Only an idiot would try to write anything today about the epic mess currently unfolding in British politics. You’d barely get to the end of typing a sentence before events had rendered it obsolete. But there’s one thing we’d really like to know, which bewilderingly nobody is mentioning.
The primary root cause of Brexit was idiots complaining about immigration. The core supposed aim of leaving, no matter what anyone said, was to reduce the number of foreign people coming to live and work in the UK. The issue of immigration regularly topped polls of what voters were most concerned about, and a 2017 study showed it was the biggest factor in the Leave vote.
But yesterday the UK government, after two and a half years of quite spectacularly inept negotiation, produced for the approval of the electorate a Brexit deal which did precisely NOTHING about immigration, and nobody in the media even mentioned it.
Ever aware of its need to deliver informed enlightenment to the populace, the state broadcaster has recently put up a “BBC Brexit Jargon Buster” page on its website. We’re not sure it was meant to be quite this candid.
This piece ran in the Telegraph – a newspaper with no Scottish edition and almost no Scottish sales – on Friday. Click to enlarge.
Our favourite line is:
“Think of what the UK would be like without the vast wealth generated by the 44bn barrels of oil pumped from British territory over the last 40 years.”
(Curiously, this is a rather different line to the one Critchlow took during the indyref, when he was the Telegraph’s full-time business news editor penning a string of articles about how bankrupt an independent Scotland would be despite possessing an asset that’s now apparently big enough to prop up an economy 12 times Scotland’s size.)
It’s worth keeping in mind whenever Unionists tell us (a) how volatile and worthless and used-up oil is, (b) how much Scotland depends on the kind benevolence of the UK to survive, and (c) why we can’t have another referendum until years after Brexit.
Wings Over Scotland is seven years old today (the period of time defined by the Good Friday Agreement as a “generation” in terms of referendums), and it doesn’t feel like a day over 25. Can we hurry up and have another indy vote before the entire country burns to the ground around our ears, please?
There was a certain uncomfortable 2018 inevitability this morning over the fact that where people were offended, arrests would follow.
And the burning of a cardboard model of the Grenfell Tower last night was certainly right up near the top in the pantheon of cretinously offensive things. Many victims of the appalling tragedy, which killed 72 people and injured many more, still haven’t been properly rehomed almost a year and a half later.
You do @IanBlackfordMP a disservice. The point is rather more subtle - if one part of UK can benefit from one type of differentiated deal for its unique reasons then another may likewise benefit for albeit different reasons. #brexit #ScotlandsPlaceInEurope https://t.co/AoCRRajZdk
