Sturgeon’s pet project runs out of steam on the road to Brexit
FANS of cult television might recall a 1960s series called The Prisoner, about a former secret agent trapped in a mysterious ‘Village’.
Branded ‘Number 6’, the protagonist – played by Patrick McGoohan – tried each week to escape, only to be foiled by his tormentors.
Nicola Sturgeon is currently starring in her own slightly less action-filled version of that drama – portraying Scotland as Boris Johnson’s ‘prisoner’.
Her every attempt to break free of those Tory shackles has ended in disaster and – like McGoohan’s character – she finds herself back at square one.
Tomorrow sees the launch of another bid for freedom, when MSPs will be asked to back a second Scexit vote – not much of a nail-biter, as the result is already in the bag.
With the support of the Greens, the SNP will triumph, but it will be something of a Pyrrhic victory, because it’s a doomed plea that will succeed only in wasting parliamentary time.
On Friday – Brexit Day – Miss Sturgeon will set out the next steps in the ‘campaign to secure Scotland’s future as an independent country’: a grand strategy that, for now, is short on detail.
Her party appears to be unravelling, with rival factions squabbling over tactics – while Perth and North Perthshire MP Pete Wishart’s big idea for ‘gentle persuasion’ of undecided voters lasted for all of approximately five minutes.
Paisley MP Mhairi Black, the SNP’s Scotland spokesman, has become the latest senior figure to raise the prospect of a wildcat independence vote.
Joanna Cherry, Miss Sturgeon’s nemesis, who had backed Mr Wishart’s call for a moderate approach, changed tack over the weekend and tweeted that Holyrood has the power to hold an ‘advisory’ referendum, adding: ‘Whether that is correct would need to be tested in court.’
Miss Cherry was one of the leading orchestrators of legal challenges against the Tories during the Brexit stalemate, which ultimately proved futile; it’s easy to see why the idea of a courtroom shortcut might appeal to the ‘non-practising’ QC and some of her cohorts.
Frankly, Unionists should welcome this apparent rush of blood to the head among so many SNP politicians: it’s yet more proof that in the wake of its success at last month’s election, it’s in a state of panic and disarray.
Consult as many dusty tomes on constitutional law as you want; hold as many marches as you like, shuffling through rainy Scottish streets on Saturday afternoons; threaten unauthorised, Catalan-style votes until you faint with the giddy excitement of it all.
But none of this daft political theatre can change the fact that we’re out of the EU on Friday, regardless of the howls of protest from the SNP – a historically Eurosceptic party that only discovered a passion for Europe when it realised it might benefit its central goal of smashing apart the UK.
And when the sun still rises on Saturday, whatever the apocalyptic forecasts of Hugh Grant (who branded the Tories’ General Election victory a ‘catastrophe’) and other assorted Remainers, Remoaners, and Rejoiners like him, the SNP’s political irrelevance will reach new heights.
The Nationalists need a bogeyman, and when Brexit happens – and the world continues rotating on its axis – they will be stripped of another source of grievance, which fuels the entire separatist movement.
Miss Sturgeon’s portrayal of Scotland labouring under the yoke of Tory rule, wrenched from the EU against its democratic will, was always implausible – but it will become untenable by the end of the week.
The SNP offers an illusory freedom: in reality it wants to lead us back into the quicksand we’ve only just left behind: independence, followed by a long and uncertain struggle for re-entry to the EU.
(Number Six: like Sturgeon, the eternal Prisoner)
It’s a backward-looking plan that would leave us saddled with the euro (an inevitability, whatever the view of separatist die-hards).
‘Yessers’ always prided themselves on positivity, but are now reduced to making dire predictions of Armageddon the moment we quit the EU.
Forget the rhetoric of the doomsayers in their social media echo-chambers: far from regarding us as a laughing-stock, much of Europe envies our imminent liberation from a club of failing, debt-ridden economies.
The Common Agricultural Policy raises food prices by about £100 a year for every family, while the EU also imposes import tariffs to raise the price of goods from the rest of the world, costing every family up to £750 a year on average.
But the SNP would drag us back into the stranglehold of that sclerotic regime, on far less favourable terms: a ‘prisoner’ state languishing on the fringes of a partnership of nations that is about to lose a large slice of its income.
The UK economy is bigger than the 18 smallest EU countries combined, which means in economic terms that the EU will lose not just one member state after Brexit – it will effectively shrink from 28 members to ten.
Miss Sturgeon wants to build a coalition of support among EU nations for a re-run of the failed 2014 Scexit vote. But will they listen?
After all, back in 2016, the First Minister met a junior German minister in August to discuss the UK’s vote to leave the EU, in a restaurant as opposed to a Government venue – prompting Tory MSP Jackson Carlaw to mock her summit in a ‘backstreet brauhaus’.
In the midst of Brexit upheaval, how many of the SNP’s ‘European friends’ will heed its call for solidarity?
We’re told that after this weekend, Mr Johnson has ordered his minsters not to mention ‘Brexit’ again, to drive home that it has been done, and it’s time to get on with other vital reform.
No such hope of the i-word – independence – fading from the SNP’s lexicon; as the UK forges ahead with a dramatically new vision – dynamic, innovative, and essentially optimistic – the SNP’s pitch is more of the same, and at its heart it’s a deeply pessimistic message.
Novelist Franz Kafka – whose work, including The Trial, influenced The Prisoner – once wrote despairingly of his tedious legal studies that he had ‘nourished [his] mind on sawdust, which had already been chewed by a thousand jaws before me’.
Much the same could be said of Miss Sturgeon’s bankrupt agenda, but this week she is finally running out of road.
Let tomorrow’s hollow vote go ahead, with Miss Sturgeon propped up yet again by her de facto backbenchers in the Green Party – and let her pontificate about her latest wheeze to pretend 2014 never happened.
The SNP remains in power, but is powerless to fulfil the only objective it really cares about – while the Union it loathes can look forward to a bright future free from the bitterness and bile that have dogged devolved politics for nearly 13 years.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 28, 2020.
