When she’s dead and the BBC no longer put out anniversary programming.

“Salmond’s SNP administration in Holyrood would have collapsed long ago without tacit, and at times overt, support from Goldie.”

AG has worked out how to operate in this environment. There is no sign that any in the Scottish Labour party have, or that the UK party would allow the flexibility that would be necessary. Labour have too many other problems to participate and perhaps lack the will to do so.

Perhaps after losing the next UK and SP elections they will begin to act as a responsible minor party should. That would be better for everyone, including the SNP government.

“I’ll vote for LD as it is the best chance to stop Con/Lab in my area. ”

Maybe that explains the fall in LD support in Scotland. The face competition from the SNP as best buy for the negative voter. That can be very regional or local.

It’s not about what the LD’s have done or not done, it’s just that in some places there is a better product available.

The SNP in this SLD constituency claim that they couldn’t find anybody who voted FOR the LD and very many who voted against Con, Lab, Con+LAB or SNP.

Is that a prescription for a safe LD seat? Are the negative voters the majority?

You and a few others posting seem to think Politics should be defined by Left and Right wing .The population are not like that they don’t think in terms of Lenin or Marx or Adam Smith .Left and Right are rather arcane concepts now.

To me you have two largely conservative parties (Labour and Conservative plus UKIP and BNP) who fundamentally want to keep things as they are/go back King Canute style to what we once seemed to be) and swap power occassionallly and two largely progressive parties Liberal Democrats and Greens.

There are some progressives in both Labour and Conservative parties too but there a a minority.

The politics of left and right is an early 20th Century concept that is finally dying (at last) hence the decline in Labour and Conservative combined vote share at each successive GE.

‘Th Lib dems are left wing they support nationalization the railways, removal of tuition fees, joining the euro.’

They support temporary nationalisation of public services until the economic crisis is over, they do duspport the removal of tuition fews and only afew of them want to switch to the Euro. As a Lib Dem supporter i do think we should work more with the EU but i do not support converting to the EU, i find it odd quoteing Mrs Thatcher but here i go:

‘The pound sterling has served the country and indeed the world well’ (or somthing to that accord).

I wasn’t aware that the there were more than the minimum of no. seats, but the average Welsh or Scottish constituency still has significantly fewer people than the UK average: Wales has 6.2% of MPs (40) but 4.9% (3/61) of the population, Scotland has 9.1% of MPs (59) but 8.3% (5.16/61) of the UK population.

No doubt there are reasons why the Boundary Commissions have allocated more seats than population would suggest, but I was trying to illustrate that they are subject to rules that cause imbalances in the sizes of constituencies and Wales would still have more than 4.9% of MPs, even if Wales only had the minimum of 35.

The most recent boundary changes have been tinkering – 651 in 1992, 659 in 1997 & 2001, 646 in 2005 & 650 in 2010. These seem to have had little impact on the pro-Labour tilt of the system. But what would reducing the number of MPs to 600 or less do?