If we don't defeat the SNP this time we will deserve what follows

 

Scotland for the past decade has been dominated by the SNP. It would oddly I think benefit the SNP if it were decisively defeated at the election, because then it would have to address its failure of the past decade. If the SNP wins a few seats less than Labour, it will continue as before. If it by some mischance wins one more seat than Labour, it will demand negotiations on independence with Keir Starmer beginning the day after the election and we will be back to where we started on the day after the referendum in 2014.

The fundamental problem with Scottish nationalism is that while it has an emotional case for Scottish independence it does not have an intellectual case. It did not have it in 2014, for which reason it lost, and it has it still less now because it has not adapted to the changed circumstances of the past ten years.

The SNP had a much better argument in 2014 because the UK was a member of the European Union. The SNP have argued since 2016 that Brexit was a reason for voting for the independence because most Scots voted for Remain. But it has never honestly faced up to the downside of Brexit for the Scottish nationalist argument.

It's all very well claiming that the UK isn’t a country, and that Scotland subsidises the other parts of the UK or that Scotland will have an open border after independence just like Ireland does or that there will be no issue at all using the pound while trying to join the EU. This sort of stuff convinces those who are already emotionally convinced by the argument for independence, but you need an intellectual argument to persuade everyone else. It is this that the SNP has lacked.

It may be that if Nicola Sturgeon were still leader of the SNP, it would still be winning nearly all of the seats in Scotland. But the SNP project had in fact already failed prior to her departure. It was stuck forever promising a referendum next year that then didn’t happen.

But because it kept winning the SNP felt no need to think about how to make the intellectual case for leaving the UK and it was this stagnation of thought as much as its general incompetence in government that has seen so many Scots turn to Labour.

Independence may be an emotional ideal for many Scots who generally feel much more Scottish than British, but even if I felt the same way I would vote against the SNP for the reason that post Brexit independence means a hard border with England. It also means uncertainty with regard to my house price and my savings as Scotland would have to go through the experiment of using the pound unofficially, then setting up a Scottish currency and then perhaps joining the Euro.

It would mean the loss of the subsidy that Scotland receives from the UK Treasury. Mr Swinney admits that he needs it, otherwise he would not ask for health spending in the UK to increase so that it might increase in Scotland too.

In order to join the EU Scotland would need to impose tariffs on trade with England but would still require nearly all of its goods to go through England in order to reach the continent.

If you are a certain sort of Scot who insists that Scotland is a country just like France or Germany because we play them at football, then the emotional pull of voting for the SNP may be strong. Most if not all countries are independent, why not Scotland? This argument is very good but it’s not enough. If it were enough Scotland would have won independence already.

The reason it has not is because of these questions. Do you really want to be poorer? Do you really want to go through the turmoil of trying to break up the UK with no real idea what consequences it would have either here or elsewhere? Do you really want to break up the British armed forces and make its nuclear deterrent homeless while Putin threatens? It is these questions that the SNP has to answer and which it does not even address. It will not begin to address them unless it is decisively defeated.

The same goes for the Conservative Party. I remember people saying 2019 that Boris Johnson could remain Prime Minister for a decade and more because Labour could not overcome an eighty majority in five years.

The failure of the Conservative Party is not merely that like the SNP it has ruled incompetently, the failure is that it has failed to produce an intellectual argument for right wing free market economics.  More importantly more than half the electorate voted for Brexit because they wanted Parliament to take control of our borders and for our government to be genuinely sovereign rather than subordinate to international bodies like the EU.

We are still just as subordinate as we were. We cannot stop illegal migrants crossing the Channel without visas. But when we go on holiday to Spain, we have to give our fingerprints and have our faces photographed and if we stay too long, we can be deported. British tourists have fewer rights than illegal migrants in dinghies.

Worse still the Conservative Party has allowed millions to arrive legally. We have simply swapped free movement from the EU with free movement from the rest of the world. No wonder Brexiteers feel cheated.

If the defeat of the Conservative Party is decisive enough it may learn its lesson kick out the wets and there may in time be a rebuilding on the right that produces genuinely conservative thinking.

Everything else is to “abandon all hope you who enter here.” If we don’t limit migration in the coming decades Britain will cease to be the country, we grew up in. It will be somewhere else, changed beyond all recognition with only the landscape staying the same.

If we don’t start making a profit, grow the economy and lower public spending and reduce the size of the state we will every year become poorer until at some point we wake up to find that managed decline has managed to turn us into Romania and we can no longer afford the triple lock on pensions and you can no longer afford to run a car or buy a nice bottle of wine. We will achieve net zero by having carts pulled by donkeys and call it progress.

The best we can hope for from the Labour Party is that it will be competent. The worst is that it continues to increase public spending, does nothing to fix the NHS, pays ever more benefits to incentivise people not working and makes it still easier for both legal and illegal migrants.

So, I hope for the best from Labour, but fear the worst. I hope that the SNP is decisively defeated for which reason I have voted Conservative in my seat as it has the best chance of defeating the SNP.

But Conservatives generally and Scottish Conservatives in particular have to learn that the only root to electoral success is to make the argument for free markets, low migration and a smaller state. You have to distinguish yourself from your political opponents by putting forward different ideas that work better than theirs do.

The failure of Conservatism in the past five years is that it has become social democracy. People think they want social democracy, but actually they prefer to be better off and only right-wing economics can give them that.

So let us try one more time. We will have another experiment with socialism, discover that it doesn’t work and then just maybe have another chance of doing what we ought to have done in 2019. There will be another day.

But in Scotland our main task is to put the SNP out of its misery. This will enable all of us to move on to new thinking and to rediscover those Scottish virtues that once gave us the great thinkers that we now lack.  

Whatever you do don’t wake up next Friday to find Mr Swinney promising us a second referendum in 2025. If we miss our chance to defeat the SNP this time, we will deserve everything that follows.

