Clear as a Bell

Why Salmond Laughed All The Way To The Budget (from The Herald )

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"Abstaining from the vote on the SNP's Budget was one thing. It was tactically odd and incomprehensible in strategic terms. Who secures an amendment, as Labour did, then chooses to abstain? Who decrees a Budget "flawed" financially and fails to oppose it in the name of the people it represents? Labour's retrospective excuse - that the Nationalists already had a deal with the Tories - was as weak as watered shandy. If you oppose, you oppose.

"Yet that fiasco was not, in fact, the heart of the matter. Labour had reached that dark place even before the vote. Mr Salmond had threatened to resign if his government's Budget was rejected. Cut through the technicalities - particularly the provision that allows parliament 28 days to cobble together an alternative administration - and the challenge to the opposition was clear. If you want your heart's desire, if you want me out, take it to the electorate.

How best to put this? Here's how: confronted with that choice, Labour ran away. It did not have the stomach, the confidence, the organisation or (a lovely irony) the cash to take on the Nationalists. In that, not in £950 cheques or strange abstentions, lies the lasting damage to Ms Alexander.

"How do you tell voters that Mr Salmond is doing untold damage to Scotland yet refuse the invitation to attempt to remove him? Even if Labour and the Liberals had failed to muster all the votes required to defeat the Budget, cause the First Minister to resign and force an election, it might, surely, have seized a half-chance. Not a bit of it. The last thing it wanted was another trip to the polls.

"What was being acknowledged, I think, is that the SNP has become stronger in government. Put bravado to one side: at no point did Mr Salmond anticipate losing seats in an election. But nor did Labour believe that it could win back constituencies. The effect has been to make a minority administration seem bigger, more powerful, than its actual numbers would suggest."

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