The change Labour promises is just more of the same

Oct23 by weegingerdug

Last week, Labour won two by elections in formerly safe Conservative seats in Tamworth in Staffordshire and Mid Bedfordshire, in both cases Labour overturned huge Conservative majorities. In Tamworth the Conservatives had won 66.3% of the vote at the general election in 2019, making it one of the safest Conservative seats in England. In Mid Bedfordshire the Conservatives had won 59.8% of the vote at the 2019 general election. Conservative constituencies don’t come much safer than those two, or at least, they didn’t.

The highlight of the evening as the results were announced was Andrew Six Chips Bowie, who has a razor thin majority of 843 in his West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine constituency, desperately try to spin the results as being nothing much to worry about and continuing to insist in the face of all the evidence that “on the doorstep” people are grateful for what the Conservatives are doing. That’s certainly a novel way of interpreting a door being slammed in your face. Andrew’s levels of delusion are off the charts, even for a Tory.

Another delusional Conservative is the Tory immigration minister Robert Jenrick who said on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg Show on Sunday that the Conservatives could be trusted with the economy and that they would make “sensible decisions”. Oh really? Forgotten Liz Truss and her kamikaze mini budget already have we? Speaking about the recent protests demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, Jenrick said: “If someone is spreading hate they have no place here and they should leave.” Quite. That’s advice that most of his loathesome parliamentary party should heed, most of all his immediate boss Suella Braverman who gave a hate filled speech to the Conservative party conference channelling Enoch Powell and that Nigel Farage whom senior Conservatives recently said would be welcome to join the Tory party. And not forgetting the editorial staff of the Daily Express and Mail newspapers.

The Conservative candidate in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, had come under criticism prior to the vote for sharing an offensive tweet about people in poverty, he then delayed appearing with the other candidates for the announcement of the result, candidates receive prior notice of the result from the returning officer and the graceless Cooper was obviously angered that he’d lost a seat that he must have believed was a shoo-in. Then like the petulant and entitled man child that he is and as such is so emblematic of the modern Conservative party, the bad loser stormed off the stage immediately after the results were announced while the victorious Labour candidate was still thanking her campaign team.

What a shame, Cooper would have been perfect as a Tory MP, nasty, bitter, full of himself and oozing with entitlement.

The Conservative vote simply evaporated. The low turn out in both seats suggests that Tory voters simply stayed at home, and we must hope that in this instance ‘home’ is merely a euphemism for a deep dark well from which they can never escape.

These results mean that there is now no such thing as a safe Conservative seat and the Tories are not simply looking at defeat at the next general election, they are staring at the very real possibility of annihilation. On Sunday it was reported that the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is considering standing down as an MP so that he will not have to face the humiliation of doing an Andrew Cooper at the next General Election, boundary changes mean that Hunt’s seat is no longer as securely Conservative as it once was.

Following the devastating results one Tory MP told the Observer newspaper that for the Conservatives the next general election will be about minimising the party’s losses not trying to secure a victory, saying: “There is nothing Rishi can really do now other than try to look competent and hope for the best. You can’t admit that it is now just about minimising losses … you can’t go out and say that, but that is where we are.”

Although Labour is now loudly demanding an immediate general election, that is the very last thing that Sunak is going to agree too. It’s now looking more likely that he will cling to power as long as possible in the increasingly diminishing hope that something will come up to save the Conservatives’ skin. That also works in the SNP’s favour as the longer that Scottish voters are exposed to the reality of Starmer’s Labour party, the less appealing it becomes and the more obvious that the ‘change’ which Starmer promises is in reality no change at all.

The right wing control freakery which is the true face of Keir Starmer’s flag waving ‘non-nationalist’ party became starkly apparent this week as over a dozen local Labour party office bearers resigned in protest over Starmer’s gagging order on any discussion or debate about the situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Of course the horrendous attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians, including women, children and the elderly should be unequivocally condemned, but anything other than full hearted and uncritical support for the extreme right wing authoritarian Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is strictly forbidden in the Labour party even as Israel embarks upon a brutal collective punishment of the entire population crammed into Gaza, one of the most densely populated territories in the world, a territory whose borders are sealed, leaving innocent civilians caught up in the war with nowhere safe that they can flee to.

Over the weekend Amnesty International said said that the fact that both the UK Government and the Labour party are refusing to condemn Israel’s “clear” breaches of international law is diminishing the gravity of the human rights violations committed by Netanyahu’s government.

The Labour party under Starmer has already adopted Conservative policies wholesale and ditched anything that might appear even vaguely left wing. And in international politics this tragic war has revealed a Labour party in lock step with the Tories and the Pentagon. Starmer has denied ever saying that Israel had the right to cut off water and food supplies to the people of Gaza, even though there is video evidence of him doing just that.

In an interview with LBC on 7 October, the Starmer was asked what a “proportionate” response to the Hamas attacks would look like, he replied that responsibility “lies with Hamas” and that Israel “has the right to defend herself”. Interviewer Nick Ferrari then asked: “A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power, cutting off water?” Starmer replied: “I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation.”

Starmer is now denying that his words meant what they clearly meant and insisting he did not say he believes Israel has the right to cut off essential supplies to Gaza. Starmer is now cracking down hard on any dissent within his own party, which promises a strongly centralising government in the Conservative mould. There will be no safeguards put in place for the devolution settlement and the Über-Unionists of Labour appear set to continue the assault on the Scottish Parliament begun under the Tories.

Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.

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The British failure of democracy in Scotland

Oct19 by weegingerdug

In some parallel universe where British democracy is a functioning reality and the Scottish media is fair, balanced, and truly representative of the views of the population it is supposed to serve, today, Thursday 19 October 2023, would have seen the holding of the second Scottish independence referendum, a referendum which would have been preceded by a passionate campaign during which both sides of the argument would have been fully explored and given equal attention. When the votes were counted, it is almost certain that the people of Scotland would have chosen to vote Yes and after over three hundred years of Westminster rule Scotland would be poised to rejoin the ranks of independent nations where it truly belongs.

Sadly, as we all know too well, that is not the universe which we inhabit. In this universe the British state is characterised by lies and mendacity, claiming on the one hand to be a voluntary union of four nations while acting in practice like a centralised one nation state whose representatives repeatedly refuse to specify exactly how the supposedly voluntary nature of this so-called union can be put to the test through the democratic choices of the people of the smaller nations which are part of this pretendy union.

Meanwhile we have a media which claims to be unbiased and neutral, a claim which has as much basis in reality as the claims of British politicians who wrap themselves in British flags while asserting that they are opposed to nationalism. The reality of the Scottish media, and the wider British media of which it is a part, is that it has a strong right wing British nationalist bias which it typically refuses to acknowledge just as it refuses to acknowledge that British nationalism is indeed a form of nationalism, and a particularly reactionary and self-regarding one at that.

To live in the British state is to live in a state that deludes itself about its true nature, a delusion aided and abetted by a media which is more interested in colluding in the delusion than in holding power to account and defending democratic standards.