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Farage is largely right about Ukraine

 

The fuss about Nigel Farage’s remarks about the war in Ukraine is clearly overblown. He makes clear that he supports Ukrainian sovereignty and unequivocally says that it was wrong for Russia to invade. Describing the causes of the war is no more appeasing Russia or justifying Russia’s actions than arguing that the Versailles Treaty was one of the causes of the Second World War. To make this point neither excuses Germany of blame, nor in any way appeases. It is simply to discuss history.

Ukraine is a sovereign state, and it ought to have been possible for it to choose to join the EU and NATO, but by the same token Cuba is a sovereign state and it ought to have been able to host Soviet nuclear weapons. But during the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 the United States made this a redline issue and took the world to the brink of war to stop the deployment. Cuba was in USA’s sphere of influence even though it was a sovereign state. If today Russia tried to deploy nuclear weapons in Mexico or attempted to create a military alliance with Mexico, there is little doubt that USA would intervene to stop it.

For this reason, the Euromaidan revolt 2014 that led to the impeachment and departure of Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was unwise and the encouragement it received from the EU and the West generally was unwise too. It led directly to Russia annexing Crimea and the Donbas.

Again, Ukrainians ought to have been allowed to revolt and get rid of their president. It was their business and their business alone and did not justify Russia’s invasion. But it was also a failure to understand the reality of living next door to Russia. This was a long-term policy error since the beginning of Ukraine in 1991.

Ukraine’s borders follow those of the Ukrainian SSR. They are due to territories conquered by the Russian Empire from the Ottoman Empire and especially territories conquered by the Soviet Union from Poland in 1939. Ukraine’s borders are therefore somewhat arbitrary and its people somewhat mixed. In Galicia in the west, which previously had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Ukrainian language was widely spoken, to the east of the Dnepr historically Russian was more widely spoken.

Ukrainian nationalism failed to accommodate the fact that a significant part of Ukrainian population was ethnically and linguistically Russian and tried to impose the language of Galicia on places that had historically spoken Russian.

Contrast this with Belarus, which initially went down the Belarussian nationalist route of trying to make everyone speak Belarussian, but later recognised that its population was mixed and allowed everyone to speak whichever language they pleased. Belarus too had a policy of remaining close to Russia. For this reason, Belarus has not been invaded because it neither attempted to join the EU nor NATO nor to make life difficult for a significant part of its population. The downside is that Belarus is a vassal state, but at least it was not invaded.

Having lost Crimea and the Donbas we had a frozen conflict from 2014 to 2022. Crimea and the Donbas were de facto parts of Russia, but legally part of Ukraine. But it was always likely to become a hot conflict simply to resolve this contradiction.

Ukraine in 2022 was no threat to anyone and certainly had no plans to attack or in any other way damage Russia. Putin’s decision to invade was wholly unjustified, but the historical context partly explains his decision to do so.

Ukraine and Russia have common origins and a thousand years ago they were certainly one people. The divergence between Ukrainians and Russians was primarily due to Ukrainians being ruled historically by Poland and Austria Hungary.

The Soviet Union was the successor to the Russian Empire. When the Soviet Union collapsed Russia lost in an afternoon territories that it had spent centuries gathering. It was the worst catastrophe in Russian history. Just as the Soviet Union spent the years 1918 to 1945 gathering back the territories that it had lost during the revolution, so too Putin sees his task as gathering back the lost territories of the Russian Empire.

To explain this is of course not to justify it.

The West was not directly responsible for the Russian invasion in 2022, but we were indirectly responsible because we appeared weak after the chaos that followed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and our defeat in the war in Iraq. We were not spending enough on arms, and we were getting involved in too many conflicts that were none of our business.

It was right to help Ukraine in 2022, but it was a mistake to allow much of the Ukrainian population to flee. Outside those parts of Ukraine that were invaded, Ukraine is far less dangerous than Britain was during World War Two. It would have been impossible for Britain to continue the war effort then if large parts of our population had escaped. Soldiers have to have something to fight for. You can’t fight for something that now lives abroad.

Now two years later the ideal would be of course that Ukraine freed all its territory from Russia and kicked the invader out. But realistically if there was a chance of that happening it ceased in the summer of 2023. When Wagner rebelled and in one day got closer to Moscow than the Wehrmacht in 5 months, then Ukraine had its opportunity. It failed to take it and another such opportunity cannot come again.

So, there is a choice either we have another frozen conflict with the present front lines the de facto borders, but Ukraine still legally sovereign over its 1991 borders, or we have a comprehensive peace treaty.

A frozen conflict will become another hot one in a few years.

No one wants to reward Russian aggression by giving it territory, but historically this has proved to be the only way to arrive at lasting peace. Sometimes as with Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Loraine in 1871, this has contributed to later wars. But often as with the boundary changes that followed the First and Second World wars people have come to accept the new reality and peace has endured.

It ought to be possible to talk honestly and openly about Ukraine. Farage may not have been right in all details, but he is right that mistakes by the West contributed to the war and that it is best to learn from those mistakes.

What happens in the war in Ukraine is up to the Ukrainians, but at some point, quite soon an American president is going to tire of spending quite so much on a war that has reached stalemate and then if the Ukrainians want to keep fighting, they will have to do so without American money or weaponry.

We may not like this, but it is the truth.

 

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Two party politics is dead

 

The result of the election promises to be both strange and familiar, because it has already happened here and recently. The solution to the democratic problem will be the same because it has already happened here and still more recently.

In 2015 the SNP won all but three of the seats in the General Election in Scotland and this dominance has continued in every General Election since then up to now. The opposition could not compete with an SNP that was winning around 45% of the vote because it was divided almost equally. The Conservatives and Lib Dems are strong in certain parts of Scotland but could not broaden their support beyond that. Labour too could not return to its previously dominant position in the Central Belt.

