Government shelves foxhunting vote after SNP opposition | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... opposition

The cheek of the Scots, changing tactics on Team Posh!

I suspect they're trying to make the Tories so angry that they'll rush into the English votes for English laws and give them the pretext for another referendum perhaps as soon as next year.

Hmm.. If Parliament changing the laws so that acts which apply purely to England are voted on by English MPS is a pretext for another referendum in Scotland, by the same logic that referendum should include everybody in England in it's voting roll. Because logically it's a change which doesn't affect Scotland at all but does affect the legislation structure of the whole UK...

The fact that its got naff all to do with them yet they can vote on it really peeves me. Christ they cant even vote on it for Scotland as that's the Scottish parliaments remit. </rant>

There is actually some relation to Scotland because the Scottish government was planning to bring the position in Scotland into line with that in England and Wales (which is currently more stringent). In effect the Tories want to have the more lax and ineffective position that's been allowed in Scotland until now.


Well, you have to admit that they're doing a rather good job of getting what they want then. As I stated previously I expect the SNP MP's at Westminster to make themselves a massive pain in the backside in order to push everyone into the breakup of the Union. Getting the Tories to rush through lopsided laws on the representative power of Scottish MP's achieves that because it lets the SNP say to the people of Scotland that they've been disenfranchised in the primary legislative body of the country (however true that actually is). I don't generally support the SNP but I have to say, in terms of actually connecting with people they've been doing a far better job than most of the other parties

Can we have SNP candidates in the rest of the UK at the next election please?

why?

I would suggest not 'SNP" per se but a party that was espousing many of the non-Scottish-specific policies of the SNP. Progressive liberal, I think they'd be in broad terms using current political jargon. Basically, we didn't have a party pushing that line in 'the UK', we only had it in Scotland. Anyone in the rest of the UK who wanted to vote for a party along those lines rather than the current orthodoxy of more or less strident conservatism were left with indies or The Greens, and may not actually even have had those choices to vote for.

There's some discussion to be had whether the SNP's landslide in Scotland was only down to the growth in nationalism in Scotland, or was in some part down to the fact they were offering an actual alternative to the Tories/Labour/UKIP, who were all effectively offering slightly varying degrees of the same set of policies.

It's a question that simply hasn't been looked at in any detail - 'How many English people would have voted for a party like the SNP given a chance, and why?' The Labour party certainly don't seem to want to answer it, their panic reaction to the election was 'we have to be more like the party who won!', totally ignoring the point that being 'like the tories' is never going to get you anywhere if people also have the Tories as an option to vote for.

Jon