Wings Over Scotland

As a right-of-centre English conservative, there are Scottish National Party concepts I haven’t so far been able to comprehend. Perhaps it’s because I don’t follow Nicola Sturgeon and Ian Blackford. Should I keep an eye on what The Scotsman is saying?

SNP leaders talk in the same sentence of a “free” and “independent” Scotland having a future as a member of the EU. My grasp of those words is not theirs. Distinguished lawyers – be they Remainers, Leavers or Don’t-Care-Just-Pay-My-Billsers – all agree that a series of European Court of Justice decisions have established the unqualified supremacy of European Union laws – disguised as “Regulations and Directives” – over the national laws of EU states.

By 1970, the court ruled that Community law must take precedence even over the constitutional laws of member states — including basic laws guaranteeing fundamental rights, such as in Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH v Einfuhr- und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel.

I see this as vassalage, not independence.

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Well, here’s your New Britain. Here’s your “better deal”. Own it, you tossers.

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?

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Today is – thanks be to God and all that is holy – the last day of the worst general election in recorded human history, and indeed perhaps the worst thing of any kind to have happened in the UK since the Blitz.

In less than 24 hours many of us will go out to vote. But then what?

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We hate to harp on, but it seems kinda important.

Maybe they just bought a Lib Dem bus by accident and only had time to repaint the photo or something.

This site still remembers what it was created for. We hope the SNP does.

As we steel ourselves for the wretched purgatorial misery of (at least) the next six weeks, we’ve been sitting up late trying to think of a positive aspect of the coming election campaign, and the best we’ve come up with is this: if it’s awful for most human beings in the country, just imagine how terrible it is for Nigel Farage.

Because as has been increasingly obvious from the Brexit Party leader’s comments this month, Farage knows only too well the truth that the rest of the country is going to realise quite soon, if it hasn’t already: he’s now the only thing that might stop the UK leaving the European Union.

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It’s a long time, apparently. Because while a general election on 12 December would be a “barking mad” idea according to the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford on Thursday, having one on 9 December instead is genius.

So in a month in which this site has been extensively screamed at by SNP diehards as the work of a “traitor” and an “MI5 plant” for suggesting that maybe the SNP could vote with the Tories (or perhaps just abstain) to let Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal go through in exchange for a second indyref, the official SNP plan is to now vote with the Tories to give them the election Boris Johnson has been trying to call for weeks – which all polls suggest he’d win, allowing him to enact any sort of Brexit he wants – but to cleverly NOT get a second indyref out of it.

Y’know what, folks, we can’t even be bothered.

It’s Monday morning, readers, so welcome once again to the world’s favourite situation comedy, the United Kingdom.

The current position is that absolutely nobody has the slightest idea what’s going to happen this week, or today, or by lunchtime. The Prime Minister is as we speak being taken to court (again), and a whole series of votes in the House Of Commons may or may not take place and may or may not determine anything.

But there’s one particularly interesting thing going on.

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So, almost a third of you are bloody idiots and we’ll just have to deal with that.

The good news is that at least there couldn’t be any unforeseen consequences.

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