HOORAY FOR A DELAY
TORCUIL CRICHTON
TREMENDOUS relief this week for Nicola Sturgeon’s speechwriters.
A Brexit delay – promised by Theresa May and endorsed by a huge majority in the Commons on Wednesday – is what the people whose job it is to make the FM’s words sing off a page were praying for.
The dictionary of quotable quotes can be put away, the historic parallels rested, the slogans can stay in the fresh mints tin.
In short, they don’t have to tie themselves in knots trying to put scaffolding around a delay in demanding an independence referendum.
Much as Brexit means Brexit, delay means delay.
Sturgeon has said she would enlighten us on whether to push for a second independence vote before the party’s spring conference in April but this makes things so much easier.
The polls tell her an IndyRef is unwanted and unwinnable at this stage, and Sturgeon doesn’t want to blow her second and last chance, despite the enthusiasm of many separatists (and some politicians) to go for broke.
If there is a delay to EU departure then the “fog of Brexit “will still be hanging over us until the summer and so a pronouncement on which precise direction the independence movement should face cannot be made.
The Brexit uncertainty will not have lifted in time for the SNP annual conference in the autumn and then we’re into 2020, only a year to go until the Holyrood elections.
That’s only a few more conference speeches or so after this one for those lucky people in the leader’s words factory.
There’s no point in getting into a squabble over a referendum in the year running up to an election that will effectively be a referendum on whether to stage a referendum (do keep up).
That is, of course, unless they want to maximise turn-out for that election by putting a Bunsen burner under the inevitable refusal from the UK Government.
Nothing is simple when it comes to referendums, except that they are to be avoided.
That would seem to be Jeremy Corbyn’s view. He has bridled against a second Brexit referendum from the beginning.
Now the horse whisperer, Keir Starmer, Labour’s unshowy Brexit barrister, has led him to water.
Labour’s turnaround is probably too late and there are enough Labour MPs from Brexit strongholds to make sure a Commons vote on staging a second referendum is unlikely to pass.
But despite 35 of the 40 Labour target seats being strongly for Leave, there are far more remain-voting Labour supporters than leavers.
In the north of England, the 60 per cent Leave majority has changed into a 50-50 split and that could swung further if Labour campaigned harder.
The latest YouGov poll shows the party supporters dividing four to one against leaving the EU.
Add to that the shocking statistic that as many as 28 per cent of Labour’s 2017 supporters say they would switch to the new Independent Group and you can see why Corbyn was persuaded.
It is all tactical, of course it is. This is politics after all. By moving to a second
WAS that double-Dutch or a touch of double standards?
SNP Westminster leader and self-declared “humble crofter” Ian Blackford broke into Dutch to welcome Dutch parliamentarians to the Commons chamber on Wednesday.
You don’t hear much Dutch spoken at the sheepfank these days.
But if you’d been an international banker running Deutsche Bank’s equity operations in the Netherlands, I suppose you’d have a few words to seal a money deal.
referendum Corbyn has effectively swept away one of the main reasons the Independent Group was formed.
Theresa May swept away another by conceding the delay to stop defections from her own party.
Here’s a prediction. When the delay kicks in, when the Tory Brexiteers prove themselves to be unreconcilables that they are, it will be the turn of Theresa May to be led to the river.
The customs union that Labour failed to get through the Commons this week might return as the only way to break the Commons impasse.
She may refuse to drink but it might be that or a referendum that neither she nor Corbyn wants. If no one leader wants a referendum, all speechwriters can sleep easy at nights.