May 2015 UK General Election Campaign.

[garbon]

My upstairs neighbour who made a point of introducing himself is a LibDem.

[Sheilbh]

I hate it when they shove it in your face

[garbon]

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally I have many things to post.

First TESTS:
https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/
I got 30% each Labour and Lib Dem and 20% each UKIP and Green
Labour: Crime, Health/NHS, Welfare
Lib Dem: Economy, Environment, Education
Green: Europe, Immigration
UKIP: Foreign Policy/Defence, Democracy
And:
http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/
Labour: 56
Green: 41
Lib Dem: 28
Tory: 4
UKIP: -39

Second, the Tories

I'm really struggling with seeing a UK Prime Minister and apparent unionist spending the election demonising the voters of one member country to the voters of another and apparently planning to attack the 'legitimacy' of any government depending on SNP votes (forgetting that the Tories in Holyrood propped up a minority SNP government for four years). It's a disgrace for a Conservative and Unionist Party to be so divisive and, again, so careless with the constitution. So on Scotland:

To keep Scotland, Britain must embrace the separatists
Jonathan Freedland
Friday 24 April 2015 19.50 BST

Just as actors call Macbeth the Scottish play, so historians will for ever think of 2015 as the Scottish election. Whatever happens on 7 May – whoever ends up limping through the door of 10 Downing Street – the big, enduring fact of 2015 will be the shifting of the tectonic plates now under way in Scotland. It is nothing less than a realignment – and it will last.

As one longstanding Scottish observer puts it, the shift in allegiance from Labour to the Scottish National party is "not cyclical". The pendulum has swung so far, it's snapped off.

For Labour to lose Scotland is like the Tories losing "the home counties", says the former Scottish secretary Malcolm Rifkind. One Labour peer admitted to me this week that he's placed a "cheeky bet" on the Tories emerging with more MPs in Scotland than Labour. That's not a turnaround; that's an earthquake, reshaping the landscape out of all recognition.

Participants and observers are both, blinkingly, trying to adjust their eyes to this new terrain. The appealing, if maverick, view is that the SNP's imminent arrival in Westminster with up to 50 seats – they had just six in the outgoing house – could, paradoxically, see the separatist party embed itself in the union. If the Nats assist Ed Miliband into No 10, they will overnight be "handed a starring role at the very heart of the British state," says the Scotsman columnist Kenny Farquharson. Scottish voters might warm to a Labour-led administration, backed by the SNP. No longer would the nationalists be able to disdain Westminster as a faraway imperial capital oblivious to their concerns. They'd be right in it.

Many of those who want this union of four nations to endure will suspect that's too optimistic. Not because of what they predict will happen after 7 May – but because of what's happened before it. It's everything that's led to this moment that has them fearing for the future of the United Kingdom.

Blame attaches first to the Tories. For one thing, they have repeatedly talked up the SNP, adding to the latter's momentum. Tory grandees sniff at the suggestion, insisting that the Nats didn't need to be bigged up, they've been getting bigger all by themselves. In which case, why was George Osborne's first spin on the seven-way leader's debate – and remember, this is a man who does not choose between jam and marmalade in the morning without thinking through the political implications – praise for the performance of Nicola Sturgeon? The Tories' narrow and obvious calculation is that the SNP takes seats from Labour, so a stronger SNP is better for them.

The Osborne bouquet for Sturgeon was unusual for being so direct. The preferred method has been roundabout, aiming simply at inflaming nationalist sentiment. The bar was set low and early by David Cameron the morning after the independence referendum result. Instead of issuing a 7am message of healing and national reconciliation, he immediately declared that the real issue raised by the democratic renaissance of Scotland was ... England. He implied that there could be no progress, even on honouring the "vow" he had just issued with the other Westminster leaders, until the perennial English question had been solved first.

The sheer speed of the apparent betrayal, the confirmation of the age-old nationalist caricature of unionists – and the English – as perfidious, cast the 55% who had voted no as suckers. Many decided right then that they would not be fooled again. They switched from Labour, who had partnered the Tories in the ill-conceived Better Together alliance, to the SNP. And they have never looked back.

