Democracy? You've got to love it!

I spent most of last night in an impressively improvised TV Studio for Broadcasting Scotland in the same kind of incoherent shock as has been displayed by Theresa May ever since her tight wee circle of acolytes launched her manifesto, and the damn thing sank like a boat in a Buster Keaton movie.  But come the dawn, and the Tories having lost their majority, and Jeremy Corbyn talking about forming a minority Labour government with a mischievous plausibility that will have most of his own parliamentary colleagues reaching for a fresh pot of paint to daub a frozen smile across their masks of despair...with the EU now in a position to absolutely dictate whatever form of Brexit they feel like, even with  Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories and the DUP combining forces to put whoever is leading the Tories next week over the line…I have got a smile on my face that I don't have to paint on.

This election, on both sides of the border, has worked out really well.  In fact, even with the loss of some real talent from the SNP Parliamentary group, in terms of what comes next, I’m not sure how it could realistically be any better.

Think of it this way.  35 SNP MPs matter FAR more in THIS context, than 45 or so MPs would have mattered had the Tories achieved the thumping majority they were after, or than 56 mattered until yesterday.  I don’t believe any more than Jeremy Corbyn really does that Labour can REALLY form the next government…His main cause for celebration today is that the Blairite hegemony in his own party is now decisively over.  But even if they did try to form a government, they would absolutely now need the SNP to pass a budget, and to renew Trident…to name but two. 

As it is, yes, of course, the Tories will form the next UK government…and this is not a good thing...but did anyone really expect them NOT to? The real news this morning is that the UKIP/Tory fusion Party which Theresa May had decided was the way to keep her safe from having to make deals with ANYONE, her own party very much included, is as dead as a door nail, even if TM tries to hang on as a deeply damaged PM.

But what about Scotland?  Symbolically, if in no other way, this is a surely a huge comedown from the heady symbolism of the Tsunami two years ago?

Firstly, I’d argue that this is no bad thing in and of itself.  Symbolism, after all, is only symbolism.  If this election has taught us anything it is surely that real life continues anyway, and that the vast majority of the electorate, God Bless 'Em, don't give much of a toss for it. The Yes/No divide in Scottish politics is what produced that tsunami…the 45% for yes had somewhere obvious to go, and the Unionist vote, under the illusion in 2015 that Scottish politics could back to a status quo ante referendum led to them coming unstuck.  What has happened, paradoxically, in the highly successful reorganization of the Unionist tactical vote that has STILL left the SNP with a healthy “majority” of Scottish seats is first of all, a predictable and salutary catching up…better reflecting our divisions and no longer allowing the 2015 result to allow some in the Yes movement to imagine that we’d sort of won in 2014 after all…and secondly, it's a confirmation of the re-focusing of Scottish politics as an entirely distinct entity from politics South of the border, as having changed forever.  Scottish politics now is ALL about the constitution, and in the long run, that’s exactly where the nationalists want it to be.

But what about the second referendum? So that Scotland gets to decide on what kind of Brexit deal we want?  Well, first of all, the EU are in the driving seat on that one, and not the UKIP/Tory merger…and second, can we now admit that it was never a very good idea in the first place?  Calling a referendum when you don't know the result in advance may make for exciting television, but it's no way to run a government. It may be that democratically there was no option but for Nicola Sturgeon to announce that there should be some specifically Scottish say on the shape of the Brexit to come…but still, we're better off without it being any kind of immediate promise let alone prospect...in terms of running Scotland properly, if nothing else.

Calling a second referendum when you can’t predict the outcome was always a very dangerous strategy, and one doomed to a second defeat, on this timing, in my view. Now that, first of all, the Brexit process is itself completely up in the air, and we have even LESS idea what we might be voting on in that referendum in 2019, in terms of narrow politics,  iit makes even less sense.  So when Ruth Davidson triumphantly demands that Indyref 2 get off the table NOW, I think we should let the baby have her bottle and think that we've just dodged a very nasty bullet.

In another wonderful paradox of democracy, by making this election campaign in Scotland about NOTHING but the “threat” of Indyref Two…the Tories have won some seats, but in the longer term, even in the medium turn, have done the SNP an enormous favour. It may be that Nicola Sturgeon, after due consideration of the changed UK posture on the Brexit talks, can concede that “while the Brexit deal is so uncertain, there will be no referendum in the course of this parliament “…and breathe a sigh of well deserved relief. This is a chance to remove am electoral millstone from around the neck of the Scottish Government, who can now take part in the Brexit process with a MUCH better mix of Westminster parliamentary arithmetic and a secure Scottish government for years to come.

