the de-industrialisation of Scottish industry, the trial of the Poll Tax and massive public sector cuts under Thatcher.

Labour once offered an alternative… they no longer do as they have to appease the middle ground and the Tory press. They offer in reality ‘austerity-light’. The alternative Scots have lay at the door of the SNP who appear on the surface not to be that radical at all. For many in Scotland however the word ‘betrayal‘ seems to crop up so often from former Labour voters for their ‘complacency’ in office and their failure in thirteen years in power to improve social conditions in Scotland. Given that there has been five years of Tory/Liberal austerity the Scottish electorate are ready to give a well deserved message to the Westminster establishment.

With just over a week to go until polling day the union hangs in the balance. I have a feeling that the Tories may well have a small surge in the final week and will get near 300 seats. They will “out scare” the Labour Party and will win enough marginal seats to be propped up by the Lib Dems and the DUP and may well just sneak over the line in terms of having a majority. There may well be a situation where Scotland may have 1 Labour MP, 1 Lib Dem MP, and 55 SNP MP’s, but yet may be governed by the Conservatives for another five years who have no Westminster representation in the country. This scenario has referendum written all over it and this time the Scots will vote differently. Ironically, it is New Labour’s only real lasting legacy in Scotland, Holyrood, that will provide the springboard to that referendum. Scotland may finally get the country, the democracy and the society it rightfully deserves.

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