It looked as if Pro UK Scottish parties would never be able to beat the SNP, because each had similar levels of support and it was politically impossible for them to merge to form one united Pro UK party. Any sort of merger or even formal pact with the Conservatives would be toxic in Scotland and would help the SNP by enabling it to say that Labour and the Lib Dems were collaborating with the wicked Tories.

Pro UK people tried to change the situation by means of tactical voting, but in each of the elections from 2015 to 2019 this did not achieve the result of the defeating the SNP. It worked in some seats, but not enough to defeat the SNP.

What is different this time is that one of the Pro UK parties has because of Sturgeon’s resignation and the chaos that followed been able to reach parity in terms of share of the vote with the SNP. Once that was achieved it became obvious to every Pro UK voter that Labour in Scotland was the means to defeat the SNP. The case for tactically voting has become enhanced, because it has become more obvious that voting Conservative or Lib Dem in Labour’s target seats is pointless.

This was the solution to a divided opposition. The task was not to merge the Pro UK parties it was for one of them to become dominant.

The UK situation is likely to be analogous to what happened in Scotland in 2015 and the years following.

Labour may win around 40% of the vote and win nearly all of the seats. The Conservatives may win around 20% of the seats, with Reform winning around 20% too with the Lib Dems rather less. But all together they may win not much more than 100 seats with Reform winning hardly any.

This has happened before of course. It is in the nature of First Past the Post to produce landslides. But the result of the present election is likely to be more lopsided than usual. The official opposition may have less than 60 seats, the government may have more than 500 seats. Even when Blair and Thatcher won landslides the opposition was still significant.

The Lib Dems are always going to plod along gaining between 20 and 50 seats because when Labour is a social democratic party there is no reason to vote Lib Dem as the two parties agree on almost everything. A Lib Dem opposition would not be an opposition at all.

The right as represented by the Conservatives and Reform may achieve together around 40% of the vote and could surpass Labour’s share while still winning only 50-60 seats.

This is a dangerous moment for the right, but also for Labour. If it misinterprets an enormous majority as a sign that it can do anything or that it need not govern for the majority that did not vote Labour, then Labour could equally go the way of the Conservatives after it won a majority of 80 in 2019.

I am not concerned about the idea that Labour will be in power for decades as it need not be so. Just as the Conservatives could lose a majority in 5 years so can Labour.

The right has to choose one or other of Reform or the Conservatives or else merge. The danger is that it wastes election after election just as the Pro UK parties did in Scotland before the public decides which is to be dominant. If this happens then Labour will keep winning just as the SNP did.

There are advantages in ditching the Conservative brand because its history makes it unelectable in parts of the country especially in Scotland. Reform are not Tories because it does not have the history that the Conservative Party has. The Conservative Party has the advantage of a long track record of electoral success, but also a track record of managing decline and an unwillingness to be a properly free market party that decisively rejects social democracy.

If the Conservative Party elects a one nation Tory wet to lead it after the election, then it will be clear that it is incapable of learning. Capitalism works, social democracy largely does not. The message to the Conservatives is be a proper right wing alternative to Labour and the Lib Dems or else perish and deserve to perish.

If Reform wishes to take over from the Conservatives, it will need to be both radical and sensible. It will need to resist extreme solutions and to remain within the mainstream traditions of Thatcherism. A genuinely right-wing party arguing that it will do what it takes to reduce migration to 100,000 per year while promising to cut taxes and the size of the state, could defeat Labour at the next election no matter how big Labour’s majority. This message was popular and election winning in the 1980s. It can be again.

I am not worried about the scale of Labour’s victory. It will be a price worth paying to defeat the SNP and securing the unity of our country.  It won’t be a dictatorship, because we will have the chance to kick out Labour too in 5 years.

But let’s take it one step at a time. If you are a Pro UK person living in Scotland first do what you can to kick out the SNP, then reflect on the overall vote and what that means for the future. One thing is clear. The previous two-party system is dead and something else must emerge.

In a democracy when the results so radically do not reflect the results of the voters leaving one party on 50 seats and the other on 500 you can be quite certain that radical change will follow. It will have to.

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Does Humza Yousaf share British values?

 

Freedom of religion is an important value. It ought to be possible for people of all religions to worship as they please without encountering any sort of prejudice. It is wrong to discriminate against Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Sikhs. Religious forms of dress should be permitted so long as they do no harm to anyone else. It does me no harm if someone else wears a turban, a kippah, a headscarf or a cross.

I dislike the word Islamophobia. I ought to be allowed to dislike Islam as a religion just as I ought to be allowed to dislike Christianity or any other religion. I ought to be allowed to disagree with Islamic texts and rules. For instance, while it is a rule for most Muslims that it is wrong to display a picture of the prophet, it ought not to be a rule for me because I am not a Muslim. A devout Muslim may dislike seeing a picture of the prophet, but he cannot expect non-Muslims to follow Muslim rules anymore than we can expect or force a Muslim to drink communion wine every Sunday.

Freedom of religion requires us all to be able to believe what we want, but also to disbelieve what we want. It ought not to be considered discriminatory against Muslims if someone mocks Islam, disagrees with Islamic opinion on any issue or expresses opinions that Muslims dislike about foreign policy or the behaviour of some Muslims in British society.

It is however discriminatory to be unkind to Muslims we might encounter or to treat them in anyway worse than anyone else. Our fellow citizens deserve our kindness.

Humza Yousaf in a recent article has complained about the rise of Islamophobia both in Britain and Europe. Oddly Rishi Sunak has never complained about the rise of Hinduismphobia. Neither has he written “it is increasingly difficult to persuade fellow Hindus that Europe does not have a problem with our very existence.”

Why is the presence of Hindus not a political issue either in Britain or in Europe, while the presence of Muslims is?

