After all that money spent, all the hoo-hah, all the ferment, all the hyped up blatherings of the TV news types – don’t they just love all this? I think they think it makes them important – all the discussion of change, it turns out that Scotland returned exactly the same balance of representation to the UK Parliament as it did five years ago.

It kind of makes you wonder why we bothered.

But of course what Scotland overwhelmingly voted for it didn’t get.*

Does that remind anybody of anything?

I noticed David Mundell (the only Tory MP in Scotland and so the only candidate for Secretary of State in a Tory minority government, God help us) claiming that since it was a UK election the Tories would have a mandate to rule Scotland.

I hope we hear nothing from him then about MPs for Scottish constituencies not being able to vote on matters that come before them that pertain only to England, as that would rather undermine his argument, would it not?

*Neither, of course, did England. (At least, not yet.)

I’€™m not sure I want to wake up on Friday morning. I have this terrible feeling that Mr Irresponsible will win an outright majority.

It’€™s not that I’€™m in favour of Labour, though. Because of the nature of Labour in Scotland, I couldn’€™t bring myself to vote for them. But for all their drawbacks in the UK sense (Iraq, ID cards, other infringements of personal liberties, failure to bring the bankers to heel, not scrapping public private partnerships, intense relaxation about people being filthy rich) they are still better than the Tories. To take one example of their success, the NHS is immeasurably better than it was 13 years ago.

The reason that I dread a Mr Irresponsible premiership – more accurately I fear a George Osborne chancellorship -€“ is experience. The Tories have a track record. They seem to take a visceral delight in the cutting of public expenditure. But it’€™s all right for Cameron and Osborne; they’€™re well off and won’€™t be affected. (In fact, due to their inheritance tax plans, they’€™ll be even more quids in if their parents snuff it.)

It’€™s other people who will suffer, people who can least afford cuts, either in their benefits, their pensions or their jobs.

I know the other main parties are also saying they would make cuts but they are more likely to make efforts to mitigate the worst effects.

And don’€™t tell me the Tories are the party of low taxation. I well remember them during the 1979 election campaign denying claims that their plans would require the rate of VAT to be doubled. In their first budget after the election they raised VAT from 8 to 15%! (In subsequent Parliaments they raised it further to 17.5%.) VAT is a tax which hits most those who can least afford it.

I also fear for the BBC. It’€™s a great British institution which happens to be tremendously good at what it does. I would go so far as to say at everything it does. We would all miss it when it’€™s gone. I know we all have to pay for it almost willy-nilly but it is amazingly cheap at the price. The Tories are in Rupert Murdoch’€™s back pocket (as well as Lord Ashcroft’€™s) and he would like nothing better than to see the BBC dismantled or at least curtailed. Sky would not be able to give us such sterling service. It never could, because Murdoch is only seeking to turn a profit. I would rather never watch TV again than contribute to his coffers.

I know my vote is not going to make a difference. My sitting MP (Gordon Brown) has a huge majority and I can’€™t see it being overthrown. Besides when was the last time you heard that the incumbent PM actually lost his (or her) seat?

I genuinely don’t know for whom I’€™m going to vote; only that I will. Too many people fought too long and too hard for my right to do so for me not to honour them. But it will not be Tory or Labour.

If Mr Irresponsible should win on Thursday then, in the words of a prominent 1980s politician, I warn you not to be old, I warn you not to be ill, I warn you not to be poor.

The trouble is that, down the line, you (and I) are likely to be at least two of those things, if not all three.

I wasn’t going to post about Politics again so soon but I see Gordon Brown has been getting pelters for referring to a voter as a bigot.

Is that really the story here?

Which of us has not said one thing to somebody for the sake of being polite and yet revealed a contrary opinion when in private?

For this is the crux. Gordon Brown’s “gaffe” was uttered in private. It was not for public consumption. The fact he was miked up at the time does not negate that.

So who is in the wrong here?

I would say that it was those journalists who were eavesdropping on his private conversations and did not immediately switch off their receivers nor forget what they’d heard.

Let us not forget that the man is – for the moment – Prime Minister. The journalists had no right to listen in to his private conversations. If they had such a right we might as well forget all about the thirty year (or is it twenty year now?) rule and wire the Cabinet Office for sound right now and be let in on those deliberations.

That the journalists did listen in is contemptible. To then reveal the content is politics of the lowest variety.

And for what it’s worth Gordon Brown was right. The woman was – is – a bigot; at least in what I heard her say to him.

No British voter elects a Prime Minister. Neither do we elect a government.

