Politics - Scottish independence and Christine Jardine.
I see that Christine Jardine, the Lib-Dem MP for Edinburgh West, has been flapping her lips again! This is something she frequently does. Firstly, in a piece for The Scotsman and secondly in an interview with Mike Graham on talkRADIO.
In The Scotsman piece she starts by having a go at the SNP in Westminster wasting time on pushing pointless questions about a second Scottish independence referendum when they should have been concentrating on more important questions. Well, in case Ms Jardine has not noticed, it’s currently a waste of time asking any questions in Westminster due to Johnson’s huge majority - a situation brought about in no small part by the Lib-Dem’s failure to do better at the last general election (and this assisted by the Labour Party’s failure to do like wise). Boris Johnson is simply able to do whatever he wants - and he does. I would also argue that fighting for Scotland’s democratic right is not a waste of time and needs to be argued for as much and as often as possible.
In addition to that she made two statements which are, to my view, simply contradictory. Firstly, she said “Independence will not deliver better, or possibly even different, government for Scotland” and, secondly “I want to remain in the United Kingdom not because I don’t believe in Scotland’s ability but precisely because I do”.
Now, I accept there is no guarantee that Scottish independence will deliver a better Scotland - but there is a very good chance that it could do, while there is next to no chance that staying in the UK will deliver anything other than the continuation of the current mismanagement. Any government can make a mess of things - but what we know for sure is that the UK government has made a mess of the Scottish economy over many years, since at least Thatcher, and I have zero confidence that this will change any time soon.
If we look at Jardine’s first quote, that independence will not deliver a better Scotland, then that is in effect saying we do not have the ability to operate as an independent country in the same way that, for example, Denmark does. This is simply restating the negative ‘we are too wee and too poor and too stupid to succeed’ unionist argument. If, however, her second statement is correct - that we have the ability - then the first statement is incorrect. It appears to me that Ms Jardine is trying to have it both ways.
In a third quote she goes on to say “More specifically, I believe in our ability to work well with our neighbours and other countries”. I would ask Ms Jardine where exactly the SNP propose doing otherwise? The SNP seek to rejoin the EU - and that would entail working, and sharing, with many more countries than staying in an isolated UK will provide for. In addition to that I have nowhere seen, or read, that the SNP, following independence, intend ignore close ties with what would be the countries of the rUK. In fact the SNP leaders have, several times, made it clear that an independent Scotland would look forward to working closely with all the rUK countries. Saying otherwise is simply the continuation of the 2014 NO campaign’s scare mongering.
In a fourth quote she goes on to say “But who would the Nationalists be able to blame without Westminster.....”. This quite simply shows Ms Jardine’s inability to understand the aims of the SNP. The SNP do not want to blame anyone - it simply wants Scotland to be able to make it’s own decisions and take charge of it’s own affairs. Any pointing to the failures of the UK government is not some sort of grievance exercise but simply a way to highlight the issues that the SNP believe could be handled better, for Scotland, by full independence (within the EU).
Next there was Jardine’s talkRADIO interview with Mark Graham - an excruciating exercise in unionists slapping each other’s backs while sticking their heads deeper and deeper into the sand. This is a very long interview come discussion so I apologise in advance for the lengthy response which follows. I would like to have made it shorter and snappier but that, given the many lies and half truths pedaled, will not be possible.
The interview, if we can call it that, began with the host, one Mike Graham, ranting about Boris Johnson’s recent visit to Scotland and how this was nothing to do with Johnson coming to Scotland to try to save the Union. His claim was that the support for the SNP was nowhere high enough for the SNP to endanger the Union. At this point it should be pointed out that Mr Graham claimed to be Scottish and later that his parents still lived in Glasgow. Based on this he seemed to suggest that with his Scottish connections he somehow had his fingers on the Scottish pulse and that he, because of this, was confident that support for the SNP is not as strong as some are making it out to be. This indicates that he is refusing to accept that all the recent Scottish polls clearly showed an increase in support for the SNP such that the YES side might well win a second Scottish referendum. Well, that’s fine Mr Graham - I’m quite happy for you are your friends in London to continue with that delusion,
Anyway, immediately following his rant, he brought in Christine Jardine to discuss her views on the matter.