The real reason that we are not having a referendum despite the clear and unequivocal mandate for one given to the current Scottish Parliament is that the parties of “we’re not nationalists we’re British” are bricking themselves about the likely verdict that the people would deliver on all their lies and deceit during the last independence referendum campaign and the glaring mismatch between the “union of equal partners,” continuing membership of the European Union, and the imminent arrival of federalism which they promised Scotland in 2014 and the hard Brexit and continual undermining of the devolution settlement which they have actually delivered. And now it appears that Keir Starmer’s Labour party as much as the Tories is committed to a hard Brexit and equally hell bent on continuing to undermine and by pass the Scottish Parliament.

You could not ask for a clearer example of the betrayal of democracy but the anti-independence Scottish media has no interest at all in defending the basic precepts of democracy in this British state which it is so determined to keep Scotland a part of and refuses to hold the Labour and Conservative parties to account. Instead we get the fetishisation of ferry timetables and massive publicity for every big ego with a grudge against the SNP.

There are many who are keen to blame the SNP for the fact that there has been no independence referendum this week. Many of these have their own agenda seeking to promote their own pro-independence political party of choice, and that’s fair enough, that’s how politics works. But let’s be very clear here, it’s not the SNP who have betrayed democracy, it’s the parties of British nationalism.

Realistically what could the Scottish Government have done? Without the democratic expression of a majority for independence through the ballot box, “dissolving the Union” or unilaterally declaring independence is a fantasy.

In a Scotland where the overwhelming majority of the media is vehemently opposed to independence and polling suggests almost a half of the population is yet to be convinced of the case for independence it would be a recipe for civil unrest and violence from those Über-unionists who have a track record of violence. It’s not enough to assert that the people of Scotland are sovereign, you must ensure that a majority of people in Scotland and the international community agree with you. Indeed it is the antithesis of belief in the sovereignty of the people of Scotland to attempt to declare independence without unequivocal majority support for it as expressed through the ballot box.

Alternatively the Scottish Government could have attempted to press ahead with a referendum without the consent of Westminster and without first attempting to put it on a secure legal footing. However the referendum would most likely still have not taken place as the anti-independence parties would have taken legal action to block it, legal action which we now know would have been successful. If the Scottish Government had pressed on regardless local authorities under Labour or Conservative control would have refused to facilitate the voting process and would not have opened ballot stations.

The anti-independence parties would have boycotted the entire process in an attempt to de-legitimise it and reduce voter participation. Meanwhile the Scottish media would have subjected us all to a barrage of negative propaganda, insisting that there was no point in even independence supporters voting as the vote would be illegal and would not be recognised. Unlike Catalonia where there is a large and well funded pro-independence media and the broadcast media is ultimately controlled by the Catalan government, Scotland has only one pro independence newspaper and a broadcast media which is controlled by Westminster and which faithfully acts as an agent of pro-British propaganda.

The Catalan media was able to maximise the participation of independence supporters in the process, ensuring that it had the greatest support possible amongst the wider population. In Scotland the media would have the opposite effect.

There would have been a Yes vote on a very low turn out with many council areas not participating at all. The Scottish media and the anti-independence parties would immediately declare the entire process a failure and thus emboldened the Conservative government would then openly attack the powers of Holyrood in a way that we have not seen before.

Scotland would still not be independent and Holyrood would be rendered impotent while members of the Scottish Government could be finding themselves on trial. This might appeal to those who are fans of hopeless romantic gestures, but it would not have achieved independence and only reduced Scotland’s chances of achieving independence in the future while rendering Scotland powerless to resists the onslaughts of right wing British nationalism.

19 October 2023 is not the day that the SNP failed, it’s the day that the British state failed to uphold democracy in Scotland, and that is precisely why Scotland needs independence, because democracy in Scotland can only be guaranteed with independence.

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The BBC’s blink and you’d miss it SNP conference

Oct17 by weegingerdug

It’s the blink and you’d miss it SNP party conference, the conference of the largest political party in Scotland, the party of the Scottish Government and the third largest party in the House of Commons entered its second day on Monday. Not that you’d know this from most of the British media, the BBC, which gave us blow by blow accounts and extensive coverage of the recent Labour and Conservative party conferences did not mention the SNP conference at all during its main lunchtime UK wide news programme on Monday or on BBC Scotland’s “news where you are” bulletin that followed. Not. One. Single. Word. However in that same bulletin BBC Scotland did find time to give us not one but two reports on the fitba.

On the main evening edition of Reporting Scotland the conference rated a mere 15 second mention of Nicola Sturgeon’s visit to the conference, more than half way through the programme no further details were given. And that was it. Don’t go thinking that your politics are important, Scottish people. They are certainly not important to Scotland’s self-described national broadcaster. Considerably more time was given to the appointment of a new manager for Rangers football team, a report which was followed by another report about yet more fitba. Priorities, eh?

Meanwhile on the BBC news on Sunday evening and again on the breakfast news on Monday, we were informed by the announcer that the SNP had passed a motion at the conference saying that if the party wins a majority of seats in Scotland at the next Westminster general election then they will use that as a mandate to request another independence referendum from the Westminster government. That is not at all what the SNP decided, the BBC has very obviously not been paying attention, although we already knew that from the cursory coverage the Corporation has been giving to the conference.

Further evidence that the BBC is not paying attention and what reporting it is carrying of the SNP conference is refracted through the lens of British nationalist prejudice came on Monday afternoon when the BBC was forced to issue a correction after senior presenter Amol Rajan, the BBC’s media editor until January 2023 and currently the presenter of the quiz show University Challenge as well as the presenter of Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme ‘Today’ falsely claimed on Monday morning’s edition of the show that the SNP are currently embroiled in an ongoing court case. While Police Scotland’s long running investigation into the SNP’s finances is indeed ongoing, no charges have been brought and there is no current court case.

What the conference really decided was that if the SNP wins a majority of Scottish Westminster seats at the next UK general election, it will not waste time asking yet again for another independence referendum. It will instead seek to open independence negotiations with the Westminster government. The BBC cannot shift itself out of the mindset of Scotland being a junior and powerless supplicant at the knee of the big boys and girls of the British Government. In this the BBC displays the characteristic Anglo-British nationalist concept of Scotland as a British ‘province’ lacking any agency.

It is clearly vital for the SNP to take a more aggressive and proactive stance in dealing with a media which is so very heavily weighted against them. It is nothing short of a disgrace and indeed a danger to democracy that only one newspaper in Scotland out of the 38 or so daily or weekly newspapers published in this country supports the constitutional stance favoured by at least half the population while the publicly owned broadcast media is a branch office of a highly centralised London based operation which fully subscribes to the perspectives, prejudices and priorities dictated to it from that London head office. So we get a BBC Scotland which consistently ignores any positive developments for the independence case, indulges itself in an orgy of SNP bad while refusing to hold the parties of British nationalism to the same level of scrutiny or criticism, gives us a level of royalist sycophancy which is completely unwarranted by the true level of interest in the monarchy in Scotland and which constantly infantilises and trivialises news reporting in Scotland with its obsessive concentration on sports, murrdurrs, and cutesy stories about wee animals.

