Scotland is not a nation, advises Rod Liddle

It was a slightly peculiar experience watching the discussion on Scottish independence on Wednesday night's Dinner With Portillo, with the only person I really had to cheer on being a decidedly right-of-centre historian. I must admit, though, that although I may not have agreed with Michael Fry on every point, he is a very effective and passionate debater, and given the circumstances thank heavens he was there. The most bizarre segment of the programme offered us yet another unwelcome opportunity to take a wander around the frightening terrain that is Rod Liddle's psyche. "Scotland is NOT a nation," he thundered repeatedly. You might assume such a startling claim would be backed up with a sophisticated and considered argument, but instead what we got was - "on the east coast of Scotland they speak like Northumbrians, on the west coast they speak Gay-lick". Yes, I must admit every time I visit Dundee I really have to pinch myself to remember I'm nowhere near Lindisfarne, and come the weekend I enjoy nothing more than a trip to Troon to sample the very best the Gàidhealtachd has to offer. Seriously, though, is Liddle really offering up the continued survival of one of Scotland's indigenous languages as evidence that Scotland is less of a nation than it would otherwise be?

Vernon Bogdanor is of course a much weightier figure than Liddle, but even he seems to be stuck in the nineteenth century, talking of his "regret" that Ireland left the United Kingdom. You'd think he might have got over it by now. Underlying this of course is the stubborn idea amongst some traditionalist unionist thinkers that it would have been a more desirable outcome had Home Rule for Ireland headed off calls for full independence. That seems an utterly incredible worldview to hold in 2010 - does Bogdanor also think devolution for India within the UK would have been a more rational, progressive outcome in 1947?

This is the joint 42nd best blog in Scotland, apparently!

Many thanks to everyone who nominated and voted for this blog in the inaugural Scotblogs awards. These awards have been lots of fun - they even got a little mention on Newsnight Scotland a week or two back, and the best thing about it has been the opportunity to discover some extraordinary blogs I hadn't previously been aware of (Everyone I Ever Kissed stands out).

And many congratulations to Jeff on his well-deserved victory. Given the mythology that's grown up about the supposed Cybernat scourge, it seems rather apt that the blog voted the best in Scotland is written by such a polite, tolerant and thoroughly ecumenical SNP member!

Why Jon Cruddas just might be Labour leader

My ears pricked up (figuratively speaking) when I read Iain Dale's headline 'Why Jon Cruddas won't be Labour leader', because a few weeks ago for Political Betting's annual prediction game I had taken a wild guess that Cruddas might be the party leader twelve months from now. So I was curious to see if there was something blindingly obvious that I'd overlooked. But of the three 'reasons' Dale provides, two relate to his own prejudices about why Cruddas shouldn't be Labour leader, including one that is utterly risible (namely that he allegedly lives in Notting Hill rather than Dagenham). The third reason is a bit more pertinent - that there is a danger that Cruddas might lose his seat to the Tories at the general election. But if Dale's level of confidence that the Tories will win that seat is so high that it totally precludes even the possibility of Cruddas becoming party leader, why does he rather amusingly feel the need to end his post by begging for cash for the local Tory campaign?

For my money, Cruddas is the one potential leader that might just have a chance of restoring Labour's standing in public esteem. He's a likeable, straight-talking conviction politician who, rather novelly, actually seems to believe in at least some of the things a social democratic party is supposed to believe in. He once mischievously said "I'd like to see us lurch to the centre-left". It's a thought.

SNP seem set to complete full four-year term in office

Around a year ago, after the Scottish budget had passed at the second attempt, I pondered here on whether the SNP government had just come through its defining trial, and effectively secured its full four-year term in office. Although there was still the obvious test of one more budget to come, I thought it was highly unlikely that the opposition parties would seek to bring down Alex Salmond's administration when a) a Westminster election is so close and b) there is only one more year to go until the next Holyrood poll. A few months later, the emergence out of nowhere of the Megrahi controversy made such a prediction seem - temporarily at least - quite foolish and premature. And yet, here we are, with this year's budget passed and with no more hurdles that we know about needing to be jumped between now and May 2011.

'Know about' being the operative phrase - what happened with Megrahi late last summer is a reminder that there is always what Donald Rumsfeld might pithily describe as "unknown unknowns, that is to say things that we do not know that we do not know". And beyond the totally unforseeable, there is also the nightmare scenario that we've always known about of the tight Holyrood arithmetic changing - which of course could happen very suddenly. But it hasn't happened over the last three years, and the odds on it happening yet are lengthening by the day.

