COME on. Let’s admit it. We’re on the edge of our collective seat to see if Boris Johnson goes ahead with his Covid law-breaking trip to Scotland – partly to see what a burach he makes, partly to hear how he squares the trip with Scotland’s legal ban on inessential travel, and partly to understand why a man whose visits only boost indy support is feeling so generous.
After all, that midge-ridden Highland holiday didn’t end so well for the Tousled One and tightly controlled trips to RAF Lossiemouth and Orkney a month earlier were evidently pointless – so much so that the Unionist MP for Orkney and Shetland has warned Boris to axe this latest trip unless he has “some real work to do”.
Ouch.
Sadly for Johnson, it’s not just Alistair Carmichael who wants his guts for garters. There’s an orderly queue now including the folk who obligingly supplied the crabs for his Orkney photo-shoot, the fishermen in Lossiemouth, Peterhead, Fraserburgh and right round the coast of his party’s former Scottish “strongholds”. There are no rural “safe havens” anymore for the party that “Got Brexit Done” and in the process Got Fishing Communities Stuffed – so Boris and his entourage are on the back foot. Forced at last to visit Edinburgh and Glasgow.
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Once word gets out there will doubtless be small, local, safe, socially distanced protests. But onlookers should be in no doubt. The reason tens of thousands of Yes campaigners won’t be on the streets is respect for the Scottish Government’s lockdown measures – the ones “our” Prime Minister will flagrantly disregard.
So why on earth is he coming?
Has the PM become strangely addicted to getting a guid (metaphorical) kicking every couple of months, in a Stockholm syndrome kinda way – not from the carefully selected folk he meets here of course, or the ultra-polite Scottish Unionist press, but from papers like the National (whose well-timed Yes Challenge launched yesterday) from Yessers on social media and from the London media who’ve finally realised Scottish independence is the Next Big Thing.
Whether he’s a sucker for punishment though, Johnson isn’t a pushover for haggis.
It wasn’t the seasonal attractions of Burns and copious drams that made the Old Etonian hanker for a trip north. On the 25th Boris tweeted “Burns suppers are one of the highlights of the year and I’m sad that millions of Scots … across the world won’t be able to come together to toast one of our finest poets. We will do so again, but this Burns Night please stay home.”
Right.
Stay home (Scots) – but don’t stay home (Boris).
We understand.
Unfortunately for the PM, we are also unco’ full o’ the Bard’s stinging verse about the hypocritical, useless and unco guid. So much so that Burns’s words rise almost unbidden as we contemplate the Prime Minister’s visit.
Ah Boris thou art but a skellum,
A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum;
Or mebbe…
Ah, gentle Scots! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen’d, sage advices,
The PM frae oor FM despises.
Or perhaps the verse almost penned with de Pfeffel Johnson in mind:
Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that,
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that.
Clearly, folk o’ independent mind do look and laugh when it comes to Boris Johnson’s protestations about Scotland. But some folk listen.
So, what will the Prime Minister actually say?
On recent form, there will be breathtakingly double-standards about constitutional plans being hatched by the Scottish Government during a pandemic – to which every right-thinking Scot will simply chorus, “Aye – what about Brexit?”
There will be audacious and tactless chat about the life-saving aspects of UK membership, with heavy mention of the Oxford vaccine and the British Army.
OF course, most folk will judge any Covid boasts against the terrible milestone passed on Tuesday – Britain is a world leader in Covid death. Who’s to blame? Boris must take the rough with the smooth.
Perhaps for good measure the Prime Minister will fling in the furlough scheme, even though other countries have more generous and longer-term support packages in place and even though Britain’s basic welfare provisions are the weakest in the developed world.
If the British state was truly, consistently generous, the Covid death toll simply wouldn’t stand where it does today.
Doubtless, there’ll be talk of the multiple top tables “enjoyed” by Scotland via membership of the UK – like the EU negotiating table barred to us perhaps?
It’s important to realise top tables have small country members too.
Like the tiny Faroes whose Finance Minister takes over as Secretary General of the Secretariat to the Nordic Council next month.
Or Estonia, which has a temporary seat on the UN Security Council after just 30 years as an independent country. Of course, the UK has had a permanent seat since the Council’s inception.
READ MORE: Scotland can do better than the UK speaking for us on the world stage
But would Scots prefer 100% clout occasionally – sharing influence the rest of the time with other like-minded, near neighbours – or zero clout all of the time – with toes and fingers crossed that “our” top table chappies are advancing Scottish ideas about nuclear weapons, illegal wars, arms exports and human rights?
I wonder.
So why the heck is Boris coming?
Well, it seems he has a BIG announcement to make – conceding that the UK’s “existing constitutional architecture is not working” and announcing – a Constitutional Commission.
Pause for applause.
Of course, there will be none.
Unless you count the hard stares and slow hand claps coming fae the Glesca jury.
Why not?
How long have you got?
We’ve heard it all before.
There’s no demand for devolution in the English regions.
And no will to act except when independence flies high in the polls.
We have no more patience – and no more belief. The Tories are currently undermining the devolution settlement, but we are to believe they suddenly want to “add value” to it?
Naw.
The Tories have cynically bulked up the massive House of Lords with cronies, so that not a single peer’s primary working background is in manual or skilled trades.
And we are to believe they really want to reform it?
Aye, Boris will talk.
And aye, that will create a flurry.
Aye, sundry commentators will speculate that his announcement heralds the dawn of a new era for centralised Britain.
And we will nod wearily and pass a simple judgement – aye right.
So why is he really here?
Perhaps the truth is simple.
Boris Johnson doesn’t learn.
If he did, there would not be more Covid deaths in the second wave than the first.
If he did, there would be not be a contemptuous, Covid law-breaking trip to Scotland.
If he did, the man would have gathered by now that his blustering physical presence does not leave Scots all a quiver.
But never mind Boris Johnson’s infinitely slow learning curve.
Scots ARE learning – volumes about the limitations of the British state.
And for the democratic day of reckoning that lies ahead, that’s all that matters.
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