So it is encouraging that at the Conference depute leader Keith Brown announced the creation of a new rebuttal unit which signals a new and more aggressive media approach and which will actively respond to criticisms and attacks made by the anti independence parties and their friends in the media.

The rebuttal unit will be run through SNP head office and will allow party members to submit queries based on the claims of Unionist politicians and other sources which argue against independence.The unit will then be tasked with creating counter arguments or pointing out errors in the submitted claims.

It’s about time the SNP did something like this.

There is a key aspect of the SNP’s new independence strategy which the party’s usual Anglo-British nationalist critics conveniently overlook. Firstly the SNP – despite what the BBC might say – has moved on from asking nicely for an independence referendum which Westminster is never going to agree to for fear that it will lose, the SNP is instead asserting the right of the people of Scotland to self-determination via the only democratic means left open to them, exercising their vote at a Westminster election.

Secondly, and crucially, this means that the real question now is not for the SNP, it is for the Labour and Conservative parties. That question is – does democracy still have any meaning in Scotland under Westminster rule? If the outcomes of elections in Scotland are only to be respected and acted upon when the people give an answer that is acceptable to Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak, then all that Westminster offers Scotland is the performance of democracy, not its substance. We already know that neither Labour nor the Conservatives accept that winning a Scottish parliamentary election counts as a mandate for Scottish self-determination, and if the SNP win the next Westminster general election in Scotland only to be haughtily informed that that isn’t a mandate either, then what is left?

What guarantees can Labour or the Conservatives give to Scotland that they will respect the outcome of elections in Scotland that produce results that they don’t like? It’s all very well for them to insist that the UK is still a voluntary union but without such cast iron and binding guarantees that is mere sloganeering without any meaningful effect. Scotland deserves more than a vacuous sound bite.

This general election to come is not a test of support for Scottish independence, it is a test of British democracy to see if it is still a reality in Scotland or if it’s a dead letter.

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Starmer breaks the irony meter, and a non fungible Tory

Oct13 by weegingerdug

The SNP party conference is due to start in Aberdeen on Sunday, nevertheless that didn’t stop a reporter on Sky News as the Labour conference came to a close this week remarking that the end of the Labour conference brought the party conference season to a close. The SNP is still by far the third largest party in terms of representation at Westminster but seemingly it still doesn’t count as far as the British media is concerned. That speaks volumes about the true place of Scotland within this so called United Kingdom.

The Labour conference ended on Tuesday with a speech from Keir Starmer which naturally gave several minutes to triumphalist gloating about Labour’s victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election the previous week. As he stood on a stage in front of a massive British flag in an auditorium bedecked with more flags than you’d see at a Coronation party in an Orange Lodge, and unveiled a new party membership card which has a British flag replacing Labour’s traditional red rose on one side and bears the legend “putting country first” on the other, Starmer proclaimed that the Labour party had defeated “nationalism”. It’s official now, Keir Starmer hasn’t just broken most of his previous promises, he has broken the irony meter as well.

The party’s new membership card is not merely a blatant and overt proclamation of Labour’s full hearted espousal of Anglo-British nationalism, it is also a document which as recently as a few years ago would have unambiguously marked you out as a member of a far right party. In fact Paul Golding, the leader of the extreme right wing party Britain First, has praised Labour’s redesigned membership card saying: “Labour Party membership cards are looking very ‘Britain First’.”

I have often commented that a defining characteristic of Anglo-British nationalism is it’s refusal to admit that it is indeed a form of nationalism, but with the recent Labour party conference we were treated to a display of obvious and naked nationalism yet Starmer proclaimed that this self-evidently Anglo-British nationalist party has “defeated nationalism”. That is not merely delusional, it is positively pathological.

Labour insists that it is open to Scotland’s independence supporters, but what it really means is that it expects Yes supporters to abandon their dreams and hopes and get behind Starmer’s brand of muscular unionism, the Labour party has absolutely no intention of meeting them half way, far less acknowledging that people in Scotland have voted repeatedly in favour of having an opportunity to revisit the question of independence in a referendum. All that supporting Labour offers Scottish independence supporters is to give Keir Starmer the opportunity to proclaim that he has defeated nationalism while he wraps himself in a British flag, refuses to set out a democratic route to another independence referendum, and continues the task of undermining the devolution settlement which was begun by the Conservatives.

During the Conference Anas Sarwar, the branch manager of the Optional Identity Mark said that he was open to the idea of introducing English style elected regional mayors to Scotland. Responsibility for local government in Scotland is devolved to the Scottish Parliament so the only way in which Sarwar can get his wish is either for the Scottish Parliament to agree to it, or for a future Labour government in Westminster to impose it on Scotland in yet another outright assault on an already tattered and torn devolution settlement.

However the real reason that Labour in Scotland is now in favour of greater powers for new regional authorities in Scotland is simple. It’s for the same self-serving and transactional reasons that a reluctant Tony Blair was persuaded to support a Scottish Parliament in the 1990s. Blair was persuaded to give his backing to a Scottish Parliament because he was assured that it could provide an alternative power base for the Labour party in Scotland when the Conservatives were in power in Westminster. Sarwar wants powerful directly elected regional ‘mayors’ in Scotland, even though Scotland’s towns and cities have never had mayors, they’ve had provosts and lord provosts, because he wants to establish alternative power bases for the Labour party since Labour cannot be certain of holding power at Holyrood. In the 1990s as now it has never been about what the Labour party can do for Scotland but rather what Scotland can do for the Labour party. The repeated electoral kickings that voters in Scotland have been giving the Labour party for the best part of a decade have taught Labour precisely nothing. The moment that Labour gets a whiff of success at the ballot box its old sense of entitlement comes raging back undiminished.

Meanwhile hours before she was due to be deselected by a local constituency party that was thoroughly fed up with her, East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow MP Lisa Cameron made the bizarre announcement that she is defecting to the Tories. She released a statement complaining that she had been bullied by the rest of the SNP Westminster group. One SNP MP speaking to the Scotsman said that her decision was ‘malicious’ and that it came as no surprise as she had always been a Tory. If that’s the case then the SNP group should have forced her out a long time ago. There can be no place in the SNP for a Conservative politician who tells the Daily Mail that Scottish independence is divisive and who praises Rishi Sunak. The Tories are heading for a thrashing at the next election, what we have here is a rare instance of a rat jumping onto a sinking ship.

It’s a move which smacks of vindictiveness. If she was merely unhappy with the SNP in general or its Westminster group in particular she could have resigned the party whip and continued to sit as an independent or defected to Alba. Then she could have made a case that she was still upholding the core principles on which she was elected. However she jumped to a party which defines itself by its opposition to Scottish independence, its naked hostility to the devolution settlement, and its support for the concept of a single British nation and a unitary British state.