There are I think two issues here. Mass migration would be a political issue no matter where the people were coming from.

Cymru used to be the word not only for Wales, but for much of Northen England too. It was contrasted with Lloegr the realm of the Anglo-Saxons. It is reasonable to assume that Cymru or something similar was originally the word for the whole of Britain. The Celtic speakers of Britain no doubt resented the migration first of Romans and then of Anglo-Saxons. They longed in their poetry for a Britain free from the speakers of Old English. From the point of view of the Celts they were right to be concerned about the mass migration of Anglo-Saxons. Fifteen hundred years later Cymru has been pushed into just Wales and the original language of the British is a minority language in Wales. Migration caused this.

But in every other respect the Ancient Britons and the Celts were similar. They were both European and in time they both followed Christianity. What if instead the migrants had been the Moorish people who conquered Spain and might if history had turned out differently have conquered the rest of Europe too. In that case modern Britain would be very different indeed.

So, the issue facing Europe is not merely mass migration, it is who is migrating. If a few million Poles had moved to France there would be little if any controversy because in time the Poles would have learned French and would have become indistinguishable from other French people.

The reason people are not concerned about Hindus in Europe is firstly that they are relatively few in number and secondly there are no instances of Hindus committing acts of terrorism, nor instances of Hindus making a teacher go into hiding for showing a picture of Krishna, nor instances of Hindus making threats if someone disagrees with or mocks the Bhagavad Gita. I can make a satirical film about the life of Krishna and there will be no demonstrations, but if I did the same about the prophet my life would be in danger.

If something is dangerous it is not a phobia to be scared of it. It is common sense.

It’s all very well for Humza Yousaf to complain about Islamophobia, but this is to assume that the problem is all on the side of the non-Muslims. But British people have been remarkably tolerant and even positive about Islam and Muslims. Sadiq Khan is mayor of London. Humza Yousaf was First Minister of Scotland. Anas Sarwar is Scottish Labour leader and may be First Minister soon. Being Muslim is not a bar to high office and Muslims can be found in every important job.

It’s an odd sort of Islamophobia that keeps electing Muslims.

Yousaf complains that Nigel Farage said that “that Muslims do not share British values”. But Yousaf himself denies that he is British although he has a British passport. Yousaf like nearly every other Scottish nationalist is Scottish not British. So presumably Yousaf agrees with Nigel Farage that he does not share British values, because he denies that he is British at all. Yousaf is allowed to say about himself that he is not British, but if anyone else dared to say it he would doubtless be prosecuted for a hate crime.

The reason mass migration in general and mass migration of people from Islamic countries is an electoral issue is firstly that people in many European countries including Britain do not want their countries to be changed as drastically as was the case when the Celts were pushed to the margins of Britain.

Here the issue is neither to do with race nor any other phobia. We might love the Dutch and be similar to them, but we would not want ten or twenty million Dutch to come to Britain. If that many did come our language, culture and way of life would be changed for ever.

But the migrants who are coming to Britain and Europe are mainly from the third world and mainly follow Islam. They frequently fail to integrate but instead live in their own communities and hold religious and cultural beliefs with which we disagree.

Some members of the Islamic community believe in forms of Islamic fundamentalism, follow political forms of Islam, take part in acts of terrorism or threaten other people for exercising their right of free speech. Large number of Muslims also take part in demonstrations calling for the destruction of the state of Israel and sympathising with the goals of terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Whenever there is a conflict involving the UK and a Muslim country, British Muslims and Scottish Muslims too if they are not British tend to side with our opponent. Under these circumstances it is remarkable how little Islamophobia exists in Britain.

Prior to the Second World War there was no racism in Britain, because there were only around 7000 people from ethnic minorities. The amounted to 0.01% of the population. There was no one to be racist about as most people never met someone from an ethnic minority.

In the space of one lifetime, we have arrived at almost 20% of the population having origins from somewhere else. Far more people have migrated to Britain since the Second World War than in any similar timespan including when the Anglo-Saxons conquered Cymru from the Celts and during the Norman Conquest.  

I am not against migration, and I am not against Muslims, but we can have too much of a good thing. Let us attempt to limit migration to no more than 100,000 per year. Let us pick talented people from all countries who can help our economy and health service, but we must set limits otherwise in the coming decades 20% will become 40% and then 60%.

If Humza Yousaf cannot bear to live in the same United Kingdom to which his parents migrated but would rather split it up, how are we to find the unity and commonality that every country needs when its people will be so diverse as to have little in common. If the sons and daughters of migrants in Glasgow and Bradford lack a common identity and a shared future together then Farage is making a reasonable point.

British values I believe are not specific to Britain though many originated here. We have shared values across the free world. Many Muslims both here and elsewhere share them too. But a country also needs a shared identity and Humza Yousaf does not have a shared identity with Rishi Sunak. He thinks Rishi Sunak is a foreigner and there should be an international boundary between where they both live.

How can a country survive if this is the result of migration. How can a country survive when people like Humza Yousaf spend their whole lives complaining about their fellow citizens having phobias and does not think they are his fellow countrymen but wants instead to turn them into foreigners.

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A fairytale that has nothing to do with Scotland. Part 25

 Part 24

Once upon a time there was not only a loo, there was the head loo. It’s motto was

One loo to rule them all,
one loo to find them,
One loo to flush them all
and to the cesspit send them.

There used to be public conveniences everywhere, but they had all been united to form the one head loo, which was neither a convenience to the public nor an efficient way of flushing curds into the pit.

In fact, despite the head loo surpassing even every Japanese loo in terms of its technological development being not merely computerised but having the latest AI technology installed it was failing in the whey it was flushing a whey curds.

There were three curds that just would not disappear. The AI inside the head loo decided to name them “The rock”, “Old Nick” and “Colon Betty”.

