‘Coalition of chaos’ draws its battle lines

THERESA MAY has called it ‘a coalition of chaos’, an unholy alliance of the SNP, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens hellbent on preventing her from strengthening her hand in Westminster in June’s General Election.

This so-called ‘progressive alliance’ got off to a shambolic start. First, Nicola Sturgeon hinted she would join forces with Labour in a bid to install Marxist bumbler Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street.

He then ruled out any formal link-up with a party that is intent on breaking up the United Kingdom.

Miss Sturgeon took umbrage at that. During a febrile First Minister’s Questions, she ran rings around underwhelming Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and turned the whole affair into a party political broadcast.

‘We only have to take one look at the polls to see that Jeremy Corbyn ain’t going anywhere near Number 10 Downing Street – on his own or with the help of anybody else,’ she said.

So that was that... until an insider on the Labour team let slip the true strategy.

Labour are increasingly in thrall to the hard Left. Mr Corbyn is now being advised by James Schneider, the former national organiser of the militant Momentum group.

The plan is to informally band together with a cosy ‘you scratch my back...’ stitch-up.

‘Our number one goal is to deny the Tories a majority,’ said the insider.

The thinking seems to be that enough damage can be done to the Tories to allow Labour to cut a deal with all the rest to take effective control at Westminster.

It certainly seems to square with the SNP’s message in Scotland.

After ten lacklustre years in power in Holyrood, the Nationalists have little to boast about.

Education is a shambles, justice is in chaos, the NHS is in crisis, transport is a disgrace, councils are howling, colleges withering – and all while Scots are the UK’s highest-taxed workers.

At Westminster, the SNP’s cohort of MPs have been noisy but ineffectual. As Graham Grant charts on pages 14, 15 and 16, scandal dogs an embarrassing number of them.

So they have fallen back on an old trope. Their message is ‘vote for us to bash the Tories’.

It’s a pitch to voters as sterile as it is hackneyed, harking back to the days of Mrs Thatcher.

Where is the glorious vision, the innovative thinking, the bold determination to better the lot of hard-working Scots?

It’s missing, of course, because the SNP lacks an intellectual hinterland on which to draw. They have one notion: independence, their supposed panacea for everything. But they have a two-fold problem. The first is that the public saw their false prospectus for going it alone torn to shreds in 2014. Its heady mix of economic guesswork and fiscal wishful thinking was exposed and derided.

So now the Nationalists are forced to say: ‘We pulled the wool then but we’ll be honest with you now.’ How very unconvincing.

The other problem is that the Tories have moved on. Mrs May has shown an adroit grasp of Scotland that was outwith her predecessor’s grasp. She talks a huge amount of sense about Brexit and her firm refusal to even discuss Indyref 2 before matters European are settled is flawless.

Meanwhile, under Ruth Davidson the Tories are making steady and positive progress in Scotland, ready to take the fight to the Nationalists in June. The battle lines here are plain to see. As Mrs May herself has said, there is ‘a very clear choice between strong and stable leadership under the Conservatives or a coalition of chaos led by Jeremy Corbyn’.