Anyone who’s followed the UK political media over the last decade or so with specific reference to Scotland will know that in a very crowded field, the standout poster boy for arrogant, condescending metropolitan cluelessness is the Independent’s chief political commentator John Rentoul.
For reasons which escape us, Rentoul – who was born in India and as far as we know has spent not a single day of his life resident in Scotland – identifies as Scottish. And yet he doesn’t appear to even recognise the concept of Scotland as a political entity, and today he demonstrated that fact in a manner so stark and striking that it’s worth recording for posterity.
“Parliamentary democracy” is a REALLY interesting pitch to refuse Scotland’s right to self-determination from. What it means, of course, is a system whereby the share of votes a party gets in an election is completely irrelevant – the only thing that counts is the number of votes in Parliament they get, ie the number of seats.
Parliamentary democracy is the system by which UK parties are able to achieve large majorities and absolute power on a minority of the popular vote. Labour, for example, achieved a comfortable majority of over 60 seats in 2005 on just 35% of the votes cast.
Even rather slow-witted children, therefore, would immediately be able to observe that if a party were to achieve not just a majority of seats but an overwhelming majority, outnumbering every other party combined by four to one, they would clearly have an indisputable mandate under the system of Parliamentary democracy for whatever policies they’d campaigned on.
But as soon as his own rules work against him, Rentoul pulls a U-turn.
All of a sudden, the number of seats won – which is the sole determinant of success in a Parliamentary democracy – count for nothing. When it suits Rentoul, magically it all becomes about vote share.
(Interestingly, and perhaps because it would involve making an overt statement that Scotland is a prisoner in the UK, Rentoul doesn’t use the SNP’s actual UK vote share in the UK election – 4% – but its share in Scotland.)
But that doesn’t work either, because in 2015 pro-independence parties DID get a majority of Scottish votes in a UK election. The SNP got 49.97% and the Greens got 1.35% for a total of 51.32%. With a majority of votes and a breathtaking 95% of seats, the SNP could simply have declared independence there and then under Rentoul’s rules, without even a referendum. Yet independence did not follow.
(Parliamentary democracy places no relevance whatsoever on the contents of a party’s manifesto, incidentally. The solitary mechanism for holding parties to account should they act outwith the contents of their manifesto is the next election.)
How, then, might Scotland seek to democratically extract itself from the Union, given that it can never achieve a majority of seats at Westminster even if it got 100% of Scottish votes, and neither a majority of Scottish seats nor a majority of Scottish votes counts? We must surely conclude that Holyrood is the determining arena.
And initially Rentoul appears to agree:
But hold on – there already IS a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament. In the 2016 election pro-independence parties won 53.5% of the seats, and indeed went so far as to successfully pass a vote calling for a second referendum – the very definition of how a “Parliamentary democracy” operates.
But wait! Apparently that vote must be disqualified on the grounds of what someone is supposed to have said in 2014, even though one of the core founding principles of the UK’s Parliamentary democracy, with its absence of any written constitution, is that no government can bind that hands of its successor. Any individual Parliament’s sovereignty in the UK is inviolate other than at the hands of the monarch.
So even if Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon HAD been making a pledge when they used the words “once in a generation” – which of course they weren’t, any more than when a football manager says a cup final is a “once in a lifetime” opportunity but then enters the competition again the next year – that pledge was rendered completely irrelevant by the 2015 and 2016 elections. No new Parliament is beholden to the old dead one.
If not, we’d be intrigued to hear which other pronouncements of Alex Salmond several years ago Rentoul considers to be binding on Scottish politics for the next 20 years. Indeed, if “whatever Alex Salmond said in 2014 goes” is the rule, why bother even HAVING elections again before 2039? Don’t we just have to do whatever he wanted?
Rentoul does indeed appear to hold the view that democracy ended in 2014, for a period to be determined by him. Because in an actual Parliamentary democracy, the straightforward answer to his question below is “However often Parliament votes for one, even if it votes to have one twice a year and three times in leap years until it either gets the result it wants or gets thrown out by the electorate at an election.”
If you disagree with that, fine, but you don’t believe in Parliamentary democracy.
(If Rentoul IS questioning the supremacy of each new Parliament to act without regard to the wishes of its predecessors, that opens up a whole new fun can of worms.)
So let’s recap:
– Scotland cannot escape the Union by electing a majority of pro-independence MPs to Westminster, because it’s vote share that counts, not number of seats.
– Scotland cannot escape the Union by a majority of its voters voting for pro-independence parties in a UK election, because it’s number of seats that counts, not vote share, and Scottish MPs are outnumbered 10 to 1 at Westminster.
– Scotland cannot escape the Union by electing a majority of pro-independence MSPs to its own Parliament, because it did that in 2016 and Westminster simply ignored what those MSPs voted for.
– Scotland cannot escape the Union by having a majority vote for independence in a referendum, because it had a vote on that in the past and apparently that vote ended the very concept of Parliamentary democracy for decades to come, seemingly to be replaced by the eternal will of [a deliberate misrepresentation of] Alex Salmond.
These rules require the UK to be governed both by Parliamentary democracy and NOT by Parliamentary democracy, determined by whichever one would deny Scots the right to decide their own future at any given moment. The UK is Schrodinger’s Democracy.
And fittingly, this impossible and inescapable Catch-22 is defended and advocated by someone who is somehow both Scottish (by his own assertion) and not Scottish (by any other definable criteria) at the same time.
Rentoul, like so many of his ilk, is nothing more than a bully’s lackey, holding down the victim to be punched and robbed of their pocket money by a gang of bigger kids, all the while sneering “Why don’t you just get up and walk away?”
It’s a mentality typical of the privileged but cruel private-school education that formed him, though the glaring intellectual feebleness of his argument would surely shame his Cambridge alma mater.
But more to the point, it demonstrates how independence will never be won by playing “fair and square” with the British establishment, with its endless history of moving the goalposts. It really is time we got in a fight.