Upon this rock I will build my loo said the head loo. It will be the Cephas and the Πέτρος that will show to everyone that the head loo rules all, the head loo knows all, and the head loo finds all. 

One curd kept trying to give off a perfumed smell, but it was the very devil to remove as it stuck to the sides of the head loo and so the head loo decided to call it “Old Nick”.

The third curd had clearly festered in the colon for so long that it had gained the staying power of Elizabeth the First and would if not flushed sink the Spanish Armada and so the head loo decided to call it “Colon Betty” because it was such a treasure.

But within the bowl of the head loo there was not merely the whiff of corruption from the decaying curds, there was also beginning to be a distinct smell coming from the head loo itself because of the amount of money spent on investigating the curds and the inability of the head loo to flush them into the cess pit.

The curds may have been corrupt, but it was in the nature of curds to smell badly, this after all was why we had the one loo to flush them all. What was not in the nature of things was for the head loo itself to be corrupt. How could anyone trust the head loo to rule them all and to believe that the head loo would find them if it could not even flush away these three curds?

And so an operation began to find a way to investigate the curds. It began as a seed, became a root, gave rise to a trunk, which developed bows and then branches, then twigs and finally leaves until it had form, but could it send the three curds to the cess pit? It could not.

More and more money went into the investigation until finally the head loo was spending all of its budget on investigating “the rock”, “Old Nick” and “Colon Betty”. The head loo looked into the history of the three curds and discovered their chemical composition. It dug into the cesspit to discover if there was a clue to the longevity of the curds. It investigated the chemical toilet in the campaigning vehicle where the curds had temporarily lodged prior to their arrival at the head loo, but though finally after nearly a year the head loo was able to procure a fiscal reward for all its work by putting all of its effort into turning its flush into one almighty charge of the Scots Greys, still two curds remained in the bowl and there was the fear that even if you crucified Cephas upside down he would still be resurrected and reappear just like his master.

And now there was the question of who was in the elect or to be inclusive what would you return as? Would you be a toolmaker? Would you be a fish or a swine? Would you be still useless, or would you be the only g-g-g-girl that I adore?

Now there was some pressure on the head loo not to succeed just now in flushing the two remaining curds not least because one of the curds was due to stay up all night on the eve of independence day on independent television and the head loo couldn’t possibly prevent this by putting “Old Nick” in the Nick as it obviously would be unfair to those who liked independence even though the question of who was in the elect or who was reincarnated had obviously nothing this time to do with independence.

But here the whiff of corruption is not so much coming from the curds. They are aging and decaying and have been so long unflushed that their stink has been accepted so much that they have been reincarnated as the Gadarene Swine, which are just about to be driven off a cliff.

Now the real stink of corruption is coming from the head loo itself. Any other three curds would have been flushed and sent to the cess pit long ago. If “the rock” has disappeared from the bowl, why can’t the head loo manage to flush away “Old Nick” and “Colon Betty”. They are clearly all the same sort of curds. It can’t be that the head loo doesn’t dare to flush away “Old Nick” because of who it is or who it was. That would involve a worse smell of corruption coming from head loo than the smell of the most rotten of curds.

If there is even a whiff of the head loo itself being the source of the corruption and the smell strongly suggests that the head loo smells worse than the curds it cannot flush away, then the whole system that gave us the head loo and which supports and sustains it must be flushed away and that this indeed is of far greater importance than the investigation into the nature of the curds.

This is by far the most important issue that we face before independence day or else none of us will live happily ever after being ruled by rot and corruption that is at the very heart of the head loo and is its very nature because then like a certain ring it would be an evil force that destroys the morality of the wearer and it would need to be cast into Mount Doom.

 

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Our task is to defeat the SNP

 

I’m a Pro UK Scot whose main concern is defeating the SNP. Scottish politics has been about independence alone since at least 2011. This has not only been divisive it has meant that all of the political parties and especially the SNP have ignored other issues. This has damaged Scotland hugely and made it a poorer place to live, which is a huge pity as otherwise Scotland is a wonderful place to live.

I voted Conservative in 2019 and for Brexit in 2016. I am on the right economically, but I am hugely disappointed by how the Conservative government has failed to take advantage of Brexit, has left the economy in a worse position than it found it and has allowed almost unlimited migration both legal and illegal. The city where I work has become almost unrecognisable in the past few years. The demographic change has happened incredibly quickly and is greater I believe than the official figures or census tell us.

I am not really represented by the Scottish Conservative Party, which is a centrist party or even a social democratic party of the centre left. There is minimal difference between the Lib Dems, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives. All three accept the Scottish establishment view that the solution to all problems is collective and involves spending more public money.

So, who should I vote for?

I will vote for the Scottish Conservative Party?

Why? Because of where I live.

This I think is the key to thinking about how to vote. If I lived in Clacton I would be tempted to vote for Nigel Farage. As I have written previously, I have mixed feelings about Farage. But if I lived in parts of England where Reform is doing well, I might well choose to vote for it too.

If I lived in Northern Ireland, I would vote for either the DUP or one of the other unionist parties. I would reflect on who had the best chance of defeating Sinn Féin.

If I lived in Wales, I would make a similar calculation about who had the best chance to defeat Plaid Cymru. But I don’t. I live in the north of Scotland and here I have to work out who has the best chance of defeating the SNP.

It’s not difficult to figure it out. If I lived in Orkney and Shetland, I would vote for the Lib Dems. If I lived in most of the central belt I would vote Labour. There are any number of guides online that will tell you objectively who has the best chance of defeating the SNP where you live.

We all have a pretty good idea of how the campaign is going. Labour is doing better than in 2019, the SNP is doing worse. So, it is not simply a matter of looking at what happened last time. There is also quite a lot of selfish misinformation on leaflets. But still, you should with ease be able to work out in most cases who has the best chance.

Where I live the Conservatives have the best chance. Unless something very odd happens, the Lib Dems and Labour are too far behind to challenge the SNP.

