Nailing the first Labour lie of the general election

Labour has kicked off its 2015 general election campaign with a lie that is so blatant that it has forced me out of my Christmas and New Year hiatus a month earlier than planned. The porkie basically states that a vote for the SNP in May's general election could leave the Tories in power. This is because, says a Labour spokesman: “It is a simple fact that the single biggest party gets to form the next government. The more seats the SNP get from Labour, the more likely it is the Tories will be the biggest party and David Cameron will get into government through the back door.”

In February 1974 the Tories won 297 seats to Labour's 301, but Ted Heath did not resign immediately, he tried to cobble together a coalition with the 14 member Liberal contingent. He was entitled to do that as sitting Prime Minister because it is not about which party is the largest, but about who can command a majority in the House of Commons.

That is why when Labour scored 258 seats to the Tory 306 in 2010, Gordon Brown still tried to hang on in the hope of a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats who had been returned with 57 seats. As with Heath a generation earlier, it was not possible, but nobody in 2010 claimed that Brown had to resign because he had fewer seats than Cameron. His resignation came about because he could not create a majority in the Commons which is not the same thing.

So why are Labour lying? The answer is obviously that they believe that we are so stupid north of the River Tweed that we will believe any old wank that they can come up with, such is the hatred of Toryism in Scotland. If Labour can take its Scottish fiefdoms for granted then it can pander for the votes of the South English middle class scrote element and then form a majority government.

In other words, the people who have suffered the most during that past thirty-odd years will get nothing other than a few table scraps, because Labour will have to keep pandering to the scrotes for fear that they will desert back to the Tories at the following election.

On the other hand, the SNP have already set out their stall for a deal with Labour and none of the items on offer are anything that a traditional Labour man can oppose. End the war on claimants, abolish some of the more loathsome Tory acts such as the bedroom tax, stop the near constant wars against the Islamic world, abolish Trident.

If Labour wants to get its collective snout into the public trough then we should at least ensure that we get something for ourselves out of the deal. A vote lent to the SNP might just ensure that an incoming Labour government has to remember that it isn't just Tristram and Samantha who can dump them: so can Billy and Mary.