A Tory leadership contest could cement Johnson’s hold on power

May31 by weegingerdug

The number of Conservative MPs who have confirmed that they have sent letters of no confidence to the chair of the back bench 1922 Committee continues to tick upwards. Under party rules, if 15% of Conservative MPs write to the chair of the committee to express their loss of confidence in the party leader, a leadership contest will be triggered. 15% of the number of current Tory MPs is 54, and that is the number of letters that Committee chair Sir Graham Brady must receive if there is to be a leadership election.

The committee chair does not publish a running total of the number of letters he has received and not all MPs choose to reveal that they have submitted letters. Currently around 40 MPs have let it be known that they have lost confidence in Johnson, although it is not known if all of them have submitted formal letters to the 1922 Committee, however it is thought that a number of others have already done so but have chosen not to make the fact public. Often this reticence is out of fear of alienating their constituency associations, particularly if the push to remove the leader fails to gain sufficient support.

We have already seen the humiliating screeching U-turn performed by Scottish Tory branch manager Douglas Ross, who was very vocal about the urgency of Johnson’s need to resign when he thought that there was enough support to trigger a leadership contest, but as soon as it became clear that the move to unseat Johnson was fizzling out, all of a sudden Ross thought Johnson wasn’t doing such a bad job after all. There is no such thing as principle in the Conservative party, there is only a transactional calculation about what Conservative MPs think is best for their careers.

What is clear however is that disquiet about Johnson amongst Conservative MPs has reached such an extent that they are close to triggering a leadership contest. This may die down, as it did earlier this year, but it could still gain fresh momentum.

Parliament is in recess this week, MPs have returned to their constituencies where it is thought that many will take soundings from their local constituencies about the extent of the damage that Johnson’s lies and law breaking have done to their chances of re-election, which is all that the vast majority of Conservative MPs care about. An opinion poll published recently suggested that if a General Election was to be held just now the Conservatives could be facing the loss of as many as ninety seats, which would wipe out their majority and leave Labour as the largest party in Parliament. The party could even face the humiliation of Boris Johnson losing his own seat. No sitting British Prime Minister has lost their seat in a General Election since the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour lost his seat in the General Election of 1906.

Former Tory minister Tobias Ellwood a prominent Conservative critic of Johnson told Sky News that the party was “increasingly in a difficult place, adding “and we still seem to be in denial. It’s time to shake off this partisan Stockholm syndrome, I believe. Our party brand is suffering. We will lose the next election on current trajectory as reflected in recent elections.” The party is due to face two challenging by-elections on 23 June, one in Wakefield triggered by the 18 month jail sentence imposed on Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan following his conviction in April this year for the sexual assault of a 15 year old boy in 2008. The second by election on 23 June will be in the Conservative strong hold of Tiverton and Honiton in Devon. This by-election was called after Neil Parrish resigned when it came to light that he had been watching porn on his mobile phone in the Commons on two occasions.

Wakefield is one of the so-called Red Wall seats in Northern England which the Conservatives took from Labour in the 2019 General Election and Labour will be hoping to take the seat back from the Tories. This is one of the seats that Labour must recover if it is to have any chance of overtaking the Conservatives in a General Election.

Tiverton and Honiton covers an area which has not been represented in Westminster by a party other than the Conservatives since 1923. It is likely that the Conservatives will retain the seat, but nervous Tories will be watching how well the Lib Dems perform. A strong Lib Dem performance will reinforce Tory fears that Johnson has become an electoral liability who threatens their stranglehold on power.

Party managers will be doing their best to manage expectations before the by-elections and to some extent a drop in the Conservative vote is already priced in, however if Labour and the Lib Dems do much better than expected and there is a dramatic decline in the Tory vote, this will only encourage yet more Conservative MPs to submit letters of no-confidence in Johnson to Sir Graham Brady.

Yet even if a leadership contest is triggered, Johnson has made it clear that he has no intentions of going quietly and will fight tooth and nail to keep his job, using all the dirty tricks at his disposal. There is no obvious successor in sight. All the likely contenders are heavily implicated in the misgovernment which characterises the Johnson regime, while the hitherto prime contender Rishi Sunak, has also been fined by the police for breaching lockdown and has additional come under severe pressure due to his family’s tax arrangements. This pressure has cracked open Sunak’s carefully curated public image and has revealed him to be in his own way every bit as contrived, venal, and entitled as the man he would like to replace.

It is a shocking indictment of the Westminster system that the only way in which a lying law-breaking Prime Minister can be removed is if the Conservative MPs who put him in the highest office in full knowledge of his entitlement and propensity for lying and holding rules in contempt if he finds them inconvenient decide that it is in their personal and political interests to replace him with another of their number. Whoever does replace him will be just as committed to the Conservatives’ post-Brexit project of centralising power in Downing Street and continuing along the road of British nationalist authoritarianism.

There is every possibility that Johnson could survive a leadership challenge. If he does the rules of the Conservative party state that he cannot face another challenge for a year. That could be just what Johnson needs, it would give him a year during which he could behave as outrageously as he liked without fear of any consequences, and during which the UK’s democratic safeguards will continue to be attacked and undermined.

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Getting the measure of Johnson

May30 by weegingerdug

Boris Johnson’s declarations of humility, or rather shamility, lasted as long as it took for Tory MPs to shuffle out of the Commons and coo over an elderly royal. The real scandal here, according to Glasgow Tory group leader Thomas Kerr, is not that his party is led by a serial liar and law breaker whose attitude towards standards in public office is much the same as his attitudes towards Downing Street itself, something that you can vomit all over and then refuse to take any responsibility for, it’s that Glesca Cooncil have much the same view of the Jubilee as the large majority of the city’s citizens, something that they have as much interest in as Boris Johnson does of accepting that he ought to resign in disgrace. That’s why the council has taken the sensible decision, much to the disgust of Thomas Kerr, not to put on any official events to celebrate an obscenely wealthy and privileged woman with access to the very best health care making it into her mid-nineties, something which is a lot easier to achieve when you don’t have to worry about the heating bill for your palaces.

Actually while we are on the subject of Thomas Kerr, given that the Conservatives lost all but two of their seats on Glasgow at the recent local authority elections, it’s a bit of a stretch to call him the leader of the Conservative “group”, that’s a bit like calling a scary clown hiding in a storm drain the Cirque du Soleil. Although a pair of scary clowns hiding in storm drains is a fairly accurate summary of the Conservatives in Glasgow.

Anyway, despite the desperate hype of the British nationalist media, which is to say most of it, trying to persuade us against the evidence of our own eyes and ears that “the whole country” is consumed with jubilee fever, “the whole country” in this instance clearly does not include Scotland. For the most part people in Scotland feel that wasting £1.3 billion of public money on a Jubilee ego-trip, while millions of families are struggling, is nothing to celebrate. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there are 1.5 million people in the UK who are destitute and unable to afford basic essentials. That £1.3 billion could have been spent on giving those people over £850 each. The Queen has spent millions to bail out Andrew from his legal difficulties. Yet she won’t spare a penny for those struggling right now or donate to food banks. Instead Buckingham Palace seeks staff who are willing to accept less than the minimum wage, because the royal household has exemption from that legislation.

