Don’t Panic!

It’s Monday. It was only on Thursday (26 March) that, launching in Glasgow, Labour’s leader Anas Sarwar was at pains to make clear that he would make no deals with the beleaguered Lord Offord and his depleted candidates. “No coalitions, no deals, no stitch-ups – we are not going to touch Reform,” he said.

Now, today we have the news, via The Scotsman, that Sarwar has found a ‘tactical route’ and something called a ‘moral mandate’ to get himself inside Bute House. David Bol reports: “Labour’s potential route to Bute House would rely on unionist parties, including Reform, to vote in Mr Sarwar as first minister following May’s election, with Labour attempting to govern as a small minority administration.”

Labour would have, apparently, a ‘moral mandate’ to form a government.

This is magical thinking, sustained only by a press that seems remarkably collaborative.

Now we have the Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay saying he would instruct his MSPs to vote for Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to form a government.

Dear reader, I have questions.

Where to begin?

With the media taking this seriously?

With people within the Labour Party considering doing an electoral pact with what is essentially a neo-fascist party?

With the slow learning curve from Better Together in 2014?

With the fact that the Tories are facing electoral annihilation and so it’s probably not a good idea to rely on them for the numbers?

That this looks like an act of absolute desperation?

No, let’s start with some arithmetic.

Current polling predicts a huge pro-independence majority which would make such a Unionist stitch-up a fever dream.

SNP: 66 (+2)

GRN: 19 (+11)

RFM: 15 (+15)

LAB: 12 (-10)

CON: 9 (-22)

LDM: 8 (+4)

Do the sums. It doesn’t add up.

David Bol writes, more than a little optimistically: “Mr Sarwar and key Labour campaigners are poised to visit all of Scotland’s eight electoral regions and around 40 constituencies in the coming days and weeks.”

But Labour have poured vast sums of money into Sarwar’s presidential campaign, all of the right people in all the right places have written all the right things about him, and yet in many polls they are coming fourth.

Not only is this, or some close variation of it, the overwhelming consensus of credible pollsters and pundits, there is something more at play.

While Sarwar and Findlay and Offord play games about how they can rig an election, a reality is dawning that looks very different. The idea that Reform UK is just another party like all the others to pally up to, or the idea that Britain is not changing dramatically with the collapse of two-party politics, or the idea that this all doesn;t have profound implications for Scotland and the Union is delusional.

As Adam Ramsay has written [The Holyrood Elections will Change the Constitutional Debate] :

“… what does seem almost inevitable is that Scotland is about to elect another pro-independence majority. People here will, once again, give our parliament a mandate for a referendum on leaving the UK.”

“And after the election, the polarisation will likely become clearer: the SNP and Greens, together, will have won the overwhelming backing of younger, urban and progressive voters. The leading representative of unionism will no longer be Labour, or even moderate Tories, but Reform: a party of landlords, millionaires and offshore industries, largely relying on the votes of the pensioners. The unionism of Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, Menzies Campbell and Jim Wallace, Rory Stewart and Ruth Davidson has already been forced into retirement. It’s not going to be replaced by a centrist like Anas Sarwar, attempting – however ineptly – to build consensus around a shared future. Instead, it will led by immigrant-bashing, anti-LGBT, culture warriors.

For years, the union has been held together by two staples: the solidarity of Labourism, and the loyalty to the British state of Toryism. Both of these are about to be ripped out.”

This kind of self-deception can be a useful psychological tool when facing a deeply uncertain future. But if it turns out this is a wake not a coronation, all of the people who have played along with this will seem very dim indeed. There is some honour in losing well, but little in trying to fix an election you have put everything into and come up short.