JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: I'M VOTING TO KEEP SNP OUT BY NOT VOTING REFORM

Awaiting us in our letter box on our return home from holiday on Sunday were two envelopes marked ‘official poll card enclosed’. 

One for me and the other for the lady who agrees with me that politics is a subject best avoided in our household.

I found them first and, democrat that I am, dutifully ensured that hers was placed with near-ceremonial solemnity into her hand.

So, we are all set. On Thursday next week, we will go to our polling station, duck inside neighbouring booths and, in all likelihood, cancel each other out.

I say this is the likely scenario because I don’t ask direct questions for the reason I alluded to earlier. It is better to feel the vibe. 

The vibe I’m feeling in my two-horse race Glasgow constituency is our household’s votes will be divided equally among the frontrunners.

It almost didn’t matter whether the poll cards arrived or not. The only thing our contribution to the day will affect is turnout.

But that is not the main reason for the heavy-heartedness which will attend my journey to mark my X in six days’ time. 

The biggest disappointment is – yet again – I am voting against something I don’t want rather than for something I do.

My mission, at every polling booth opportunity, to exact maximum damage on the SNP’s plans to dismantle our Union is unchanged in more than a decade.

As long as independence represents a threat, I will use my vote to extinguish it. 

This is the overriding Scottish political issue of my lifetime, towering over the transient squabbles of parliamentary terms, and, if I have to, I’ll devote the rest of my lifetime’s polling booth visits to protecting these isles – all of them.

I’m rather hoping I don’t have to. It’s a dispiriting task for any voter who clings to the ideal of their X effecting change for the better.

Here in Glasgow South West it is, for Unionists, all about avoiding change for the much worse.

I will vote for Labour not through any endorsement of the party on a local, Scottish or UK-wide level – I have zero enthusiasm for the idea of Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister – but because they are most likely to beat the SNP.

Were the Tories the main contenders, I would vote for them – again, I am afraid, with no real enthusiasm. Rather like the SNP in Holyrood, the Westminster government has run out of road and ideas. 

Both parties – so bitterly opposed – have broadly similar campaign strategies. Yes, we’re a shambles, but better the shambles you know.

Where the Lib Dems represent the most serious challenge to the SNP, I’d vote for them in a heartbeat. I cannot remember which one they are today – slightly to the Right of Labour or slightly to the Left.

But it doesn’t matter. Leader Sir Ed Davey will never form a government. His ambition in 2024 is for his party to fill more seats in the Commons than the SNP and that sounds swell to me.

Indeed, the only pro-Union party of any note which I would dismiss as a non-starter is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. 

Much as I regret that the new party leader does not feel safe enough in Scotland even to cross the Border to campaign – he fears much worse than milkshakes in the face here – I wish him only more of the same electoral failure.

I am far from clear that all his party’s Scottish candidates are even Unionists at all. Embarrassingly, party chairman Richard Tice offers no reassurance on that.

Asked this week whether he could help us out on how many of those standing for Reform UK support Scottish independence, he said: ‘I don’t know. I’ve got 611 candidates. 

They’re all wonderful.’ I would like to think that, in Scotland at least, they’re all about to lose their deposits too.

If, for voters like me, keeping the SNP out is the only show in town, why vote for an outfit which will dilute the support for their main challengers and let the SNP back in? There is holding your nose in the interests of tactical voting and then there is cutting it off to spite your face – and clear blue water, always, between the two.

It’s a matter of lasting despondency for me that there is any nose-holding to be done and that nothing even approaching true party allegiance appears on the horizon for me. 

I am not so much a floating voter as one abandoned in the vastness of the centre ground where parties Left and Right fear to tread despite the rich electoral pickings here.

Tony Blair once capitalised on them. So did David Cameron. Many in their parties have never forgiven them.

And so here we moderates are, politically homeless but fighting at least for the home we know as Britain and the right to consider as compatriots those from all corners of it.

And this time around, at least, there is reason for optimism that the SNP will be soundly punished, not only for its destructive intentions towards the Union but all else that it represents – sky-high taxes, our economy, education system and health service in a race to the bottom, ministerial incompetence married to over-weening arrogance…

Yes, electoral commentary on all of the above is long overdue and I hope it proves brutally frank.

And yet, even if my wish is granted, the satisfaction will be tempered by the knowledge that politics is still falling down on the job. 

We still don’t like politicians very much; we just dislike some more than others.

This, I used to think, was a quirk of Scottish politics in an era of constitutional turbulence. 

But, looking across the Border at a political landscape where few seriously suggest that England should strike out on its own, I see a broadly similar story.

Sir Keir will likely become the next Prime Minister not because of what he is (leaden and charisma-free) but because of what he isn’t (a Tory).

There is none of the giddy exhilaration that ushered in Tony Blair’s premiership, no wave of Cool Britannia to ride, no real new-era optimism – just pragmatic acceptance that so it must be.

‘Are you two really the best we’ve got?’ asked audience member Robert Blackstock during the BBC’s Prime Ministerial Debate this week – and it’s not only Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer who should be asking themselves that question.

If politics has reduced the electorate to voting against what they don’t want rather than voting for what they do, then politicians of every hue are failing us.

Why, when they knock so many doors at election times, is the essential disconnect between politicians and those they are supposed to serve so glaring? 

Why do we so often feel they are self-serving? 

Why is so much of the language devoted to ‘operation fear’ and so little to vision?

Mr Sunak is right about one thing. We’ve no idea what Sir Keir will actually do. 

You don’t win elections by sharing that kind of information.

And I plan to help him into government.

British politics… they should offer clothes pegs as well as pencils at the polling stations.

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2024-06-27T21:31:27Z dg43tfdfdgfd