ANKARA
With just over a week to go until the U.K. heads to the polls, the prospect of Scottish nationalists propping up a minority Labour government has come to dominate the general election campaign.
The leader of the left-wing Scottish National Party (SNP) emphasized on Monday that her party did not want to use the election as a stepping stone to a repeat of last September’s independence referendum.
“Even if we won every seat in Scotland that would not be a mandate for a referendum,” Nicola Sturgeon told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. “This election is not about a referendum on independence."
The SNP’s popularity has risen sharply since the referendum, largely to the detriment of Labour support in Scotland, where it has been the dominant party for decades. The SNP’s surge is one of the factors threatening center-left Labour’s ability to form a majority government after the May 7 poll.
A recent poll gave the SNP a 28-point lead over Labour in Scotland. Based on these figures, news website The National predicted the SNP would take 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the Westminster parliament.
Len McClusky, general secretary of UNITE, Britain’s largest trade union, waded into the debate over a potential Labour-SNP alliance on Monday.
“I’m expecting [Labour leader] Ed Miliband to be prime minister and in those circumstances I would expect him to work well with any progressive party who seeks to support the vision that he has of changing Britain for the better,” he told the Guardian newspaper.
Labour has ruled out a formal coalition with the SNP and on Sunday Miliband dismissed a looser agreement, whereby the SNP would back a Labour budget in return for concessions on other issues.
“I want to be clear about this. No coalitions, no tie-ins… I’ve said no deals. I am not doing deals with the Scottish National Party," he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
Left-winger McClusky, whose union is the largest financial donor to the Labour Party, has frequently clashed with the party’s leadership, despite supporting Miliband in the 2010 leadership battle with his brother David.
Last week, a note published by a consultancy firm chaired by former Labour election supremo Peter Mandelson, who helped engineer Labour’s return to power under Tony Blair, predicted that the SNP’s gains would "pull the Labour Party to the left, away from the centre ground of English politics."
As a stalwart of “Old Labour,” which opposed the party’s stance under Blair, McClusky would welcome such a shift to the left, observers have noted.
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon pounced on McClusky’s support for a Labour-SNP alliance, describing it as proof that Sturgeon “knows she will be pulling Ed Miliband's strings if he gets into Downing Street.”