You can see this for yourself on the official jubilee online guide to enforced nationalist jollity which has an interactive map allowing you to find the jubilee street party nearest to you. On this map Scotland appears like a map of water parks in the Sahara. There are hundreds of events listed in every region of England, but as soon as you get to Scotland there is only a handful of events listed, most of which are like the Jubilee party listed for Parkhead in Glasgow, an area represented by a certain Thomas Kerr on the cooncil, which describes itself as a “Feck the Queen party”, or the “Sharpen your guillotine” event listed for the city’s West End. Meanwhile over in Edinburgh there’s a “Lock up your daughters in case Prince Andrew visits” party.

The official jubilee website primly notes that there are fewer neighbourhood street parties in Scotland because there are different laws in Scotland about closing off public streets. Aye, right uh-huh, that will be the reason.

The second that Parliament went into recess so that MPs could bugger off to a jubilee street party in their constituency, or in the case of the Scottish Tories to blame the lack of them on the vile SNP and not a complete lack of Caledonian interest, Johnson showed us just how much humility he really had about the damning findings of the Sue Gray report by announcing some changes to the ministerial code. Meanwhile questions continue to be asked about the extent to which Johnson leaned on Sue Gray to remove some of the most damaging material from her report. The new Johnsonian ministerial code no longer requires members of the government to behave with honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability, Johnson has removed those injunctions from the foreword, the kindest explanation is that it was because he doesn’t know what any of those words mean.

The amended rules make it clear that ministers will no longer always be expected to resign if they have been found to breach the code of conduct. Under new sanctions, they could apologise or temporarily lose their pay instead. Although making an apology is not a sanction. It is the minimum you should do when incurring a genuine sanction. It’s not a sanction, it is merely an acknowledgement of wrong doing. It is telling indeed that Johnson thinks that having to apologise is punishment enough. Johnson has also blocked his independent ethics chief, Christopher Geidt, from gaining the power to launch his own investigations, Johnson reserves to himself the right to start any investigations into his own behaviour. It’s a shocking indictment of the lack of democratic safeguards in what passes for a British constitution. If you are a lying law-breaking Prime Minister who is worried about being found to be in breach of the ministerial code, just rewrite the ministerial code so that it allows you to keep lying and breaking the law with impunity.

But never mind any of that, we have a jubilee and union flags everywhere, and if you complain about the descent of Britain into a corrupt flag bedecked authoritarian nationalism, in fact all those things that the Conservatives accuse the SNP of, it’s just because you’re a vile lefty remainer who hates Britain. We might not have an honest or accountable British Government, but we do have the reintroduction of Imperial measurements as a jubilee Brexit benefit. After six years and the trashing of international treaties, at a cost of £440m in lost trade per week, here you have it – the one and only Brexit benefit. You can now weigh things in pounds and ounces, and measure liquids in fluid ounces. With the number of dead cat tactics that Johnson and his government constantly throw about, it’s a wonder the RSPCA hasn’t launched an investigation. every time Johnson has something he wants to bury, he says something stupid as a distraction. A bridge to Ireland anyone?

Proof, as if more proof was needed, that the UK is an unending shitshow of mortifying fuckwittery. What’s next? The return of pounds shillings and pence, national service and the birch? You couldn’t put it past this shower of evil clowns in storm drains. That’s where Douglas Ross is currently hiding in case someone asks him about the changes to the ministerial code, although that someone is unlikely to be BBC Scotland. Whether it’s feet and inches or metres and centimetres, we all have got the measure of Johnson. He is still a lying law-breaker no matter how you measure it.

There can now be no remaining doubt that the UK and the Westminster Parliament is utterly incapable of reform. The Labour party is complicit with the Tories by continuing to peddle the fantasy that the UK can be reformed. It can’t. There is only one way that Scotland can get a government that the people of Scotland can hold to account, by becoming a normal independent nation.

The graywash

May26 by weegingerdug

The long awaited Sue Gray report has finally been published. As was widely predicted, the report detailed a catalogue of shockingly bad behaviour which the Prime Law-Breaker presided over in Downing Street. And as equally widely predicted, Johnson mugged his way through a performative apology and lied about taking full responsibility before going on to claim that he didn’t know what was going on in the offices that he was in charge of and insisting that his responsibility did not extend to tendering his resignation.

The Gray report did not cover some of the most egregious examples of law-breaking in Downing Street such as the party on 13 November 2020 which led to the police issuing a number of fines. The report just mentioned that this had already been dealt with by the police. So the Gray report will not tell us why Johnson did not receive a fine for attending a party which the police clearly thought was unlawful even though other less important party goers were fined.

We learned about drunken parties that went on until 4 am, about staff getting so drunk while still at their place of work that they vomited, garden furniture getting broken by pissed up staff member, staffers betting into an alcohol fueled physical confrontation. We learned about the bullying derision and contempt heaped upon security and cleaning staff who tried to point out that what was going on was deeply inappropriate. It’s the Bullingdon club as government.

The journalist and environmental campaigner George Monbiot tweeted that a source in the Met Police had told him that the reason junior staff were fined but Johnson and more senior Downing Street staff were not was because the senior people attending the event had declined to cooperate with the police enquiry and had not filled in the questionnaires sent to them by the police. It is not, as Johnson and his apologists would have us believe, that the police found he was not guilty of any wrong-doing. It’s just that he refused to help the police with their investigations.

However sorry Johnson claimed that he was when he appeared at Prime Law Breakers Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, you can be quite certain that he was not remotely sorry when he thought that the public didn’t know that puke ups, punch ups and piss ups were what passed for government in Downing Street. A work culture starts at the top. Staff take their cue from the boss. Johnson says that he was not aware of what was going on, but even if that obvious and blatant arse-covering lie were true, it merely points to a gross negligence and incompetence in office which alone constitutes grounds for Johnson to be removed from office.

Ten years ago this week, Theresa May first publicly coined the term “hostile environment” – a set of hideous and xenophobic policies designed to make life impossible for anyone who can’t prove their formal immigration permission, in hopes that callous cruelty would make them disappear. Now the self same Theresa May is what passes for a moral compass in the Conservative party, not even the realisation that no one now considers her the worst Conservative PM in living memory was enough to cheer her up. She sat stony faced through Johnson’s so-called apology and left the chamber clutching a copy of the Gray report, this is how low the British establishment has sunk, Theresa Hostile Environment May is considered a beacon of rectitude and decency. The worst of all is that there is still no bottom in sight. There is no hostile environment for Tory misbehaviour and entitlement, only collusion and enabling. Those Conservative MPs who sat in silence in the Commons resolving to do nothing are every bit as culpable as Johnson. He is a creature without honesty, integrity or respect for the law, and those are his best qualities. Johnson the corrupt lying law breaker will continue to transform the institutions of the British state in his twisted and venal image for as long as the Conservatives allow him to cling to power.

