Wings Over Scotland

You wouldn’t know it to watch the black-hole-scale mess our politicians are making of it, but the thing about Brexit is that it ISN’T an insoluble problem. That two of the supposed “partners” in the United Kingdom are being forced out of the EU against the will of their people is a political choice, not a necessity.

There are numerous perfectly viable ways to practically address the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain while Wales and England voted Leave, none of which are especially outlandish.

Last July this site put forward an idea that respects the referendum result in all four constituent nations and would have wide public support. Yesterday the Guardian published a variant on the concept with lots of strong technical detail. And earlier this week we suggested another approach which could break the current deadlock.

But the stupendously incompetent Tory executive running the government, and the equally useless notional Labour “opposition”, have both handcuffed themselves across the emergency exits, preventing any hope of escape from disaster as the country burns down around everyone’s ears.

We no longer have a union. We have a hostage situation.

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UK politics is stuck fast in the mud, going nowhere, and the casualties are mounting. Whether on Brexit, independence or anything else, we’ve all become so dug-in to our positions that some people – naming no names – have forgotten where the battle lines are or what their political war was even about in the first place.

For 30 months now, the Yes movement has been trying to answer the question of how to get a second indyref. The SNP has a triple-locked democratic mandate based on Scotland being dragged out of the EU against the will of its people, but as strong a moral argument as that is it unfortunately runs straight into a brick wall of reality: the constitution is reserved to Westminster.

Equally we’re consumed by the ongoing Brexit trainwreck, which has no apparent escape route from a poisonous stalemate paralysing the UK’s politicians and leaving nobody in control as the country heads for some very hard buffers.

As the self-imposed Brexit deadline looms, Theresa May is running out of options. Her deal is a dead duck. When it inevitably fails, there are two possible scenarios: a second EU referendum of some sort (nobody can agree what the options would be), or a general election.

Neither the Tories nor Labour want another referendum because both parties want Brexit to happen, so another election is the more likely. But all the polls suggest it would deliver much the same hung parliament as we have now, solving nothing.

Last week, SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC gave a speech to a diverse pro-Europe group that includes former Green leader Caroline Lucas, pro-indy commentator Lesley Riddoch and Tory MP Dominic Grieve. And as she waxed lyrical, with a twinkle in her eye Cherry slipped in reference to a hitherto-undiscussed plan that offers an escape route for everyone.

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The extremely sharp and perceptive New Statesman writer Stephen Bush buries some of his political insight in a daily email newsletter (because, we assume, his fax machine doesn’t work, you can’t send telegrams any more and London flats don’t have enough room to keep a lot of messenger pigeons or let you send smoke signals).

And it’s a lot easier just to quote you a chunk of today’s than it is to rewrite the same observations into a new article ourselves.

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Blimey, that was quick. This was Tory MP Douglas Ross yesterday:

Short version: “I don’t care what my constituents want, I will vote loyally for the party I was elected as a member of.”

And this is him today:

Never let it be said Wings readers don’t get things done.

Last night the UK government lost a vote which, while largely symbolic, was designed to hamper its ability to generate its finances in the event of a no-deal Brexit (and therefore to try to incentivise it to avoid a no-deal).

A handful of Tory MPs voted for the motion, combining with the opposition to defeat the government by 308 to 296. No Scottish Tory MPs rebelled, however – despite having pledged when they were elected that they would vote to defend Scotland’s interests, something pretty much everyone agrees a no-deal Brexit would be a catastrophe for.

A reader contacted one of them, Douglas Ross, and forwarded their exchange to us, because it raises enormous questions about the entire UK political system.

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We’ve got no words for this, so we’ll let it stand by itself.

Because 55% voted No. Welcome to Brexit.

The last two years, particularly 2018, have been a pretty miserable time in the annals of Scottish independence. Not because support has fallen – it hasn’t budged an inch, however much Unionists might try to desperately convince themselves otherwise – but because there hasn’t, in essence, been anything we could usefully do.

Faced with a brick wall of “now is not the time” intransigence from a UK government elected by England and determined to frustrate the democratic will of the Scottish Parliament, we could talk all we wanted but had no means to determine our own fate, locked in the boot of a car speeding towards a cliff edge with a lunatic at the wheel.

That age – and it’s felt like an age – is very nearly at an end.

It’s time to get ready.

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We can think of no better illustrative metaphor for the brain-withering idiot festival that was 2018 than page 16 of today’s Sunday Mail, which in the space of a single inch of newsprint predicts both SNP gains at any new general election, and then SNP losses to the exact same Labour and Tory parties that the editorial on the left excoriates as incompetent, “deluded” and “moribund”.

We wish we could rationally hope 2019 will be any better.

Okay, it’s only the 19th of December, but we don’t think there’s any chance of this one being beaten by the time it’s 2019.

As expected, Labour bottled the chance to call a vote of no confidence in the UK government today, refusing to support a motion tabled by four other opposition parties last night and thereby guaranteeing the Tories at least another two months in power.

Their official stated reason is that the only way to avoid a disastrous hard Brexit is to call a vote of no confidence in the Tories next month when it’ll (somehow, magically) be more likely to succeed, trigger a general election, get (somehow, magically) a Labour majority and then go to the EU and negotiate (somehow, magically) a better deal from them than the Tories have done.

Which makes this a bit of a beamer:

So if it’s “very clear” that there can be “no more negotiations” (and therefore no better deal), and Labour is going to vote against Theresa May’s deal (which Labour says it is), and if Brexit is going to happen (which Labour says it is), then the only possible conclusion left is that Labour’s official policy is now to crash out of the EU with no deal, and absolutely everything the party is saying in public about Brexit is a lie.

So at least everyone now finally knows where they stand. Even if, as is so often the case nowadays, it’s only because Labour told the truth by accident.