A crucial message

THE people currently revelling most in Labour’s disarray are, of course, the SNP.

MP Pete Wishart broke off long enough from his pitiful seat- stealing antics at Westminster to tweet: ‘What on earth are they there for now?’

Listening to jeering SNP triumphalism, it is hard to believe that a few short months ago the separatists were agog at the prospect of a power-sharing deal with Ed Miliband (who, you may recall, was simultaneously going to have his feet held to the fire by Alex Salmond while being made to dance to Nicola Sturgeon’s tune).

The truth is that Labour paid the electoral price of being a party that was not trusted on the economy, welfare, public spending and immigration.

The SNP will howl at Tony Blair’s blunt analysis that nationalism is the politics of the caveman and hurl brickbats about his illegal Iraq war. But what Tony Blair knows and they don’t is that all parties are, ultimately, judged on their ability to deliver good governance.

Labour’s grip on power slipped as unaffordable levels of debt were racked up to fund astronomical bills for welfare and public-sector pay.

The SNP can’t hear it over all its own shouting about how marvellous it is as the ‘new, true opposition’... It won’t hear it as it roars its latest demands for another independence referendum... It won’t hear it over its complaints that Westminster rises a fortnight after Scottish schools break up...

But contained within the very Labour discomfiture it laughs at so loudly is a quietly spoken but pivotal message for the SNP: spend like madmen and you may have a very long time in the political wilderness to repent your profligacy.