Radical Times

The current debate among Scottish nationalists appears to be about whether or not it might be best for the SNP to lose next year’s Scottish elections, leaving the Labour Party to take the blame for implementing London’s impending budget cuts.

The argument appears to be that if the SNP wins the May 2011 elections, they will be forced to pass on Westminster’s promised budget cuts, and the Scottish press will paint the SNP as willing Vichy partners in the Tory devastation of Scottish society.

So if the SNP were to lose this election, so the argument goes, it wouldn’t really matter. Labour would get the blame for the subsequent cuts, and Scots would remember they were offered an alternative, and avoid making the same mistake in 2015.

At first sight, this argument appears to have merit. For a moment I started to believe it myself. After careful consideration, however, I now see there are huge flaws with this strategy. One is that it relies on Scots coming to blame Labour for the Tory cuts, when for four years the Unionist press in Scotland would be singing in perfect harmony that it is not Labour’s fault, but the Tories.

But there is a bigger problem. This strategy would lead many in the SNP to conclude that it’s better simply to give up now without a fight, to stop campaigning and take a break.

The Labour Party, not to mention the British Establishment, would like nothing better.

Consider this: if Labour knows that savage cuts are coming in Scotland, why on earth do they want to win this election so badly? Because they know that an SNP victory will probably mean more SNP seats in Holyrood. Which will be one step nearer a majority, and Scotland will be one step nearer a referendum and independence.

But if the SNP were to lose, everything that has been achieved in the past three years will be swept away as if it never happened. A massive opportunity will have been missed. Momentum will be lost. Scottish independence will be taken off the political agenda for four more years, possibly longer.

That is what is at stake here. That is why the SNP and its activists must do their utmost to win this election, fighting tooth and nail, down to the wire.

Whatever happens, the SNP must hold Holyrood, and Labour must never be allowed into power in Scotland again.

The question is, though, how to achieve this? How to fire up the troops, especially with so much self-doubt in the air, after deciding not even to demand a referendum?

On the referendum, let me say that Alex Salmond was absolutely right to take it off the table for now.

First, this move has caught the Unionist parties off guard. Their printing presses were already set to say ‘Waste Of Money At Such Hard Times’, and ‘Salmond’s Vanity Project All In Vain,’ etc. They thought they knew what was next, and they were wrong.

Second, it has made the SNP rank and file wake up. Many were quite happy to sit back for the next eight months and ‘leave it to Alex’. The rigmarole of the voted-down referendum would fire up Scotland to vote the SNP back in. Sure. That’s all it would take. And all the voted down legislation for the past three years has had exactly the same effect. Scots are simply livid about Unionist obstruction on a minimum pricing for alcohol. They are marching in the streets for more borrowing rights for the Scottish Government. Can’t you feel it in the air?

Keech.

What is called for now is a series of bold, dramatic, game-changing political moves that seize the initiative once more, energizing the SNP activists to make this election about Scottish independence. And then to win it.

At very least, the SNP should do the following:

1. Stop complaining about the Unionist media in Scotland. Bypass it. Issue press releases, policy statements and interviews exclusively to Newsnet Scotland and STV. Nurture them as alternatives to the BBC and the Unionist dead tree press. Foreign-based contributions are restricted to political parties, but not to media organisations. Advise your cashed-up non-dom supporters to tip their millions into Newsnet Scotland.

2. Start thinking like a radical NGO. NGOs take a hostile and indifferent press for granted. Learn their tactics. Hire creative people with this background to plan media campaigns. Get them to teach your members how to form activist cells. Pull off a breathtaking and ever-building series of spectacular media stunts that exposes the true exploitative nature of the UK presence in Scotland and, by extension, teaches Scots how much better their lives could be in an independent nation.

3. Unleash the party activists to start using the tactics of creative disobedience and nonviolent protest against London rule. Turn Scottish independence into a moral issue. Get activists to study and adopt the creative protest tactics of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Saul Alinsky. These tactics work. They are unstoppable.

4. Label the BBC a foreign news agency and that as such non-payment of the BBC licence fee will not be prosecuted. Boycotts are a core strategy of nonviolent protest. The people of Scotland will rally to the cause. It will politicise Scots of all backgrounds, especially the unemployed. The courts would be powerless to handle the number of cases. Those that feel guilty can regain the moral high ground by donating their licence fees to charity. Or to Newsnet Scotland. I’m sure it could find a use for £300 million a year.