The other widely predicted thing about the Sue Gray report is that in the grand tradition of British government reports and inquiries into British government wrong doing is that it will make not a whit of difference. At best some minor functionaries will be thrown under the bus, there will be claims that procedures have been changed, and regulations tightened up, move along now nothing to see here, and Johnson and the rest of those in charge will sail on regardless, free from any meaningful consequences. The system which allowed such an individual into the highest office will remain unchanged, despite the fact that it gave us an individual who is manifestly unfit for office. It’s not just Johnson whose position is untenable even as he clings to office, so is that of the Scottish Conservative apologist in chief Douglas Ross and every Scottish Conservative MP and MSP who refuses to demand Johnson’s immediate resignation. They are all complicit in the debasement of public office. Every Tory MP that fails to send a ‘no confidence’ letter to the 1922 Committee is in support of the notion that a known liar and criminal is an acceptable leader. They are equally dishonourable as Johnson.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak tweeted :The Prime Minister has apologised and lessons have been learned. I hope we can now move forward…” The only lesson that has been learned is that Johnson never has to face any consequences.

As the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford said at PMQs on Wednesday : “When the Tory Members retire to the 1922 committee this evening, I hope they will bear in mind the now infamous Government advert featuring a desperately ill covid patient. It says – Look into her eyes and tell her you never bend the rules.”

Some Conservatives laughingly tell us that we must move on from this issue because Johnson has learned his lesson. I am furious and am never moving on. The only lesson that Johnson has learned is that his spineless party has let him get away with his bad behaviour which will only teach him that he can continue to get away with it.

Some, such as the Brextremist Brendan Clarke-Smith, the Conservative MP for Bassetlaw, insult everyone’s intelligence by popping up on the TV to insist that dethroning Johnson only plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands, shamelessly hiding Johnson’s appalling behaviour behind the smouldering rubble of a Ukrainian apartment block. Brendan, who used to be an RE teacher, told Channel4 news that he was perfectly content to have a law-breaker as PM. It was a craven and spineless defence of an egregious liar.

On Thursday the government grandly announced what it described as help for households to tackle the cost of living crisis, to be funded by a windfall tax on the bloated profits of energy companies. They could have done this weeks ago, but they cynically waited until the Sue Gray report was published so that they’d have something to point at and say, “Look over there!” This isn’t help for households to tackle the cost of living crisis, it’s help for Johnson to tackle the partygate crisis.

The graywash confirms that the institutions of the British state are incapable of holding the powerful to account and unable to guarantee even the most basic standards of acceptable behaviour in public office. The best thing you can say about the United Kingdom is that it will be over soon.

The most important issue in the coming indyref: Scottish democracy or British authoritarian sleaze

May25 by weegingerdug

During the 2014 independence referendum campaign there was a lofty assumption by Better Together campaigners of the supposed superiority of British institutions and of the UK and the Westminster parliament as a yardstick of democratic standards of government. Some opponents of independence went so far as to insist that it was only because of the UK that Scotland enjoyed democracy and that as an independent state Scotland was at grave risk of descending into authoritarianism and becoming a one-party state in which any opposition to the government would not be tolerated.

Others asserted that it was only the tender administrations of Westminster which prevented fractious Scots from falling into civil unrest with the Highlands tearing lumps out of the Lowlands, Glasgow from attacking Edinburgh, and English born residents of Scotland being rounded up into internment centres prior to being deported. One of the most frequent claims was that Westminster and the UK protected Scotland from the perils of nationalism. Throughout the campaign there was a constant denial that British nationalism even existed. Nationalism was a curse for Scotland, a curse for which Westminster provided the cure.

Throughout the campaign, any questioning of the democratic credentials of the Westminster system were met with howls of British nationalist derision. We were constantly told that Westminster was the world’s most successful and stable democracy and that Scotland needed Westminster as a guarantor of democratic standards. This was an unquestioned assertion, constantly reinforced by Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media as well as by the Bitter Together parties. Left to our own devices, we were told, Scotland would descend into barbarism, social strife and totalitarianism.

Eight years on and it is clear that Scotland is indeed in very real danger of falling into authoritarianism due to an intolerant and xenophobic nationalism, that life is being crushed out of the fragile flower of democracy by corrupt nationalist politicians who consider themselves to be above the law and who are neutering any institution or organisation which could potentially hold them to account, while at the same time taking steps to criminalise protest and to restrict the right to vote. This danger comes from the right wing Anglo-British nationalists who have taken control of the Conservative party following the Brexit vote which they orchestrated with a campaign of lies, mendacity and deceit.

Despite their continuing denials, it is laughable for the Conservatives to pretend that they are anything other than xenophobic parochial nationalists obsessed with a romanticised vision of a long lost past, precisely all the sins which they accused supporters of independence of embodying in that referendum so long ago, which took place in such an utterly different world.

It is also now laughable for opponents of independence to insist that Scotland needs the UK in order to guard against authoritarianism and the destruction of democratic safeguards. The greatest threat to democracy in Scotland comes from a Conservative Government at Westminster which is presided over by a corrupt law breaking serial liar who cannot be held to account and who holds the norms and standards of democracy in contempt because he knows that the spineless party of charlatans which is formed in his image will allow him to get away with it. Johnson is bereft of morals and principles other than an abiding lifelong conviction that he should be allowed to do as he pleases and it is churlish to insist that he faces any consequences for his behaviour.

However this is about more than one man who is manifestly unfit for the office that he holds. It is about the entire Westminster system which put him there and which hands absolute power to the occupant of Downing Street but lacks any effective or meaningful checks and balances or means of removing a law-breaking liar from power. This is why we are in the ludicrous position of having to rely on Conservative MPs to unseat him, so that they can replace him with another of their ranks who is equally tainted by the sins of the Johnson regime in order to cement their party’s hold on power.

It’s like expecting East London gangsters to grass the Kray twins up to the police so that another crime boss can take over and rob more banks with impunity. That however is the closest that the Westminster system provides to any means of ensuring that those in the highest office abide by the rules.

The issue of securing and defending democracy must be front and foremost in the referendum campaign that lies ahead. Within the UK, Scotland runs a serious risk of seeing democracy destroyed, or at least neutered and rendered meaningless. It must be obvious by now that Westminster is incapable of reforming itself and that neither of the two main British parties have any intention of doing so anyway. They both have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are. Our civil liberties and democratic rights will continue to be whittled away by politicians who will grow ever more arrogant with every passing scandal as it will merely reinforce their confidence that they can get away with anything without having to face any consequences.

