So the sinister Len McCluskey has had his way. The Labour Party has committed electoral suicide by choosing a leader who commands the support of no more  than ten per cent of his parliamentary colleagues.

I thought that Gordon Brown, old Captain Barbossa as I fondly nicknamed him when he was our unelected Prime Minister, was bad, but the idea of Jeremy Corbyn with his hand on the national tiller is incomprehensible. Apart from the fact that the man is a poor imitation of Michael Foot and peddles a brand of Marxist-lite politics that by comparison puts Nicola Sturgeon somewhere close to Maggie Thatcher in the political spectrum, there is this:

The next UK General Election is scheduled to take place on May 7, 2020. On that date, the new Leader of  HM’s Official Opposition will be nineteen days shy of his seventy-first birthday. Today, I am just over nine months shy of mine, and while as far as I know I am in decent health, I would no more consider myself physically fit for the rigours of five years of national leadership than I’d offer myself as a replacement for Wayne Rooney should he fail his fitness test this afternoon. (Okay, I might step in as a sub for Motherwell, but they’re in another league altogether.)

Will Corbyn still be in office in five years? The smart money says ‘No’, but given that he secured 60% of the vote in a four-horse race, and presumably has no intention of changing the insane electoral system that put him where he is, it seems to me that he’s going to be bloody difficult to remove by anything other than Divine intervention.

As for the new Deputy Leader: who is he?

This headline appeared in yesterday’s Herald newspaper.

Directorship ban for lying Tory

It won’t make me cancel my subscription, but it does make me wonder. If the chap in question had been a known Socialist, would that have featured in the banner? I’ve been an SNP member for 17 years, so I’m grinding no axes for the individual, but I’m asking, should a quality newspaper, as the Herald is perceived to be, resort to the politics of abuse?

My wife and I wound up discussing Donald Trump last night over the dinner table. Her general view is that he’s preposterous. I don’t disagree with that but he’s no joke. The polls show him at the moment as the Republican Presidential candidate most likely to beat Hillary Clinton. If they stay that way, the nomination will be his.

As regular visitors to my blog will be aware, I am not, never have been and never will be a supporter of the Labour Party. However I have friends who are, and it is for them that I fear the future, if the crazy rules for voter qualification are not changed pronto.

I have just filled in on-line a form to become a registered supporter of the Party. If I was so minded I could buy the right to vote by forwarding it, with a £3 payment, then cast a mischievous ballot for Jeremy Corbyn. I’m not about to do anything so irresponsible, but a hell of a lot of people will; as far as I can see from the process there is no way of screening out the imposters, whatever Harriet Harman etc. may say.

There is a clear and present danger that Corbyn will be elected as Leader of HM Opposition. That would put him at the head of a parliamentary group that would never have nominated him for the position had he not been handed votes by other candidates in the half-baked belief that the Left, in his case the extreme Left, should be on the ballot paper.

The daftness of that proposition when allied to  the wacky voting eligibility set-up is, as Denis Thatcher’s fictional self used to say in the ‘Dear Bill’ letters, as clear as the balls on a dog.

So far Corbyn’s headline plus point is re-nationalisation of the railways, a move which polls indicate would command 80% public support. Andy Burnham has already put on that jacket, and you can bet that before the next election, the Tory Governmennt will have enacted or enabled something that won’t be called re-nationalisation, but which will have much the same effect.

This morning I read Corbyn’s headline negative, a demand that the UK stop bombing ISIS targets and instead isolate it. How exactly do you isolate a brutal extremist army? You don’t; you destroy it.

On the same platform, he went on to propose that a former leader of his party should be put on trial for war crimes, over the invasion of Iraq. There might be some popular support for that, but it’s difficult to see how it could be done without also indicting the entire Cabinet of the day, who backed him, and possibly also every MP who voted to give Blair the authority for military action.

Apart from being a walking economic own goal, Corbyn is also a threat to national security. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Palestine that he would ever be elected Prime Minister. However the way things are heading there is a strong possibility that he will soon stand opposite David Cameron at the Dispatch Box. If that happens, then the party that my pals have supported for their lifetimes will face virtual extinction as a political force.

Last year Scotland voted to remain under the yolk of Westminster. If that is how it must be, then there must be stability in that Chamber. We could be headng for chaos.

‘Andy Burnham pledges half-female shadow cabinet as Labour leader’

Guardian headline.

Are we back to Caitlyn Jenner here?

Or is the potential new leader saying that in his Shadow Cabinet ability and suitability will be secondary considerations?

