As some alert readers have already noticed, our Twitter account has been suspended again, three and a bit years after the last time. The ban is supposedly permanent. To save a lot of repeated explaining in emails and direct messages, a brief record of the pertinent events follows.
Last night a bomb went off in British politics. It utterly destroyed the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and may have fatally weakened the foundations of the UK itself – Northern Ireland now has a majority of nationalist MPs for the first time in its history, and over 80% of Scottish seats went to the SNP.
As this site had been warning for months and months, the patience of English and Welsh voters with Parliament refusing to implement their 2016 vote to leave the EU finally snapped. Some wildly improbable Labour seats – including the constituency of Grenfell Tower, for God’s sake – went to the Tories, especially in Wales and the north of England, in order to “Get Brexit Done”.
The Lib Dems, the only UK party with a clear (okay, fairly clear) Remain position and with a minimum of 48% of the electorate to target, somehow contrived to LOSE seats, not only compared to their 21-MP starting point (bolstered by defectors since the last election) but compared to the 12 MPs they won in the 2017 election itself.
And the SNP? Well, the SNP failed too.
Because having expressly told voters that the election wasn’t about independence but about stopping Brexit, they won 13 more seats, but seats which have zero leverage at Westminster and will be able to do absolutely nothing to prevent the UK leaving the EU seven weeks from now. For all Scotland’s renewed “STOP BREXIT” message, Brexit will not be stopped. The UK, and Scotland with it, will depart next month.
We can’t help but note at this point that if the party had taken our advice and done a deal with the Tories in October to let Brexit pass in return for Section 30 powers, we’d now have an indyref in the bag (which we’d win) and as a parting gift to our southern kin we’d also have saved England from having a thumping great Tory majority for the foreseeable future.
Hindsight, eh?
Today is – thanks be to God and all that is holy – the last day of the worst general election in recorded human history, and indeed perhaps the worst thing of any kind to have happened in the UK since the Blitz.
In less than 24 hours many of us will go out to vote. But then what?
There are just under 36 hours until the 2019 general election.
God help us all.
Two stories from yesterday’s Scottish papers, published at 11.19am and 11.28am:
But it’s even weirder than it looks.
Scottish Labour would like you to meet Rory.
They want you to believe that he was an SNP member and independence voter who’s recently changed his mind and become a devolutionist Labour supporter.
But that’s not quite true.
We hate to harp on, but it seems kinda important.
Maybe they just bought a Lib Dem bus by accident and only had time to repaint the photo or something.
This site still remembers what it was created for. We hope the SNP does.
Wait, Scotland is a what now, Conservative Home?
Beyond the embarrassing clanger, though, the article is an interesting analysis of the key marginal seats in Scotland next week, which is to say nearly all of them. With anywhere between 25 and 50 being a reasonable estimate of the SNP’s possible tally, readers may wish to familiarise themselves with the latest local data.
We all remember this happy time, right?
Of course, it didn’t work out like that in practice.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