The first thing was that Ms Jardine fully agreed with Graham about the support for the SNP not being as high as was being claimed. She went on to mention that the SNP only achieved 45% of Scotland’s vote in the 2019 general election. A couple of points on this.
Firstly, Johnson’s trip to Scotland was not based on the general election results but on the recent increase in SNP support - which indicated that support for the SNP and Scottish independence was on the rise. With a no deal Brexit now looking pretty likely then this support is only likely to increase further. If that proves to be the case, and the SNP win an outright majority at next year’s Holyrood elections, then Johnson will either be forced to allow IndyRef2 or he will be forced to ignore the clear will of the Scottish electorate. Johnson wishes to do neither, so the way to do that would be to reduce support for the SNP as quickly as possible. Why he thinks that him coming to Scotland will help to achieve that I’m not sure as the more Scots see of him then the more likely they are to flock to the SNP. I suspect Johnson knows that any vote now would result in a YES victory and he is hoping to delay matters long enough for Brexit to be completed and then shown to be a success. The first will happen soon enough but any success could well take many years, if ever.
Secondly, the 45% of the vote achieved by the SNP is not the total support for independence or, at least, for a second referendum. You can be fairly sure that the vast majority (if not 100%) of SNP voters want independence (or, again, at least a second referendum). Then there are those who voted for the Green Party. Scottish independence is also their aim but with green policies coming first it is unclear how many of them actually want Scottish independence and would vote for it - but we have to assume a good number. Then we have the supporters for independence within the Scottish Labour party members and voters. It is not clearly known how many of them there are but a recent article I read suggested up to 40%. So, if we add together all the Scottish citizens who want independence, from all three parties, then the support for this is way beyond that 45% the SNP achieved in the 2019 general election.
Thirdly. Ms Jardine seems to rubbish the fact that the SNP did achieve 45% of the vote in Scotland, as if this was not a fine achievement worthy of recognition that should be taken into account. This, in her view, was not a mandate for anything. At the same time, Johnson, with a (slightly smaller % of the UK’s vote) is able to proceed to take the UK out of Europe without a confirmatory second UK referendum on the EU - when most polls over the past couple of years have indicated a majority for now staying in the EU. Her view also fails to take into account that her party, the Lib-Dems, had said that they were going to reverse Brexit also without a second EU referendum to determine if that was what the UK population now wanted. In the most unlikely event that the Lib-Dems had won power at Westminster (Swinson’s fantasy dream) then the chances of them having done so with anything like the percentage of the vote the SNP achieved in Scotland are vanishingly small - but a majority at Westminster would (perhaps) have allowed Swinson to proceed as she claimed she would. So, what is good for the Tories, Labour and the Lib-Dems (a Westminster majority with less than 50% of the popular vote) is, somehow, not good enough for the SNP and Scotland. Keep in mind, too, that at this stage the SNP seek only a second Scottish independence referendum to see if Brexit has changed Scotland’s mind about staying within the UK. The SNP, at this stage, is not seeking to change anything (drag us in or out of anything) but, instead, only seeks to hold a further referendum to determine the current view of the Scottish people following the EU referendum vote. Why, if the Unionists are so confident, are they all so afraid of IndyRef2?
At a later stage of this discussion Ms Jardine went on to say that she was “sick and tired of the SNP claiming to be the only party which spoke for Scotland” - and she went on to point out, again, that they had ‘only’ achieved 45% of the Scottish vote. I have to tell Ms Jardine that I remember the days when the SNP made this claim when they only had about, say, 10% of the Scottish vote. Why? Because this claim has nothing to do with the size of SNP support. It is based on the fact that all the other major parties are controlled by party HQ in London - and that this meant that those parties in Scotland did not represent the Scottish people, that only the SNP, a purely Scottish party, could claim to represent Scotland. Now, I can accept that the major UK parties will refute this - but it is this, not the SNP’s level of support, which leads to the SNP claiming to be the only party which speaks for Scotland. I’m surprised that Ms Jardine needs this explained.