I read this morning that the runners and riders are now in place for the leadership and deputy leadership elections in the Scottish Labour Party.

Labour is not alone in running simultaneous leadership and deputy elections with completely different cast lists. Whatever the party, the practice means that losers in the senior vote remain just that, and are excluded from consideration for the deputy slot. Also, by definition it means that none of the deputy candidates are considered good enough to run for leader.

So why do it? How does it add to the electability of any party? Would it really damage democracy to allow the chosen leader to anoint his or her own deputy, the person with whom they believe they will work best, rather than have them potentially saddled with a number two whom they neither like nor trust?

This might shock a few people.

I was a member of the Conservative Party for much of my adult life and voted that way in the majority of the polls since I cast my first General Election ballot in 1966. I did so because at that time it suited the shape of my political philosophy; pro free enterprise, against public ownership, but pro health and welfare. But through all those years, I was a strong believer in the right of Scots to manage our own affairs, within  the context of a United Kingdom if possible. That is to say I wanted to keep the Queen but cut as many ties with Westminster as possible. In 1978, and again, 20 years on, I voted for devolution.

In 1997, I was content with the inevitable coronation of Tony Blair, because he was committed irrevocably to a Scottish Parliament. I was content with that outcome, but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy at all that year. On May 3, the  day that Tony and Cherie moved into Downing Street, I was widowed. It was shattering, and politics were irrelevant at that time; everything was irrelevant at that time.

A few months later, as I began to adjust to my new status, I found myself reappraising my life completely. I became a full-time novelist. I began to spend more time working in Spain. I reviewed all of my personal values, my belief structure, everything. I resolved to be a different man. I resolved to be a better man.

It was against that background that I took a fresh look at my political allegiance, and came to the conclusion that the Tory Party and I had reached an impasse. I was fully committed by that time to an independent Scotland, and the Conservatives, or what was left of them, were implacably opposed. So I called Mike Russell, who was then the Chief Executive of the SNP. He invited me to visit him in his office. We talked about the Party and about what it meant. I remember very clearly him saying, ‘Belief in Independence is the sine qua non for membership.’

And so I joined, publicly, to the public sneers of someone I’d thought was my friend, and yet who lacked the courage to put his name to them, preferring to be quoted as ‘A Conservative Spokesman’. I joined a party that made me feel comfortable, because it was a broad church, but one with a single God, Scotland the Nation. I wasn’t naive. I had no unrealistic expectations, I didn’t believe that Alex Salmond would ever achieve an absolute majority in Holyrood, and so secure a formal independence referendum, recognised by a Tory Prime Minister. If you’d told me that Nicola Sturgeon would lead the party in securing 56 Westminster seats out of 59 in 2015, I’d have asked you what you had inhaled or ingested.

Yet it all happened. The broad base of its membership united in protest. Not, in my view, against the referendum result, but against the way in which it was fought, and against the Scottish politicians who were perceived to have betrayed their own people by allowing themselves to be swept aside by their collaborating London leadership, culminating in the notorious vow. That’s what I signed up for, and viewed in simple terms, it’s a triumph.

What I didn’t sign up for was a leadership of the hard left. I didn’t join a party whose leader puts her own political philosophy above the prime objective, Scotland the Nation. I didn’t join a party whose Westminster front-man declares that the SNP is the real HM Opposition. That’s not Nicola’s right, and it’s not Angus Robertson’s job.

The First Minister’s function is to deliver in Holyrood the manifesto that saw Alex Salmond elected in 2011. She has no role in Westminster. The SNP parliamentary group shouldn’t be seen as her puppets, and it isn’t there simply to make Labour look bad. It is there to deliver independence by agreement, or more realistically, to secure the best possible post referendum settlement from a Tory government with an absolute majority.

It has become fashionable to deride Alex Salmond, now that he’s out of meaningful power. Those who do so forget that his great skill and indeed his great challenge was to draw into the SNP people from across the political spectrum, and unite us behind a common cause. He didn’t do that by linking metaphorical arms with Len McCluskey and his ilk or by stupid grand-standing.

Very quietly, the Scottish Conservative Party, which I predict will soon ditch that name and return to being the Scottish Unionists, is reinventing itself under a hitherto derided leader and a very capable deputy. Scotland will never be a one-party state. If the present SNP leader focuses on supplanting Labour as Scotland’s left-of-centre Party, she may be in for an unpleasant surprise in next year’s Holyrood Election.

