THE SCOTTISH National Party (SNP) has promised to work with Welsh nationalists to offer an alternative to the “decade of despair” it claims is threatened by both Labour and the Conservatives.
Alex Salmond, SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, said neither Labour nor the Tories wanted to detail where their axes would fall on public expenditure, but both were committed to substantial cuts.
“We will break through the cosy Westminster consensus on cuts,” said Mr Salmond.
“There is no justification for an approach that puts vanity projects like [the] Trident [nuclear weapons programme] and its replacement before the education, the health and the safety of the people of our nation.”
He continued: “At Westminster, we will work in partnership with Plaid Cymru, the party of Wales, to secure the best possible deal for our nations: to win key concessions on funding, jobs and the economy.”
The SNP holds only seven of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster and would require a swing of more than 10 per cent against Labour to win more than a handful of extra seats. Mr Salmond had previously set a target of winning 20 seats in this election, but opinion polls suggest such an outcome is unlikely.
Plaid, with three seats, has set itself the more modest target of exceeding its previous best of four seats. But even a modest bloc of nationalist MPs could exert influence in a hung parliament.
Mr Salmond is not contesting his seat at Westminster, an institution which he said was now held “in contempt and disrepute”. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)