Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The issue of Two Flags great dilemma – to go or not to go (whatever happened to conviction politics?) - is the subject of this weeks meeja feeding frenzy. He’s one of very few (bordering on none) who have picked up on the Scottish dimension to his conundrum. Most (again teetering on all) focus exclusively on the significance of the Brown versus Cameron polls. I love it when their insularity masks the constitutional elephant in the room.

Here’s Oborne’s insight:

“From a purely human point of view and for someone who has waited so long to achieve his dream, this nervousness is understandable. Gordon Brown has worked all his life to become prime minister, and has no desire to be remembered in history as the most short-lived occupant of high office since the Conservative leader Bonar Law in 1922. There are also strong arguments which mitigate against an autumn election, and badly need to be taken into account. The weightiest of these concerns Scotland, where Labour is paying the price for the assiduous work done in cultivating middle England.

To give one example, Worcester voters may have found Gordon Brown's opportunistic meeting with Margaret Thatcher extremely reassuring and a reason to vote Labour. However, north of the border, the Brown/Thatcher alliance has had the opposite effect. Scots still remember the poll-tax, the economic disasters of the 1980s and Gordon Brown's own virulent denunciations of Mrs Thatcher at the time.

Alex Salmond and his Scottish National Party are ready to exploit this and there are already plans to use photographs of Gordon Brown and Mrs Thatcher posing together outside Downing Street in its election literature.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Labour Party is in crisis. The useless Jack McConnell has been quietly disposed of as leader in a quiet coup of the type that used to be engineered by the Kremlin in client states in Eastern Europe. Nobody knows whether his replacement, Wendy Alexander (a high-ranking member of the Brownite nomenclatura) is any good.

The truth is that calling an election this autumn risks a bloodbath north of the border which would give a massive boost to the independence movement and make the break-up of the United Kingdom more likely than ever before.”

As Peter Oborne also points out: “The second problem is Europe. Most inconveniently for Gordon Brown, any election campaign would be interrupted by the European Summit in Lisbon on October 18 and 19. This is the meeting which is due to stitch up the final details of the controversial European Treaty.”

I should like to point out that you don’t have to actually buy the Daily (Hate) Mail to read this article.