What's more, with the Tories relying on MPs elected from Northern Ireland, there is absolutely no way that the "hard Tory Brexit" that justified that referendum can happen. The "fringe" nations, including Scotland are in a FAR better place to negotiate a soft, even differentiated Brexit, than they were yesterday.  Time to blow the dust off that proposal that Theresa May so arrogantly dismissed a couple of months ago.  If Indyref 2 is off the table, it's because a differential Scottish Brexit is now back on.  

Crystal balls probably belong in the trash…but by re-aligning Scottish politics so decisively along constitutional lines, and insisting as the “prize” of “SNP defeat” that the SNP drop a second referendum which I strongly suspect they never really wanted in the first place... and with pressure on the SNP in Holyrood coming from a Labour Party which entirely owes its revival to its own left wing, I don’t see, beyond the improbable “Coalition” that people may have considered in the wee small hours last night, that this could be any better.

Democracy, as well as being a ruthless bugger, as Theresa May and Alex Salmond have both found out, also has a fantastic sense of humour.  That’s one of the reasons you’ve got to love it.

What Can Go Wrong?

Cast your mind back to the beginning of this year.  Since becoming Prime Minister in the unexpected summer of 2016, Theresa May has been thinking, of course, about the next election. There are two issues, she knows, that are going to be uppermost in the minds of the British electorate, whenever that next election is.  One is going to be Brexit…no matter what else is going on, the general Election after the Brexit referendum is going to be about the deal that she negotiates for the qualified disengagement of the British Law and economy from what has been holding it together for the last forty years.  And the other, associated issue is the leadership of the country that she has assumed after the posh boys had pissed all over it and run away.

And there is absolutely nothing she can see about an early election that can possibly go wrong. The Labour opposition have been supine and incompetent. Article 50 has gone through with barely a sniff of a hitch. The opposition leader is an impossible gift to the formidable Tory election machine.  The press and even the Parliamentary Labour Party are uniformly and contemptuously dismissive of the hapless, hopeless, unelectable Mr Corbyn.

What can possibly go wrong? 

Now do the same memory and imagination exercise for Nicola Sturgeon just a few months ago. Her decision is slightly different.  In response to the triggering of Article 50, does she announce the intention of a second independence referendum or not?  Part of the calculation for her is that this second plebiscite to be held sometime in the future – she doubts very much if it will be on the announced two year schedule for Brexit -  is that it will combine not only the national question, but also the Brexit question.  It will be a specifically Scottish verdict on what will almost certainly be a deeply tiresome car wreck of a negotiation process towards an outcome which is hugely demonstrably worse than even the 62% of Scots who voted against it in 2016 thought it would be.  The Prime Minister has said that there won’t be another election until after the process is finished, so why not pre-empt that 2020 election with the THREAT, the bargaining chip, not necessarily to be played, of a second referendum on Independence.  There will be a short term hit in the polls, an irritation with the prospect…but it’s not NOW…the electoral heat won’t be on the SNP for at least two years.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, we don’t yet know the verdict of the electorate.  What we do know is that a good sized portion of the electors seem to be demonstrably pissed off with both incumbents.  Leaving aside the entirely unpredictable reversal in the predicted political performances of the leaders of the British parties, the unhappiness of the public with this election being so cynically called in the first place is surely the roots of what has indeed gone a bit pear shaped for Mrs May, whose anticipated landslide has been transformed, like the Better Together campaign, from a Dead Certainty into a Narrow Squeak at best.

What has happened to Nicola Sturgeon is that a threatened Indy Ref - which was predicated on the Prime Minister not lying about there being no election till 2020 - has been transformed from an Ace in the Hole to a Millstone around the neck of a General Election Campaign that in Scotland has not only NOT been about Brexit but has not, in any meaningful way, been about an election to Westminster either.  What we have actually been going through for the past few weeks has actually BEEN the second referendum campaign that absolutely nobody wanted to happen right now, and for which Nicola Sturgeon, rather than Theresa May, is getting the blame.

What has been inflicted on the public North and South or the border is a demonstrably meaningless exercise in cack-handed cynicism from which ALL politics is taking a hit.  The beneficiaries are the anti Politicians, the Corbynite left …and, paradoxically and ironically, the Scottish Tories who have successfully used the campaign to send “them up there in Holyrood a message”…The message being to fuck off and leave us alone when we’ve got terrorism and Trump and a forthcoming economic and then environmental apocalypse to deal with.

That the anti-politics mood should for the first time encompass the SNP government in Holyrood is probably the only lasting and consequential (and not wholly unwelcome in the long run) change that this whole ridiculous exercise will accomplish.  Even if the Tories go so far as to lose their overall majority, the likely result is yet another election in the autumn rather than a “progressive coalition.” If the Tories maintain or slightly increase their majority, as still seems more likely, then the election in 2022 will STILL be, in effect, a Brexit election, a verdict on whatever swamp of malfeasance and resentment they get us into.

