To independence
welcomed the broader ruling, it means Scotland won’t get a say beyond Parliament at Westminster, where the SNP’s 54 MPs make it the third-largest party, unable to influence the move toward the EU exit.
That impotence reinforces the nationalist argument that the political system in the UK can’t accommodate Scotland, according to Nicola McEwen, associate director at the Centre on Constitutional Change at Edinburgh University.
“It places the focus where it’s always been and if it doesn’t lead to any consensus it will make another independence referendum highly likely,” said McEwen.
It is becoming clearer by the day that Scotland’s voice is simply not being heard
With each twist and turn in the Brexit debate that’s convulsing Britain, another vote on Scotland breaking away from the rest of the UK appears more imminent.
Polls currently suggest the result would mirror that of a referendum in 2014, when Scots voted 55 per cent to 45 per cent against independence, but Sturgeon can now lay claim to an argument with which to sway sceptics: that Scotland is being sidelined democratically.
After ordering her ministers to prepare legislation for another independence referendum, Sturgeon put forward a package of proposals in December to keep Scotland’s access to the single market and free movement of people. She called it a compromise and May said she would listen. Then last week, May outlined a vision for Brexit that involved leaving the single market and potentially walking away from the EU without a deal. Sturgeon said the UK Government thinks it “can do anything to Scotland and get away with it”.
The Scottish Government has to be seen to be doing everything it can to compromise and cooperate, said McEwen. There’s no sign at the moment that the British Government is willing to accommodate Scotland’s wishes, she said.
Given the current polling, “the Scottish Government doesn’t want to risk pushing ahead with a referendum on independence,” McEwen said. “‘But if they have to do it, they’d want to show they’ve exhausted all other possibilities so they can say it’s a democratic issue.”
Nicola Sturgeon
Violent thunderstorms tore across the US South over the weekend, killing 19 people. But in an incredible stroke of good fortune, a bathtub probably saved the life of a woman sheltering from a twister that carved a 20km path in east Texas.
The National Weather Service forecast office in Shreveport, Louisiana, filed a storm report on Tuesday that is jaw-dropping. It describes an 800m-wide tornado packing winds of 210km/h that tore off the roof of a storage building on Sunday and tossed a barge 200m into a grove of trees. “A woman inside took shelter in a bathtub and the tornado lifted the tub out of the home and deposited it in the woods with the woman still in the tub but the woman was not injured.”
Jason Hansford, a senior meteorologist who conducted the storm survey, said he spoke to the woman. “She heard the tornado warning come out and she took cover in the tub in her bathroom,” he said. “The only thing she remembers is that the tornado came in from the southwest across her home. At that point the whole backside of her house was sheared off. Her bathtub was ripped out and she ended up still in her tub in some woods near her home.”
Hansford said he didn’t know exactly how far the woman, who he estimated to be in her 60s, was thrown. Except for some cuts and bruises, “she was uninjured but emotionally shaken”. Her house was totalled.
In the absence of an underground storm shelter, meteorologists frequently tell people to shelter in a bathtub. “The bathroom has strong framing and the pipes in the walls could help hold them together, according to Tornadoproject.com,” wrote AccuWeather in 2011. “The bathtub and commode are directly anchored to the ground. They are often the only things left intact after a tornado passes.”
Several people survived tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011 by huddling in bathtubs. But it is amazing that this tornado dislodged the bathtub, lofted it into the air and then laid it back on the ground — with the woman unharmed.