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

A Wild Thought - is Brexit about to do Independence Talks a HUGE Favour

On a lunatic morning when Michael Howard appears to be suggesting War with Spain to Keep The Buggers Off Our Rock, when Simon Heffer seems to be suggesting the return of the Groat as negotiable currency and it as announced that we are going to spend £500m of turning our passports Back to British Blue, an even wilder thought is occurring to me.

I was listening to Mike Russell and Jackson Carlaw as they talked about the Scotland Act and negotiating how we might go about creating a common legal and fiscal framework for the European Laws and Regulations as they appertain to devolved areas like fishing and farming...

And it occurred to me...Are these areas not exactly the same areas, in terms of trade and labour standards, as would need to be negotiated between a separated Scotland and England?  Is not a degree of agreement between sovereign nations (such as will now have to happen in an offshore version of the EU) in order to pass the Great Repeal Bill and give it legislative consent not a more or less exact duplicate of the kind of negotiations that would have to happen post Independence?  Isn't Brexit once more shooting the Unionist fox?

During the last referendum campaign, over and over again, angry demands were made of "Yes" about exactly these issues.  How will you trade?  What will be the rules? What will be the common framework? We were assured again and again that it was quite impossible for Scotland to arrive at any kind of reasonably negotiated position with regard to the rest of the UK.

Now it seems, in order to arrive at a settlement for Brexit, we're going to have to come an agreement anyway...and surely no one is going to seriously suggest that thew agreement we come to as four polities in order to facilitate Brexit is going to then be torn up?

The free trade framework that the UK government aspires to create within thye UK and thyen with the EU will HAVE to include Scot;land on both counts.

So this morning, not only did the Unionist case lose the argument of the "Spanish Veto"...It also lost the argument on trade.

There's really only Trident and blue passports left.

Tick, as they say, tock