So if the SNP are indeed set to see out their full term of office despite holding just a one-seat advantage over the largest opposition party, it really is quite an achievement in itself. My recollection from the coverage in May 2007 is that academics were pointing out that there was no example of a minority government in the whole of Europe successfully functioning despite being so far short of a majority, and Robin Harper revealed that the general consensus at Holyrood was that the government would last for two years before being forced to seek a fresh mandate. So we shouldn't lose sight of how those early expectations have been exceeded with such apparent ease.

The most lightweight Cabinet minister ever?

I see Jeff has picked up on the debate over who might be the Secretary of State for Scotland should the Tories win power in May. I must say I favour Eddie Barnes' logic over Jeff and Malc's - it's highly likely to be David Mundell. For the reason, you need look no further than the jibe that's going to be thrown most frequently at a Tory government north of the border - that they have no mandate to rule. It would hardly help to counter that perception if they proved unable to man the Scotland Office from the directly elected ranks of Scottish Tory MPs. So that would exclude the possibility of parachuting David McLetchie into the Lords, or appointing a Scot who represents an English constituency. Of course, there may be a few more Scottish Tory MPs than just Mundell after the election - but none that would be any better suited for the job.

Which wouldn't be saying much. Indeed, it begs the question - has there ever been a Cabinet minister who has been appointed for reasons other than his own personal attributes to quite the same extent that Mundell is about to be? It's hard to think of any other circumstances in which someone of Mundell's standing would even get close to the Cabinet table. If Cameron wasn't faced with a de facto one-man shortlist for the Secretary of State role, Mundell might even currently be relishing the prospect of becoming a PPS. Unkind?

ComRes subsample : OK, this one probably doesn't count

I'm normally fairly scathing about people who say, in Snow-esque fashion, that the Scottish subsamples of UK-wide polls are "just a bit of fun". My normal reply is that they certainly need to treated with considerable caution, but if they really were totally meaningless the figures and placings wouldn't be as relatively stable as they generally are. But the latest subsample from ComRes seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Not much comment is really needed on these figures -

Labour 50% (+11)
Liberal Democrats 19% (+4)
SNP 18% (-3)
Conservatives 9% (-11)
Others 4% (-1)

Of course, the real story from this poll is the narrowing of the gap between the Tories and Labour at UK-wide level to well within hung parliament territory. What's fascinating is the way that a number of Tory supporters are pretending this is somehow a good thing for their party, because the closeness of the race will "concentrate minds". It's a handy truism that the best way to judge if a statement has any credibility is to turn it on its head and see if it intuitively makes much sense. In this instance that would mean Labour trying to work out what would be the most effective way of getting back into the game - and concluding that what they really need is for the Tories to maintain massive poll leads right up to election day. Yep, that makes perfect sense.

Bad night for the Tories.

YouGov double-header offers mixed news for the SNP

Over the weekend there were two new UK-wide polls from YouGov, published on consecutive days. However, the fieldwork was not carried out at identical times - the first ran from the 26th to 28th of January, while the second was carried out on the 28th and 29th. The Scottish subsample from the first provided some encouragement for the Nationalists, with Labour's lead being cut from fifteen points to nine. Here are the full figures -

Labour 36% (-3)
SNP 27% (+3)
Conservatives 20% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 15% (+2)
Others 1% (-6)

However, the second poll showed that trend being reversed -

Labour 39% (+3)
SNP 22% (-5)
Conservatives 20% (-)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-4)
Others 8% (+7)

Of course, none of these changes can be regarded as meaningful over the space of a day or two - it just boils down to differences in the sampling. However, the good news for the SNP is that all recent YouGov subsamples have had them in second place. The figures from the latest ComRes survey (which sees the GB-wide Tory lead being slashed to just seven points) may be available later this evening.

For all my years of experience of dealing with the media, nothing could have prepared me for a grilling by FERN BRITTON.

If it wasn't so unspeakably maddening, it truly would be comical. Step back for a moment from the narrative about Blair's peerless communication skills ensuring that there will never be a chink in his armour on Iraq, and the conclusion that he had in fact already skewered himself weeks ago would be inescapable. By conceding that he would still have wanted to remove Saddam from power even if he had known there were no WMDs, Blair had unambiguously demonstrated that much of the case for war was built on a conscious deception. How was that statement, for instance, even remotely consistent with his firm undertaking weeks before the war that "even now" Saddam could stay in power if he disarmed? It wasn't, and it was clear from his performance yesterday (for that, of course, was precisely what it was) that he knew that perfectly well. So no way out of that one, then? Oh, don't be silly - this is a) Blair, and b) the Chilcot Inquiry we're talking about. All that it took to get off the hook was a sheepish grin, and a suggestion that he's simply far too much of a novice to be expected to handle fiendish lines of questioning from heavyweight political interviewers like...Fern Britton. As ever, the brazenness is beyond breathtaking.