5. Win Glasgow’s heart. Take a leaf from Old Labour’s book: create a powerful emotional bond between the people of Glasgow and the SNP as their protectors. The SNP is the only major political party that is prepared to defend Scotland against London’s cuts. Hold two or three meet-the-people cabinet meetings every year in the heart of Glasgow. Forget persuading the long-term unemployed – they don’t vote. They will gain from Scottish independence by getting jobs, but most won’t thank you for it. It’s the working and middle class who vote New Labour. Talk to them. Recruit for the party amongst their community leaders. And then win Glasgow Council.

6. Get Scottish teenagers engaged in politics. Get MSPs to visit schools to talk to students like adults. Recruit more students to the party. Get them to help with by-elections. Build a grassroots organisation that grows organically. Play the long game.

7. Go on the information offensive. Work with Newsnet Scotland to hit Whitehall and the BBC with a hailstorm of freedom of information requests. What exactly did the Scotland Office spend its £7.2 million a year on under Jim Murphy? What directives have BBC management given to IT staff on censorship of nationalist comments on BBC blogs? What is the true nature of MI5 Operations in Scotland? Which political activists in Scotland are under surveillance? Publish the findings on Newsnet Scotland.

8. Walk away from Westminster. Announce that the SNP will no longer contest Westminster seats. This will resonate powerfully with Scots and will be the first stage of Scotland ending its association with London. Explain why – that Westminster is a waste of time and resources and that the SNP can achieve nothing there, even if they win every single Scottish seat. Leave Westminster to the New Labour piggies as their path to peerage. This handful of Scottish seats is a potent symbol of the slavish incorporation of our political class into a greater political establishment. England has refused to accept it in Europe. Why should we in Britain?

9. Fix the message. Ruthlessly, relentlessly and repeatedly push the following positive and negative messages in front of every offered microphone:

A. Independence is the only way to stop the proposed cuts to Scotland's pocket money. The cuts stop the moment we become independent.

B. The Tories have no respect for Scotland. They never did. They never will.

C. New Labour is not the answer to the Tories. The SNP is the only major party with Scotland’s interests in mind. The SNP = Scotland.

D. The Labour Party that gave us the National Health Service is dead. New Labour is the party of Tony Blair, greed, corruption and illegal wars.

E. New Labour corruption is killing Glasgow.

F. New Labour is a British party, not a Scottish one. New Labour is keeping Scotland in the UK for its own political ends. New Labour is a self-serving UK political party whose only goal is power for power’s sake. Joining the Labour Party is a career move. Most people in it have never had a real job.

G. New Labour's policies are the root cause of Britain’s financial woes. New Labour must never be trusted with power again – in London or Edinburgh.

H. New Labour let in the Tories, walking away from forming a perfectly viable UK government, just to keep out the SNP.

I. The UK is having a referendum on its voting system. Wales will get a referendum too. Where is Scotland's referendum? What is London afraid of?

J. Norway is our model. Same population size. Same landscape. Same climate. Same economy. Forget Ireland. Forget Iceland. Forget Australia. NORWAY.


That's only a start. There is so much more.

If for no other reason, these steps will give a good boost for party morale, which will be sorely tested in the times to come. You don’t win wars by ignoring your enemy. We are not children or saints: counter-punches have their place. As does creative attack.

The SNP is now fighting for the very soul of Scotland.

It’s time to get radical.

What Has Become of the BBC?

A world-renowned news service, second to none. The standard for others to meet in the quality of its analysis and the depth of coverage. Celebrated as the voice of truth and feared by repressive regimes around the world. Justly famed for its impartiality.

But all is not as it seems. The BBC, paragon of journalistic virtue, bastion of broadcasting neutrality, has a blind spot.

It seems that the BBC doesn’t do positive stories about one of the most successful governments in Europe, a government that has in only three years of power managed to improve the lives of its citizens, avoid expenses scandals, keep within its budgets, all while running a popular minority administration.

That place is Scotland.

