THERE was plenty of drama on this morning's front pages: "The SNP ransom note!", "Pulling the strings!", "SNP control!" The Conservatives and their chums in the media want nothing more than to talk up the possibility of a Labour government reliant on a party that would break up the United Kingdom, destroying Britain's three-century-old union. There are reasons to be sceptical about this nerdily insiderish line of attack. The launch of the separatist Scottish National Party's manifesto today is unlikely to have troubled the consciousness of the average English voter. Do voters in middle England really discuss the minutiae of minority government around the water cooler? Still, visits to Farsley, Guiseley and Wetherby, middle England in bricks and mortar, earlier today persuaded your correspondent that there is method to the Conservatives' apparent madness. The fact is that, however much it is undermining a union they claim to cherish, their Labour-SNP attack is cutting through. On the doorsteps, ordinary Tory-Labour swing voters in the suburbs of Leeds are talking about The Scots. And residual bad feeling about The Scots' immolation of Wetherby in 1314 can only explain so much.



Despite the bluster, however, today the SNP wrote itself out of nation-changing power, not into it. Two routes were available to Nicola Sturgeon as she strode out to rock-concert-like applause at her manifesto launch this morning. Both were politically viable, consistent with her stated desire to lead Scotland to independence, and would have guaranteed her influence over any Labour government dependent on her party's MPs.

The first route was to put forward a really left-wing electoral programme: eye-watering tax hikes on the rich, an expansion of the welfare state, mass-renationalisation of utilities and infrastructure. That would have invited Scottish voters to give Ms Sturgeon a mandate to twist the arm of any Labour government. It would have aligned her with her stated allies in England: the Green Party. It would have fired up the many thousands of excitable young, left-wing Scots who have signed up to the SNP since the independence referendum last September. Indeed, it would have been consistent with the Yes campaign's own loopy proposals and prognostications. That campaign, prone as it was to treating arithmetic as a fusty English imposition, laid radical left-wing tracks onto which Ms Sturgeon could have steered the SNP train. But she did not.

Another option would have been a return to the SNP's own fiscally conservative roots. Remember: the party spent several decades as the "tartan Tories", the home of palid, calculator-fumbling oil executives and chartered accountants. Imagine if Ms Sturgeon had strode out onto that stage and pledged to cut the deficit and make the state leaner and more efficient; to make the numbers add up. "Scots are fed up of paying the interest on English debts", she might have insisted. Imagine the dismay at Miliband HQ as it dawned on strategists that, in any SNP-supported government, SNP MPs in Westminster would be able to point to their own manifesto as justification for siding with Tories, in the event that they did not get their way when legislation was being drafted. With a mandate to triangulate in Scotland's interests, Ms Sturgeon could have variously played off England's two main parties against each other and, whenever she failed, trumpeted the case for independence afresh.

But she took neither route. Instead, she took the one guaranteed (whatever the English tabloids claim) to minimise her party's influence in Westminster; that is, the one entirely in keeping with the outlook of the average member of the parliamentary Labour party. Reading the SNP manifesto, your correspondent was overwhelmed by a single impression: no document in recent British history has better epitomised the instincts of the average Labour MP. Like Labour, the SNP would: raise the top rate of tax to 50p, abolish the "bedroom tax", increase the minimum wage, reintroduce the bankers' bonus tax, boost house-building and support for the disabled, decentralise political power, overhaul the House of Lords, mandate lower energy prices, accelerate progress towards carbon-reduction targets, increase female representation on company boards, cut (but not abolish) tuition fees across Britain, support EU membership, uphold Britain's international aid commitments, oppose the "privatisation" of the NHS and boost apprenticeships. As the Resolution Foundation notes, the two parties' fiscal plans are eminently reconcilable. The only major difference—the SNP would abolish Trident where Labour might not—invites as much prevarication over the next five years as did the coalition agreement between the pro-Trident Conservatives and the Trident-sceptic Liberal Democrats in 2010. And (whisper it softly): those two parties got on just fine.

The fact is that the SNP manifesto could do Ms Sturgeon and her party immense damage. It writes her into an alliance with Labour out of which she cannot easily wriggle. A notable gap between the parties would have given her both leverage in Westminster and, when that fell short, an excuse for the second independence referendum that she craves but that few Scots currently do (witness the noisy booing from the audience when she refused to rule it out in the second televised Scottish leaders' debate two weeks ago). But no such gap exists. The SNP leader will not hold Labour "to ransom". In fact, come any Labour-SNP majority, it is not Ms Sturgeon who would be the "most powerful woman in Britain", but Rosie Winterton. The not-inconsiderable abilities of the Labour chief whip would dictate what any such government could achieve. SNP MPs would have a simple choice: toe the line, or stray from their own manifesto. And be in no doubt: where they erred, Labour would be well placed to dump failures on them in precisely the fashion that makes even left-leaning Lib Dem MPs mumble that they might be better off back with the Tories. Moreover, Ms Sturgeon's case for a second independence referendum, one that she could certainly make (probably successfully) under a new Conservative-led government in Westminster, would wither.

Ms Sturgeon is known on Fleet Street for admiring Michael Foot, who presided over Labour's hard-left, "longest suicide note in history" manifesto in 1983. Yet her first manifesto as leader of the SNP more closely resembles the path that Labour would have taken under John Smith, the utterly moderate, European social democrat who assumed the party's leadership a decade after Foot's resignation and whose death precipitated Tony Blair's more centrist approach. Indeed, such is the path to which the party has returned under Mr Miliband. By clinging so closely to the agenda of a party that she wants to put out of business, Ms Sturgeon has published the second "longest suicide note in history" (at about 16,000 words, it is about a quarter shorter than Labour's self-destructive programme in 1983). But it is much to the right of the first. And eventually, if Labour leads the next government, it will put her own party out of business.

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