Yesterday morning, 14th April,, Nicky Campbell had five candidates for the Argyll and Bute constituency in a Helensburgh studio, with the interest being that this constituency is seen as one of the few ‘four-way marginals’ in the coming UK General Election.
The UKIP candidate, Caroline Santos, was added to the representatives of the four major contesting parties – Liberal Democrat, Alan Reid, the sitting MP; Conservative Alastair Redman; Labour’s Mary Galbraith; and the SNPs Brendan O’Hara. [in order of party performance in 2010].
Predictably, after a cool warm up, it became a bear pit in which an unintelligible cacophany made switching off a very attractive option. Listen here – it starts some time after the 2h 15m point and is in train by 2h 20m.
The SNP candidate had no clear idea whatsoever on what to do about creating jobs in Argyll, alongside his party;s anti-Trident stance and – forgetting which election he was contesting, a proposition that included siting the joint military base for an independent Scotland – including a Scottish Air Force, at Faslane outside Helensburgh. This unfortunate defence brought him a swift knock-out from Mary Galbraith who laconically pointed out that Helensburgh has no airport.
Mary Galbraith also reminded Mr O’Hara and listeners that because of different constituency boundaries between Scottish and UK elections, Argyll and Bute has two MSPs – not just an SNP one, and including Labour’s unquestionably most formidable player in Scotland, Jackie Baillie, Shadow Finance Secretary in Scotland.
The young Conservative candidate, Alastair Redman, sounded confident and assured – but came badly unstuck on two issues, one avoidable, the second deeply embarrassing.
The first was his attempt to represent the Labour Candidate, Mary Galbraith, as a parachuted-in party apparatchik, describing her as having worked at the EU parliament in Brussels. Ms Galbraith [Kintyre born and raised and now a change management consultant living in Glasgow] fiercely shot that down, voice rising by the octave, saying that she had never even set foot in the Brussels parliament. Mr Redman agreed with Nicky Campbell that his allegation was ‘a factual error.’
Caroline Santos, EKIP candidate, later felled Mr Redman in saying that earlier in the campaign he had phoned the UKIP office ‘begging us not to stand a candidate in Argyll and Bute’. He accused her of lying, at which point, with a laugh in her voice, she said: ‘It was me who answered the phone, Alastair’. He still accused her of lying – which was shrill and silly – and the audience got the picture.
Of the four, the only one who told the truth about the nature of this election in Scotland was Alan Reid. He made it clear that, in Scotland, this is, in effect, all about the continuing campaign for Scottish Independence. The other three, each for their own reasons, flatly denied this.
This denial is forgivable in the case of the SNP who have a strategy to protect and an overt cause to win. It is utterly unforgivable in the case of the other two unionist parties – Labour and Conservatives – because in denying this reality, they are putting party interests before those of the United Kingdom – whose election this is.
These three focused on issues a hundred miles from the one issue that is galvanising not only Scotland but the UK as a whole: whether the SNP will get the stand out sweep of seats in Scotland that the polls predict – and which will produce in 2016 a campaign for a second referendum.
This election is Scotland is ONLY about a second indyref
Yesterday’s poll put the SNP at 52% in Scotland – the first tine they have crossed the half way mark of a victory which is unstoppable, unless it is actively arrested at this election.
SNP Leader and First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon said in the first and repeated, in the second televised leaders’ debate, that this election is not about another referendum – but that the 2016 Scottish election ‘is a different matter’. She said that there would be no second referendum ‘unless there is a material change like in public opinion’.
This was an unequivocal signal that the game is on. If the SNP sweep the Scottish seats in this UK General Election, this will be an undeniable claim of the material change to public opinion that will validate the inclusion of a second referendum in the SNP’s 2016 manifesto.
Ms Sturgeon said, on entering office as First Minister, that she was ‘not one for short cuts to independence – but that if there was a second referendum in any SNP election manifesto and if the party won on that manifesto, this ‘would be the mandate’.
This sequence of validation, manifesto, win, mandate, second referendum is certain and unstoppable – if this General Election returns a forest of SNP victories.
Why on earth would – should - the SNP not take the winning opportunity to achieve their founding aim, when it is palpably there and may never come again?
This election could not more utterly be about a second referendum – and that makes it a two-vote campaign – one vote for the SNP or ONE vote for the Union. Of course, no one of three alternative votes has any chance against a single SNP vote.
That ONE pro-union vote has to be a tactical decision for each constituency as to which basket is the best single receptacle for the union eggs.
Here in Argyll and Bute, in what they admit was one of the most difficult seats to call, Scotland’s BIG Voice has issued guidance to vote Conservative, with their intelligence showing the Liberal Democrat vote weak, the Conservative vote holding and Labour making headway – but not enough.
They do though, expect voters in each constituency, on local knowledge, to make an unselfish and wise decision to back a single pro-union party in what is now the only way to put a real pause for a generation on the evangelism for indy.
In our view, the strongest envelope for the union vote in Argyll is the Liberal Democrat’s. They have held this seat since 1987 when Ray Michie defeated the then Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the Conservatives John Mackay. Her direct successor, elected in 2001, is the current candidate and sitting MP, Alan Reid.
Alan Reid has been a hard working MP maintaining a continuing presence across this vast and complex island and mainland constituency. A workaday MP, Mr Reid has offended almost no one and has been open to almost everyone, making him the most likely candidate, in centrist party and in centrist person, around whom the pro-union vote can come together in Argyll and Bute.
In general the unionist parties are behaving like brain-rotted old soaks in the last chance saloon, still busy hacking limbs off each other in carrying on their usual inter-party warfare. They are choosing to see and hear nothing, unable to perceive the massive threat to the union and to their own continuity in Scotland which could not be more vividly in their faces.
The sheer survival of the very notion of unity is a call for unconventional voting behaviour; but the parties continue to unpack their travel clothes in the staterooms while the lifeboats are being lowered.
People are beginning seriously to understand the perils of living in the one-party state which, in the union or outwith it, Scotland is well down the road to becoming in 2016. Only the people can make the difference now.
This is arguably the greatest threat of all to an effective democracy in Scotland; greater indeed than the loss of membership of the United Kingdom itself.
In this election, tactical voting – ONE vote for the union in each constituency – has the only chance of protecting democracy in Scotland and the life of the Union.