There may also be a large dose of ego and self interest involved too. It has been reported that Cameron’s defection was orchestrated by Sunak himself and there is speculation that part of the deal was the offer of a peerage. It must be stressed that this is only speculation on social media without reliable sources, but should this prove to be true it will merely provide further confirmation of the moral and political bankruptcy of the Westminster system Lisa Cameron now seeks to uphold.

Lisa Cameron was perhaps best known at Westminster as chair of the Crypto and Digital Assets All-Party Parliamentary Group, now she can pivot from promoting cryptocurrencies and digital assets as an SNP MP to promoting cryptocurrencies and digital assets as a Conservative, in Lisa Cameron’s case NFT stands for non-fungible Tory.

After the news of her defection broke, Cameron insisted to a pro-Alba website that she still believes in Scottish independence but has “grave misgivings” about it being achieved by the SNP. So instead she has joined a party that loathes the very idea of Scotland as a nation with the right to self-determination, constantly undermines the devolution settlement and relentlessly pursues the absolute supremacy of Westminster. If you can follow that logic you can win an NFT of a bored ape wearing a vote Tory for Scottish independence t-shirt.

Despite her protestations and complaints, Lisa Cameron is not the victim here, the real victims are the voters of her constituency who elected a supposedly pro-independence pro-EU, anti-austerity MP who have now been landed with a woman who sings the praises of Rishi Sunak and now represents a right wing Anglo-British nationalist party which opposes Scottish independence and seeks to undermine the devolution settlement. The real victims are the local party members who expended their party time and effort to chap doors in all weathers and to canvass and campaign to get her elected only for her to turn around and stab them in the back. She has ended her career and destroyed what credibility she once had.

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Apathy was the big winner in Rutherglen

Oct8 by weegingerdug

This is an expanded and extended version of an article I wrote for The National on Friday.

There’s only really one story in town this weekend in Scottish politics, Labour’s not entirely unexpected win in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by election. There is no denying that the result is a poor one for the SNP and a good one for Labour, but some of the excited coverage of the story in the British media has been risible. On Friday morning Sky News was breathlessly touting a graphic purporting to show that if the result of the by election were to be replicated at the next general election then the Labour party would almost sweep the board in terms of Scottish seats won, taking 42 of the 57 Scottish Westminster seats up for contention with the SNP being reduced to a rump of 6, the same number as the same Sky News graphic predicted for the Tories. The graphic took no account at all of the collapse in the Tory vote recorded in the by election. On Thursday’s showing they’d be erased from the Scottish electoral map.

The graphic was utterly meaningless, serving nothing but propaganda purposes. There was a lot of that in Friday’s reporting of the result. By election results are never replicated at subsequent general elections, particularly a by election in which turn out was as low as the 37.2% reported for Thursday’s election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. A responsible news provider should have pointed that out. Indeed you might say that a responsible news provider would never have indulged in such a graphic to begin with, far less giving it such prominence and failing to present it with the necessary caveats. It speaks of the desperation of the British media to convince itself that what it perceives as the decade long “threat” of Scottish independence has passed, and that it’s back to British nationalist business as usual. They’re in for a big disappointment.

Naturally BBC Scotland gleefully reported the by election, devoting almost half of Friday evening’s Reporting Scotland to a succession of voices telling us how it was all over for the SNP. You know that BBC Scotland is really getting its teeth into an SNPbad story when it cuts into the airtime it normally allocates to the fitba.

In some respects this was the perfect seat for Labour to contest, having swung back and forth between Labour and the SNP at successive general elections since the SNP tidal wave of 2015. Had a by election been held in an SNP stronghold the result might have been rather different.

It’s important to remember that even the most spectacular by election swings, far exceeding the 20.4% swing to Labour from the SNP achieved on Thursday, are never repeated at subsequent general elections. In 1993 there was a by election in the Dorset constituency of Christchurch. The by election was called following the death of Conservative MP Robert Adley. Then as now the Conservatives had held power at Westminster for many years and there was widespread public anger at a Conservative government which was seen as corrupt, incompetent, and out of touch.

The by election was won by the Lib Dem candidate Diana Maddock who took the seat with a 34.5% swing from the Conservatives. This was largely due to the fact that Conservative supporters largely did not bother to turn out to vote, and Labour supporters voted tactically for the Lib Dem candidate, although it should be noted that voter turn out in this by election was still 74.2%, almost double that recorded in yesterday’s by election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West.

However despite a swing which dwarfed that achieved by Labour’s candidate in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, at the subsequent general election in 1997 the seat was retaken by the Tories who have held it ever since.

The big winner in Thursday’s by election was not the Labour party, it was apathy. Keir Starmer’s Labour party has certainly not sealed the deal with a Scottish electorate which has no great enthusiasm for Starmer’s brand of Blairism on steroids. The Labour vote was boosted by significant tactical voting from the constituency’s not insignificant number of Conservative voters, many of whom are of a distinctly orange persuasion. It’s a sign of how far to the right that the Labour party has moved that they feel so comfortable voting Labour. The Conservative vote collapsed and the Tory candidate Thomas Kerr lost his deposit.

It is unarguable that the SNP failed to motivate independence supporters to turn out and vote for the party. That is the key takeaway from the by election that the SNP will have to address. In part that failure to turn out will have been because independence supporters did not for the most part believe that the outcome of a Westminster by election would have any meaningful impact on progress towards Scottish independence. In part it will have been a reflection of public anger about the irresponsible behaviour of Margaret Ferrier, although it must be said that she has paid a far higher personal and political price for her breach of covid regulations than senior Conservatives have paid for theirs – we’re looking at you Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. It was also due in no small measure to a barrage of negative SNPbad media stories recently, even greater in number and intensity than we have grown used to, with its murder tents and relentless attention to ferry services even as it ignores Scottish Government success stories such as the Scottish Child Payment and the successful avoidance of strikes in NHS Scotland. Partly there will also have been an element of independence supporters wanting to give the SNP a wake up call in order to get it to refocus on independence.

However the main factor in the SNP’s failure to inspire the pro independence vote to come out and support it must surely be a lack of any public clarity about how independence or a referendum can be achieved in the face of the absolute intransigence of the Labour and Conservative parties to recognise the will of the Scottish public as expressed through the ballot box – except that is when it is a result to the liking of the parties of “we’re not nationalist we’re British.” When people do not believe that their vote will be respected or that they are being offered only a supposed choice between one right wing Brexit supporting British nationalist party and another slightly less right wing Brexit supporting British nationalist party, then they are just not going to bother voting at all, and that is what happened yesterday in Rutherglen and Hamilton West.

Hopefully this result will force the SNP to renew its focus on independence as that is the only way in which it can motivate independence supporters to turn out and vote. A far more muscular and assertive approach is required. The SNP must also reestablish its links with the wider grass roots independence movement. Scotland is not going to win back its independence by asking for it nicely. There is still time before the next general election for the SNP to turn things around. Formulating an independence strategy which can enthuse and motivate a pro independence support base which remains undiminished will be the key task for the SNP over the weeks and months ahead. That strategy needs to be muscular and assertive, refusing to depend on asking Westminster nicely for an independence referendum which it is never going to agree to.

