Friday, March 21, 2008

The English and Scottish Conservatives should remember the Union!

Iain Dale from earlier on in the week:
The SNP no longer regards the Tories as the devil incarnate, but any formal coalition is currently still an impossibility under the SNP constitution, I believe.

Nice of them, but shouldn't that be the Conservative and Unionist Party still regarding the SNP as the "devil incarnate"?

Apparently not:
This would have been unthinkable even a year ago, yet in Scotland there is a growing respect between the SNP and the Conservatives, and this is being reflected in Westminster too. There is growing friendly banter between leading Tories and the SNP's small but perfectly formed band of Westminster MPs.

Mr Dale also describes Alex Salmond as a "political colossus", a phrase which even the SNP Propaganda Dept would have rejected as a bit too OTT .
OK, that's just Iain Dale's opinion and after all "growing respect" and "growing friendly banter" is rather hard to objectively quantify...but still, he does have his ear pretty close to the ground and it does make you wonder about where exactly Salmond is leading the Tories.

But more importantly is that "unthinkable" scenario previously mentioned-it is, of course, the Tories at Westminster after the next election forming a coalition government with the SNP.

What should be worrying all Unionists with that possibility is what price would Salmond extract for such a deal and what exactly would the Conservatives be prepared to pay to return to government after almost 15 years?

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