Listening to hours of Blair testimony is a bit like watching the Conservative party conference - eventually you find yourself being sucked into a parallel universe where black really is white. Some other choice examples from yesterday -

'If you want to deal with WMDs, you start with a regime that's used them before.' Well no, actually, what you do is you start with a regime that's actually got them. Like North Korea, perhaps, or even Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons, as opposed to Iraq which had...well, nothing.

'What was a surprise was that al-Qaeda and Iran got involved in Iraq.' Well, perhaps it wouldn't have been quite so much of a surprise if you had listened to the countless voices warning that, far from tackling international terrorism, the invasion of Iraq would actually fuel it. Blair might counter that nobody could have known any of that was going to happen, it was all just pure speculation. Well, quite. In that sense it was rather like the pure speculation that Iraq had an 'extensive and growing' WMD programme with which it planned to threaten its neighbours - speculation that was solely based, let's not forget, on 'sporadic and patchy' intelligence. So what was the difference between one lot of speculation in early 2003 and the other lot? Faith. Conviction. To coin a phrase, he simply 'knew it was right'. Even, apparently, the categorical proof we now have that it was wrong still doesn't mean it wasn't right. Now that's real faith.

'The really interesting question is the Iraq 2010 question - what would have happened if we had allowed Saddam and his sons to remain in power?' From a man who has just acknowledged that terrorists and malign Iranian influence ended up in Iraq as a direct result of the invasion (and yet in a way that was apparently completely unforseeable), it really is beyond satire to base the case for war entirely on his own 'foresight' of the unspeakably terrible things that would have happened otherwise. Blair even informed the committee in grave tones that important 'lessons' for the future needed to be learned from the way in which Iraq became a terrorist base. Perhaps chief among those lessons ought to be that this outcome (the real "2010 Iraq" outcome) could have been easily avoided by not invading Iraq, and that such a devastatingly simple avoidance strategy might have been rather wise with the benefit of hindsight?

'What made Saddam different from other dictators is that he was responsible for the deaths of a million people.' But to get to that figure, you have to include all the casualties of the Iran-Iraq war, on the basis that Saddam was responsible for every single one of those deaths because he started the war by launching an unprovoked invasion. That really is exceptionally dangerous ground for Blair to be treading on given the circumstances, and once again, extraordinarily brazen. And that's before you even recall the fact that the west seemed to be rather supportive of Saddam's bloodthirsty adventures in Iran at the time.

'Some people thought there would be a humanitarian disaster in Iraq. We avoided that, actually.' Is this guy for real?

Angus Reid : SNP close the gap on Labour

The Scottish subsample for the latest UK-wide Angus Reid poll makes somewhat healthier reading for the SNP, with the party narrowing Labour's lead from fifteen points earlier in the month to nine now. Here are the full figures -

Labour 35% (-1)
SNP 26% (+5)
Conservatives 19% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 14% (-4)
Others 6% (-4)

While the Conservatives leapfrog the Liberal Democrats to return to third place, this is nevertheless another dismal sub-20 showing for them, with little over three months to go until the probable general election date.

Goldsmith's broad range of one-sided soundings

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to watch Lord Goldsmith's evidence to the Iraq inquiry live, but after catching some of the snippets on the news a couple of questions are nagging away at me. Goldsmith claimed his biggest problem in arriving at his final legal opinion was the creative ambiguity of UN Resolution 1441, the wording of which meant very different things to the different countries that had voted it through. His moment of clarity seemingly arrived after speaking at length to US lawyers, and pondering on whether the US would really have allowed a resolution to be passed that gave the UN (and by extension France, Russia and China) a veto on war. But couldn't it just as easily be asked - would the French and Russians really have allowed through a resolution that in their view gave the US legal authority to attack Iraq without referral back to the UN? Of course they wouldn't, and in a sense this is a circular argument - if Goldsmith's starting proposition was that resolution 1441 was made deliberately ambiguous to suit everyone, it should hardly have been a surprise to him that US lawyers thought they had got precisely what they wanted out of it. What may be a surprise to others is that an Attorney-General who claims to have taken soundings from all quarters did not apparently see fit to make an equivalent trip to France or Russia to hear the interpretation of lawyers there.

Which leads me neatly on to my second question. Goldsmith claims to have been put under no pressure to change his original opinion that the invasion would be unlawful by Tony Blair or anyone else in the government. But in precisely what sense did the terribly helpful arrangement for Goldsmith of an itinerary of meetings with handpicked pro-war 'experts' in the United States apparently not constitute any 'pressure' at all?