Independence is the only way in which Scotland can guarantee democracy. We need a written constitution which explicitly spells out the procedures for removing an elected official from office if he or she is found guilty of having broken the rules. We need an effective redistribution of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary with meaningful checks and balances in place in order to ensure that power cannot be amassed by the head of government in the way that successive Prime Ministers of the UK have turned the office of the Prime Minister, who is theoretically only first amongst equals in the cabinet into what is effectively an all powerful autocrat with few limits on their power and influence. When that Prime Minister is as immoral and corrupt as Johnson the law breaker and habitual liar, the fragility and shallow roots of democracy in the UK are laid starkly bare.

The British state traditionally did without such formal provisions, choosing to rely upon what was called the “good chap” theory of government, relying on the principles, sense of honour and shame of those in high office to resign if they had breached the customs, principles and traditions which underpin the British constitution. It’s a system which is rendered useless when the high offices of state are occupied by unprincipled liars like Johnson, Gove, or Patel, who are utterly bereft of any sense of shame and whose only principle is to do whatever is in their own self-interest.

This current scandal will go the way of all other Westminster scandals, even if Johnson is eventually forced from office the system which allowed such a manifestly unfit individual to attain the highest office will remain in place, and the UK will continue to go down the road to jingoistic flag ridden British nationalist authoritarianism. Only independence can guarantee that democracy is secure in Scotland. The fate of democracy must be the major issue in the referendum to come.

Flags, fetes and fascism

May24 by weegingerdug

When I first saw the photo on social media I thought it was a fake, a mock up created by some user in order to make a point about the slide of Britain into authoritarianism and outright fascism. But sadly, it was all too real. The photograph of Regent Street in the centre of London, literally wall to wall with union flags, like all of Northern Ireland’s orange flute bands had decided to launder their union jack themed bedding on the same day and hang it up to dry along one of London’s most important thoroughfares was no fake. This really is what parts of the UK look like in 2022, bedecked in a fetishistic flag shagging orgy of red white and blue.

The only thing distinguishing this from North Korea or Red Square is the absence of a parade of tanks and missile launchers and marching soldiers. There’s a fawning and sycophancy on the TV and in the press that would not be out of place in a dictatorship in the midst of a full-blown personality cult. A personality cult is precisely what it is, and while the UK is not a totalitarian dictatorship, it has already gone a long way down the road to authoritarianism and a failed democracy.

Tories on social media praised the display and suggested that there is nothing that is wrong with modern Britain that can’t be solved with more flags and even greater obsequiousness to the Royal family. This is 2022. In any self-respecting state the quasi-deification of an obscenely wealthy family of social parasites would be an embarrassment, but in modern Britain we are so far down the rabbit hole that it is considered the epitome of bad taste to discuss the fact that a 97 year old head of state is statistically unlikely to be around for much longer and to want to talk about ensuring that the office of head of state is in the future more representative and accountable to the people.

All this is taking place as photos are revealed showing Johnson partying during lockdown, photos which prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Prime Law-Breaker repeatedly lied to Parliament. ITV News has obtained pictures of Boris Johnson drinking at a No10 party during lockdown in November 2020. The photos cast fresh doubt on the PM’s repeated claims he was unaware of rule-breaking in No10 during the pandemic. On a personal level these photos are deeply hurtful.

In November 2020 I was lying in a hospital bed, paralysed down the entire left side of my body after suffering a massive stroke. I did not know if I would ever walk again, or even be able to function on a most basic level, it was a truly terrifying experience, yet because of covid restrictions no visitors were allowed into the hospital. I saw my husband just once, glimpsed from a first floor window as he stood waving in the rain in the car park below. I have never felt more alone or more afraid, and I was far from being the only person put through that dreadful terror. I accepted it, as others did, because we knew it was for the greater good. Other people died alone, without the comfort of loved ones. Families were unable to say a final farewell to their nearest and dearest. Yet as all this was going on, Johnson was having a party in Downing Street, lying to us that we’re all in this together.

The police have fined some of those who were at the November party, meaning that the police consider it was an illegal party. However there has been no explanation from the police about why they didn’t fine Johnson, who was not only present, but who according to some reports had been the one who instigated the party. It only adds to the already strong impression that in Britain there is one rule for ordinary people and another for the rich and powerful. Johnson was asked specifically about this party in the Commons, but denied that there had been any party on the date this party took place. He lied to Parliament, but still his party won’t force him from office.

Douglas Ross has called on the Prime Law-Breaker to explain himself, but Douglas Ross has quite a bit of explaining of himself to do too. First he wanted Johnson to resign, then he didn’t, and now it looks like another U turn may be on the cards. Ross should just install himself in a revolving door, it would make all those about faces easier, and easier for Ross to decide which of his faces to present to the public that day.

But never mind any of that, we have flags, we have the Queen, we have jubilee pudding, we have a commemorative coin for William’s 40th birthday bearing an image of the Prince with rather more hair than he really has, and these things allegedly more than make up for the fact that callous deceit, cronyism, authoritarianism , a determination to avoid accountability, and contempt for the public are what pass for the governing principles of the modern Conservative party. That is what all those flags stand for, and that’s why so many of us look at the images of Regent Street and are sick to our stomachs. The modern UK is flags, fetes and fascism.

For the benefit of younger readers. It is important to remember that what is happening in UK now is not normal. It is not acceptable, and it must be resisted. I was born in 1962. Even though I remember all the misery and contempt for ordinary working people displayed during the Thatcher years, never have I seen such a serious threat to the rule of law, standards in public life, human rights and democracy itself as the danger that emanates from Johnson’s government. When the law does not apply to the lawmakers we are not being governed, we are being ruled over while democracy and justice are being overruled. I did not think it was possible to despise a politician more than I despised Thatcher, but Johnson has managed it.

Tory MP Michael Fabricant – he of the straw blonde wig that couldn’t look more fake if it was actually made out of real straw – took to Twitter to tell us how lovely all those flags on Regent Street were and to express his upset that people had the temerity to criticise a display of triumphal nationalism in a state whose government has contempt for the law and for truth and decency for looking ever so slightly fascist.

But this is British nationalism that we are talking about here after all, and has been mentioned previously on this blog on numerous occasions, the defining characteristic of Anglo-British nationalism is a refusal to acknowledge that it is in fact nationalist, so you can be certain that modern Anglo-British fascism will be equally in denial about its fascism. British fascism comes with fops in Savile Row suits and English public school accents, telling you that they will protect you from “the woke”, or from Europe, or from Scottish nationalism, or from migrants and asylum seekers, while they strip you of your rights, destroy democratic accountability, slash public services to the bone and enrich themselves and their cronies from public funds.

