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Thursday

Alex Massie

The disunited kingdom

Never before — at least, not in living memory — has there been such a disconnect between north and south Britain. We vote together, but cast our ballots in very different contests. Scotland and England, semi-detached in the past, are more estranged than ever. The mildewed contest between David Cameron and Ed Miliband touches few hearts north of the Tweed; the battle between Labour and the SNP still mystifies many of those sent north to observe the strange happenings in Scotland. Edmund Burke wrote of another revolution: ‘Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Scotland’s nasty party

You get bad losers in politics and bad winners, too, but it’s surely a rare business to get a bad winner who didn’t actually win. Yet this, since they lost last September’s referendum, has been the role of the SNP. Dismay, reassessment, introspection, contrition, resignation; all of these have been wholly absent. Instead, they have been triumphalist. Lording it, with cruel and haughty disdain, over their vanquished foes. Who, we must remember, they didn’t even vanquish. Well, maybe they’ve vanquished them now. I write this pre-election, with the polls all saying that the Nats will win something between almost every Scottish seat and actually every Scottish seat. Only, of course,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Miliband’s tablet of stone may cost him my vote

You have the advantage over me. You know the result of the general election, whereas I do not — a consequence of the moronically linear progression of time. Indeed, you may already have fled to one of those countries with a much lower tax rate and less fantastically irritating politicians — Algeria, for example, or Benin. Or Chad. And you are reading this digitally on some patched-in fibre-optic service, the electricity generated by goats trotting forlornly around a gigantic hamster wheel outside — but you are nonetheless delighted with your new life, despite the flies and the occasional gang of marauding, maniacal jihadis. At least you’re not here to experience Britain

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Nick Clegg got coalition wrong. Tomorrow, he’ll pay the price

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would emerge with a list of achievements voters would applaud – as they did in the 2003 Holyrood elections when, after four years of coalition, the Lib Dems overtook the Scottish Conservatives to become the third-largest party. On the radio the other day Clegg vainly paraded his boast list, his own version of Kelly Clarkson’s Because

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

If the SNP doesn’t hate the English, why do so many of its supporters behave as if they do?

You get bad losers in politics and bad winners, too, but it’s surely a rare business to get a bad winner who didn’t actually win. Yet this, since they lost last September’s referendum, has been the role of the SNP. Dismay, reassessment, introspection, contrition, resignation; all of these have been wholly absent. Instead, they have been triumphalist. Lording it, with cruel and haughty disdain, over their vanquished foes. Who, we must remember, they didn’t even vanquish. Well, maybe they’ve vanquished them now. I write this pre-election, with the polls all saying that the Nats will win something between almost every Scottish seat and actually every Scottish seat. Only, of course,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

I have worked out the only possible way to build a viable government (but it’s not pretty)

For the past few days the BBC website has had an interactive game where you have to build your own coalition, using a series of possible results from tomorrow’s election. It ought to be marketed as an educational test, far more challenging even than Michael Gove’s rigorous school tests. But finally, I think I have done it. I have worked out the only possible way to build a viable government using the composition of the House of Commons which the polls appear to be predicting. Take Nate Silver’s analysis of the polls this morning, which predicts the following: Tories 281 seats, Labour 266, SNP 52, LibDem 26, DUP 8, Sinn

Douglas Murray

This election campaign has shown a democracy in a horrible state of disrepair

It is often said that we get the politicians we deserve. But throughout this election I have kept wondering, ‘Are we really as bad as all this?’ The answer must be ‘yes’. This bland and empty ‘campaign’ has not only been the fault of the main parties competing to govern the UK – it has also been a reflection of what they believe we, the general public, now expect from our politics. Of course the result is aggravating, in part because we keep trying to enjoy contradictory things. For instance at some point in recent years it was decided that any statement outside a vague centre-left orthodoxy constituted a ‘gaffe’.

Hope Whitmore

Why elections are bad for your health

The excitement and anxiety was tangible during the election of 1997. Even as a child I was able to pick up on it. I saw the signs of stress in the adults around me: jiggling knees, bitten lips, my mother twirling hair around an index finger. Elections are stressful and this can cause serious health problems – anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies and even depression. A senior editor of a British publication spoke to me about his ‘irrational’ and ‘obsessive’ behaviour around the American election in 2000, in which he was rooting for Dubya: The internet just was just up and running and I found myself compulsively visiting websites to see if there had been

Tuesday

Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset. The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a

Monday

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: SNP voter trolls the Secretary of State for Scotland

Although one recent poll suggested that the SNP will win every seat in Scotland, there are still a few Liberal Democrat MPs who hope to retain their seats come Thursday. However, although Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Scotland and Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland, winning his seat in 2010 by a majority of nearly 10,000 votes, he ought to be more alert to the dangers of the SNP. On a recent train journey, one SNP voter took a photo of herself posing with her ballot paper while Carmichael dozed off in the background: Mr S suspects that Carmichael won’t be getting much sleep now until polling day.

Ed West Ed West

Three reasons why Labour might not actually want to govern

There’s an episode of The New Statesman in which geologists discover that there’s no more oil in the North Sea and the British economy is about to crash; as a result all the parties try their best to lose the election so as not to carry the can for the next five years. Alan B’Stard, put in charge of the Tory campaign because they think him a liability, appears in the election video with Page 3 girls offering free bingo to the voters. Unfortunately, this proves a huge hit with the electorate. A conspiracy theorist might think this is actually happening today, judging by the inertia of the major parties.

