If we were to write an article every time Murdo Fraser said something moronic, we’d have to rename this site Wings Over Murdo Fraser, and drink an awful lot of Red Bull to be able to cover it all.
Stuff like this, for example, is almost too easy.
43% (actually 45.3% excluding Don’t Knows) is considerably more than Murdo Fraser has ever achieved in an election, either himself or as part of a party. His average over the seven elections he’s contested and lost since 1999 is just 30.1%, and until a blip in 2016 it had been falling lower and lower each time, as people have watched how he performed as an MSP and got less and less keen on the idea.
That’s still actually slightly more than the 28.6% his party secured in Scotland at the last election, though, in what was nevertheless generally regarded as an unusually impressive performance. Two years earlier they gathered just 14.9% of the votes cast.
Yet neither Fraser nor the Tories disappear for a generation every time Scotland tells them to go and get stuffed. Fraser keeps trousering an MSP’s fat salary despite two decades of unbroken and unequivocal personal rejection from the electorate, even as he demands that the independence movement gives up after losing ONE vote.
But in his defence, his leader’s not setting him much of an example.
No, not Ruth Davidson, his ACTUAL leader.
Again, it’s almost too easy to mock the witless hypocrisy of the Prime Minister’s warm words to little Latvia, a country with well under half the population of Scotland and less than half the per-capita GDP, yet which still thrives as an independent nation.
(Even if, unlike their fellow Baltic states Lithuania and Estonia, they haven’t managed to humiliate us at football yet.)
But it’s only when you examine the tweet a little more closely that you realise what a piece of condescending, ignorant and innumerate drivel it is.
Latvia unilaterally declared its independence from Russia in 1918, triggering a two-year civil war before a democratic government was installed in 1920. It survived for less than 20 years before the Soviet Union effectively annexed the country in 1939 and a puppet government brought Latvia back into the USSR.
Two years later it was invaded and occupied by the Nazis, and by the end of the war was firmly back under Soviet rule, where it remained (having eventually been granted a small measure of devolution by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist government) until a referendum in 1991 regained its independence.
So Latvia’s supposed “100 years of independence” have in fact comprised 52 years of brutal authoritarian Soviet/Nazi rule, two years of civil war and just 46 years of actual independence. To be honest, it could probably have done without the UK’s “protection” altogether for all the use it was.
We’re not sure if Theresa May’s ignorance of history, arithmetic or democracy is the worst. But it’s nice to know the PM still wants to be friends with small countries that take control of their own affairs. We’re sure she’ll feel the same about Scotland when it frees itself from another large neighbour that won’t let it decide its own future.
