“New mutant strain of Covid in Britain, continent cut
off” should have been the headline, but somehow, we have lost the defiance that
we used to have when such headlines were or were not written.
The truth is that Britain is in pretty good shape
compared to our “friends” and “allies”. The new mutant Covid is in fact an old
mutant Covid that may have originated in Brazil eight months ago. It has been
spreading all around the world ever since. Britain has been able to recognise
that it exists here because we have excellent facilities to test such things,
other countries have it too, but as yet pretend that they don’t. This is to our
advantage rather than theirs. We are further ahead than anywhere else in
vaccinating and will reach the point where the most vulnerable have been
vaccinated much earlier than EU countries, at which point the pandemic will
effectively be over here while it will continue there. The task is to get
through the next couple of months. So, stay at home, avoid other people, buy as
much food and drink as you can consume and stick it out. We’ll be fine.
All the worst things that Brexit was supposed to bring
and especially a no deal Brexit have been brought anyway by Covid. Even if we had
stayed in the EU we would have been blockaded, but we’ve managed, and we will
manage. The most deranged Remainer fantasies in 2016 about Britain being
punished if we dared to leave the EU, were not even remotely as bad as the
pandemic. So, ignore such predictions. The lesson of life is that you take what
it throws at you remain cheerful and battle on.
Predictably Nicola Sturgeon demanded an extension of
the transition period. She has been trying to stop Brexit ever since 2016.
First, she tried to use Parliament and the law courts to stop it, now she hopes that if Britain caves in at the
last moment then the transition period will continue indefinitely and will
eventually lead to us not leaving the EU at all.
Why is Sturgeon so keen on Britain not leaving the EU?
Why is she continually trying to stop it? If leaving the EU really made Scottish
independence more likely or inevitable, she would be encouraging it.
Of course she is trying to stoke resentment in
Scotland with the hope that this will lead to support for her party and her
cause, but if she really thought that leaving the EU made Scottish independence
easier to achieve why does she continually attempt to put obstacles in the way
of Brexit?
Sturgeon is not merely a hypocrite about masks, she is
also a hypocrite about transition periods.
Imagine if Sturgeon had been given her wish and there
had been an independence referendum in 2018 and she had won it. There would
have been a transition period. Let say it was due to end in March 2020. Scottish
Independence Day would have been April the First. Would Sturgeon have really
extended the transition period because of the Covid outbreak? But what if she
had extended it and Scotland had continued to receive money from the Treasury?
When would the transition period end? When we no longer needed the money? It’s
another word for never.
While condemning the British Government for not extending
the transition period with the EU due to Covid, Sturgeon is still planning an
independence referendum for 2021. If we must extend the transition period
because of Covid, why does she suppose it is sensible to have a referendum on
breaking up Britain? We have had four years to prepare for leaving the EU.
Sturgeon doesn’t even have a plan for independence that takes into account the
economic damage of 2020.
Brexit is massively easier to achieve than Scottish separatism.
It doesn’t involve setting up a new
state. It merely involves us returning to what we had been for centuries until
the early 1970s. The EU is a trading bloc which allows free trade between its
members. The price of this is that we pay a membership fee, cede control of our
waters and accept that EU law and regulations are supreme over British law. Eventually
if the EU succeeds in its goal, we become a region of a United Europe. Not only
that we have to apply the EU’s Common External Tariff on the rest of the world.
It’s a rather high price for free trade, which isn’t anyway free because we
have to pay a fee to have it.
If leaving the EU means that we can trade freely with
the rest of the world and if it means we can free ourselves from EU laws and
red tape, then there is every chance we can become more competitive than the EU
and undercut them. The EU sells much more to us than we do to them, so if they are
awkward about selling us stuff, we just buy it from someone else. Who loses? I
can get blueberries from Chile for next to nothing, I can certainly get wine
from Australia and cars from Korea. There is nothing the EU sells that I can’t
buy just as well from elsewhere. Trade no longer depends on proximity.
The biggest prize of all however is that we finally do
the one thing that Sturgeon really, really does not want. We leave the EU with
a clean break and with the EU having minimal control over anything. Scottish
nationalists will be angry. Let them be angry. There is nothing they can do.
Both Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson will hold the line. Getting over Covid and
rebuilding the economy will take years. There will be no time for referendums.
Sturgeon knows there will be no independence referendum
next year. She is playing to the zoo trying to tame the wilder members of her
menagerie. The good ship Britannia is sailing ever further away from the EU and
as the EU recedes over the horizon Sturgeon dream will recede too, because
Scottish independence was only ever tenable if Britain stayed in the EU. Why else
has she been fighting it for so long?
