Sorry, Sir John, but you don’t scare me
SIR JOHN Major’s back, like Coldplay or a particularly persistent case of scrofula. This week Sir John, whose observations generally seem about as up to the minute as the Babylonian calendar, was banging on about the risk of a second independence referendum if Britain votes to leave the EU, insisting the ‘uncomfortable truth is that the unity of the United Kingdom itself is on the ballot paper’.
He’s not the only one, to be fair. They’re all at it. Taking a break from inexplicably shovelling hay on a farm in Selkirkshire this week, the Chancellor George Osborne warned Scots voters against giving the SNP any ‘excuses’ for a Scottish referendum, while Tory minister Amber Rudd made similar noises during ITV’s tedious Brexit debate.
Yeah, yeah. If you vote to leave we’ll run out of full fat milk by Christmas. If you vote to leave Ant and Dec will be relocated to a hilltop in southern Albania. If you vote to leave a giant swarm of non-EU regulated bees hell bent on destroying your azaleas will immediately descend on your front garden.
For those of us north of the Border some of the ludicrous scaremongering around the Brexit campaign has a sour tang of familiarity about it.
The yawning hyperbole seems exhaustingly reminiscent of the frantic weeks of September 2014 when the Yes campaign painted postindependence Scotland as a world filled with unicorns and rainbows while Better Together muttered darkly about falling into the North Sea.
A few months ago, you could have FROM the department of You Couldn’t Make It Up (except they clearly did): mobile phone customers on the island of Barra have been told their poor signal is caused by ‘trees in the way’. Astounding, given there are hardly any trees on Barra. GOOD to see Nicola Sturgeon backing England in the Euro 2016 tournament, which started yesterday. I too will be supporting England, and hope many other Scots will too – if only because the ‘anyone but England’ mentality is a deeply embarrassing, parochial quirk that makes us seem far more bitter than we really are. And anyway. There’s always Euro 2020, right? been forgiven for believing that leaving the EU might spark another referendum on Scottish independence. I certainly did.
Before the Holyrood election, Nicola Sturgeon herself indicated that Brexit would ‘almost certainly’ trigger another referendum, a statement that magnificently backfired when she attended a pre-election TV debate and found herself roundly booed by an audience sick to the back teeth of the SNP’s inability to let the matter rest.
But that was then, and this is now. In between there has been a Holyrood election that failed to give the SNP the majority they so desperately craved.
Plans for a ‘summer of independence’ in which Sturgeon promised she would try to ‘persuade other people of the strength of my case’ (note: people don’t need to be persuaded Nicola, they made up their minds two years ago, there was a big vote about it, surely you remember?) appear to have been shelved.
Not surprising given Stewart Hosie, forced to step down as deputy party leader last month after revelations of an extra-marital affair, had been tipped to helm the project.
And anyway. Sturgeon knows fine well that using a Leave vote to attempt a second referendum would be a foolhardy venture that would completely undermine her cause. There is absolutely no way the First Minister will attempt to push through a second referendum any time soon for the simple reason that a second referendum any time soon would result in a second No vote.
So look, vote how you want in the EU Referendum. If you’re concerned over fishing quotas and think our country’s fishermen get a raw deal, then vote to leave. If you’re worried that leaving the EU will destroy our trade links, vote remain.
But for goodness sake don’t vote to stay because you have been scaremongered into thinking it will prompt a second independence referendum. No matter what Sir John and his chums might try to tell you, it won’t.