Speaking for ‘all of Scotland’? Nicola barely speaks for all of the SNP on the Brexit issue

John MacLeod

SHE was ‘obviously disappointed’, grated Nicola Sturgeon the other day, after the Supreme Court – as generally expected – decreed that the UK Government’s bid to begin our departure from the EU must be put to a Parliamentary vote.

Not only that but the court ruled that the devolved legislatures (including Holyrood) have no rights of veto and need not formally be consulted by the Prime Minister.

It is ‘becoming clearer by the day’, stormed the First Minister further, ‘that Scotland’s voice is not being heard or listened to within the UK.

‘The claims about Scotland being an equal partner are being exposed as nothing more than empty rhetoric.

‘And the very foundations of the devolution settlement that are supposed to protect our interests – such as the statutory embedding of the Sewel Convention – are exposed as being worthless.

‘This raises fundamental questions… Is Scotland content for our future to be dictated by an increasingly Rightwing Westminster government with just one MP here – or is it better that we take our future into our own hands?

‘It is becoming ever clearer that this is a choice Scotland must make.’

It was robust, even inflammatory stuff. It sounds as if Miss Sturgeon is indeed gearing herself and her troops up for a second independence referendum – though opinion polls continue to suggest, in Sir Humphrey’s deadly term, that such a plebiscite would be ‘courageous’.

And yet, too, it was eminently predictable and really quite boring, underpinned by Miss Sturgeon’s usual lazy assumptions – that all Scots are appalled at the prospect of leaving the European Union, that all Scots instinctively dislike ‘Right-wing’ governments and that there is no problem not, fundamentally, Westminster’s fault and to which independence is not the answer.

Worse, we have heard essentially the same moan from Miss Sturgeon, and on a near-weekly basis, since the EU referendum last June – ever tinnier, ever less convincing and putting one ever more in mind of those lines from an old hymn: ‘Strange that a harp of thousand strings,

Should keep in tune so long…’

Let us deal briefly and with relish with the First Minister’s prime beef on Tuesday. The Sewel Convention is as old as devolution itself and is the principle that, from time to time and when it would be easier for all concerned, Westminster can directly legislate in an area normally devolved to the Scottish parliament.

It was begotten by John, Baron Sewel, a minister in the Scottish Office under Donald Dewar who was closely involved in drawing up devolution and whose public life ended in colourful circumstances two years ago.

And last year’s Scotland Act – bestowing upon Holyrood assorted extra powers as promised just before the 2014 referendum – again enshrined it: ‘Westminster will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish parliament.’

Obsession

Despite the First Minister’s yowling, the departure of the United Kingdom as a whole from the European Union is not self-evidently a ‘devolved matter’. The Sewel Convention is a broad principle, not a rigid rule and – the mass of ordinary Scots having never even heard of it – its averred slighting is most unlikely to have us rioting in the streets.

What is an evident obsession of the First Minister, her party and the general howlround social media echo chamber of Scottish nationalism is of no great interest to the rest of us.

However we voted last June, the vast majority of us accept that we voted as a United Kingdom, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, we are duly going to leave the European Union and it is most unlikely anything awful will happen.

But Miss Sturgeon does sound increasingly – and dangerously – out of touch with certain realities.

One is that Europe has never been a matter Scots have felt very strongly about. After all, for more than three centuries we have grown used to being governed from the distant capital of our southern neighbour.

The ceding of sovereignty to what was then a Common Market beyond that, 40 years ago, made little practical difference.

Repatriating that sovereignty will not dramatically affect us either. Immigration has never been a thing Scots fret about – indeed, we could do with a little more of it – and shrill SNP outrage over Brexit is simply not felt in Scotland at large.

Another concern is that Miss Sturgeon’s central demand – that Scotland somehow, on its devolved lonesome, be allowed to remain in the single market – is impossible. Not because of a heartless Prime Minister and her evil regime but because the European Union itself would never permit it.

‘The SNP is not coming up against the Prime Minister or the Tories,’ one bewildered online commentator points out, ‘but basic EU law. Diplomats in Brussels are baffled as to why the SNP are even talking about a non-member state either being in the single market or having a separate relationship with the EU.

‘The Spanish are vehemently against this and would veto. So Sturgeon’s demands are a charade, given their constitutional impossibility. She’s asking for something the EU would never allow, no matter what Theresa May says.’

It is wearying when Miss Sturgeon poses as the Voice of All Scotland to say things that are simply not true. Scotland will certainly be heard during the Brexit debate at Westminster. We have 59 MPs there, 56 of them (if we include two or three currently helping police with their inquiries) lock-step Scottish nationalists.

Indeed, we have already proudly been told that the SNP group will table a cool 50 amendments to the Brexit Bill – a faintly quixotic gesture, as at the last they will vote against the whole thing anyway. It is a faintly depressing spectacle as, whatever contribution the SNP makes to the debate, no debate inside the SNP is permitted on our membership of the EU.

Even Theresa May tolerates the odd rebel – Kenneth Clarke, Anna Soubry – but not the Nationalists.

Yet, despite a campaign that never set the heather alight in Scotland, and despite all the major party leaders campaigning for a Remain vote, almost 40 per cent of Scots voted Leave last June – almost as many, numerically, as voted for the SNP last May.

Support

A minority of all Scots eligible to vote backed Remain and almost a third of Leave voters, analysis has since confirmed, habitually support the SNP.

We have heard far too much, through three winters now, of ‘the 45’, the percentage of voters who backed independence in September 2014. But ‘no one talks about the two in five Brexit voters’, sighs one observer. ‘They have become unScots, flies in the Nationalist ointment…’

Miss Sturgeon does not in any meaningful sense speak for Scotland on this matter, indeed she can scarcely claim to speak even for the massed Nationalists.

Yet she continues – and will continue – to bloviate on the enormities of Brexit, even as her administration fails to ensure all our children leave school able to read, write and count, cannot secure nearly enough GPs for our communities, cannot reduce waiting times in Accident & Emergency and cannot deliver a reliable and punctual rail service.

All this is with a view, it seems, to an independence referendum pencilled in for autumn next year which most Scots do not want and when most Scots will probably vote No.

And no wonder, as it will take just one sour speech from the Spanish foreign minister to make plain that a Yes vote will blow us out, and for always, of two unions – a gesture as pointless and despairing as a howl in space.