Last night a bomb went off in British politics. It utterly destroyed the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and may have fatally weakened the foundations of the UK itself – Northern Ireland now has a majority of nationalist MPs for the first time in its history, and over 80% of Scottish seats went to the SNP.
As this site had been warning for months and months, the patience of English and Welsh voters with Parliament refusing to implement their 2016 vote to leave the EU finally snapped. Some wildly improbable Labour seats – including the constituency of Grenfell Tower, for God’s sake – went to the Tories, especially in Wales and the north of England, in order to “Get Brexit Done”.
The Lib Dems, the only UK party with a clear (okay, fairly clear) Remain position and with a minimum of 48% of the electorate to target, somehow contrived to LOSE seats, not only compared to their 21-MP starting point (bolstered by defectors since the last election) but compared to the 12 MPs they won in the 2017 election itself.
And the SNP? Well, the SNP failed too.
Because having expressly told voters that the election wasn’t about independence but about stopping Brexit, they won 13 more seats, but seats which have zero leverage at Westminster and will be able to do absolutely nothing to prevent the UK leaving the EU seven weeks from now. For all Scotland’s renewed “STOP BREXIT” message, Brexit will not be stopped. The UK, and Scotland with it, will depart next month.
We can’t help but note at this point that if the party had taken our advice and done a deal with the Tories in October to let Brexit pass in return for Section 30 powers, we’d now have an indyref in the bag (which we’d win) and as a parting gift to our southern kin we’d also have saved England from having a thumping great Tory majority for the foreseeable future.
Hindsight, eh?
And for all the result is outwardly a mandate for another indyref, the Unionist parties have shown no inclination to budge an inch. Richard Leonard last night told TV viewers that it didn’t amount to support for a second vote, and Ruth Davidson was quick to – quite reasonably – highlight the SNP’s own statements that this election WASN’T about independence.
(Interestingly, of their 14 gains the SNP only took one seat from the Lib Dems, who were also campaigning on a Remain platform, and also lost one to them.)
And no matter what moral arguments may be deployed, there is nothing in practical terms that the SNP can do about that. They’ll ask Boris Johnson for a Section 30, he’ll tell them to get stuffed, and the SNP’s choices will be either to go to court (as we’ve said they should have done since 2017, in which case we’d have had the decision by now), or to just meekly sit back down and grumble and try to win another useless Holyrood mandate in 2021.
The SNP recovered about half of the 2015 voters that it lost in 2017, and our view is that many of them held their noses yesterday and gave the party one last chance to take action. If they haven’t done so before the next Scottish election – if they’ve sat on their hands for the whole of 2020 and told their supporters “Just one more mandate and they’ll definitely cave in!” – we strongly suspect people will throw up their hands and walk away and that’ll be the game over for good.
Because make no mistake, barring some sort of miracle, last night the Tories didn’t just win the election, they won the 2024 election too. It’s not clear who’s going to take over the Labour Party from Jeremy Corbyn, but whoever it is will have one hell of a mess to clear up – a party torn in two by divisions so toxic and so ingrained by the factional infighting of the Corbyn era that it seems inconceivable they could be fixed in just half a decade.
And the Lib Dems are a shattered joke, decapitated by the SNP in one of the evening’s small handful of high points (despite the best efforts of the Greens), after a campaign so inept under a leader so arrogantly hopeless that their vote dropped every time she appeared on TV. Britain now belongs to the Tories – Tories at their most ideologically extreme, with almost all their moderates thrown out, a party publicly disowned by many of its best-known senior figures – for at least 10 years to come.
We hate to throw a big damp towel on last night’s widespread jubilation in the Yes movement so early, but the fact is that Scotland is now leaving the EU next month and there’s no plan in place to do anything about it. Any chance of an orderly transition for an independent Scotland before the UK is fully out has been squandered. Whatever happens, the process will now be much more complicated and difficult and therefore offputting to voters should indyref 2 ever actually happen.
The SNP’s strategy was to win over Remain voters and it succeeded in that, but it won a worthless prize – 48 MPs whose votes count for nothing in the face of a Tory majority of 80, and a moral mandate that’s equally toothless and which in any event is badly undermined by the party’s own insistence that it wasn’t won for independence but for stopping Brexit, in which it has been overruled by the voters of England and Wales.
The time for playing nicey-nicey softball by the Marquess of Queensberry rules – if you’ll forgive the mixed sporting metaphor – is over. The SNP needs to get the gloves off and start punching fast, because the final round is approaching.