However it’s probably better for the SNP to have received this electoral kicking now, in a by election which is probably a year out from the really crucial vote represented by the general election which is most likely to be held towards the end of next year. That gives the party time to formulate and implement a new strategy more suited to the current political climate. The pro independence vote is still there, but the SNP needs to mobilise it and motivate it to come out and vote.

From 2010 until now the main party of British nationalism in Westminster has been the Conservatives. The SNP is now dealing with a resurgent and increasingly right wing Labour party which is presenting itself as the only party which can get a corrupt, incompetent and increasingly authoritarian Conservative party out of office. This pro-Labour message floods a media which presents the upcoming general election as a Labour-Conservative contest and speaks to an electorate which is desperate to rid itself of the Tories. The SNP needs to establish the message that not only is a vote for the SNP equally effective at unseating the Tories as a vote for Labour, it is also an explicit rejection of the Tory policies which Labour has taken on wholesale.

But above all the SNP needs to establish the message that Starmer’s Labour party is hand in glove with the Tories when it comes to denying the people of Scotland their right to decide the future of Scotland for themselves. The “change” that Labour offers is illusory and is no change at all. It simply represents back to Westminster business as usual, with Scotland being marginalised and ignored. Labour’s false promise of “change” can only enjoy traction while it is in opposition. Once in power its true Blairite and Brexit supporting British nationalism will inevitably be revealed. Any Labour gains in Scotland at the next general election will not breathe fresh life back into British nationalism in Scotland. They will be its death rattle.

Only a vote for the SNP can keep the dream of independence alive. Labour would like nothing more than to crush the SNP and remove the prospect of Scottish independence from the table for the foreseeable future, thus allowing the British nationalist Starmer to pose as the latest incarnation of the Saviour of the Union. But Labour will do nothing to allow Scotland to defend itself from a future Conservative government which will inevitably occur, with a Tory party which by then will fully have espoused the extreme right wing authoritarian populism and espousal of conspiracy theories which was strongly in evidence at the recent Tory party conference. Only independence can protect Scotland from the British nationalist fascism which has taken over the Conservatives and which will one day, sooner or later take the reins of power.

It’s not too late, despite the predictable crowing from the Scottish media and the Labour party, there is still time for the SNP to turn things around. It’s a big challenge, but an achievable one. Westminster was never going to make this easy for us, but Scotland can still take its own destiny into its own hands.

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The Conspiracy Party conference

Oct5 by weegingerdug

The Conspiracy party conference has finally drawn to a shambolic close. The day after the Tory party conference ends always feels a bit like the first time you go outside after being ill with projectile vomiting and diarrhoea for a few days. Your head is slowly clearing but you still have a foul taste in your mouth and still feel sick to your stomach.

What the conference proved in the starkest terms is that the Tories are unfit for office and pose a very real danger to the fragile democracy which exists in Britain. The Conservatives have abandoned truth, factual evidence, and rational reality based debate in favour of extreme right wing conspiracy theories, scaremongering, the demonisation of vulnerable minorities and worshipping at the shrine of a disgraced former Prime Minister whose insane economic policies almost crashed the economy, costing the public purse billions as the Bank of England desperately tried to prop up a plummeting pound and causing interest rates to soar leading to large increases in housing costs for hundreds of thousands of households. Liz Truss would have been booted out of office in under a month had it not been for the two week long suspension of Parliament due to the death of the Queen.

Yet despite this Truss was the darling of the Tory party conference, touting her discredited right wing menu of tax cuts for the rich to a packed audience of adoring fans at a conference fringe event. The unapologetic Truss has evidently learned nothing, and neither have the Tory fan boys and girls who lapped up her every word. Truss still maintains that her economic nostrums were brought down to earth, not by the weight of their own ridiculousness, but by those well known socialists in the Bank of England and the international money markets. A large part of the Conservative party buys into this conspiracy theory bullshit.

Truss’s aim was to set markers for the party in its inevitable period in opposition following the next general election, which most observers believe is now unwinnable for the Tories – this is not because of any widespread public faith in Keir Starmer’s woeful Labour party, but because of generalised revulsion at the corruption, cronyism, incompetence and authoritarianism that the Conservatives embody.

Truss and her many allies in the Conservative party want to take the Tories even further down this extreme right wing path towards lunacy and anti-democratic authoritarianism.

But it was not just Liz Truss who was peddling conspiracy theory madness. Transport secretary Mark Harper chose the conference as the perfect opportunity to make a fringe far right conspiracy theory go mainstream. There is currently an urban planning proposal called the fifteen minute city, the aim of which is to ensure that cities are as pedestrian and cycle friendly as possible and to develop public transport rather than roads and cars. The concept sees more cycle lanes and footpaths and public parks and green spaces instead of the asphalt deserts of huge parking lots and highways. Ideally everything a city resident requires should be reachable by walking, cycling or public transport within a fifteen minute radius of their home. Proponents hope that in this way cities can be made into more pleasant, livable and healthy places in which to live.

However the far right conspiracy theorists on social media hold that fifteen minute cities are all part of a globalist plot to lock us all in our homes so “they” can better control us and to limit our freedom of travel and the amount of times we are allowed to venture outdoors.

You might have thought that the job of a responsible politician in a mature democracy would be to debunk such arrant nonsense, but the modern Conservative party seeks instead to spread it further in order to pose as the champion of the motorist. The Tories narrowly avoided defeat in the Uxbridge by election due to their opposition to the extension of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone and see this as a potential path to avoiding a wipe out at the next general election. In pursuit of this they have no compunction about blatantly lying and scaremongering and in the process bringing a nonsensical far right conspiracy theory into the mainstream, in the process debasing political debate.

This is classic fascism. Fascism arrives by inventing an enemy and then asserting that only the fascists can save society from this imaginary foe.

More overtly fascist was the deplorable and despicable conference speech of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Fresh from standing on the tail of a blind conference goer’s guide dog, Braverman took to the podium to give a speech that was to all intents and purposes identical in content and tone to Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech in which Powel gave an apocalyptic warning of the supposed dangers of immigration which stoked the fires of racism and gave succour to the fascist far right. Braverman did exactly the same, warning of a “hurricane” of migrants poised to descend on Britain’s shores.

The difference is that Powell was swiftly sacked as Shadow Defence Secretary by then Tory Leader Ted Heath. Braverman’s appalling speech saw her become the darling of the Tory conference.

It’s not just Braverman, Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch and other senior Conservative figures are now openly espousing the language and rhetoric of the fascism which plunged Europe and the world into tragedy 90 years ago.

This conference focused on attacking trans people, migrants and asylum seekers, pandering to all the very the worst racist instincts and tropes of the Anglo-British nationalist extreme right wing.

Lewis Goodall of Sky News remarked: “You could have been at a UKIP or Brexit party conference. The way in which in policy terms, and the way in which the Conservative party talks about politics. The move to the Farage agenda has been extraordinary. This is the story of 13 years of Tory government.”

