Wings Over Scotland

It should now be abundantly clear to any rational person that time has very nearly run out to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

Theresa May has been sent swiftly home from Europe with a skelped arse and told that any further negotiation is out of the question. But she’s insisted that the meaningful vote in the UK parliament on her Brexit deal won’t now happen before Christmas, which in practical terms means before mid-January.

That means that if Labour wait until the deal is thrown out before they call a vote of no confidence – which is their current position, so far as anyone can tell what their position is – then by the time the government falls it’ll already be February.

(Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, after a successful VoNC there are 14 days for someone to try to form an alternative administration before an election is called.)

Add in the six weeks minimum that are required for an election campaign and you’re halfway through March, literally just a few days before the UK will automatically crash out of the EU with no deal.

Even if a couple of months extension of Article 50 were to be granted – and we’re not sure who’d be asking by that stage – that’s plainly nowhere near enough time for a new government to come up with anything the EU would agree to.

(Remember that the withdrawal agreement was supposed to be done and dusted by October in order to give the EU six months to ratify it. Their patience with the UK is plainly at an end, and it’s hard to see them agreeing to drag the whole mess out for another year or more, which would be the realistic timescale.)

“And that’s all very well”, readers might be thinking at this point, “but that’s a picture of Kezia Dugdale, an insignificant backbench Holyrood list MSP. What the bloody hell’s it got to do with her?”

And the answer is that it’s all her fault.

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This is the 5,000th post since Wings Over Scotland began in November 2011, which is just shy of two a day, every single day, since then. We wanted such a landmark post to be something serious and significant, but in light of the utter brain-melting futility of trying to write anything sensible about politics in the UK today that won’t be overtaken by ridiculous events within seven minutes, screw it, we’re going to this instead.

So we’ll see you all later this evening for the result of Theresa May’s confidence vote. What’s the worst that could happen?

No, really, we’re asking.

On one level you have to feel a bit sorry for Scottish Unionists. Having believed until very late in the day that they’d win a crushing victory in the 2014 indyref and put the matter to bed for a century, they’ve never been able to relax since.

And this week the fear has them well and truly in its grip.

The hapless Scottish Secretary demonstrated the lack of self-awareness for which he’s famous when he said at the weekend that the thing he warned would threaten the Union (a defeat for the PM’s Brexit deal) was going to happen on Tuesday, at which point – having said he’d resign if the Union was threatened – he’s made it absolutely clear that he ISN’T going to resign.

And he wasn’t alone in the panic room.

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Brexit isn’t really this site’s remit, which is why we’ve been relatively quiet in recent weeks as the UK’s shambolic exit from the EU hogs all the news and Scottish politics has been relegated to a largely-dormant backwater in the press.

Yes supporters don’t speak with one voice on the EU, and while we’re in favour of it we’ve long said that the indy movement can’t really move on until the fog clears and we know for sure what Brexit’s going to look like. Deciding whether to be part of the EU should be a decision for an independent Scotland to make, not a precondition.

But dear lord, this is such a mess it needs to be examined.

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We now have the verdicts on Brexit from three of the UK’s four nations. The Scottish Parliament, speaking for the Scottish nation, voted overwhelmingly this afternoon to reject both Theresa May’s draft agreement and leaving the EU without a deal.

And it wasn’t alone.

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Posed by Kezia Dugdale in the Holyrood chamber today:

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If there’s one thing you can say for the Tories, it’s that right or wrong, they always stick to their principles.

Oh, not YOU, Scotland.

At a time of unprecedented political chaos and uncertainty, just about the only thing you can still count on is that for any given situation, senior Labour figures will issue proclamations both firmly in favour of it and stoutly opposed to it, usually the same day.

So the stories below, which are respectively from today’s Scotsman and today’s Times, won’t come as much of a shock to anyone.

But against the odds, we think we’ve made some sense of it.

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From today’s Daily Mail:

The headline is, of course, a lie.

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