A few months ago there were two main strategic
challenges facing Britain. How to leave the EU successfully and how to keep our
country intact? There are in addition, of course, the usual challenges facing any
government. How to keep the economy growing? How to earn more than we spend?
How to keep our people safe? Other unexpected challenges will arise from time
to time. But these challenges are different in kind from the two main ones.
Leaving the EU and keeping our country intact are existential challenges. They involve the nature of our country's existence.
Some people thought that leaving the EU might cause
the break-up of the United Kingdom. Many Remain campaigners saw this as one of
the main arguments for staying in the EU. Some apparently Pro UK writers have
been terribly pessimistic ever since last June. Scotland voted to Remain,
Nicola Sturgeon and indeed Alex Massie were very angry, therefore Scotland
would soon be independent. We were doomed. I gave up reading this sort of
stuff. It was all too depressing.
The problem with most political journalism is that
it is far too short term. It thinks that the day to day affairs at Westminster
or Holyrood matter. They don’t. No-one much follows what happens and no-one much
cares about the day to day trivia. What matters is long term strategy and
getting to the essence of the issue.
Leaving the EU is keeping our country intact. The
threat from Nicola Sturgeon even two or three months ago looked real and
imminent. The Scottish Parliament voted to hold a second independence
referendum and if it had been held I have no idea who would have won. I think
it would have been very close indeed. Campaigns are very uncertain things as we
have just found out. A big lead can be lost. People get caught up in the heat
of the moment. We might have lost in 2014. We might have lost in 2018. But the
moment passed. The moment of greatest danger is already behind us.
Whatever her faults, I will always be grateful to
Theresa May for standing up to Nicola Sturgeon. If she had not done so, then I
do not think we would have had the result we had yesterday. Nationalism in
Scotland is probably always going to be with us. But it can be kept manageable
or it can be unleashed with all its force. Now it looks to be going into a
decline. Let us hope that this continues for Scottish nationalism has the power
to divide not only the UK but Scotland too. I think it is this above all that
the Scottish electorate sensed. The SNP are being punished for the fact that
the 2014 was so unpleasant for so many of us. It was bitter and traumatic. The
majority of the electorate will vote for anyone to avoid a repeat of the
experience.
But more than this it was voting the EU that
concentrated minds. Scottish independence fundamentally depended on the UK
remaining a part of the EU. Voting to Leave was the condition for the
possibility of defeating the SNP. Paradoxically not getting what Scotland
wanted in the EU referendum destroyed the SNP argument. The UK outside the EU
looks an awfully lot more independent than Scotland within it. This is why so
many SNP supporters voted to Leave. But they too misunderstood how this fundamentally
destroyed their position. Scotland is tied to the other parts of the UK in
terms of history, family, and economic relations. Brexit and Scottish independence
would sever those ties and put us on radically different paths. It would put a
chasm between Scotland and England. It made Nicola Sturgeon and all her threats
look fanatical. She does not care whether Scottish independence would damage
Scotland just so long as she can grasp it in her little hand. It must have
seemed so close.
We must keep fighting in Scotland to lessen support
for the SNP. We must try to bring back the time when the SNP were a minor party
who won a few seats here and there. This is now quite close. SNP people in the big
cities will return to Labour recognising that there best chance of achieving socialism
is to vote for Labour. Tartan Tories in the countryside will return to the
Conservatives. The long period of Conservative decline in Scotland has ended.
The ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcised by Ruth Davidson and so it no
longer haunts us and defines what we are. This is an historical achievement by
Davidson. She has done it by being herself and by being above all a Unionist.
No-one could doubt that she above all other Scottish politicians would stand by
the UK. Well done indeed.
We may soon end up with a situation in Scotland like
it was until the 1980s. It will be a political fight between Labour and the
Conservatives with the Lib Dems winning a few seats here and there. We must
disagree fellow Pro UK Scots. We must fight each other for these Scottish
seats. We must talk about the constitution less and public services more. When
independence is no more an issue than restoring the Stuarts, only then will our
country will be safe. So for the meantime let us fight our different fights. We
all are making our country safe from Scottish nationalism. Let us try to remain
on friendly terms. But above all let’s try to move our country on from a
sterile debate and a question that was settled once and for all in 2014.
Britain’s Northern flank for the present is secure.
We must be wary and watch for nationalists trying to get around it, but we must
move on to the greater strategic challenge.
The goal is to that the UK becomes an ordinary
country like Australia, New Zealand, Japan or the United States. Our Parliament
should be supreme. No-one should tell the UK electorate what it can or cannot
vote for. We should be able to trade freely with who we want depending on their
agreement, but in no way should be controlled or constrained by those we trade
with. We should be able to decide how many or how few people from elsewhere
come to Britain. Let our political parties argue over this. I am in favour of
having reciprocal rights with European countries and perhaps even English
speaking countries. But let that be a matter for debate. What we want in
leaving the EU is quite ordinary. It is not nationalistic or immoral for Japan
to not wish to be part of an Asian Union ruled by Beijing. But Japan trades
quite successfully with China. What we seek from the EU is free trade and
nothing else. We want to be an ally and a friend, but we don’t want them to
tell us what to do. That’s it.
