Manifesto’s nothing but an SNP con trick
IT all sounded so soothing, so reasonable, delivered by an SNP leader whose style is as unctuous as her predecessor’s was combative.
Instead of the belligerent f i st of Scottish Nationalism, Nicola Sturgeon said she was instead extending the ‘hand of friendship’ over the Border.
But the stark truth is that the entire SNP manifesto delivered yesterday is a con trick.
Set aside for a moment that much of it is utterly ludicrous.
A section where the party takes credit for creating jobs and cutting unemployment by dint of free prescriptions and a council-tax freeze ought to send shivers down the spines of every hard-working family in this country.
This is the Nationalists shamelessly claiming credit for the benefits of the strong austerity medicine we have all been forced to swallow in the years since the global crash – the very austerity measures the Nationalists want to end in a blizzard of tax, borrow and spend. Talk about financial illiteracy.
No, the manifesto i s duplicitous because it disguises one fundamental fact. The SNP exists for a single reason: To break up Britain.
All its talk is of progressive policies, thick with the moral superiority the Left love to parade.
But having been roundly defeated in September’s independence referendum, the agenda now is to get as many SNP MPs as possible in to the very heart of a Union which the Nationalists so despise. The ultimate aim i s nothing l ess than achieving independence via the back door. Nothing the mercenary cohort of Nationalists do there will be for the good governance of Britain.
Instead, all their actions will be weighed against their narrow separatist agenda.
Mr Miliband will quickly find the SNP hand of friendship has a vice-like grip.
Hence their manifesto’s pledge to press for wildly reckless spending, pushing Mr Miliband even further to the Left and adding up to £140billion to debts that would hang like a millstone around the necks of today’s taxpayers, their children and grandchildren. As former prime minister Sir John Major will warn today, a Miliband-led government after May 7 would be subjected to a ‘ daily dose of political blackmail’, with the SNP able to bring it down at any moment. Voters south of the Border would quickly bridle at a party they could not vote for making the political weather.
Meanwhile, the separatists here will seize on any resistance from Labour as proof that the Scots and the English are irreconcilably different.
Nicola Sturgeon said yesterday that this General Election was not about independence. There were gales of laughter from her party faithful. They know that it is emphatically about independence because everything the SNP do is, in the final reckoning, designed to advance that cause.