Ms Jardine went on to say that while the SNP wanted Scotland to join the EU (which she had not wanted to leave) there was a very good chance that the EU would not allow this. This might well be true but she phrased her point in such a way that seemed to indicate that the EU was likely to reject Scotland seeking to rejoin when many EU leaders have now (following the Brexit vote) indicated support for such an idea. She went on to say that one objection would come from Spain, afraid of the situation in Catalonia. Some leading Spanish politicians, however, have said that they would not object to Scotland’s application as long as independence was achieved through legal means. The irony of Spain’s position is, of course, that they will not allow a legal (within Spanish laws) referendum in Catalonia. So, we have Jardine repeating, again, the scare mongering from the NO side of the 2014 referendum when attitudes around Europe have clearly changed over the past couple of years and especially since the EU referendum. Graham and Jardine then went on to claim that they could not understand anyway why Scotland would choose to leave one union (the UK) only to join another (the EU). The answer to that is pretty straightforward. The UK is organised in such a way that Scotland (Wales and Northern Ireland to some extent) almost never get the policies and government they voted for. This in many ways is fair enough given the size of England’s population compared to the other three countries - but that will mean Scotland always having to bow to what England, via the UK parliament, wants. On the other hand, the EU is organised in such a way that Scotland is more likely, from time to time, to see the EU implement policies it agrees with and wants to see implemented - while there is very little chance of this ever being the case within the UK. The pair of them then went on to indicate disbelief that Scotland would want to see a border between Scotland and England with custom controls etc., etc. Scotland does not want to see such a border - but it is the English (and Welsh) voters who voted to leave the EU and it is that vote which could result in a customs border and it’s not anything to do with what Scotland might actually want. Such a border would be unfortunate but less unfortunate than the vote to leave the EU was.
After this topic, Graham and Jardine moved on to the COVID-19 pandemic with them agreeing that Scotland would have been devastated (or similar) without the financial support of the UK government. They also went on to claim that Nicola Sturgeon did not have the overwhelming support of the Scottish people in how she had handled the situation. The first claim is simply a Unionist lie (which I first heard pedaled by Jackson Carlaw). Yes, the UK government’s financial input has been extensive and badly needed (although some European countries have done more) but that is simply because the Scottish government does not have the borrowing powers to raise the funds which were needed. The UK government, alone in the UK, has those borrowing powers - and that is what they did (they borrowed on the international money markets so that the funds to deal with COVID-19 were available). An independent Scottish government would, like any other independent country, have had the powers to borrow the required funds - but, under current rules, they were unable to do so. So an independent Scotland would have borrowed in the same way that the UK did and would have been able to deal with the problem without UK assistance. It has been reported that Sturgeon wanted to close the schools and go into lockdown sooner. I don’t know if that is true or not but it has also been suggested that she was unable to do so as the UK had to move on this, too, before the funds to support doing so would become available. If that is true then an independent Scotland might well have been able to act sooner and avoid the loss of so many lives which the slow response of the UK government clearly cost. As for their claim that Sturgeon does not have the support of the Scottish people on this topic? One can only wonder what planet Graham and Jardine are living on. All recent polls show, quite simply, an overwhelming support for Sturgeon in her handling of the pandemic. If all those feeling that Sturgeon has done a good job on this had voted SNP then independence would be home and dry by a very huge majority.
Very near the end of the ‘interview’, Graham went on to suggest that England might vote to chuck Scotland out of the Union. That’s fair enough as England, after all, has the same right as Scotland to end it. Bring it on, I say - as long as things were done in a friendly, productive and positive way for both countries.
Finally, Jardine went on to admit that the organisation of the UK needed to change and she went on to say that her preference was a federal UK (to be fair, long a Lib-Dem policy). As said in a previous post, this is something I’d be happy to consider but I feel the chances of the UK going down this line are pretty remote - and a federal settlement that satisfied both England and Scotland even more remote - and Scotland would still, now, be out of the EU when it wants to stay a member (and probably still paying for nuclear weapons).
In summary, while not expecting politicians to be honest, this interview was about the most completely dishonest discussion, from start to finish, that I’ve ever heard - but I suppose, since it involved a Lib-Dem politician, we should not be too surprised about that. After all, those supporting the SNP will well remember the outright lies Alistair Carmichael spouted about the SNP just a few short years ago. Being willing to lie in such an extensive way seems to be a prerequisite for being a Lib-Dem politician.
