---

Dissolution of Parliament

I did not attend the count in Glasgow, but I understand that the count in one particular district gave a strong indication that the hon. Gentleman might, to use a well-known Scottish phrase, "find his jaicket on a shoogly nail"—and I will translate that later for Hansard. Let me say a little about my constituency. It contains mining villages that were decimated during those 18 long years. Lives were shattered and people were marginalised by a Government who engaged in a political strategy to smash a mining industry, and failed to provide any alternative employment. My constituency contains rural areas where there was no investment in education or transport. It took the re-emergence of a Labour Government, and then a Labour-led Scottish Executive, to ensure that the schools in my constituency were either rebuilt or refurbished, and to ensure the commissioning of a new hospital which had been a dream for 40 or 50 years—a dream which, I believe, was shared by the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Gordon Banks). I say to the nationalists, "Put your political posturing to one side. Last time you did this, it cost the Scottish people dear. Tonight many Members will join you in the Lobby, but do not be flattered, because they flatter to deceive, just as they did last time." The nationalists are playing political games when people in Scotland and people across the United Kingdom are looking to this Government, and indeed to the Scottish Government, for responsibility and leadership to get us through difficult times. This motion is self-indulgence of the worst kind. It exposes the willingness of members of the SNP and their colleagues in Plaid Cymru—who, admittedly, did not vote to bring down a Labour Government on the last occasion—to be used by a Conservative party which, if it were ever given the chance again, would introduce a spending regime that, albeit cloaked in different and softer words, would make it almost impossible for them and us to deliver the necessary services to the Scottish people and to people across the United Kingdom. The last time the Scottish nationalists played midwife to a Tory Government, they thought that it was a price worth paying. Labour Members will do all that we can to prevent that from ever happening again.