But the insults have continued, amplified in the echo chamber of the Tory-cheering press. Sturgeon has been cast as "the most dangerous woman in Britain", with any suggestion that the SNP might use its democratically won seats in the House of Commons depicted as a "coup". All of this has a twin purpose: to anger Scots by making them feel like strangers in their own country – so pushing them closer to the SNP – and to stir English voters who might fear an SNP tail wagging a governing Labour dog.

The polling suggests there are not many who think that way. Indeed, many non-Scottish voters have been impressed by Sturgeon. But according to YouGov, there is an 8% slice of the electorate "not already voting Tory" who think that a Lab/SNP deal is likely and would be a bad thing, and who would prefer a Tory government. This 8%, many of them flirting with Ukip, is the target audience for those images of Sturgeon mounted on a wrecking ball or playing puppeteer to a marionette Miliband.

You can see the electoral logic clearly enough. But it is a strategy fraught with danger. As several Tory grandees, and other unionists, keep warning, the price for what may bring a narrow advantage over Labour is serious peril for the union. The rise of a party committed to the union's break-up is the least of it.

For the Tory attack both assumes and awakens a mutual loathing between the English and the Scottish. Witness the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine referring to Scots and English northerners as "leeches", or this Times headline: "The example set by Scottish women should embarrass the rest of the UK.")

It rests on the idea that the English cannot stand the prospect of Scots having a say beyond Scotland. Hence the Tories' unprecedented launch today of an English-only manifesto.

In Dead Sheep, a terrific new play about the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, we see the former PM refer to Labour not as an opponent but as "the enemy". That is the process now under way against the SNP. It depicts them not as internal adversaries, but as an external threat – as if they have no place inside this country. Labour's insistence that it will do no deal with the SNP, as if they are too toxic to be touched, only reinforces that feeling.

But, comes the reply, the SNP is different. The fact that they want to break up the UK puts them in a separate category. There's some logic to that. But it misses the shift now taking place. If the predicted landslide comes, this will no longer be about the SNP. This will be about Scots and Scotland.

If the electoral map turns yellow on 7 May, then to ostracise the SNP will be to ostracise the Scottish nation that – under our first-past-the-post system – will have given that party an overwhelming mandate. To say Sturgeon's party cannot be a legitimate partner in the governance of the UK will be to say that the Scots are not a legitimate partner in the governance of the UK. And that will be the end of the union.

It's a paradox. The unionist parties will have to work with those who don't believe in the union. But to do otherwise will be to pronounce the union dead.

It means unionists have to start talking about this in a different way. Maybe it was once fine to speak with venom against those who would break up Britain. But now that is heard as venom directed not at the SNP but at the people who are choosing them: Scots.

The tone has to change. Those who believe in the union need to speak respectfully of the choice their fellow citizens are about to make. It doesn't mean they have to agree with it or like it. But the onus now is on unionists to prove the union is a hospitable, inclusive place for Scots – that they are seen not as an enemy within but as equals. If we believe in the union, we have to prove it works.

And secondly a brilliant piece of reporting by the FT:

Report from Glasgow – a city on the brink of a political earthquake
Jim Pickard    Author alerts
| Apr 24 07:00 | 35 comments | Share

"We can get the Tories out and start delivering fairness in this country," he told her. "Aye," she replied, nodding.

"We won't get fairness while they're still in." Again she replied, smiling: "Aye."

After Mr Bain disappeared up the street she gave her honest opinion. "No, I'm voting SNP. I'm all for independence," she said.

Possilpark is one of the most deprived areas in Glasgow, scarred by the decline of manufacturing since the 1980s: out of 70,000 adults only 28,000 are registered taxpayers. Close to 10,000 are on long-term sickness benefit.

Many of those canvassed by Mr Bain said they were solidly behind Labour. But the former MP is keeping an eye on the bookies' odds, which are getting closer every day.

When Mr Bain – majority 15,942 – cannot take his seat of Glasgow North East for granted, it speaks volumes about the future of the Labour party in the Scottish city.

Out of seven Labour MPs in central Glasgow he may be the only one to survive on May 7.