So, the logic is simple. I may not much fancy a Labour government and I may not much like how the Conservatives have ruled, but I will vote Conservative because it has the best chance of defeating the SNP where I live.

The prize on offer to us in Scotland is different from in England. If by our efforts, we can make the SNP lose twenty or thirty seats we won’t have to worry about it demanding a second referendum and we will barely hear the word independence for the foreseeable future. If on the other hand the SNP does better than expected and has more seats than Labour, it will the next day claim to have won Scotland and we will hear nothing else for the next five years.

Unfortunately for Reform and Nigel Farage we are in a 1983 situation. In that year the Alliance of SDP and Liberals won 25% of the vote and gained nearly 8 million votes but won only 23 seats. Labour won 27% of the vote and had 8 and half million votes but won 209 seats. It may be that Reform wins a similar number of votes to the Alliance, but it is still likely to gain very few seats indeed. I would be astonished if Reform won a single seat in Scotland. There is not one seat anywhere in Scotland where Reform is best placed to defeat the SNP.

Like me you may sometimes agree with Farage during the election debates. You may like me hope for a new alignment on the right with a party that offers us genuine free market economics, lower taxes and a smaller state, but none of these things will happen by you voting for Reform in Scotland this time. The only result of voting for Reform in Scotland is to decrease the chance of either Labour, the Lib Dems or Conservatives defeating the SNP. You may not like this. I may not like this, but nevertheless it is true.

We are going to have to wait and see what happens after the election. The two parties that are nominally on the right, the Conservatives and Reform are going to cancel each other out and together could gain less than 100 seats even though their share of the vote together might be higher than Labour who could win closer to five hundred seats.

My view is that there is a natural majority in the UK for a genuine moderate right-wing party that is serious about limiting immigration, Brexit and undercutting the EU to bring us prosperity. These are the Leave voters of 2016 who won that referendum. The failure of the Conservative Party since 2016 is that it has allowed the Tory wets to frustrate the aims of these voters so much that they have been driven into the arms of Farage and Reform. It was the Conservative Party that split the right by moving so far to the centre that millions of ordinary Conservative voters can no longer support it.

In Scotland around 60% of voters as shown in 2016 support the wet mush of Remain, but the rest of us are unrepresented by anyone. It would have been sensible if the Scottish Conservatives appealed to those Scots who supported Brexit and if it offered a genuine alternative to the other centre left parties. The folly of Scottish Conservatism is that it is not conservative. All it has to offer Pro UK Scots is that it is Pro UK. But if the SNP is decisively defeated at this election there will be little point in Scottish Conservatives banging on about independence either. This leaves them indistinguishable from Labour and the Lib Dems.

Politics above all is about offering a genuine choice. When everyone is in the centre there is no choice and therefore no democracy. This is why Reform is doing so well.

But these are the issues that must be resolved after the election. For the moment we have one battle and one battle only. We must do all we can to defeat the SNP in each constituency. I will vote Conservative because of where I live. You must work out who has the best chance of defeating the SNP where you live. But be quite certain of this point. Reform will win no seats in Scotland. Voting for Reform merely helps the SNP.

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Rishi Ross : the same failure

 

The problem with Douglas Ross is the same as the problem with Rishi Sunak, both have too much ambition, but too little political instinct.

Ross blew up the Scottish Conservatives campaign by deciding to replace the present Banff and Buchan MP David Duguid in the new Aberdeenshire North and East Moray seat. Duguid has recently been ill with a spinal condition.

Boundary changes mean that Ross’s own Westminster constituency of Moray has become Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey. Perhaps Ross thought this was less winnable than before, but the result of his actions is that the Scottish Conservatives are likely now to win neither seat.

It might have been reasonable to point out to Duguid that he was too ill to stand for Parliament. But Ross required Duguid’s cooperation in this and the consent of the local party. He also required the general agreement of other Conservative MPs, MSPs and supporters. His failure to obtain these shows that he wasn’t leading anyone and so naturally it became untenable for him to remain party leader in Scotland.

The failure is not merely one of leadership it is one of judgement and instinct. How would it look to force an ill MP to resign when that MP wanted to continue? It would look terrible.

If Duguid had been allowed to stand he may have gained some sympathy from voters for his steadfastness in the face of illness and determination to carry on with his job. Instead, Ross will now have no sympathy at all, and the seat is liable to go to the SNP.

Ross is ambitious but is not obviously intelligent. If he were he would not have made such a stupid judgement as he has just made. It’s also entirely unclear what if anything Ross believes. We know that he supports the UK, but what does he believe about anything else? Just the usual Scottish Tory wet mush where we argue against Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP but agree with them on every substantial economic issue.

The difference between Rishi Sunak and Douglas Ross is that Sunak is genuinely intelligent and talented. The similarity is that he too lacks political instinct. This is not merely about his missing the photo opportunity on D Day. Again, a reasonable case could in Sunak’s mind be made for going back to Britain to conduct an interview. The problem like Ross is that Sunak failed to have the instinct of what it would look like. One interview was not worth the days of negative coverage. The problem is that despite his intelligence Sunak just did not get this. That in the end is how history will judge him an intelligent decent man who did not get it.

Again, the problem is that while Sunak clearly has ambition enough to plot against Boris Johnson and then again against Liz Truss, it is entirely unclear that his ambition was connected with any real political beliefs. What does Rishi Sunak believe apart from the same centrist wet mush that we are soon going to get from Labour? Nothing. This is why he is going to lose.

There is an argument that elections are won from the centre and sometimes this is true if one of the parties is viewed as extreme. But the problem is that the political centre doesn’t achieve anything. It neither gives you socialism nor does it give you free markets. All it gives you is ever higher public spending, ever increasing debt and deficit, ever higher taxes and a larger state.