All we vote for – all we ever vote for – in UK General Elections is a representative, a single member of Parliament.

I have voted in nine General Elections and have yet to find a question on the ballot paper asking me who(m) do I wish to be Prime Minister – or indeed whom I wish to be in government.

The only person who can be said to “vote” for the Prime Minister is the monarch – at present the Queen – who invites an MP to form a government (albeit usually on advice from the outgoing PM.) This is true whether that invited MP can “command” a majority in the House of Commons or not. It is Parliament (a word, by the way, derived from French and meaning, almost literally, talking shop) which decides whether a government exists or not; as only the House of Commons can vote a government down.

In this regard I find the complaints that Gordon Brown was an unelected PM to be strange, even ignorant – if not deliberately mischievous. He was as elected – or unelected – as Tony Blair, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Alec Douglas Home, Harold MacMillan etc. etc. before him.

Every Member of Parliament has been elected, except, in days past, for the Speaker, whom convention required to be unopposed – and he or she could not become PM. UKIP and others are, I believe standing against John Bercow on May 6^th. Michael Martin had some opposition too last time as I recall.

In the 2005 General Election Gordon Brown’s name certainly appeared on my ballot paper. To call him unelected was a distortion of the truth, at best. It subsumes into the term only those closed electorates which may choose a political party’s leader. Not being a member of any of them I was not consulted when those parties made their respective choices so in that respect, but in that respect alone, they were/are all unelected. As has been every Prime Minister in my – and anybody else’s – lifetime.

Still, if Mr Irresponsible or even that inoffensive Mr Clegg become PM after next Thursday I may take some delight in dubbing them unelected.

I noted it mentally at the time but let it pass. However, Call me Dave’€™s remarks last night brought it to mind again.

His posturing over Georgia would have gone beyond recklessness if it were to be repeated in office. [I have to say here that David Milliband was as bad back then. Don’€™t they have advisers who know about this stuff?]

But not only did Call me Dave get it wrong over Georgia and thereby possibly antagonise Russia, he now wants to target nuclear weapons on Iran and China. Note Nick Clegg’€™s startled reaction in the clip.

Iran!

Iran which does not have nuclear weapons (any more than Iraq had: anyone with knowledge of the Middle Eastern psyche knows what I’€™m talking about here) and which therefore our threatening them with amounts to bullying. And nobody likes a bully.

And China!

China: with whom we have no quarrel and which has more than enough capacity to make ours seem piddling and which, therefore, it makes no sense to threaten.

Quite apart from the fact that the UK most likely can not or will not use its nuclear weapons without prior US approval and we probably only have them because the French do too (as Yes, Minister put it once) what on Earth was he thinking? Or did he just let his mouth run away with him?

Either way such talk is dangerous and does not bode well for the country’€™s international relations under a Call me Dave premiership. For you can be sure the relevant authorities in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing (not to mention elsewhere) will have taken due note. Mehdi Hassan in the New Statesman makes much the same point.

So, Dave, I’€™m not going to call you Dave.

I’€™m going to call you irresponsible.

I caught the preamble to Call Me Dave’s launch of the Conservatives’ manifesto today. Over the PA they were playing all sorts of songs with “change,” “changes” or “better” in their lyrics – except of course D:Ream.

Did the Tories have permission to do this?

One of the songs was Bowie’s Changes, which contains the line “Don’t want to be a richer man.”

I don’t suppose Dave does: he comes from money and took good care to marry even more.

The song also has, “You’ve left us up to our necks in it.” Was this a prediction, Dave?

Look out you rock ‘n’ rollers.

My first response when the good lady informed me of Michael Foot’s death was there goes Plymouth Argyle‘s most famous supporter. Come to think of it he was probably the only supporter of their’s I’d heard of.

He was very proud of the fact that he’d been registered for them as a player on his ninetieth birthday. (To play only on the left, of course, never the right.)

Quite what his view would be of the ridiculous advertising campaign for an insurance company that seems to take the Albion’s supporters in vain I dread to think.

His other incarnation (as a politician) reached its peak when he was elected leader of the Labour Party. Unfortunately for him, or perhaps fortunately as I don’t think he ever really wanted to be PM, this was at the time the Thatcher juggernaut was in full swing.

There was a confected furore when he arrived at the Cenotaph for the Remembrance Day observances in 1982 wearing what was dubbed a donkey jacket but was more like a duffle coat. This was taken to be disrespectful of the dead – mostly by those who’d never been within miles of a battlefield themselves. (He had himself volunteered for military service in the Second World War but been turned down due to his chronic asthma.)