Frank Burke, who lives on the other side of the city, was among the union members who went out on strike in the 1970s under the leadership of Jimmy Reid at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.

For decades there was no question that he would vote any other way than for Labour.

But the pensioner is disillusioned:
"Labour are rubbish, they are not left-wing any more, they should nationalise the railways, gas electricity," he told me. "Instead they are full of careerist politicians and they do nothing for people like me."

Some Glaswegians used to deride the Scottish National Party as "Tartan Tories": But the tables have turned. Now there are stickers across the city attacking Labour as "Red Tories".

Glasgow was once a Labour stronghold: it is now a fortress on the brink of conquest by the increasingly popular SNP.

In the Easterhouse estate in east Glasgow– another area of acute deprivation – every person who stopped to talk said they were likely to vote for the nationalists.

They included Graham Epton, a handyman who backed Scottish independence last year: he is now switching his support from Labour to the SNP.

Labour had monopolised votes in Easterhouse because it was for both "the working class and the unemployed", said Mr Epton, chatting outside the Easterhouse Community Health Centre.

He described an area dogged in the past by "umpteen gangs" and endemic knife and drug crime – but with "hundreds of great people" getting by.

"I'm not sure that Labour are working for us any more. I know a lot of people who are definitely voting SNP. A lot of people."

An early summer descended on Glasgow this week but the clouds are gathering for Labour.

Margaret Curran, shadow secretary of state for Scotland, said that only a "fool" would deny that Labour is facing a tough battle in the west coast city.

"There is a definite sense that people want change," she said, talking to journalists after an event at a nursery in Baillieston in Glasgow East.

"They do feel that Westminster has let them down. We need to prove that the best party to produce positive change in the whole country is Labour."

Glasgow East was Ms Curran's seat in the last Parliament: now her majority of 11,840 looks likely to crumble.

It did not look very positive for Ms Curran on the streets of Easterhouse. Ann Monaghan, a cleaner, said that most of her friends and family would vote for the SNP – including herself.
"It's most people now apart from a few diehard Labour people," she said, waiting at a bus stop. Her friend, who did not give her name, is also SNP: "My son is making me," she said.

Someone once told me of Scottish politics: "It's so vicious because the stakes are so low". (The quote was a twist on Henry Kissinger's observation on student politics.)

Today that no longer holds.

Voters in Scotland now hold the key to the result of the general election, deciding the country's political future for the next five years.

The polls are pointing to only one result: a landslide for the Scottish National Party.

There will be seats where Labour clings on: but it will be reduced from its previous tally of 40 MPs to a vastly diminished rump.

And that could decide – on the national canvas – whether Labour wins more seats than the Tories on May 7. It seems increasingly likely that Scotland will be the crucial factor.

The SNP had six MPs in the last Parliament. Now it is set to deliver 30, 40 or even 50 politicians to Westminster.

Labour's biggest losses are expected in the one-time Red stronghold of Glasgow, a concept that some people find mind-boggling, including Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Tory former Scotland secretary. "It is like my party losing the Home Counties," he told me.

Others on the outer fringes of the city are also under severe pressure: including Jim Murphy in East Renfrewshire, Douglas Alexander in Paisley and Tom Greatrex in Rutherglen & Hamilton West.

Labour has not lost a seat at a general election in Glasgow for three decades: since 1983.

Political commentators often talk about "big events": the resignation of a cabinet minister, a big Parliamentary defeat, or Mark Reckless winning the by-election in Rochester & Strood.

But it seem likely that Ukip's two by-election victories last autumn will be only a footnote to 2014.

In Scotland – by contrast – it feels as if history is being made.

Polls are just polls, of course. But after four days talking to scores of people around different areas of Glasgow it seems pretty clear. The pollsters are right.

For years many Scots have voted one way for Holyrood elections and another for Westminster elections – delivering a majority to the SNP in Scotland four years ago. The big shift is their willingness to vote for the nationalists in both events.

What no one knows yet is whether a landslide for the SNP will turn out to be a cyclical event or structural.

