Scottish Labour have just helpfully destroyed one of their own favourite myths - thanks, Anas

You may recall that in the run-up to the 2015 Westminster general election, when there was opinion poll evidence of a swing from Labour to SNP of biblical proportions but nobody quite believed it would be fully replicated on polling day, one of the tactics Labour used to try to bring voters "back home" was to lie through their teeth and claim that it was a "fact" that in a hung parliament the largest single party gets to form a government.  When it was pointed out to them that there was no rule or constitutional convention that supported their claim, and indeed that the 1923 election led to the Labour party forming a government in spite of the Tories being the largest party in the House of Commons, they simply modified their line to "for the last 90 years, the largest party has formed the government", as if that was a distinction without a difference, as if something that hadn't happened for 90 years couldn't possibly happen ever again.  The point of the fib, of course, was to hoodwink people into thinking a vote for the SNP wasn't 'really' an anti-Tory vote - that if you were serious about dislodging a Tory government you had no choice but to vote Labour.

Voters weren't impressed, but that wasn't necessarily because they didn't believe Labour's claim - it was probably more because Yes voters were still caught up in an indyref mindset and weren't as preoccupied as usual with getting rid of the Tories.  In other circumstances, the Labour con might well have worked, because it has a 'truthy' feel to it.  Most people aren't going to bother to read up on the niceties of the constitutional convention that requires the monarch to appoint a Prime Minister who commands a majority in the Commons - which pretty much means that if Labour and the SNP have a majority between them, there cannot be a Tory government, regardless of whether or not the Tories are the largest single party.  (Unless of course Labour do a deal with the Tories themselves.)

So could a similar fib work for Labour in a closely-fought 2024 general election?  Of course not.  Thanks to the SNP-Green government's #2023ReferendumGuarantee, an independence referendum is certain to have taken place before the next Westminster election.  It is utterly inconceivable that Nicola Sturgeon will go back on her word, so the 2024 election will be pretty much an irrelevance in Scotland, and we can just totally relax about it.

Just as a bit of fun, though, let's pretend that a 2023 independence referendum isn't the nailed-on certainty that we all know it is.  What if, heaven forbid, the 2024 election turned out to actually be an active contest in Scotland?  Even then, Labour would have a credibility problem with the "largest party forms the government" wheeze that they didn't have back in 2015.  And they would have nobody to blame but themselves, because they've just given voters a high-profile precedent of a party taking power from second place that is much more recent than 1923.  

Here is the state of the parties on Edinburgh City Council after the local elections earlier this month...

SNP 19

Labour 13

Liberal Democrats 12

Greens 10

Conservatives 9

That result has - nominally at least - produced a "minority Labour administration" with Tory and Lib Dem support, in spite of the fact that Labour are in a distant second place and have just 21% of the seats on the council.  As I said on Twitter the other day, this takes the meaning of the word "minority" into a whole new dimension.  What is even more striking is that Labour are inviting us to accept this outcome as if it was totally unremarkable and routine, and are getting their journalist proxies in the mainstream media to credulously parrot the same message.  Nothing to see here, folks.  Happens every day of the week, apparently.  

Well, OK, if you want us to believe that, then fine, but never again insult our intelligence by pretending that it would be in any way difficult for Labour to form a Westminster government from second place if they had a parliamentary majority in combination with the SNP.  In fact, the only conceivable obstacle would be that, as the Edinburgh outcome yet again demonstrates, Labour are considerably keener on doing deals with the Tories to keep the SNP out of power than they are on cooperating with the SNP to keep the Tories out of power.

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