Liberal Landslide

It took all of 18 seconds for the SNP to renege on the first of many manifesto commitments in this afternoon’s announcement on the Strategic Spending Review. Graduate debt will go unserviced, quell suprise, and that was just the start. It was stunning, the finance minister got to his feet and had the brass cohones to suggest that the SNP had ditched some of its manifesto commitments, not because of some inherent flaw in their spending calculations, but because they knew that in minority administration they would fail to obtain enough Parliamentary support. I have never heard, until now, of an administration jettisoning its manifesto commitments so early on and without a struggle in parliament except as part of some sort of coalition negotiation. Will the SNP be able to convince the electorate of anything at the next election if it is so prepared to cut and run at the first sign of trouble?

Nicol was excellent, delivering body blow after body blow to the SNP’s ‘sham politics and shifty accounting’. Once again Kenny McKaskill’s Newsnight words came back to haunt him when Nicol recited the transcript of Monday night’s interview in which Kenny admitted police number increases might drop to zero and that he didn’t know exactly how many police officers were on active duty at any one time as training courses and the like made them difficult to count. The wheels are off the wagon and the honeymoon is over.