Wee Ginger Dug: Westminster's arrogance will be the death of the Union

Despite having spent the entire EU referendum campaign insisting that control had to be returned to the British Parliament, after a Leave vote the Brexiteers don’t want the British Parliament to be consulted. When the High Court ruled that the Prime Minister doesn’t have the constitutional right to overrule an entire body of law by fiat, the take-back-control mob immediately launched an appeal so that the parliament they demanded should be in control wouldn’t have any control at all. This is the only context in which Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox could ever possibly be described as appealing.

Naturally, the Daily Mail was outraged, and blamed the decision on openly-gay Olympic fencing judges. But then outrage is the baseline state for the Daily Mail. Just this weekend it was outraged that voters in Austria had rejected the far-right candidate for the country’s presidency in favour of a pro-EU Green candidate.

The last time an Austrian fascist was elected the Daily Mail was thrilled. If Brexit isn’t a project for the far-right, you do have to wonder why it is that the Daily Mail thinks that a victory for a right-wing extremist in the Austrian presidential elections would have been a victory for what it likes to describe as “the Brexit revolution”.

One of the striking features of 2016, other than the mass celebrity die-offs, Brexit, and the non-dumping of the Trump, is the way language is being perverted by right-wing extremism, and parts of the media are complicit in it. We’re not supposed to call the far right fascists any more. The approved term is “populist”.

Night after night on the TV news, out-and-out fascists are being described as populists. Left-wing political movements never seem to be described as populist. The Syriza movement in Greece, Podemos in Spain, or the Corbyn Momentum in the UK aren’t populist, possibly because they’re not popular with newspaper proprietors. The Scottish independence movement is only ever described as populist when British nationalists seek to link Scottish independence with far-right extremism.

We also have a new term, alt-right, which is 2016’s synonym for nasty white supremacist – spotty middle-class white adolescents who are upset that the advances in social equality and civil rights over the past few decades mean middle-class white men have to compete on a playing field that’s marginally more level than it was before. Because when you’re the oppressor, equality feels like oppression, and it’s far easier to blame feminism for the fact that you can’t get laid than to stop being a whiny middle-class brat with an entitlement complex. The alt-right rails against the establishment, but what it’s really opposed to are minorities and women becoming a part of the establishment.

What the UK Government’s appeal against the High Court decision tells us is that the supposedly populist right wing isn’t about returning control to the people at all. It’s a rearguard move by the establishment to retain control and to reverse the progress achieved by the social democratic civil rights movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The far right, Brexiteers and the Ukipised Tory Party are the opposite of populist, they’re exclusionary and inward-looking reactionaries who dress their elitism in a veneer of mass appeal.

There’s certainly no control being conceded to the people of Scotland by the unlayable reactionaries of Conservative Ukipification. Ukipised populism is markedly unpopular in Scotland. You might imagine that when the voters of Scotland decided that they wanted to remain in the EU, and decided by a considerably larger margin than they decided that they wanted to remain in the UK, that the British Government would go out of its way to appease the rebellious Scots in order to get us on board with their supposedly populist project. Quite the reverse. Because only some populaces are popular with the populists of Westminster.

The digital journal Scottish Legal News reported that Scottish legal commentators have described the UK Government’s legal response to the Scottish Government’s submission to the Supreme Court as “fantastically rude”, “unnecessary”, and “inappropriate”. The British Government is essentially arguing that when the Unionist parties vowed back in 2014 that the permanence of the Scottish Parliament would be enshrined in the British constitution and that changes could only be made to the devolution settlement with the consent of Holyrood, they were telling a big fat lie to the voters of Scotland.

Moreover, they’re annoyed that the Scottish Parliament should have the audacity to complain that they were lying, and have come close to calling the Scottish Parliament stupid for complaining, because the sovereignty of Westminster means that Westminster has the constitutional right to lie through its teeth. Promises to voters mean nothing at all. That’s British populism for you. How dare you want something different?

The argument hinges on the word “normally”. The law says that Westminster will not “normally” legislate on matters that are devolved. But the British Government is arguing that it’s entirely within its gift to decide what is or is not normal, and they have decided that Brexit isn’t normal. In other words, the guarantee that they gave the voters of Scotland back in 2014 was a guarantee of absolutely nothing at all.

We’ll have to wait and see what the judges say. But one thing is perfectly clear. This is no Union that Scotland is in, it’s the death embrace of a centralised state that has no respect for the different nations of which it’s composed. Britain isn’t a Union, British nationalism is an intolerant arrogance where difference is to be crushed, not accommodated.

Only some people are allowed to be popular with our supposedly populist government. The British state has no intention of accommodating the will of the Scottish people, and that means that its days are numbered.