The Queen Mother – no left winger – apparently thought differently as she is said to have told him, “Very wise. It’s cold today.”

In all of his utterances he always seemed to be one of the few politicians who are genuine and mean what they are saying.

Michael Foot: 23/7/13 – 3/3/10. So it goes.

There aren’t many things that can make me sympathetic to the Scottish Labour Party…..

But the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in one of its periodic fits of pique is certainly up there.

Apparently Cardinal Keith O’Brien has accused the government of undermining religious freedom. (That would be the UK government, though. The Cardinal seems to have forgotten the SNP is in power in Scotland now.)

Well now; the last time I heard, people of all faiths (and none) in Scotland and indeed the whole UK were free to go about their business as long as it was within the law.

I don’t see any evidence of persecution nor of churches being forcibly closed down by the forces of the state. The Cardinal has had no difficulty in putting his point across* and has been widely quoted. So where is this infringement of freedom?

The churches have as much, and therefore as little, right as anyone else to have an input or a view on political matters. What they don’t have, and, despite the Cardinal’s and Secretary Of State Jim Murphy’s, strictures, ought not to have, is a superior right, which I fear is what the Cardinal is advocating. He seems to want freedom for his views but not for others’.

*Edited to add: He was given yet more air time on today’s Reporting Scotland.

The Digital Economy Bill seems to be the latest step in the UK Government’s apparently ongoing project to restrict and undermine the civil liberties of its citizens.

The bill contains provisions to remove internet access from alleged illegal file sharers even if they have not been convicted of any such offence. This strikes at one of the most fundamental underpinnings of the justice system.

Charles Stross puts the argument against the bill here.

There is also a petition you can sign up to – if you’re a UK citizen (sorry, subject) – on the No. 10 Downing Street web site.

With the release of a tape of a telephone conversation between Jacqui (sic) Janes and Gordon Brown it has become blindingly obvious that the hoo-hah surrounding his letter of condolence has been entirely confected; part of a sting operation against the Prime Minister almost certainly constructed for narrow (party) political purposes.

I do not buy for a single moment the notion that this is all about one woman’s grief or indeed supporting the troops in Afghanistan. It is solely about providing a bad press for the Prme Minister.

Not the least of the disturbing aspects of this affair is the revelation of the contents of the telephone call. Was Gordon Brown informed he was being taped? If not; is it not an offence to record someone over the phone without informing them that it is being done? This makes Ms Janes a law breaker and the Sun an accessory at the very least. (May we look forward to a prosecution?)

Moreover, due to these dubious circumstances – after all, which citizen, without ulterior motive or inducement, has the necessary recording equipment readily at hand, just in case? – I am inevitably led to the suspicion that Ms Janes may be rewarded financially for such deceit. [For the record: this is a suspicion that I would be delighted to be proven unfounded.]

However, I now have no sympathy whatever for Ms Janes.

Quite apart from Gordon Brown’s poor vision – which may make writing difficult for him and hence, also, his script difficult to read (and many people, myself included, have appalling handwriting) – how can Ms Janes object to his spelling when she, or her parents, cannot even spell her own name? The traditional form is Jackie, not Jacqui.

She not only spurned his initial letter – which he did not have to write; when, for whatever reason, he made another gesture of condolence by telephoning her, she was ungracious enough to reject this too.

It sounds very much like she is flailing around desperately trying to blame anyone for her son’s death.

Now (this is not to disparage the Armed Forces and it is especially galling to be writing this on Armistice Day) but Britain does not have a conscript army. Her son had to volunteer. Squaddies know the risks when they enlist. And unfortunately, if necessary, the duty they sign up for is to die. So to put it brutally, the only person to blame for his death is himself.

But perhaps she feels she could have stopped her son joining up and wishes now that she had, and so herself feels guilty for not doing so.

Whatever the truth of all this, the Sun’s complicity in her actions is despicable. She should have been left by them to grieve in peace; not driven to higher heights of denial and torment.

If the Sun’s intention was to make people less likely to have sympathy for the Prime Minister then in my case it has backfired spectacularly. It’s almost enough to make me consider voting for Gordon Brown. (And, unlike most people, I am actually in a position to do so.)

The man has done the decent thing twice over; and been pilloried for it.

He would have been damned if he hadn’t and he was damned that he did.

So, how likely is he in the future to write letters to the relatives of dead soldiers?

Wisely, David Cameron steered clear of this at PMQs today.