For some bizarre reason, and let’s face it just about everything to do with Michael Fabricant is bizarre, the Tory MP has taken to writing his name on Twitter in Russian, as Майкл Фабрикант, alongside his Ukrainian flag emoji. In Ukrainian it would be Михайло Фабрiкант. But then he probably thinks that he’s written his name in Ukrainian and just doesn’t know the difference. An inability to distinguish between foreign types is another defining characteristic of Anglo-British nationalism, just like an inability to distinguish between democracy and fascism.

The choice: independence and democracy, or the UK and jingoistic authoritarianism

May23 by weegingerdug

On Sunday there were two important political developments. As the long-awaited Sue Gray report comes closer to publication following the conclusion of a police investigation which saw the Prime Law-Breaker and the Chancellor both be fined for breaking lockdown laws, and over a hundred fixed penalty notices being issued to staff at Downing Street. Now the attention has turned to what smells like an attempt by Johnson to interfere with what is likely to be a damning report about the culture of contempt and entitlement which Johnson presided over in Downing Street.

Questions are being asked about a meeting Johnson held with Sue Gray. Downing Street had originally claimed that it was Sue Gray herself who had requested the meeting, something that the senior civil servant was forced to deny. Secretary of State for education Nadhim Zahawi was trotted out for the TV in order to explain that a man who got sacked twice for lying, lied to the queen, lied to Parliament, confected a series of lies about the EU,and cheated on two wives, would never lie about a meeting with Sue Gray. Zahawi hummed and hawed his way through the interview, unable to answer the simple question of who called the meeting despite this story first having broken on the previous Friday and Zahawi certainly knew that he was going to be asked about it when he agreed to go on Sky News. Yet again we see the contempt that this government has for accountability. They are not even pretending to answer a very simple question.

I want to say that his car crash interview was a new low for this government, but sadly we know that another new low will be along in a day or two, possibly the next time that Michael Gove decides to adopt a silly accent in order to give a flippant non-answer to a serious question that has many thousands of people deeply worried.

Meanwhile in Scotland, following her as not seen on the BBC trip to the USA during which she discussed Scottish independence with senior American officials, the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon published a piece in The National on Sunday in which she announced that her government will shortly publish its new prospectus for independence and reiterated the reasons why ,despite the denials of the Conservatives and Labour, now is most definitely the time to debate Scottish independence. She stated that the matter of whether the people of Scotland want another independence referendum was decided in last year’s Holyrood elections when the people gave a large majority in Holyrood to parties which support another referendum and reaffirmed her government’s determination to ensure that the referendum will take place within the promised timetable.

The First Minister said that this reinvigorated debate will centre on deciding how to manage and develop the extraordinary assets of Scotland in order to build a better nation. Scotland, she noted, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with an almost incomparable the combination of natural resources, a highly-educated population and a competitive edge in some of the global sectors of the future.

She also noted that here is no longer a status quo.

The world has changed dramatically since 2014. The Conservatives have taken the UK out of the EU, the single market and the customs union, dragging an unwilling Scotland with them. They have used Brexit as an excuse to embark upon an assault on the devolution settlement, without seeking the consent of the Scottish people to do so, in direct breach of the promises that they made to Scotland in 2014 in order to secure a no vote in that year’s independence referendum. We have experienced the pandemic which proved that Scotland is perfectly capable of rising to the challenges of a global crisis, and to make a better fist of it than an increasingly corrupt Westminster.

In Scotland, the Conservatives and their allies continue to deny the outcome of last year’s Holyrood election. This was an election fought on the single dominating issue of a second independence referendum. The people of Scotland listened to the arguments, and returned a Scottish Parliament with the greatest pro-independence majority ever, yet having lost that election the Conservatives and Labour continue to refuse to accept that the people of Scotland voted the way they did and in a blatant denial of democracy they continue to threaten to block another referendum from taking place. This raises the important question of whether Scotland can enjoy democracy within a UK where British parties have no qualms about using the electoral power they derive from votes elsewhere in the UK in order to block the democratic choices of the people of Scotland.

We have also seen the rise of populism and authoritarianism around the world, with an emboldened nationalist right take measures to weaken and undermine democracy and to evade accountability, measures which the right wing Anglo-British nationalist government of Johnson has adopted with enthusiasm. We have seen a drastic curtailment of the right to protest, the independent Electoral Commission being brought under government control, obstacles being put in the way of exercising the right to vote, a law-breaking Prime Minister who lies with impunity yet is still defended by his party while corruption runs rampant and the Conservatives are fueled by dark money and donations from wealthy individuals who are rewarded with honours and peerages. But hey! Jubilee! flags! Gawdbless’er isn’t she maaaaaarvellous!

The Home Secretary now seeks to silence police chiefs from speaking out on matters she deems to be politically sensitive. Patel is also seeking reforms to the Official Secrets Act which could see journalists facing prison sentences of up to 14 years for publishing stories that embarrass the Government. The move would criminalise the leaking of papers to the press, even when it revealed that the Government was breaking the law or that there was a clear public interest in releasing the information.

We have also seen Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has driven over six million Ukrainians into exile according to the UN, has wrought destruction on swathes of Ukraine and cost the lives of thousands. The war has destroyed the post cold war security consensus and reanimated fear of nuclear conflict as well as illustrating the dangers of relying on dictatorships to supply a large part of Europe’s energy needs.

The climate crisis continues to worsen, and together with the need to move away from the fossil fuels which fund dictators, it is increasingly imperative that Scotland develops its massive potential for renewal energies to the full. For all these reasons and more, a new prospectus for independence is needed, one which talks more about the democratic deficit of the UK. The political struggle of our time is no longer left versus right. It is democracy versus authoritarianism. The UK is becoming an authoritarian failed democracy. It’s a very far cry from the claims of Better Together in 2014 that Scotland relied upon the UK as a guarantor of democracy and good government.

The response of British nationalists was to attempt to get trending on social media a hashtag based upon unfounded homophobic rumours, about an alleged incident in their fantasy of the First Minister’s personal life, which supposedly took place quite some time ago and which even if it was true has nothing to do with whether the First Minister is any good at her job, and which in any case has even less to do with whether or not Scotland should be an independent country. Tell me that you are afraid to engage with the substantive issues without telling me that you are afraid to engage with the substantive issues. If irrelevant homophobic ad hominem whataboutery is what passes for a “positive case for the union” these days, then no wonder the Tories and their allies are so terrified of another independence referendum.

The English dreaming of Peter Hitchens

May20 by weegingerdug

Peter Hitchens, the conservative contrarian who hates to be called a contrarian, has decided that Brexit isn’t enough to restore greatness to England as it still leaves England encumbered with Scotland and Wales, countries which he appears to see as lesser nations which sap the glory that rightfully belongs to England alone. Hitchens has published a column in the Daily Mail in which he argues that England should give up trying to persuade Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to stay and instead secede from the United Kingdom, leaving the ungrateful Celts to get on with it by themselves. England, he tells us, should leave the UK to embrace “a golden future,” a future which judging by recent behaviour would seem to consist of being stroppy and ripping up treaties which it had itself negotiated, deporting migrants and asylum seekers, bollocks to everyone, and flags everywhere, sticking it to Europe with two world wars and a referendum.

