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A couple of days ago a reader asked on Twitter if we thought Reform, who continue to lead in UK opinion polling, might allow a second indyref if they actually got into power, as it would for obvious reasons be hypocritical of them not to. And to be frank we dismissed it out of hand, because Nigel Farage is the ultimate British nationalist, he’d have no obvious political reason to, and since when did hypocrisy bother politicians?
And then last night a longstanding Courier/Press & Journal reporter (who despite that is an all-round decent chap and indy supporter) tweeted this:
And actually, on further thought, that’s not the craziest idea at all.
On Wednesday, after our reader put the suggestion, we’d actually gone and had a look on the Reform Scotland website, and were mildly surprised to find no mention of a policy on the independence question at all where we’d expected a flat-out “You had your referendum in 2014” dismissal. And in the process we’d noticed that a number of Reform candidates had already identified themselves as Yes voters.
We’ve noted several times that Reform’s striking showing in Scottish polls is despite the party having almost no presence north of the border and showing very little interest in Scottish affairs. And in fact it would probably be more accurate to describe Farage as an English nationalist than a British one. So what if he was actually more than happy to see the back of the whinging Jocks and their lefty voting habits for good?
Obviously, it’s hitherto been widely and reasonably assumed that Reform’s polling in Scotland has been cannibalised from the Unionist parties, and suddenly adopting a pro-indyref2 stance would risk torpedoing that support overnight. But we very much doubt Reform are all that fussed about footling around at Holyrood, so that’s probably not much of a gamble for them if it might mean a way to ensure a permanent cut of 40-plus SNP/Labour MPs at Westminster.
When you then remember that more than a third of SNP voters voted Leave in 2016, suddenly Reform could find itself pushing at an open door with a lot of very disgruntled and disillusioned people (their favourite kind) behind it. They might not wholly trust Farage to keep that promise, but the SNP are promising them nothing and they know the SNP deliver nothing, so what do they have to lose?
The move at least makes credible political sense for Farage, which is more than the SNP’s insistence that Westminster will suddenly cave if we give them five more years to whine impotently about it every few months before cashing their expenses cheques again does. He has no very detectable love for Scotland, and the last time he showed up there he got embarrassingly chased out by a mob of shouty student wokies calling him “transphobic”. We doubt he’d shed many tears over it.
We have no idea if Neil Drysdale’s source will turn out to be right, although last night we were told to expect an official announcement next week. And we certainly agree with Neil’s assessment – if it does happen, it’ll set the cat amongst the Scottish political pigeons in a way nobody expected. The SNP’s bowels will run with ice at the prospect.
(They’d have various options for brazening it out, of course, but they currently have all the credibility and integrity of some starving weasels in a butcher-shop’s sewage outlet so who’d be listening to their lines? All Reform would have to say would be “If you vote SNP we’ll have to assume you don’t actually want independence at all, so deal’s off.”)
The Scottish electorate is thoroughly and brutally scunnered with all its political parties and has been for some time. The 50% of them who want independence will suddenly be getting offered a viable, if slightly unpalatable, route to achieving it, something that absolutely no halfway-sane person thinks currently exists.
And heaven knows, even if they turned out to be lying they couldn’t realistically make a bigger pig’s arse of governing at Holyrood than than SNP have for the last 10 years or Scottish Labour would in the currently wildly unlikely event of Anas Sarwar taking over in Bute House.
It’s a real Hail Mary play, and we’ll be honest with you, viewers, we really really really hope it’s true, because not only would it revive hope for independence, at the barest minimum it’d suddenly make Scottish politics interesting again, and that’s something we haven’t even been daring to dream of for the last few years.
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