As political journeys go, it’s akin to Jeremy Corbyn quitting his allotment to grow marrows on an Israeli settlement. Nicola Sturgeon, a lifelong pro-European since June 24, 2016, has decreed that the SNP will vote against the free trade pact agreed by the UK and the EU.
This is quite the turnaround. Sturgeon has previously said ‘a no-deal Brexit is a catastrophic idea’, warned of ‘the dire economic consequences of a no-deal Brexit’, described ‘the nightmare scenario of a no-deal Brexit’ and urged the UK Government ‘not to countenance in any way a no-deal Brexit’. She personally claimed that no-deal ‘could push 130,000 people in Scotland into poverty’ and touted an assertion by Dame Sally Davies that, in Sturgeon’s words, ‘it cannot be guaranteed that people will not die because of potential medicine shortages and the impact of a no-deal Brexit’.
Last September, she informed Holyrood: ‘SNP MPs will do everything possible to stop the UK crashing out of the European Union without a deal.’ Barely three weeks ago, she said that Scottish food and drink businesses would be ‘hit particularly hard if there is no deal’, telling MSPs: ‘The consequences of that for Scotland’s businesses could, and will, be devastating, with consumers also being badly affected.’
Sturgeon is simply a cynical calculator who sees in Brexit an opportunity
Now, Sturgeon says:
‘A deal is better than no deal. But, just because, at the eleventh hour, the UK Government has decided to abandon the idea of a no-deal outcome, it should not distract from the fact that they have chosen a hard Brexit, stripping away so many of the benefits of EU membership.’
She is like the leader of a US doomsday militia who, challenged as to why the world hasn’t ended when she predicted, says it’s yet another thing the damn federal government can’t get right. Her MPs — and they are her MPs — will follow the latest fiat from Bute House and vote en bloc against the deal.
Sturgeon’s placeman at Westminster, Ian Blackford, set the tone. Just last year, he tried to pass a Commons amendment pledging ‘not to leave the European Union without a withdrawal agreement and future framework under any circumstances’. Now he describes the UK-EU trade deal as an ‘unforgivable act of economic vandalism and gross stupidity’.
Sturgeon’s opponents have branded her ‘No-deal Nicola’. Of course, she has not become a no-deal Brexiteer, or a Brexiteer of any description. She is simply a cynical calculator who sees in Brexit an opportunity. Her delegates at Westminster will vote against the trade agreement because her opposition to Brexit must be black and white. It doesn’t matter all that much to Sturgeon whether the deal brings boom or bust; it’s the optics of Scottish victimhood she’s interested in. She understands the Scottish psyche in the same way Donald Trump does that of low-income whites in Ohio: she knows what they fear, who they hate and what wounds to jab to get both emotions to come out swinging.
Even if Brexit puts a chicken in every Scottish pot, and perhaps especially if it does, it will go on feeling like a humiliation to some. Despite 62 per cent of Scots voting Remain, and despite our Emmanuel Goldstein being Westminster rather than Brussels, we have been coopted into someone else’s grievance. Not only have our own special resentments been sidelined, we have been forced to confront how banal and commonplace they are.
Brexit could render Scottish independence politically and economically unviable, but that in itself would not necessarily mean defeat for the nationalists. They are winning where it matters, on culture, values and identity, and they have the apparatus of devolved government to sustain them until their next opportunity arises, and the one after that, and after that again. Downing Street is outgunned politically, intellectually, strategically and institutionally and, while efforts to invest directly in Scotland and standardise practices and regulations via the Internal Market Bill are useful, the UK government is unwilling to embrace the reform agenda necessary to prevent the SNP using the devolution settlement to drag Scotland ever closer to the exit.
Ministers are not the only ones clueless about Sturgeon and her intentions. The SNP leader’s anti-Brexit rhetoric helped cement her position as a darling of England’s post-national progressives, the sort who would baulk if an English politician spoke at Westminster as Sturgeon does at Holyrood, or did so surrounded by quite so many flags. Like the lefty London commentators who endlessly simp for her, Remainers gush over not Sturgeon but one of her many guises. She is not a true-believing European (though she is by no means a Eurosceptic), just as her feint as a social democrat comes and goes according to the political conditions of the day.
Sturgeon is a nationalist. She may be the most capable and accomplished nationalist in the democratic world, but she is nothing more than that. Polls tell her opposing Brexit is the route to independence; if they told her the opposite, that is where she would be. No matter the catastrophes, the dire consequences, or the nightmare scenarios. Sturgeon is on only one political journey and she will take whatever path gets her there.
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