In reality it is far more than a blind spot. That in itself would perhaps be a credible explanation for the traditional crude parody of Scottish culture, lack of proportional investment, and shallow condescension that often passes for BBC reporting on Scotland. This is something new. Something profound has changed in how the BBC operates in Scotland, and people are starting to notice.

Blithe conciliatory explanations about a poor understanding by BBC staff of the Scottish devolutionary settlement within the UK are no longer acceptable, believable, or sufficient to explain what is now happening. The BBC’s new style of coverage in Scotland consists of the willful mis-reporting and twisting of stories to protect the British Establishment, clumsy Internet censorship, the suppression of crucial and important stories central to understanding the nation’s political life, scornfully discourteous interviewing of Scotland’s First Minister, and the barring of Scottish Government representative participation in UK election debates for a parliament that is supposed to represent Scotland’s interests.

Until the Al Megrahi release a year ago, little of what was happening could have been classified as deliberate censorship or propaganda. Until then, most of the problems were sins of omission, ignorance and interview bias, however blatant. The reality is probably that most BBC employees are essentially decent people with good critical thinking skills but with a blind spot within their own British identities, people who are struggling to understand or accept the geopolitical transformation that is happening right on their doorstep.

But a perceptible and strategic shift has indeed occurred. What we are witnessing today has all the hallmarks of a state propaganda machine that would make Chinese Government officials and their IT managers proud. This is no exaggeration. Follow the links.

The remarkable thing is why anyone should be surprised. This is what happens when financial rewards for organizations are skewed: quarterly reports lead to quarterly corporate performance; allowing banks to make loans with no matching reserves lets them lend to whatever misguided fools will accept a loan; self-regulation of money markets leads to the lunatics taking over the asylum and derivative financial products that even those selling them cannot understand. That’s what happens at the frayed edges of all incentive schemes. Organisations and people will almost always perform precisely how the financial structure around them demands them to perform. Good intentions and noble market forces be damned.

The BBC is no different. The inconvenient truth for Scotland is that the means by which the BBC Trust is funded creates a powerful incentive for its stakeholders to oppose Scottish independence. This is not just about the BBC’s Scottish employees protecting their jobs – if anything, many of these are good people held back from doing their jobs as they would wish. This goes right to the top.

The reason is that when Scotland eventually, inevitably, goes its own way, the BBC Trust stands to lose nearly 9% of its £3.6billion revenue, or approximately £310million, the total that Scots contribute (on pain of criminalization) to the BBC balance sheet. This is a mighty inducement for BBC management to direct its staff to run interference on anything that even resembles kudos for the nationalist-led Scottish Government whose stated intention is to lead Scotland to independence.

This colonial nonsense has to stop.

Whoever is responsible, the simplest solution would be for the Scottish Government to demand that the BBC immediately:

1. Cease and desist from the suppression of news and to allow its BBC Scotland staff to report stories pertaining to the Scottish political scene in a fair and balanced manner.

2. End its censorship of all commentary on BBC news websites and BBC blogs relating to Scottish politics (under the pretence that the comments are offensive).


The Scottish Government should let it be known that if this does not happen by a stated date then the BBC will be forced to provide under freedom of information all minutes for the past three years for BBC Scotland management and IT policy meetings, particularly pertaining to news content. As a public body these documents must exist. The sheer volume of information will prevent any attempt at redaction or selective destruction.

If they have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to fear.

If the BBC cooperates, so be it. If not, there should be a number of consequences. First, the BBC Trust should be considered to have violated its charter in Scotland and that the Scottish legal system, which retains the ultimate right of appeal in Scottish criminal cases, would henceforth not be prosecuting any cases brought for TV licence non-payment that are appealed.

This would, at a stroke, remove Scottish revenues from the BBC balance sheet and eliminate the financial incentive for the disgraceful censorship and news manipulation that is currently being passed off as political news in Scotland. The misinformation, half-truths and censorship would no doubt continue, but at least Scots will not be paying for it.

Second, the inter-government standoff would not only create a huge amount of sympathetic publicity in the High Streets of Scotland, something the Scottish Government so badly needs for its successes. Nor would it merely make Scots wake up to what is happening, and perhaps even begin to question what they are hearing.

The Scottish Government-endorsed payment boycott would galvanize and politicize ordinary Scots into action, creating a national sentiment and community solidarity around an unlawful and undemocratic situation. The dispute would be constitutional, not criminal. And no law would need to be passed in the Scottish Parliament to initiate it.

Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all recognised the difference between morality and legality, and the need to break unjust laws peacefully. Civil disobedience was the cornerstone of Indian Independence and the US Civil Rights movement. If laws are all so perfect, why do we have parliaments to change them? Politicians make laws, but if British MPs are so perfect, why were most of them recently found to be intrinsically dishonest?

If the British Government says one thing, but the Scottish Government - for whom the Scottish people are sovereign - says another, which is right?

At some point it is inevitable that Scotland will have her own national broadcasting service. Norway, with a slightly smaller population than Scotland, manages fine with a TV licence fee of Kr2,322 (about £249) while Ireland, with its even smaller population, pays only €160, about £133 – each comparable to London’s annual UK propaganda fee of £145.50. So come independence, Scotland will easily fund a perfectly adequate national broadcaster for herself.

Instead of tolerating a corrupted version of someone else’s.

‘Significant’ UK Scientific Breakthrough

Reuters - Details are still sketchy, but, in an astonishing scientific breakthrough, it appears that British scientists have finally discovered the gene that actually prevents Scots from governing themselves.




If confirmed, the project, completed in the final days of the last UK Labour administration, will amount to nothing less than the Holy Grail for those Scots who argue that an independent Scotland would be a violation of the laws of nature. As such it will also be a godsend for those in the UK Labour Party and the Scottish and British media – especially the BBC, the Scotsman, Glasgow Herald and Daily Record – who until now have been forced to argue this without evidence.

Called traitors by their own countrymen, these Scottish ‘unionists’ – an assorted rabble of politicians, hack journalists and second rate economists, all with a vested interest in keeping their jobs in the UK political machine – were last night jubilant that they could finally explain why Scots were able to act as British prime ministers, British Empire governors, founding fathers for the United States, New Zealand and Canada, heads of banks and corporations around the world today, and yet be strangely incapable of running their own affairs.

A visibly shaken Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland and champion of Scottish independence, was devastated at the news.

“It’s a total bombshell. Think of all the years we’ve wasted campaigning for something that was always beyond reach. Of course, we’ll be disbanding the Scottish National Party within a few days. I feel like we’ve let every North British person down. There was just no way we could have known.”

When asked if he had any specific comment on the findings, Salmond was reflective.

“Och, well,” he sighed. “At least this solves the puzzle of what Labour’s Scotland Office was actually doing with its £7.2 million budget. We thought it was trying to prove the existence of alien life, but now we know.”

An ecstatic ex-Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy last night explained the true significance of the discovery, on a hotline from the wilderness:

“It’s what we’ve been saying all along. We’ve finally proved beyond doubt that Scots need exposure to English culture to learn governance, which is England’s gift to the world. Thank God Gordon Brown and I got our English culture from our wives. Without that contact, our genetic makeup would have put us at a serious disadvantage. We’d both be wife-beating alcoholics by now.”

When asked about Scots’ solid record of leadership over the centuries, Mr. Murphy was defiant:

“Yes,” he yelled hoarsely, struggling to be heard over the tundra gale, “but England gave those countries their culture. So indirectly, it’s the English context that Scots needed to succeed, not our genes, which in fact hold us back. It’s only our acquired English culture that allows us to succeed.”

And the fact that Scotland was an independent nation for over eight centuries before the Union, and as such one of the oldest nations on earth? At this point Mr. Murphy seemed to grow irate.

“Look pal, don't give me that medieval pish. We were never a real country. And any real leaders we had all left to settle the Empire. It’s only the genetic dross that’s left.”

When asked if he included himself in this category, Mr. Murphy abruptly terminated the interview.

Breaking Down the Scottish Labour Mythology

During the recent election, the local Labour candidate came to my parents’ door and introduced himself. My father later told me what happened, sounding quietly honoured that someone like an MP would come to his little corner of the world and knock on his front door.

