PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE:

Tories open 8-point lead after election blunder (Andrew Grice, 30 October 2007, Independent)

The Conservatives have opened an eight-point lead over Labour following Gordon Brown's decision to call off a general election, according to the latest monthly poll for The Independent.

The ComRes survey shows a remarkable turnaround since last month, when Labour enjoyed a three-point lead on the eve of the party conference season. Now the Tories are on 41 per cent (up seven percentage points since last month), Labour on 33 per cent (down four points), the Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent (up one point) and others on 10 per cent (down four points).

If repeated at a general election, the figures would give David Cameron an overall majority of two seats.

So he's falling because of calling off the election he called off because he was falling?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the paper they acknowledge what's actually causing the fall, EU treaty is a constitution, says Giscard d'Estaing (Ben Russell, 30 October 2007, Independent)

Gordon Brown faces a renewed row over Europe after a declaration by the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing that key parts of the European constitution remain "practically unchanged" in the new EU Reform Treaty.

Conservatives repeated their call for a referendum on the treaty after M. Giscard d'Estaing, one of the architects of the EU constitution that floundered after referendums in France and the Netherlands, said that the central proposals of the rejected document had been retained in the new treaty, agreed earlier this month by European leaders meeting in Lisbon. Writing in The Independent, M. Giscard D'Estaing said: "The proposed institutional reforms, the only ones which mattered to the drafting convention, are all to be found in the Treaty of Lisbon. They have merely been ordered differently and split up between previous treaties."

The English and the Scots don't even want to share a state but the British elites are trying to force them into one with the French and Germans?

MORE:
The national indifference: England and Scotland are becoming foreign lands - thanks chiefly to ignorance on the south (Julian Glover, October 30, 2007, The Guardian)

Let me take you on a journey to a foreign land, though it shares a Queen and a prime minister. It is not far from home, if you come from England, and offers none of the immediate telltales of international travel, no ostentatious signs of difference. This land has red Royal Mail vans and Ordnance Survey maps. BBC Radio 2 brings Terry Wogan. Cars measure their speed in miles per hour and beer comes in pints.

But this land - which is Scotland - is becoming foreign to England. The three centuries-old union still stands strong in its institutions, but the joint cultural understanding that made the UK something more than a political arrangement is falling away. Two nations now talk of different things, discuss different people, and fear different threats.

Some of this pulling apart is political, and has to do with devolution. To talk politics in Scotland is for the ignorant English visitor to enter a conversation as remote as the Australian election - half-familiar, but distant. The common points of reference - people, parties, characters - that fuel English understanding of Westminster are absent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 30, 2007 7:03 AM