Wings Over Scotland

It’s a sleepy Wednesday in July, so let’s celebrate some proud British culture!

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The next five years of UK politics:

This was David Mundell on Sunday, guaranteeing that any extra money produced for Northern Ireland to secure DUP backing for the Tory government would be matched by more funding for Scotland (as much as £4.5bn under normal Barnett Formula rules, because Scotland has nearly three times the population of the province):

And here’s the truth 24 hours later:

Who could ever have etc?

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The media is aflame today with some rather woolly “news” to the effect that Theresa May might possibly, in some unspecified manner, have conceded a veto over Brexit to the Scottish Parliament.

We can see no evidence suggesting such a thing has happened or will happen, and would instead direct readers to a report published yesterday by Unlock Democracy. We strongly advise taking five minutes out of your day to read pages 26-33 of it, but if you’re really in a rush this paragraph will give you the basic conclusion:

Remember your place, lesser nations of the UK.

This map probably correlates quite closely with one of the strength of Leave vote.

It seems somehow appropriate that on the day negotiations begin (with the UK having no government, no mandate and no idea what it actually wants), large parts of the country are essentially already on fire.

From just under two years ago.

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We know that people like to chat generally about issues of the day (and more) in the comments, so while we’re taking a break we’ll probably put up stuff like this now and again just so that we don’t end up with a single post with thousands of comments in it. (And so you know we haven’t been killed by bears.)

They probably won’t all be about politics. Call them conversation starters.

This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:

On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.

In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.

(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)

Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.

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Not 36 hours after a campaign which focused relentlessly on the idea that a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and the Liberal Democrats would be an unconscionable democratic outrage, the Prime Minister is as we write en route to 10 Downing Street to inform the Queen of her intention, despite having lost 13 seats and her majority, to form a minority government propped up by the most extremist party in the UK Parliament.

The DUP opposes equal marriage, opposes basic abortion rights, rejects the concept of evolution, wants the death penalty back and intends to demand as part of its price a rock-hard Brexit, including a hard border with Ireland that pretty much everyone on all sides agrees risks the return of widespread terrorist violence to the province.

(NB The party actually says that it doesn’t want a hard Brexit, but there’s no possible way that can be done without NI having special status, which the DUP flatly opposes.)

But what would have been “the worst crisis since abdication” had it been the SNP and Labour is apparently all just tickety-boo if it’s the DUP and Tories.

So that’s going to be fun for the next wee while.

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As we write this at just gone 4am, there are 140 seats still to declare. But there are some things we can say already.

1. The SNP have won the election in Scotland. They currently have 32 seats with a handful to declare, so they know that they’ll have more than the three Unionist parties put together. Their total, whatever it is, will be the second-highest in the party’s history, streets ahead of the previous second-best of 11.

2. Labour will be crowing about getting more seats than anyone expected – it’s looking like six – but in fact they’ve barely clung on to their 2015 vote share and most were won by tiny majorities of under 1000. Jeremy Corbyn has, however, largely won back the votes that Kezia Dugdale – who bitterly opposed his leadership – lost in the two years since then.

3. At this stage it seems inconceivable that Theresa May can stay on as Prime Minister. It appears certain that she’s lost her majority in an election where she was at one point expected to have one of more than 200 seats.

4. Jeremy Corbyn, however, has no chance of forming a government without SNP votes. So despite losing 20-odd seats, the SNP may well find themselves in a more powerful position than they were before the election was called.

5. Corbyn has also repeatedly stated that he won’t block a second independence referendum. Independence has now for some time been more popular than the SNP in polls, and if Corbyn does grant a Section 30 order in return for the SNP putting him into power – giving them control of the timing inside a four-year window – the game is very much on.

6. The SNP will now have to pursue that referendum with more urgency, because they can no longer be at all certain of securing a pro-independence majority at the next Holyrood election in 2021. The long grass is no longer an option.

7. It looks highly possible that Labour and Lib Dem tactical votes for Tories in Scottish seats made the difference between the Tories being able to assemble a majority with DUP support and not.

8. Nevertheless, the Tories have lost their majority at Westminster while the SNP have achieved a majority of Scottish seats, although the Tories got a bigger UK vote share than the SNP’s Scottish one. The debate about “mandates” just got a lot more complicated.

9. What happens with Brexit now is absolutely anyone’s guess.

10. A second general election this year is a very real possibility. Sob.

The next few days should be fun.