In The Scotsman piece she starts by having a go at the SNP in Westminster wasting time on pushing pointless questions about a second Scottish independence referendum when they should have been concentrating on more important questions. Well, in case Ms Jardine has not noticed, it’s currently a waste of time asking any questions in Westminster due to Johnson’s huge majority - a situation brought about in no small part by the Lib-Dem’s failure to do better at the last general election (and this assisted by the Labour Party’s failure to do like wise). Boris Johnson is simply able to do whatever he wants - and he does. I would also argue that fighting for Scotland’s democratic right is not a waste of time and needs to be argued for as much and as often as possible.
In addition to that she made two statements which are, to my view, simply contradictory. Firstly, she said “Independence will not deliver better, or possibly even different, government for Scotland” and, secondly “I want to remain in the United Kingdom not because I don’t believe in Scotland’s ability but precisely because I do”.
Now, I accept there is no guarantee that Scottish independence will deliver a better Scotland - but there is a very good chance that it could do, while there is next to no chance that staying in the UK will deliver anything other than the continuation of the current mismanagement. Any government can make a mess of things - but what we know for sure is that the UK government has made a mess of the Scottish economy over many years, since at least Thatcher, and I have zero confidence that this will change any time soon.
If we look at Jardine’s first quote, that independence will not deliver a better Scotland, then that is in effect saying we do not have the ability to operate as an independent country in the same way that, for example, Denmark does. This is simply restating the negative ‘we are too wee and too poor and too stupid to succeed’ unionist argument. If, however, her second statement is correct - that we have the ability - then the first statement is incorrect. It appears to me that Ms Jardine is trying to have it both ways.
In a third quote she goes on to say “More specifically, I believe in our ability to work well with our neighbours and other countries”. I would ask Ms Jardine where exactly the SNP propose doing otherwise? The SNP seek to rejoin the EU - and that would entail working, and sharing, with many more countries than staying in an isolated UK will provide for. In addition to that I have nowhere seen, or read, that the SNP, following independence, intend ignore close ties with what would be the countries of the rUK. In fact the SNP leaders have, several times, made it clear that an independent Scotland would look forward to working closely with all the rUK countries. Saying otherwise is simply the continuation of the 2014 NO campaign’s scare mongering.
In a fourth quote she goes on to say “But who would the Nationalists be able to blame without Westminster.....”. This quite simply shows Ms Jardine’s inability to understand the aims of the SNP. The SNP do not want to blame anyone - it simply wants Scotland to be able to make it’s own decisions and take charge of it’s own affairs. Any pointing to the failures of the UK government is not some sort of grievance exercise but simply a way to highlight the issues that the SNP believe could be handled better, for Scotland, by full independence (within the EU).
Next there was Jardine’s talkRADIO interview with Mark Graham - an excruciating exercise in unionists slapping each other’s backs while sticking their heads deeper and deeper into the sand. This is a very long interview come discussion so I apologise in advance for the lengthy response which follows. I would like to have made it shorter and snappier but that, given the many lies and half truths pedaled, will not be possible.
The interview, if we can call it that, began with the host, one Mike Graham, ranting about Boris Johnson’s recent visit to Scotland and how this was nothing to do with Johnson coming to Scotland to try to save the Union. His claim was that the support for the SNP was nowhere high enough for the SNP to endanger the Union. At this point it should be pointed out that Mr Graham claimed to be Scottish and later that his parents still lived in Glasgow. Based on this he seemed to suggest that with his Scottish connections he somehow had his fingers on the Scottish pulse and that he, because of this, was confident that support for the SNP is not as strong as some are making it out to be. This indicates that he is refusing to accept that all the recent Scottish polls clearly showed an increase in support for the SNP such that the YES side might well win a second Scottish referendum. Well, that’s fine Mr Graham - I’m quite happy for you are your friends in London to continue with that delusion,
Anyway, immediately following his rant, he brought in Christine Jardine to discuss her views on the matter.
