It’s only old farts like me who remember the death throes of the Callaghan minority government. The trouble is it was not a government at all, it was an enormous pork barrel where the meat was pretty rancid. And every minority party demanded a share. I remember dear old Merlyn Rees, who was Home Secretary at the time, explained to me over a drink how confidence and supply used to work. ‘Jim and I used to wander the tearooms and give the boys what they wanted’. So when Miliband said on Marr this morning that there will be no deal with SNP he may have been telling the truth. The reality is that each parliamentary vote will be a nightmare of deals. Everyone would be paying everybody else off. And Sturgeon has one aim. Make a killing at the 2016 Scottish elections with a manifesto commitment to an early referendum and then hold a gun to the head of Miliband with an offer he would not be allowed to refuse.
But Sturgeon is only part of this nightmare scenario. Most people have forgotten about Labour’s die hard Socialists on the back benches. They have forgotten about Len McCluskey and his army of sponsored MPs. How many of them in rock solid seats will there be? Fifty? Sixty? More? We just don’t know. But it will be in serious double figures. Combine that with Plaid and the SNP and you have a significant force of the left. A dangerous Orc army hell bent on singing from the yellowed pages of the Socialist song book.
Socialism died in 1979 and was buried in 1997. And now Miliband will forced to exhume the body. Well, hardly forced; he will be using his shovel with relish. Digging for victory. Apart from a tiny minority, there is no stomach for Socialism in the UK. It is a failed experiment which has brought France to its knees and is trashing Greece. But have the Tories cried wolf too often on this? The demon eyes campaign in 1997 was ridiculous. New Labour won power for so long because it had consigned left wing ideology to the cemetery. People were no longer afraid. Well they should be now. Never has the threat been so great.
It is right that the Tories should spend the last few days of the campaign concentrating on the economy, but it would be insane not to warn of the dangers of a grand Socialist coalition. If the opinion polls are still at stalemate on the Monday before polling day the markets will get rattled and money will flow out of Britain. To the left this will be a badge of honour. To the rest of us it will be a taste of the horrors to come. The bond markets will lose confidence, interest rates will be under threat and inflation will begin to creep up as the unions will demand higher wages with threats of industrial action. And the economy will crash. Investors would flee the country, tax receipts would be in free fall and there would be no money to keep the NHS alive. I have always trusted the common sense of the British people. They usually get elections right. It will be decided by the undecided of which there are legions.
The Tories should be reminding voters of the catastrophe of the most dangerous political coalition this country has seen in years; Brown, Balls and Miliband and pose the simple question, ‘can you afford to take the risk?’