The piece reeks with the exceptionalism and claimed victimhood which are the contradictory twin characteristics of modern right wing English nationalism. Hitchens is at pains to stress that his proposal does not mean that England would declare independence. Hitchens’ England is far too grand and glorious for that, declarations of independence are what lesser dependent nations do. England, he tells us, has never depended on the other nations of these islands. So we must have been imagining how it was Scottish oil revenues that paid for the massive development of the city of London in the 1980s. It was just a dream that Irish labour built the railways or that Welsh coal kept the steam trains running.

The way in which Scotland, Wales and Ireland were bled of resources, talent, and capital in order to help build the modern English economy was just the Celts paying their dues for the privilege of England allowing us to be ruled by that parliament and government which Hitchens tells us is English already and has simply, “given hospitality to others during the long adventure of the Union.” No, he really did write that, presumably in all seriousness. So when the Conservatives foisted their hard-line ideologically motivated Brexit upon Scotland and stripped us all of our rights and privileges as European citizens, they were just being hospitable. Aren’t you glad that Hitchens has cleared that up for us. I’m sure it comes as a huge comfort to those EU citizens resident in Scotland who have had to apply to a cold-hearted Home Office in order to remain in the communities where they have made their homes.

Hitchens says that England would not be declaring independence, his England has always stood gloriously apart, and needing no one, an island nation except for the uncomfortable fact that it has to share an island with ungrateful and lesser neighbours. This is the England of whose empire, Hitchens writes, approvingly quoting the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana “never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.” He briefly concedes that “no doubt many wicked things were done by our empire”, glossing over the slave trade, the Irish and Bengal famines, the genocide of indigenous Australians, institutional racism, colonial exploitation and appropriation, to name but a few, but still says of England’s Empire “ours was better by far than any that has ever existed.”

What he calls for is not independence, instead he calls it the “Restoration of England” because he implcitly believes that England is being prevented from achieving its full potential and sense of itself by those Celtic nations which hang on to England’s coat tails and hold it back. You see, England is the real victim in this UK, selflessly sacrificing itself for smaller nations which don’t appreciate all that England does for them.

Santayana’s most famous aphorism is : “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Hitchens and other right wing English nationalists cannot or more accurately will not, remember the many sins of the British Empire, its racism, its exploitation, its contempt for “lesser breeds”, its rampant theft and corruption and the abiding sense of entitlement of its white Anglo-Saxon masters. The modern Conservative government repeats the past tragedies as farce.

Hitchens does not think that there need be an English independence referendum. Instead he believes that any party which put English secession in its manifesto for a General Election would win a resounding majority. Note that the English nationalists who insist that Scotland should only be able to hold another independence referendum with the permission of a parliament at Westminster which Hitchens asserts is English already also believe that England should be free to secede from the UK without even consulting the other nations, never mind asking their permission. That is a very telling double standard.

Of course Hitchens is merely being his usual contrarian and attention seeking self in making this proposal, but he does speak for a growing constituency within England. For decades opponents of independence have insisted that Scotland is financially dependent upon England, people in England have absorbed this message too, and naturally wonder if they would not be better off if they ditched what they believe to be the ungrateful financial millstone that is Scotland. An opinion poll in 2019 found that 75% of English Brexit supporters would be willing to “let Scotland go” in order to ensure that Brexit was done.

In 2020 a YouGov poll found that less than half of voters in England, just 46%, thought that Scotland should remain a part of the UK. What this, together with Hitchens kite -flying article, tell us is that a significant part of the English electorate, and particularly Brexit supporting Conservatives, are not strongly motivated to keep Scotland a part of the UK. This means that a Conservative Government could easily position itself as the champion of English interests by agreeing to a Scottish independence referendum, although what is far more likely is that post Brexit English antipathy towards Scotland means that in a future referendum Scotland will be told that no further devolution or “special treatment” is on the table, and the choice for Scotland is either independence or to accept its status as a “region of the UK” with no greater status than Yorkshire or East Anglia.

Personally I feel that one of the greatest advantages of Scottish independence is that it means we would be able to secede from Peter Hitchens and the cancer that is the Daily Mail.

The elephant and the bin bag

May19 by weegingerdug

In an earlier piece this week I remarked that the current behaviour of Satan’s little helpers the DUP, following their historic defeat in the recent Northern Irish Assembly elections demonstrated the fundamentally undemocratic nature of British nationalism in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. British nationalism is a dogma which disguises itself with a veneer of respect for democracy, but in reality it is a majoritarian, not a properly democratic form of politics.

Majoritarianism is the belief that the majority community should be able to rule a country in whichever way it wants, by disregarding the wishes and needs of the minority. This can easily be confused with democracy as long as the majority community is indeed the majority, but the moment that majority community loses its former dominance, its true anti-democratic nature becomes apparent.

This is what is happening in Northern Ireland just now as the DUP, aided and abetted by the Conservatives in Westminster tries to destroy the Northern Irish Protocol despite losing the recent election to Sinn Fein and despite the electorate of Northern Ireland voting for a Stormont with a large majority of parties which support the Protocol.

The DUP is unable to accept that it no longer represents the majority of the population, ever since the British carved Northern Ireland out of Ireland in order to create an artificial Unionist majority in the north, it has been an article of faith amongst Northern Irish Unionists that they are the majority community. They are emotionally and psychologically unable to accept that this is no longer the case. This is why the DUP and the even more frothy and extremist TUV which split from the DUP in 2007 because it objected to the DUP sharing power in Stormont with Irish nationalists believe that they are justified in bringing down the Assembly because the voters of Northern Ireland had the temerity to make Sinn Fein the largest party and to give an absolute majority to parties supporting the protocol.

British nationalists in Scotland have a very similar view of themselves and the same majoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies. One prominent and particularly zoomy Scottish Unionist group on social media even calls itself “the Majority,” unsurprisingly this betokens a conceptual inability to comprehend that its brand of hard line unionism may not in fact be supported by a majority and an equal inability to accept that there is a majority in the current Scottish Parliament for holding another independence referendum. Holyrood’s pro-independence majority and the mandate which it possesses for another independence referendum must be delegitimised, sidelined, and discounted, because to accept its existence means accepting that the Unionist “majority” may not in fact be a majority after all.

Mainstream opponents of Scottish independence are usually careful to maintain a veneer of democratic accountability. However former Scottish Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins let the mask slip in a recent article for the Herald newspaper. Tomkins has been something of a loose Scottish Tory cannon ever since he was ousted from his front bench position in the Scottish Tories following the putsch orchestrated by Ruth Davidson which unseated Jackson Carlaw and replaced him with Douglas Ross.

