Sorry Nicola, but your hypocrisy over Brexit is breathtaking

LET me say this loudly and clearly,’ Nicola Sturgeon intoned. ‘If the issue comes before the House of Commons, SNP MPs will support a People’s Vote which includes the option to remain in the EU.’

The SNP leader was addressing the People’s Vote march in London and she had to speak loudly and clearly because she was 300 miles away in Scotland at the time. She appeared instead in a video message, like those Hollywood stars who accept their BAFTA via satellite link because they’re ‘filming in Mexico’ when in fact they’re at home but not willing to leave the poolside for anything less than an Oscar.

A People’s Vote on Brexit is Miss Sturgeon’s idea of a BAFTA. She’s holding out for the Academy Award: Indyref 2. That is why the First Minister wasn’t there in person on Saturday. That is why her remarks were delivered in the conditional tense: ‘If the issue comes before the House of Commons’.

The Nationalists are so determined to have a People’s Vote, they are willing to wait until someone gets it on the order paper and then, by golly, they’ll march into that Aye lobby right behind everyone else.

Miss Sturgeon’s political skills are much-vaunted but in the end amount to just two – the ignorance of her friends and the haplessness of her enemies. Remainers down south are under the illusion that Miss Sturgeon has spent the past two years fighting Brexit, while Remainers here treat her cynical equivocations as statements of principle.

Daring

Hypocrisy is the easiest charge to level in politics but, despite much evidence, Miss Sturgeon’s opponents can’t manage to mount a prosecution. Calculated vagueness is cowardly but has its uses.

As I said last week, I thought Brexit was a terrible idea, so I voted Remain. I still think Brexit is a terrible idea, but a majority of my fellow citizens voted for it so it must come to pass. This is a daring new proposition I like to call ‘democracy’.

One of the miserly pleasures of Brexit is watching the Nationalists declaim the dangers of separatism. When you derive joy in the torments of others, it’s known as schadenfreude, except when it involves the leader of the SNP having to reproach ill-costed Nationalist illusions – then it’s called Sturgeonfreude. There was a powerful dose of Sturgeonfreude at the SNP conference this month. During her set piece speech, Miss Sturgeon struggled to delineate the difference between the two nationalisms that have come to define British politics.

She assured delegates: ‘Brexit is about turning inwards, pulling up the drawbridge, retreating from the world. Independence is about being open, outwardlooking, aspiring to play our full part in the world around us.’ As George Orwell observed: ‘All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between simi160,000 lar sets of facts. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.’

Thus must Miss Sturgeon inveigh against all she stands for because, rather inconveniently, it turns out to be not all that different from what people like Jacob Rees-Mogg stand for.

Yes, the aesthetics are divergent, the language at variance here and there. The Brexiteers and the Scottish Nationalists have their own distinct hang-ups about incomers. But those are details.

On the main themes, Sturgeon and Rees-Mogg are simpatico. The people against the distant elites (but never the ones closer to home). Flags before facts. Stop talking your country down. Have some self-belief.

The Yes campaign has been allowed to rewrite itself as a plucky, popular uprising when it was in fact the establishment campaign waged in the interests of the Scottish Government and the ruling Nationalist caste. Scottish separatists can tell themselves they are unlike English Brexiteers, that their efforts were civic and good-natured, but the rest of us were there.

We remember what happened. We remember the mobs that sought to intimidate the BBC. We remember the hateetched screamers who surrounded any Unionist politician daring to speak in public. We remember how supporters of the Union were followed and filmed and cowed on their own streets. We remember it all and we remember it well because the EU referendum was for us a refresher course in nationalism.

In the course of Miss Sturgeon’s comments to the People’s Vote march, she said: ‘The Leave campaign has already gone down in history as one of the most disingenuous, dishonourable and downright dishonest electoral contests of modern times. Those responsible should be utterly ashamed of themselves.’

Who could disagree? Certainly not the woman who spearheaded an 11th-hour effort to convince voters that the (wholly devolved) NHS would be privatised if they voted No in 2014.

Nor the hardened political shin-kicker who, faced with an EU making unhelpful noises about a separate Scotland’s place in the community, warned: ‘There are EU nationals from other states living in Scotland… If Scotland was outside Europe, they would lose the right to stay here.’ How quickly that little flash of nastiness has been forgiven and forgotten by the swooning commentariat. Sturgeon the remote Remainer beamed down on Saturday’s rally as she decried the Leave campaign: ‘Instead of a coherent vision and clear prospectus setting out what a vote to leave the EU would mean, all we got was waffle and that infamous lie on the side of a bus.’

It was reassuring to hear the First Minister take such a firm stance against illconsidered and deceptive blueprints. Someone should draw her attention to a classic of the genre, a 650-page proposal for starting a country that contained just one page on the financial circumstances of the new state. There was, however, space to promise untold oil wealth and prosperity – a cruel fiction carried into every sink estate in the country and sold as hope to desperate people. It was a lie, not just infamous but inhuman.

Dreamers

Incidentally, the sequel – the Growth Commission report – was not debated at SNP conference because there is no debate to be had among party members. They can’t stand the thing. Andrew Wilson’s review into the economics of independence may have been wishful thinking with footnotes, but the footnotes, with their grudging admission of fiscal pain, were too much for the angry dreamers. Believe in Scotland. #ProjectFear. We’ve had enough of experts.

Now Miss Sturgeon is forced to rail against the Brexit threat to jobs and investment, knowing that, at some point down the line, she will ask the Scottish people to endorse the same threat under a different flag.

She upbraids Downing Street for dragging Scotland out of the European single market, while she herself yearns to hoick us out of the UK single market, even though our trade with the latter is worth almost four times that with the former. Brexit, she says, will hurt our universities – and it will, though not half as much as cutting off Scotland’s academics from the well of UK research council funding.

Perhaps Sturgeonfreude is an uncharitable response to all this. It can’t be easy having to go around denouncing yourself by implication, but the First Minister has brought this on herself.

When she lets rip on Brexit, she delights most of her grassroots, but she underscores for everyone else how harmful and chaotic nationalism can be. Her every word will loom on the sidelines now, ready to haunt her when the time comes.

Independence supporters believe their cause is different. In a sense they’re right. Brexit may well sucker-punch the UK economy but independence would double the trauma for Scotland, a country in worse fiscal shape.

Nationalists share the same illusions and they are undone by the same immutable truth: Economics will always get you in the end.