The conference closed with a speech from Sunak which was as fact free and fantasy based as the rest of the conference. Sunak complained that for the past 30 years British politics has been dominated by a short term consensus, without any acknowledgment that the Conservatives have been in power for the past 13 years and that Sunak himself has held senior posts in those governments. He’d like us to believe that the Conservative government prior to last year has nothing to do with him. He included an adolescent jibe at Nicola Sturgeon which if I repeated here would leave me potentially open to criminal prosecution for contempt of court. If anyone else had made that remark they’d have been taken off air immediately. Sunak has been reported to the police, but don’t go holding your breath that he’ll have to face any consequences.

This conference did not just prove that the Conservatives are unfit for office, it also proved that they are unfit and dangerous as a party of opposition, peddling conspiracy theories and blatant racism and bigotry. The Tories represent a threat to democracy and put out the welcome mat for authoritarianism and fascism.

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Optional identity mark sock puppets

Oct3 by weegingerdug

I’m a bit late with this blog piece because I had a physiotherapy appointment on Friday and then we had friends from London staying over for the weekend. But things are back on track now.

Last week Keir Starmer was in Scotland to insist that Labour is “the change that Scotland needs,” that change apparently being Labour controlled North Lanarkshire Council closing down a swathe of public services and Starmer’s wholesale adoption of Conservative party policies. So the “change” that Scotland needs is apparently things staying exactly the same as they are just now except without the threat of a Scottish independence referendum to force the Westminster Government to pay attention to what Scotland actually wants – as expressed by the people of Scotland through the ballot box – instead of Starmer and his cabinet lecturing us about what Scotland’s priorities “really” are, priorities which entirely uncoincidentally happen to conform precisely with Starmer’s brand of centre right politics all wrapped up in a British flag. But he’s not a nationalist you know, oh no, not at all. Starmer can’t be a nationalist, because he’s British.

During a press conference, Starmer blew the gaff on the real status of Labour’s Scottish Optional Identity Mark, which he still pretends is a distinct political entity with policies and a self governing identity of its own, an assertion which has as much substance as Starmer’s claim that the supposedly United Kingdom is a voluntary union even as he refuses to say what the democratic route to another Scottish independence referendum might actually be.

Starmer made it abundantly clear that the Labour party’s Scottish Optional Identity Mark is really just his sock puppet and that the Labour party in Scotland has no room for divergence on those issues which Westminster has deemed not to be devolved matters. In those crucial topics, which include the great majority of social security and taxation policies as well as energy policy and the crucial subjects of Scotland’s constitutional relationship to the rest of the UK and the powers of the Scottish Parliament, it’s Starmer who will make the decisions and the representatives of the Optional Identity Mark will be obliged to follow meekly along in Starmer’s wake.

During a press conference in Scotland on Friday, Starmer was questioned about the issue of another independence referendum and imperiously replied that on matters related to the Scottish constitutional debate, “Whatever I say will be what Anas says.” He quickly added that he and Optional Identity Mark branch manager Anas Sarwar would speak “as a team,” “so it doesn’t really matter which of us says it.”

However Starmer left no doubt at all about who in that “team” was the one who makes the decisions, and it’s certainly not Anas Sarwar or any mythical entity touted by the media as the “Scottish Labour party.” Anas Sarwar is merely Keir Starmer’s sock puppet. Starmer makes the decisions and the sock puppets of the Optional Identity Mark have no option but to follow along obediently, pretending that they have a power and influence that they don’t come close to possessing.

Vote Labour, vote sock puppet. A more accurate slogan for the Labour party in Scotland would be “The sock puppet Scotland doesn’t need.” Because Labour is not going to deliver anything remotely close to meaningful change.

What Labour most certainly will not do is to give the Scottish Parliament any more powers which would enable it to protect Scotland from a future Conservative government hell bent on undermining the devolution settlement even more than the current one has done already. Neither will a Starmer government introduce any measures to bring about much needed reform of the deeply dysfunctional Westminster Parliament. He’s not going to abolish the offence to democracy that is the house of Lords because Starmer wants to make full use of the power of patronage that appointing new peers will give him as Prime Minister.

Neither will Starmer introduce a proportional voting system because his Labour party is as much in thrall as the Conservatives to the prospect of near absolute power won on a minority of votes cast that the current system offers the largest parties in British politics.

Even if Labour wins the next Westminster general election, eventually the Conservatives will be back in charge again, by which time they will be even more authoritarian, anti-democratic and extreme right wing Anglo-British nationalists than they currently are. Starmer’s Labour party will have ensured that Scotland is fully exposed to the cruel and icy blasts of that government.

Starmer’s Labour party has adopted a slew of Conservative policies already, and it’s still in opposition, if prior experience is anything to go by it will be even more right wing once it gets into power. Tony Blair promised all sorts of social democratic policies when in opposition then once in office became a right wing privatising government, enthusiastically participating in American Republican party warmongering and saddling the public sector with ruinously expensive Private Finance Initiatives which the public are still paying through ther nose for decades later. Starmer’s Labour party offers only Blairism on steroids, Starmer has purged Labour of the left wing which was still influential during Blair’s time in office.

The sock puppets of the Labour party’s Scottish Optional Identity Mark have nothing to offer Scotland except delusions and deceit and the short term satisfaction of booting out Sunak and his cronies at the expense of keeping most Conservative policies intact and leaving Scotland powerless to resist the depredations of the future Conservative government which will inevitably return, by which time the Tories will be even more extreme right wing authoritarian English nationalists than they are at the moment.

Voting for Labour in order to get rid of the Tories is like signing up for a burglar protection scheme the cost of which is Labour taking its pick of all your possessions that a Tory burglar might make off with and then after a period of five years removing your front door so that your house is left wide open to Tory burglars in the future.

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The Lib Dem conference: the ego has landed

Sep26 by weegingerdug

Party conference season is upon us, the time of year when politicians make speeches aimed at pleasing their party’s base and the rest of us switch off. These are likely to be the last party conferences before the Westminster general election which is due next year, and the parties will be using their conferences as an opportunity to set out their stalls for voters in the “let’s get rid of the Tories election” that is anticipated. Unfortunately for everyone who is not an avid viewer of those right wing ‘news’ channels that are proliferating on British televisions like dog turds on a dog park, all the British parties are vying with one another to adopt as many Conservative policies as they can in order to minimise the attacks on them by the UK’s ludicrously right wing media which means that although we may get rid of the Tories by name at the next general election, their mean spirited and vicious politics of punishing the poor in order to reward the rich will very much live on.

First up it’s the Lib Dem party conference in Bournemouth, always guaranteed to be an exercise in grandstanding, futility, and irrelevance. Naturally BBC Scotland took advantage of the excuse to give airtime to party leader Ed Davey, who was allowed to prattle on completely unchallenged for several minutes about how much he hates the SNP.

Not to be outdone by Labour leader Keir Starmer in the right wing U turn stakes, Davey has a right wing U turn of his own to debate at his party conference. In interviews over the weekend to mark the conference Davey refused to say that the LibDems want the UK to rejoin the EU, although this remains official party policy, at least for now. However the Lib Dem website https://www.libdems.org.uk/ merely talks about “eventually” rejoining the European Single Market and adds that the party’s “long term ambition” is to see the UK “at the heart of Europe once more”, carefully avoiding the scary words “rejoin the EU,” far less giving a time table for doing so.

