Calm Down: The SNP Are Probably Not Going to 'Ruin' Britain

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Britain is in grave peril. Such peril, you need to understand, that one Mail on Sunday writer actually wrote that the Thames may soon be "foaming with blood" (srsly). Such peril that the Tories made a poster showing Ed Miliband as Alex Salmond's pocket hankie. Because having lost the referendum, it now turns out that Nicola Sturgeon and her menacing band of anti-British separatists have set their eyes set on a higher prize and that come May, they'll be marching on Westminster.

Unless every single poll conducted over the past few months has been spectacularly wrong, the general election will deliver a landslide victory for the SNP in Scotland, with the party taking as many as 56 of the country's 59 seats. This means that, particularly with UK-wide polls being too close to call, they could play a decisive role in deciding the next government of a country that they don't even want a part of.

Because of this, a lot of people—well, Labour spin-doctors and Daily Mail op-ed writers anyway—are freaking out. With the SNP having firmly ruled out any support for a Conservative Government, all the attention has turned to a will-they-won't-they scenario of their MPs propping up a minority Labour Government in some form. It's unchartered territory for British politics, meaning there's a lot of wild speculation about what it will actually mean.

Faced with an electoral wipe-out, Scottish Labour have started trying to be as much like the SNP as possible, even rewriting their constitution to talk about how "patriotic" they are in the meagre hope this will turn their fortunes around. The Liberal Democrats seem to be pinning their electoral hopes on a series of flyers that look like the Take a Shit magazine spoof by Viz, full of recipes for sausage stew and photos of Danny Alexander, and conjuring up images of a nightmarish, faceless SNP bogeyman, so obsessed by independence he doesn't even have a name.

The Tories can barely contain their glee. Although their sole Scottish seat might fall victim to the Nationalist surge, it'll be a price worth paying if it means they get to spend the next two months telling everyone who'll listen that the SNP and Labour are intent on destroying Britain together. Judging by their output over the past week, this seems to be their plan. It's the "frightening prospect we must avoid," David Cameron tweeted while unveiling his party's latest attack advert, which features a gormless Miliband perched inside Salmond's pocket. (Although he's no longer SNP leader, Salmond is standing to be an MP in May.)

The assault continued in yesterday's English edition of The Sun, which featured a dodgy photoshop of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon riding in on wrecking ball, Miley Cyrus style. The not so subtle message being, of course, that the SNP are out to wreck Britain and, at least according to senior Tories, that means Labour are as well. Helpfully, the paper provided a quick guide to exactly which areas the SNP are planning to "ruin Britain" in, including their pro-immigration stance, their opposition to renewing nuclear weapons and calls for more devolved powers. They forgot to mention anything about the Scottish edition if The Sun's support for the SNP over the past five years, but did find room for a rogues' gallery of four prospective SNP candidates. This terrifying line-up included an, er, NHS breast cancer surgeon, a 20 year old politics student and a random photo of an Asian woman that isn't even the right candidate. With separatist monsters like this holding the grip of power in Britain, what hope is there for ordinary, hardworking families?

A few days earlier, another Mail writer, Max Hastings, also got in on the act, with a grave warning to "English taxpayers" about the prospect of Labour support for the SNP's "near-Stalinist" agenda of Highland land grabs and fantasy economics, pushing the idea of Scotland being some sort of knock-off Cuba in the North Atlantic.

The reality is they're far more boring and managerial than any "Tartan Stalinist" nightmare, an image that seems to only exist in the imaginations of frothing right-wing commentators. The Scottish Government have to balance their costs and last year actually underspent their budget by $660 million. The party has earned a reputation for competent government, although in part that's because they're in the perfect situation of being able to pass the blame for any unpopular policies, like cuts to local council budgets, on to Westminster. No irony is lost though in that after years of warning Scotland that it needed to stay in the UK for fear of becoming a one-party state under the SNP, many of these same commentators are now in a panic about much the same happening to the entire UK, with the prospect of a government in which Salmond "calls the tune," as Cameron put it yesterday.

The SNP themselves are pretty keen to play up how important they're going to be in the next parliament, in which it seems unlikely any party will win a majority. Although saying that they wont enter a formal coalition agreement with Labour, meaning no ministerial car or cabinet job for Salmond, they may support them on a vote-by-vote basis. While not really a basis for secure government, it does mean that they'll be in a position to squeeze concessions out of Labour in return for support, and maybe "ruin Britain" while they're at it.

But when it comes down to it, could they really force Labour to do loads of stuff that would make Britain look like East Germany, even if they wanted to? Probably not. They'll still be under a huge amount of pressure to compromise, for fear of letting a Miliband government fall and the Tories in by the backdoor. Few things wind up SNP members more than invoking the memory of 1979, when the party's MPs—reeling after a devolution ballot was shot down because of low turnout—sided with Thatcher and helped bring down the last Labour government for 18 years. Given they still haven't lived that down, it's unlikely they'll want to repeat the experience.

The polls in Scotland seem unlikely to change much ahead of the referendum, meaning the Tories' new obsession over a Labour/SNP coalition will likely keep running all the way until May. If you live in England, it's probably best to start bracing yourself for a deluge of Alex Salmond billboards.

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