In the words of the old joke, in neither 10 Downing Street or Bute House would either incumbent want to start from here.  At least Nicola Sturgeon can take some comfort from knowing, unlike Theresa May, that assassins in her own party haven’t already got the knives sharpened for whatever comes next.

The Bewildering Brexit Election

What is so very strange about the way the "Brexit Election" has gone is that Brexit, as far as one can tell, isn't really an issue - in and of itself - at all.  This has wrong-footed both the Tories, who wanted to build an entire campaign around Theresa May being the only possible God Given Champion of what The British People Demand - and , perversely, the SNP, whose pitch of "Scotland rejected Brexit and demands a say" is likewise evincing no electoral traction except with the small fraction of voters who were already strongly committed to that view. This election campaign is catching all the experts off balance, in the parties and in the papers, in Scotland and England.  So what's going on?

The conclusion behind all this may be that "The European Issue", both for and against Brexit, is STILL really only a very minor consideration for the vast majority of the electorate, (with the possible exception of Northern Ireland, where the voters have THEIR border very particularly in mind) just as it was before the Tories' unexpected outright win in 2015 accidentally put it front and centre of a political agenda that was so shallow rooted as to be manipulable by the noisy but marginal likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.  Just as the EU referendum took place in an atmosphere of ill informed indifference as to the outcome, so it seems that the consequences of Brexit, economic and political, simply haven't sunk in...for the very good reason that they haven't happened yet. This is why, after all, with that whopping great lead in the polls, Theresa May and a VERY tight circle inside the Tory party, decided to call this election before the excrement made contact with the ventilation system.  What she, along with the rest of the political "chatteratti", all commentators included, including me, didn't get...was just how shallow are the roots of political engagement, how very little connection is now made between "politics" and "real life"and consequently, just how volatile political allegiance has become.  

All this makes the prediction game extremely and unusually hazardous.  You've got a submerged Labour Party establishment who were completely convinced that a ruinous campaign would allow them to ditch Corbyn and get "their" ball back.  This turns out to be as ill-starred an expectation as the Scottish Labour Party's abiding conviction that "their" voters would see the light "any day now" and come flooding back penitently to the cold embrace of Old Corruption.  It also seems likely that Ruth Davidson as much as her leader is about to discover the limits of the Cult of Personality (though no one could surely have predicted just how abysmal and unhappy a public performer Theresa May would turn out to be.)  The Corbynites even have the outside possibility of the Hung Parliament that everyone expected LAST time, all unbidden and unwanted, swimming into the realm of possibility THIS time.  With a week to go, there is surely nowhere for the Tory vote to move but down...and it may well be that if the Tories DO scrape home again it will be thanks to their formidable and sub-media ground game in individual constituencies, just as it may well be the local machine politics of the SNP, calling on at least a fraction of their huge, passive membership, that may save 50 or so seats for Nicola Sturgeon.  

The threat of the SNP holding the Balance of Power is likely to dominate the last week of the campaign, as it did in 2015.  But in today's atmosphere, can you really sing the same song twice?  Will the electorate in England, having already had their spasm of nationalist resentment in LAST year's referendum, really respond to another war cry against the Jacobites coming down the hill to Derby?

And here in Scotland, specifically, other questions occur which may or may not be answered next week. If the election South of the border is hard to define, then the election North of the border is very, very clearly about one thing and one thing alone…and it isn’t Brexit as such.  Despite the protests of the SNP, the dominant energies of this election are ALL to do with the prospect of a second referendum.  The very amorphousness of the UK campaign has allowed, with the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties banging on about it endlessly, independence to entirely dominate the debate…both for and against.  This prompts two observations.  One is that Scottish and British politics now seem to be irrevocably divorced.  The other is that the anti-politics mood from which the SNP benefited with the huge protest-vote Tsunami of 2015, now very much includes the SNP.  The “scunnered with all of it” mood which inflected an element of the Yes campaign in 2014 has turned round to bite the Nats. If the Electorate in the UK are acting as if Brexit is settled and done, rather than about to break over our heads with fury, farce and chaos, then the electorate in Scotland are acting, paradoxically, as if the Yes vote won in 2014 and that the SNP can be held to account for the wider failure of politics to make anything better.  It may be that a Rubicon into a new normality has been crossed. 

Or it may not. It may be that when the cards land back on the table, we will all be back exactly where we started…with a Tory government with a small majority, an undefined Brexit and an uneasy, unstable devolution within the UK, as fraying, nervous and unstable as the Prime Minister herself - and a chaotic, undefined, unwilling, angry, messy car crash of a divorce from the EU that none other than a couple of loudmouth loonies in the pub ever really wanted.

As I've said here before , Nobody Knows Anything.