The Lib Dems hope to boost their chances at the general election by treating it as essentially a series of local campaigns, focusing on local issues in each constituency in the hopes of taking votes from disenchanted Conservative voters and not scaring away Tory Leave voters by talking about rejoining the EU. Davey even claimed in one interview that no one is talking about rejoining the EU, something which is certainly facilitated by the BBC choosing to ignore the large pro-EU demonstration held in London over the weekend even as it gave coverage in the main news bulletin to a much smaller protest against banning American bully XL dogs which was taking place nearby.

However the prize for delusion goes to Scottish Lib Dem groupuscule leader Alex Cole-Hamilton, the man who leads the smallest group in the Scottish Parliament yet who has the biggest ego and the highest estimation of himself. Alex doesn’t need a kindly granny to tell him how wonderful he is, he does that himself each morning every time he looks in the mirror. Alex thinks this counts as self-reflection.

Onieweys, Alex’s unintentional comedy sketch which passed for his speech to the party faithful was notable for the claim that Humza Yousaf was going to be the last “nationalist” first minister of Scotland. He asserted that the SNP is “haemorrhaging fair minded, reasonable voters” and that people were “looking for a party to inspire them again, adding: “We are the answer they’ve been looking for, and it’s why Humza Yousaf will be the last nationalist First Minister of Scotland.”

This claim is deluded on three counts, firstly because despite their recent political travails the SNP remain by far and away the largest political party in Scotland and recent polling suggests that the next Scottish Parliament is most likely to retain a pro-independence majority, meaning that Alex looks set to have to continue confusing his self-importance with political relevance.

Secondly, and perhaps even more delusional, even if the SNP were to be ousted at the next Holyrood election as the largest party in terms of MSPs by either Labour or the Tories, both these parties are now nakedly nationalist. Both fully support Brexit, both wrap themselves in British flags, both extol the monarchy, the armed forces and “British traditions.”

Just because a key tenet of British nationalism is an abiding refusal to acknowledge that it is in fact a species of nationalism, and a rather nasty and intolerant one at that, does not give British nationalists a free pass, a Labour, or may all the gods forbid, Tory first minister of Scotland will still be very much a nationalist first minister, just an Anglo-British nationalist one. British nationalists are the Christian fundamentalists of nationalism. Certain Christian fundamentalists typically refuse to acknowledge that they have a religion. To their mind they possess the absolute truth, “religion” is something that characterises lesser belief systems.

Thirdly, it’s delusional because no one is inspired by the Lib Dems, least of all Scottish voters who favour independence and a return to the European Union. The Lib Dem’s brand of muscular unionism is just as unappealing as that of the Conservatives, and their promise of a federal United Kingdom is so much pie in the sky with as much substance as their desire to rejoin the European Single Market “eventually.” I have as much chance of becoming the next first minister as Alex Cole-Hamilton does, I even know how to wear a waistcoat properly, [hint Alex, you shouldn’t see your shirt poking out between the bottom of your waistcoat and your belt.] but I’d rather poke my eyes out with rusty knitting needles than stand for Parliament.

However there is one way in which Alex’s, ahem, prediction may come true. Scotland could become independent and then we’ll have a Scottish Prime Minister and not the First Minister of a devolved parliament. But then Alex is the guy who told the Oxford Union that Scotland should not and must not exist again. Very few voters in Scotland will find that extremist sentiment “fair minded and reasonable.”

We are in for a lot more of this kind of – what we can kindly call comedy – from the parties of we’re not nationalists we’re British as the conference season progresses.

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British nationalism means heads, Scotland loses, tails, Scotland still loses

Sep20 by weegingerdug

There can be no doubt by now that the Labour party is in the business of peddling exactly the same right wing Anglo-British exceptionalist nationalism as the Conservatives. It’s the politics of fantasy and goal post shifting.

Keir Starmer’s Brexit plans have been dismissed as “delusional” by leading European commentators. Wolfgang Münchau, director of the EU policy website Eurointelligence said: “Sir Keir Starmer’s attempt to re-write the relationship is based on a delusion of a similar kind[to previous UK policy], that it is possible to stay outside the single market and the customs union, and get a better deal. This is a political lie.”

He added: “Probably the biggest delusion yet to be unpicked is Sir Keir’s repeated assertion that there is a better deal with the EU out there. This is simply not true. There was a lot of vindictive commentary from the EU during the entire Brexit process, but the deal that was eventually agreed was a reasonable third-country trade deal.”

Meanwhile closer to home there was yet more British nationalist exceptionalism from Labour. Over the weekend Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves waved away the prospect of an SNP victory in Scotland at the next Westminster general election. It’s not that she refused to countenance the possibility that the SNP could win a majority of Westminster seats in Scotland, that would simply be the kind of pre-election puffing that we expect of politicians bigging up their party’s chances before a vote takes place. Reeves appeared to accept that it’s perfectly plausible that the SNP could end up with a majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats, what she said was something far more insidious and concerning, remarks which it’s fair to say call into question whether there is any longer such a thing as democracy in Scotland as part of this supposedly United Kingdom.

What Reeves said was to deny that an SNP victory in Scotland at the next Westminster general election would constitute a mandate for another independence referendum. Naturally she did not spell out precisely what would constitute a mandate for another referendum given that we know that Labour, just like its Conservative fellow travellers refuses to accept that it’s a mandate for an independence referendum when the people of Scotland vote for a Scottish Parliament with a majority of MSPs from parties which explicitly stated in their manifestos that they would seek to bring about another independence referendum should they win a majority in the Scottish Parliament. Meanwhile Labour and the Conservatives, which stood on platforms of explicit rejection of the idea that there ought to be another independence referendum, lost that election.

Yet Reeves now tells us that a pro-independence and pro-referendum party winning a majority at a Westminster general election doesn’t count as a mandate either. Then she had the gall to trot out the same patronising guff that the Scottish electorate had heard from her party back in 2021 and had rejected at the ballot box.

It is clear that a blatant set of double standards is at play here. Labour and the Tories would both claim a mandate to form a government and implement their policies on the basis of winning a majority of seats in the House of Commons at the next general election, they would do so no matter what percentage of votes cast that they had won, because that’s how elections in Britain work. The current Conservative Government enjoys a comfortable majority of seats in the Commons even though they won just 42.4% of votes cast. The current Scottish Government is based on SNP MSPs and the SNP won 47.7% of the constituency vote in the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary election. Apparently the Scottish Government doesn’t have a mandate but the Tories do.

