HE’S back, with a vengeance. As Tony Blair conjured up his inner Arnie and returned to the political fray, urging voters to “rise up” against “Brexit at any cost,” one can imagine how the likes of Remainers Nick Clegg, Tim Farron and Chuka Umunna were punching the air while Leavers such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and IDS were punching their television sets.
Indeed, it did not take long for the eulogies and denunciations to spring forth. Mr Farron declared, unsurprisingly: “Tony Blair is right,” while Mr Johnson attacked the former prime minister’s “bare-faced effrontery” and urged people to rise up and turn of the television when he was on.
The slick re-emergence of Mr Blair to the national conversation will prove divisive but also intriguing. There will be some hardline Brexiters who will rub their hands at the very thought of the former Labour leader, whose reputation is so tarnished by the Iraq war, coming to the aid of the Remainers.
Yet one has to remember that, two years after the allies invaded Iraq and that country began its descent into a bloody civil war, Mr Blair won a third, historic general election. Indeed, if Gordon Brown and his supporters had not ousted the now well-heeled, globetrotting diplomat-for-hire from office in 2007, who would have bet against him winning a fourth term?
His argument is that political discourse is never fixed and that, just because you have lost an argument at one moment in time, it does not exclude you from making it again at another. Of course, this will be music to the ears of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond who contend that, okay, in the circumstances of September 2014, they lost the independence argument; but, hey, the sands of political time have shifted and the prospectus for independence has to be repackaged and remade for 2017, 18 or 19.
Indeed, Mr Blair, who has previously alluded to how Brexit would boost the notion of Scottish independence given the No side’s arguments in the first referendum, made clear that the UK’s decision to quit the EU, in the face of a majority Remain vote in Scotland, made the case for Scottish independence “much more credible”.
For all their contempt for the former prime minister, the SNP could not look a gift horse in the mouth and seized on his words to point out gently that they “simply reflect the reality that the independence debate now is fundamentally different to the one in 2014” and, in a rhetorical echo, stressed how the Tories’ threat of a “hard Brexit at any cost to Scotland” would only see support for independence rise further still.
The pro-Unionist parties were understandably aghast at Mr Blair’s independence reference. The Scottish Tories pointed out that only 25 per cent of Scots wanted a second referendum and that none of the challenges of Brexit would be solved by “separating ourselves from our own Union of nations”.
While Mr Blair sincerely made clear he wanted Scotland to remain in the UK, his lead-balloon remarks have not helped Kezia Dugdale, Ruth Davidson or Willie Rennie in their constitutional cause and only highlighted how, in a matter of weeks, Nicola Sturgeon has a big decision to make.
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