OUT of Westminster’s Zombie Apocalypse something rather more redemptive has arisen and not a little ironic either. Thus the handful of MPs who have evinced some measure of the dignity and grace associated with the UK parliament belong almost exclusively to the party which wants eventually to leave it.
Few who have been transfixed by the Brexit Danse Macabre will not have been impressed by the regular interventions of the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford and the party’s Justice and Home Affairs spokesperson Joanna Cherry. This pair have carried torches into the darkest recesses of this squalid pantomime.
In the face of delinquent Tory taunts to “go home” and the BBC’s ignorant and unprofessional practice of cutting away from their reactions to key Brexit votes they have maintained their dignity and poise. That eloquent old warrior, Winston Churchill, whose statue stands guard over this place, would have concluded that during this febrile period when Westminster has become an intellectual Lilliput, dominated by braying inarticulacy, these two have upheld some of those qualities that he held dear. The sight of Michael Gove, no mean orator himself, being reduced last week to flinging bar-room insults at the SNP, is proof of how foolish and shallow he and his colleagues appear. The party which seeks to sever all ties with this place has been a credit to it while those who purport to uphold its finest traditions have treated it with contempt and reduced it to an end-of-pier beauty contest as they jostle for position in their squalid lust for power.
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In Brussels the SNP MEP Alyn Smith has matched his Westminster party colleagues’ oratory with a few outstanding contributions. His parting plea last week for the European Parliament to “leave the light on” for Scotland was both poignant and significant. It framed the battleground on which the next referendum on Scottish independence will be fought and ensured that the Yes movement second time around will have more allies in Europe than was the case in 2014.
Mr Smith’s experience and contacts at Brussels, where he has garnered a significant degree of respect both for himself and his cause, will be crucial to the independence movement during the next referendum. He won’t need me to tell him either that his advice on Europe to Yes and SNP strategists must come with a measure of vinegar. Such has been the shambolic nature of the Brexit process at Westminster that the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels, white, grey and condescending to a man, and the flawed institution that permits them to promenade through Europe like princes have escaped any scrutiny of their own faults.
Each week they move through those gilded halls dispensing aphorisms and apercus with an air of haughty disdain. With each of their supercilious utterances they remind you of why 17.4 million UK citizens voted for Britain to leave this place. Much has been said about the apocalypse that awaits the UK if we leave the EU; nothing about the root and branch reforms that Brussels still needs to undertake to loosen the influence of the international banking cartel. Just ask Greece and Italy and look at how much some German banks made from the emergency bonds which were issued to bail out the Greeks.
The SNP must tread with great care over the next few months that in endorsing a so-called People’s Vote on Brexit it doesn’t alienate the many among its own supporters who voted to leave the EU. Nor must it fall back on the lazy disdain that many Remainers harbour for those who voted to Leave. These weren’t all Tommy Robinson clones wielding mobile phones and talking about the Muslim threat. In Sunderland the other week I watched a drookit bundle of old Brexiters begin their march on London to protect the Brexit they thought they’d voted for. In the main they were decent, old Labour types from communities all along England’s north-east coast who felt betrayed by what they regarded as the metropolitan elite recently come to manage their party. They resented being portrayed as racist simply for seeking to protect jobs and wages from the sort of EU legislation that allowed firms to pay foreign workers at the reduced rates of their countries of origin.
Some of the previously concealed fault-lines running unnoticed beneath English society reinforced the divisions that have since become apparent in the last three years. They exist in Scotland, too, and if the SNP and the wider Yes community don’t wake up to them they will conspire to destroy the independence dream just at the point where it has edged beguilingly closer once more.
Scotland possesses its own political elites. These include politicians and advisors; lobbyists and bloggers; journalists and ‘artists’. Their discourse is often conducted on Twitter where they compete for ‘likes’ with laconic put-downs and their appreciation for indie bands and photographs of their home-made beetroot fricassees. If you don’t belong to this self-regarding caste of political savants and share their views on what they consider to be enlightened or progressive or modern then you become effectively a non-person. Last week the Catholic Church, whose adherents emerged as the most-pro-independence of Scotland’s faith groups, spoke of its concerns about its members being criminalised simply for adhering to the beliefs of their faith, especially in respect of marriage, the family and the sacred right to life of unborn children.
Others, many of them reasonable, liberal and left-leaning have been puzzled at a raft of legislative stunts like Named Persons, a smacking ban, assisted suicide and minimum alcohol pricing. These might look good on a progressive CV but fail to address the far more pressing problems of multi-deprivation; educational and health inequality; child and in-work poverty and actual alcohol and substance abuse. Decent people who work hard, uphold the law and love Scotland tend to resent being regarded as criminals, abusers, homophobes and sexists simply for upholding the traditional teachings of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
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Those who would disparage the Westminster elites which alienated England’s working class communities seem not to acknowledge the elect seeking to micro-manage Scottish society and arranging an officially-approved system of values. An independent Scotland run by these people looks like a gaunt and chilly place.
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