The Tories thought they would return after being wiped out in Scotland in 1997: that recovery never came. (Although the party had one Tory MP in the last Parliament.)

Instead, the party seems as defunct as the Victorian gravestones in the Necropolis that looms above Glasgow, built by rich merchants in the heyday of the "Second City of the British Empire".

For all their public talk of "confidence" and "resilience" some Labour strategists fear this is not a defeat that they will bounce back from too easily.

For anyone outside Glasgow– which has been a fiefdom of the Labour party for a lifetime – the trend may seem puzzling. The city holds a special place in the history of industrial relations, not least because of the "Red Clyde" workers' demonstrations of the early 20th century.

"If you're from Glasgow you're a socialist," said Stewart O'Neill, a Tory-supporting student. "My preference makes me unusual," he said with considerable under-statement.

But the city was one of the few areas that backed independence in last autumn's referendum: by 194,779 votes to 169,347. (Or 53%:47%).

That sense of longing for "freedom" and "change" has endured: and with it a feeling of having been short-changed by the Westminster parties in the immediate aftermath.

Mr Bain probably articulated it most clearly.
"What we have got here is a hybrid between the basic left-to-right politics you have got in England and the pure identify politics of Northern Ireland," he said. "We are now a mix of the two. That makes it a challenging place electorally. What matters at the moment is how people feel."

The sight of Labour politicians working alongside the widely-hated Tories has been immensely damaging.

John Boyle, one of Scotland's best known entrepreneurs – who provided financial backing to last year's Better Together anti-indepence campaign – still cannot quite believe the polls.

The multi-millionaire former owner of Motherwell FC is astonished by the spike in support for the SNP despite what he calls their "stardust" measures based on a "cloud of economic nonsense."

"Having won the battle, to now lose the war seems extraordinary," he said over a Diet Coke at his house in suburban west Glasgow.

Politicians like to think that the public are hanging on their every word; their promises, their speeches, their manifestos.

That is not the case – even in Scotland, where the level of political engagement is refreshing compared to the widespread apathy in England. (People are talking about politics at home, in the pub, in the workplace.)

Many Glaswegians told me they opposed Westminster-led "austerity" or perhaps the Trident nuclear deterrent: but no one mentioned zero-hours contracts, or the mansion tax, or free schools, or any of the other themes that dominate the English political debate. If anything they wanted Labour to be even more left-wing.

Instead many people described a positive emotional response to the SNP: they believed simply that the party would stick up for them.

This is the message on posters across the City, above a picture of a confident Nicola Sturgeon: "My vow is to make Scotland stronger at Westminster." The SNP manifesto title? "Stronger for Scotland."

It is a simple phrase but it is working.

At dawn, on the slopes of Ben Arthur, in the Trossachs National Park– half an hour north of Glasgow– I encountered climber Euan Ryan, a 20-something SNP supporter.

"A change is needed," said Mr Ryan, who works in the creative industries.

"Things need to be shaken up a bit. I feel I don't have a voice in Parliament at the moment and that is now going to change at last."

The mood is perhaps best summed up by Samantha Morton, who works at a housing association.

She told me: "For the first time ever I think my vote might actually count for something...I feel completely empowered."

At an event at Glasgow University on Tuesday night, former first minister Alex Salmond was given an honorary doctorate. In his acceptance speech he made a direct appeal to the hundreds of academic types sat in front of him and emphasising the SNP's "progressive" ideals.

"Caged rats will choose freedom for other rats over cheese for themselves," he declared, clad in red robes. "If even rats have empathy, so can humans."

Lorna Young, a student at the university, said it was an "excellent" speech.

"The more represented the SNP is at Westminster, the more we will be able to put forward what we want as a country," she said as she left the event. "I just don't think Labour has put up a good fight for Scotland's interests."

The main thrust of Labour's counter-attack is to warn that for every SNP politician sent to Westminster– at its expense – the more likely it will be that the Tories get back into government. And surely voters don't want another Tory government?

That may sound logical. But it smacks of negative campaigning. And it is not cutting through to voters, many of whom believe that most politicians would say anything to get elected, true or otherwise.