Friday

Steerpike

Michael Gove claims Tories will win more seats in Scotland than Labour

Michael Gove was out and about with fifty odd Tory activists dressed as Nicola Sturgeon in Westminster today, when he made an extraordinarily bold prediction about next week’s election results. The top Tory claimed that his party would end up with more seats in Scotland than the Labour Party. He also suggested that Sturgeon was more dangerous than Russell Brand, ‘because she votes’. While Miliband’s party might well be set for an absolute hammering north of the border next Thursday, they do currently have 41 Scottish seats whereas the Tories have a single constituency. Mr S later asked the Chief Whip to back up his claim. ‘It is a reality based prediction, yes,’ Gove

Thursday

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband’s refusal to admit that Labour overspent could cost him dear

Tonight’s Question Time special with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg provided the best television of this campaign so far. A well-informed audience relentlessly pressed the three leaders on their weakest points. At the end of the evening, an ICM poll for the Guardian gave the evening to Cameron by 44 per cent to Miliband’s 38 per cent with Clegg garnering 19 per cent support. Miliband’s didn’t have a great night and his most awkward moment came on the record of the last Labour government. The audience were audibly irritated by his repeated refusal to concede that the last Labour government had spent too much money. Under questioning from the audience, Miliband

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

A (partial) defence of the spin room

Tonight’s ‘Question Time’-style TV debates will be followed by what has become probably the most hated aspect of this rather uninspiring general election campaign: the spin room. This spectacle of journalists interviewing journalists as they listen to frontbenchers from all the parties parroting lines about how their leader was the best (or, in the Tory case, how well Nicola Sturgeon has been doing) is odd enough inside the room, let alone for those watching at home. The way the politicians spinning talk is even less natural than usual: it’s like a Westminster version of Made In Chelsea, stuffed with people acting at being actors. And yet there is a reason

Melissa Kite

Miliband country

Imagine rural England five years into a Labour government led by Ed Miliband, and propped up by the SNP and perhaps also the Greens. If you can’t imagine, let me paint the picture for you using policies from their election manifestos and only a small amount of artistic licence. The biggest house-building programme in history is well under way, with a million new houses mainly being built in rural areas. Several ‘garden cities’ have sprung up in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, though in truth the gardens are the size of postage stamps. No matter, because having a big garden is a liability since right to roam was extended so that

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

New poll suggests SNP will win all 59 seats in Scotland

Just when Scottish Labour didn’t think it could get any worse, a new poll suggests they are now facing total wipe out next Thursday. According to Ipsos MORI/STV News, the SNP is now up to 54 per cent of the vote share — up two points since their last poll in January. Punching these numbers into Electoral Calculus suggests the Nats will win all 59 seats and wipe out the other parties. Another prediction website, ScotlandVotes, suggests that this vote share would leave one Liberal Democrat MP after polling day. Unlike Lord Ashcroft’s recent polls north of the border, this survey was conducted across the whole of Scotland — not just

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Trident has become a political weapon in certain constituencies

One constituency where the Tory attacks about a possible deal between Labour and the SNP work very well is Barrow and Furness, where Labour’s John Woodcock is standing for re-election. The seat includes shipyards where the new Trident submarines would be built, and so any suggestion that Labour might scale back its commitment to Trident is hugely potent for the local campaign. A couple of days after Michael Fallon launched his poorly-received attack on Ed Miliband, in which the Defence Secretary warned that the Labour leader had stabbed his brother in the back and could therefore quite easily stab the UK in the back by forging a deal with the

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: nine days to go

In today’s election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s ramped up rhetoric on the SNP threat to the Union, the Tories’ promise to create 50,000 new apprenticeships from Libor fines and Labour’s latest attempts to talk about controlling immigration. We also briefly look at the Liberal Democrats ‘red lines’ for future coalition negotiations and Ukip’s attempts to woo voters in the north. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Cameron’s ‘10 days to save the Union’ message work?

David Cameron continues his anti-SNP campaign today, launching what the Times calls his ‘strongest attack so far’ on a Labour-SNP government. The Prime Minister tells the paper that there are ‘ten days to save the United Kingdom’, which is an echo of Tony Blair’s ‘24 hours to save the NHS’ and William Hague’s less successful ‘last chance to save the pound’. The Conservatives are increasingly talking about the SNP and spending money on billboards featuring a thieving Alex Salmond because they say this message is cutting through in marginal constituencies. But the SNP’s retort is that even if people are bringing the SNP up on the doorstep, it may make

Sebastian Payne

Campaign kick-off: nine days to go

David Cameron is upping the ante on the SNP today, warning voters there’s just ‘ten days to save the United Kingdom’ — despite the fact the election is now nine days away. Or maybe he is counting until the coalition negotiations begin? Ed Miliband on the other hand will add some meat to his promise that Labour will put ‘controls on immigration’. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. The Battle for Britain, cont. David Cameron is staunchly defending the Union today, warning in an interview with the Times that the SNP is ‘not like another party that