We got a tweet this morning from one of those odd Twitter accounts that’s been going for eight years and still only has six followers. This one appears to be a fairly moderate right-wing, UK-nationalist Brexiter with only a few dozen tweets (nearly all replies) to their name since 2011.
But readers, he’s got a point.
We’ve pointed out before that the SNP have gotten themselves into a real mess over Brexit, whereby they’re campaigning to prevent/overturn the very thing that gives them a mandate for a second indyref.
(Independence being, let’s remember, the SNP’s primary if not sole reason to exist, and a referendum now being officially the party’s only stated route to achieving it.)
They’ve fallen into a managerialism trap, prioritising the mitigation of bad UK decisions in a devolved Scotland over escaping UK decisions in an independent one. They’ve become – accidentally, we hope – a party of better devolution, not independence.
The SNP has no mandate – either political or moral – to save England and Wales from what they voted for in 2016. They voted Leave, then they declined to vote for Remain parties in the 2017 election, and if they’ve changed their minds now then it’s up to them to sort it out.
(Does anyone seriously think that if the SNP somehow managed to stop Brexit, they’d be carried shoulder-high from the Commons, all given knighthoods and told Scotland could have whatever they wanted? Remember how that was supposed to happen if we voted No five years ago?)
If the SNP were to vote for Theresa May’s deal in exchange for a second indyref they’d be doing the rest of the UK a service by preventing a no-deal Brexit, which would be enormously worse then even her scabby and battered deal.
By ensuring that a withdrawal deal including the Irish backstop went through, they’d be doing the best they could to protect the Good Friday Agreement and peace process, and they’d be royally pissing off UKIP and Nigel Farage and all the hardcore Tory Eurosceptics, which presumably nobody reading this site would object to very much.
They’d be securing the best chance of winning an independence vote that any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes. Circumstances are never, ever going to get better than now. The UK is never going to be a less attractive option.
They’d be giving people in Scotland a clear and concrete democratic choice: to stay in the EU with Scotland, or leave it with the UK. We already know from numerous polls that a majority of Scots think Brexit will be worse than independence. Now they’d have to actually vote for one or the other.
They’d earn at least the grudging respect of those troublesome Yes Leavers who are (notwithstanding the above paragraph) currently keeping indy support below 50%, by acknowledging the UK’s legitimate right to leave in accordance with the wishes of the majority of its voters.
(Because unlike a second indyref, which has an empirical electoral and political double mandate, the inconvenient fact is that there are still absolutely no democratic grounds for a second EU referendum, however much some people might want one. Labour and the Tories stood in a general election AFTER the EU referendum, both on platforms of carrying out Brexit, and got 82% of the vote between them. If people wanted a second EU vote they could have voted Lib Dem in 2017, but they didn’t.)
Their position would be coherent and principled, rather than the current confused and contradictory fudge. Their job is to secure independence for Scotland whether Brexit happens or not, and their duty is to seize any chance to make that happen. They owe England and Wales nothing, other than perhaps to respect their democratic choices.
If we were Theresa May right now (ugh), we’d be putting the offer on the table. If she believes, as she claims to, that Scots really want to stay in the Union then she’s got nothing to lose. She’d keep the UK together AND get the Brexit she desperately wants.
(If she was wrong and Scotland voted Yes, we know the people of England wouldn’t be very bothered and it wouldn’t hurt her anyway.)
And in the unlikely event that she does, Nicola Sturgeon should snatch her hand off.