Many believe the SNP claims that Labour would carry out "austerity-lite". The Labour argument that it would cut the deficit less painfully than the Tories is not gaining much traction.

Nor is the claim from the IFS – made on Thursday – that the SNP would cut some parts of government even more deeply than Labour.

"I just think it's scare tactics, that's what we had during the referendum campaign," said Ms Monaghan, the cleaner in Easterhouse. "I'm just fed up with it."

Derek Holland, a 45-year old electrician, said he had heard the argument. "But I don't think it will make any difference, Labour won't make a difference."

The SNP is picking up support from those who wanted independence last year – and came tantalisingly close – from other parties.

That alarms some Labour loyalists. "As far as I'm concerned, if you vote SNP you're voting for the break-up of the UK, people need to wake up and realise it's just around the corner," warned John Wall, a 68-year old former union official.

In Possilpark, pensioner Patsy Filligan told Mr Bain that she would never back the nationalist "mob". The last time the SNP knocked on her door she slammed it closed on them, she recalled. "They never came back."

Such views are getting less common, however.

Behind closed doors the morale of Labour activists is hitting new lows with every passing week.

One compared the situation to being a professional sportsman doing the same thing as before – but this time finding it does not work. "Everything we do, everything we say, it just isn't moving the dial," he said mournfully.

Another former MP said he was disillusioned with politics. "I should have stood down last year," he said.

One Labour figure observed that Scotland appeared to be gripped by something akin to the US Tea Party trend.

The Labour brand is in decline – even if it is still nothing like as toxic as that of the Tories.

"Labour used to be the party of the people but they aren't any more," said Mr Holland. "The SNP is the new lot, the way Labour used to be."

Labour candidates are astonished by the speed of the reversal, which has occurred in barely half a year. "Last summer you could get odds of 100:1 on me losing my seat," said one former Glasgow MP, incredulously.

Some fear that the party was damaged by its association with the Tories during the Better Together campaign.

Others within the party point to an organisation hollowed out by decades of complacency.

"I went up to help the campaign last summer and asked who the local organisers were and where I could see their database," said one member of the shadow cabinet. "They didn't have one – because they hadn't needed to do any campaigning for so long."

Jim Murphy, Labour's leader in Scotland, struck an upbeat note as he campaigned on a soap box in Glasgow City Centre on Tuesday morning – a technique he refined during the independence campaign.

Mr Murphy seemed to enjoy taking on SNP hecklers, rolling up his shirt sleeves as he declared that always loathed "bullies" when he was growing up on a Scottish "scheme" – or estate. "You've got to do better next time," he told his tormenters, after drowning them out with his microphone.

But Mr Murphy's machismo belies the fact that he too is in potential trouble. His seat of East Renfrewshire– which he has held for 18 years – is up for grabs, if a poll by Lord Ashcroft is correct.

Mr Murphy appears to have aged rapidly. "He has gone grey in the last five months," said one of his own activists.

Vincent Waters, who is managing the local SNP campaign from a former butchers in Clarkston, said his party had made contact with nearly 10,000 people in the constituency.

"The number of those people who said 'I have voted Labour all my life and I'm going to back you was unbelievable," he said over a cup of tea.

Mr Murphy is not a popular figure in Glasgow, judging by people who spoke to the FT.

Arthur McPhillimy, one of his constituents, said he was "not impressed" by his former MP. "He doesn't strike me as a strong person. He is wishy-washy," the pensioner said.

Others are even more hostile. "I just don't trust him, don't like him, he's a typical politician," said one waitress. "He was really aggressive in the TV debates."

On Ed Miliband the verdict was in a way even more damning: people just weren't interested.

"Weak" was one comment. "Well-meaning" was another. Many people barely had any view on Labour's national leader at all.

Mr Mr Miliband flew into the area on Monday to address trade unionists at their annual conference at Ayr racecourse.

He delivered a passionate speech, citing Keir Hardie – who lived locally – and promised a list of union-friendly policies such as an inquiry into blacklisting.

"His picture hangs on my wall as a constant reminder of all the strength and courage of the people who built this movement," Mr Miliband said.

