The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:
Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.
Emma Roddick MSP, who holds cherished ambitions of one day becoming a dunce and was until very recently a Scottish Government minister, announced that her vision of Scottish independence was, um, a union with England, Wales and Ireland.
(Strikingly, she didn’t even say NORTHERN Ireland, so we suppose that someone had better go and break the news to Dublin.)
She kept repeating it so that nobody misunderstood. She wanted, she said, to “go back to basics on what independence means”, and asserted that that meant being in a union with England, which she would “personally love”.
Of course, she did specify that the CURRENT union was not acceptable. She appeared to be proposing to the people of England that their 53 million voices should carry no more weight than the 5.3 million of Scotland, the 3 million of Wales or – we presume in reality – the 1.8 million of Northern Ireland.
And, y’know, good luck persuading them of that. But in a miraculous world where you could convince them to give away so much of their power for nothing, what would it be that you were creating? A four-country union in which Scotland was still a minority and could still be outvoted by the other three, for a start.
(And how would you, for example, solve a tiebreak in a case like Brexit, where Scotland and NI voted to stay but England and Wales voted to leave, which is a 2-2 draw? Presumably the “goal difference” would have to be the total numbers of votes, which is what actually happened anyway. So your “independent” Scotland would still be dragged out of Europe against its will.)
But more to the point, what you’d be campaigning for was simply a better version of the UK, and if anyone can explain to us how that’s different to what, say, Gordon Brown wants – and indeed what he and the other Unionist leaders promised in “The Vow”, as demanded by the SNP’s current chief executive, and which he and they both insisted had been delivered – we’re all ears.
We remember the indyref, readers, and we’re pretty sure Gordon Brown wasn’t on the same side as us. But it’s increasingly clear that he’s now on the same side as his old pal Murray Foote’s new SNP, and it’s not because HE’S changed his views.
