Just after the Brexit vote I came back from holiday
and found a string of messages from Pro UK people. They were worried. Nicola
Sturgeon was continually on the television complaining about something or
other. Far from encountering systematic bias from the BBC, she was getting
encouragement. At least she wasn’t one of those dreadful Brexiteers.
People were asking me where have you been. Some were
angry that I had encouraged them to vote to leave the EU. Look what you’ve
done. The pound will soon be worth nothing. The markets are going to crash. We’re
all going to lose our jobs and we’re not going to have a Prime Minister for
months. Nicola Sturgeon is going to call a second independence referendum and
she’s going to win it. It’s all your fault.
There is something feverish about news at the
moment. It must be to do with it being on all the time. They have to fill up
the time with something. When there is a plane crash there are endless
interviews with experts who know absolutely nothing about what has happened.
When there is a budget there are continual speculations about what will be in
it. Why not just wait a few hours and find out? Well so too with the EU
referendum. There was endless noise. Much of it was just people complaining
about the result and signalling that they were not and never had been a
Brexiteer.
Scotland didn’t vote to stay in the EU, nor did
England and Wales votes to leave. None of these places are members of the EU. Try counting the members if you are unsure. Scotland is no more a member of the EU than is Aberdeenshire or Antrim. When the Scottish Assembly
was established it was on the basis that it had power over certain matters and
didn’t have power over certain other matters. That is what the majority of
people in Scotland voted for. Foreign affairs have never been devolved.
International relations take place between independent sovereign nation states.
Many people in Scotland would prefer that Scotland was such a state. But again
we had a vote on this and they lost.
The endless noise from Nicola Sturgeon is based on a
simple mistake. It is of course a deliberate mistake. She thinks that if she
acts as if she were the leader of a sovereign independent nation state she is
more likely to become one. But really Scottish nationalists ought continually
to be reminded of a simple matter of logic. You cannot become what you already
are. If you already are independent, why are you campaigning for it? But then
Sturgeon’s grievance collapses. She is complaining about something that was
never within her remit and which the electorate in Scotland has more than once
decided not to give her the power to control. Until and unless Scotland becomes
independent it will not be able to have foreign relations with other sovereign independent
nation states.
Most news and most comment about news is trivial.
The reason for this is that most news will be forgotten a year from now.
Political comment likewise is usually of no consequence. There was endless comment during the last General Election about what would happen if there were a hung
Parliament. Today there is a lot of noise about Theresa May’s trousers. Nicola
Sturgeon’s talking head after the Brexit vote was of no more consequence than
these lederhosen. It is vital to see through the day to day noise and try to
think about long term consequences. What matters is not that an argument works
today, but that it works a year from now.
Nicola Sturgeon talks about all sorts of conditions
that must be met or else she will call an independence referendum. This is all
noise. There is only one condition. Can she win it?
The whole narrative is ludicrous. Supposedly the UK
Government has to make all sorts of concessions to the SNP or else Nicola
Sturgeon will do what she wants to do more than anything else in the world, i.e. have another independence referendum. But
let’s say the UK Government gave the SNP everything they could possibly dream
of. Imagine if the Scottish Parliament was given even more powers, and even
more money. Imagine if there was another Constitutional Convention and Gordon
Brown made another vow. Imagine if the UK became a federal state. Imagine if
all these things happened would it kill of the hydra of Scottish nationalism.
Would the SNP cease to want independence?
All sorts of weird and wonderful schemes are dreamed
up by which Scotland somehow gets to stay in the EU or the Single Market. These
are then presented as the condition for the SNP not calling a second
independence referendum. But what if Scotland were given this special status?
Would this mean that we wouldn’t have a second referendum five years from now or
ten years from now? Of course it wouldn’t. So why bother. We have to learn the
lesson that there is no appeasing nationalism. There is nothing the SNP wants
except independence. So no more Constitutional Conventions please, the last one
has done enough damage. The UK needs more unity. We need to go in the opposite
direction to the one in which the SNP wants to travel.
So cut through the noise coming from Nicola Sturgeon’s
mouth. Jabber, jabber, jabber Scotland … jabber, jabber, jabber … independence.
The only thing that matters is whether what she wants is what the electorate in
Scotland wants.
Again it is important to look at matters from a more
long term perspective. There were a few opinion polls in June and July that
showed support for Scottish independence had increased. This was one of the
reasons why people were writing to me in a panic. But polls go up and down and
anyway they are wildly inaccurate. What matters is the fundamentals. Leaving
the EU makes Scottish independence harder.