But the oration was met with a half-hearted standing ovation. Perhaps 30 out of nearly 200 people in the room took to their feet to applaud the Labour leader.

Scotland's union movement, supposedly the backbone of Labour, is deeply divided – with Unite and Unison having refused to campaign against independence last year.

Twenty miles up the road is the gravestone of Keir Hardie himself, although many of the locals in the village of Cumnock seemed unaware.

Local people had only vague opinions – if any about the celebrated Labour stalwart. "Never heard of him," said Angie Dynburn, 19, pushing a pram.

Gillian Davies, 58, said she had never visited the grave despite living in the village.

"The older generation might know about it, but not me, I suppose it might be something they teach in schools?" she said.

And finally for the really bored, Alex Massie on why, of course, an SNP-Labour government would be legitimate:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/04/yes-of-course-an-snp-backed-labour-government-is-perfectly-legitimate/

Edit: Also Scottish politics has a wonderfully different atmosphere to the UK in general. Especially Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson seem like normal people. I don't know how they do it. Maybe they just are normal

[Josquius]

Too many people in the UK are ignorant of how our system works.
Something really not helped by the leaders debates

[Agelastus]

First TESTS:
https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/
I got 30% each Labour and Lib Dem and 20% each UKIP and Green
Labour: Crime, Health/NHS, Welfare
Lib Dem: Economy, Environment, Education
Green: Europe, Immigration
UKIP: Foreign Policy/Defence, Democracy

UKIP 40%, Conservatives 30%, Liberal Democrats 20%, Labour 10%
UKIP: Environment, Foreign Policy/Defence, Europe, Health/NHS
Conservatives: Crime, Economy, Democracy
Liberal Democrats: Immigration, Welfare
Labour: Education (!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?)

There were three or four places where I'd have liked to select two sets of policies, however. It's a shame that option wasn't available.

And:
http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/
Labour: 56
Green: 41
Lib Dem: 28
Tory: 4
UKIP: -39

UKIP: 37
Tory: 24
Lib Dem: 12
Labour: -16
Green: -49

No surprises here.

I'm more shocked by Sheilbh's score of 41 for the Greens!

------------------

On the Scottish issue, I'm concerned that post-election we may see the first stirrings of an incipient divorce between British and Scottish politics in the same way there's a divorce between Northern Irish and British politics. If the SNP can sustain their current level of support for more than one election then the only way to oppose them in a FPTP system is to create a Unionist coalition as an alternative (albeit under a different name for historical reasons.)

I think the Scottish Tories would accept such a divorce from the parent party given their experience of the last three decades; I'm not so sure how Labour and the Lib-Dems would take it - even though you probably could cobble together a viable Unionist party from the Scottish Tories, Scottish Lib-Dems, and the realistic elements of Scottish Labour.

It would hardly do much for the stability of the Union, however.

[Tamas]

I had only categories like immigration, defense, economy, and welfare, so not an overall one...

I scored 100% Conservative 

I would find it a personal insult to be considered right-leaning in Hungary. Then again, the right there are autocratic socialists, so there is that.

[Sheilbh]

Still a personal insult here

Not interested in Europe? Odd for a Tory.

[celedhring]

Loved this 

David Cameron's own goal

The Conservative prime minister gets confused about which football team he supports

DAVID CAMERON'S inability to remember which football team he claims to support—he said on April 25th he was a West Ham fan, despite having for years claimed to follow a different team in claret-and-blue, Aston Villa —was the most embarrassing gaffe of his career. It made him look foolish. It made him look a fraud. It also stands for how imperfectly the Conservative prime minister has learned the lessons of Tony Blair, his thrice-winning New Labour predecessor, who was a far more accomplished phony football fan.

Mr Blair was not the first Labour Party prime minister to understand the potency of Britain's most popular game. Harold Wilson, a prime minister of the 1960s and 70s, was a Huddersfield Town fan who compared politics and football endlessly. After England won the World Cup in 1966 he quipped that this had only ever happened under a Labour government; he blamed Labour's defeat in the 1970 election on the goal, scored by Gerd Muller for West Germany, that had knocked England out of the World Cup four days before. But if Mr Wilson's flaunting of his passion for the working-man's game grated, no one doubted that his passion was real. Not least, because at this time English football was similarly politicised and left-wing. "The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life," said Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club. Brian Clough, another great manager, and socialist, turned down invitations to stand as a Labour MP. But what Mr Wilson gently manipulated, Mr Blair span outrageously.

