Fuel to Scots’ fire,
EDINBURGH— Hang on to your Glengarry: It’s the neverendum referendum.
Scotland, deeply disappointed and even deeper at odds with the “Out” result in Thursday’s European Union plebiscite across the United Kingdom, appears destined for another slog to the polls after casting ballots four times in the last two years.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the ruling Scottish National Party, is adamant that she will not have it; won’t stand for the sundering of Scotland from Europe’s megamarket that so profoundly runs against the wishes of the northern populace. But just beneath the surface discontent there was as well, on the morning after, a flash of renewed and resurrected independence aspiration.
In that sense, for all Sturgeon’s woebegone posture yesterday, she and her party were also winners.
Independence for Caledonia didn’t die after all on that night 20 months ago, Sept. 18, 2014, with a solid rejection from voters in an 85 per cent turnout for the referendum question: Should Scotland be an independent country?
Even though the issue — the essence of the SNP — was supposed to remain beyond revisiting for another generation. Because, Sturgeon proclaimed on Friday, the landscape has changed. All deals are off. All promises renounced.
“I think an independence referendum is now highly likely,” Sturgeon told a news conference at her official residence, Bute House.
So, while the EU may have lost a core member in the U.K., with its fifth largest economy on the planet, Scotland is already positioning itself to tear apart the U.K. with a heavensent do-over.
As justification for reversing its word, Sturgeon, the teenage activist grown up into a formidable political personage, who took over the reins of the SNP when Alex Salmond resigned hours after the nay-toindependence result, points at the skewed numbers:
Across the U.K., the Leave side drew 51.9 per cent of the vote, compared to 48.1 per cent for Remain. In Scotland, however, the figures went heavily the other way: 62 per cent for Remain, 38 per cent to Leave. Remain took all 32 voting regions across the country (a whopping 74 per cent voted Remain here in Edinburgh), although the turnout was just 67 per cent.
Voter fatigue, probably. Which might set the electorate against the SNP, if forced yet again to ponder a fate even more crucial than staying or departing the EU: their very British-ness and whether that can coexist with Scottish-ness.
They thought they’d decided it. But the SNP, which exists primarily to promote independence, is hell-bent on exploiting this referendum’s outcome.
“Scotland, like London and North- ern Ireland, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU,” said Sturgeon. “We voted to protect our place in the world’s biggest single market and the jobs and investments that hinge upon it. We voted to safeguard our freedom to travel, live, work and study in other European countries. And we voted to renew our reputation as an outward-looking, open and inclusive country.”
Put another way, the Out mob got it wrong all around — and Sturgeon is eyeballing you, England, especially — London Town off the blame-hook — for that 53.2-percent Leave vote. On minimal evidence, the “In” crowd continues to cast Leavers as narrow-minded, immigration-averse, self-absorbed reactionaries pining for days of old, days of nostalgic apartness which can never be retrieved in a globally-interlinked present.
That’s a superficial explanation for what happened Thursday night into Friday morning. In fact, the Leave brigade took a leap of faith — in themselves — to risk jobs and income and an immediately battered British pound.
That strikes me as more quixotic than mean-spirited.
They certainly knew — they’ve been hammered with economicsbased statistics for the past four months — what might be at risk. Yet the Brexiters didn’t put money and markets first, not even the Labour supporters — and the outcome was very much a net loss for Labour, perhaps costing leader Jeremy Corbyn (admittedly somewhat phlegmatic in his pro-stay position) his job as early as a non-confidence motion next week.
Prime Minister David Cameron, by announcing his resignation early Friday morning, falling on his Remain sword, gets to hang around until October, when the two-year countdown on detaching from the EU formally begins.
“As things stand, Scotland faces the prospect of being taken out of the EU against our will,” Sturgeon continued, as if the fact of the referendum were still negotiable. Although she clearly doesn’t have a great deal of respect for referendum outcomes. “I regard that as democratically unacceptable.”
That’s where these results play right into SNP’s independence wheelhouse.
“We face that prospect after less than two years of being told that it was our own referendum on independence that would end our membership in the European Union and that only a rejection of independence would protect it. Indeed, for many people the supposed guarantee of remaining in the EU was a driver in the decision to stay within the U.K.”
Well, that’s certainly debatable. The EU was not front-of-mind in Scotland’s independence referendum.
But Sturgeon prattled on, rhetori- cally buzzing from alpha to omega on the subtext of Scotland-Out.
“There is not doubt that (Thursday’s) result represents a significant and a material change of the circumstances of which Scotland voted against independence in 2014.”
The SNP’s party manifesto, says Sturgeon, clearly allows for another referendum to be held in the event of significant and material change in circumstances from those of two years ago.
“Scotland now faces that prospect. It is a significant and material change in circumstances and it is therefore a statement of the obvious that the option of a second referendum be on the table. And it is on the table.”
The Scottish Parliament, however, can’t pose the independence referendum without the consent of Westminster. Would a Tory majority led by, say, Boris Johnson — Bo-Jo the primary candidate to replace Cameron — accede to that?
Sturgeon, eyes wide shut: “It would be inconceivable . . . that the U.K. government would seek to stand in our way.”
Says the woman so out-and-out wrong about her stay-in prediction on this referendum. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.