Labour could very well win a large majority of Commons seats at the next Westminster general election despite failing to win a majority of the popular vote, Labour will then claim it has a mandate to deliver its policies, because that’s how elections work. Elections are not referendums. Yet although that is how elections are supposed to work, the Labour party and the equally democracy blocking Tories insist that Westminster elections in Scotland work in a completely different way. Moreover that’s a way that they are not going to specify. Effectively the Scottish electorate are reduced to a football team which is trying to score a goal only the goalposts keep moving and the team is blindfolded. Moreover Westminster reserves the right to change the position of the goalposts retroactively, so even if Scotland does score they’ll only tell us that it didn’t count.

The Labour party is telling us that it could fail to win a single seat in Scotland but it would still have the right to impose its will on the people of Scotland on the back of the Commons majority that it won outwith Scotland, meanwhile how the people of Scotland actually vote themselves is supremely irrelevant as far as Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are concerned. The winning party in an election in Scotland only has a mandate if the majority party in the Commons says it does.

The unspoken truth which neither Labour nor the Conservatives is prepared to say out loud is that they will only accept the outcome of a vote in Scotland if the electorate of Scotland votes in a way that Labour and the Tories approve of. If the people of Scotland fail to oblige then their votes will be britsplained away while the likes of Rachel Reeves lectures them on what their priorities “really” are.

This is all but indistinguishable from authoritarianism. Elections in Scotland are reduced to a performative exercise from which all democratic import has been stripped. British exceptionalist nationalism means heads, Scotland loses, tails, Scotland loses too.

This intervention from Reeves proves that there can be no democracy in Scotland as long as Scotland remains under Westminster rule. How Scotland votes will be waved away and ignored if it is not to the liking of the majority party in the House of Commons. The only way in which the people of Scotland can get what they vote for is with independence.

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Keeping the dream alive

Sep15 by weegingerdug

An opinion poll carried out by Find Out Now was published this week showing that a majority in Scotland would vote Yes for independence if Westminster were to permit a vote, a vote which neither the Labour nor the Conservative parties will concede to because they fear that the No campaign would lose. According to this poll, once don’t knows are removed and likelihood to vote is factored in, 52% of respondents would vote Yes. The significance of this poll lies in the fact that it still produced a majority for Yes even though the polling company weighted its sample according to the result of the 2014 referendum.

As I have previously blogged, this practice made good sense in the the couple of years following the 2014 referendum as it helped to ensure that the polling company’s sample was truly representative of the wider population, however nine years out from the independence referendum there are good reasons to question whether this practice really does help produce greater accuracy as there are strong arguments for believing that it may instead artificially inflate the No responses and underrepresent those in favour of Yes.

This is because approximately 12% of the total electorate in 2014 has passed away in the nine years since, around 56000 or 57000 people die every year in Scotland. The leading causes of death are heart disease, strokes, and cancer, all of which are illnesses which tend to affect older people. It is a consistent pattern in polling on the independence issue that older people are less likely to support independence than younger people. This means that the 500,000 or so people who have passed away in Scotland since 2014 are disproportionately more likely to be older people who voted no than younger people who voted yes. In fact the youngest people to vote in the 2014 referendum, those who were 16 at the time, will now be 25. Many thousands of people in Scotland who were too young to vote in 2014 will now be of voting age, this age group is disproportionately in favour of independence.

What polling companies who weight their sample according to the result of the 2014 referendum are doing is to standardise their sample with reference to a Scotland which no longer exists, a Scotland containing a higher proportion of No voters.

The continuing use of this methodology by polling companies is most likely due to institutional inertia which is compounded by the fact that unlike polling for political party preference, there is no corrective in the form of an election which would lead a polling company to adjust its methodology. The reality is that most polls are commissioned by anti- independence media outlets which have no reason to pressurise polling companies to change their methodologies in ways which might potentially favour a larger Yes vote.

It’s a sign of how far independence has been normalised in Scotland that a poll showing a narrow majority for Yes is greeted with a shrug of the shoulders for the most part. Many independence supporters bewail these figures, wanting to know why support for independence is not much higher. The answer to that lies in the woeful state of the Scottish media, an overwhelmingly anti-independence media which is in no way reflective of the Scottish population it purports to represent. Scots are subjected to a constant and unending barrage of negativity and woe. Positive developments or news which is good for the independence case is brushed over and ignored, bad news is dwelt upon at inordinate length.

The really surprising thing is not that support for independence is not higher but rather that it remains unaffected by the incessant British nationalist propaganda which fills what passes for the Scottish media.

There are also complaints from sections of the independence movement that the SNP does not do enough to advance the case for independence and they blame the SNP for the failure of support for independence to break through in opinion polling and produce consistently large pro-independence majorities.

Not only does this ignore the role of the Scottish media in actively suppressing support for independence, it also ignores another vital role played by the SNP. Although all recent polling agrees in showing that support for independence is distinct from and unaffected by party political support in polls for the SNP, the reality is that it is only because the SNP is a dominant force in party politics in Scotland that independence remains a live political issue and moreover the issue that is central and definitive in the Scottish political landscape.

If Labour were to succeed in replacing the SNP as the largest political party in terms of votes or seats won at the next Westminster general election, the British nationalist parties will triumphantly declare that the general election was after all a de facto referendum on independence – despite denying it was such a thing beforehand – and will insist that Scottish independence is no longer an active political issue. Independence, greater powers for Holyrood, and meaningful constitutional reform of the sclerotic and undemocratic Westminster parliament will all be brushed under the carpet.

An opinion poll from YouGov published this week suggests that Labour hopes of overtaking the SNP in Scotland may be overstated. Should the SNP succeed in remaining the largest party in terms of seats won, this will be taken as a mandate for independence. Naturally the Westminster government will stall, prevaricate and gaslight us, but the issue of independence will remain very much alive and kicking at the top of the Scottish political agenda. If Labour does displace the SNP, hopes of independence will be snuffed out for the foreseeable future.

So when some people complain that the SNP has done nothing for Scottish independence they are mistaken. The SNP has fulfilled the vital task of ensuring that the issue of Scottish independence remains central to Scottish political discourse. It has done so despite almost the entire Scottish media being ranged against it and in the teeth of suspiciously well funded tactical voting campaigns organised by shadowy British nationalist organisations.

The truth is that the SNP is the only pro-independence party which has a realistic chance of winning Westminster seats at the next general election. The challenge for the party is two fold, first it must convince voters in Scotland that a vote for the SNP is equally effective in unseating a hated Tory government as a vote for Labour, and indeed that only an SNP vote represents a rejection of Conservative policies given Keir Starmer’s full throated adoption of right wing Tory Anglo-British nationalism.

Secondly the SNP needs to motivate pro-independence supporters, a far larger constituency than SNP supporters, to come out on the day and vote SNP as the sole means of keeping the issue of Scottish independence on the table. It’s the only way to keep the dream of independence alive.

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

The change Labour promises is just more of the same

The British failure of democracy in Scotland

The BBC’s blink and you’d miss it SNP conference

Starmer breaks the irony meter, and a non fungible Tory

Apathy was the big winner in Rutherglen

The Conspiracy Party conference

Optional identity mark sock puppets

The Lib Dem conference: the ego has landed

British nationalism means heads, Scotland loses, tails, Scotland still loses

Keeping the dream alive