The further New Labour pivoted towards the middle-class-populated centre ground, the louder its members trumpeted their football love. To be a member of the Labour governments that ran Britain from 1997 to 2010 was, with remarkably few exceptions, to be—or to claim to be—obsessed with the game. Mr Blair, a middle-class, public-schoolboy from Edinburgh, claimed to be a diehard Newcastle United fan. Footage of the Labour leader playing keep-up with Kevin Keegan, a former Newcastle and England great, shortly before he made it to 10 Downing Street, was about the most iconic of his career. His lieutenants were similarly, and in some cases actually, football-mad. Alastair Campbell, Gordon Brown, Ed Balls all talked up their love of the game, in a way that could seem revealingly challenging and self-righteous. To proclaim football love was a palliative for New Labour's junking of the class war. It was a redoubt of the male chauvinism it otherwise frowned on. Ironically, what was meanwhile happening to English football was more indicative of Britain under New Labour. Turbo-charged with satellite television money, the English Premier League grew rapidly, to become the highly commercialised, globalised business it now is, from which traditional working-class British culture has been largely banished.

New Labour was cynical and opportunistic in its football love; at least it had something to say about the main enthusiasm of modern Britain. Most Conservatives seemed uninterested in the game which, by contrast, seemed indicative of their general fogeyishness. According to Mr Campbell, the Tory MP Nicholas Soames proudly advertised the fact that he preferred fox-hunting to football. Mr Cameron, a keen huntsman until hunting was banned in 2005, was probably of the same stable. Addressing the House of Commons in 2001, he said: "Many of those who have spoken in the debate or have written about the subject are either lawyers or football fans, but I have to confess that I am neither". Yet a decade later, the self-declared "heir to Blair" and Tory moderniser was pictured jogging in a customised Aston Villa shirt and declaring himself to be an "ardent fan".

Sham football ardour is now widespread in British politics. (The Labour candidate for Thurrock, Polly Billington, a former spin-doctor, provided a particularly irritating demonstration during last year's World Cup in Brazil. Having feigned umbrage at being disturbed during the England team's group game against Uruguay, she then sent your correspondent a celebratory text after the Uruguayans scored, followed by the inevitable retraction: "Sorry, that wasn't meant for you".) But this doesn't excuse Mr Cameron's bungle. In a speech on multiculturalism, this Villa obsessive trumpeted a Britain:"Where you can support Man Utd, the Windies and Team GB all at the same time. Of course, I'd rather you supported West Ham."

Oh dear. He claimed it was the result of a "brain fade". More likely, he was reading out a badly-prepared speech. Either way, it was the sort of appallingly sloppy error it is impossible to imagine the cynical, but efficient, Mr Blair and his team of New Labour spinners making. Mr Cameron should feel cripplingly embarrassed.

[Valmy]

So long as the SNP sits at Westminster and doesn't go all Sinn Fein on us I don't see why they cannot help form a government. Hell that would probably be the best thing for the Union. Tories are stupid.

[Richard Hakluyt]

So long as the SNP sits at Westminster and doesn't go all Sinn Fein on us I don't see why they cannot help form a government. Hell that would probably be the best thing for the Union. Tories are stupid.

They are noted for it. Film when the big hand is pointing to 12 and the little hand is pointing at 11.

[Sheilbh]

They truly are the stupid party. A unionist party still struggling to learn the lessons of the 1880s.

Not unrelatedly, the SNP are now polling at 54%

No legitimacy though.

[Ed Anger]

I support Monster Raving Loony.

[Josquius]

As expected the quiz gives me 50 labour, 25 green, 0 lib dem, -25 Tory and -50 UKIP

[celedhring]

34 Labour, 34 Green, 14 LibDem, -22 Tory, -31 UKIP

The other test is way too long.