Stay on message, Nicola and Angus, and remember that you represent all of us who put you where you are . . . or where you think you are.

RIP Charles Kennedy.

So I was wrong about Mr Tristram Hunt coming t through to lead the Labour Party. I guess that the cousin of a former Tory Cabinet Minister would have been a step too far. That leaves us with three likely candidates, since Mary Creagh may not clear the threshold of 35 nominees among the parliamentary  party.

I’ve been looking at the CVs of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. Apart from their Oxbridge link, they have one other common trait, and that is minimal experience of the working world outside the political sphere. Liz Kendall does list a spell as director of the Ambulance Services Network, but even after a good rummage in the NHS website, I’m not exactly certain what that is. If Mary Creagh does make the list, she will add experience as a lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Cranfield Management College. How one can hold such a post on the back of a modern languages degree followed by a stint as a volunteer in the European Parliament and then a  post with the European Youth Forum, and without every having been an entrepreneur, well, that rather beats me.

My point is this. These people all want to be Prime Minister, yet none of them seems to have any real practical work experience outside their very limited, enclosed little world. Surely there is room for a public examination of the credentials of everyone who aspires to be  leader of a national political party. If there were, I suspect that most of the candidates would fail.

One election behind us and another looming.

Who will be the next Leader of the Opposition? I’d have put my money on Chuka Umunna until it emerged that he wasn’t backing himself. The bookies are saying Andy Burnham, but his association with the ogre Len McCluskey may cost him. Yvette Cooper is second favourite but her association with her husband, rejected by the electorate two weeks ago, will surely taint her. The coming man is said to be Tristram Hunt, but a quick glance at his CV reveals him as ‘Tony Light’ or even ‘Tory Light’, take your pick. Then there are the outsiders Liz Kendall, and Mary Creagh, of whom the less known the better.

I won’t be taking up Harriet Harman’s invitation to register to vote in the election, but I have taken a look at the background of the five potential candidates. At once an interesting common fact grabbed my attention: each one of them is a Oxbridge graduate. Only Chuka does not have a degree from either Oxford or Cambridge, but his name won’t be on the ballot.

If I was a Labour supporter, that’s a mould I’d be trying to break. The People’s Party seems to be no more; it has become as elitist as the crowd across the floor of the Commons, and there is nobody on offer who is going to reverse that trend, especially not Mr Hunt, the man I suspect may win out in the end and whose personal manifesto seems to be ‘Let’s pick the best bits of Conservative policy and copy it.’

If there was a second election next month, and the SNP fielded candidates in every UK constituency, running on an out and out left wing manifesto, how would it do? Very well, I suspect.

Labour in Scotland is in a mess of unimaginable proportions. It is lost, leaderless and possibly irrelevant having been replaced as Scotland’s leading left of centre party by the SNP. The front runner for the national leadership gave a very clear hint on TV yesterday that he wouldn’t mind if it was cut adrift.

If it is to survive as anything meaningful, it needs a new, strong helmsman and needs him fast. His tenure needn’t last long. The job is to renew the failed party’s faith in itself, to point the way forward and rebuild it as a campaigning unit. He’ll shout me down for suggesting this but my candidate for that task would be my friend George Foulkes. He has integrity, experience, ability, and he takes no prisoners.

He may be 70+,  but if I had any wish to save the Labour Party in Scotland, which I don’t, he’d be the guy I’d choose.

Until a couple of weeks ago, there was a comment of which Labour supporters were very fond: ‘There are more pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs.’

Now that Labour are in the same boat, any chance they’ll try to mate them?

It’s been six days since the election and the smoke has cleared.

On May 1 I made a prediction, on this blog. Scroll down and check it out. I was wrong in only one respect, in that I underestimated the scale of Labour’s Scottish disaster. However events are in the process of proving that I was on the ball in suggesting that a minority Tory government would’ve been a better result for Scotland. For all its 56 seats, Scotland has no leverage to apply to force a constitutional settlement that is better than the ‘not quite halfway’ house that the Smith Commission proposed.

We voted powerfully for an SNP Manifesto calling for full fiscal autonomy. Will Cameron acknowledge that and cut a deal? Not a prayer? Will Trident will be removed from Scotland?

A cat in hell would have a much better chance.

I’ve just been asked three questions by ITV, through YouGov.

1) Have you made up your mind on how you will vote tomorrow?

2) Have you changed your voter intention during the course of the campaign?

3) If no party can form a stable coalition or get an overall majority would you want a second election later in the year?