This was how he described the conversation:

‘Can I count on your vote in the Election?’
‘Oh, aye. We’re Labour folk fae way back.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye. Mining stock. Baith sides ’o the faimily.’
‘Really? Whar fae?”
‘Motherwell and Kilmarnock.’
‘That’s marvelous. It’s aye nice tae meet people wha ken whar they’re fae. Ken whit ah mean? People wha can mind the auld days.’
‘Oh, aye. Different times noo, though.’
‘Aye. And there’ll be big changes again if they Tories get back in.’
‘Aye, you’re no’ wrang.’
‘Will ye be needing a lift tae the polling station?’
‘Ach, no. Wur getting oan, but we can still get aboot. A freen's geein us a lift.’
‘That’s the spirit! Still soldiering oan, eh? It’s been a real pleasure tae meet ye. Cheerio, now.’

The hypocrisy of this exchange gave me bile. My father retired a couple of years ago and was disgusted to find that the pension he had contributed to all his life was almost worthless. I tried at the time to explain that it was Gordon Brown’s scrapping of tax relief on pension fund dividends that had destroyed his pension, but to no avail. That was one argument.

He often tells me about confrontations with local junkie neds, whose cheek he claims to find amusing, in an I-can-still-take-it, razor gang chic kind of way. He told me the story of the junkie asking for flavoured methadone from a terrified young chemist assistant and was bemused when I didn’t find it hysterical.

When pushed, he thinks we need a war to bring back some respect for authority. This is where I try to explain that we’re already in a war, that the lads who are dying in Afghanistan are just normal kids, and that these wasters would not be the type to join up anyway. And besides, what difference would a war make? After all, he hadn’t been a soldier himself – that was not where he had got his values from. That was another argument we had.

My mother was sick last year. She got the best of treatment in a hospital about two hours away. He visited her every day for a month, leaving the car for free in the car park, sometimes for hours at a time. I explained this was an SNP idea. ‘Aye but they stole the idea off Labour. And the free tolls on the Forth was just populist nonsense. Just a bunch of bloody Tartan Tories.’ Straight from the Daily Record songsheet.

He spent a small fortune on fuel on these trips, and grumbled at the time about the price of petrol. He was getting to the stage where he couldn’t even afford to run his car. The idea that we should be one of the richest countries in the world with cheap petrol is a fantasy he refuses to even contemplate. ‘If Norway is so bloody great, why don’t you bugger off and live there,’ he says.

The inconvenient truth for the SNP is that supporting Labour in the West of Scotland is part of Scottish workers’ identity – whether or not they still work. This is what the SNP are up against. The mainstream Scottish media have nurtured this identity for years. They feed Glasgow and the South West a steady stream of Old Firm rivalry, Scotland’s salt of the earth industrial toughness, and myths about her former glorious role in Empire, alongside the same celebrity tat that’s served up around the world. Not to mention any chance they get to make the Scottish Government look either incompetent or useless. And the central westies lap it up.

The tragedy is that Scottish working men and women are utterly unaware of the complete disconnect between the Labour Party of old and the slick PR operation of today. My father used to tell me when I was younger that I should get down on my knees and thank Harold Wilson for giving me my free university education, and, while I was at it, Clement Atlee for the NHS. To a certain extent, I agree. But these things were achieved decades ago. New Labour and old Labour are not the same thing.

To my father, the idea that the Labour Party has become a self-serving power structure that might actually have a stake in men like him staying poor is incomprehensible. He could never even begin to understand that Labour and the Tories need each other at Westminster, that they are both deeply conservative parties committed to the status quo, and that they must appear to be enemies to create problems for the other to fix up every fifteen years or so. Thirty years of Labour would be just as destructive as thirty years of the Tories. It is an oscillatory system of elected absolute power, periodically delivering up heroes and villains to satisfy everyone, and giving each side a bite of the cherry. Like an old German clock, rolling out different puppets every hour, both waving the British flag.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how to change my father’s mind about Scottish independence.

Perhaps all politics are local after all, and the answer lies in delivering high profile health, social and transport programs that are clearly seen to be SNP policies. If so, continuing the battle to control the councils must remain core SNP policy. Fortunately, this is a war of attrition the SNP is winning.

The SNP must also learn to counter the non-stop scare-mongering in the Scottish unionist press, of the type ‘SNP denies plan to hand out free heroine to children.’ This is serious stuff. If Joseph Goebels proved anything it was that in absence of any dissenting voice, any intelligent, literate society starved of real news can be made to believe almost anything. The owners of the Daily Record know this. Scottish Government and SNP press releases on their pretty web sites are simply not getting through. This is a media war that Labour is winning.

