AS Brexit gets more real, the British government becomes more cartoonish in its villainy. It would be marginally more reassuring to think that if Scotland was going to be a victim of a power grab, that the power would be being grabbed by someone who had an idea of what they were going to do with it.
Instead, Scotland is the victim of a Westminster power grab and Westminster doesn’t have a clue about what it’s going to do with the powers it’s taking, nor much of a clue about anything else. It’s like being a mugging victim in a Wile E Coyote cartoon, only without the wit, the humour, or indeed the wile.
Westminster has painted an unconvincing picture of a highway on a cliff face, and is telling us it’s the road to a better, brighter future. We’re about to be flattened by a big European lorry barrelling down it.
This week Westminster started debating the so-called Great Repeal Bill. The main thing that’s being repealed is the last of the pretence that Scotland is an equal and valued partner in a family of nations. Westminster is acting as though devolution had never happened. There has been precisely zero recognition of the fact that Scotland voted to remain as part of the EU by a considerably larger margin than it voted to remain a part of the UK. Devolved powers which were exercised by the EU are not to remain devolved. Westminster has unilaterally decided to keep them for itself.
There has been no consultation with the Scottish Government on devolved matters. The EU is sending its chief negotiator Michel Barnier to speak with Holyrood’s European Committee next week to give an update on the progress of Brexit negotiations.
Westminster sends Fluffy Mundell, who’s only able to tell us that ginger snaps, and possibly Bourbon Creams, will be available along with the tea and coffee. The authorisation of chocolate biscuits is above his pay grade, and he’s certainly not allowed to browse the ACME Catalog of Cunning Brexit Rocket Sleds.
None of this is going to be challenged by the 13 MPs representing the Ruth Davidson’s Vote Ruth Davidson We Don’t Want Another Independence Referendum Isn’t Ruth Great party in Westminster. They see their job as being to hold Scotland to account for Westminster, not to hold Westminster to account for Scotland.
This week Ruth was bewailing that Brexit might result in what she called a short-term economic hit which we wouldn’t recover from. That’s the definition of a permanent economic hit, not a short-term one. Ruth’s definition of short-term is a bit like getting a limb cut off and imagining that you can regrow it. This could well be the proof that we needed that the Tories are in fact inhuman lizard aliens from a distant galaxy. Although we’ve already got abundant proof that they’re inhuman.
Ruth’s representatives in Westminster – because they’re not there to represent Scotland – won’t be rebelling against the Government any time soon. Despite the fact that Theresa May is hell-bent on a hard Brexit, despite the fact that the leave vote was won by blatant lies, despite the fact that prominent leavers were insisting that a leave vote didn’t mean a vote to leave the single market, despite the fact that the majority in the referendum was wafer thin, Ruth Davidson’s bunch of MPs from the Let’s Not Mention the C-word at Least During an Election party won’t be lending their numbers to a vote to soften the impact of a Brexit that their own leader acknowledges is going to be bad for Scotland.
As far as protecting Scotland goes, Scotland’s Conservative MPs are as useful as a hand-knitted condom.
Internal British government documents were leaked this week which proved that Theresa May and her band of glassy eyed Brexiteers are as delusional in private as they appear to be in public.
The Home Office’s internal paper on a post-Brexit immigration policy was denounced as “highly misleading and inflammatory”. In other words ‘‘tabloid BS” by a professor of EU law. This means that we can put to rest any fond notions that apparent British confusion might all be a cunning ruse to wrongfoot the EU. They really are that clueless.
The former Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald discovered this during negotiations with Margaret Thatcher’s government about the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1980s.
In his memoirs he recalled how the British kept changing position. They’d agree something one day, then come back the following day with an entirely different policy. At first the Irish thought this was part of some cunning Machiavellian plan on the part of the British government to unsettle the Irish.
Then they realised it was just because the British really didn’t have any idea of what they were doing or what they could realistically achieve. Over 30 years later, and nothing much has changed.
The UK remains as clueless and delusional as ever, only this time they’re up against a negotiating team which represents a bloc of countries far more powerful than Britain.
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