This may shock and scandalise you to learn, but I am not a supporter of the Labour Party; neither am I a resident of England or Wales. However, if either those descriptions were true, I have my ideas about how best to achieve Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister – mostly, by replacing existing Conservative MPs with Labour MPs.
This should not be a difficult concept to grasp, should it?
I had this election all wrong. It seems so obvious in retrospect.
This was never about the EU negotiations, of course – though this result undoubtedly wrecks what little clout the UK Government had. It may have been about the Prime Minister destroying Jeremy Corbyn and his party for a generation or more, with the might of the British Establishment brought to bear, even though a majority is a majority, which they already had. A more cynical explanation could be that it was to dodge the then-incoming election fraud allegations. What I didn’t realise is that this election was most assuredly about crippling the SNP – and stopping a second independence referendum.
Consider: how many Labour heavyweights were ousted last night? I can’t think of a single one. Then consider the SNP figures we lost. How many seats did the Tories lose compared to the SNP? They lost 12 to the SNP’s 21. How was it that, in a UK General Election, a party contesting only 59 seats lost more than a party contesting over 600?
Well, it makes sense once you realise that Labour weren’t the target in this election – it was the SNP all along.
I did one of those wee Twitter “moment” things, just to say thanks to all the SNP MPs who made history in 2015, and the candidates who aim to continue on this strange, interesting road to Scotland’s future.
Center your country in the Tao and evil will have no power. Not that it isn’t there, but you’ll be able to step out of its way. Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.” ~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 60
I’m not playing the “how many seats will the SNP win tomorrow” game. I didn’t play it in the last election, or the one before that, or the one before that. For all I pride myself on being calm and dispassionate in my analysis, I cannot extend this to pondering which seats will go where – especially not in this election.
I cannot bear to think about a social democratic candidate failing to win their seat, because of some misguided and futile attempt to frustrate the democratic mandate of the people of Scotland. I cannot stand the idea of Scotland contributing to the extremist takeover of the UK Government. At the Inverclyde hustings just a few days ago, the candidate with the red rosette insisted to us that “Brexit is happening.” There was nothing we could do about it, it seems: the decision was made, we have to suck it up and get on with it. Capitulation to a gerrymandered, likely compromised poll which is being used as an excuse to destroy decades of advancement.
So, Brexit is happening – but an independence referendum is not happening. Even after the disenfranchisement of the people who will be most affected, the choice to leave the European Union is represented by 0 of 32 Local Authority areas in Scotland – but it’s happening anyway, because The British People Have Spoken, which means the People of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Gibraltar have to do what the People of England want. A Scottish Independence Referendum proposed for this exact situation – from a manifesto the current Scottish Government was elected on by a historic turnout – is not happening, because the parties elected by most people in England don’t want it.
The truth is, when you look at it in every way except seat numbers & the regional list, the SNP have a greater mandate for an independence referendum than even the 2011 landslide. More people voted SNP – indeed, more people voted SNP than voted for any party in a Scottish election ever. A greater percentage of voters voted SNP in their constituencies, leading to the SNP winning 59 of 73 constituency seats – a Parliamentary landslide unmatched by any UK election. To say the SNP have no mandate is as grotesquely anti-democratic as to say the SNP didn’t win the 2016 election. Which is something party leaders have actually stated.
But even the issue of Scottish Independence, something which I have no reluctance in saying is utterly paramount to politics in Scotland, pales in comparison to the nightmare brooding on the horizon.
Here’s a thing that happened on Saturday.
It’s something that’s been controversial for a while, not least because it took place 5 days before a snap General Election – despite the fact the event was organised long before the election was even suggested. Some SNP candidates & supporters asked folk not to attend the rally, but to campaign for their pro-independence candidate in their individual constituencies. Other SNP figures were at the march themselves.
I’ve already written my piece on marches, but it bears repeating again: the SNP is not the Scottish Independence Movement, the SNP serves the Scottish Independence Movement. The SNP candidates are focusing on getting elected, so of course they will be looking for more canvassers, leafleteers, and campaigners. But even if something like 1 in 50 voters in Scotland is a member of the SNP, that means there are an awful lot more independence supporters who aren’t members, maybe not even voters. Obviously some people at the march will be members of the party – but pretending that independence is the sole dominion of the SNP, the Greens, or indeed any or all of the pro-independence parties, is pretending that Scottish Independence is a party-political issue.
And who does that serve?
You might not know it from some of my posts, but I’m an eternal optimist. Some say there are people out there who would never vote for independence: that they either identify too strongly with their British identity to even consider a vote that they feel could jeopardise it, or because they think Scotland is incapable of making a success of what literally hundreds of other countries around the world do right now, or simply because they believe themselves to be “anti-nationalist.” I refuse to believe that anyone can be immovably anti-Independence, any more than anyone can be immovably pro-Independence. We’ve already seen movement from both sides – people I could’ve sworn would never turn suddenly joining the SNP, and others who seem hell-bent on undoing decades of struggle for a cause we used to share.
Yes, of course it’s more useful – in a cold, tactical sense – to go to the undecideds and “soft” electorate on both sides. All we need is another few hundred thousand more than the last official record. But I worry about those we write off as inconvertible – those who we view as lost to the clutches of a mad party which has taken leave of any sense they had after the chaos of the EU Referendum result. They are going to shape the future of these islands.
This election is not like others that have come before. It is not a matter of parties, of policies, of the nuts and bolts of democratic governance. It is nothing less than a national emergency – a keyframe of the story of the 21st Century. It’s a moment that we Scots will, as ever, only be able to significantly alter in the event of a close contest. We have a way out. But what of our fellow Britons?
In fierce anguish & quenchless flames
To the desarts and rocks He ran raging
To hide, but He could not: combining
He dug mountains & hills in vast strength,
He piled them in incessant labour,
In howlings & pangs & fierce madness
Long periods in burning fires labouring
Till hoary, and age-broke, and aged,
In despair and the shadows of death.
– William Blake, depicting post-Brexit Britain (probably) in The Book of Urizen
You know what? Forget my worries about being a Cassandra. I’m just going to call it like I see it. World’s mad enough as it is.
