Talking turkey

Much of the honest scheming is surely going on in smoke free back rooms, war-gaming possible scenarios, running the counterfactuals. Would any minority administration long survive? What if the Nationalists won enough seats to put Labour over the top, would England wear it, and would Miliband cut the deal? If the balance of power lay with Nigel Farage, would he go into coalition with Cameron's mob, and would the punters accept it?

Could the depleted rump of the Liberal Democrats be persuaded to prop up the Labour Party with a confidence and supply deal, a renewed Lib-Lab pact for the 21st century? These kinds of questions seem to be dominating the fizz of anticipation on the airwaves. But much of the public commentary about the Scottish dimension seems to me to miss the mark and to be neglecting obvious tensions and challenges thrown up by the 2015 general election.  

The Nationalist pitch in 2015 seems to fall into two or three key arguments. One. Dump the calculations and the tactics. Vote with your heart. Give Labour a kicking. Punish their hubris. You know it'll be fun. "Red Tories." "They're all the same." Better Together. Etcetera. 

This sits - somewhat uncomfortably - alongside proposition two: Labour can't be trusted to govern alone. With Ed sitting unsteady at the helm, they look like losers, despite the much more equivocal polling picture. Vote SNP to despatch a powerful phalanx of Nationalists to torment the Labour Party into virtue, on spending cuts, military hardware and enhanced devolution. It is equally important for the party to be coy about how precisely this might actually work. If the Nationalists ruled out a coalition, the case for including them in the fraught saga that is the leadership debates would be very materially weakened.  

This makes sense if we are anticipating a minority Labour "win", but in any other scenario, it is essentially a pitch for "our" feeble fifty to replace Labour's. A key plank of the argument for independence was that Scotland frequently doesn't get the government that the majority supported. We can despatch dozens of anti Tory parliamentarians to London: it makes no difference if the majority in the rest of the country votes true blue.  

If the stars do not align, and an agreeable minority does not materialise, however, our fifty risk being doomed to being feeble too.  "A strong voice for Scotland" in Westminster, but one at risk of crying in the wilderness. The opposition given the government by the Nationalists may be more gratifyingly robust than the current Labour regime offers -- but it remains opposition, with very limited powers of action. Ask Jim Murphy. All he can do is mew and call for this and that issue to be considered and prioritised. With a strike of her pen, Nicola can make things like this happen. 

It is cold, thankless, frequently fruitless work outside those government offices. Redundancy is one thing, one political cul de sac, but worse, what if it works? What if the Nationalists are somehow able to throw their weight around at Westminster, frustrating Whitehall plans, and elbowing the centre of British politics leftward, playing the table cannily. Where then for the argument that only independence can secure for Scotland the politics that the majority seems to desire? Oops.

But when you get into it, into the detail, how is any SNP deal going to work, and what does it risk? And to whom would it be acceptable? There's quite a bit of sloppy, flip thinking doing the rounds at the moment about the implications of this for the Nationalists. A coalition of any sort seems decidedly difficult to envision, given the party rhetoric, local enemies, traditions, and party support.

The SNP must have seen enough junior coalition parters being cannibalised to learn caution. They must also know that the discreet, deniable informal arrangement between 2007 and 2011 when the Tories helped pass the minority government's budget cannot extend to any Westminster deal they are involved it. It will all be done in the glare of publicity, and in the context of a Scottish political discourse shot through with hard antipathies. Nobody wants to be 2015's Nick Clegg.

But if a full coalition, and voting in support of English legislation is too rich for your blood, you may be inclined to say, "ach well, we'll go for confidence and supply instead" - as if that represented a wafer-thin undertaking for any party to give to a governing minority. Applying yourself for a minute or two to the implications of this should reveal, however, that any deal of this kind has the same capacity for toxicity as full coalition. Sure, you may not be contributing ministers to be monstered in the press, but it means voting for the Labour budget. 

Imagine you are a new-minted Nationalist MP, sent to Westminster with your blood roiling, determined to challenge the state-shrinking, welfare-cutting orthodoxy which dominates the present coalition and Labour party thinking. Would you - could you - vote for that? Cast your mind back to your constituency, and the heated rhetoric of the campaign. Do you think your confidence and supply vote would survive its rigour? Would you satisfy your own critique of Liberal - and Labour - sell outs, turncoats and right-wing bastardy? Good luck with that one.

Governments do plenty of controversial things, but supporting a budget is more than a technical matter signing off the national accounts: it is to be implicated in basic economic and social decision-making of the governing regime. Unless a minority Labour Party could be persuaded radically to depart from Ed Balls' current spending plans, any coalition or confidence and supply deal between Labour and the SNP is fraught with peril. 

Even if the Labour party hand us the scalpel, we're under no obligation to draw it across our throats. Ad hoc unpredictability, issue by issue, may offer a safer haven. But eventually, it comes down to this: would you vote to sustain or to evict a government from office? If you are the sitting Prime Minister whose fate is being decided, this is a hair-raising situation to find yourself in. But the predicament engulfs all of the opposition too, particularly in a tight parliament. 

There is an important lesson here. Although I remain skeptical about he likelihood of the SNP achieving anything like the kind of breakthrough in Westminster current polling suggests is possible, being sent in triumph to a hung parliament with unpredictable bottom line numbers represents a great opportunity - and a real threat - to the party, if events are not handled with cold-eyed self-awareness, and the right calculations made. A good, but more modest result - twelve seats say - may deliver us from peril. But history is frequently cruel. And even victors are by victories undone.