The week in Scottish politics: just how threatening is the SNP?
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Version 0 of 1. To start the week with a dangerously socialist bang, we had an exclusive interview with She Who Shall Only Be Known Now By Her First Name - or Nicola, as I know her. David Cameron celebrated the launch of the SNP manifesto by promising an annual Treasury review of Scottish government policy. But no one could hear him above the applause. Here are the key points of the manifesto, an overt offer to Labour to form “a constructive alliance”. Though Ed Miliband said it “ain’t gonna happen”, Our sketch writer John Crace was somewhat swept away... On Tuesday, John Major warned Labour of potential “political blackmail” by the SNP, probably not because he has Ed Miliband’s best interests at heart. Which set him at odds with his former cabinet colleague Michael Forsyth, who said in a Guardian interview that leading Conservatives were playing a “short term and dangerous” game that threatened the future of the UK by building up the SNP as a way of damaging the Labour party in Scotland. We took a forensic look at the insults piled on SWSOBKNBHFN. noting that Sturgeon has at least won the accolade of most featured woman in the election campaign so far, rather than Samantha Cameron. Whose husband dismissed his critics, saying that the ‘SNP threat’ was as plain as the nose on his face, which says more about his nose, and his face, than anything else, while Miliband accused him of demeaning his office, and Sturgeon dismissed Major’s comments as “an affront to democracy”. Norman Tebbit added his tuppence, advising Tories to vote tactically, and he’s not the only one... The IFS published its latest - pretty dire - projections for the SNP’s full fiscal autonomy policy, which Nicola Sturgeon later dismissed at Thursday’s FMQs, where she also crossed swords with Kezia Dugdale over her failure to call for the resignation of exposed troll and Edinburgh South candidate Neil Hay. A dog drove a tractor. I know. Yvette Cooper, Margaret Curran and Kezia Dugdale launched the Scottish Labour women’s manifesto (sadly without the pink bus, or multiple-occupancy transport of any kind). Like a pre-teen boy who hasn’t yet realised that shouting “You’re ugly!” across the playground isn’t the way to win the heart of the girl he loves, David Cameron tweeted a video of Alex Salmond making a joke, after making a much less convincing joke about Salmond himself. We carried a brilliant long read on the rise of - you guessed it - Nicola Sturgeon, exquisitely penned by Ian Jack - on Thursday. On our election live blog, Severin Carrell followed the numbers throughout the day: Institute for Fiscal Studies report says Scotland’s block grant would be lower under the SNP’s plans than under Labour; John Swinney telling Severin: “Crucially I would accept that it does take us longer to get the deficit down”; a new report from Fiscal Affairs Scotland challenging Nicola Sturgeon’s insistence that Scotland’s large fiscal gap can be closed by a rapidly accelerating Scottish economy; Sturgeon rejecting the IFS’s conclusion that SNP plans would lead by 2019 to deeper UK spending cuts than Labour; and finally the IFS rejecting her claim that they got their figures wrong. And on Thursday evening, Gordon Brown took to his favourite podium at Old Kirk, Kirkcaldy, to accuse Cameron of risking UK unity by “whipping up anti-Scottish feeling”. There was more great writing on Friday from Ewen MacAskill on the travails of Scottish Labour.Nicola Sturgeon spent Friday morning painiting a plate with a SNP logo so convincingly that one was left wondering whether she does all the badges herself too - there she responded to Cameron’s English manifesto plans. And finally, in case you missed it, and WHERE WERE YOU if you did, this happened... Add hits, misses, links and lolly preferences BTL as usual. |