The results, from 2,162 respondents:

1) 88% Yes, 7% No, 4% Won’t vote.

2) 24% Yes, 72% No, 3% Won’t vote. (I guess that 1% of respondents changed their minds between Q1 and Q2!)

3) 61% Yes, 26% No, 12% Don’t know.

Five days ago, I made an election prediction, that we would see a small Tory majority.

Given what the polls are saying, that might seem more than a little rash, given also that the polls usually get more or less right.

But as Sky News keep saying, this is an election unlike any other. In 2010, the two-party system became three, and today it appears to have become five, maybe even five and a quarter if you add the Green element. This has come about because of the absence of a credible leader in any party other than the SNP, which contests less than one tenth of the 650 seats.

Five years ago, David Cameron became Prime Minister because the voters disliked him less than they disliked Gordon Brown, old Captain Barbossa, as I will never tire of calling him. The electorate couldn’t bring itself to give him outright power, so it hung a millstone round its neck in the form of the Lib Dems, the greatest argument against televised leadership debates that any country has yet put forward.

Today nothing much has changed. Cameron has made no friends, but fewer enemies than might have been expected. Miliband is the least likeable Labour leader that I can recall, and his personal approval ratings prove it. Clegg is a hollow man who will only keep his seat, if he does, because of Tory tactical voting. Of the newcomers Farage is a bumbling caricature of an English nationalist geezer, not that far apart in philosophy from the BNP, and Natalie Bennett of the Greens is so unimpressive that her party is thinking of changing its name to the Greys.

Then there’s Nicola Sturgeon, of the SNP, whose moment this most certainly is. She has been far and away the most impressive leader of this campaign, and yet even she is on a hiding to nothing. The media and the pollsters are predicting over fifty SNP members of the new Westminster parliament. George Kerevan has my postal vote already in East Lothian, where I expect him to be elected. If he has more than twenty-nine parliamentary colleagues on Friday, I will be pleased and surprised, but anything less than those fifty seats will be portrayed as a failure by Sturgeon by the same media who have been building her up.

But let’s forget Scotland for a while and look south. There the polls show Labour with less than one third of popular support, where one would expect them to be after five years of ineffectual opposition under an unloved leader. The Tories are not doing much better, with a lead of around three per cent at best. The unknown quantity in England is UKIP, which scores around 15%, way ahead of Clegg’s Lib Dems, who could be heading back to the Grimond days of half dozen MPs.

There is no groundswell that will sweep Miliband into Downing Street. The electorate doesn’t want him. But does it want another coalition, or a completely unpredictable nature?

The outcome will depend on how many of those people who have declared for UKIP to the pollsters, can actually bring themselves to cast their vote for Farage and his Band of Idiots, whose raison d’être is undercut by Cameron’s pledge of an In-Out EU referendum. Will one in six out of every English voters do that? I don’t believe they will.

Roll on May 8. Let it all be over.

I voted last week, by post, hoping to play my part in the eradication of Labour from the ranks of Scottish Westminster MPs. It’s a fate I believe that party has earned, by its performance during the 2014 referendum, and by its shameful treatment of its honest Scottish leader, Johan Lamont, during and after the campaign.

Three posts ago I made a prediction and expressed a hope; I’m about to do the same again.

The prediction: that there will be a small overall Conservative majority, and that the SNP will win a majority of the Scottish seats, but not as many as the wilder polls predict.

The hope: that the Tories win 320 seats, making them the largest single party but short of outright power, with their preferred option being to form a minority Government.

My Prime Minister of choice would be Nicola Sturgeon, but she won’t be an MP. (Not Alex Salmond? No, too divisive.) In her absence, my preference must be for Cameron to carry on (without the Lib Dem millstone) for I don’t believe that Miliband deserves to be Prime Minister. He carries the mark of Cain (if your brother can’t trust you, who else can?) and he’s surrounded by too many of the people who screwed it up last time, including the awful Balls couple, who’ve been kept as far out of the electorate’s sight as possible. (Could that be a tactic on their part, to preserve Yvette as a leadership candidate, post-Ed?)

My hope might cut across Nicola’s expressed determination to keep the Tories out of power, but that statement was made in the context of a powerful campaign against Labour in Scotland. Her first responsibility is to the people of Scotland, and to deliver the best possible post-referendum settlement, and for me that means full fiscal autonomy vested in the Scottish Government. By denouncing the SNP, Miliband has ruled that out should he lead the largest minority party on May 8. Only Cameron can give us what we want, deserve and need.