If this is what Rishi Sunak, Douglas Ross and the limp wet Scottish Tories want why don’t they join the Lib Dems or Labour. The result would be the same.

Elections can be won from the mainstream right. Margaret Thatcher won three of them and would have won a fourth if she had not been kicked out by the Tory wets who could not quite forgive her victories. Because of her genuine political beliefs and goals, she was able to transform the British economy and reverse the decline that had set in since 1945.

If the Conservative Party in 2019 with a large majority had set out with a similar goal to transform the British economy to lower taxes and shrink the size of the state while doing everything in its power to keep legal and illegal migration to around 100,000 per year it would not now be losing so badly that it may almost cease to exist.

The pandemic was an unexpected event, but the Conservatives responded to it with authoritarian socialism, giving free money to those who did not work and forcing upon us the greatest loss of collective liberty in our history. Worse this response far from saving lives cost more than it saved. If you vote Conservative and get authoritarian socialism you may as well vote Labour. This is what the country is now going to do.

The right has to stay mainstream, but it has to offer a smaller state, lower taxes and prosperity with a straightforward long-term plan like the one that Thatcher offered and a deal that says if you are law abiding and work hard you will prosper, but we won’t reward idleness and criminality.

Voters will reject any sort of extremism either from the left or the right, but capitalism is not extremism and reducing the size of the state and reforming public services so that they are more cost effective and efficient would benefit all of our lives. But none of these things were even attempted by Ross or Sunak and neither even made the case for Conservatism.

Both Ross and Sunak have failed because of lack of political instinct not merely in the short term by stupid misjudgements that looked terrible, but more importantly because neither made the argument that you should vote Conservative because capitalism works and will improve your life whether you live in Scotland or anywhere else in Britain and that this improvement can only be obtained by voting Conservative.

Only the right can offer a genuine alternative to the social democracy and the managed decline that forms the consensus that unites Labour with the Lib Dems and the Tory wets. The reason the Conservative Party is going to be destroyed is that since 2019 it has not even made the argument for right wing economics let alone done anything to transform the British economy.

What is the point of Ross and Sunak’s ambition if they do nothing with it?

 

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The SNP is trapped

 

We have in the past ten years had a number of important historical anniversaries. The 80th anniversary of D Day has just happened. Prior to that we had the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the end of that conflict. Such anniversaries with dignitaries and speeches and the few if any survivors show what popular history remembers and what it forgets. So too I think when we look back at the last ten years in the decades ahead.

Politics is not war of course, but the two are related. War is a continuation of politics by other means. But then obviously politics is war without the machine guns and the artillery. Britain has been in as desperate a fight for its existence as ever was the case between Dunkirk and D Day in the years since the referendum in 2014. The risk of the UK ceasing to exist was at times higher indeed I was told on numerous occasions by SNP supporters that our defeat was inevitable. The Germans must have thought so too when they surrounded our army at Dunkirk and only had to defeat our air force to cross the channel.

But here too history will misremember, and commemorations will miss the point. D Day was a victory just like the referendum in 2014, but it was only the beginning of the campaign and was easier than what followed. What happened afterwards in the Battle of Normandy has been almost completely forgotten. So too the ten-year slog, the trench warfare that was necessary to defeat the SNP will be forgotten as if it never happened.

D Day was a triumph of organisation, planning and deception, but casualties were lighter than expected. Omaha went badly, but it was nothing like the first day of the Somme and nothing like either Stalingrad or Kursk. It was in the days following D Day that the allied armies had far tougher battles than they faced on June 6th. This is the bit that is not told during the anniversary commemorations. This is the bit that will also be forgotten when our story is retold.

The SNP is in disarray. I am reminded of the scenes in the Longest Day where German officers are playing bridge only to be told that there is going to be an election on July 4th. They dismiss the reports and won’t tell Nicola Sturgeon because no one dares to wake her up. But soon after they are throwing papers in the fire and someone in a bunker spots the allied fleet coming out of the mist. They are here he shouts. It’s the election.

Something like this happened when John Swinney just in the job for a week or two found out that he had to campaign with no money, no manifesto and no plan. John did not so much have a long moustache as a long face.

Well, we have been fighting in the bocage in Normandy for the past ten years against the crack troops of Hitler Jugend, we have had to bomb Caen with Lancasters to try to break the stalemate, but finally the Americans have captured the Cotentin peninsular and the British have nearly reached Falaise and now there is only a narrow gap from which the SNP can escape from the pocket.

It must have seemed impossible to the same Germans who had captured France with ease in 1940 and almost reached Moscow in 1941 that they could reach the Falaise pocket in 1944. So too in 2015 when Nicola Sturgeon reached the peak of her popularity it must have seemed incredible to her and her supporters that she might in time fail. But both failed for the same reason.

There is justice in the world. Britain ought to have been defeated in 1940. It took a miracle for the army to escape from Dunkirk and further miracles to survive that year and those that followed. But we also benefited from the overconfidence of our enemy.

So too the SNP’s cause was always fundamentally unjust. Trying to break up the UK after the UK had twice played a decisive role in liberating Europe from German tyranny was historically unjust and for this reason if for no other it failed. Unjust causes sometimes win, but not normally and not here. It’s impossible not to believe that history is governed by morality and justice. Otherwise, we are mere atoms governed by blind chance. To believe that is simply unhistorical.

We are not there yet. The issue is whether the SNP escapes from the Falaise pocket or whether it is completely routed. Douglas Ross is behaving like one of those clownish British generals determined to give the SNP a hand, but it won’t make much difference. By September we will be on the Rhine no matter how much Boy Browning Ross mucks up.

This again is where the commemorations get it wrong. What made D Day a success was the fighting that was done elsewhere on the Eastern Front and that the Luftwaffe had ceased to exist because of the bombing campaign whose purpose was not so much to destroy German cities as German aircraft.

