'The best laid schemes o' Blair and Brown gang aft a-gley'

This morning Tony Blair is sitting in Downing Street looking at a Britain potentially in ruins. The local election results across the whole of the UK yesterday produced some dreadful reverses for the Labour Party though maybe not on the scale Blair himself had feared. However where the damage has been greatest has been where it carries most importance, in Scotland, which returned the Scottish National Party as the largest party in Scotland, to the Scottish Parliament. The SNP and its leader Alex Salmond have as their ultimate goal complete independence and they plan to hold a referendum on that issue within three years.



Blair must be thinking he is better off out of it, due to announce his resignation as Prime Minister next week, and what a bitter legacy he leaves behind. The man who came in on a wave of joyous enthusiasm ten years ago, who enhanced his image at the time of Princess Diana's death and at 911, is leaving his post as a reviled leader, the architect of British involvement in Iraq, the collapse of pension schemes and now the angry butt of doctors who see the National Health Service collapsing around them.

For his presumed successor, Gordon Brown, Blair's attempts to put a brave face on the electoral disaster will have a very hollow ring. "I don't think the results are that bad," warbled Tony, "I see them as a springboard for a future General Election victory."

Brown must be looking at those words with a baleful glare. Springboard for who he may well ask? Certainly not the Labour Party on the evidence of yesterdays vote. But for Brown, himself a Scot, the grim future must be north of Hadrian's Wall. In Brown's own parliamentary constituency, the SNP took the seat so in a General Election could the the Prime Minister-elect lose his own parliamentary seat? Its not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Worse is the situation regarding a future relationship with a Scotland led by the SNP. If Scotland does vote to rip up the Act of Union, then apart from the other consequences to the United Kingdom, all the Scottish Parliamentary seats at Westminster will, at a stroke, disappear. It is those seats which have kept the Labour Party in office. Without them the chances of a future Labour Government in what would be left of the UK would be almost nil.

Blair must be surveying the wreckage all around him and asking himself what went wrong. Ironically it is his reforming measure to allow the nations of Scotland and Wales a limited degree of independence through their own parliaments which has given the Scots the necessary confidence to vote for the possibility of one further step - complete independence. Rather than showing the gratitude through the polls that Blair had confidently expected from this measure, the voters of Scotland have kicked him in the teeth with it.




And the tartan disaster was not confined to the political effects on the UK. On a day when the most important Scottish election for over 200 years took place, Scottish officials decided to hold their Parliamentary and local council elections on the same day - using two different voting systems. The result was a disaster. In a nation of 2 million voters, 100,000 voting slips were declared invalid because of mistakes in filling them in. On a day of such importance, to attempt such a stupid cross pollination of two systems is absolutely disgraceful. Whether the lost votes would have meant a bigger victory for the SNP or Labour retaining control of Scotland we will never know, but it must have put the tin lid on an appalling night for Tony Blair and for the future of the United Kingdom.