From the annual report into the state of the UK, published by Deloitte:
It really is remarkable how often that has to be explained to stupid people.
The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has, it seems fair and uncontroversial to say, thrown Scotland’s Unionist parties into something of a spin. With all of them having campaigned for a Remain vote, all are now faced with the unsquareable circle of operating in a country that voted to stay in both the UK and the EU but can now only have one of those things.
Scottish Labour were the first to get themselves into a fankle, unsurprisingly. Their leader Kezia Dugdale first said she might conceivably be able to see herself voting for independence in order to stay in Europe, but then frantically backpedalled as soon as anyone noticed, and is now locked into a position of “never, no chance, not no way, not no how”, even as her own deputy publicly disagrees with her.
(Uncharitable readers pointing out that she took the same view on Jeremy Corbyn, before backing him wholeheartedly when he first won a leadership, then backing Owen Smith a year later on the grounds that Corbyn was useless, then insisting that Corbyn had her fulsome support and could definitely win a general election when he won the leadership again, should be ashamed of themselves. If a leader can’t U-turn three times in the space of 12 months, who can?)
But remarkably, the Scottish Tories seem to be even more confused.
Alert readers may recall that almost three years ago, the No campaign issued a series of dire warnings that independence could cause supermarket prices to rise:
Thankfully, by staying in the UK and therefore leaving the EU, Scotland etc etc.
We fully endorse this message from LBC’s James O’Brien.
It wasn’t easy to find a positive side for this.
But we suppose that it’ll at least be bleakly funny, whenever the second independence referendum comes round, watching Labour try to sell a vote for the UK as a vote for internationalist brotherhood and solidarity.
To be honest, readers, we gave up on taking any notice of David Torrance‘s mundane attempts at trolling in the Herald some time ago. But some alert readers pointed us towards this week’s column, suggesting that it was a bald rewriting of history some way beyond their usual bland irritancy.
This was the passage they objected to:
It’s a patronising piece of “shut up and eat your cereal” condescension for sure. But to be fair to Torrance, it does also happen to be true. Wait, not true. The other thing.
The starting pistol hasn’t actually been fired on the two-year Brexit process yet, but now we have a clear statement of when it will be: this morning on The Andrew Marr Show, the Prime Minister pledged that it would happen before the end of next March.
When she gave a speech to the Conservative conference later, Theresa May did even more than that. By the common consensus of the punditariat – whatever that’s worth these days – May’s message was that the UK was heading for the “hard” version of Brexit, with the single market sacrificed for control of borders.
(We might end up broke, in other words, but at least we’ll be good old British broke, with none of those awful smelly foreign Euro-Johnnies around to see it.)
And nobody was getting a sick note.
And for supporters of independence, that’s about as good as news gets.
The Daily Telegraph just released a video called “100 Reasons Why Brexit Was A Good Thing”. It listed them to a soundtrack of “Jerusalem”, the same song that closed the Labour Party conference earlier this week with its stirring ode to just one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.
100 reasons why #Brexit was a good thing pic.twitter.com/s2gyYSDUzJ
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 30, 2016
We’ve saved a few of the highlights below, just in case the Telegraph should delete the video in a fit of sanity. We’ve also added one fake one. See if you can spot it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