Voting for Brexit in the short term angered quite a
lot of Scots who found themselves on the losing side of the argument. It
angered a lot of people in the rest of the UK too. Naturally this had a short
term effect on opinion polls. But just like news, these day to day emotions are
trivial. This is human nature. We get angry, but then we get bored. Each of us
had a huge emotional reaction to Brexit, but it was also complex. I was
pleased, but scared and uncertain. Would the scare stories come true? For the
first month I read everything I could about Brexit, but then I got on with my
life. I stopped following every detail. Above all I stopped listening to Nicola
Sturgeon.
The last six months hasn’t been a disaster for the
UK. Perhaps next year will be. Lots of people seem desperate for leaving the EU
to go as badly as possible. It’s a peculiar sort of masochism. Above all it’s
peculiar if you want the UK to remain intact.
Most Scots just got on with their lives in the past
few months. Whichever way we voted in the EU referendum we got on with daily life. We put the debate behind us. It is for this reason that support for
Scottish independence has not increased and instead has fallen. I didn’t take
part in the SNP’s national survey. But then I don’t know anyone else who did. Apparently
SNP activists were going to ask all their friends. That seems an excellent
method of coming up with an unbiased sample. I’d love to know what the results
were, but the SNP won’t tell me. But then again I don’t need them to tell me.
Imagine if two million Scots had told the SNP that they were desperate for
another independence referendum. Would the results be secret under those
circumstances?
Some disappointed Remainers will continue to try to prevent
Brexit or to turn it into leaving in name only. They will fail. But they might
help the SNP. 2016 was a year of revolutions and the momentum from this is
liable to continue into 2017. The UK electorate is sick of an establishment
that has ignored its legitimate concerns for decades. That is the fundamental
thing that happened this year. That is the thing that will remain news a year
from now. In time it may even topple the Scottish establishment. Who are they? Well they have been in power for quite a long time now.
The EU apparently wants to be as nasty to Britain as
it can be. Again some Remainers will cheer them on. They will be delighted that
the EU wants to make leaving as unpleasant as possible that it considers those
who attempt to escape as deserving severe punishment. I get the impression some
Remainers think that the EU is really called Stalag Luft III and that
Brexiteers deserve to be shot by machine guns in order to discourage the others.
But this too won’t work. Once you have turned your beloved EU into a prison,
you have lost the argument. What’s more the revolution is contagious.
We have seen off worse than the EU and we have also
been isolated before with the whole of Europe against us. This just helps
British unity.
The SNP thinks that Scots prefer the EU to the UK
but they are mistaken. We all want free trade and we all want to be able to
live and work in Europe. But few indeed of us want more than this from the EU. When did you last watch a debate in the EU Parliament? Some of us vaguely think of ourselves as internationalists. But Scots who want
to create a border between England and Scotland are a peculiar sort of
internationalist.
What we want from the EU is no more than we are
willing to give them in return. If they allow us to live in their country, then
we will allow a similar number to live in ours. If they trade freely with us,
we will trade freely with them. That is the essence of the matter. The rest is
noise. You should not have to be ruled by someone in order to trade freely with
them. Moreover you shouldn’t have to pay to do so. Paying for free trade means
that it is not free.
Brexit makes the choice for Scottish nationalists
particularly delightful. Do you want to live in a Britain that is not ruled by
the EU or do you prefer to be an “independent” Scotland subject to ever closer
union more and more ruled by Brussels and ultimately by Berlin? Do you want to
end up in a different trading bloc to your closest trade partner? Do you think
a place with five million people will get a better deal from our European
neighbours than a place with sixty five million people? Do you think that the
UK leaving the EU makes it more or less likely that they would share a currency
with Scotland? If Scotland were in the Single Market, but England was not would there have
to be customs at Gretna? Do you know that the EU countries that want to
discourage secession will even allow Scotland to join in the short term? How
sure are you that the EU will even exist in ten years? The Visegrád Group don’t
seem very keen on being bossed around and Italy has become the new Greece.
Brexit forces Scottish nationalists to choose. It
makes the disadvantages of Scottish independence more acute. It makes any split
from the other parts of the UK more fundamental and deeper. If we can make
Brexit work, if we can show that prosperity awaits the UK outside the EU, we
have the chance to kill off Scottish nationalism. So all Pro UK people should
work together to get the best Brexit deal possible. The Scottish nationalists
would love it if Brexit were to fail. They have the excuse that they hate
Britain. Do you?
