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The Torygraph reports that Boris Johnson “will make clear on Sunday that he will not grant a second Scottish independence referendum, even if the SNP wins a majority in May’s Holyrood elections.”
His stated reason? Because a referendum would be dangerous during a pandemic. Seriously! Remember that the May election has not been postponed. In fact in May there will be elections in many other places in Britain too, ones that have already been postponed for a year. If there can be an election in May without everyone catching the lergy, then there could be an independence referendum 6 months later. Anybody who says otherwise is taking the p*ss.
If this is true about what Johnson will say at the weekend, it’s great news for the SNP.
It’s hard to believe that Johnson and the Tory government could be so stupid, but let’s assume it’s true. Why is he saying this? The reasons would appear to be as follows:
1. He thinks it will win votes for the Scottish Tories in the May election. It might win them a small number of votes, but it would win the SNP far more. Anybody who knows Scotland knows that. Any idea that “England is stopping Scotland from doing something” plays directly into the SNP’s hands. If somebody knows nothing about Scottish politics and they want to start by learning something, that fact is what they should learn. It’s from the very first class in Scottish Politics 101.
2. On the basis of polls conducted in the past week, he thinks that while there is a majority in favour of the union, there is a larger majority against holding a referendum soon. In other words, he thinks a fair proportion of those who are pro independence are against holding a referendum. Now why might that be? Well it might be because a) that proportion of the electorate prefers to achieve independence by fighting an armed struggle, including against the majority of people in Scotland – perhaps beginning with a Washington DC-style “Capitol” event somewhere near a pub – but I think that’s unlikely. Or it might be b) because they think SARSCoV2 would be more likely to fly up their nostrils in a polling station if they’re voting in an indyref than if they’re only voting in a general election, especially given that turnout in the indyref would be much higher. That’s rubbish too. It’s much more likely to be c) because you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the polls. It’s obvious that a vote for the SNP or for their helpers the Greens is a vote for another referendum and soon too.
I wonder whether the Scottish Tories will call Johnson before Sunday and tell him he can f***ing do one.
I’ve said it before, but if the British rulers actually do want to retain the union (and that’s not necessarily the case) and if there is an indyref rerun then they will have to get rid of Johnson beforehand. He is a liability and he could totally screw things up in the course of one bad afternoon. They would have to replace him before the referendum, probably with Michael Gove who is Scottish, possibly with Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak, but not with Jacob Rees-Mogg (who I doubt would run for the leadership anyway).
OK. It turns out that Johnson has NOT said what the Torygraph predicted he would say. He has not promised “no referendum, no matter how people vote in May”. Whether he was preparing to say that, I don’t know. But if he was, then presumably he listened to Scottish Tories who, as might be expected, know Scotland better than Tories do who are based in London.
As for the “creation of Civil Service jobs” in Scotland, including posts in the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office, rather than primarily an “employment” measure this is probably to do with buying votes in Glasgow by giving bungs to those who are considered to have an influence over how people vote in that city.
It will be a fascinating election, particularly in Glasgow. The party that came second in all seven Glasgow seats in the 2019 British general election was…Labour! In 2017 Labour came second in six of them, the exception being Glasgow North East, which they won. In the 2016 Glasgow city council election, Labour won more than twice as many votes as the Tories. (When I lived in Glasgow Northeast – or Glasgow Springburn as it was called then – the seat had a 22000 Labour majority.)
In places such as Glasgow North East and other parts of Glasgow too, Nicola Sturgeon or whoever leads the SNP in May may find it hard to articulate the message “If you vote Labour, you’re helping the Tories”. Many who have never voted Tory in their lives may not take kindly to being insulted like that. It’s true that the Tories may find it hard to articulate the message “Vote Labour”, but they’re unlikely to be saying that openly anyway.
Might Sturgeon possibly be attackable as a West Coaster who has sucked up to the Edinburgh establishment? 🙂
I will be celebrating if the fine city of Glasgow tells the SNP where it can go.
Some more “politics of truth”:
EU members aren’t allowed to sign trade deals with EU non-members. So it’s a case of “Vote SNP if you want trade between Scotland and the rest of what used to be Britain to be decided between London and Brussels”.
How long will the SNP continue to con so many people into not realising that an independent Scotland’s most important relations with a foreign country wouldn’t be with Iceland, Norway, or Russia, but with Rump Britain, and that it is totally legitimate to demand that the SNP leadership be clear on what kind of relations it wants – rather than trying to distract from the issue by saying it’s up to Britain who it recognises as British citizens and things like that. They wrote that garbage document “Scotland’s Future” in 2013. How about writing something better this time? Pros, cons, weigh them up, and find out if they can persuade the kind of people who can do joined-up writing.
