Oh God. Would you look at the absolute state of this, readers?
Let’s make like everybody’s mental health and break that down.
In the light of David Davis’ resignation last night and the continuing shambolic chaos that is UK politics, it seemed a pertinent time for these findings from our latest poll.
Readers probably won’t be too shocked that it’s Scotland Vs The Tories again.
So this is an interesting one. The UK government currently finds itself in an appalling mess over the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with Ireland, due to the inconvenient fact of a small part of Ireland being in the UK, and has no idea what to do about it.
The closest thing Westminster has to a plan – and it has to be said that it’s not VERY close to a plan – is the so-called “backstop”, which isn’t a backstop at all and merely kicks everything down the road a couple of years, and which the EU has already said is a non-starter.
The fallback on the backstop, as announced last December, is “regulatory alignment” on the island of Ireland, which would effectively mean Northern Ireland staying in the EU and a border coming into existence in the Irish Sea (or to be more geographically accurate, the North Channel).
This would be, um, bitterly opposed by the DUP, on whom Theresa May’s government notionally depends, but given the absolute trainwreck of Labour’s position on Brexit it’s not at all clear that the DUP’s opposition would be enough to scupper any vote, so it could happen anyway, opening a simply massive can of worms.
That’s about the shortest rendition of the situation we can manage. But of course, in reality it’s much more complicated than that.
In our latest Panelbase poll, we asked the same independence question we asked in the last one, and got much the same answer. (Technically the indy vote went up by about a sixth of one percent, but that’s statistically meaningless.)
That’s a bit disappointing after the events of recent weeks, but also not very surprising – after all, the way the question is framed pretty much guarantees at least 38% of the population will choose the second option straight off the bat.
Much more interesting is the question we asked next.
The Sun (English edition only, the Scottish one goes for a domestic murrdurr story) has an inflammatory front page today, as Parliament debates the most important series of votes so far on Brexit, including one to overrule devolution.
It’s a rerun of a(n in)famous previous front-page illustration from the paper, which you can see below. But there’s something odd about it.
Last week we revealed that English voters would happily see Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK if it was the price of securing Brexit. But one of the odder things was that those figures included a sizeable number of Remain voters, who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.
We were a little perplexed, so we did a follow-up question asking those people if they’d elaborate a bit and got some interesting replies. One person, for example, answered “The Scottish people are very arrogant and although they want to be separate from the rest of the UK they are happy to take money from England”. Charming.
But there was also another stream of opinion on the subject, and it was revealed in the responses to another question in the original poll.
Sane people across the nation have watched in growing disbelief for the last two years as the UK government’s catastroshambles over Brexit has unfolded. In the latest jaw-dropping developments, David Davis has revealed that he’s only just now thinking of STARTING negotiating a trade deal with the EU – 22 months after the referendum and with absolutely no idea of how to solve the Irish Question on which it all depends.
Meanwhile, Faisal Islam of Sky News has made the pertinent point that the one “land-based” border between the UK and mainland Europe, the Channel Tunnel, has no infrastructure in place for serving as a checkpoint because it was fundamentally never designed or envisaged for a Europe without the UK, and the UK government has done absolutely nothing in the last two years to prepare for that changing.
And the more ludicrously chaotically and ineptly the whole farce plays out, the more it’s only possible to come to one rational conclusion about it: that the Prime Minister’s grand plan for enacting Brexit is to fail.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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