The first thing was that Ms Jardine fully agreed with Graham about the support for the SNP not being as high as was being claimed. She went on to mention that the SNP only achieved 45% of Scotland’s vote in the 2019 general election. A couple of points on this.
Firstly, Johnson’s trip to Scotland was not based on the general election results but on the recent increase in SNP support - which indicated that support for the SNP and Scottish independence was on the rise. With a no deal Brexit now looking pretty likely then this support is only likely to increase further. If that proves to be the case, and the SNP win an outright majority at next year’s Holyrood elections, then Johnson will either be forced to allow IndyRef2 or he will be forced to ignore the clear will of the Scottish electorate. Johnson wishes to do neither, so the way to do that would be to reduce support for the SNP as quickly as possible. Why he thinks that him coming to Scotland will help to achieve that I’m not sure as the more Scots see of him then the more likely they are to flock to the SNP. I suspect Johnson knows that any vote now would result in a YES victory and he is hoping to delay matters long enough for Brexit to be completed and then shown to be a success. The first will happen soon enough but any success could well take many years, if ever.
Secondly, the 45% of the vote achieved by the SNP is not the total support for independence or, at least, for a second referendum. You can be fairly sure that the vast majority (if not 100%) of SNP voters want independence (or, again, at least a second referendum). Then there are those who voted for the Green Party. Scottish independence is also their aim but with green policies coming first it is unclear how many of them actually want Scottish independence and would vote for it - but we have to assume a good number. Then we have the supporters for independence within the Scottish Labour party members and voters. It is not clearly known how many of them there are but a recent article I read suggested up to 40%. So, if we add together all the Scottish citizens who want independence, from all three parties, then the support for this is way beyond that 45% the SNP achieved in the 2019 general election.
Thirdly. Ms Jardine seems to rubbish the fact that the SNP did achieve 45% of the vote in Scotland, as if this was not a fine achievement worthy of recognition that should be taken into account. This, in her view, was not a mandate for anything. At the same time, Johnson, with a (slightly smaller % of the UK’s vote) is able to proceed to take the UK out of Europe without a confirmatory second UK referendum on the EU - when most polls over the past couple of years have indicated a majority for now staying in the EU. Her view also fails to take into account that her party, the Lib-Dems, had said that they were going to reverse Brexit also without a second EU referendum to determine if that was what the UK population now wanted. In the most unlikely event that the Lib-Dems had won power at Westminster (Swinson’s fantasy dream) then the chances of them having done so with anything like the percentage of the vote the SNP achieved in Scotland are vanishingly small - but a majority at Westminster would (perhaps) have allowed Swinson to proceed as she claimed she would. So, what is good for the Tories, Labour and the Lib-Dems (a Westminster majority with less than 50% of the popular vote) is, somehow, not good enough for the SNP and Scotland. Keep in mind, too, that at this stage the SNP seek only a second Scottish independence referendum to see if Brexit has changed Scotland’s mind about staying within the UK. The SNP, at this stage, is not seeking to change anything (drag us in or out of anything) but, instead, only seeks to hold a further referendum to determine the current view of the Scottish people following the EU referendum vote. Why, if the Unionists are so confident, are they all so afraid of IndyRef2?
At a later stage of this discussion Ms Jardine went on to say that she was “sick and tired of the SNP claiming to be the only party which spoke for Scotland” - and she went on to point out, again, that they had ‘only’ achieved 45% of the Scottish vote. I have to tell Ms Jardine that I remember the days when the SNP made this claim when they only had about, say, 10% of the Scottish vote. Why? Because this claim has nothing to do with the size of SNP support. It is based on the fact that all the other major parties are controlled by party HQ in London - and that this meant that those parties in Scotland did not represent the Scottish people, that only the SNP, a purely Scottish party, could claim to represent Scotland. Now, I can accept that the major UK parties will refute this - but it is this, not the SNP’s level of support, which leads to the SNP claiming to be the only party which speaks for Scotland. I’m surprised that Ms Jardine needs this explained.
