Snp

I don't think this is a very good idea: Senior staffers in Ed Miliband’s office started briefing Scottish hacks last night that Miliband is now going to take a much more "hands on" approach to the campaign. Miliband has only made one, brief appearance in the campaign so far. But he and Ed Balls are due to be in Scotland this week to push a more strident "anti-independence" message. I suppose it's possible that this might resurrect Labour's fortunes but it seems unlikely. And that's partly because Labour have run such a drab, dreary, depressing campaign. Their principle approach to policy has been to thieve stuff from the SNP and rewrap it in Labour cloth, trusting that voters will think it belonged to Labour all along.

Severin Carrell reports that tomorrow's edition of the Sun will endorse Alex Salmond and the SNP. This should not surprise anyone. I suspect most of the Scottish press will support, albeit with significant qualifications, the Nationalists. The most significant of those qualifications is that this is a Holyrood election, not a Westminster one. Endorsing the SNP does not require anyone to support independence it's merely making the best of a poor job and recognising that the Nats are a more attractive choice than Labour. The press is prepared to back Salmond but only because independence is not on the immediate or even medium-term agenda. If it were the Nats would find themselves defriended by many of their erstwhile backers in the press.

Scotland on Sunday publishes a thumper of a poll today that suggests the SNP is on course to defeat Labour and remain the largest party at Holyrood. In fact, John Curtice's calculations have the Nats taking 55 seats to Labour's 49. The Tories, meanwhile, slip to 14 while the Lib Dems suffer a catastrophe and would be left with just six MSPs, just ahead of the Greens with five seats. Should this poll be accurate and should the election - which is still 18 fun-stuffed days away - produce a result of this sort then happy days indeed. By which I mean, of course, not-as-desperate-as-they-might-have-been-days. Kenny Farquharson lays it on a little thickly this morning when he contrasts the SNP's campaign of "hope" with Labour's fear-based approach but he is, in essence, correct.

Crivvens, the idea of an SNP-Labour coalition refuses to die. Here's Iain Macwhirter in the Herald: The rule seems to be that, in Scottish politics it’s easier to work constructively with parties you don’t agree with than with parties you do. Labour and the SNP now agree – independence aside – on most of the big issues, such as NHS privatisation, comprehensive education, free university tuition, more powers for Holyrood. But unfortunately they hate the sight of each other. Could they ever bury their differences? Most polls suggest that this is the coalition partnership Scots would most like to see. A grand coalition, perhaps, against the Tory cuts. Scotland’s two national parties working together for the common good. It’s not going to happen.

Meanwhile, STV have a poll asking punters who they think would make the best First Minister. The results are almost entertaining: Don't Know - 37% Alex Salmond - 30% None of Them - 16% Annabel Goldie - 9% Iain Gray - 7% Tavish Scott - 2% Remember that the same poll has Labour and the SNP neck and neck (38% to 37% on the constituency vote and 35% each on the list vote) and so, by my calculations, fewer than one in five Labour voters will tell pollsters their so-called leader is the best man to head the government after this election. Mr Gray complains that the SNP are a "one-man band" which is reasonable enough even if one suspects he'd have been out-polled by Nicola Sturgeon too. But even if he is correct he merely invites the observation that his own party is a no-man band.

Though this blog has tried to ignore the fact, there are elections to the Scottish Parliament this year. In just over ten weeks time in fact. I've ignored the subject because, frankly, the idea of Iain Gray - he's the leader of the Labour party in Scotland - becoming First Minister is too depressing to contemplate before the idea is thrust upon us by cruel reality and dastardly necessity. Mr Gray is the fifth person to lead Labour's Holyrood group since devolution and by some hefty distance the least impressive. This is a low bar to fail to clear but there you have it. For months now it has looked as though Labour would "win" the right to govern with no new ideas at all.

You know, when you see that Neil Clark has written a piece for the Guardian arguing that, from his perspective, this government is even worse than Margaret Thatcher's you might expect to be entertained but you don't anticipate him making sense. But, lo, here he is: [...] Clegg, and his fellow Orange Book Liberals, are actually more keen on market forces and globalised capitalism than the so-called Tory wets were. In last year's election, the free market fundamentalism of the Liberal Democrats was ignored by many commentators and voters who saw their opposition to Labour's security measures, and their advocacy of electoral reform, as evidence that the party was progressive.

There are precious few heroes in Ireland today and no gods either. But not all the losers are Irish either. Some are Scottish. Chief among them, Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party. Not because an independent Scotland would necessarily have been destroyed by the financial tsunami that swept the globe (though, to put it mildly, it would have been "difficult" to cope and might well have required a humiliating begging-trip to London) but because an independent Scotland would have made some of the same mistakes and unfortunate assumptions that have helped cripple poor Hibernia. Europe, you see, was an important part of the SNP's slow rise to power. At the time, it seemed a masterstroke: "Independence in Europe" offered the best of all worlds - sovereignty and safety.

The main sufferers of this admittedly rare condition are London-based Scots. Fraser, I'm afraid, seems to have come down with a case of SDS if this post is anything to go by. The murder of Linda Norgrove is a ghastly, horrid business that might, one would think, be considered sufficiently awful to be above or beyond politics. Apparently not. I see nothing wrong far less anything political in the First Minister issuing a statement about the murder of one of his compatriots in Afghanistan. Criticising Salmond for making cheap political capital out of such an awful business is itself a cheap journalistic shot.