If we had invaded France in 1943 as we perhaps ought to have done, we might have liberated Poland and restricted the Soviet Union to its own borders, but then again, we might have been thrown back into the sea if we had tried a year earlier and we would have lost more troops than either the British or the Americans could bear to lose. Better by far for Soviet troops to die instead.

And so, if the General Election had been held in early 2023 the SNP machine guns would have slaughtered our troops not only at Omaha, but at the other beaches too. We had to wait and prepare and above all else the SNP had to reach peak hubris. No one dared to wake Nicola Sturgeon, no one dared to tell her that she needed to limit her ambition, no one dared to tell her that if she were not careful her troops would be surrounded at Falaise just as prior to that they were surrounded at Stalingrad. No one dared to question that the SNP finances were in order. No one dared to tell her that naughty things are sometimes punished.

One of the loyal spear carriers who did not dare to tell Sturgeon anything was John Swinney, for which reason also he doesn’t know what to do now except throw more papers on the fire lest someone find more scandals.

 

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A double edged Farage

 

The primary instinct of most voters is moderation. If you have a reasonable job, live somewhere reasonably pleasant and can buy what you need while going on holiday somewhere warm once a year, why risk it?

Jeremy Corbyn promised us a socialist paradise. Alex Salmond promised us that everything would be better in an independent Scotland and also that everything would be the same. Both failed to overcome the scepticism of ordinary voters that just perhaps they were being overly optimistic and maybe things would be worse.

It is for this reason that Keir Starmer has been so determined to purge his party of the far left. It is much more likely that Labour will be elected if it is perceived as centrist rather than extreme.

But as was shown with the fuss about Diane Abbott standing, Labour in its heart remains a socialist party. No one joined the Labour Party to be a centrist, not even Keir Starmer. They might have concluded that socialism doesn’t work and that the best that can be done is social democracy, but they all wish that socialism did work and, in their dreams, they still hope for the socialist paradise that Abbot and Corbyn dream of also.

Voters too love the idea of socialism so long as it doesn’t involve them personally having to give up any of their privileges and any of their wealth. So, they will vote for Labour in the hope of some more free things paid for by other people’s taxes so long as their isn’t a socialist revolution that threatens their lifestyle and their holiday once a year.

For those of us on the right there is also a balance between not frightening the horses by being too extreme and actually getting something done. The difference is that while socialism doesn’t work and while even social democracy rarely works genuine right-wing economics does work.

Wherever it has been tried cutting the size of the state, cutting taxes, lowering public spending and increasing free markets and free trade there has been an increase of wealth. Capitalism works.

The problem is that the Conservative Party has become so centrist that it has become social democratic. It spends too much, it taxes too much and it merely manages British decline.

At this point there is a genuine dilemma for voters. Do I stick with moderation knowing that while for the moment I keep my pleasant lifestyle every year things get worse and two or three decades from now Britan ceases to be a genuine first world country or do I recognise that we have serious problems, and something must be done.

While Scotland rejected the SNP’s idea of revolution because the fundamentals never added up voters embraced it in 2016 by voting to leave the EU. It was a risky strategy. It would have been safer to have remained. But voters hoped for greater prosperity and for parliament to be sovereign and able to do what voters wished. The gamble has largely failed. Now we are being asked to gamble again.

Nigel Farage was certainly responsible for giving voters the referendum in 2016, but he also very nearly lost it by his lack of moderation. It required Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings to make the revolution of leaving appear less risky and more palatable.

This is the balance that is needed for the right. It needs to move away from the wet centre in order to have the revolution that Thatcher brought about in the 1980s, but it cannot become so extreme that it frightens the voters or else disgusts them by becoming too populist or by flirting with the far right.

This is the danger with Farage. He is I think a genuine Thatcherite, but he flirts with Trumpism, and this is dangerous for the right because that way lies madness.

Trump is not a free marketeer. He is a protectionist. If there is any ism that is worse than socialism it is protectionism. Worse despite the absurdities of Trump’s conviction, it is still not clear if Trump and his followers will accept legitimate defeat. So, it is not at all clear if either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party are either democrats or republicans. Flirting with either side is dangerous. The Democrats will jail you rather accept the result of democracy, the Republicans will be tempted to revolt.

In Britain we will all accept a Labour victory without question, and we should be grateful for that if nothing else. But we can hope for something better. The hope is for something that works and protects our country.

It could be that Farage may by destroying or taking over the Conservative Party be able to deliver a second Thatcherite revolution, which is able also to limit mass migration to around 100,000 a year rather than 700,000. There is no reason why this should not work.

Not every country relies on mass migration. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Poland and other Eastern European countries are managing quite well without high levels of migration. They recognise that the character of their countries depends on maintaining what is distinctive about its population.

The most important thing is for all British people of every background to agree that we must limit migration or else lose what makes Britain attractive to all of us. It doesn’t mean refusing all claims of asylum, nor does it mean stopping all work and study visas. It just means limiting migration to a level that can be absorbed and a level that does not risk changing the character of our country forever.

Economically and culturally, there is room for a new Thatcherite Conservative Party that is willing to do what it takes to benefit from Brexit and allow parliament to control our borders and our laws.

Perhaps Farage can help bring this about, but he can only do so if he keeps within the bounds of Thatcherism and does not flirt with Trumpism or worse.

The way forwards lies with the destruction of the Conservative Party and a new movement that is willing to actually improve the NHS, defence, the economy and control of our borders. If Farage is part of this, we may well be grateful to him again. But we must also recognise that Farage is as capable of losing the battle as winning it and is as likely to deter voters as attract them.

In Scotland our task is to do what is necessary to defeat the SNP. Neither voting for Reform nor Farage will help this. We must focus on our battle first. If we win it decisively, we can move on to arrest the managed decline that has been part of British politics since 1945 except for one brief Thatcherite interlude.

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