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Scottish Elections 2007

A sequence of events normally precedes a disaster—I say that from an old miner's point of view—and we saw a number of sequences of events, which resulted in probably the worst debacle that we have seen for many years. It ill becomes all parties first to argue that they want an independent review—many of them also questioned whether it was really going to be independent—and then, now that that independent review is here, to call for one person's head. A sequence of events means that everybody has to take some blame for what happened. I look forward to the debate that we will have, because I for one will have my say on what went wrong. I believe that thousands upon thousands of Labour voters were disfranchised in that election. We should have won that election, and I still believe that we would have won it if all the votes had been recounted, as I said at the time.