She has lost all the arguments but still Sturgeon clings to her teenage dream

Politics has just become transcendental. it is no longer about your rights, your standard of living or your opportunities. the state of the health service, education and pensions are for the unenlightened to obsess about. it’s not about the real world.

We need something that transcends our pitiful existence. independence. so decrees the queen of the selfies, our dear leader Nicola sturgeon.

Yesterday she told us that independence ‘transcends’ issues such as Brexit or any of the false promises she made in the 2014 referendum. Practicality and reality are secondary. We need to do it whatever.

the ‘just cause’ has now become ‘just ’cos’. light a joss stick, assume the position and believe.

sturgeon has conceded that the rational argument for scotland leaving the United Kingdom has been lost. she just wants to do it anyway, no matter what damage is done to the country she professes to love. that means a second referendum is coming – sooner rather than later.

When Alex salmond said last week that there would be a referendum within two years, many commentators thought he was pulling Nicola’s chain. Yesterday, as so often before, she flushed in response.

Tactics

this is not a strategy for the future of scotland. these are the electoral tactics of the SNP. they have looked across no man’s land and reckoned that the enemy’s trenches are empty. And so they can attack in numbers, even if they are not armed with any rational arguments.

only two years ago, salmond and sturgeon argued that an independent scotland would benefit from a ‘second oil boom’, we would prosper and that there would be a currency union so that scotland could retain the pound. Now they admit that they were talking mince.

this time they can’t even be bothered coming up with a new set of arguments. this time we will simply be offered the chance to daub ourselves in woad. cry freedom. the English, after all, don’t know who their fathers are.

i have known Nicola sturgeon for nearly 30 years. she is easily offended. Her hope is that her fellow scots egos are similarly easily bruised, in particular by the Brexit vote.

scotland is being dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ against our will out of the EU, she tells us on an almost hourly basis.

therefore we should kick over the table of the United Kingdom, saying this is no kind of a game of peever. the belittling of scotland is not coming from our neighbours but from our own government.

let me ask you to suspend disbelief for a moment. let us say that scotland had voted Yes in 2014 and, according to the sturgeon timetable, we had become independent last March.

We would now be trying desperately to join the European Union. With the rest of the UK voting to leave the EU we would also – if we had any sense – be pleading with the EU to give the rest of the UK the best possible deal or we would lose access to our biggest trading partner.

We would be trying to build relationships with other nations not break them.

But the realities of the independence dream are not to be contemplated.

the reality of how to fill the £15billion gap in our national finances is neither here nor there. the collapse in the oil price a mere bagatelle. What currency we would have is a question for fools.

Just wrap a saltire around your eyes and you can’t see any of those problems.

to be fair to sturgeon, on a six-figure public sector salary, with a husband on a six-figure SNP salary decided by his wife, worrying about how pensions or benefits for the pesky, penurious populace are paid for, or how businesses survive, must seem distant. let them eat cranachan.

in this, they have become what they once despised. Many years ago i asked a now senior member of the SNP why he joined the party. He explained that he had grown up in lanarkshire and while he shared labour values, he wanted change in his community that it wasn’t delivering.

the labour Party was in the ascendancy then and he found it opaque, resistant to reform and, he felt, corrupt. Not a tory and with the liberals eternally irrelevant, he joined the SNP, even though not convinced of independence. He got on at the ground floor and rose with the lift.

As someone who shares the same labour values, i also share concerns about how the party expressed them internally and externally.

Yet the ‘liberating’ force of the SNP presides over a country where one of the country’s top political lobbyists is in charge of the scottish Government’s policy for economic growth.

What they once railed against as labour’s ‘jobs for the boys’ culture is now the Nationalists’ ‘jobs for the boys’ with knobs on.

For all the SNP’s faux outrage at the corruption of Westminster, that kind of thing wouldn’t be contemplated nor tolerated south of the Border.

Yesterday, a former SNP spin doctor and lobbyist argued that BBC scotland should embrace the idea of a ‘scottish six’ because it would mean a scottish government under even greater scrutiny.

that would mean this ‘free’ scotland would be the only place in the genuinely free world where the government decrees the format of news coverage. And he forgot to mention that only weeks ago his own MPs managed to remove a critical commentator from STV’s website.

Extreme

this golden generation of the SNP have done a grand job of making their party electable but they seem to be running out of road. their argument does not stack up and so they come to extreme resolutions.

Buy off civic scotland and threaten your critics. Bully the Press. And now they cannot think of a rational argument for why scotland would benefit by leaving the UK, they tell people just to believe.

Nicola sturgeon’s admission would be refreshing if she took it to its logical conclusion – if she admitted that scotland already has self-government, even if she isn’t very good at running it.

that we are effectively independent but for more than 300 years have been part of an alliance which we have manipulated to our advantage and which has been mutually beneficial.

this isn’t about the prosperity and freedom of scots or scotland. this is about the fulfilment of a dream a teenage girl had her bedroom in the 1980s.

the world might have changed beyond recognition but she can still feel her anger at Margaret thatcher and see her own face on a fiver of the new currency of an independent scotland.

i will bet you a tenner – with the Queen’s face on it – she fails.