FORMER First Minister Jack McConnell was on Radio Scotland yesterday morning, suggesting that if Nicola Sturgeon was to pick up the phone and ask him for advice on when the next independence referendum should be, he would tell her not to hold it for “at least five” years.
That would be “depending on public demand and circumstances,” he added.
Hours later Theresa May was in Florence, addressing a crowd seemingly made up entirely of British journalists and her own Cabinet, when she gave us a bit of a clue about what those circumstances might be.
READ MORE: Theresa May gives ground in Florence speech as she pleads for Brexit transition deal
As expected, she told us Britain would want a “strictly time limited” transition period of “around two years”.
This tapering of the leaving process, dragging it beyond the Brexit date of March 30, 2019, would mean we would effectively be part of the EU until 2021.
If you want to know what the 2021 Holyrood election’s going to be about, well, yesterday McConnell and May gave us a fairly good idea. Does Scotland want to remain in a properly post-EU UK, or does it want to choose some other option?
Could Scots conceivably vote on independence again in 2022?
Well, maybe. Half a decade is a long time in politics.
Only a fool would try to predict with any authority what might happen – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un could wipe us out before the end credits of tomorrow’s Songs of Praise.
And what May’s speech didn’t give us was any sort of detail on what the relationship between the UK and the EU will be after the transition. As the European Parliament’s chief negotiator Guy Verhofstadt pointed out, we know more about what May doesn’t want – no Norway model, no Canada model – than what she does want.
It’ll be creative, she said. The fix is temporary.
Everything feels a little temporary right now.
May is, by all accounts, not a great Prime Minister. Weak, ineffective, and not liked, it seems, by her whole party. It seems unlikely she’ll be around much longer.
Within minutes of her walking off the podium in Florence, Brexiteers were howling “betrayal”.
When she goes, who replaces her, and what happens afterwards, is beyond my ken.
And then what does that mean? Might Jeremy Corbyn get in? Labour are, despite appearances, not a terribly unified or happy party either.
The SNP, too, have, I think, lost some of their steely discipline over the summer. The loss of just under half a million voters has shocked the party.
What does this all mean?
Could there be another General Election? Interestingly, in Nicola Sturgeon’s recent interview with the New Statesman, there was a telling remark from the First Minister.
She said, for the first time, that a second EU referendum, was getting “more and more difficult to resist”.
Although that might set a precedent others in the party aren’t too keen on, the reaction to May’s speech – the Brexiteers raging, the Remainers unsatisfied – could make that more likely.
Maybe, as one regular reader told me recently, you’re bored with stories about Brexit now. Sorry. This is going to dominate the agenda for years.
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