Labour’s Scottish problem isn’t going away

Certain questions are eternal and many of them are correspondingly dreary too. ‘How should Labour deal with the SNP?’ and ‘What can Labour offer the nationalists?’ are two of them. Since Labour requires a swing of heroic – or 1997 – proportions to win even a bare majority at the next election, you can understand why these questions will not disappear. Equally, if Labour cannot win a majority, it must dance with the parliament likely to be returned, not the parliament of its dreams.

There is a problem here. What appears to make abundant sense viewed from London makes little sense viewed from Scotland. And vice versa. Any arrangement with the nationalists must surely come at the cost of conceding the SNP’s demand for a second independence referendum. People in London, many of them wise and knowledgeable, appear to think this a minor detail or, rather, one which accommodates itself to the most probable parliamentary arithmetic.