Theresa May is right in terms of strategy. She has
been damaged. Who knows how long she will last? But the last thing we need is
yet another Prime Minister seeking a personal mandate. Let Theresa May
at least see us through Brexit. Her strategy is sound. We want free trade and
we should be willing to pay a little for the privilege. But we should not be
willing to pay more to trade with the EU than it would cost us if they charged
us a tariff. That is the bottom line. As soon as they wish to charge us more,
or if they want to constrain our newly won freedom, then we must be willing to
walk away. They must know that we will do this. That is the only way they just
might grant us the goal we seek.
We are in a strange world politically. We are
continually surprised. Two years ago the SNP looked invincible. Now they must
fear that their support is a bubble that just went pop.
The Lib Dems and UKIP look like an irrelevance. The
ultra-Remainers who hoped to win 48% of the vote ended up winning 12 seats. The
ultra-Leavers won none. It would be better by far if both parties ceased to
exist. They can prevent another party winning, but they cannot win themselves.
For the Lib Dems to get back to their 2010 level will require decades at this
rate. Long term the attempt to challenge the two party system that began with
the creation of the SDP in 1981 looks like ending in failure. Liberal support
has returned to the level it had in the 1970s and for Lib Dem bird is more dead
parrot than phoenix.
The Labour result is extraordinary. Jeremy Corbyn in
affect is a communist. He is a revolutionary socialist who wanted the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics to win the Cold War. He would like our country to be
more like the USSR than the USA. He would very much like to turn Britain into a
socialist country. It’s like New Labour never happened.
Jeremy Corbyn has proved Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock
wrong. They believed after the defeat of Michael Foot in 1983 that for Labour
to be relevant it had to move towards the centre. They set about reforming Old
Labour and in effect ditched socialism. Tony Blair was a social democratic and
his party apart from a few diehards like Mr Corbyn was social democratic. The
conventional wisdom was that it was this that enabled Tony Blair to be elected
three times.
Mr Corbyn’s success in winning more than 40% of the
vote means that all those who challenged him since his surprise election to the
leadership have been wrong. All those Labour MPs who said they had no
confidence in him last summer were trying in fact to get rid of their greatest
electoral asset. Some of them have already recanted and repented. “Give me that
old time religion” sings buffoon in chief Owen Smith.
For the foreseeable future Labour are going to be a
Far Left party with the aim of turning Britain into a socialist state. The
problem is that socialism doesn’t work. The fundamentals are wrong. If you
doubt this, look at the Korean peninsula. They started from the same point in
1945, but the socialist north is now one of the poorest and least free
countries in the world, while the capitalist south is a wealthy western
democracy.
At some point given Labour’s present level of
support they are going to win an election. This no doubt is good for our
democracy. The biggest trouble with socialism is that it is so attractive. If
only we could create a world without poverty, where everyone was equal, we
would have paradise on earth. “Imagine no possessions” sang John Lennon, but
you don’t need to imagine, you just have to look at where this experiment was
tried. It is above all for this reason that this song was played over the
credits of the 1984 film the Killing fields. The ideology of John Lennon and
Jeremy Corbyn ultimately leads to Pol Pot and Cambodia. That is what you voted
for folks.
But socialism is so attractive that each generation
has to learn its lesson. 2008 is rather a long time ago if you are twenty. 1979
might as well be 1789. Labour will have to try again to create its socialist
paradise, because perhaps this is the nature of man always longing for the
Garden of Eden that we lost. Always trying to storm the gates of heaven and
create heaven on earth.
Labour will win an election at some point, but then
they will fail. The Far Left will wreck the UK economy again and the electorate
will realise its error and turn once more the Conservatives. This is the
British electoral cycle. What Labour breaks, the Tories mend until the electorate
forgets that Labour made them poorer and asks them to try again.
Strategically Labour is in a worse position than it
was. Social democracy has a chance of working. It has a chance of winning three
elections in a row. Socialism ultimately takes Labour back to 1983 and the need
to reinvent itself again. So have a nice little celebration dear socialists.
You may well win next time. But you will go into that election with a Far Left
leader and a Far Left manifesto and if you win your Government will be saddled
with ideas that don’t work and which are doomed to fail.
All this though is for the future, for the moment we
can allow ourselves a little pause to reflect on things. One thing is going to
happen in the next few years and another thing is not going to happen. We are
going to leave the EU and there will not be another referendum on Scottish independence.
The one will not happen because of the other. Not only this. I believe we have
a great chance of gaining a free trade relation with the EU and the process of
leaving will in the long run make Britain much more prosperous. It is not
necessary to have political union between the vastly different peoples of
Europe in order to have free trade. That is the EU’s long term strategic error.
The SNP’s error on the other hand is that it makes no sense to split up people
who are fundamentally the same. It certainly makes no sense to do so in order
to make Scotland socialist.
Party fortunes rise and fall. In the end this is a
matter of a few years. We have had a Labour Government before and we will have
one again. They will make a mess, but we will get through it. That is democracy
and it is no long term threat. The SNP were the greatest threat to our country in its
more than three hundred year history. They came close to breaking up our
country. But history written one hundred years from now will reflect on how
they failed. Keep fighting folks, they are retreating and we can let loose our
cavalry. Now is not the time to cease our attack but rather to attack with
renewed vigour. That way we can turn defeat into a rout.
