It’s tempting to throw everything onto the bonfire this weekend – elections, referendums, Brexit deals, ghastly effigies of our politicians – and then throw in some heavy duty media fireworks and see the whole clamjamfrie disappear in a hail of sparks. Guy Fawkes tried this in 1605 and failed.
But the Edenbridge Bonfire Society in Kent is trying again with a bonfire looking like the Houses of Parliament. On top is an 11metre high effigy of the Speaker John Bercow carrying the heads of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn in his hands.
It would all be great fun, if it wasn’t so serious. But ask yourself: would you rather be ruled by a dictator and his oligarchs, or a king and his aristocracy, or a pope or an ayatollah or a drug baron or a warlord or even a university professor or a high court judge ? As Churchill famously remarked: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
And so we enter the first winter general election since 1923 which led to the unlikely outcome of Ramsay MacDonald becoming the first Labour Prime Minister. Among the attractive characteristics of democracy is its unpredictability. Boris Johnson and the Conservatives might be 12 points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls but who knows where they will be on the morning of Friday 13 December.
The campaign got under way in Scotland with Nicola Sturgeon going straight to the SNP’s top target constituency, Stirling, on Wednesday. The Conservatives’ Stephen Kerr won the seat from the SNP last time with a majority of just 148 and now MEP Alyn Smith is standing for election here. The SNP are expected to do well across Scotland, with opinion polls showing them at around 40 per cent support, double what any other party is getting.
At an election-fuelled First Minister’s Questions Ms Sturgeon branded both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn “useless” and with no interest in Scotland. The interim Conservative leader Jackson Carlaw claimed the SNP had done a deal with Labour for a second Scottish referendum which would “lay a red carpet for Jeremy Corbyn to walk into No 10 Downing Street.”
The Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard tried to shift the debate onto the state of the NHS under both the Conservatives and the SNP. But he has been embarrassed by hints from the party leaders at Westminster that Labour “would not stand in the way” of a second Scottish referendum, if not next year, then the year after.
It’s not clear at this stage whether the two constitutional issues, Brexit and independence, will continue to dominate this campaign or whether the state of the economy and the public services will emerge instead. Both have been the given health warnings in the last few days.
The independent National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicts that the British economy will be 3.5 per cent worse off over the next ten years as a result of the government’s Brexit deal. A Scottish government report says Scotland will be 6.1 per cent poorer, or £1,600 per person.
Last week we were warned the NHS faces a £1.8bn shortfall over the next five years and this week MSPs were told by the Auditor General Caroline Gardner that Scotland’s prisons are “operating at well over capacity” and had endured a cut of 12.5 per cent in their budget over the last four years. As a dramatic illustration of the pressure they are under, four prisoners have died in jail in the last few days.
We finally got the report this week from the Fatal Accident Inquiry into the police helicopter crash in Glasgow in November 2013. It concluded that the pilot “took a chance” that the low-fuel warning system was faulty. The aircraft suddenly ran out of fuel and plunged to the ground, killing all three on board and seven customers in the Clutha Bar beneath. The fuel warning system has since been improved and the Crown Office has apologised for the length of time it’s taken to hold a full FAI. So, hopefully, lessons have been learned.
Last week I reported that the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the SNP’s Eva Bolander was in trouble for claiming £8,000 in clothing expenses. Although she has done nothing technically wrong, she has now resigned, following a two hour meeting with the rest of her SNP colleagues. Another lady who has thought better of her actions is Ruth Davidson, the former Conservative leader. She’s decided to forgo the £50,000 a year she was reputed to be offered to work part-time for a corporate communications firm, while remaining an MSP. I wonder if either decision has anything to do with the general election.
Sport, like politics, is an unforgiving and unpredictable business, depending on the bounce of the ball and the mystery of chance. This weekend sees a battle for a place in the League Cup final between the two Glasgow and Edinburgh premiership football clubs. Celtic play Hibs and Rangers play Hearts. Both Edinburgh teams are struggling – they’ve only won one match each this season. And we learnt on Thursday that the Hearts manager Craig Levein has been sacked but will remain in a back-room role at the club till the summer. The pundits are trying to work out what’s going wrong in Edinburgh. On the international front, Scotland may be out of the Rugby World Cup but our cricket team has made it through to next year’s T20 World Cup.
Finally, I see that a survey for the toy company Legoland has found that more than half of parents admit changing traditional Fairy Tales and Halloween ghost stories to give them happy endings. Although the majority said it was right to expose children to frightening stories, it was important that they weren’t too frightening, and all was well in the end. May the same be true of the Halloween story that ends on Friday 13 December.
