Nicola Sturgeon has an article in today’s edition of The Observer newspaper in which she sets out her opposition to Trident and explains why she would never press the nuclear button. It’s a pretty strong indictment of how far from the moral high ground that British politics has fallen that a party leader has to explain why they think it’s wrong to evaporate hundreds of thousands of people, condemn millions more to slow lingering death, destroy cities, and pollute the planet with radioactive fallout risking the end of civilisation. It’s an even greater indictment that she’s being criticised for stating her opposition to killing millions of people. It’s the greatest indictment of all that suitability for leadership in the UK is predicated upon a person’s willingness to commit mass murder and use weapons of mass destruction. What does that tell us about the moral character of the British state? Nothing good.
You’d think that opposing mass death and destruction ought to belong to the category of things that were obvious. Like it should be obvious that you think that burning innocent people to death and condemning the survivors to cancer and to bear children with horrifying deformities, because a minority amongst them voted for a self-serving avaricious idiot as the leader of their country. But not in the UK. Oh no. They deserve all they get, because they’re foreign.
Likewise it should belong to the category of obvious things that a party leader who is incapable of telling the truth about the number of children that he’s got, who built an entire career out of lying in the pages of The Telegraph newspaper, and who has lied repeatedly in the few short – but seemingly so long – week that he’s been Prime Minister cannot be trusted to keep any of the promises which are now so copiously and frequently falling from his fat lying lips. But not in the UK. Oh no. Will of the people. Get Brexit done. Oven ready just add water. The destructive liar who’s prepared to press the nuclear button is regarded as being a more serious contender for leadership than someone who baulks at the idea of mass destruction.
Today, Sunday, the Conservatives revealed their manifesto. Answers on a postcard about why they bothered, as everything that Boris Johnson has said to date has been a lie, so it’s not really clear why this manifesto is going to be any different. It only has one purpose, to get the Conservatives through the next couple of weeks, to secure them a majority on 12 December, then it will join the long list of lies and broken promises already made by a man who lies about what his name is.
Even the campaign slogan for the Conservatives is a lie. Brexit will not get done by the end of January even with a majority Tory government in Westminster. The UK leaving the EU at the end of January next year won’t mean that Brexit is done. It means that Brexit is only just beginning. The divorce might be agreed, but there is still no agreement on the future relationship between the UK and the EU. Those negotiations are going to be even more brutal for the UK than the divorce agreement has been, because the UK will by then be a third country as far the EU is concerned, and because the Conservatives are still being fundamentally dishonest about the kind of relationship that they seek.
We will be back to deadlines, to Brexit clocks in the corner of TV news screens, to approaching cliff edges. If the UK is to remain closely aligned to the EU then that will entail an acceptance of EU standards and regulations that are anathema to the Brextremists. The trade deal will need to be done by December next year, but it will not be carried out under Article 50, but rather Article 218. It will have to be ratified individually by each EU member state, and by certain regional assemblies within some of those states. Wallonia in Belgium held up the trade deal with Canada. If any one of those blocks the deal, we’ll be back to the risk of crashing out with no deal unless the Prime Minister asks for another extension. Brexit will dominate 2020. It will dominate British politics for years to come. Get Brexit done is a lie repeated by man who lied when he said he believes that truth in politics is important.
The tragedy for the UK is that it appears, if polling is anything to go by, that the Conservatives are likely to win that majority that Boris Lying Johson craves so much. He’ll use it to take the UK out of the EU at the end of January, then will piss away 2020 pretending to negotiate a trade deal. He’ll use his majority to castigate the poor for the sins of the rich, and we’ll see even more homelessness, more foodbanks, more sticking plasters on open gaping wounds in the body politic.
Boris Johnson will use his majority to tell Scotland to get back into the shortbread tin. We will see a return to the era of the 1980s, when Thatcher ran roughshod over the will of the Scottish people. Only this time with Brexit, with threats to the integrity of the NHS, with a government full of liars and opportunists who lie shamelessly and often. The rising public anger within a Scotland that’s been torn out of the EU and into a Tory dystopia will only fuel demands for independence.
The next Conservative government will be a government which will destroy any pretence that Scotland is a partner in a union. It’s a government which will make Scottish independence inevitable, although the road is a rocky one. They’re not going to make it easy for us but we shall win in the end. Buried away in today’s news is a Scottish opinion poll which showed that 45% of people in Scotland believe that independence will be a great opportunity for Scotland, as opposed to 37% who think independence will make Scotland worse off. Only 24% think that Brexit provides an opportunity for Scotland. We’re winning the economic argument. We’re winning the argument about democracy. We’re winning the argument about morality. Independence is only a matter of time. The first necessary step to that goal is to keep calm and vote SNP on 12 December.
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