Ms Jardine went on to say that while the SNP wanted Scotland to join the EU (which she had not wanted to leave) there was a very good chance that the EU would not allow this. This might well be true but she phrased her point in such a way that seemed to indicate that the EU was likely to reject Scotland seeking to rejoin when many EU leaders have now (following the Brexit vote) indicated support for such an idea. She went on to say that one objection would come from Spain, afraid of the situation in Catalonia. Some leading Spanish politicians, however, have said that they would not object to Scotland’s application as long as independence was achieved through legal means. The irony of Spain’s position is, of course, that they will not allow a legal (within Spanish laws) referendum in Catalonia. So, we have Jardine repeating, again, the scare mongering from the NO side of the 2014 referendum when attitudes around Europe have clearly changed over the past couple of years and especially since the EU referendum. Graham and Jardine then went on to claim that they could not understand anyway why Scotland would choose to leave one union (the UK) only to join another (the EU). The answer to that is pretty straightforward. The UK is organised in such a way that Scotland (Wales and Northern Ireland to some extent) almost never get the policies and government they voted for. This in many ways is fair enough given the size of England’s population compared to the other three countries - but that will mean Scotland always having to bow to what England, via the UK parliament, wants. On the other hand, the EU is organised in such a way that Scotland is more likely, from time to time, to see the EU implement policies it agrees with and wants to see implemented - while there is very little chance of this ever being the case within the UK. The pair of them then went on to indicate disbelief that Scotland would want to see a border between Scotland and England with custom controls etc., etc. Scotland does not want to see such a border - but it is the English (and Welsh) voters who voted to leave the EU and it is that vote which could result in a customs border and it’s not anything to do with what Scotland might actually want. Such a border would be unfortunate but less unfortunate than the vote to leave the EU was.
After this topic, Graham and Jardine moved on to the COVID-19 pandemic with them agreeing that Scotland would have been devastated (or similar) without the financial support of the UK government. They also went on to claim that Nicola Sturgeon did not have the overwhelming support of the Scottish people in how she had handled the situation. The first claim is simply a Unionist lie (which I first heard pedaled by Jackson Carlaw). Yes, the UK government’s financial input has been extensive and badly needed (although some European countries have done more) but that is simply because the Scottish government does not have the borrowing powers to raise the funds which were needed. The UK government, alone in the UK, has those borrowing powers - and that is what they did (they borrowed on the international money markets so that the funds to deal with COVID-19 were available). An independent Scottish government would, like any other independent country, have had the powers to borrow the required funds - but, under current rules, they were unable to do so. So an independent Scotland would have borrowed in the same way that the UK did and would have been able to deal with the problem without UK assistance. It has been reported that Sturgeon wanted to close the schools and go into lockdown sooner. I don’t know if that is true or not but it has also been suggested that she was unable to do so as the UK had to move on this, too, before the funds to support doing so would become available. If that is true then an independent Scotland might well have been able to act sooner and avoid the loss of so many lives which the slow response of the UK government clearly cost. As for their claim that Sturgeon does not have the support of the Scottish people on this topic? One can only wonder what planet Graham and Jardine are living on. All recent polls show, quite simply, an overwhelming support for Sturgeon in her handling of the pandemic. If all those feeling that Sturgeon has done a good job on this had voted SNP then independence would be home and dry by a very huge majority.
Very near the end of the ‘interview’, Graham went on to suggest that England might vote to chuck Scotland out of the Union. That’s fair enough as England, after all, has the same right as Scotland to end it. Bring it on, I say - as long as things were done in a friendly, productive and positive way for both countries.
Finally, Jardine went on to admit that the organisation of the UK needed to change and she went on to say that her preference was a federal UK (to be fair, long a Lib-Dem policy). As said in a previous post, this is something I’d be happy to consider but I feel the chances of the UK going down this line are pretty remote - and a federal settlement that satisfied both England and Scotland even more remote - and Scotland would still, now, be out of the EU when it wants to stay a member (and probably still paying for nuclear weapons).
In summary, while not expecting politicians to be honest, this interview was about the most completely dishonest discussion, from start to finish, that I’ve ever heard - but I suppose, since it involved a Lib-Dem politician, we should not be too surprised about that. After all, those supporting the SNP will well remember the outright lies Alistair Carmichael spouted about the SNP just a few short years ago. Being willing to lie in such an extensive way seems to be a prerequisite for being a Lib-Dem politician.
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