Well, there goes the crystal ball

First of all, this is clearly a fucking conspiracy to stop me getting any work done.  And second, this is going to be hellish. Third, the crystal ball needs top come out of the cupboard, despite its utter failure to predict Brexit, or Trump...or this.

Psychological need rather than prescience, I fear.

What can happen in the UK?  Well, Corbyn could step down and/or the labour Party could split.  A single issue “Remain in the EU“ Party might actually have a chance of taking the Tories on…(a better chance than Labour have as they are anyway)  Paul Mason is already – fruitlessly - suggesting a grand alliance of opposition parties.

But let’s just take a reasonable bet on none of that, or anything like that, happening.  (We’ll know quickly…if it doesn’t happen by the end of this week, it’s not happening.)

Everything depends on the two Labour parties…but the chances against innovative ideas are pretty damn slim.  The chances are that Labour will go into this election as one party and get gubbed seven ways to Christmas on the 2oth anniversary of the Blair landslide.  May will now have an irrefutable mandate for the hardest of hardcore English National Brexits.  I think any thought of the new Tory intake (400, 450?) being anything other than xenophobic dingbats of the deepest water is ill founded.

Oh…UKIP will vanish and the Lib Dems will pick up some seats…some of them in Scotland...You heard me right…There will be a highly organised and motivated anti-SNP bandwagon in which the Tories and the LibDems will joyfully participate, with Scottish Labour trying desperately to cling on to their one seat.  They won’t succeed.  But the the SNP will have to fight like hell to lose only ten seats and not fifteen or twenty.

This has clearly been on the cards for a while.  This is why “now was not the time” for an indyref.

The Lib Dems and Labour will try to present themselves as opposition to the Tories, but in the Scottish (scarcely relevant) bit of this general election, nothing will be so important for any of them as “Beat the SNP.”

Labour will lose everything in Scotland, and the Tories and the Lib Dems between them will win ten seats and claim that settles Scottish Independence as an issue till the Sun turns into a red dwarf and swallows the planet.

There is no way we wake up on June 9^th with anything but a bloody big mountain to climb, whoever we are.

Corbyn will probably quit, but the Labour Party in the UK, reduced to 150 seats at best, will still need to split to sort itself out between those who are interested in being the government of England, and those who want to wave their virtue at everyone like a bunch of liberal toss bags.

And yes, the government of England is what they will have to go for, because, in an unholy, messy, awful way…this brings the inevitability of either forced absorption or separation closer than ever.  Scotland will be gone from the union in any terms of positive identity.  Brexit will either absolutely confirm that, or we will finally, messily escape it…possibly by electoral mandate in 2022…possibly not. That’s one murky glimpse too far inside the crystal ball.

A referendum?  Who knows?  The Break Up of Britain?  Tick Tock