A bad night for monkeys

This is a rare departure from the travel focus of this blog - although the 12,000 miles distance between me and the site of the story might just qualify. I love - and want to share - these quotes from Ian Macwhirter's article in The Guardian on Friday May 6th.

'Seasoned political hacks were lost for superlatives in their efforts to encapsulate the scale of the Liberal Democrat defeat. Their vote didn't just collapse, it was vaporised.'

'Scottish National Party has achieved what most political analysts believed was not possible: an overall majority in a proportional electoral system. The political map of Scotland has been transformed.'

'Labour's campaign insulted the intelligence of the Scottish voters by insisting that, as their manifesto put it: "The Tories are back" when they emphatically are not – in Scotland at least.'

So the debate about independence for Scotland is shifting up a gear now that ten+ years of 'autonomy' has shown Scotland is not just willing, but also extremely able. I don't share the view of people who commented that the (now assured) referendum on independence will not return a positive result. If that opinion is as current as the comment about passport control at Carlisle, I'd start planning the severance package. Has somebody not noticed that the EU ruled out the need for passports at Copenhagen, Calais, Cologne or Carlisle?

I'm not sure I share the view of the article's author either, when he says:

'The voters have returned the insult by applying to Labour the kind of tactical voting they used to destroy the Scottish Tories in the 1990s.'

Is it not just vaguely possible that voters picked the horse they wanted to win, rather than the one most likely to fall and trip up the winner? Just a thought!