Corbyn flunked it. Yet again. And his failure to skewer the government left the field open to the SNP. Speaker Bercow seemed to collude with this arrangement and he gave the Nats six opportunities to quiz the prime minister. Angus Robertson appeared to relish the battle. His great grey face was already brimming with fury as he demanded that Mrs May reach ‘an agreement’ with Holyrood before triggering Article 50. By ‘agreement’ he meant that Scotland must stay within the single market while the rest of Britain gets out. Which is hardly sensible. Like putting a zebra-crossing on a runway. But the SNP isn’t interested in good sense or compromise. Disharmony and strife are its objectives. Robertson thundered that Mrs May had refused to deliver an ‘agreement’. So, he quivered, she would be requited with a Scottish referendum.
The SNP’s Mike Weir got up and complained that insufficient ‘respect’ had been shown for Scotland’s predicament. Their views had been ‘ignored’. The PM replied with maddening blandness that the SNP’s ideas had formed part of ‘the discussions.’
Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh made a lot of noise praising the popularity of Nicola Sturgeon. The first minister, she yelled, could hardly be blamed for fulfilling a referendum pledge made in her 2015 manifesto. In reply, the PM mentioned a speech in which Alex Salmond had accepted the 2014 verdict as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ vote. Salmond seemed to offer an instant rebuttal, vigorously shaking his head, his jaw and several of his many necks.
The SNP’s game-plan is clear. To claim that a second referendum is being imposed on Scotland by irresistible forces. By destiny. By democratic logic. By Tory intransigence. Any combination of these will do. What Scottish voters may puzzle over is the eccentricity of Nicola Sturgeon’s timing. She wants the second vote held before any Brexit deal has been finalised. Which is like drinking gin during a blood-test, or getting your hair blow-dried while having a leg amputated.
Two more Nats popped up today. Hannah Bardell complained that the Treasury is about to cut staff numbers at a Livingstone tax-office. But this evacuation ought to be music to her ears. Should she not call for more and swifter withdrawals of Whitehall’s influence from her homeland? She’s forgotten that her sole purpose in politics is to reduce London’s role in Scotland to zero.
Callum McCaig is a youngish Nat who offered a paradox instead of a question. With the national debt at £1.7 trn, he said mischievously, did the PM believe the UK could survive as an independent country? Howls of laughter greeted this. And McCaig seemed a bit too pleased with his sophistry and couldn’t stop smirking from ear to ear while the PM dismantled his point by referring to Britain’s impressive economic growth and shrinking dole-queues.
But McCaig’s non-question illuminates a wider problem. The epidemic of superfluous parliamentarians. Scotland’s population is barely a fraction of England’s and yet, per head, it supports twice as many statesmen. Everyone in Scotland has two members of parliament. One in Edinburgh to make laws for Scotland. And another in London to make trouble for Downing Street. This is one of the regrettable consequences of devolution. And it’s a relatively recent development. In the last 100 years, Britain has had seven prime ministers (Bonar Law, MacDonald, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Blair, Brown and Cameron) who were Scottish by birth, ancestry or upbringing. That era is over. Scottish politicians no longer come south to lead Britain but to sabotage it.
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