ALL OVER BAR THE VOTING

Estimated Declaration Times

Well, it's all over bar the voting.

Much has been written about melt downs and Labour and the Liberals being obliterated.

I'm cautious. OK, call me a pessimist and a glass half empty man, but I prefer to predict low and be pleasantly surprised, rather than the other way around.

Remember any more seats than we have at the moment will be a gain.

At present the SNP has 6 seats in the London parliament. To get 12 would represent a massive success. It would double the representation, and would be one more than they have ever had in London.

Synchronisity  in Anas's ward.
All these people seem to have had the same thoughts, and written the same letter at the same time. Just how completley amazing is that?
Does he have magic powers?

Twenty seats would be a fantastic breakthrough; 30 utterly fabulous.

I'm thinking somewhere between 30 and 35 seats may go SNP.

Any more than that and we are off the scale.

Whatever it is, if it isn't the 59 that some of the press has been predicting, the unionists will call it all a busted flush. Be ready for that and remember that on the day after the election, parties tend to, and have always tended to, big up what little success they have had.

How well we remember, Dave.
Just read it back now and weep for your wickedness.

Just for a little light relief on the last day...

How many seats do you think the SNP will get, realistically?

And...

Of the potential losers, who do you most wish to lose their seat, and why?

Will it be Margaret Curran, for the vitriol she has spewed and for her dogged devotion to right-wing Jim, when only weeks before his election (she voted for him too) she was promising Glasgow Man a lurch to the left; to old Labour and socialism? (Like she remembered what that was!)

Will it be Jim himself? 

The strangest possible choice to lead a party that is begging for a move to the left, is a neo-Liberal, anti-Muslim, white supremacist, enthusiast for war, and lieutenant of the odious Blair. 

Why did they elect him? 

Failure to win his seat would be the ultimate humiliation for the party. Not particularly likely to happen as I'm sure they will have put massive resources into the seat, and will have taken every possible measure to ensure that Jim is back with a decent majority.

Or maybe it will be Cathy. Her record certainly suggests that she is pretty solidly anti Scotland having any powers. Interestingly in a year when most public servants had no pay rise or a pay rise of 1%, she appears to have given her husband a rise of 100%. Nice work if you can get it... and keep it. 

There's a raft of obnoxious Labour MPs who seem to have achieved almost nothing for some of the poorest people in Britain, and Western Europe. Amazingly Willie Bain, the worst of them, is almost guaranteed his seat. 

Just as well, what else could he do?

Remember though, whoever it is you want rid of, THIS is what we are up against. For all their protestations that they want us to stay, there is a strong feeling that we are not welcome in their union.

Who can put up a strong fight for Scotland? Maggie Curran, Cathy Jamieson, Anas Sarwar?

Of course we shouldn't forget the Liberals, although heaven knows, it's easy to do just that. They seem to have adapted remarkably quickly to being Tories. The obvious choice is high flyer Danny Alexander. You may remember that he's not a REAL Tory, just an honorary one.  Alternatively, there is the all but useless Scottish Secretary whose involvement in l'affaire francaise has still not been explained?

Anyway, your thoughts, if you have time on what I know will be a busy day, will be much welcomed.

Fingers crossed. Good luck in all your constituencies.

OHH, HOW QUICKLY THEY FORGET...

Quite often I wonder about the wit of politicians (and by that I don't mean how funny they are, but how bright they are), but today's news that Iain Gray and Cathie Jamieson are demanding that Alex Salmond come clean over the fact that Brain Soutar got a knighthood, has left my chin on the floor all day. Indeed, it's only in the last half hour or so that I've managed to raise it.

The jist of the story is that Brain Soutar did indeed agree to match pound for pound any donation to the SNP up to a maximum of £500,000, back in February of this year. There was no attempt to hide this. It was in all the papers. In the Queen's birthday honours list Souter was knighted.

A spokesman for the First Minister said: "Scottish Ministers make no nominations, and are only informed of those receiving honours shortly before they are publicly announced". The entire process does not involve Scottish ministers, but a committee of civil servants, and Alex Salmond in 2007 actually gave up his right to scrutinise the list before it is sent, through the English PM, to the Queen.

I imagine that this committees is quite careful in its scrutiny, since the Cash for Honours case, so, erm, expertly handled for the Metropolitan Police by...who was it again...oh yes, Yates of the Yard, the man who can review a case of 5,000 pages in a few hours and find no case to answer. That will be why he was forced to resign his post. Again I'd just point out that this particular donation, and indeed Soutar's previous donations to the SNP, were well publicised.

Anyway, the jaw dropping part of it all was the incredible stupidity of Jamieson and Gray. If I were in the Labour party, the subject of cash for honours is one I would steer very very clear of.

Why? Well quite apart from the fact that there are calls for the above case to be reopened in the light of Mr Yates' resignation, and heaven knows what that will throw up, I can mention a few names that the two hapless Labourites might like to cogitate over, before they make too much more of it and have it thrown back at them by bigger beasts than Munguin's Republic.

1997 - David Sainsbury, who, they might recall, had donated £3 million to the Labour Party became Lord Sainsbury

2004 - Paul Drayson donated £555,000 to the Labour Party and became Lord Drayson and a privy councillor to boot.

2006 - David Garrard and Barry Townsley whose names were submitted to the Lords for investing in Blair's Academies. Downing Street first said it was ridiculous to make connections with their donations, but after it was shown that this had figured largely in the argument put forward for their elevation, they said that they wanted lords who knew about education... they were not allowed.

2011 - Lord Noon, originally knighted and most recently sent to the Lords having "lent" the Labour party money.

And that's off the top of my head...there were many more whose names escape me for the present.

Now Cathie and Iain, what was that about openness?