Will Scotland veto Brexit?
A Romanian friend, living and working in London, asked me today, 'is the Scottish Parliament going to veto Brexit?' This post is my answer.
Yes and no.
And so we begin again
The last — very negative — referendum is over, and it ended in the triumph of Hate over Fear. It was a referendum fought between neoliberals and xenophobes, a contest which pitted blatant racism against doomsaying. A campaign — on both sides — of the most extreme dishonesty and bad faith we have seen in my lifetime.
But from its ashes arises a new referendum.
Let's make this one positive. Let's make it about welcoming, about looking outwards to the world and talking about how Scotland can contribute to making it a better place.
On a Difference of Opinion
One of the things the Better Together campaign tried to convince us of during the independence referendum campaign was that there was no significant political difference between Scotland and the rest of the UK in general, and England in particular. That always struck me as a tendentious proposition, but it's only in the last couple of weeks that I've run the numbers and discovered quite how false it was.
YouGov's startling remain/leave map is one of the pieces of information which started me investigating; the other was the claim by a Twitter user (I've forgotten whom) that Scotland wasn't really any more left wing than England.
Now, of course, what counts as 'left wing' depends on your standpoint; the particular Twitter user with whom I discussed this believed that Labour were left wing, and that the SNP were not. The Political Compass disagrees on both points, and I'd tend to trust the Political Compass as a fairly neutral observer on this. In any case, the question is not whether one party is or is not 'left wing' in an absolute sense, but whether one position is more (or less) left wing than another.
In defence of John Whittingdale
Life imitates art, but when it does so it's unsettling. I'm in the process of writing a novel in which the protagonist publicly defends the practice of BDSM. That provides a degree of safe distancing; I am not my protagonist and, in any case, hardly anyone reads my novels so it wouldn't be a great deal of exposure.
I don't normally write publicly about my sexuality, and I am also not someone who's entirely comfortable defending Tories. However, let's start.
A couple of weeks ago in a press interview, Kezia Dugdale said, in simple, dignified terms, that she had a female lover, and this was published without sensation. The press had known the fact, apparently, for years, but no-one had thought it appropriate to 'out' her. Her privacy was respected, as it should have been. In the days after the interview was printed, the Scottish press and the Scottish chattering classes congratulated ourselves at how much we'd grown up as a nation, that we no longer saw someone's sexuality as a matter for public discussion.
Draft letter to Nicola Sturgeon on BothVotesSNP
Dear Nicola Sturgeon
You know as well as we do that the Scottish National Party is — deservedly — well on the way to an epic victory in the coming election. You know that the SNP will win all — or almost all — of the constituency seats — and will deserve to. But you also know as well as we do that victory in this election — that forming the next administration — is not an end for the SNP: it is only a means to an end.
The end is to create a better Scotland, and you believe — as we do — that to achieve that requires the powers which will come with independence.