As for the current talk about Boris Johnson being about to decide he will consent to an indyref rerun (or “call a snap referendum” in English Tory parlance), this is similar to “Boris Johnson realises what two plus two equals”. What has probably happened is that the Scottish Tories have managed to thump some sense into Johnson’s head. Johnson would be a massive liability for Unionism in any rerun of the independence referendum. All it would take would be one bad afternoon. The penny may drop on this too in Tory Party centrale, if the SNP together with their pals in the Green cult win a majority in a fortnight’s time.
There’s a week to go until the Scottish general election. Here are the April 2021 polls from Savanta ComRes for the Scotsman newspaper:
SNP %, chronological order:
constituencies: 49, 46, 45
lists: 40, 38, 36That works out at around 52-53 seats, a long way short of a majority (65). Yet a non-majority is offered at a little shorter than evens (1.91) at Betfair.
“SNP suggests independent Scotland would ‘totally’ accept joining euro as price of EU membership
Confusion over currency plans as party MP says Scotland’s debt is too high to join the euro meaning it could keep using the pound“
The SNP leaders love sounding like gangsters but here are some facts.
1. If you join a club you have to accept its rules. You don’t get any choice in the matter. If you say you’ll only join if they change their rules first, they are very likely to tell you to f*** off. (You may be walking 10 foot high after an independence victory in a referendum, but that won’t cut any ice with the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the German or French governments, or the governments of any of the other 25 EU member states for that matter.)
2. One of the EU’s rules is that any new member has to work towards having the euro as its currency by steering its monetary policy in that direction. Before they let you join, they will want to know how you’re going to do it. Slapping the table and calling sceptics “anti-Scotitic” won’t get you anywhere with the European Central Bank or with Moody’s, Fitch, Standard and Poor’s, or the Bank of International Settlements.
3. You can only have your own monetary policy if you have your own central bank that prints your own currency. You can’t do it by using some neighbouring country’s currency, because you don’t have any say over that country’s monetary policy.
4. If you print your own currency and the international money markets don’t have much confidence in it, you may find you go bankrupt. That could be great news for the crooks at the helm of the state. (Think big backhanders from Gulf Arab or “Russian” billionaires who stump up some money to
“rescue the country”buy up assets in the fire sale as the country goes down the tubes.)5. I welcome the fact that SNP leaders are talking about a price of entry to the EU. That’s much better than saying they had the right to “stay” in the EU, which is what they said in 2014.
The policy of “an independent Scotland inside the EU”, which was only ever the political equivalent of “we support whoever’s playing against England”, may turn out to be the “step too far” which reveals the SNP to be the bunch of bullsh*tters that they are, rather in the way that “We haven’t got a clue what currency we will use” turned them into a laughing-stock for anybody who had some brain cells in 2014. Why? Because independence with EU membership inevitably means a HARD BORDER and an economic policy best described as “ER…ER…ER…DUNNO, PAL”.
This may be a case of “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.
If Nicola Sturgeon loses her constituency seat in Glasgow Southside, do people think she will stay on as First Minister after sailing back in as an MSP because she is on a regional list?
It’s somewhat ridiculous that both she and her opponent the Labour leader Anas Sarwar are list candidates as well as candidates for the Glasgow Southside constituency. Maybe there should be a rule that the First Minister has to be a constituency MSP. Or better still, get rid of the d’Hondt system.
But my question is whether she’s likely to stay as FM if Sarwar takes her constituency seat from her, assuming that MSPs from the SNP, the Greens, and Alba if necessary, together number 65+. Will she have the guts to say “Glasgow Southside doesn’t want me, but Scotland loves me”?
Hilarious: Nicola Sturgeon speaking about currency issues.
Sturgeon hasn’t got one iota of a clue. There is no way that such a moron would make it to the political top in any serious independent country.“Let’s not go independent, because Sturgeon is a complete idiot” is a totally sound argument. I imagine most of the Edinburgh middle class would agree, even if they have additional reasons for reaching the same conclusion.
Seriously can’t the Scottish independence movement find somebody to lead it who a) has got two brain cells to rub together, and b) is not Alex Salmond?
Sturgeon doesn’t even know what “central bank” means. She’s been First Minister for five years and she’s been too damned lazy to find out! What does she do all day?
She also lies through her teeth. No, the SNP did not have a policy in 2014 on what currency an independent Scotland should have. And no you can’t do quantitative easing if you haven’t got your own currency.