Something has to give.

My father lost his licence this year because of his health, and can no longer drive himself to the fishing. Luckily, he’s well liked and one of the younger lads will often drive him up to his favourite loch when he feels the need to drop a line in the water. He might not get the place to himself anymore, but he’s still catching fish, and it puts a smile on his face.

I once asked him how the Scottish Government could help him.

'Change the law about Sunday salmon fishing,' he replied. 'The working man has aye been denied fishing for salmon on Sundays, so the toffs dinnae hae their rivers over-fished by the workers.'

Perhaps he is right. This might win a few over. It sounds like a good idea, even though, dare I say, a tad populist. But how would this help lift the people in Glasgow out of poverty? And, just as importantly, how many would be persuaded by this measure to stop voting to stay in poverty? Not too many, I would think.

My mother doesn’t answer the door when politicians call. And like me, she’s learnt not to debate politics with my father. She knows he doesn’t like her voting differently to him and that he considers it a wasted vote if she does. She did it one year and told him, and he was furious.

Today, as far as my father is aware, she votes Labour too, and there are no arguments on polling day. But my mother and I always have the last laugh.

Mum votes SNP.

UPDATE

Unions Review Links With 'New Labour'

Union poll shows majority in favour of independence

Labour Have Put Scotland’s Head in the Tory Noose

In a former post, I argued the case that we cannot realistically call opponents of Scottish independence ‘traitors’ for two reasons: first, Scotland is not yet an independent state. Second, there are only 5 million of us. Slightly more than Norway, a wee bit less than Denmark. Unless we plan to shoot people to improve the polls, those who disagree with us have to be persuaded, until those in favour of independence are in a healthy majority.

This means that the case must be made to those Scots, English, French, Chinese, Irish, Poles and Pakistanis living in Scotland that their quality of life would be vastly improved outside the financial and cultural straitjacket of the United Kingdom. To browbeat fence sitters by calling them traitors and fools sounds arrogant, and can only serve to harden attitudes.

Recent events, however, have changed my mind about one particular group of Scots. It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the Scots of the Labour Party are traitors to their own people. I refrain from saying the ‘Scottish Labour Party’, an entity which does not actually exist. I mean the UK Labour Party in Scotland. (1)

If the post-Election negotiations proved nothing else, they proved this: that, knowing full well what the Tories will do to Scotland, a cabal of Scottish Labour Party members preferred to let the Tories back into power to wreak havoc on Scottish society, rather than work with the LibDems and Scottish and Welsh nationalists to form a progressive, social democratic alliance. They lined up to shoot down the idea of an anti-Tory alliance live on television. This while the leaders of their party were still in talks with the LibDems on forming a coalition.

No concessions on referendums or special powers were asked for by the SNP as a price, yet these Labour Scots slapped away the SNP hand, unwilling even to discuss the possibility of cooperation.

The central proposal on the table was to keep the Tories out. Yet it’s now clear for all to see that Labour’s priority was something quite different: to keep the Scottish Nationalists out.

So maybe now at last we can put to bed the tired old Labour mantra that the SNP let in Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In 2010, the Scots of the Labour Party – with living memory as a guide for what to expect from the Tories – walked away from a viable alternative UK government and let the Tories back into power. This government would have held a UK majority, just as Labour likes to claim that Unionist parties form a majority of opinion in Holyrood.

Think about what this means: that the Labour Party would rather sit out a decade in paid but impotent opposition under a UK Tory Government than give 1 second’s consideration to working with Scottish nationalists.

The Labour Party Scottish footsoldiers evidently have stronger attachment to their Westminster salaries, benefits, expenses, titles, privileges and pensions than their own people. Protecting those eking out a living in Scotland in the face of impending Tory cuts is a long way down their list of priorities.

So let us lay the blame for everything that now happens to Scotland under this Tory-LibDem regime fairly and squarely at the feet of the Labour Party in Scotland.

Thank you, Scots of the Labour Party, for putting Scotland’s head in the Tory noose.

NOTES
(1) The London-based British Labour Party is probably in violation of British electoral law by representing their party in Scotland as the Scottish Labour Party, a name that is an invention of Labour’s spin doctors.

UPDATE

Labour MP admits being 'relieved' when Tories got in