WE have a bit of form here. Scots rarely take kindly to parliamentarians popping over the border to tell the natives where their constitutional duty lies. Most especially when the emissary in question hails from the house of unelected peers.
Baron Adonis, Andrew as was before being ennobled in 2005, came north over the last weekend to rally the tartan lieges to his latest and most passionate cause; the campaign for a second “People’s Vote” on Brexit. It’s fair to say his intervention was not greeted with unalloyed joy.
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As he packed for his trip to the far north there had been some reasons to be cheerful – a massive rally in London a week before where an estimated 750,000 turned out to shuffle along the crowded streets to parliament demanding a final say on whatever last minute deal has been cobbled together. And, most especially, to be consulted if no such deal emerges.
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Then the result of a poll in the Sunday Times buried quietly on the bottom of an inside page two days ago. When you ask your readers to demonstrate their hostility to another vote and 70% of them instead say “bring it on” it’s clearly a mite embarrassing.
On the debit side he faces no shortage of rather large road blocks en route to EUref2. One is that Theresa May has set her best vicar’s daughter’s face against any such re-run; and the lady does not seem in the market for turning. More crucially is his own party where the indecision is final. Every time a Labour shadow minister begins an answer with “as we’ve been perfectly clear” you know that more obfuscation is the order of the day.
But the good Lord has a plan.
He came among us to say that what might make all the difference to the Commons arithmetic is a popular front of Labour and the SNP.
Lord Adonis has made an interesting political journey. A social democrat, he moved to the LibDems, and thence to Labour where he became a minister (latterly he even got a job from that nice George Osborne). But his political education apparently didn’t embrace much in the way of Scottish political history. Or its legendary tribalism.
I refer him to social media on which territory the tribes conduct their more vitriolic battles. He will quickly learn that the chances of a ScotLab/ScotNat pact on another poll are as likely as Alex McLeish’s finest lifting the next World Cup.
He probably does know that a few weeks back the First Minister committed her own party to working for a People’s Vote. This was of no little significance considering there were still many doubters in her own ranks. Their reasons for not wanting to pose the Brexit question again were varied.
Some worried it would impact on the next independence referendum either because the electorate might suffer from poll fatigue or because trying to alter a Brexit verdict would provide a precedent for anyone trying to upend a future Yes vote. And there was the not-so-small matter of SNP voters who also plumped for Leave.
In truth, there are still doubters in the ranks, not least Pete Wishart MP (no relation) who took to Twitter yesterday to fret that: “It’s all very well for Andrew Adonis to come to Scotland and ask us to vote against Brexit again. We already have and our vote was ignored. What happens if we vote to remain and the UK votes to Leave again? No answer.
"We are to be ignored and disrespected again.”
Yes that could happen. We can’t know. What we do know is that Brexit will likely have a catastrophic effect on the Scottish economy if it isn’t stopped. Our majority Remain vote last time round is no protection.
It seems to me the risk of our vote being ignored again matters rather less than sitting on the sidelines whilst the national handcart hurtles hellwards.
The nearer we get to B-Day the more we learn about the likely impact of wilfully cutting ourselves off from our major marketplace. Business and industry have been queuing up to tell us – somewhat belatedly – what tariff laden trade and port delays would mean. Investment has stalled all around since nobody knows what next month looks like never mind next year.
The UK Government has been slowly releasing all these impact statements which for so long apparently didn’t exist. The ones which tell us about planes having to deliver crucial medical supplies, about food prices rising, about shortages of components. Some folks in England woke up the other morning to find their local motorway being converted into a car park for lorry queues.
Meanwhile, little Liam Fox’s brave new world of multiple trade deals under the WTO has turned out to be the fantasy everyone but he suspected.
And it seems the Metropolitan police are apparently just too busy to feel the collars of those non doms and dodgy operators who blatantly broke the electoral laws in 2016 and lied and cheated to the electorate without remorse.
The Scottish Government have spent a great deal of money trying to cushion Scots from the impact of UK led austerity.
There simply isn’t enough money in anyone’s kitty to avoid the disaster of Brexit.
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