Sunday 9 May 2021

Scotland heads for indyref2

Eurosceptics in the Tory party plotted a path to Brexit for years. The first step was to have Article 50 inserted into the Lisbon Treaty. They successfully argued that there was no legal route for a member state to leave the EU and so the EU obliged, at the UK's insistence. Nine years later, they manage to trigger Article 50. You might say that’s fair enough. But you might also point out that the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland doesn’t contain an exit door either.

Imagine how Scotland feels now. They were 62% against Brexit and against the triggering of A50. They now have Boris Johnson deny them a referendum on independence. How would Brexiteers have reacted I wonder if the European Commission had refused Cameron the legal right to hold the 2016 referendum or had rejected demands for Article 50 in the first place?  There would have been howls of anger.

But as someone points out on Twitter:

Johnson's position is not sustainable and the more he refuses the worse it will get.

The British government have confirmed that the UK never lost sovereignty in Europe because we entered the EEC through laws passed by democratically elected MPs in 1972 and then confirmed by the 1975 referendum. We left in 2020, again by democratic means after a narrow referendum win in 2016. This is what sovereign countries do.

But Brexiteers are happy to deny Scotland real sovereignty and hold them inside a Union in which the dominant partner routinely ignores their wishes. All the devolved administrations refused consent for the Withdrawal Agreement but Johnson went ahead anyway.

Scotland (and Wales if it broke away) would have far more influence inside the European Union, with a veto on decisions that require unanimity and a proportionate weight on anything with QMV votes.  At the moment they have devolved governments with almost zero influence on Westminster simply because they have a totally different ideology.

The result in Scotland at constituency level by the way looks like this:

The distortions of the FTPT system used to elect Scotland’s constituency MLPs can clearly be seen. Of the 73 MLPs elected by that method (as opposed to the PR system used to elect the other 56 regional MLPs) 62 are from a single party , the SNP, even though their vote share was only about half of the total.  It seems the Greens will get 9 regional seats and are pro-independence so a coalition of some kind looks certain.

I see on Twitter there are some unionists claiming the SNP doesn't have a mandate for another referendum!  Amazing.

Incidentally if I look at the latest Yougov polling, the figures for Scotland shows that after don't knows are excluded, over 68% now think the decision to leave the EU was, in hindsight, a mistake.  Make no mistake, a huge constitutional crisis is coming and the break-up of the UK is all but certain. There is only one man to blame and it would be fitting if it was all to happen on his watch. Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC sees it all ending in the Supreme Court.


Dr North

Now, to something else. Dr North is part of the 'Leave Alliance' and they have a twitter presence.  Yesterday I noticed this:

The tweet has 427 replies this morning, most of them angry remainers like this one:

It is however, a clear and unequivocal admission that Brexit has been a disaster for jobs and trade and its 'potential' squandered but the tweeter is still glad we've left because he never wanted a 'supreme' European government.  Quite what the benefit is I am not sure.  But who actually wrote the tweet?

The answer must surely be in another Leave Alliance tweet:

Dr North spends his time building tiny models of military vehicles so I assume it was him. A glance at other tweets from the same source reveals exactly the same nihilistic view of Britain and the EU that he has shown for years and which helped to bring about the disaster he now bemoans.  North also tweets under his own name by the way.

The EU was no good, the UK government inept and incompetent and I see this morning "local government is a mess" at best - according to Dr North.  I don't believe I've ever heard him praise any local, national or international authority at any time. He seems to be some sort of anarchist with the only good government being one led by him, where he makes all the decisions - and invariably the right ones - all the time.

One of the problems that men like him (it's usually men isn't it?) face is that either the world is run by bureaucrats using the best available advice, in which case he would denounce it as undemocratic, or it's run by amateur politicians, elected by people who shouldn't be allowed to cross a road unaccompanied, who then go on to ignore experts and run headlong into one disaster after another.  He denounces them as incompetent.

What we need is politicians who ignore there own stupidity, acknowledge their ignorance, recognise and listen to expert advice and wise men, challenge things where necessary and then sell it to the public, get it accepted and then implement it. 

This is how it used to work here - and how it still works in Europe.  

It's Europe day today by the way, look out for flags!


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