In the piece Tomkins tacitly acknowledges that the Scottish Parliament has both a mandate for another independence referendum and the majority needed to pass a Bill in Holyrood in order to legislate for a second independence referendum. He goes further than most of his unionist colleagues by admitting that if there is another independence referendum then Yes side would win. He says that Yes would win because of public anger about Brexit, the British Government’s mismanagement of covid, Westminster’s failure to reform and for the corruption and contempt which characterises the Conservative government.

However this is where Tomkins reveals the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of British nationalism in Scotland. He believes that it is this certainty of a yes victory which makes it imperative both that the British Government refuses to permit another independence referendum and that any Bill which Holyrood passes in order to facilitate another independence referendum should be struck down by the UK Supreme Court as unlawful. The message from this prominent Scottish Tory is clear: “Scotland you can’t be allowed to have an independence referendum because you’ll only use it to vote in a way that British Unionists won’t like.”

Tomkins dismisses the outrage that this undemocratic and authoritarian move would invariably provoke as “political noise” which the British constitution will “quietly deal with”. I suspect that Tomkins in his legalistic arrogance gravely underestimates the political ramifications and consequences of what he is proposing.

The Scottish constitutional debate cannot be resolved by the law because it is a political problem not a legal problem. That public anger with Westminster which Tomkins gives as the reason why he believes Yes would win the referendum will not go away because Westminster resorts to legal chicanery in order to evade the democratic verdict of the people. It will only intensify and deepen the anger. Tomkins is proposing the wrong tool for the wrong job. What Tomkins is advocating is like suggesting that you can dispose of an angry elephant by stuffing it in a bin bag and chucking it in the bin. You’re just going to end up with a shredded bin bag and an even angrier elephant.

What is being acknowledged here by a former Scottish Conservative front bencher is that the traditional Scottish Unionist conceit that the union between Scotland and England is entirely voluntary is a fiction and that there is no democratic path by which the people of Scotland can express their desire for another independence referendum. He is saying that another referendum is entirely the gift of the British Prime Minister, who will only grant one if he or she is certain that it will produce the result that British nationalists desire.

Tomkins is making it plain that the entire basis upon which the people of Scotland have accepted the Union since the introduction of the democratic franchise is a lie and that Scotland is after all a mere possession of England with no right to self-determination, and any choices that the people of Scotland make about the future of this country are subject to the veto of a Prime Minister from a party which has not won an election in Scotland since the 1950s. He proposes to use the law to trap Scotland into the UK forever, irrespective of the will of the people of Scotland.

This is deeply undemocratic, and politically unsustainable. Its chances of success rest upon the implausible likelihood that having closed down any democratic route to another independence referendum, independence supporters will simply swallow their deep misgivings about another major milestone on the UK’s journey to undemocratic authoritarianism and say, “Well that’s just fine then, let’s give up on this whole independence malarkey,” because people who demonstrably have no respect for democracy have told them that they have made it unlawful because they are afraid of the verdict of the people.

What Tomkins proposes would not generate mere “political noise”, it would create a political earthquake that his precious union would be unlikely to survive. You cannot use the law to patch together a political union that has lost the confidence of the people, it’s like trying to stuff an angry elephant in a bin bag.

Stephen Kerr’s permapoplexy

May18 by weegingerdug

Holyrood’s resident gammonista gum-bumper has been at it again. Scottish Tory list MSP Stephen Kerr, a B-movie version of a James Bond baddie, is one of those middle class right wing British nationalist heterosexual white men who are convinced that the world is eager for their hot takes on all and every topic on account of the fact that they are middle class right wing British nationalist heterosexual white men, who as everyone who reads the Daily Mail knows, are the most marginalised and oppressed people on the face of the planet.

Kerr, who is currently suffering from a fit of apoplexy because Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives addressed Nicola Sturgeon as madame First Minister, has been taking twitter lessons from Donald Trump, although to be honest apoplexy is Kerr’s base state, he suffers from permapoplexy, and makes the rest of us suffer for it by vomiting his ill-informed bile all over Twitter.

Yesterday Kerr took to Twitter to opined that the SNP want to “Join the EU, but not the EURO. Join NATO, but reject Nuclear Weaponry,” adding, “The SNP really don’t get it, do they? These aren’t just clubs for all-comers where you can pick and choose what you get.”

Talk about weapons, and there he is, the Scottish Conservative Holyrood whip. Before we get into the substance of how Kerr is wrong yet again, it is worthwhile to note that Kerr’s comments are a bit rich and ever so slightly lacking in self awareness, coming as they do from a member of a party which on the very same day announced that it intends to pick and choose which parts of an international treaty it wants to abide by.

Obviously Kerr doesn’t understand how international institutions and the EU in particular actually work, but then that’s scarcely surprising because neither does anyone else in the Conservative party and certainly not in the Conservative government in Westminster, which operates on the assumption that the EU is a vile plot to do Britain down. The British Government is currently expressing its shock and surprise that the EU is implementing the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol which guarantee the integrity of the European Single Market. The British Government appears to have operated on the principle that the EU would just ignore those parts of the protocol that the Conservatives and their partners in slime the DUP didn’t like.

You might think that someone who imagines himself to be a serious politician ought to have familiarised himself with the basic facts before taking to social media and unwittingly revealing himself to be god’s gift to the cause of Scottish independence, but a mere trifle like fact checking cannot be allowed to get between Kerr and a potential approving mention in the Daily Express.

Kerr’s claims have already been debunked by independence campaigners, yet opponents of Scottish independence keep repeating them because they have a religious belief that Scotland is utterly dependent on the Westminster Parliament, completely incapable of achieving anything on its own merits, and that without the UK Scotland would be alone and friendless in a hostile world. It’s the sadly familiar “you’d have nothing without me cry” of the spurned lover. It’s a belief system which is impervious to mere facts or reality. It’s like trying to explain evolution to a creationist who can’t understand how human beings can be descended from “the monkeys” when monkeys still exist.

However given the state of the media in a Scotland where the overwhelmingly anti-independence press and the BBC are all to happy to amplify the faith-based misinformation of British nationalists like Kerr, it is imperative that those of us who seek Scottish independence do not cease to publicise accurate information, no matter how frustrating or dispiriting it may be to have to keep on repeating the same thing time after time.

So once more with feeling. Joining the EU does not automatically mean joining the Eurozone, or the Schengen area for that matter. Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden are all EU members but do not use the Euro. Denmark, like the UK when it was a member of the EU, has an opt out. All the others must in theory enter the Eurozone after meeting certain criteria. The key term here is “in theory.” All EU countries have the right to put off making any effort to meet the Eurozone criteria for any reason and for as long as they like, and thereby indefinitely postpone their adoption of the euro. Crucially, the EU has no means of forcing any member state to meet the criteria and has no mechanisms for sanctioning any member state which declines to make any effort to meet the relevant criteria.

The Czech Republic has stated that it has no plans to adopt the Euro despite not having a formal opt out from the common currency. Referring to the fact that it is entirely up to a member state to decide if and when it moves towards meeting the necessary criteria for adopting the Euro, in 2014 the Czech Prime Minister noted that there was no need for a formal opt out, saying : “No one can force us into joining the euro… We have a de facto opt-out.”

As far as an independent Scotland is concerned, before it could even consider adopting the Euro it would first have to have its own Scottish currency, and for this to be in place for some years before any moves to adopting the euro could be made, and even then the timing and implementation of those moves would be entirely up to the Scottish Government to decide. But of course what Kerr really has a conceptual problem with is the notion that it could possibly be up to Scotland to decide anything. The idea that Scotland could have agency is alien to the Conservative British nationalist mindset.

Although I am not personally in favour of NATO membership for an independent Scotland, this blog has already explained on a number of occasions why insisting on the removal of Trident from the Clyde is not the automatic barrier to NATO membership for an independent Scotland that Kerr and his fellow British nationalists would have us believe it is, most recently in March this year. In order to save me from rehashing those arguments all over again, here is a link to that piece here :
https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/2022/03/09/trident-has-to-go/

An SNP spokesperson said: “Stephen Kerr is either deliberately spreading false information or simply displaying his own ignorance of the facts. The euro isn’t used by every EU country and the vast majority of Nato members don’t possess or host nuclear weapons.”

But the reason that Kerr keeps doing it is because for the most part the media in Scotland lets him and his fellow British nationalist scare mongers get away with it. We can be certain that as Scotland moves towards another independence referendum,independence supporters will still keep having to debunk the British nationalist scare stories that refuse to die.

The banquet of consequences

May17 by weegingerdug

Boris Johnson visited Northern Ireland on Monday to meet with the parties elected to Stormont after last week’s elections which saw a historic victory for Sinn Fein. For the first time since the British carved Northern Ireland out of Ireland with borders drawn in such a way as to guarantee a Unionist majority, an Irish nationalist party has become the largest party in Stormont. It’s a seismic shift in Northern Irish politics and one which, as you might expect, the DUP is not taking at all well. The DUP and the other Unionist parties fought the recent elections asking the people of Northern Ireland to give them a mandate to overturn the Northern Irish protocol which was the basis of Johnson’s Brexit deal with the EU.

The protocol attempted to solve the contradiction created by the Conservatives’ ideologically driven insistence that Brexit meant that the UK must exit the European Single Market and Customs Union, and the Good Friday Agreement underpinning peace in the troubled six counties, a key component of which is the guarantee that there must be no checks or controls of any kind along the border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. The DUP had been enthusiastic proponents of Brexit, believing that it would sink the Good Friday Agreement cement Northern Ireland’s place in a UK which was firmly outside the EU, and make the reunification of Ireland a distant and unlikely prospect.

Instead Brexit has proven to be the undoing of the DUP. Hitherto the party’s intransigence and its unwillingness to embrace the principle of compromise had always been its greatest strength, but they made the fatal mistake of taking the lying Conservatives at their word, and now the DUP find that not only have they lost their prized place as the largest party in Stormont to Sinn Fein, but there are customs checks and controls between Northern Ireland and Britain, and a reunification referendum is now a more likely prospect than it has ever been. It has been a catastrophic miscalculation on the part of the DUP, who are now sitting down to a banquet of consequences which they themselves brought about. No wonder they are currently in the midst of a full on strop. Can you hear that sound? It’s the world’s tiniest violin giving a rendition of the Sash, only it turns out it’s not a sash, it’s the petard that the DUP are hoist by.

Northern Ireland uses the same electoral system for Stormont that Scotland uses in council elections. It is a strictly proportional voting system. By a substantial margin voters gave a clear and unarguable majority to parties which support the protocol. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the First Minister must come from the largest party in Stormont and the Deputy First Minister from the second largest party, However having lost the election the DUP has now refused to participate in government, even refusing to allow a speaker to be elected, meaning that no business can take place at Stormont, in effect holding the Northern Irish Assembly to ransom in order that they can still impose their will on an electorate which had the audacity to reject them at the ballot box. Unionism was never democratic, it was majoritarian, but now it’s no longer in the majority its anti-democratic nature is exposed. There is a lesson there for Scotland too.

The protocol works for and is supported by Northern Ireland. It’s the English Tories and their sectarian British supremacist friends in the DUP who have a problem with Northern Ireland showing the rest of the UK what a folly Brexit is.

So now, in order to get itself out of a mess which it itself created, because of its lies and duplicity and by pandering to the DUP and teaching it that its intransigence would be rewarded, the British Government is threatening to renege on the Protocol. This means that Johnson is now prepared to rip up an international treaty and risk a trade war with the EU precisely when households are facing soaring energy, food and housing costs, and the worst cost of living crisis in decades. All those countries around the world which “global Britain” seeks to sign post-Brexit trade deals with will now know that no deal which the British Government signs up to will be honoured and that the UK will trash it the second that Johnson feels that it is no longer in his own interests.

Johnson admitted that he negotiated and signed up to the protocol, but he had hoped that the EU wouldn’t adhere to the terms of the deal that he himself had negotiated and then sold to the British public as having got Brexit done, proclaiming that it was a fantastic deal. But now the Prime law breaker is insisting that the current mess isn’t his fault, it’s all the fault of that EU for imagining that when Johnson agreed to a deal that was hammered out after a lengthy process of negotiation, he actually meant a word of it.

It’s outrageous, but entirely in character for the Conservatives that government ministers are now pretending that they had no idea of the chaos Johnson’s “oven ready” deal would cause. Their own Brexit impact assessment said that the deal would mean checks, increased costs to businesses and an increase in the price of high street goods, and that it entailed those checks on commercial traffic between Northern Ireland and Britain which Johnson promised the DUP were never going to happen. But it seems that they were far too busy having boozy lockdown busting parties to read it.

DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. even claimed that Johnson privately said before the 2019 election that he would “tear up” the Protocol. He told BBC Newsnight before the December 2019 election : “Boris Johnson did tell me personally… after agreeing to the protocol, he would sign up to changing that protocol and indeed tearing it up.” So much for “oven ready.”

Johnson lied to the DUP, he lied to the EU, and he lied to the public, and now he too is sitting down to a banquet of consequences. The global Britain that Scotland was promised it could be a part of in 2014 has been exposed as a rogue state which trashes international treaties which it itself negotiated, stabs its friends and allies in the back, and has not the slightest care for how its recklessness affects its citizens who are already struggling to make ends meet. This is what happens with a Westminster system which prevents politicians from being held to account, you get governed by charlatans who blame everyone else for their own sins.

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Biting the hand of Project Fear

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